* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

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

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Stop fiddling with my browser!

Thanks but i've some fairly ugly tabs.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Benchmarking

I assume by being hooked more directly into the OS for certain operations.

Indeed, Apple reserves some hardware acceleration features for its own software only.

Why did automakers stall while the PC supply chain coped with a surge? Because Big Tech got priority access

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The just-in-time world

Some companies even keep zero inventory and rely in on-demand purchasing, said Lee.

Most car makers run everything on just-in-time and have zero inventory. And, seeing as governments will generally bail them out if there is over or under supply, there is little incentive for them to go back to expensive warehouses. If demand tanks, as it did in the autumn of 2019, then either the government will pay for short-time schemes or juice the car market with incentives. If, as is now happening, demand outstrips supply, governments will also pay for short-time schemes and companies can use the opportunity to raise prices.

The comparison with the world of phones is hardly relevant: the chips for cars are coming from completely different assembly lines. The only thing that really matters is probably the squeeze on China, which will certainly have forced reconfiguration of supply lines. So, can we get a face-saving deal with China that allows us to feel good about ourselves when talking about human rights violations in Xianjiang, whilst letting the fabs in Guangdong get back to work?

Cynic, moi?

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Auditors...

By "you", I assume you mean "Simon". But in the real world auditors aren't that easily distracted. It's got to be a big enough project with a big enough pay-off – Wirecard, HP's purchase of Autonomy, etc. – for them to be able to invoke the principal-agent problem and get paid not to find anything fishy! ;-)

Charlie Clark Silver badge

So close to the bone

Over the last year it's been possible to declare almost any expense as due to the pandemic. Though when review things most of this will pale in comparison with some of the bigger wheezes pulled off by companies such as short work.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Auditors...

I don't think you've met many auditors: as members of the undead, they're notoriously difficult to kill.

Google drinks from Oracle's pond: SQL system log slurp part of grand data-sharing vision

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Reinventing triggers?

While I can think that this kind of thing might occasionally be useful I do worry about going outside the existing toolchain to do so, certainly when it comes to replication. If you need to replicate the DB, you'll presumably have the setup and the tools, this approach seems to depend upon inferring changes from the log. Where's the guarantee that things work? Any change to the log file format or junk could cause all kinds of problems and leave you in no mans land.

Similarly, you might want to kick off some analysis in certain conditions but DBs already come with the tools to do this. I assume the idea is that you can use this approach to "scale" up when necessary so the precious on site resources don't suffer from a rogue CPU hammer of a query. But anything that offloads data processing to another environment needs to get the data there and network latency is usually a bigger problem that CPU load, especially if this enough data to warrant processing elsewhere.

But maybe the examples just aren't detailed enough?

Four women suing Google for pay discrimination just had their lawsuit upgraded to a $600m class action

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Agreed. If they joined a union this could probably be settled without the courts.

Russian gang behind SolarWinds hack returns with phishing attack disguised as mail from US aid agency

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: This is what happened, when The Register pushed propaganda the last time

Where's the propaganda? Russian doesn't particularly try and hide its hackers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Offshored development in Russia

Most of the offshoring I know of goes to south Asia.

Dominic Cummings: Health secretary's 'stupid' targets delayed building UK test and trace system to combat COVID

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Hindsight

Tübingen is not in Bavaria but in Baden-Württemberg.

But, otherwise, Boris Palmer is an interesting mayor and, along with the mayor of Rostock deserves credit for demonstrating that there are alternatives to lockdown.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Fundamentally undemocratic

here's a separate person responsible directly to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary

This sums up Cummings' approach to parliamentary democracy and the civil service: avoid it. Hancock may be a fool, though I think I've seen worse, but it's his job to set the priorities for the NHS and he is accountable to parliament. Being accountable to the PM means essentially means being accountable to no one as a series of cabinet office disasters should have proved.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike parliament, the cabinet and the civil service but, within the constraints of the UK constitution they are the bastions of government and, hence, our democracy. The cabinet are the appointments of the Crown and it is thus the duty of parliament to hold them accountable. Civle servants on the other hand are not political lackeys but servants of the country who's job is too see the will of people done by enforcing the laws passed by parliament. This inevitably leads to fiefdoms and conflicts but, so far, we haven't come up with anything better.

