* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Lenovo's ThinkPad line goes under the knife: X13 models look a bit taller but worry not, the 'nipples' are still intact

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

That'll happen as soon as distros offer the same kind of incentives to install their stuff as Microsoft and bloatware companies do. It certainly won't be demand-led because the demand isn't there: Dell tried it for a while and dropped it due to lack of demand.

And that's before you get into the problem of the drivers…

'We're finding bugs way faster than we can fix them': Google sponsors 2 full-time devs to improve Linux security

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Convenience

downloading a binary image for a Linux distribution…

If they're building their own distros, they'll be building their own binaries and putting them on their own repositories and configuring their clients to search there first. In exceptional circumstances the latest, greatest version might no be available but this is the point. This has been the way BSD admins have done things for, er, decades.

SD card slot, HDMI port could return to the MacBook Pro this year, says Apple analyst

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Magsafe, yes: the advantages and USP are obvious. HDMI maybe, USB-A unlikely as more and more things switch to USB-C and SD card in the Apple world? No chance.

My 2020 MBP has 4 USB-C ports of which I currently use only one, because it's simpler to charge it via the dongle…

Mozilla Firefox keeps cookies kosher with quarantine scheme, 86s third-party cookies in new browser build

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Don't understand

It's still going to make aggregation across websites more difficult. And, the legal consequences of providing a domain for potential GDPR breaches are definitely more serious than just running a third-party tracker.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Only one buttock?

I don't agree. While this doesn't prevent tracking per se, it does significantly limit tracking across websites, which is what most of the trackers are interested in. Also, as a browser setting, it overcomes user inertia when it comes to handling cookie settings: most will go with "accept all" to continue with whatever they're doing.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Don't understand

I'm not sure how many companies would approve such sub-domains – there are definite legal ramifications – but even so DNS checks for the ip-addresses would soon indicate the real owner.

Apache foundation ousts TinkerPop project co-founder for tweeting 'offensive humor that borders on hate speech'

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Protect?

* Is thusly a word?

It is if you want it to be. But as it means in this way there is no need to stick an adverbial suffix on it. I believe there is a subtle difference in its use as a conjunction – "Thus, we see that…" == "therefore" – and an adverb – "We thus see that…" == "subsequently" – though this could simply be convention.

Not sure which icon to go with…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Not voting in a democracy is always an option. We've got elections here later this year and I currently have not idea who to vote for, though I know who I'd like to vote against! None of the above should be an option.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
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Re: Hey, Apache Software Foundation ...

It is probably only a matter of time before someone has an attack of fake conscience and decides to spend a shedload of cash "rebranding" the Apache Software Foundation into something vaguely progressive but essentially bland and innocuous…

Because rebranding the foundation is a whole lot cheaper than returning the land but makes still gives us a nice warm feeling about how much we do care.

Samsung shows off next-generation big-pixel camera sensor tech, coming to an Android phone near you

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Probably next year and possibly then only in the premium segment. But all modern phones already have great cameras in them. Performance in low light is the only area where they might disappoint, though, here too, things have been improving with each generation. Do some research and go with one of the phones with multiple lenses and you should be happy.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "You don't want quantity – you want size"

Phones exist only to grab a pic when you've not got anything better.

Not quite: they're now so good that most people don't need another camera. Or, as one famous photographer once said: the best camera is the one you have with you.

NASA sends nuclear tank 293 million miles to Mars, misses landing spot by just five metres. Now watch its video

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: Mars probe success rate

Does anyone know what the chances of anything coming from Mars are?

About a million to one…

Where's the invisible man icon when you need it!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Magnificent!

Best space probe footage ever.

Can't agree with that. Every mission is fantastic for its time. But, for me, it's difficult to top the footage from Cassini-Huygens. Though, if we ever manage to do something on Venus or in any of the oceans on Titan, Europa, Enceladus, etc., that would certainly count.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Mars probe success rate

Landing a robotic rover on Mars is no easy feat; about 50 per cent of all attempts have ended in failure before Perseverance, it's said.

It's not just said, it's true. However, this is over the whole history of sending probes to Mars: the first few were basically carefully aimed rockets. Recent missions are much more successful with NASA 3 for 3, I think. Even so, each mission is still essentially a prototype building on the previous ones: this one is the first to have a pinpoint landing; and it has a helicopter for the first time ever on such a probe. But, the next one is an even bigger challenge: not only getting safely to the right spot but launching a rocket back from there.

Malware monsters target Apple’s M1 silicon with ‘Silver Sparrow’

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: FTFY

On a modern multimedia OS, any access to the hardware is essentially permission escalation, which makes the design even more important to reduce the inevitable vulnerabliities this entails.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: This cannot be true!!!

Seems like quite a leap of faith and not backed up by the numbers: compromise the build servers and there'd be meeelions of compromised machines. Easy to wait for DNS or certificate SNAFUS and MITM. Better still: trick the user into installing whatever it is with maximum permissions.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: This cannot be true!!!

