Posts by Charlie Clark 12180 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Allo can be useful for getting in touch with people who might not using the same mesaging service as you. It's quite clear that Google has plans for the notification service it uses to do this.
Both Allo and Duo are also examples of making an app as simple as possible, although this is somewhat marred by including the Assistant in Allo.
I think one problem is that people are still confusing Google with Alphabet. The restructuring was designed to move some of the high risk innovative stuff outside of Google and off is balance sheet; Google could then focus on tuning its highly profitable money making activities and this includes culling projects that don't go anywhere.
This tech won't be able to escape forensic detection for some time.
Seeing as the approach – an "antagonistic" neural network – relies on a forensic AI evaluating its creations then I think you're wrong. The two work in tandem to create the convincing image. We're rapidly approaching the point where computer image recognition is more reliable than the human kind.
See this article for an earlier example and explanation.
And are you then saying that the car was in the right to continue regaining its lane and side-swipe him?
No, the conclusion is that the motorcyclist acted dangerously and tried to overtake before it was safe to do so. In this interpretation it was the bike that did the swiping. But IANAL and would expect this go to trial to get a precedent juddgement.
self driving car hitting another vehicle is a problem.
I don't agree on this. This may well become a test case for the manufacturers. If GM pursues it and wins, then it will set a precedent. Assuming they have sufficient telemetry I think they'll happily go to court over this.
Developers must continue teaching cars to drive defensively but, as the numerous "what if…" questions demonstrate, you cannot anticipate and prepare for every possible eventuality and there will, inevitably, be accidents. In such situations the law must be the same for people and computer drivers.
Insurance companies and legislators will be watching this carefully.
TBH sales of Samsung's S6 did show how much the market prefers the premium model with "something special". Samsung underestimated demand for the Edge version and had to adjust production accordingly.
It's early days for Apple yet but 30 million at around $ 600 profit per phone is worth having.
Not sure how to interpret the speculation that the X will be canned. It could be that everyone who wants, and can afford one, has one. But it could also be that they will squeeze the components back into a more standard format later in the year and it's really just the "notch" that gets the chop. OLED, wireless charging, waterproofing and everything else Apple copied from Samsung are here to stay.
You're right: it's tokenism. Nothing will save coal as long as shale production is so cheap. But the fuckwits in the Appalachians are too dumb to realise this and will continue to think he's "on their side". Trump wants right-wingers to win the primaries in the run up to the mid-terms so he has a House full of single-issue loons.
@Doctor Syntax true though we can expect more to come. There's an interesting article on this in this week's Economist which bases expected advertising rates on current share valuations: effectively an "adpocalypse"™ with spending rising to consume nearly all profits.
Discount fests like the stupidly imported "black Friday" are one-way bets. They might move the needle temporarily on cashflow and market share. But can also end up costing more than they bring. It was surprising but refreshing to read comments from some retailers that they might scale back such activities in the future.
Things are a bit different in the US where the potential credit risk, traditonally high because of lenient bankruptcy laws, is sold on to some sucker almost immediately.
So, go on, make that appointment for the test drive, you know you want to…
however routing didn't turn out that way,
I think the answer to this is: where didn't it turn out that way? An awful lot of transatlantic traffic is hub and spoke via London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, CDG, et al. And traffic in Asia is growing at a rate we Westerners don't really understand and over greater distances. This is why Emirates is happy to continue growing its fleet.
Plane list prices are always a bit of a joke, volumes are often so low that traditional "marginal pricing" doesn't make sense.
Emirates seems pretty happy with the A380 for many of its routes but it needs Airbus to keep making them. Airbus has cashflow and can afford to continue investing in the product line. Presumably meaning there will be a NEO version at some point. There are still lots of potential routes for this kind of plane and demand, particularly in Asia is growing.
For the old type bicycle cranks that attach to a square section bottom bracket, a torque wrench on the 8mm Allen key was recommended. In most other situations though just a bit if mechanical sympathy is all that's needed.
Torque is always useful when you have steel bolts in aluminium threads. Turns out to have been essential for the seat-tube mounted rack on my girlfriend's bike as otherwise one bolt invariably wore loose and I didn't want to tighten all the way to 11 and risk ripping the thread. Could have just taken the bike down to the bike shop but now I have my precious!
Recently swapped my existing power strips with ones with built-in USB ports. Yes, I still have the old ones but I've thrown out a couple of the older and larger USB-chargers. Turns out you can run lots of things like radios on 5V.
Did get a power socket / USB combo for mounting in the desk but it needs a bigger hole, so replaced it with a USB-hub (USB-3 no less) for charging and possibly eventually connecting to my 4-port KVM (only USB 2). Anyone without a KVM can't really call themself a geek!
But my proudest one-off buy was a set of allen keys with torque settings! Give me MOAR!
All of this is nothing compared to my dad. How's about 45 oscilloscopes for starters?
The problem with all things microwave is getting the dosage right. 3 minutes for how many grams? Get it wrong they'll be worse than anything you boil or steam. Cooking things in water gives you greater control as the hordes of sous-vide fans will tell you.