Please bear with my naive idealism but I think we could all benefit from a better explanation of the different roles and the important we all have to play in a democracy.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

To give him his dues, I don't think he really cares: he really is messianic. He threw a load of shit during the Brexit campaign and still landed a good job. In fact, the shit-slinging is partly what makes him attractive for those politicians seeking to get close to the plebs…

So, we have no doubt not seen the end of him close to government.

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Nice try, but package management will never work as well on Windows as it does on Linux

Given how many problems there are with the various Linux installers that doesn't sound promising.

Packaging, especially when external libraries are required, is hard.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Restarts

Because --reload is so difficult?

Oracle intros Arm-powered cloud, includes on-prem option for big spenders

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cloud at customer plan

CapEx versus OpEx: clouds tell you you can have all that scale now and you don't need to worry about all that expensive and trained IT staff.

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: End to End

Or, even if the messages are unbreakably encrypted, it's easy for the CIA to get as list of people's contacts: just sent a fax.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: End to End

OK, so just let me get this straight. Criminals aren't using the mainstream Social Media apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook

Actually, that's not what was said. Just because apples are green things doesn't mean all green things are apples. Hence, even if EncroChat was set up in 2016 and is favoured by criminals, doesn't mean it's the only messaging service that criminals use.

The focus on various services to stop the criminals seems generally to be limited to pornography and terrorism. I wonder if this has anything to do with using emotional subjects to railroad through draconian legislation. Surely not.

A lot of financial criminals use chat systems such as Bloomberg safe in the knowledge that only whistleblowers seem to get punished. EncroChat might appeal to some if it promises not to disclose member information but there are plenty of services out there that provide reliable e2e with message destruction (which is what you really need). Through in some good VPN and burner phones and you're getting close to secret service levels… but only if you keep the phone switched off nearly all the time.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

On properly e2e systems the servers aren't that useful. AFAIK the police infiltrated EncroChat simply by joining.

Otherwise the advice is as sound as it's ever been: never call when you can talk, never talk when you can whisper…

Pics or it didn't happen: First images from China's Mars rover suggest nothing has gone Zhurong just yet

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: They lied about COVID

Rinse and repeat for pretty much any communicable disease from anywhere in the last 50 years: no one wants to be responsible.

Lessons have not been learned: Microsoft's Modern Comments leave users reaching for the rollback button

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "Modern Commenting"

MS (sigh) has yet to learn after all these years that there is good reason for the phrase, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

They just need to look at their operating margins and net profit to know they're right.

Android 12 beta lands bringing better personalisation, speed upgrades, and some privacy tools borrowed from iOS 14

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Yuck - what a colour choice

To quote Oscar Wilde: fashion is something so awful that is has to be changed twice a year. But the hideousness doesn't seem to deter us all from joining in.

Personally, I think that the various mobile OSes have largely converged on a pretty good system that does provide room for the dreadful customisations that people insist on having. There have been good, and bad (notches), ideas from all sides but, overall, an increasing focus on how phones are actually used. Probably too good to last®.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Looks like shit

Personalisation is a big thing: it earned Nokia big bucks when they introduced different coloured phones, ringtones, etc. and Apple launched the iMac with much the same rationale. People love to express their individuality by being the same as millions of others…

It will be an option because this kind of thing polarises. Personally, I find all wallpapers an unnecessary distraction and remove it but SWMBO, who has the same phone, much prefers her pretty pink homescreen wallpaper to my black.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

IIRC Samsung has committed to three years updates for the S series so that should include 12. Their software development and, particularly the rollout of updates, has significantly improved in the last few years.

Beyond video to interactive, personalised content: BBC is experimenting with rebuilding its iPlayer in WebAssembly

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Personal adverts?

I think so. Presumably why I'm continually being asked to "register for a better experience".

Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Making Python faster

Note, I was talking particularly about the standard library but there are also many excellent Python libraries out there.

