* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Meta Platforms demands staffers provide proof of COVID-19 booster vaccine before returning to office

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Good.

I have, in general, little against vaccine requirements. However, limiting them to COVID-19 does seem arbitrary. There are other highly commuincable and dangerous diseases out there, such as influenza for which a similar requirement would make just as much medical sense. However, it probably makes even more sense to limit such requirements to employees where transmission at work is likely to lead to significant morbidity such as in hospitals and care homes.

Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike resigns, leaves WhatsApp co-founder to run things until a successor is named

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: invites all sorts of government investigative and regulatory meddling

The spooks and their idiot masters and mistresses are mainly interested in being able to extract metadata* about who people talk to and the contents of their messages. Hence, the mudslinging that only terrorists encrypt their messages using Signal and all conspiracy cranks use Telegram.

* In many situations this is all they need to know who to watch and bug.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Time to fork it already?

Forking is easy enough but you might end up having to run your own server infrastructure, which isn't so easy, even for the minimal overhead that Signal has. Mobilecoin has to be enabled and makes no sense for > 99% of all users – there are simpler, safer alternatives.

You might simply have more success by submitting a PR to remove the "feature".

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Bloat?

I think one of the reasons, apart pandering to some vocal users (and for obvious reasons Signal probably has a greater share of these than other platforms), might have been to facilitate support payments from users. Now that it is possible to support the app through the usual channels even this justification is no longer required.

Who knows, maybe it will be quietly removed at some point.

Free AI protein software packages nearly predicted structure of the Omicron coronavirus variant correctly

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Nice to see AI working

I think the real advantage is that it's another part of the puzzle. The money that has been thrown at SARS-COV2 itself is ludicrous but the tools that have been developed including the sequencing, folding and the analysis of the method of attack and distribution, mean that we're now getting closer to reasonable simulations. This could come in very handy given the size of the list of zoonotic candidates.

Logitech Signature M650: A mouse that will barely emit a squeak or a clickety-click

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Stop with the handedness!

To reduce strain on the wrist, you want a mouse that fits well into your hand this means almost inevitably left- or right-handed. An ambidextrous alternative is a trackpad.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Contempt of which particular court? Also, you might want to look at the history of ITC decisions…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Patent madness

In most jurisdictions, ideas are not patentable, only specific implementations. For example, chemical are not patentable but the methods of making them arc. A well-known example of different implementations for the same thing is the "widget™" that Guiness used in cans to create a "draught pour" experience. It was soon imitated by "gadgets" that did the same thing slightly differently.

Then there is the US which lets things like "rounded corners" be patented…

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "relatively modern programming language"

The main difference between BeOS and other OSes due to the use of C++ throughout was the consistent programming model: object orientation and message passing. This meant that lots of things of applications could be implemented directly using system APIs rather having to be written more or less from scratch or using some random toolkit. This did mean that reliable applications could be written quickly. Context switching, essential for multimedia work, was also extremely fast. Work in the kernel was, at least for a while, was restricted to C, but this had as much to do with the way x86 handles privileged code as much as anything else.

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

That's only part of the story. The NHS, as such, doesn't exist. It refers to a collection of service providers (hospitals, doctors, dentists, etc.) and a central budget. For years, various governments have tried to impose IT from the top but this has usually met with resistance because the "IT" didn't solve problems. Covid 19 has shown just how well various parts can work together when the government doesn't interfere. NICE is another example of letting the professionals decide what's best.

I've only seen things at great distance but any kind of centralised system has to been conceived and delivered as a service to the NHS and not the other way round. However, the usual suspects (consulting agencies, manufacturers, drug companies) have the better lobbying apparatus and usually win out.

All your database are belong to us: Snowflake named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Usual blah, blah

if you are not stuck in the relational system thinking, and decided to quickly select the database system, it may be a good choice to go with MongoDB especially if developers decide they don't need a database administrator…

Relation databases are not some kind of ideology but products based on solid mathematical principles. Normalisation, atomicity, referential integrity, etc. solve a lot of problems that are otherwise largely unsolvable. And any database without some kind of administrator is an accident waiting to happen. There may be a market for processing lots of transient data, but it's not a database market.

