* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Oh, it's so nice to be patronised…

Your maths is still off as you asset that charging the car is faster than filling the tank: wrong on both accounts - it takes longer and you need to do it more often. More importantly, taking as least twice as long to charge as to fill means needing twice as many chargers as fuel pumps to provide the same capacity. This will make a big difference as the number of electric vehicles picks up, currently tiny in most countries. Here in Germany we're already starting to see limits on household charging points because the grid can't cope with lots of them on the same street. Again, you have to provision for the maximum draw.

It also provides the lie to your assertion that 300 kW lines aren't a problem. I routinely see lines of cars waiting to fill up at petrol stations: batteries will be quickly flattened if the number of electric vehicles gets anywhere near that of petrol cars.

But it's also nonsense to play hydrocarbons against electrics as they are undoubtedly a much better form (energy density, flexibility) than batteries.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Your anecdote is a good example of "it works for me so it works for everyone" bias.

But your maths is also wrong: a fuel tank fills in a couple of minutes and will provide about three times the range of your seven minute charge. Also, how many 300kW chargers do you think can be supported without requiring additional generating capacity at peak times, which is what you need the grid to be able to provide.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

But the electricity companies will love all the extra potential peak demand they create! And this will go on until the subsidies run out and new ones for fuel cells become available: kWh/kg/litre or similar is the metric we should be using.

Thunderbird is coming to Android – in K-9 Mail form

Charlie Clark Silver badge

A few years ago K9 became unusable. I switched to FairEmail which is an excellent alternative.

MongoDB wants to grab work from other databases

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Columnar store?

I thought the big advantage was that it's a "document" database that doesn't need the stinking columns and tuples of relational databases?

Elsewhere, in the relational world, columnar storage has been around for those that need it for a while. Why, if I'm already running Postgres with the option of columnar storage for my time series stuff and binary JSON for the volatile data, but have ACID storage for all the transactional stuff, would I look something that does binary JSON and is just introducing columnar storage? With all the additional overhead I guess it's just as well that you can spawn so many processes…

Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Seeing as they're sticking the M2 in MBPs i think "entry-level" isn't quite appropriate.

The memory restriction is really quite odd. I'm assuming this is largely down to manufacturing issues due to the way memory is accessed. But the problems with "shared CPU/GPU" memory should be clear to those of us able to remember Intel's foray into the area. Assume you have 75% and possibly only 50% of nominal capacity at most available.

I agree that MacOS is fine for many things with 8GB but not if you're going to run any VMs or do any kind of grunt work.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It's really about the performance of the overall system and this is where Apple have got most things right but also where they skate over things. For a high-end chip a max of 24 GB of shared memory isn't really enough even if what there is, is very fast and this does help make the chips feel faster than they really are.

Anyone who's been playing with ARM chips for a while will know that, while never as fast as x86, they're pretty quick and much smaller and tend to draw less power. Then there's all the hardware acceleration, assuming Apple lets third party software run it. The neural engine is probably less impressive, because model training is likely to be running on a cluster anyway, than GPU oomph for things that can take advantage of it like media encoding, though there other non-ML areas where all those vector units can be very useful.

And battery life: this is for notebooks after all. Apple seems to have decided that 1 kg is what most people are happy with as long as battery life is good enough: for less you have to start taking useful things like the battery away or have a smaller screen. This is where Apple have traditionally excelled and where the new machines outlast the competition.

Crypto market crashes on Celsius freeze, inflation news

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Inflation hedge

Some Cryptos are conceptually inflation hedges due to fixed supply.

Well, there seems to be a problem with that concept. Inflation hedge is just one of the many justifications trotted out for these various schemes.

Apple M1 chip contains hardware vulnerability that bypasses memory defense

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: ARM or Apple?

As the article says, this is the first PC using the feature. It's certainly possible that other chips will have the feature and other OSes may or not have protection.

It would be good for Apple to provide a response to the study authors before the conference.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Not to that degree of precision, but there are uses: sources of entropy and validation of the algorithm itself if it's particularly efficient.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Google can't count, nor can most of world

Mathematically your correct. What we observe linguistically is literally inflation due to the vulgar use of scientiffic terms, particularly when talking about things like the US budget or debt. Most people don't care about precision, and couldn't explain it anyway, they just want to be able to compare different numbers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Is it known?

