* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I seem to remember that someone decided, after running the numbers, it seems that Microsoft makes a loss from Windows over time. But it's considered to be a useful loss leader for that MS Office which is very profitable. The move to the subscription model, makes this somewhat moot. It was Office 365, now its Microsoft 365, and you will have Teams forcibly installed and you will use it!

Hence, I think the real reason for the change will be to limit any liability claims for holdouts when Microsoft stop providing updates to all users.

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I think it's reasonable to assume they already have. The announcements serve several purposes: let the public know how good police tech is; force the low-hanging fruit to look for another solution and make them worry that it's been compromised.

A-list gangs probably already use a-list encryption tools…

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re: How about wanting everyone to know the truth

It is and shouldn't be confused with facts.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re: Justified?

It doesn't matter what the fuck it is or whether the person is right or wrong: it doesn't have a place on the kernel mailing list. But if it was my list I'd just treat it like spam and remove the user.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re: How about wanting everyone to know the truth

The truth is always unavoidably subjective.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: In a stockyard...

You have to admire the naive optimism! Multispecies (bats, pangolins, humans, cats, minks, ferrets, etc.) viruses are notoriously difficult to eradicate.

BOFH: Despite the extremely hazardous staircase, our IT insurance agreement is at an all-time low. Can't think why

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Loved it

Veiled threats from the get go!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Danger, danger, high… potential!

You're overthinking it: there's an implied elision so that it's purely the subjunctive: user's potential and the.

Bottles do break.

Mine's the one with Shirtlift Surgical Supplies on the back. RIP Rik & Nick.

Blue passports, French service provider: Atos bags £21m UK Passport Office deal

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: "become completely digital"

My mum only has a phone and a TV and I'm pleased because that is all she can manage. Making her do stuff online without help is basically inviting her to fail, or get hacked.

I do lots of stuff online but there should always be other options.

Wine 6.0.1: For that one weird app on that one weird Mac

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Easier to run a VM

it is doing it extremely acceptably.

I think you win the prize for oxymoron of the week!

The Valve reference is interesting but should, I think, be qualified in that most users probably don't know that Wine's being used nor do they care. And Valve is probably in a position to ensure that all the relevant APIs are available.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Easier to run a VM

I suspect you mean the rig couldn't run Windows, which post XP was a memory hog.

Done correctly, the guest OS should be able to have nearly all the resources of the machine with the host OS just managing the VM. I know I was able to run Windows XP multiple VMs on a MacBook with 4 GB RAM in 2008 and as I was remote controlling InDesign this was a godsend.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Easier to run a VM

I've been running Windows VMs for over a decade and have yet to come across software that won't run in them. But in any case, if something won't run in a Windows VM (and you can choose your pick) then it almost certainly won't run in Wine. The overheard on modern CPUs with hypervisors is trivial.

Wine was a nice idea at the time and is a great demonstration of technology but it's also fatally flawed. Virtualisation of the hardware supplanted emulation of the sofware around the time IBM added support for Windows to OS/2. This is why there are virtualised mainframes out there running code for which the source code no longer exists.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Easier to run a VM

WINE is pretty neat but basically if you really need to run a Windows application, just use a Windows VM because it's guaranteed to work.

AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn’t fix for hours due to ‘environmental conditions’ on data centre floor

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Once again, Single Point of Failure failed

You might want to design a second aircon system as backup, just to be sure.

I'm not sure that that's directly practicable. What you need is a resilient aircon that might have different pumps on different power circuits but a completely separate airflor is difficult.

And, at some point, all that extra redundancy means additional complexity, particularly when it's at a single site: load-balancing across separate data centres, or at least buildings on a site is probably easier.

I did see an alert from one service I know of (but don't manage) but the ops team said there was no downtime.

Samsung brags that its latest imaging sensor has the ittiest-bittiest cam pixels in the world

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Nope

You seem to have dropped your sense of humour…

A entomologist might have replied with "consider the stag beetle's dilemma"

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The trade off isn't simply size versus numbers: there is also the sensitivity of the cell to consider (and all the stuff that happens with the lense). This is why we have seen smaller cameras produce better pictures in a wide range of conditions. We long past what were once considered to be inviolable laws by combining the physics with software. We also do this with radio telescopes.

And Samsung has for a while been at the forefront of many of the improvements and innovations so you're missing out by avoiding them. That said, improvement over the last few years have been marginal and, therefore, easier to find in more devices. The factories in Shenzhen have not only got better at replicating (sometimes copying requires mastering some tricky new manufacturing processes, though industrial espionage definitely does go on) but are also working on their own. The Chinese market alone is big enough to make this relevant and why we see clever things from Xiaomi and other manufacturers.

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: we can use this modern asset

Your medical data is very much an asset.

