Re: Stop fiddling with my browser!
Thanks but i've some fairly ugly tabs.
12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
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?
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! ;-)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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®.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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