Posts by Charlie Clark 12169 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Yes, I'm well aware of that. But, for companies that have already gone that way (putting everything on rented hardware), they're finding it hard to hear anything over Microsoft's siren song of: "cheaper licences with us". Embrace, extend, extenguish redux.
So, your argument to the board begins with what they won't be able to use under your plan? Thank you for your time.
To get anywhere, you have to at least convince them that there are financial benefits to the proposed change, which is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
Being bought by Compaq was partly because of the failure of the Alpha. While NT did run on Alphas, Microsoft wasn't keen on the work needed to maintain it and developers couldn't simply recompile for Alpha or ship fat binaries. NT was supposed to provide the hardware agnostic base so that the chip architecture wouldn't affect applications but, by NT 3.51 this had been ditched to make x86 run faster (and less securely). Windows on ARM only looks okay because modern chips are so fast, the underlying problem of needing to compile GUI apps for specific architectures has not changed.
Itanium had one real aim: kill DEC's Alpha chips and it succeeded in this. Other than that, Intel knew better than anyone else that keeping x86 largely the way it was, was the best to way to enforce lock-in. Switching architectures imposed huge costs for developers and users, who were supposed to be the same software twice. Even now, with heaps of excellent compilers, it's still by far the dominant desktop and server chip because migration on Windows is not entirely possible, expensive and not necessarily faster.
Microsoft is preparing for an x86_64 only world with probably only the huge investments that companies have made around 32-bit version of MS Excel holding it back. That, and people still wanting to buy their own machines rather than renting them from Microsoft.
Yes, I still use appstores (both Play and APKPure for geoblocked stuff). I have bought very few apps - mainly OSMand which is certainly worth it. But I also recently bought a years's subscription to Windy (outside the store no 30% for Google), which is unbeatable for doing anything outdoor.
As libraries went, I found JQuery reasonable both for functionality and size. It was popular because it provided a lot of extremely useful functions such as feature detection that were essential as we moved away from purely desktop websites. As time went by, less was required and it became more modular.
Caching (both on the client and server) has always been the best strategy to handle resource contention and quite a few servers effectively cached compressed versions of files. The problem with websites that were heavy users of Javascript was more related to limits on connection numbers, especially for blocking requests. With a little thought it was possible to optimise most of this so that the website would render quickly while some resources continued to load. Of course, lots of "theme" based websites will still chocka with Javascript and CSS they never needed. http2 solved most of the problems by providing persistent and reusable connections, which meant additional requests had a much lower overhead.
Only for some files, mainly text. But you could also just enable compression on the transfer. What compression/archiving did provide was all the files at once, Windows had to use Zip because it didn't support tar.
Compression made sense when disks were small: before we had compressed folders, we have disk compression like stac. There's generally a trilemma: diskspace, CPU power and bandwidth. CPU power is probably the current bottleneck as the price per GB continues to fall.
It was both: deaths and sickness caused by pandemics also affect the economy. This was exacerbated by some of the policies in some countries which depressed demand in some sectors while accelerating it in others. Excessive monetarry and fiscal largesse, especially to companies, also fueled inflation.
I'm not in anyway suggesting this stuff should be in consumer devices. I've had several Samsung phones but have stayed clear of their services, which are normally provided by third parties. The one Samsung TV we have, most infamous for privacy breaches, isn't on a network.
This looks like a medical device. And you should really look at the data that the big providers are already collecting and not even providing to the medical staff.
You'd be surprised at quite how much data the manufacturers of medical equipment already collect.
About ten years ago Samsung announced it was going to into the medical equipment business, presumably because of the huge margins and long-term contracts. This looks to be bearing fruits. Samsung has probably done the most work on OLED screens and have come up with some fantastic things are a result.
Well, it is the machinery operators. And the pints are pints of vodka…
Despite the fact that article 37 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation stipulates
that “Every citizen has the right to work in conditions that meet the requirements of safety and hygiene”, according to the Federal State Statistics Service more than 47 thousand people are injured every year at work, from about 2 thousands of them die. Quoted in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347621934_Obtaining_statistical_data_on_industrial_accidents_in_Russia/
They've been doing this for several months for the munitions factories that went to three shifts. Yes, production increased, but the failure rate increased significantly faster up to 20%, I think. But don't quote me!
And in Russia, you have to factor that drinking spirits on the job is more than just tolerated, it's the norm. It's the main reason for severe industrial accidents in the afternoon where the muziki come back from lunch drunk. If they can't drink, they won't work.
I've seen copyright assertion by the image big boys like Getty who helped write current legislation. The answer every time is: pay now before it gets worse.
Oh, you're a small time artist? Well, hard luck because the laws weren't written for you. Assign your copyright to one of the big boys and, for a fee, they'll be more than happy to pursue the matter.
