Posts by Charlie Clark 12172 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
The BSD licence was explicitly designed not to attach strings and encourage adoption, wherever possible: it was unix with bells. Without it we wouldn't have much of the excellent software and infrastructure and arguably even the internet. The GPL was always political and has largely been a commercial failure, which is why it's fallen out of favour.
3G in Germany is being phased out this year. I think 2G may stay around for a while, because of the range and there are lots of embedded devices with it, but nothing using much bandwidth as there never was much anyway, so it will probably be easy enough to pare back the spectrum used and reallocate.
I think things in the UK will probably be fairly similar in practice with spectrum being awarded for a certain period of time and most operators having already moved on to LTE kit in most locations anyway, because it's easier to manage and maintain.
Sounds like an interesting approach, got a link for some examples?
Postgres will let you send the stored procedures over the wire, which makes keeping your server and client code in the same repository easy. Hannu Krosing demonstrated this in Python a while back, where he used a decorator for code that was to run on the server. Must say, I thought this was pretty neat but have not yet got round to trying it myself.
there are many applications were MySQL and clones/derivatives are quite suitable but Postgres would be serious overkill.
That it simply not true. In the past, you might have gone with MySQL for the apparently better performance (at the expense of integrity). But this was always possible in Postgres by simply disabling integrity. But that is mismatch and non overkill. Overtime, that lack of data integrity and, oh, things like table locking would come back to haunt you again and again and again.
SQL has a long history of being knobbled by various vendors, who then implement their own versions of it, to ensure lock in, while being used by the marketing departments as argument for it. The criticisms of it, both for data definition and querying, are long-standing and still valid.
What's surprised me is how Postgres views Oracle as their target, not MySQL.
Postgres is older than MySQL and has always done things like ACID that MySQL has only recently been able to do properly. MySQL became popular quickly because it had great write speed and the developers understood the need for good Windows tooling: I've run Postgres on Windows with cygwin and while it worked, it wasn't likely to win many fans.
But there was never much money on the MySQL space because the reasons why it was fast were also why it was completely unsuitable for the business world, where data integrity and support for transactions were essential. To be fair, this wasn't what MySQL was developed for, but that didn't stop thousands of people finding out the hard way.
But software development, and particularly software quality and handling bug reports, was always awful. And this was something that improved almost immediately after Oracle took over: personally, I remember a bug report I'd submitted more than 10 years previously suddenly got notice. And there's no doubt that in the last few years, Oracle has improved the engineering and release management. But, in the open source world they're caught between a rock and a hard place: the "never Oracle" zealots who use MariaDB, precisely because it is the non-Oracle fork, and the rest of the world that finds Postgres gets it right most of the time, continues to get better (more features and better performance), and plays nicely with the inevitable existing proprietary databases such as Oracle or DB2.
There are plenty of examples on both sides demonstrating that, where interoperability is required, this is not possible without standards. But innovation, almost by definition, happens in the absence of standards. This is why many standards are developed retrospectively based on existing products. WiFi is both a good and bad example: companies scrambled to make use of unlicensed spectrum and ignored lots of good ideas, like channel management, on the way. As a result lots of the standards were always playing catch up and were essentially marketing badges. This has changed more recently with the convergence of the wifi and mobile phone networking, which, because of the use of the licensed spectrum tends to have a more committee-based RFC, specification, ratification approach.
But vendors will almost always go for some kind of standards plus approach, which will allow them support the standard but also to add their own secret sauce.
I think you mean safe harbour. But that wouldn't help here, because it's not about what gets posted but what the algorithm decides to show. Still, don't see the suit going far, not least because it's not about American citizens in America. And, even there, there's a distinct lack of retrospective class action suits.
I seem to recall from Bill Bryson's book that dinosaurs are formed from Greek and Latin stems and, thus, can have any plural form. It's tempting for anyone with a smattering of a classical education to try and get these things "right", only for us to learn that, load words tend to get localised very quickly. And, a good thing to: stati is not the plural of status… and there are heaps more. Quod erat, er whatever! ;-)
Apple cares about margins and control. With the volumes it sells, it can easily offset development costs (chip design is much cheaper than building fabs, and this is only customisation of the ARM designs) and it can then enforce its walled garden in silicon. It's great for shareholders so it must be good, right?
