Posts by Charlie Clark

Given the fact that Zlib is really just away to compress data, including http connections, I'm not sure that monoculture is an issue. But this is clearly an instance of the tragedy of the commons: everyone uses it but no one maintains it.

Re: Ouch

Doesn't libpng require zlib as a dependency?

In any case lots of software, inlcuding MS Officce, will need updating because zip is the default file format for many, even if they use different file extensions.

Re: Let's Qualify that 5.5GHz Figure

And then there are the packaging other optimisations of Apple's chips. 5.5 Ghz might be needed to run the software for which there is no hardware acceleration.

Re: I don't think many Chinese companies will defy the sanctions

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.

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.

Mozilla as a corporation has made an awful lot of mistakes and wasted oodles of money on side projects that no one was really interested in.

The work on the browser and in the various bodies around the development of the web, including documentation, has been outstanding. I'm not heavily involved in web development at the moment but, should the need arise, I'd certainly be interested because good technical documentation is hard to write and, therefore, usually hard to find.

Re: Horses for courses

If it were possible, I would completely ban high function interpreted language runtimes on boundary systems in an environment, but nowadays, so many admin tools rely on these runtimes that it's just not possible.

Seeing as you fairly easily install them as a single binary on a compromised system that's not necessarily going to help.

Re: It can't be MySQL

Yes, but is it webscale?

Shirley, this is mainly a read-heavy environment?

Re: Logistics software?

Not really the software as much as everything else: food, fuel, munitions. But also the engineers and technicians required not only for the weapons but for the trucks that keep breaking down on the way.

Re: Russxit

They already have enough of them and the exodus is not directly to the west but to other former communist countries such as Georgia where being discovery of involvement in pro-Russian activities might carry a slightly higher price.

The fact of the matter for Russia is that it doesn't have enough engineers to maintain the war effort as it is and many of these are leaving if they get the chance. This is the direct consequence of the kleptocracy that has eroded the status that used to be attached to such employment.

Re: Re:Texas : Can I move there please?

FWIW "hormone blockers", etc. are already considered harmful in many countries (Sweden, UK) and by an increasing number of US doctors, incuding some who have undergone gender reassignment surgery.

I have plenty of sympathy for those involved but no time for the extremists on either side nor for the burgeoning industry that has sprung up around it.

The specification is open. Though it was a fight to get it that far!

Re: Too good to true?

Calibration is likely to be the big problem here, but it's pretty clear that you can probably knock up pretty reasonable sensors using phone sensors. Think of it like the early days of Time Team as they went from metal detectors to radar and then lidar.

Re: Usual answer

The Windows interface before Windows 95 was deliberately crippled by Program Manager, the sole reason for existence was to avoid lawsuits by Apple. I don't think Windows 95 was much better but at least it had a tree menu avoiding oodles of windows opened just to start a single program.

Since then there have been several attempts to incorporate the ideas of Taligent with vayring degress of success.

Re: Obviously...

The sad fact is that the majority of Russians get their news from the TV and believe it. I was discussing this the other day with someone who is from Russia and is used to having difficult conversations with relatives there.

Then again, as many studies have shown, people elsewhere are not that much better informed. Still, at least we have a choice of competing conspiracy theories!

Re: Copied from Python

Static analysis of Python code has always been good and there are numerous example where static typing fails to prevent bugs. You need fuzzing and things like Hypothesis to test inputs.

Type hints are essentially compiler optimisations and were originally ruled out of Python for precisely that reason.

Re: Copied from Python

Its also easy to ignore.

I don't find this at all. Descriptors are a much more legible and less intrusive way of providing support for typing.