But you can end up with the following dilemma: focus on your own code and rely on external libraries wherever possible. This leaves you open to problems associated with code you don't control, whether it's simply poor design decisions, performance or exploits. The other choice, go the NIH (not invented here) route gives you complete control and all the responsibility. Now, contrary to their own opinion, many programmers are good programmers only in certain areas and the list of simple but fatal bugs that C is prone to is long and it would be a brave programmer who said they never made one. And it may take a long time to find out. While I'm not a fan of release early, release often, at the end of the day only running code matters.

Using external libraries does present a risk, but also a risk that can be mitigated against because it is known. It might be added that Python presents perhaps a lower risk here than many other languages because a great deal of work (IO, networking, etc.) is going to end up being done by the standard library, which has been vetted a lot, or similar libraries such as LibXML2. This could be coincidental but the persistently low number of CVEs for Pyhon code suggests otherwise. In some situations you can, of course, have a library vetted for issues and I think Google has started doing this for some popular code.

Python's promiscuity makes it relatively easy to use high performance libraries for hotspot code, letting you pick and choose which code to optimise and then write your own C, C++, Fortran (very popular for some scientists) or even language-du-jour Rust and provide a Python API for it relatively easily.

In my own experience I've benchmarked XML implementations and gone with the standard library for reading and lxml (and therefore LibXML2) for writing, used and then dropped an external calendar library; and recently benchmarked JSON implementations because JSON can be very memory intensive.

And there are still a great deal of tasks for which Python isn't suited: Google decided to go with Go for very large scale systems work, Dmitri Fontaine switched to LISP for pgloader largely because of Python's known problems with multiprocessor systems. That was before asyncio and concurrent.futures so it might be interesting to see some of his earlier work done using some of the newer techniques.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Making Python faster

As Shannon said: the Python code is likely to be trivial and therefore reliable. For many things like IO it will be making the necessary calls to C libraries but you won't have to reinvent the wheel for handling encodings, line endings, etc. Hence, the total time spent to write and run the program can easily be orders of magniture greater in C than in Python.

Fancy trying to explain Microsoft Teams to your parents? They may ask about the new Personal version

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Comparisons

WhatsApp only allows eight person vid chats.

Much as I dislike Facebook, I think this restriction is based upon the underlying Signal implementation which, as it uses end-to-end encryption, can't use a server to offload multicasting. However, as it's not always clear when WhatsApp uses e2e, I could very easily be wrong.

Otherwise it's nice to see some competition here though I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone buys Zoom. Microsoft seems to be shadowing Google over the size of group calls. I've always found Hangouts to be rock solid on the phone and a big of a hog on the desktop. Teams, at least for MacOS, seems to be the worst of all worlds, but connections are generally stable.

Latest phones are great at thwarting Wi-Fi tracking. Other devices, not so much – study

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Why would they worry about identifying via MAC when they have access to the network companies logs?

WiFi tracking is generally limited use. It's used in shopping centres, airports, etc. but often quite difficult to associate with other relevant data.

Samsung shows off rollable and foldable displays, suggests they'll arrive in 2022

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Scale

For large areas projectors are almost always going to be preferable to panels. It's simple maths: either you need lots more pixel (x * n) or bigger ones. Projectors just need stronger light sources.

However, panels are getting better at being combined together for display purposers.

Guy who wrote women are 'soft, weak, cosseted, naive' lasted about a month at Apple until internal revolt

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Unfair dismissal

He probably will have got something to keep quiet: Apple will want to keep this out of the headlines and, therefore, out of the courts and he could easily launch a discrimination suit.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I hope not

Account databases do get compromised, and any username and password so exposed can be easily fed to a bot that will try the combination out at popular websites, a technique known as credential stuffing.

I hope that passwords are no longer being stored unencrypted as that should now count as negligence: hashing with a salt makes reverse engineering much, much harder.

The quest for faster Python: Pyston returns to open source, Facebook releases Cinder, or should devs just use PyPy?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: C and then some

then there aren't really many useful alternatives to C.

Depending on the domain, you may find plenty of Fortran and Lisp fans out there… ;-)

PyPy does a fantastic job of optimising Python byte code and has over time achieved quite astonishing results. Unfortunately it doesn't play well with Cython, which is a great alternative for those occasional hotspots in libraries.