That aside, how on earth can something as dumb as blockchain ever be expected to enforce copyright? Minimal changes to anything digital would immediately invalidate any kind of hash upon which a chain could be built.
Really, it's easy to use existing spelling which clearly differentiates between the notionally imperial "ton" (how much is that exactly?) and the metric tonne. It's also worth remembering that engineering around the world has been using metric/SI units for decades because it's the best way to avoid multitudes of errors. If the spellchecker still complains then get it fixed!
Either that, or stick with El Reg Standard Units with which the world + dog are intimately familiar.
That struck me as well. The Helium-3 stuff does sound an awful lot like a magic bean. Still, I'm glad some of Sillycon Valley's money is going into physics for a change and not another (advertising-based) "disruption".
ITER should have some news over the next year or so. And, for all its problems, it's the closest to getting fusion at scale of any of the approaches.
The ruling has no effect on content moderation at all. The platforms are free to do this however they please as guaranteed by the terms and conditions that all users have agreed to abide by.
What it does do is reaffirm the right to free expression in the US. Incitement remains a crime but it is notoriously difficult to prove. Other countries have other laws.
Oh, I think there's plenty to like about them. But are they worth the price? The battery on my S10e is showing its age (4 years) and I was thinking of getting a new phone. I don't want another flagship and the A54 looks pretty good, except that it doesn't do wireless charging. So, at the moment it looks like I'll just be getting a new battery for what is still a fantastic phone.
As well as forming a commercial offer to PostgreSQL users, the move will see MariaDB increase its contributions to the PostgreSQL open source community, Howard said.
That sounds a lot like the prospect of being a services company is more appealing than one that develops its own open source database. And, indeed, caught between Oracle's improved MySQL and Postgres doesn't look like a good place to be.
Any encryption algorithm that can be broken is as useless to the spooks as it is to anyone else. They've learned the hard way that the best algorithms are those devloped openly under peer review. When it comes to interception they know that there are plenty of old school methods that will get them what they want.
I think this tells more about habits than anything fundamental in a language. Static typing is primarily an aid for the compiler which optimise based around it. While I have had plenty of facepalm moments when passing the values with the wrong types into a function, raising an exception at some point, the return value has never been an issue; this could happen in any runtime and would not necessarily be avoided by static typing. There is something to be said about not being able to explicitly return an error value in Python but other than that it's not something people discuss.
My own experience has been that I much prefer tests, preferably using pytest, to understand how code works over any kind of comment or declaration. This gently encourages code that is easier to read and maintain, which in turn leads to fewer problems.
But I would have no problem with something like a returning keyword for the definition. Anything is better than the type hints noise! I think we may get an idea of what works best in Mojo where the declarations necessary for optimisation are explicitly optional.
I think there are whole PhDs written on the subject. PyPy illustrates quite effectively how good JIT compilers can be at inferring types (for optimisation purposes) and there are plenty of examples of static typing being skirted. What should never be in doubt is the need for strong typing.
But I hate type hints and would like a mechanism within Python for declarative types (descriptors look like the best place to start, needs extending for functors and return values) so that the implementation wouldn't look like it was optional when, in fact, it's a clumsy attempt to enforce type declarations through the back door. Did I mention that I hate type hints? Well, I do.
To a degree, yes. But this is focussed even more on the hardware side, ie. running stuff on GPUs with hardware acceleration. So more like numba than numpy. I'm also quite intrigued by the keywords for the optimised code; I think this could work well. I still haven't forgiven Guido for failing to introduce a new keyword for generators and think the move towards async processing would have been a lot smoother and easier if it had.
It's a bit of a mixed blessing. While indeed many managers have grown up with open source and have no fear of it being used, there's still the potential maintenance gap. But, perhaps an even bigger threat: SaaS is eating everyones's lunch and it seems that, once companies get on "the cloud" they have fewer options to get off. So, while a few researchers may indeed be running open source stacks, the company is increasingly dependent upon a decreasing number of providers.
Python is not helped by the fact that python gets used in Linux distros / desktops as a system component in a way that exposes that Python environment to users.
This is one of the many sins of the Linux distros. *BSD users understand the difference between system and user software and ports takes away all the pain that comes from conflating the two and lets you have pretty much all the versions of a language that you would like. On my Mac I have Python 3.6 to 3.12 and no conflicts.
I've just checked the source of this page, and apart from it being a largely semantic-free soup of divs, the source is definitely more legible than say a year ago and would definitely work without JS though the lack of semantic tags would hamper a good rendering.
CSS has also improved though there were some deliberate decisions that I find make it more confusing that it should be. I didn't mention Javascript, but that too has improved and some people have even got the message that they need less of it than they thought they did. I hate "Single Page Apps" and it seems I'm not the only one as they're less popular than they were say five years ago.
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