When it comes to security breaches the numbers don't really matter. What's more important is how the breach works and what the consequences are. While Apple generally does a goob job of securing the OS even for the dumbest user, some of the changes of the last few years that are supposed to provide more security, have actually eroded it. Or at least provided new vectors because permission escalation is a necessary evil for most software.

Does Samsung want you to buy new phones? Asking 'cos Galaxies now get four years of security updates

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Mandatory 5 year minimum.

The car industry makes a lot of money from the various MoT schemes: have you seen the price of "original" spare parts? This is where the printing got its ideas from.

5 years mandatory for consumer electronics is illusory and it's not and probably wouldn't make much of a difference to the market. It's far more important to make the damn things easier to repair and, when they do reach end of life, have better programmes for recycling.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

While it's mainly PR, it will be effective in the corporate market where Samsung tends to compete head-to-head with Apple.

Planespotters’ weekends turn traumatic as engine pieces fall from the sky in the Netherlands and the US

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: RE: engine failure

the last four years in the u.s.?

You've had it for a lot longer than that. Hence, the "subprime" mortgage fiasco and Boeing's self-certification of the MAX and all the other wonders you get.

Though, to be fair, I wouldn't put the omnishambles in Texas in that particular bucket. Texas has deliberately opted to avoid the national grid, which is why, when the Texan generators of all sorts went down, it wasn't possible to pull in power from other states. No, I don't expect that to change anytime soon either.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: RE: engine failure

It's true that, when it comes to the engines, Boeing and Airbus are effectively just renting space to the engine manufacturers and the airlines get to choose these.

And, dramatic as both events were, it says a lot about the industry that they weren't worse and that the precautionary groundings* are standard procedure.

* Though I'm sure Ryanair would like to be able to offer passengers to choice…

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: RE: engine failure

Bound to. Have you not heard of "light touch" regulation before? It's great: just ask anyone who's lost money to a bank…

Mine's the one with the signed copy of Heads I Win, Tails You Lose in the pocket!

The iPhone 12 captured our attention and wallets, says new report from Gartner

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Surprised, but only somewhat

The I-Phone 12 was also a heavily touted "supercycle" update for users who'd held off from some of the poor decisions in the 10 and 11. And, no doubt in the US, there were some people wondering what to do with their governement cheques.

All great phones, but are not reaching the point of peak utility? Obviously not if people are still prepared to hand over so much for a beautifully packaged computer they hardly ever use.

UK Supreme Court declares Uber drivers are workers, not self-employed: Ride biz's legal battle ends in a crash

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Well....

but what is interesting is that a) an Uber ride is usually about 2/3 the price of the equivilent taxi ride

It's not that interesting when you know it's done by not paying for the driver's health care, pensions, holidays, etc. And the company is still making huge losses.

This doesn't detract from the fact that, in many countries, the taxi business is a cartel and needs a shake up but that's a separate issue.

Court witness describes how Autonomy founder Lynch would wash his rear-end in US prison showers and dorms

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: No sympathy for the guy, but

Indeed, but then the whole case is an abuse of the extradition arrangements. The fraud case should be tried in absentia in the US and, in the unlikely* case of a guilty verdict, extradition procedures could be started.

* Very few cases like this go beyond some kind of deal where guilt is never admitted, especially if HP's board and the auditors were to get dragged in as co-defendants as seems only reasonable. You only seem to do time in the US for large scale fraud if you act as a whistleblower!

Apple iOS 14.5 will hide Safari users' IP addresses from Google's Safe Browsing

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Who says it isn't?

Any data centre in the US will be retaining the logs for at least 24 hours, and probably longer. Not that safe-browsing query histories are really that interesing compared with, say, with DNS requests.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Figleaf

If they don't trust the API they can just blacklist and provide their own use someone else's they think is better. If they think the service is good then they can contract with Google to formally restrict the use of personally identifiable data or improve the API. And they can also make sure IPv6 privacy extensions are running to limit the usefulness of any harvested data.

helloSystem: Pre-alpha FreeBSD project chases simplicity and elegance by taking cues from macOS

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The dock is pretty awful but seeing as I have it set to autohide it rarely figures. Not that I'm cheerleading for MacOS design: it has good phases and bad phases (skewomorphic, yuck!) with the control panel currently a real collection of design ideas from the last twenty years – I haven't switched to MacOS 11 which is supposed to have cleaned this up a bit. The point being that most UIs borrow and inspire though I've yet to see a GTK-based one I didn't hate.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Further simplicity and ease of use...

FWIW that's a take on a Borges piece about a catalogue of animals of which my favourite is: "that from afar look like flies". It's nice take on any taxonomy.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Drivers, drivers, drivers

PC-BSD was about the most complete attempt at a BSD-based desktop system. The last time I looked it suffered from the general problem of missing proprietary drivers for bits of hardware but overall it was pretty nice.

As for packaging apps: the ports system and the various port managers on BSD have always provided an excellent basis for this.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Not when it comes to design it hasn't.