I'm pretty sure that every algorithm used to calculate it demonstrate this but it turns out it was proven a while back.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Measurement creep

I see your puny FX-83 and raise you my FX-180P. I programmed it to solve quadratic equations which would take about as long as it did manually. But it was nice to be able to check!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: AI

Not a good task for AI but maybe some form of quantum computing could be used for validation.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Number theory makes it clear that it is neither paradoxical nor trivial: there's more than one infinity. Also, as it is known that Pi itself is non-repeating, it's also not possible for Pi to contain Pi. You could, I suppose, think about what's the greatest precision ("314") that can be repeated but even if you find that Pi to 1000 digits (or more) is repeated, it won't really help either because the repetition itself is random and in a scale so great as to be practically useless.

But calculating Pi and other irrational numbers to nth digits turns out to have other uses.

Is this one yours?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It's an irrational number so, in theory, there could be series that are infintely long… Actually, more important mathematically than repeating digits are repeating sequences.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: spot the difference

I'm sure they have but more important is verification of the algorithm used.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: If they were proper engineers...

Bloody Stupid…

Russia, China warn US its cyber support of Ukraine has consequences

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Hello Kettle? It's Pot calling. You're black.

The US admisssion serves two purposes: reassure Ukrainians that it means what it says; let the Russians know some of the support it's providing. It's also important to other countries in Russia's self-defined sphere of influence.

Russia's cyberops stuff is pretty good, as we know, but as we've also seen, it's not as good as we throught it was. We've also seen it has pretty shoddy military communications. But it's also important, pace Enigma, not to reveal quite how much one knows.

Apple offers improved Linux support in macOS Ventura

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Windows on M1 Apple devices

Just continue to use Parallels.

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Why is it so hard to find a good email program?

Switched to MailMate on MacOS a couple of years ago. It's the best around and is being actively developed.

GitHub drops Atom bomb: Open-source text editor mothballed by end of year

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I used to use it

Yes, memory management is a problem in a lot of text editors. On MacOS I usually use TextMate for various kinds of text files not least because of the bundles, including tidy. But for large XML files I run tidy in the command line and use BBEdit.

AI and ML could save the planet – or add more fuel to the climate fire

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: err, economics

14 x 6 = 84. For a kitchen I'd expect a 100W incandescent + 20W tube, so still a saving and you have more light where you need it. You see this in modern supermarkets and factories but the savings are greater still.

Sure, there has been an increase in external lighting though this probably has as much to do with perceived security as anything else. All our external lights are downlights and the automatic ones have the sensitivity dialed right down.

Consumer power requirements have continued to inch up but this mainly due to the increase in devices and gadgets we have, though certain replacement effects are observable: flat screen TVs with solid state storage use a lot less power than CRTs with video recorders, even when networking and streaming are taken into consideration. But there's still a long way to go, both of more efficient devices, and then less of them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: err, economics

Your general points stand but conclusion actually goes beyond your premise of "more often than not".

There are lots of examples of where increased efficiency does in fact lead to less total power use: LED lightbulbs might be the best one. Even if you use them more you're still going to be using less power than incandescent lighting.

And "AI" isn't the power drain, it's training the models that is. It's possible to imagine that there will be an inflexion point where the gains in efficiency more than offset the power used to achieve them: we might need fewer new models; or more efficient ways of training. As long as power is required to train then providers will have an incentive to do things more efficiently and/or use their own renewable power supplies.

Makers of ad blockers and browser privacy extensions fear the end is near

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The mystery

People who were no longer at the company. XUL came about during the time where everyone tried to do everything XML. This turned out to be a bad idea: slow, requiring lots of memory and surprisingly error prone. But what do you do once you've made it the public API? At some point you have to hold up your hands, say it was a mistake and prepare to deprecate and replace it. In terms of communication, I think that Mozilla got this and the move away from Gecko right.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The mystery

Mozilla provided the reasons for dropping XUL and, apart from the scope for extensions, the reasons were sound: it was essentially unmaintained and unmaintainable.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Does this mean there can now never be a USB-D?

