* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

When it comes to ML, reports of JavaScript's death are exaggerated

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Automatically creating a local variable when I have forgotten to specify that as 'global' or have typed a variable name wrongly has driven me nuts using Python.

Sounds like your problems are more than with Python. global does exist but you will never need it. Like exec and eval it's there for a reason but the overwhelming majority of Python code will never need it.

Whitespace or braces is personal preference but in team work whitespace is much easier to enforce.

At a programming level Python can be criticised for dynamic typing, memory use, the global interpreter lock, speed but for any of the random inconsistencies that Javascript throws up.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

There's nothing terrible in JavaScript, nothing at all.

There have always been problems with JavaScript. Hardly surprising for something that was cooked up as quickly as it was. More surprising perhaps, is how far it has managed to get despite these limitations.

But the writing for ECMAScript is on the wall: Web Assembly. Most core JS developers, those that work on the language, seem to agree that they've come about as far as they can with it without a major rewrite and if you're going to rewrite a programming language…

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Down

Wrong-headed

But where does that leave JavaScript? Like Python, it been at the forefront of web development for about 20 years

For most of that time they've been doing very different things. And, while I'm a Python fan, I don't think it would be correct to claim Python has been at the forefront of web development at all.

Python is more suited to machine learning than Javascript because of the eco-system and libraries that have grown up in the scientific community over the years. Python isn't great for machine learning because there are TensorFlow bindings but because there is NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, etc. Python's syntax is also very popular with the non-developer types, who've suddenly found themselves being classed as "data scientists". This combined with the extensive libraries of a general purpose language makes Python eminently suitable. Node.js simply can't compete in this area and why should it? It's great for some stuff though its existence is now threatened by the agreement of the major browser developers to support web assembly. An article on this would have been far more interesting than the collection of straw men in this article.

Wait, did Oracle tip off world to Google's creepy always-on location tracking in Android?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile in other news…

Google have nothing apart from your location...

Sure, but I was referring solely to the address of the cell masts. Anything else is GDPR relevant and Google is smart enough to want to avoid any potential turnover-based sanctions.

But mobile phone companies might start to worry about what Google might do with all that telemetry: knowing where the masts are and how many people are in any particular cell at any time. Google's already shown that selling advertising is not the only business it wants to be in.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Meanwhile in other news…

Oracle has been redrafting its contracts to be fairer to customers. Oh no, it isn't.

As long as Google is not transmitting personally identifiable data from the users then I don't think there is much of a case here.

Linus Torvalds 'sorry' for swearing, blames popularity of Linux itself

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The comparison with the US constitution is misplaced and not helpful.

Security should have priority in development. If this leads to things breaking post-merge then there is a problem with the code review process. Something to which Linus is essentially admitting.

Uber: Hackers stole 57m passengers, drivers' info. We also bribed the thieves $100k to STFU

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Rotten to the core

Otherwise it'll have no incentive to change its ways, because it gets condemned either way.

What is the purpose of Uber the company if not to screw other people?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: To be fair (?!) ...

So you're saying that unencrypted files of user data on corporate laptops is OK?

No, he didn't say that.

AT&T insists it's not sweating US govt block of Time-Warner gobble

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: CNN hurt Trump's feelings

Maybe AT&T will jettison CNN in return for approval.

No need, they're almost certain to win and the case may get quietly side-lined once this becomes obvious. Sessions is going to have to step down anyway.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Mushroom

The complaint is that if they gain ownership of HBO, Warner Brothers (movies/TV), and the Turner channels then they can then hold other TV competitors to ransom by demanding higher channel fees that get passed on to consumers

Disney has already announced it's going to do this with its catalogue and privilege Hulu over Netflix. Don't remember hearing the DoJ making any noises about that. Maybe it's because Disney lets the Trump fondle and fuck as many hostesses as he wants whenever he visits Disneyworld.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Move along nothing to see

That none of the states have joined the DoJ on the suit speaks volumes. A court case will simply delay things.

America has a problem with cartels: ARPU on networks is much higher than in other comparable markets. Cheap debt and lax regulation are encouraging horizontal merges in lots of industries.

Arm Inside: Is Apple ready for the next big switch?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Well Done

Much as I like ARM I think the article is hinting at proposed "secure boot" extensions for MacOS to stop users doing what they want. :-/

Back to the Fuchsia: The next 10 years of Android

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Money

Analysts estimate Apple makes more money from iOS than Google does from Android. Which is really embarrassing

Not really. It's not as if Google doesn't make money from Android. Any comparison should take into consideration the capital cost (Google doesn't really make many phones so it's much lower) and also the market. Google might mot make money in China but it still makes money in places like India, Africa and South-East Asia where Apple's devices are too expensive for many people. It's also an almost pure services play which means Google continues to make money whether or not people update or buy new phones. And it provides Google with enormous amounts of data for future services.

