Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: How generous

There is, of course, merit in competition, even among technological standards. But the "market" is usually not the best place for this, because it generally doesn't look for the best technical, but the cheapest solution.

The GSMA was setup because European networks and providers understood that the IDEN/CDMA/PCM approach could not work in Europe. There are also risks in such clubs that they will ignore better technology simply because it's from non-members. But there's no doubt that the drive towards compatibility through technical standards helped the rest of the world "get online".

Exactly, as it's disabled by default this shouldn't be considered a bug. I've never used it but the function seems to rely on extreme proximity with it telling me there are users < 100m from me. Difficult to see how you can fuzz this and still make it useful.

A more useful feature, for me at least, is being able to share your location with contacts while you move. Even better is being able to do this from within OsmAnd, which uses Telegram purely as a data pipe.

Re: The Institute for Government, a bunch of non-scientists

I'm not sure if the same approach has been used for years. Many of the most recent flu pandemics have provoked little or no response with mortality rates slightly lower than the current ones seemingly accepted without much discussion.

The development of vaccines has indeed been astonishing. As for the approach: this shouldn't be an either or debate, but about finding out what works best in which situation and is most sustainable over time.

Re: 'When the pandemic abates and the outbreak is contained, we will close the COVID-19 datastore.'

And it's easy to move the goalposts anyway. Given the high efficacy of the vaccine and the stable mortality rates per age group, you don't need sophisticated modelling to work out who should be vaccinated. And, surprisingly, models don't give you more supplies or clinical staff.

Re: Funny thing, though...

Because it needs direct access to the hardware multimedia is always going to be a vulnerability in some way, though Qualcomm silicon does seem to be particularly prone.

Wonder if Fuchsia will have a silver bullet for this? Somehow I think not.

Re: Cookieless tracking

Won't exempt you from GDPR. Even first party cookies are limited in scope and the any data collected is also covered so that if you do, for example, pass nicht anonymous logfiles to a third party for processing without both advising the user, and giving them the chance to opt out, having a suitable contract with that third party, then you are breaking law.

Re: Ever notice ...

And funding from the US DoD, which more many purposes needs plausible deniability when it comes to the rights of US citizens.

I used to be with Unitymedia (now Vodafone) but switched earlier this year back to DSL, because it just kept having problems almost inherent in coax, with some numpty on the line sticking something on that buggers the RF up for everyone.

1 & 1 has been pretty reliable since and faster (100 Mb/s ~ 12 MB/s) for the same price. Interestingly, the LTE backup is one of the Vodafone Gigacubes so depends a lot on where the nearest tower is, but I know that they do still have a very good mobile network.

Re: Try again *later*

Depending on the system, it's a reasonable approach because it acknowledges there is a problem and sets an expectation that the problem can be fixed soon — this is a much worse word to use — and that you should do something different for a couple of minutes rather than pressing refresh all the time.

A major outage like this can never be ruled out but should have some form of recovery plan. Individual plans for each system should also exist and are easier to test.

Re: VISA gift cards

Not really, they deployed untested code on a massively scalable system, which was what they wanted, and went to bed. While I think we've all learnt from leaving something running unattended, doing this with untested code is always asking for trouble.

Re: "Google is well known for enthusing about projects and later abandoning them."

Their record in open source software is somewhat better, I think.

Re: How long do these kind of patents last?

25 years after registration in general so not relevant here. Things get more complicated with standards like H264 which are normally covered by a patent pool to prevent precisely this kind of case: manufacturers pay a single fee and are imdemnified. However, I don't know the details of this particular case but it is causing additional problems in the notebook channel.

Re: Single threaded writer

I'm sure pgloader runs copying in parallel, though this might of course be using processes rather than threads. Throughput is any case pretty impressive.

Re: Well...OK

Notebook vs 4U comparison will fail not least because of the display in the notebook.

Re: Unless I 've misunderstood something...

Replacing Access with something less likely to give you deadlocks should be pretty easy as Access' SQL is pretty limited. Though, if you've managed to run stuff on the web for years, you obviously haven't run into Access' many limitations.

You will probably have more challenges with VB. In theory, any kind of ODBC driver should let you work with VB and you can probably compile the VB in to run on .NET core – Mono is really for GUI stuff and if it's a website you probably don't need that.

Re: "Across the free software world we have a problem in getting people to pay for things"

For companies, the costs for MS Office are reasonable. Okay, support is basically non-existent but the permanent access to updates will swing the deal for many beancounters. Whether people should be using Office as extensively as they do without relevant training is another matter.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is the loss of control and the risks associated with that as Microsoft are more or less forcing companies to give them their data. Oh, and Exchange and Outlook are a dreadful combination of productivity killers.

Re: I have to ask...

I suspect more people like these "digital assistants" than we imagine. Personally, I don't and get annoyed every time I hit the key by accident when I'm trying to adjust the volume. It should be optional and the button could be better positioned but, in a sense, the more different providers there are, the better.

Re: "acting within the rights granted"

Why should it ever be in the kernel? Surely, it's always optional?

Re: That's annoying, I like the stylus

There's obviously still a market for them – 8 million units aren't to be sniffed at – but the difference between the Note and the other Galaxy's is much less marked. Doesn't mean they'll stop selling sensitive styluses, but these may just become accessories for the flagship.

Re: Who killed MIPS?

NT was cross-platform and very easy to port

That was the the idea but it was only really possible for low level parts of the system and nothing that relied on MFC. This why versions of NT for the Alpha were always late and why DEC also invested in providing x86 support on the chip.

Later on, things got even worse as the kernel was optimised for x86 quirks, which is why Microsoft struggled with the x86_64 transition and later with the move to ARM. It had a definite interest in supporting as few architectures as possible and Intel kept promising that the next generation of chips would be faster… But how much was really a plot and how much was just "stuff" we'll never know. In the end, a bit like VHS versus Beta or VESA local bus versus PCI, the better technology looks like it will win.

Re: Why do you need rules?

Yes, but they also have far higher mortality rates.

Re: Excuses, excuses

Still more money from passengers. But most of the vaccines have localised production and distribution strategies, so this is probably just more FUD.

I recently got some LED bulbs from China via air freight and there was certainly no premium for those.

Re: 21st century capitalism

Yes, there is a lot of money being thrown at this. But costs per treatment are very low – AstraZeneca's will be around $ 5 per treatment, or 1/1000th of those for Remdesivir. Compare that with the juicy recurrent returns for statins, etc. and it's easy to see why Big Pharma still doesn't like vaccines.

All the more credit to those companies like Biontech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, et al. for putting the work into platforms that allowed for the rapid development of vaccines and, even more importantly allow for production at scale. This goes back to the scares around the so-called avian and swine flu a decade ago and depends upon the continuous advances in DNA analysis and manipulation.

Re: 5G

The problem is that telco companies are luring people into contracts where they get a new phone every two years or so

That's been the model for years but is increasingly less the case as more and more users switch to SIM-only PAYG contracts, which are generally much cheaper and keep their "old" phones for longer, because they're generally still more than good enough.

5G was dreamt up by the networks in the hope that it would turbo charge the refresh cycle but this doesn't seem to be having that much effect. If you already have a good 4G signal, 5G doesn't offer very much and if you don't have a good 4G signal you almost certainly won't have a good 5G one!