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Well, yes, there's a cartel. Amex doesn't even really compete on handling transactions because its charges are even higher, it competes by market segment by promising to bring big spenders…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

You could apply more or less the same criteria to other states: Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Russia.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

Yes, they're essentially the biggest Ponzi scheme yet created. Notes on the power wasted on the associated blockchains are a distraction, which while probably true, masks the fact that the endless chains are a bad idea for finite transactions.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Expanding horizons and equations

But you are sort of proving his argument. While you can create all kinds of very reliable parsers with regular expressions, handling edge cases can lead to regular expressions which themselves are impossible to read and, hence, maintain.

Fortunately, we now have better tools for working them, things like regex101.com which help you step through them, but also heuristic tools (fuzzers) that help test them to cover those cases you didn't think of.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

It's always been possible to avoid some of the fairly arbitrary sanctions, though this sometimes incurs a high cost. For individuals, money drops usually work pretty well. And there are equivalents for countries: why shouldn't Iran sell North Korea oil? The embargoes and sanctions generally just create black markets, of which the cryptoexchanges are just a new variant.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

but at the end of the day their entire business is about processing transactions.

Not really: this is a misconception that the monopolists are keen to see circulate but their main business is preserving their monopoly on transactions and hence margins and mining all that lovely personal data they accrue by it. Alternative payment provides would, theoretically, drive down both fees and energy use.

Car makers lock in long-term deals with chip giants for future autonomous vehicles

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: EV EOL

You seem optimistic that the necessary legislation will be passed on time. It will be much easier for manufacturers to continue to own the vehicles, sweat them, retire them early and avoid all the hassle of product liability.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: EV EOL

I'm not sure if you were wrong to buy an electric car, but you do have a valid point about reliability of software. However, thus far, car manufacturers have not been able to avoid liability by promising software updates. And the fact is that cars have been becoming increasingly dependent upon computers for well over a decade. Many vehicles produced since then cannot be serviced without sophisticated computer diagnostics.

For various reasons, and certainly in cities, we're moving from car ownership to mobility as a service. This may mean renting or leasing a vehicle for a long period or booking one when you need it but it's definitely the way things are going: regular cashflow cushions manufacturers from the economic cycle and optimising vehicle use is good for the asset owner but also might help reduce pressure for parking spaces.

Hauliers report problems with post-Brexit customs system but HMRC insists it is 'online and working as planned'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: They've had since January 1973 to work out how to leave the EU

Hey, haven't you forgotten someone in that list? Jews, gypsies, the Irish, my neighbours and a bloke called Trevor who beat me to the bar at last orders…

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Hmm

What is your point? That Northern Ireland would make negotiations difficult was clear from the start. That negotiations require the agreement of all parties is also clear. It was also clear that both the UK and the EU wished to keep the Good Friday Agreement, which directly affects the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Personally, having seen some of the consequences of the troubles, I'm pleased that both parties decided peace was so important.

It's not bad faith to point this out. The backstop was one UK proposal, which the EU was happy to go along with, the NI protocol another.

It is sympomatic of the naivety of many brexiteers that the inability to resolve a dilemma, which consists of contradictory issues, is somebody else's fault rather than an unreasonable expectation. While this might make for great electioneering, it has proved to be a terrible negotiation strategy. Though, rather than admit this, Lord Frost decided that it was the equally predictable lack of focus in government that led him to resign. Who could have thought that such an overtly political opportunist like Johnson would drop the issue as soon as possible?

But some people never learn, which is why so much faith is being placed in the next potential leader of the Conservative Party…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Hmm

You mean like Mr Rees-Mogg and his investment company?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Hmm

The NI protocol was the UK's idea, proposed by Johnson and negotiated by Lord Frost… and has nothing whatsoever to do with the majority of trade between the UK and the EU.