Then it's a pity that Apple never offered its port for standardisation and uses USB-C for its most recent notebooks…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The specification describes minimum requirements. Manufacturers can go above this but the important thing is that a cable that conforms to the specification will work. For example, I can and do use the same no-name 2 port 2A USB travel charger for both my Samsung Galaxy and my MacBook.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

This is not about manufacturers, it's about free and fair markets and it is the remit of the European Commission to ensure these.

Consider the humble mains plug anything that plugs into the mains in any country in the EU must conform to the specification. But, not only does this mean that I can take my device from Germany to France, Portugal, Finland, Greece, etc., it also means that my Siemens washing machine has the same plug as a Moulinex one. There are also plugs and sockets for desktops, printers, etc. that have been through the same standardising process.

It's not even a secret that phone manufacturers used ports to restrict competition and bind users. Or, in the case of Apple, to drive up the cost of peripherals through licence fees.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Does this mean there can now never be a USB-D?

There isn't really any need for a new form factor, and that's what matters here. USB-C solves the problem that has bedevilled all other USB sockets thus far: the connections were not only not idiot-proof, they were often difficult to use correctly. I still frequently struggle with USB-A and micro connections and have too few USB-B and mini devices to care.

USB-C solves the mechanical and electrical problems and the data rate is high enough for consumer electronics for the foreseeable future (10 years).

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Charge the chargers

Where are they sold? And who buys them?

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

Charlie Clark Silver badge

To be fair, I think the statement is supposed to be ironic. TDP is robust because it's verbose but UDP has for years been preferred for streaming.

We sat through Apple's product launch disguised as a dev event so you don't have to

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Apple Pay Later,

Apple Pay Later, to spread out a purchase via four zero-interest, zero-fee payments over six weeks.

It's probably worth noting that all these schemes increase credit risk in the economy and the hidden costs are borne by merchants who will inevitably pass them on in the form of higher prices. This is why, if you can pay on the nose, you will often get a discount worth significantly more than a six-week "interest-free" loan.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: This won't run on any pre-2017 Mac

Yep, five years has been the standard "level of support" for a while. While I can understand this from Apple's perspective as a manufacturer, I wish they'd be more honest with this upfront and not impose synthetic restrictions.

My 2016 MBP has a new battery and a new daughterboard due to problems with the USB connectors. It's currently my reseve and is just as capable as my 2020 MBP, both of which are sill on 10.15 and will stay so for the foreseeable future.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Alternatives

Yep, not only can they not get or make the products themselves, they are finding it harder and harder to get engineers to install maintain kit.

Amazon’s Kindle bookstore to quit China

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A wide range of cheaper and better devices

I think you've got to be prepared to have two devices if necessary. The 6" models can fit into a jacket pocket but, even with a small font, I find the pages "too small". The Aura won't fit into a jacket pocket but fits in pretty much everything else. I think the Kobo Nia would suit you fine, my Glo is now over ten years old and still going strong. Otherwise my mate is really happy with the PocketBook HD.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A wide range of cheaper and better devices

Sorry, I should have been more specific: my comments were specific to mainland China where Amazon is up against established incumbents and different devices (comics are big in east Asia).

I personally like the Kobo readers, marketed in some countries under the Tolino label. The software contains nice attention to detail and is very flexible. I don't think much of the store but they work with whatever DRM most libraries are using. I always strip any DRM off books I buy so that I'm not tied to any particular provider or software and use Calibre to manage my library. I love my Aura One for the screen quality and form factor but SWMBO is very happy with my old Glo, that still gets software updates. I'm routinely tempted to get something even larger for technical documentation, you know when you like having two pages at once.

I also recently bought a PocketBook for a friend who's been pretty ill and this has the advantage of a Dropbox client, which means I can easily give him books to read.

Worth noting that most readers have awful PDF support. Sony is/was the exception because it licensed something from Adobe that "reflows" documents for different aspect ratios. I've not tried the PocketBook but PDFs on the Kobos are an exercise in frustration, even with third-party readers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "Amazon’s decision should [not] be taken as a sign that foreign investment in China is waning"

Indeed, hard to imagine Amazon's content offerings getting very far given all the competition. And a wide range of cheaper and better devices.

