Posts by Charlie Clark 12166 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
There wasn't a coup. That's your own cherry-picking.
Yes, history is complicated but post-WW II policy is based heavily on respecting the 1945 borders, wherever they happened to be. Putin's foreign policy has been largely about disregarding this in an attempt to resurrect the Soviet Union.
There wasn't a "coup" in Ukraine in 2014, it was a popular uprising and Yanukovych left of his own accord.
Minsk was supposed to lead to peace…
It was at best a face-saving exercise that cemented a frozen conflict in Ukraine and led to thousands of dead. Russia's idea was to bleed concessions from Ukraine and hope for pro-Russian government. Instead the Ukrainian population decided to cut itself off from the Russia economy. Opinion in the country, especially in the East was divided and then the tanks moved in and now it's hard to find anyone who thinks the invasion was a good idea.
I have very little sympathy for Ukraine's regime
It's not a regime, it's a government. There's still lots of corruption and ineptitude but it's still an elected government.
More damning is video material of executions and intercepted communications ordering it.
However, as the Russians have demonstrated well for years: they don't need to be good lies, just lots of them. No doubt the people murdered by a missile attack in Kramatorsk station this morning while they were waiting to be evacuated will be portrayed variously as recruits on their way to a military training station, saboteurs, that from afar look like flies. Anyway, it wasn't Kramatorsk, just somewhere in Yemen with a fake sign.
In Russia they have no choice but to believe it, not least because they've been force fed multiple conflicting narratives for years.
More worring is when you see some of the reports trotted out on networks like Fox (Breitbart is presumably full of it) with millions of people more than happy to believe it.
The only "bright" spot this week may have been the death of Zhirinowski who was invaluable to Putin because he was even more extreme. But after a lifetime of service to Mother Russia and, even after 7 alleged COVID vaccinations, he died of COIVD.
"YouTube video hosting has become one of the key platforms spreading fakes about the course of a special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation"
Yeah, only official Russian sources are allowed to spread fake news! I can't wait for the one describing the murder, torture and rape of the invasion as "typical youthful high spirits on a spring break".
Leaks from the mains are an interesting problem. Unless the network owner actually has to buy the water they have no interest in fixing leaks because it doesn't cost them anything. IIRC, and I'm happy to be corrected, this led to up to 30% loss in the network. This is one of the reasons why modern competition regulation aims to separate network owners (water, gas, electricity, etc.) from the resource providers. This also explains why so much is spent lobbying against such regulation!
One of the advantages of geothermal is providing warm water for households as this is, usually, the biggest energy demand. The idea is that, if every house can get enough geothermal energy to heat the place, we won't need as any power stations. Coupled with solar thermal and decent sized water storage and you effectively have a large battery in every house as well as the basis for air conditioning in hot weather.
Of course, doing this for every house is likely to prove a bit of a challenge and yields may drop the more people do it (like drilling wells). Still, it's better than some of the ideas out there.
As for fusion making itself unnecessary, that's unlikely to be the case, but the less of it we need, the better.
The rules change as soon as you go from defensive to offensive strategies, which is why to retake Donbas (and the Crimea) Ukraine is going to need different weapons. To succeed defensively, you just need to survive longer than the other guy. The civilian population will provide support and shelter as long as possible.
Going on attack and your supply lines quickly become your biggest problem. If you move into enemy territory you also have to know how you're going to deal with the civilian population. Will it cooperate? Or will it need "subdueing"? And feeding?
There is no appetite in Ukraine for anything other than reclaiming post-Soviet territory and there won't be weapons for anything else. That said, there are no doubt plans and discussions in the Pentagon, Langley and elsewhere for actions in Belarussia, Georgia, Transnistria, et al. And I've no doubt that there are assessments of whether parts of Russian military will turn against the Kremlin if the war continues to go this badly.
But in the meantime the Russians will continue to shell cities indiscriminately and use what precision missiles they still have as well as possible but also the terrorise the civilian population in occupied terrritory through murder, rape, hunger and torture.
News just in: arms manufacturers like to use wars to sell their wares. Unfortunately for the Russian military machine the Ukrainian show of Mother Russia's almighty weapon wondery* is going that well.
Elsewhere, orders are flooding in for Stingers™, Javelins™, etc. Switchblades™ will presumably be on the list once the Ukrainians are able to deply them (Kherson looks likely) along with their own homegrown loiterers-with-intent. And Turkey can probably sell 10 times more of its drones than it can make; and it will have to get the US permission for components to make more.
