Posts by Charlie Clark 12190 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
That's what I mean. If everyone is supposed to be in the office from Tuesday to Thursday, you can't downsize. I know of a couple of companies that are offering people split-working but only if they're prepared to desk share, though obviously not in a WeWork way.
Cue next property crisis if the idea really catches on: loose monetary policy has led to an awful lot of pricey office building.
So how is it that nearly every firm has found exactly the same answer?
What if, as many of us know, they haven't. First of all, lots and lots of people don't have the option of working from home. Secondly, cost-savings can only be achieved by not having everyone in the office at the same time.
As for which approach works best: while some people work best on their own, many don't. Then, throw into the mix things like data security and confidentiality – it may well be against contracts for documents to be processed outside the office – and then health and safety and working from home is no longer as simple as many gurus like to make out.
So, all in all, an article of Mr Pesce's usual quality…
While of of the reasons for the range block may be down to the use of servers for things Micrsoft doesn't approve of (pop-up servers are just as likely to be used for spam as they are for load balancing or VPNs), there's no doubt that Microsoft is keen to drive as many people as possible towards its increasingly proprietary mail service. This probably isn't the cause here but you can imagine the Microsoft support droids telling people that the problems wouldn't happen if they used Microsoft 365…
That's a very poor comparison both of the cases and the proceedings. With Assange, it would have been best had he been extradited to face trial in Sweden for statutory rape. This would have dimmed his saintly nimbus somewhat.
It seems very much like due process to wait for the judgement. But it's probably also worth pointing out that the US is, as so often, playing fast and loose with extraterritoriality in general and extradition in particular: the US never extradites its own citizens.
To throw in my own bit of false equivalence: the current civil case against Prince Andrew is one of the biggest incidences of legal hypocrisy imaginable: the age of consent in many US states is less than 16 but I don't see many attempts to get trials moved from Tennessee or Texas moved to New York state. Not that I'm sticking up for Prince Andrew, I just don't think that particular case has much merit and certainly doesn't deserve the coverage it gets.
People making a living from working on open source is likely to remain forever an exception. It's not where open source came from and it's not what it's about. Research, particularly in academia, is a reasonable comparison. A lot of it goes on without specific budgets but some things won't happen without them. And the history of the lack of research in vaccines and antibiotics over the last 50 years demonstrates similar weaknesses in our approach, with the bugs and viruses essentially discovering unpatched bugs. And, no, despite the current hype around COVID, we haven't got a solution for this either.
That was my point: sounds great as an idea but experience with it varies a lot. But the liability issue is also something that needs addressing; first for software, in general (I've got a € 30000 bill I'd like to send to Microsoft for their fiasco that is Exchange) and then for open source. If accepting payment means accepting liability then lots and lots of people will wisely say no.
The proposal sounds similar to how the music collects and distributes royalties. This works better in some countries than others.
However, the biggest problem is reconciling the open source approach with product liability when the two are, in a sense diametrically opposed.
From a personal perspective I'd say they're as bad as each other. Yes, Google's business is the mining of personal information for advertising, but when it comes to security it has, at least among tech companies, an enviable track record of identifying and fixing bugs.
As Apple moves more and more into the services business, it is going to be doing similar things with personal data for Apple Music and Apple TV. And, when it comes to patching software bugs, it has a dismal record, despite the solid underpinnings of MacOS. This is further not helped by the apparent need to fiddle with much of the open source software it makes use of: eg. when openssl bugs are discovered you normally need to wait for an OS update from Apple.
So the invasion of Crimea and the proxy conflicts in Donetsk and Luhansk are just figments of our imagination? FWIW I happen to know a couple of Ukrainians and they are taking the current build up of Russian troops very seriously. Hardly surprising considering they're in the reserves.
Well, they might be laughable without 100,000 troops stationed in readiness on the Ukrainian border.
Putin knows that he cannot expect to invade and hold Ukraine but that there are plenty of other options, which might provide some relief for the costs of supplying the occupied Crimea via ships and a bridge and a welcome distraction for the Russian population.
I think it's certainly arguable that Wall Street needs more regulation again. The ability to issue unlmited numbers of shares, combined with low interest rates, is essentially a licence for blue sky securities that are paid for by financial repression: you get nothing for your savings book, so how about some of these beans.
With it being an island, it's not surprisin that the Isle of Man also has a very proud Norse tradition so any kind of Celtic purity was lost over a millennium ago. Same is true for much of coastal Ireland including places like Galway.
A lot of common linguistic ideas are caught up in the 19th century romatincism that created them
There's very little Celtic in modern English, a few words but nothing grammatical or syntactical. It's fairer to say that it's an amalgam of Old English with Norse and Norman French with lots and lots of loan words, mainly latin and greek but also things like turquoise, tea and chutney.
My own experience has been that companies are now much more both to use and contribute financially to open source projects than they were say 10 years ago, assuming they can find a way of getting through the bookkeeping!
I have one project which has received considerable support from all kinds of companies. Not enough to work on it full time, but enough to cover the necessary work. YMMV but some times you jut need to ask.
The problem with FOSS is it is based on a communist belief
Not sure whether you mean FOSS to be perjorative but the origins of open source software are definitely not communist. IIRC DARPA was a big sponsor of what was to become BSD. Yes, that's the DARPA that's not famed for its communist affiliation, rather the opposite.
Unix, and the BSD became successful because of the academic approach of providing the source code. Okay, at the time, when all the money was in the hardware, charging extra for the software made little sense. But ideologically the idea of sharing code stems from the Enlightenment.
Nuance also provides voice recognition software for Samsung's Android phones. The merge means one fewer independent providers leaving us essentially with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Given that all of them operate some form of vertical integration (device + software), that's hardly a healthy market.
Deaths due to flu are so common that they are not kept meticulously but the number you're quoting for the US for 2017-2018 looks extremely low, given that the estimate for Germany (a quarter of the population) for that year is 30,000 - 50,000. COVID deaths are still be recorded for patients with the virus, though the actual cause of death could be something else. For example, Denmark is reporting ICU patients with COVID as such even though around a quarter were admitted for other reasons.
Direct comparisons are, however, not possible. Flu can be considered endemic which means deaths are in a population that has been infected and where vulnerable groups are regularly vaccinated.
Both viruses can lead to serious infection and death, particularly among the elderly and steps to mitigate infection, including vaccination, should be taken where possible.
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.
…schemas should never change. I think this is a nice idea but it looks like it ignores things like indexes, which could quickly affect performance. I think the general abstraction to views is a good idea but another option for Postgres is to use multiple schemas within the same database.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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