Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: How can a company be that bad...

To be fair, even with these fuckups, the planes still have a great record. But the real problem is the politically engineered lack of competition. Airbus is snowed under with orders and would probably face similar problems if it tried to scale up production to get even more. For decades the US plane makers didn't have to worry about competition until the European airlines finally got the planes they wanted and Airbus became a success. Consolidation and a duopoly were considered the only way to preserve profit margins jobs and US airlines were strongarmed into continuing to buy Boeing. Though, to be fair, if some of them had the choice, they'd buy the cheapest, crappiest things out there because most US airlines hate passengers that can't be transported in boxes.

Re: pictures

Ouch! I'd have dialled down the resolution by now.

One of the many incidences of vendor lock-in.

JPEG2000 was a reasonable format at the time but it was also DoA due to Microsoft's determination to keep it proprietary.

No, not really. No matter what you do with single images it will hardly matter in a world dominated by ≥ 25 fps video.

I have all the photos I've taken since about 2016 on my phone and even my music library takes up more space.

Like I said, not enough addresses left to redistribute, even it sounds like a lot. You're also being revisionist. Sure, if we could go back to the 1970s and 1980s, reassignments, at least of company blocks would have been possible. But, by the time, IPv4 addresses scarcity became a thing, the financial possibilities were becoming clear and very few companies were prepared to give adddresses back.

I'm not claiming IPv6 is perfect, but I also don't think it's as bad as many make out, and it wasn't quite the gravy train I think you're suggesting: there have been more egregious examples of that with W3C springing to mind.

It's taken a while, but I think we now have enough people pursuing a pragmatic migration that isn't going to cause obscure and poorly maintained networks in key areas (hospitals are one area with infamously outdated kit) to fail suddenly because IPv4 was switched off. And this should be the blueprint for future changes, though I suspect the lessons about ownership will be some of the first to be forgotten.

Re: Stuffed Turkey

I think consumer-land is moving more and more to IPv4 but providers are using 6to4 gateways for a seamless transition. The avoids the need for expensive and tricky carrier-grade NAT and will allow more parts of the internet to move to IPv6 without anybody noticing. And a smooth transition suits everyone.

I don't follow your arguments. It's not the IETF that allocated the IPv4 blocks and the suggestions to move to IPv6 are based on a lot more than just scarce IPv4 addresses. Furthermore, making IPv4 addresses free is what got us to this mess in the first place. It was national regulators, especially the US, that led to an undervaluing of the resource and the incredibly skewed distribution of addresses mainly to US institutions and companies, who are now cashing in on this largesse. There are now more devices than IPv4 addresses so a redistribution, apart from being technically potentially as challenging as moving to IPv6 wouldn't solve the problem.

Re: If

A network-traffic observer should be able to demonstrate this fairly easily.

Re: memberries

I think it's possible to think that Sun trashed Java and a takeover by someone like Oracle was inevitable, once Java had become "essential" for some companies. I'm not thinking necessarily that McNealy didn't maximise returns for shareholders, it's arguable he did because companies kept buying Sun hardware to run Java, but stewardship was a real problem. Going either fully commercial or transferring the language to a foundation would have removed a lot of uncertainty for many.

Since Oracle's takeover it's at least clearer for companies what they're facing, especially since IBM bought RedHat and thus JBoss the biggest alternative runtime, which RedHat had already locked down. This has also made it easier for companies to consider alternatives, as they also did with databases: there's no doubt that Oracle's purchase of MySQL via the Sun acquisition was the best thing that ever happened to Postgres.

Re: Pi 4 vs 5

For me the big step up is the RPi 4 because the USB-2.0 bus is very slow for data transfer. I mainly use the RPi for Kodi and have consistently had playback problems that are almost entirely down to bandwidth: h264 performance itself was fine on the RPi1 but I've had problems with audio and synchronisation on every generation until the RPi4. I realise this is a trivial example but I can imagine similar problems in other projects with a lot of data transfer. For embedded stuff with little or no data or network activity, the older ones are fine.

Re: Why aren't you taking notes?

It's what I think doc strings are for: to clearly state the intention of the code. I normally use comments on code branches which might not be obvious. And I really on tests as proofs of the code thesis.

Re: Thrusters

I think the issue is trying to land a craft accurately in low gravity. This is probably some kind of mutlilemma™ with accuracy, speed and stability just a few of the parameters. Speed might the real problem because this is from orbit on a body without an atmosphere. It landed well but with considerable momentum in a low inertia environment: things topple more easily in low gravity. Self-righting devices are all well and good, but from the country that gave us origami, I'd be looking for a more holistic concept around the centre of gravity. After all, why not try and make use of that extra kinetic energy?

Re: Excellent!

And now armed with models trained with BOFH and PFY mails, including orders for "cleaning alcohol" and "emergency provisions".

Re: Right

The European, and especially the German, car industry only has itself to blame. For decades it pleaded for incentives for larger, heavier vehicles with bigger profit margins. Like the US in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chinese electric cars will sell well because, at the moment, they are the better electric cars. But, just their like Japanese and Korean predecessors, they will need to set up European plants to succeed over time.

Re: The 737 Used To Be A Good Aircraft ...

Don't forget: Congress put the FAA under pressure to accept self-certification. After all, why should the taxpayer pay for engineers who know what they're doing to do the work when you can get the companies to do it "for free".

Isn't Conflict of Interest the new Dan Brown novel book?

Chinese plane getting US certification in the current climate? Snowballs in hell have more chances.

Re: It's still happening

Indeed the mere existence of the function suggests that there is more to this and why someone went to the trouble of writing even such a cack-handed implementation, ie. this real misunderstanding is elsewhere.

Re: No real surprise

Fair play to you but this does suggest you don't have the best contract for your use: the phones have to be paid for somehow.

Re: Leave nothing but footprints

I admire your optimism but have you actually met any humans?

Re: Seven years of support

Haven't put a phone in a trouser pocket for decades: try cycling like that. Shirt or jacket pocket but needs to be able to operated with one hand. Otherwise, silly money for these toys! The Samsung A series or its keenly priced Chinese competitors do all I need from a phone apart from wireless charging.

See what's on the market in a couple of years…

Re: Seven years of support

Yep, my S10e got 4 years of support. It's been given a new battery and will soon get LineageOS because it's still a cracking phone and not too big for my tiny hands.

Re: Chemistry wins

I suspect there's a problem with definitions: a proper fuel cell should provide the energy of combustion but at greater efficiency because the chemical process is essentially the same just slowed down. In the meantime, I'm all for ICEs running e-fuels over EVs everywhere with not a charger in sight: network and generation capacity will probably never be enough.

As I said, batteries are being used because they're "good enough" but the energy density is never ever going to be sufficient to compete with hydrocarbon or ammonia fuels. The problem with being good enough is that they're also sucking up much of the attention and capital.