In other words: after years of disappointment with wars against people armed with little more than machine guns, the US arms industry has been able to show what even limited numbers of its systems can do against a supposedly well-equipped adversary. This is probably one of the reasons why Russia has gone all "Chechyna" on the civilans using murder, rape and hunger where weapons have failed.
* Vlad himself came up with the title, allegedly.
This isn't really a diagnosis but screening and it's arguably a waste of expensive doctors' time to screen.
This is why ML is increasingly used for screening certain types of cancer: it's faster and more reliable. Rinse and repeat for anything that has clearly visible markers and, in a few years, a home screening kit may be as common as, say, a thermometer.
However, for lifestyle diseases like type 2 diabetes, there are probably easier ways of doing this than expensive pancreatic scans.
On calls I don't use a camera and I disable incoming video feeds, which I find incredibly distracting. I suspect this says as much about me as it does about the technology but I find video calls significantly less productive than normal meetings and the temptation to use spare cycles for, er, other purposes is pretty big.
With normal meetings I guess you have to factor things like travel, etc. in but I still find them more effective if the personal aspect can be taken into consideration, only possible in small meetings. Video calls have been possible since the early 1970s have consistently managed to disappoint. They can be useful as ice breakers at the start of a call but after that audio plus screensharing is generally best.
There are plenty of opportunities for VR in medicine, engineering, education and games, but they're all going to be self-contained with little need for interoperability beyond the usual needs for standardisation.
The bet by Silicon Valley is that immersive experience of games will spill out into other fields: you'll take a break from Fornite or Minecraft to hold a video call or remotely fix a valve.
It's not quite that bad: hardware tends to receive OS updates for 5-6 years, which in terms of a business device, is reasonable and better than many Windows PCs, which by that time may still be receiving OS updates from Microsoft but the manufacturer has long since stopped caring.
That said, the policy is somewhat arbitrary and annoying. I have a perfectly good 2010 MacBook Pro with a refurbished battery that, for Apple's own reasons, can't go beyond Lion. So, it's just sitting around waiting to go on ebay, because there is at least still a market for it.
I'm still on Catalina with my 2020 Intel MBP and my reserve 2016 MBP (you have to have a reserve not least because of battery issues with Macs and this one too has a new battry) because I'm waiting for Apple to fix all the problems with their new architecture and merging with IOS. And I also need to have the same basis for hot-swapping, in case of hardware failure.
That the patch for the graphics driver has not been released for the older versions is disgraceful, though I assume Apple will get round to it when it suits. IANAL but I don't think the argument that there is a new version of the OS would really wash here because the new OS comes with new T&Cs.
I also think the term parameter is misleading here. It's obviously ludicrous in the normal sense of a variable that when changed, changes some behaviour (gear ratio on a car, for example): there's no way operators can deal with that number of parameters.
You forgot to add that apart from "toxic text", babies are able to produce other toxix items…
Mines the one with the weird stain on the front and baby wipes in the pocket…
If the price comparison is solely based on exchange rates then it is inherently flawed. There is the concept of "purchasing power parity" which is supposed to mitigate exchange rate effects by comparing the price of similar products in local currency around the world. There are flaws in this, too, but it's often useful, especially when comparing what are average wages and what can be bought with them. The lower the average wage, the cheaper services will seem in comparison, but PPP can correct this to show that some things are in fact more expensive.
Of course, broadband costs are based on a mixture of high capital costs to build the network – the higher the penetration, the higher the cost – and lower wage and fixed costs to sell (got to have sales and marketing) and maintain it, plus some variable costs related to interconnection and peering charges. So you need to reflect those in any comparison.
War tends to play hell with infrastructure and telecoms is no exception. While they weren't murdering and raping, Putin's Chechens were also destroying and looting whatever they could take with them: copper cables being one of the favourites.
But elsewhere in the country, and relevant for the comparison, it seems that Ukraine benefits from having lots of internet service providers. Apparently, this might have something to do with competition. Just don't mention this to the FCC which is happy to see monopolies in the US…
Elon Musk can't apply because he wasn't born in the US…
Making predictions for US elections is fraught with difficulty but I suspect Trump won't get another chance. By then the world will have moved on while he hasn't and there are plenty of "soundalikes" who fancy their own chances. If he's not in prison by then, he'll probably enjoy choosing his successor.