I totally agree, but there's a paradox in the ownership: as long as I own it, no one is going to pay fair value. And, thank fuck we don't have the US health insurance model in Europe!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

we can use this modern asset

Nuff said, really.

The NHS has lots of examples of using patient data efficiently and securely for analysis but there is little or no need to make such data available to private companies because it is a not an asset and anyone who says it is should be turfed out immediately.

Google says its artificial intelligence is faster and better than humans at laying out chips for artificial intelligence

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Traditional algorithms

Given the number of transistors shoved onto modern chips I suspect that the algorithmic solving approach is now probably slower than it was then. The ML approach doesn't have to be optimal, it just has to be slightly better and faster. As noted in the report, the final plan can subsequently be tweaked.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The next step

No doubt they're already working on this: Google tends to release research papers after they've moved on at least one step. Google's work on chips is a good thing given the concentration in the industry – ARM does continue to evolve but nVidia has different priorities now – and Intel is still in a mess.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Up

Sounds reasonable

While you can do some of this with solvers, the number of parameters quickly makes this impractical, though you can use the approach to assess the results. So, you're left with pattern matching, something at which ML excels, learns from its mistakes (including occasionally how to repeat them…) and doesn't get bored.

Apple's macOS 12 adds improved virtualization though no sign of anything like Boot Camp on M1 silicon

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No one needs Bootcamp anymore

Thanks for the tip but I've always found Parallels to be easier to work with, on MacOS at least.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No one needs Bootcamp anymore

Ugh!

We switched to an Asterisk-based system (Ansitel) a couple of years ago. The UI is far from perfect but at least it doesn't require IE!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No one needs Bootcamp anymore

I think I had the same shitty software. Can't remember when it stopped working but I seem to remember it being able to use the USB connection in Parallels.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No one needs Bootcamp anymore

Intel does deserve a lot of the blame for dropping the ball on CPU development. My 2020 MBP is a little faster than the 2016.

But I have a lot posix stuff that gets managed by MacPorts and I do worry about some of the hacks Apple are making both to restrict access to the kernel but also make software installation easier. I have quite a bit of unsigned software – OpenOffice, Calibre – which already need extra permission to be installed. But my use case isn't standard and I have few reservations about recommending the new machines to friends and family for general use, especially as Foxconn Apple can actually deliver in volume. SWMBO would have got one if she hadn't insisted on getting a new shiny thing in the spring.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No one needs Bootcamp anymore

Always nice to hear real world reports. I think both Apple's silicon and virtualisation will improve over time and it will be interesting to see if this year's chips offer more RAM (bigger challenger for the approach they've adopted). But I expect we'll be living with other teething troubles of MacOS for ARM for a while yet, which is why I got one of the last Intel MBPs last year.

Nevertheless, I'm preparing to authorise MBAs and MBPs for general use.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

No one needs Bootcamp anymore

Bootcamp was a nice gimmick when the first Intel Macs were released but has not really been necessary for at least five years: machines have got beefier and virtualisation has got better. In addition, Bootcamp on ARM would require a heap of new drivers for Apple's proprietary hardware. Much easier to improve virtualisation support, including Windows for ARM, when it becomes generally available.

Six years in the making, Vivaldi Mail arrives alongside version 4.0 of the company's browser

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I haven't used Thunderbird for a while but was an avid user of Opera Mail which just got a lot of things right: it uses views instead of folders and automatically recognises mailing lists for example.

I got fed up of waiting for Vivaldi Mail and have switched to MailMate for MacOS which also gets a lot of things right, though less by default. But, my is it a joy to have a mail client that is actively being worked on! And Benny Nielsen deserves enormous credit for this. Every time I have to launch Apple Mail or – shudder – Outlook, I ask myself does no one really care about e-mail?

Everything Apple announced: Tor-ish Safari anonymization. Cloaked iCloud addresses. Cloud CI/CD. And more

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Applebook?

You may have a point but I think this is simply to stop users dumping Messages / FaceTime for multi-OS apps like Signal or Telegram. I've only ever used Messages on MacOS and it's pretty poor even compared with Electron-based things like Signal Desktop.

Uncle Sam recovers 63.7 of 75 Bitcoins Colonial Pipeline paid to ransomware crew

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Not your keys, not your crypto

This is why the art market is so popular. But there have already been criminal investigations over some the metal "stored" in warehouses in London and elsewhere.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Not your keys, not your crypto

US law holds any that plays along with conversion in such situations not just liable for the money but criminally liable: this means potentially much bigger fines. And part of the fun of blockchain, is that every transaction is recorded. Basically, cryptocurrencies come with their own indelible ink. Or, you can't hold them without at some point having to identify yourself. Traditional money laundering via the service industries is much more reliable and the banks will continue to make money by stealing from or betting against their customers.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: At Savvo...