Brussels may be full of penpushers but at least they know what pens are and how to push them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

And I'm waiting for a parcel from the UK that's been in customs in Frankfurt for over a week now. Stuff like this used to be three workings days, five max. Even over the holidays.

RISC-V CTO: We won't dictate chip design like Arm and x86

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No there weren't

Actually, the corporate IP lawyers will get very unhappy also if you contribute to BSD without first clearing with them, or use it within products.

The two are distinct and separate issues. The point I was making was that, at the time, HP positively discouraged employees from even looking GPL source. Things did quieten down eventually but it was an example of how the GPL hindered corporate engagement in Linux.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No there weren't

That the success of Linux was because of its licence is a popular misconception. Certainly, the FSF became an effective champion of Linux for a while, but it was a long time before corporations got involved in Linux and that only after the legal department has decided what they could and couldn't do. Even now, with things like the NTFS driver, licensing issues hold Linux back. I remember reading an e-mail in HP which advised employees to avoid GPL code, even when not at work for fear of potential law suits.

And corporations like Google, Amazon but also RedHat, now part of IBM, have shown how easily they can work around the GPL.

It's no coincidence that the GPL has become less and less popular for open source projects for years.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No there weren't

Linux got adopted largely because BSD was the subject of litigation at the time. Until then and more recently, (Free)BSD was exactly what companies wanted: they could contribute or sponsor without having to ask the lawyers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Viable alternative

But in the background, the open-source RISC-V chip architecture is stealthily emerging as a viable third architecture…

To be sure, it may be many years until RISC-V emerges as a viable alternative to x86 and Arm…

It is either emerging or will take years to do so… The interview demonstrates little grasp of exactly what RISC-V is, where it might be used, where it is already being used and where it might end up being used. At the moment, for China, RISC-V offers the best opportunity for silicon that is not at the whim of the US government. For nearly everyone else overall price and time to market remain the key criteria.

AMD claims up to 24 hours of laptop battery life with its latest Ryzen 6000 silicon

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: ARM advantage?

Indeed, in general there's little difference overall in chip design: chips with the same capabilities build with the same processes will be of a similar size, though support for x86 in hardware will still mean some overhead. But ARM still has an advantage when it comes customisation and creating discrete components on the die for codecs, encryption, etc. Apple's major advantage for apparent improvement is the return to shared memory for CPU/GPU which makes some operations much faster because nothing needs copying. This is great when it works but might also mean that you need more RAM than you thought you would.

Nationwide Building Society's Faster Payments turn into Slower Payments for 2022

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Failsafe on a new system?

Only looking at this from a very long way away but it does look like some kind of failsafe kicked in on a system that has a built-in throttle. You see similar things in exchanges nowadays as a way to handle potentially problematic transactions: sometimes it's better to bring things to halt than let run uncontrolled, especially if they could be the target of some kind of attack.

Moving money between banks, while now very fast, is not friction-free as it's a classic two-stage transaction.

France loves open source so much, even its cinema borks have Linux behind the scenes

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Francais?

Stop, unlike "chunky" or "birthday", isn't difficult to say for French people to say, and road signs that are internationally understandable do have advantages for a country that receives lots of tourists.

Yule goat's five-year flame-free streak ends ignominiously

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The Point of November 5th

Indeed, the problem with politicians is that no one who should be one, wants to be one and all those that shouldn't do and are.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Obvious risk

The problem with setting fire to the goat is the obvious risk to public safety. It's also the usual trade-off between one man's "bit of fun" and the tradition the goat represents: don't think too many people would be pleased to see the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square torched every year.

Intel ‘regrets’ offending China with letter telling suppliers to avoid Xinjiang

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Grow a pair

It's not a slippery slope merely the observation of very flexible morality; virtue, it appears, is negotiable.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Grow a pair

It's also a threat to the national security of Taiwan, a friend and ally of the United States.

So much a friend that America refuses to acknowledge it officially. And, again, no one from the US is in Saudia Arabia telling them not to bomb Yemen, even though the US has for at least twenty years considered Saudia Arabia to source of most islamic terrorism (cf. Nicholas Negroponte's Rebuilding America's Defenses and the weird post-hoc justification for invading Iraq).