The Register is not quite Radio4
Personally, I've been pleasantly surprised at the resilience and development of commentary on El Reg. While there are plenty of oldtimers, it seems there is reasonable supply of new people with their own ideas. There are areas of broad agreement but, politics aside, I think there are few areas where the "my way or the highway" mentality of many echo chambers. And even when politics breaks through, it's generally (not always), possible to accept differing opinions may be valid. Of course, this does indicate some degree of socio-economic self-selection, but that's true for all media. And I suspect the moderators are kept busy.
And, The Register, manages to provide a degree of balance through the bootnotes, etc.
That would be nice but it's not how capitalism works. While he is no doubt a talented and impressive entrepreneur, most of Musk's money comes from investors rather than profits from companies: faith in the future of Tesla causes people to buy shares now, driving up the price. This in turn drives down the cost of capital for the company, which provides an advantage over other companies that finance from cashflow. Lax monetary policy over the last decase has increased this advantage.
I think high-end x86 still outperform ARM in some single-threaded disciplines, but ARM has the edge in many other areas due to the degree of hardware acceleration, and, with Apple at least, faster memory.
And I agree with you, if anyone is to criticise the marketing, then hyperthreading is the place to start: any advantages disappear immediately for CPU intensive work.
Many data centres now have their own energy generation units (usually renewables because these are cheap and tax efficient) on site. But the simple economics of ARM systems with better per core performance in cheaper and smaller packages match customer expectations better. Virtualisation, essentially timesharing, makes sense on individual machines, but when you're billing for use, dedicated resources make more sense.
Indeed, but also in the UK, you could easily just take the case to the police because it's a crime. Whether they'll take it seriously is another matter.
It's the Americans that tend to harassment as a civil case and the NDAs come into play only when out of court settlements have been made.
The great thing about private companies is that they don't need to provide full details about the money. However, for a company of Docker's size and age, $ 100 million probably won't last that long. And Bain also has a reputation for flipping companies after asset-stripping streamlining them. Sounds like an IPO is off the table so hoping to sell to a competitor.
While it has in the past executed all kinds of cyberattacks, Russia has limited resources, specifically hackers to engage on this and the current brain drain because of the war and sanctions will also be having an effect. Even those sympathetic to Putin's war might well be considering their options. Reports are that the Russian military is already drafting reserves and training staff into the war. Who's going to want to wait for their call up?
The densities sound impressive and the technology that achieves it is impressive. But once you start thinking in the world of atoms then you realise that potentially there's a long way to go, which is why work on optical computers – bugger the size because switching is so much faster than using electrons – or molecular ones – a data centre the size of a sugar cube is ongoing, because we're reaching the physical limits of electronics, especially the ones like transistors dependent upon or susceptible to quantum effects.
Your argument extends a false premise into nonsense. Trade with America is essential for many economies for many reasons but these three are key: the size of the market, source of capital, rule of law.
That many sanctions are poorly thought out, ineffectual and partial is well-known, Iran springs to mind. But sanctions-busting is entirely market-driven and the Russian market is not that interesting for many, or do you think Putin the Paranoid is keen on letting the Chinese run its networking and telecoms?
Economically sanctions act to drive up the risk premium. If the counterparty then goes on to default, the risk premium is likely to become unaffordable.
That said, Russia did largely manage to avoid the full pain of sanctions post 2014. This was largely down to the profits made by rising prices on essential resources. However, strip the economy of energy resources and you'll see that it has been in decline for over a decade. This is why Russia continues to lose trained personnel, essential if you want to build up "substitute economy" and nowhere is this more apparent than in the armed forces which have thus far been shown to be far worse equipped than most imaginged. Though this is as much down to the kleptocracy as any inability to make parts.
Apart from selling military kit, which is incompatible with the stuff Russia makes, there isn't much revenue for Chinese companies in Russia. It's a resource rich kleptocracy, where the profits that come from exporting resources get spent on trinkets for the rich.
They're doing that mainly by listening in to the non-encrypted radio chatter, which is why they know that Russia is now deploying not just some troops, but entire battle groups from the Eastern Military District (Siberia). Ukrainian troops can all understand Russian and recognise many of the accents.
You make no commercial arguments for the switch. Apple has largely frozen browser development because it has achieved what it needs: a runtime to replace Flash for music and video content.
Switching to Gecko would be a huge wrench for Apple's team. It is far easier for it to pick bits of Blink and make it work with Webkit.
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