Open-source defenders turn on each other in 'bizarre' trademark fight sparked by GPL fall out

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Standing

The GPL, unlike the MIT license, protects against people adding a small thing to an open-source program that might become necessary to use it - thus taking it out of being usable in its open-source form. So the GPL is a good thing.

This is completely untrue. Anything that's MIT/BSD/Apache licensed keeps stays that way when code is contributed to it. What those licences don't try and enforce is whether somebody tries to embed the code in a proprietary product. This means more coding, less lawyering.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Personalities

The OpenBSD community is an amazing clash of egos.

Possibly, but at least you don't have to worry about that when you read the licence.

More than half of GitHub is duplicate code, researchers find

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

Java provided a good example: people creating a project would commit NPM libraries

What? Since when has Java been using NPM?

Tesla launches electric truck it guarantees won't break for a million miles

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Impressive

I suspect you are aware of the grid scale experiment that informed my comment (Falkenhagen): I used to work for the company concerned. Technically it works a treat, as long as you don't mind the losses.

Actually, no so thanks for the tip.

Lossy closed-loop systems make more sense where you can take producer/consumers off the grid. This would have the advantage of helping to reduce gross base load and insulating the wholesale market from the the problems associated with excess renewables.

Who knows what continued research will come up with? Got to be better than pouring more billions into things like carbon sequestration.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Impressive

The cost of fossil fuels will need to treble at least before that happens, or some process to be invented or discovered that makes the production much more efficient.

In some situations it's possible to imagine closed loop systems that produce CH4 from excess power and use it as storage instead of batteries. In this case it's competing with the inefficiency of the battery charge / discharge cycle. But it has to be closed loop to prevent arbitrage or downright illegal profiteering.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Interesting

I dont know why they cant electrify the bigger roads - just put wires overhead , Tram Style , for cars and trucks to attach to.

Imagine the cost! And a maintenance nightmare. What is already being trialled is induction charging for buses and taxis.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Impressive

Petrol or LPG are great ways of storing energy. If we ever get a way of making them from renewable power, water and air (CO2) that is cheaper than digging them out of the ground then we solve a lot of the problems associated with batteries.

Electric vehicles are currently popular because they are effectively subsidised by not having fuel duty.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Interesting

The obvious solution is to make batteries easily swappable.

Not really. Electricity itself is far more fungible than battery packs. Not only do you have to devise simple, safe and quick ways of doing the swap, you're going to have non-trivial infrastructure for charging and storing them – protected from theft – and probably the need to ship them around. I think the company that wanted to do this for cars folded, but I could be mistaken. Much easier to build charging points even with dedicated MW lines.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

@Voland don't forget the tyres.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Interesting

Who needs drivers for these things? Sounds like they'll be limited to plugging and unplugging at charging stations.

What's the load of these standard units?

MPs draft bill to close loopholes used by 'sharing economy' employers

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Flexible working

The only point that the gig economy likes "flexible working hours" is that this provides a direct mechanism for reducing wages: employees effectively have to compete for tricks.

If they get a chance there'll be something like Get Laid for prostitutes…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re Charities

Most charities are, in effect, businesses. They employ professional fundraisers, own shops, etc. Altogether this already leads to a fairly hefty market distortions. The exemptions should either go or the definition should be tightened up and more effectively enforced.

Apple whispers how its face-fingering AI works

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Apple copies Google: customers are just lab rats

Looks like this is mainly a way of testing the technology before selling it to interested parties: facial recognition for Starbucks, Walmart (fanbois don't shop there, Whole Foods, …

Intel drags Xeon Phi Knights Hill chips out back... two shots heard

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Uhh. RISC has been around since like the mid 80s? It's been an option since Intel was churning out 386s.

Not RISC versus CISC, but real RISC designs from MIPS, I think.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Sounds like some kind of Nervana to me...

From Wikipedaia: the Sunway TaihuLight uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture. ARM and RISC give customers options they didn't have a few years ago. Even Intel has started making noises about custom silicon and FPGAs…

PS. I think you mean Nirvana…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

To recap the Xeon Phi line: it's not for your common or garden server, workstation or desktop. It's aimed at supercomputer gear with machine code instructions to dash through operations on matrices and other blobs of data at high speed in parallel

So give them what they really want: GPUs and FPGAs.

Meanwhile, as the article notes at the end, China is now building its own supercomputers using its own silicon.

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I went for the mobile version

Most people won't give a damn about a theoretical 30% speed increase

Not possible on my mobile install. Hoping it will become available in a patch release.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: The Quantum of Firefox

But I - nor most people I dare say- don't use all browsers.

APIs are for developers and there care a lot about this sort of thing.