Starlink's success in Ukraine amplifies interest in anti-satellite weapons

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Success in Ukraine? PR maybe

You're such a cynic…

Actually, I was chatting to a Ukrainian friend of mine who, after showing me the photo of another friend of his who has died in the fighting, said that, where they can the Ukrainian army is making use of the Starlink's. They're just not much use in covert operations.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Success in Ukraine? PR maybe

PR mainly: Ukraine's telecoms and internet is refreshingy diverse and robust. Starlink has been good PR for Musk but hasn't seen much use on the field not least because the dishes are big and warm enough to provide targets. Where communications have been shut down by the Russians (southern Zaporizhia, Kherson, etc.) the Ukrainians are going low-tech: you can do packet internet on SW, it's not fast but it's robust and very difficult to locate.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The internet is two way

They don't need to: they get hot enough to be detectable by IR.

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: And then there's the law enforcement side.

If you've ever followed any trials related to the distribution and consumption of obscene material you'll understand what kind of resources are missing: it's almost always in bringing things to trial and seeing them through. Pressure is routinely applied to get success rates up which almost invariably means spending less time on crimes which require more time to gather evidence, etc. Without wishing to seem to be equating the crimes, this is also true of financial crime like fraud and tax evasion. But one of the biggest problems in both situations is "following the money" through the inevitable ring of shell companies.

But saying something must be done is only going to suit populists and their bags of "easy" solutions".

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Porn's effect on real life

There was an interesting article a few years ago in The Economist's largely odious* sister publication, 1843, about fan fiction. It compared and contrasted gay and female fan fiction about Star Trek: very physical in gay, very much about "the gaze" in female. This is interesting because it very much is about indulging fantasies and "the realm of the symbolic" to get post-structuralist about this!

* I used to get it for free but asked them to stop sending me such odes (sic) to conspicuous consumption. Not quite a list of the best restaurants for over € 1000 a head mixed with ads for what to wear, but getting close. Pity, because amongst all the lifestyle crap there are good articles.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Porn's effect on real life

What stuff?

Some people like to see their fantasies acted out in porn. Or they have affairs, or go to sex workers to get "what they can't get at home". But, really, they should just learn to talk to their partner.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: From Sir Humphrey's Playbook

You can never rule out future changes to any law. However, the hurdles here are, as you point out, pretty high: a change like this would require unanimity amongst EU members. And, as things stand, would have to be vetoed by Germany at least where the constitutional court has already stated that it's unconstitutional and thus Germany would not be able to ratify the law.

Getting the ECHR amended would be even harder…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Porn's effect on real life

Will you hate us for pointing out the problems of anecdotal evidence? While some people may, indeed consume stuff in porn that they would never do in real life. For example, some studies have suggested that female crime readers and writers indulge in violent fantasies that they would very much never want to be involved in.

However, this does not hold true for all and what might be a "pressure valve" for some, may just be encouragement for others. Furthermore, there is evidence suggesting that pornography "normalises" pornographic sex, setting up unrealistic expectations on bodies, sexual preferences, prowess and violence that can cause problems, particularly for adolescents. I don't think that gives the basis for mass surveillance or blanket-banning but, with all due respect for the freedom of the individual, I also don't think it means "anything goes"™.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Megaphone

From Sir Humphrey's Playbook

Given the slew of consistent judgements from all over Europe against preventive action, I think those involved know that this policy has no chance of being enacted. It's all about making the right kind of noises and then finding someone else to blame, increasingly the courts.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

You're making false equivalences. People choose to install anti-virus software, it isn't perfect and it doesn't automatically report them to the police.

Detecting undefined pornographic images is much, much harder. Videos are orders of magnitude more difficult and it's all easier to fuzz.

Murena and /e/ Foundation launch privacy-centric smartphones

Charlie Clark Silver badge

If you really want it, LineageOS, assuming the phone is supported, with F-Droid as the store probably ticks (or in this case unticks most boxes). And I'd rather pay a bit more for a device that's well-supported than trying to save money and trusting to luck.

Fusion won't avert need for climate change 'sacrifice', says nuclear energy expert

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: From the cheap seats: NO SACRIFICE IS NEEDED (and you KNOW China will not do it ANYWAY)

China's solar and wind power deployments have already led to a reduction in the number of coal-fired power stations in use. Sure, they're still building new ones (and nuclear as well) but that has as much to do with jobs for the construction industry as anything else: the renewables base has grown from around zero to the world's largest in a decade. There's still a long way to go but China is serious about renewables.