But the general drive to shoe-horning types in Python so that compilers can optimise should be resisted: code becomes bloated and unreadable and thus difficult to maintain. And then it turns out that YAGNI but it ticks a load of boxes, which is great for the project managers.

Where Python does need to improve is on multiple CPUs and, due to the way Python works, this is hard™ but there have been significant improvements and investments, due to the ecosystem built around Pandas and Numpy.

Signal banned for booking obviously targeted ads? That story's too good to be true, Facebook claims

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Or could it be

No, they don't care because they've grown up being trained to be "good" customers, ie. ready to buy the next load of crap.

In general, most people seem happy with the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument. But, in particular, they tend to find it creepy. It's easy to demonstrate this by reading their public streams and then asking them about things that they may have thought were only being read by a few people.

AWS to cut Python 2.7 off at the knees in July with 'minor version update' for Chalice

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Legacy code's legacy

Python has a history of changes, some of which are backwards incompatible: dropping support for backticks, demoting filter and reduce, etc.

While the move to Python 3 was very poorly handled, the ideas behind it were reasonable and generally approved. Code that runs on Python 2.7 will run on Python 3 with a minimum of changes, this was the reason for supporting 2.7 for so long.

But that battle is largely over now and new ones are starting, particuarly the one to force type annotations onto everything.

Samsung stops providing security updates to the Galaxy S8 at grand old age of four years

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "For an Android"

This is a major problem for Android and iOS.

IOS, yes, Android less so. A friend of mine with a collection of fruity devices routinely gets annoyed about having to buy newer version of apps to support newer versions of IOS or be forced to get newer versions of IOS or new devices in order to use newer versions of software. Android is, for better or for worse, far more pluralistic so it's only recently that support for Android < 6 has been dropped from apps.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'm not sure how they build their software...

I'm sure they've never thought of that…

Have you ever worked with SoC systems that mix RTOS with a user OS and allows for network provider customisations and may require regulator approval for changes?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Imagine my S5 feeling lonely

I liked the S5 so much I had two of them! They ran fine with LineageOS apart from a slight problem setting the storage location for photos in more recent versions and a slight flakiness in Bluetooth when using it for navigation.

I passed them on to friends when I bought myself an s10e, which while most defintely a better phone and a worthwhile update, also just highlighted how good phones in general have become.

I think the S8 was released on the cusp of Project Treble which means, that while Samsung might be dropping support for it, it should still be receiving updates directly from the Play Store. Samsung has since then clarified and AFAIK extended support for its "flagship" products.

Audacity 'scared and excited' to be bought and brought under Muse Group's roof, promises to stay free and open source

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Best UI

In general, yes. But there can always be improvements and I think it's fair to say that UI hasn't always been the focus of Audacity. Sometimes simply updating the toolkit makes a big difference. After that all changes must be argued for.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cash is a powerful motivator

It all depends on the developers who want to take up the work. This kind of sale is often because the original ones don't have the time, energy or inclination.

Googler demolishes one of Apple's monopoly defenses – that web apps are just as good as native iOS software

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Many APIs are undesirable

Yes, a lot of the ideas are half-baked. But this is why proper technical discussion with others, such as Apple, would be welcome. It goes two ways with Apple's proprietary web-kit extensions foisted on an unsuspecting world: viewports handled by meta tags, CSS support for notches, etc. This goes back to the day Apple decided it was job done with web-kit, removed developes from it and essentially withdrew from WHAT-WG.

To their credit, Google has consistently fought for the web as a platform. Yes, this is because the web is where they sell ads, but that shouldn't detract from things like webP/webM, WebRTC, etc, which have made the web a more open environment, including for companies like Zoom. Even after they essentially won the browser war they have continued to pour resources into web development. They should be taken to task (or even court) for their privacy and monopolistic practices and criticised for some of their more hare-brained suggestions, but applauded for their continued commitment to development.

Streaming mad: EC charges Apple with abuse of dominance, distorting competition in Spotify case

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "we lowered the commission rate for small developers to 15 per cent"

You left out …in a competitive environment. The app stores show the risks inherent in any vertical integration.

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Don't follow the Germans on this…

Thanks for the links and additional information. Good road signs are a great advert for the importance of design. The story of Frutiger and Roissy Airport is also interesting. And Microsoft did learn some lessons from that. Unfortunately, and this happens only too often, it decided that it wouldn't limit the number of tiles. And it added animations.