Most people won't give a damn about a theoretical 30% speed increase

People care a lot about perceived speed which for websites can be as little as 10% (0.1 second speed up for a 1 second page is notcieable). More important in Firefox are the changes in the threading and memory use. These changes are far more important than notional rendering speed. Quantum isn't perfect but after a couple of years chasing UX unicorns the Firefox team turned their focus back on the browser and I think they got most things right and will probably move back to Firefox from Vivaldi which now seems to be chasing unicorns…

You don't like it? Then fork the old code base.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The Quantum of Firefox

The legacy plugins can *NOT* "just be rewritten". They CAN! NOT! BE! DONE! ANY! MORE!!!

And for good reasons that were all explained at the time. Sorry if you want 2000 back again but the rest of the world has moved on.

Still, it's open source so you're free to write your own XUL-based piece of crap: XUL was always a bad idea.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I went for the mobile version

Mobile is very nice. Apart from the non-removable Pocket crap!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The Quantum of Firefox

Whatever improvements they deliver, it shouldn't have given them a licence to kill add-on compatibility.

Why not? The change in the add-on API was announced well over a year ago. It actually makes things easier for developers to provide add-ons for all browsers.

Amazon to make multiple Lord of the Rings prequel TV series

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Turin Turambar Dagnir Glaurunga

They would also require very, very good scriptwriters to make the most of things without downgrading them into unwatchable pap.

Wot he said.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Turin Turambar Dagnir Glaurunga

Hasn't the BBC already done this? There's definitely stuff in Unfinished Tales that could be done. But it would be difficult not to repeat what's already been done. Think of what an awful mess Jackson made of The Hobbit by turning it into an extended prequel of Lord of the Rings.

Mm, sacrilicious: Greggs advent calendar features sausage roll in a manger

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Tesco ad with Muslims

Not a problem per-se, as 99.99% of Christmas is secular.

But what if you're allergic to secular? ;-)

Christmas – the festival of the winter (or summer for those downunder) solstice lends – itself conveniently to all kinds of interpretation but best of all, and in my best Frank Gallagher impersonation, it's a great excuse for a party!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Makes a change from chocolate

Gin - John Lewis.

Very tempting, even though I don't like gin and shipping here would be extortionate…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Assuming the OP is a Christian...

> you are not the OP

I am.

And I'm Brian and so's my wife…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Makes a change from chocolate

But my favourite advent calendar would use miniatures… strictly for playing draughts with, of course.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I see you lot still find religion-bashing amusing.

It's the gift that keeps giving…

Silverlight extinguished while Angular wins fans among developers

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Or M?

What?

Samsung shows off Linux desktops on Galaxy smartmobes

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I hope by Linux they don't mean Tizen

Tizen's raison d'être is it needs less RAM to run.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So in theory, it'll run Slackware?

In theory, yes. As with all phone hardware a lot of the drivers are only available as binaries.

Want a phone that promises to be able to run Linux? Then look at the Gemini.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

While I don't think Samsung gives much of a toss about Linux on their phones, they're very keen on DeX because it's something that nobody else has. And I think they're also smart enough to see that the developers market is big enough to keep the proof of concept going. If they get the volumes then they can expand the DeX eco-system.

If they pull this off then Samsung will be the company that killed the company laptop.

Snap: We've blown $3bn this year and Tencent wants to give us more

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The company works just like their app...

The IPO gave investors a much bigger payoff than previous offers.

With anything "webscale" nowadays only an offer > $ 10 bn seems to get VCs interest. You could have an app that counts farts (or something even less interesting) and as long as you have enough users (> 200 million seems about the threshold) then investors will be desperate to hand over somebody else's pension pot to get a bit of the action.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

If they were on the open market then they weren't from Snap. That kind of sale would have to have been accounted for in the balance. Just goes to show how poorly most people understand the stock market.

Looks much more like TenCent is taking advantage of Snap's weak shareprice to move capital to the US. An inversion at some point is possible.

Give us a bloody PIN: MPs grill BBC bosses over subscriber access

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Conditional access is also not really reconcilable with universal access which the BBC is required to provide.

The comparisons with Netflix, HBO, et al. are completely erroneous. They are competing in different markets and often arbitraging back catalogues in order to conquer new markets. Yes, they produce some great stuff, and yes they're trailblazing new methods of distribution but in doing having to sign up for Netflix to be able to watch Dr Who in English in Germany is an example of market failure.

Location dramas are hugely expensive but so is maintaining a series of local studios bringing the news (and other stuff) from across the country. 24 hours news cycles and international news channels are increasingly dominated by American stories. Whether it's the whether or some more of the morons shooting each other.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: News

That's fine if it agrees with your own viewpoint but I prefer more balanced coverage myself not that you can get that.

You do realise that you're asking for an oxymoron? If you think coverage is balanced then it's almost certainly biased towards your opinions.

Some degree of bias is unavoidable but I can live with that as long as facts are checked and are, well, facts. The dumbing down of the news to little more than a series of quotes to try and show balance is what erodes news broadcasting.

Pixel-style display woes on your shiny new X? Perfectly normal, says Apple

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: OLED FTW?

I much prefer OLED screens: black is black, wider colour range, etc.