It's not really price that moves websites to CDNs but things like bandwidth and traffic filtering. Getting more bandwidth (and there are now attacks that have enough bandwidth to take out entire data centres) can be expensive but basically it's the filtering that brings the biggest returns.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: At Savvo...

A CDN is not the same as putting your data into the cloud, it's really just a set of proxies.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It's really quite difficult and expensive to build your own multi-CDN system and, given, that configuration issues become increasingly likely to be the SPOF, even that won't always help as evinced by the occasional Google SNAFU: Google effectively does run multtiple CDNs.

CDNs do take an enormous amount of risk out of the equation by filtering nearly all the aggressive traffic out there, and there is a lot of that!

Remember Anonymous? It/they might be back, and it/they are angry with Elon Musk

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Well, they know that there is money to be made on the resultant marginal trades. Lots of money Loadsamoney!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

There are two important differences: firstly, it's her job; secondly she does not stand to benefit personally from her pronouncements. That the markets respond so dramatically, though you need to look more at the volume than at the price movements, is evidence of the inefficiency of markets. Everyone knows that, given the size of the various programmes of the last few years, both interest rates and taxes are going to have to go up at some point. The only real questions are: when and by how much.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I think a lot of people do, some several times a week. I don't drive very often but when I do 5 hours between breaks isn't unusual. And then I've also sat in traffic jams for several hours at a time.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I thought ...

There is probably more overlap than you think, especially ten years on.

Just when everyone thought things might be looking up, Dido Harding admits interest in top job at NHS England

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Mushroom

Sometimes I think they keep following the drummer principle of Spinal Tap where previous experience seems to matter little.

Hang on! That gives me an idea: maybe Spinal Tap should offer her the position as drummer!

Report commissioned by Google says Google isn't to blame for the death of print news

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Some newspapers have always been shit but others have done great reporting.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Price is only one part of the value proposition. There are still many specialised publications out there that are surviving because they provide articles that go beyond the headline and strapline.

Microsoft Irish subsidiary makes $314.73bn profit

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Microsoft is good at abusing boundaries...

Worse still: they fund lobbies to draft legislation that suits them. Tax is difficult and international even more so because the lobbies get to fly the flag and make everything an act of patriotism.

Google's diversity strat lead who said Jews have 'insatiable appetite for war' is no longer diversity strat lead

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Out of context

Social media suffers from two effects: the tendency for echo chambers to develop and the fact that is a media, ie. not face-to-face. Together the two combine to form vociferious niche groups: we tend to move towards groups of people with similar opinions; mediated communication is worth less than direct, which makes it inflationary, but also more difficult to judge the impact. So, we gather in groups where hear what we want to hear and say what we think others want to hear and this includes baying for blood.

How to use Google's new dependency mapping tool to find security flaws buried in your projects

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I think the reference is specific to Javascript where it's known that there are many duplicate libraries and the quality of many leaves a lot to be desired.

Stack Overflow acquired for $1.8bn by Prosus (no, me neither)

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I'd like to see more Stack Overflow in companies

While there is a lot of crap on the sites, there is an awful lot of useful information and the barrier to entry is very low. Companies have for years been chasing knowledge management systems and SO is one of the best I've seen compared with all the chat-based shit out there.

As for Prosus, it's doing a little bit better than Softbank.

You were supposed to be watching him. Letters from SEC claim Tesla breached deal to police Elon Musk's tweets

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Careful Elon

FCC rules have nothing to do with cancel culture and everything to with a fair, or at least the pretence of a fair, capital market and comments from a company or its employees are subject to regulation.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Not another UI redesign please!

The user agent string has long been broken which is why it's being phased out by more meaningful declarations. Good websites shouldn't have been using it for years: basically since HTML5 came out but there are still a suprising number of websites that come with such stupid hard-coded behaviour. As a customer I can decide whether to visit such sites. But a developer insisting on their own user agent is effectively taking that decision for me and so the maxim "don't punish the customer" comes to bear.

And, BTW, of far greater import, is deciding to live with all the webkit-prefixes that are still plastered all over websites that were designed and programmed by idiotic fanbois. In the end, everyone caved in and decided to support them, which is a pity as they were quite useful in working with different implementations.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: New tab design

I find them pretty awful: flatness combined a fade out of text makes them pretty difficult to read. And I've never found tab-switching via the keyboard to be as easy with Firefox as it was with Opera.

Might be time to give Vivaldi another chance.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

Considering both the browsers are free to use…

Chrome is definitely sending a lot of your behavioural data to Google which in return reserves the right to monetise it. Where's the freenes in that?

Chrome is on the naughty step here not least because it doesn't respond to a standard quit command!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Stats

One of the problems with things like W3Counter and Firefox is that many users will have set the privacy settings to 11 and so won't be reporting at all.