Open Source Vulnerabilities database: Nice idea but too many Google-shaped hoops to jump through at present

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Requires a GCP account?

Your comparison is flawed: rate limiting is required here because they don't have a read optimised service so all queries are billable. I wouldn't expect that to stay that way if this becomes a real service.

Search is to a read optimised service which they provide as part of their business model. Though you will find that they do occasionally greylist ip addresses.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Requires a GCP account?

This seems to be a side-effect of the necessary rate-limiting. Which is probably because it was thrown on GAE to get it up and running. Difficult to see the need for Big Table and thus this kind of limiting for a production system. Will be interesting to see what Google does with it because it could be useful. But other services such as Safety for Python are available.

Foundation thrillogy: Rust programming language gets new home and million-dollar spending account

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Er, Shurely Shome Mishtake?

True, but I'm not sure how this applies to Monte Carlo modelling in Python when calling a C++ library.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Er, Shurely Shome Mishtake?

Seeing as most of the heavy lifting is already being done in some C/C++ (and maybe even Fortran) libraries, they may be disappointed. Where there is performance to be gained is in not copying data between runtimes, which is why zero copy data is such a thing nowadays.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Er, Shurely Shome Mishtake?

Some definitions are moveable feasts!

Python has long be used to replace shells. And, if you look at your examples, you'll see the csh, because C used to be used in the shell!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: One Meellion Dollars!

While some languages have indeed been abandoned to open source – Swift springs to mind – it's not inevitable. Programming languages don't need large organisations to maintain, but they do need institutional security. Basically you need to cover the costs of hosting the development environment, having a secretariat that can coordinate and lawyers to handle the inevitable copyright issues and stuff. Mozilla has insulated Rust from its own fate and got other interested parties onboard. If they can maintain the fine stewardship thus far, there is no reason for the language not to continue to thrive.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Er, Shurely Shome Mishtake?

But as a systems language it is, by definition, going to be far more popular than Python, for the snake-themed scriptese is pretty much useless for that purpose.

Python's existing use as a systems language would suggest otherwise: there isn't a Linux distro that can do without it. But, while it has its uses, it also struggles in some use cases, particularly processing of very large amounts of data and some forms of parallelism. However, it works well in combination with other languages and I've even seen people swapping out C libraries with Rust implementations that are then called from Python with no additional overhead and no change to the API.

Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite 'calamitous design choices' in git

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Other options are available

I'm moved my Mercurlal projects to Heptapod when Bitbucket decided to fuck us over. They managed the import and, contrary to many expectations, the projects continue to receive contributions.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The handwringing isn't overplayed at all. But the risk isn't necessarily everything going into git repositories but that of the risks inherent in any monoculture.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Born idiots. All of 'em.

I generally agree with you but also think that there should be some space for pranks as part of the need for society to hold a mirror to itself. But, in a country that lets people carry guns for self-defence, staging a robbery is particularly dangerous stunt to pull.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: This is why they should be banned.

I think the Second Amendment specifically mentions trampolines when discussing the need for militias…

Bitcoin surges, exchanges flooded after Tesla says it bought $1.5bn in BTC, hopes to accept it as payment soon

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Bubbleception

t's... weird. So Tesla spends $1.5bn on cryptograms and says people will soon be able to buy Tesla products with them. Surely it would have been simpler to flog a Model 3 for 1BC?

It would if they expected to keep them but by buying them and then declaring them to be magic beans he's limiting the downside. If anyone is stupid enough to buy Bitcoins to buy a Tesla they could easily be buying them from Tesla at who knows what profi, could easily be > 20%. And, given how many fans Musk seems to have, that doesn't seem to be unlikely.

SoftBank likens itself to a goose laying 'golden eggs' as Vision Fund boasts best results since 2017

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: LOL

As long as central banks keep buying everybody's liabilities and handing out cash it is going to be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

You'd have told them they should have used Apple/Google app model, right? NHSX seeks willing humans to fill health tech and data roles

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Just close it

Spoilsport! We need quangos to justify budgets but also to blame when things go wrong.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I'm looking at a range of FreeBSD systems with very impressive uptimes…

Wot, no systemd?

Built by sysadmins, for sysadmins!

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Apocryphal anecdote

Who'd have thought that the structure of an American sport would be dictated by TV?

This is probably apocryphal but when the football world cup was due to be hosted in the US, there reports that the TV networks were demanding that the games be split into quarters to allow for more advertising. Then they discovered extra-time and the extra advertising opportunities that offered.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
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Re: violent version of egg-and-spoon race

You are Eddie Waring and I want my £5!

Charlie Clark Silver badge
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Re: 'Merkin football? I'll stick with...

But which version of the international rules? Remember the convention of 1994 was never fully ratified, so it's still not clear whether direction on the Circle line varies according to the hemisphere… and when the pubs open!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If NFL...

Stick to league: better to watch, better to play, which is, of course, why the toffs wanted to ban it.