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Grow a pair

Apart from the fact that Intel, along with many of well-known companies, does indeed depend heavily on sales in China, the biggest problem with this virtue-signalling is that it's so selective: if we shouldn't trade with China because of Xinjiang (or should that be Tibet, or Hong Kong?), then shouldn't we also stop trading with Saudia Arabia - because in its own way it's equally as repressive and also heavily involved in a very dirty war in Yemen? What about Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea, where oil companies have, for decades, been polluting and supporting repression? Then there's Russia, where we get most of our gas from. Not forgetting Egypt or Israel (which gets to runs tests that would be illegal in the US). And what about India after Modi flagrantly broke both Indian and international law by rescinding the autonomy of Jamul and Kashmir and putting it under direct control of the national government?

Or how about stopping trade with Texas because of its recent anti-abortion law?

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

You forgot the taste free chocolates!

Of course a Bluetooth-using home COVID test was cracked to fake results

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: BluetoothDebugActivity ?

Fake it till you make it is just as true for medical products as it is for any other industry in the US. Theranos is high profile but the practices of Big Pharma are, in their own way, even more shocking and on a far bigger scale, eg. Purdue's approach to opioids, though it was far from alone in this. The lesson is: if your lobby is big enough, all you need to worry about is the size of the fine.

Electric fastback fun: Now you can surf the web from the driving seat of your Polestar 2

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Cue the anti-moving work-around in 3, 2, 1...

Amongst other things. Nothing to stop them using a tablet or a phone to do the same thing. The approach by Polestar is a sensible default, but I also want to live in a world where can I override defaults: like being able to install alternative browser engines on a I-Phone, for example.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cue the anti-moving work-around in 3, 2, 1...

You seem not to have met Mr Unlimited Liability of California…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: its not Chrome but would anyone really want Google embbedded system in their car?

Most cars for the last ten years of so have been full of sensors and come with a SIM allowing them to transmit all the data back to the manufacturer's mothership. What, you don't want that? Unfortunately, it's a compulsory opt-in.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cue the anti-moving work-around in 3, 2, 1...

That's their right.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: JXL is the future of all image formats

If there is going to be a new bitmap format, it's very much likely to be AVIF, as this is based on AV1, which more and more phones support in hardware. The JPEG licence holders spent far too much time holding out for new sources of income.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

APNG has been around since 2004 but getting browser makers onboard for anything they didn't come up with themselves has always been hard.

But for many of the situations where GIFs are used, it is now better to use MP4/AV1 files.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No, it could be useful for the web

Seeing as the improvements are largely on the encoding side, this isn't such an issue. Having codecs in hardware will make more of a difference. But, really, decoding bitmaps on a phone is nothing compared to displaying them on screen. And this again is nothing compared to watching videos: network traffic + codec + screen. This is why so much effort goes into video codecs.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Machine that weighs less than its operating manual.

We donated the manual for the IBM 7090 to the National Museum of Computing: apparently, while there's still lots of the kit around, there's a dearth of the manuals.

Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: It wasn't cancelled because it was expensive to operate

A lot of passenger planes were converted to freight last year: there's always a market.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It wasn't cancelled because it was expensive to operate

The A380, or something like it, is still a very interesting proposition for airlines because, if you can fill it with paying passengers, it's cheaper to run than two smaller craft. It's no coincidence that Emirates was a big fan: it's the perfect plane for the Haj. However, after it came into service the market moved away from the mega-hub model towards more point-to-point services. This means fewer passengers on any particular route and, hence, smaller planes.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: They only made 251 ?

Possibly, but that's still a lot of planes in a short time. Also, much of the technology developed for the A380 has been used on subsequent models like the A350, which came into service much sooner than originally anticipated.

Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

There are numerous examples, but I think SSH is the most salutory one, where security issues persisted, sometimes for years, despite active maintenance, extensive peer reviewing and testing