The M1 benchmarks flatter somewhat due to the use of shared memory. The M1 does, however, definitely benefit from the close coupling, which should make compiler optimisations for the hardware easier.
In the phone world, it's clear that there's not much between the high end chips, and Google possibly does have the edge for ML work, having decided to go for more grunt and lower precision. Apple's move is really only about margins.
Once data centre power management has become commodified, it doesn't really matter where that data centre is. The important thing is having it managed for power efficiency and while this may inevitably involve some form of outsourcing, it doesn't mean relocating. Missing from this argument are the not inconsiderable costs of providing highspeed connectivity. For your own data: sovereignty, security and speed should be key factors.
A bit of both. If you have an immersion heater then you're all avoid the biggest problem of the temperature gradient, but that's not what mining rigs are set up for.
Because electricity is in some countries, including, unavoidably used for heating, we can here, for the sake of argument, discount both conversion and transmission losses. But it's worth noting that even with nuclear, combined heat and power plants are common.
If you're only thinking in the energy converted then, you're right, it doesn't really matter. However, electric heating is notoriously inefficient, which is why it's deliberately expensive in many countries, at least since the oil crisis, and limited to things like kettles, washing machines, etc.
However, banning mining is almost impossible to do as it's difficult to enforce: is a data centre doing something useful or just runing crypto calcs? Much better to ban the trading and also reduce the massive risks due to speculation.
Fax is not being used for track and trace, but for reporting between different systems. Track and trace is devolved to the local health authorities who do a pretty good job given their scarce resources – they're often an easy target for "cutting waste".
The bureaucracy is extensive and entrenched – every time I get a jab pages of blurb get scanned and sent – but this and the degree of digitisation are a red herring in the current situation. In general, there has been far too much faith in modelling and not enough in standard operating procedures. Infections and deaths correlate, unfortunately, well with the well-documented underfunding of the care of the elderly. Including the rather bizarre decisions not to roll out compulsory rapid testing in autumn 2020 and a hesitancy for compulsory vaccinations for health and care workers.
Among the general population mortality correlates inversely to indicators of good primary health care such as the number of hospital beds per capita. Infection rates also correlate inversely to the introduction and withdrawal of free rapid testings. While this was for some a get rich quick scheme, it was also excellent public health and, hence, cheap at the price. People understood the quid pro quo, infections were identified early and people who tested positive stayed home.
I don't think this is just about money. Microsoft is getting very aggressive about moving all your documents onto their servers. In addition to statutory data protection obligations, public services often have additional requirements about what they store, in what format they store it and where it's stored. Admittedly, some of the rules are bizarre and antiquated and very often quite the opposite of open access, but they still exist.
Do any serious digging in a Pi and you will hit problems. I've been running Kodi with a Pi 1, 2 and now 3 and still have problems with audio dropouts at the start of some shows.
Doesn't mean it's a poor system – it's a game changer – it's excellent for small systems such as a firewall or for prototyping.
In this case, there's no need to go that far: bandwidth has always been limited on the Pis, basically by design. Not that it would be that expensive to have a separate controller, but it would bump the BoM noticeably and is totally irrelevant for 99.99% of all Pi projects.
You can have the same argument for any kind of consumer electronics product or things like cars: simple features are only available at a significant premium even though the hardware is there. I'm not defending the practice, though I think printer manufacturers are probably even more egregious.
If MediaTek can gain market share through as a result of this – and whether people by their phone with a contract or not doesn't really matter – then that might encourage other manufacturers to up their game. But I'm not holding my breath because this is how market segmentation works and this is something in which we all participate.
The problem with drivers really only affects hardware manufacturers in their ability to provide updates, as was the case with the Gemini, because new releases of AOSP may require new drivers. For the crowd that doesn't mind replacing the phone because there are no more updates this is fine.
MediaTek makes chips and doesn't sell phones so the crippling comparison you make doesn't really stand. Phone makers indulge in selective crippling to segregate the market, but this is just how consumer markets work.
PS I think you mean "fully fledged".
They just need a simpler release cycle. Windows 10 has suffered from the combination of bug and feature releases. Windows 11 serves two purposes: an EOL for Windows 10 gets MS out of "lifetime" support for Windows 10; it means new features go only into Windows 11 and Windows 10 only gets bug fixes. This makes Windows 10 more attractive to many.
As for release streams: FreeBSD has been the model to follow for decades: stable, current, and VCS, because sys admins know what they need.
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