Limits are important. I remember driving around the Scottish Highlands a few years ago and being not just overwhelmed but downright confused with the signs along Loch Ness: too many places in two languages.

Boomi busts out of Dell with $4bn sale to pair of private equiteers

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: bomi?

Without more details it really is just a number. Being sold to private equity could mean that there's going to be more for investment but it's more likely to be some kind of debt and equity deal: Dell is keen to pay down some of that massive debt it piled on. Boomi will then be stripped prior to being sold to a competitor in a couple of years, if the gearing is right: that will almost certainly be a cash transaction.

More than 1,000 humans fail to beat AI contender in top crossword battle

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: Unfair comparison

and probably trained on a rig consuming Megawatts

In which case you should also consider the energy used to train the meatware…

But the comparison is irrelevant. What is interesting, and why the market is so hyped, is that these kind of puzzles were often the target of the first AI systems in the 1960s, which soon proved too complicated. Some business process map quite well to these kind of challenges, which is why they're starting to be automated.

Of course, some AI, a bit like nuclear fusion will always remain ten years away…

Palantir co-founder, CEO Alexander Karp gets $1.1bn bumper payday in IPO year

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It's just more: it's not what you know, but who you know. The polling/electioneering data slant is a great door opener as most politicians would sell their soul (if they still had one) for better polling data.

Now that we have computers powerful enough modelling based on statistical extrapolation has gone from being merely fashionable to seemingly essential and the provisos that should accompany such things ignored. The models are now so detailed that they increase the illusion of control. Even though we know forecasts don't give us control of the weather it's difficult to shake off the feeling they do.

Appeals court nixes online blueprint sharing ban on 3D-printed 'ghost guns'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

And tell me, the UK has a serious problem with stabbing assaults and deaths,

It may have, yes, but less of a one than the US has.

An armed society is a SAFE society!

Not if you go on the data from the US it isn't. But other countries have similar rates of gun ownership and seem to get by with fewer mass shootings so I'd say the point is moot. But maybe it isn't about gun ownership than about what kind of guns and who has access to them. For people in countries where gun ownership is restricted, travelling to countries where it isn't certainly doesn't feel safe.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Obviously more guns needed

It's not as if it's going to make much difference, especially if no one teaches them how to make the bullets.

Brit MPs and campaigners come together to oppose COVID status certificates as 'divisive and discriminatory'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: inverse correlation

As far as I am aware the Covid-19 vaccines do not suppress or protect against influenza.

It certainly doesn't. My point was that AFAIK more people opted for the flu vaccine last year than usual. But, more importantly, the flu as another airborne virus was also denied many of its usual means of distribution through reduced mobility of the population. This was observable in the Southern hemisphere earlier in 2020.

Flu vaccines are known to be far less effective than COVID – I wonder whether this may change – not least due to mutability of the virus over the course of time, which is part of its modus operandus. Hence, sometimes we have mild seasons and sometimes (eg. 2017-2018) we have more severe ones, which we just tend to accept. The counter-factual test is difficult to demonstrate, but it could be conjectured that, with an ageing population, mortality might be expected to rise (until this becomes self-limiting). Whatever the reason: the flu season 2020-2021 hasn't really happened yet.

Of course, as you point out, if we don't die of the flu (this year), we will eventually die of something else. However, the main argument for vaccinations is that, like dental hygiene, they're dirt cheap compared with medical care and the potential long term effects. And then there is quality of life of the survivors.

The irony is, again of course, that because they're cheap the phama industry hasn't really been bothered with them: it was the university of Oxford that worked on the Adeno-based vaccine and the work on mRNA was initially done with an eye on developing treatments for conditions like MS.

Vivaldi update unleashes the 'Cookie Crumbler' to simply block any services asking for consent (sites may break)

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Permission is required for non-essential cookies. As state cannot be preserved in a browser without cookies, the cookie that needs to be set representing your decision, must be reset every session, hence the banner for you in every session. That's not the issue: the issue is the way websites attempt to gain consent for everything with misleading "accept all" buttons.