I do use a microwave for spinach for which it's excellent.
Honestly not sure why I'd bother with either instead of the card itself.
Agreed. Cheap to make and robust. Of course, the best thing to do is to get rid of the stupid barriers in the first place so you don't need to wave anything at them. This should be easy given the economics of public transport: the costs providing of the service does not correlate to the length of individual journeys…
A top-end smartphone isn’t just for Christmas: it’s for 18 months, maybe two years, two-and-a-half at a push.
Seeing as I'm onto my second, second-hand S5 I appreciate the irony! Good call quality, waterproof, usable as a remote control, expandable memory, can get replacement batteries… Sounds to me like a top-end smartphone.
The description of Face ID sounds about the best I've come across thus far. But, seeing as I don't use my phone for activating anything, and would probably drop it a lot more if I did, doesn't appeal too much. Gloves with capacitative fingers are a lot cheaper!
Unfortunately I still think the F35B is a pile of expensive and unproven crap
It's ironic that the US "won" the cold war partly by forcing the USSR way beyond its economic means to keep up technologically and is now well on the way to doing the same with its "allies".
Meanwhile on real battlefields my money would be on guerillas soon having drones that are "good enough" to be a real PIA even against such technological superiority.
Yes, but no.
Also, the trademark thing is a real issue as daft as it sounds. If the NHS doesn't defend its trademark even on things like this then it could lose it and allow shysters to abuse it.
OTOH getting permission to use the trademark is often easier than it sounds.
And finally,… if this is just about the cease and desist then bite back the bile and rebrand as something like Ubuntu for health, make use of the term NHS in any text exemplary. And check with Canonical on the use of their trademarks!
Seems you don't know much about HTML 5 if you're spouting that crap. I certainly don't want the stasis of 2003 - 2010 to come back. HTML 5 means fewer plugins, plugins being both attack vectors and spyware. Add a good blocker to your browser and you're in pretty good shape. This isn't to say that the browser makers can't do more because they can. But actually going after the advertisers, and by extension their customers, for the abuse of privacy laws is the best way to go and GDPR is a good place to start.
I wouldn't really worry about the contents of the sueball which will probably never go to court. The US legal system effectively encourages suits with long lists that lead to nice out of court settlements. Levandowski will want to bury this quickly so that none of the allegations feature in the real suit so some kind of hush money will probably be paid.
Assuming that China doesn't deploy hyperloop on/under/outrigging the existing HS lines for the longer-haul routes.
What? In any case, it doesn't really matter: choose another route in that very large and heavily populated country, at some point it's diminishing returns.
A typical high speed train can carry 1,000-1,200 people in relative comfort, uses sod all fuel compared to an airliner, and can if required run at around 5 minute intervals.
Sure, but it's not possible for all potential journeys within China. An A380 service between Peking and the Pearl River Delta could still make sense.
And, of course, the A380 is built for Africa to Mecca trips…
I think the point is really that the economics of the airline market have changed a lot since the A380 was originally designed and planned. No doubt they will change again.
The irony is that it was the work on the A380 that kick-started a lot of the technologies that have made subsequent planes possible.
If long-haul is going to be squeezed then the A380 starts to make more sense. You can reconfigure them to squeeze more people in than any other plane: "pilgrim class" as a friend of mine suggested.
But the squeeze on long-haul hasn't really started yet: it's still all about flights of 2-3 hours.
There's no doubt that there is a breach of data protection laws here and the commissioner should follow this up.
That said, I'm also slightly confused by the plaintiff taking to Twitter to air her grievances about this. Would it make a difference if she'd supplied her publically available Twitter-handle for the process? Hypothetical, I know. Can't you block numbers on WhatsApp? Should be the the first thing to do after reporting the incident.
Personally, I'd be more worried about the guy knowing where I live.
Either the pint is being pulled wrong, or the keg has been overgassed…
Actually, it's me misremembering Rambling Syd Rumpo who said something along the lines of "charge your thunder jugs with foaming nut brown ale".
Take it up with the late, great Kenneth Williams if you dare.
Of course, only poofy Southerners drink beer without a decent head! That and other wanky affectations such as drinking in a straight glass, beautifully illustrated in opening scene of "Get Carter".
What you're suggesting would add considerable complexity to the application with little direct upside if storage was really fungible; it isn't which why the real market is in application deployment. Quite a lot of risk and storage itself has become largely commodified: EB can be added relatively quickly.
But they no doubt have contigency plans that rely on something similar should their own storage systems have problems.
languages that need whitespace to decide the structure of a program should be similarly taken around the back of the shed.
Because? Block delimiters are required for the compiler whitespace is just as good for this as semicolons are and have the advantage of increasing readability.
QE has finally "done its job" and pushed equities high enough for the wealth effect to kick in. The wealth effect does, of course, encourage people to borrow more money something that the US consumers seem to love doing anyway: household debt is starting to grow but it will be masked by the apparent value of the assets such as houses. Remember that walking away from a mortgage in the US has little real consequence for either debtor (bankruptcy imposes no limits) or lender (the mortgage is sold on before the ink is dry).
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