Posts by Charlie Clark 12167 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Money – we know the TDF is trying to find ways to finance the project and the "power" of the OpenOffice.org brand is probably a distraction for "the market". But they'd probably be more successful if they changed their licence and worked towards a merge of the two projects. However, it seems they don't even want to consider that.
YMMV but I find OpenOffice feature complete and more stable, at least on MacOS, than LibreOffice. It also benefits from the fit and finish provided by IBM. And despite all those many commits, LibreOffice still contains some embarassing long-standing bugs, especially when it comes to handling OOXML documents.
They should get over themselves, switch licences so that a merge is possible. That should also make it easier to offer a commercial version, which, if done properly, could be possible.
In the meantime all the navel gazing is letting Microsoft extend its lead on mobile platforms.
Anyone with any experience of start-ups is likely to feel the same. They really mean it when they talk about investments being unicorns knowing full well that most of them will flop badly.
Investors often willingly ignore due diligence knowing that their downsides are limited and upsides are limitless, because of the way contracts are structured. If something sounds to good to be true, it is and any investor will know this after a couple of years.
It might be worth noting that Signal has finally released it's zero-knowledge, manageable group functionality. Doesn't include video chat, but it's still a milestone for a peer-reviewed important feature. The related blog posts go into the relevant technical detail.
And Telegram has started trailing group video chats. Telegram doesn't promise E2EE in group functions but so far it's done a pretty good job of thwarting mass surveillance of its communications as use in Belorussia shows: that the communications are visible is less of a problem than that they can't be suppressed.
The article isn't brilliantly written. For "bright" read "intense". And, I think, for "jet" read "jet of material". This would allow us the work out the speed of the explosion, Reg Standard Units, which sounds pretty damn impressive: life around the explosion that somehow survided the x-rays would certainly have been knocked out by the explosion!
The speed of light is really the speed of causality: it's the fastest way any information about an event can get between any two points
Well, quantum entanglement appears to be faster in some situations but also prone to destroying the information… One of the reasons why it's so hard to align quantum theory and relativity but it wouldn't surprise me if someone at some point came up with a way, along with a more fiendish problem because that's how quantum stuff tends to work. Or maybe we'll stumble upon tachyons only to find them useless for this sort of thing.
The company had nice products, good support and clear communication. The it went on a spending spree and Javasript binge and decided that existing users no longer mattered.
Fortunately, there are alternatives. As I prefer Mercurial to Git, I moved my open source stuff to Heptapod. Workflow takes a bit of getting used to but otherwise it has all I used to have and more.
This isn't about voting but about registering to vote which is a separate step in the US, somewhat akin to the abortive poll tax. Whereas in most countries as soon as you register with your local authority for anything you're automatically added to the electoral roll, in the US it's a separate procedure which allows states to come up with new rules for voter registration/suppression that are not required for other government business. One of my favourite wheezes is the way some states take people off the roll for no particular reason.
The average person in the UK is much better off in general than they were 200 years ago.
But I was talking about the last 30-40 years and there a lot of people, particularly but not only in low-skilled jobs who feel their standard of living has declined as things like housing costs have risen far faster than their incomes. You can also see how the distribution of wealth, which in the second half of the twentieth century was starting to become broader, has narrowed again.
Disenchantment with politicians has a long history. And there is no doubt that liberalisation of markets over the last 30-40 years has contributed to it by increasing the concentration of capital, which implies a fall in the standard of living for many. It's difficult not to see the effects of this all over the place at the same time as politicians have taken to telling people how much better things are for them. They almost always have become better, for the politicians at least.
The UK took a leading role in this through labour laws, liberalisation of capital markets and pushing for a more free trade approach as evinced by things like the Treaty of Luxemburg. Successive UK governments subsequently fought hard against attempts to mitigate the effects of the liberalisation. But they also joined with other governments in choosing to blame "Brussels" for potentially unpopular policies, for which they had voted (unaminity in The European Counci still being the standard). The European Commission, like any bureaucracy, has the job of putting such policies into practice.
I guess the US has seen much of the same with opprobrium heaped upon "Washington" by many who have benefitted from deregulation.
Throw in some fear associated with mass immigration, it became easy for the populists to reap the benefits by promising independence through isolation: the apparent solution for everything. Of course, any promise to keep trading neatly ellided the need to sign binding agreements to do so, even though > 50 years of free trade through GATT and WTO have shown how much more bureaucratic (and sclerotic) than the EU this has become. And the EU has remained an attractive place for skilled, qualified workers such as engineers.
The rise of extremists, on both right and left, is directly attributable to the attitude of the EU politicians who refuse to accept any political approach except their own "more Europe" dogma.
Would this also explain the rise of extremism in America? Is the EU responsible for both Trump Ocasio-Cortez?
It would remove the requirement altogether.
Mind you, I'm not sure if the requirement is going to end up meaning much more than "fit and proper" when apply to the owner of a football club.
Takeover Panel: You didn't mean the employment requirements we agreed on a couple of years ago.
Future ARM own: So what?
Takeover Pane: Just saying…
But I think that's the point: what's the company supposed when the employee leaves? Renting the hardware/software can be an option where the company does not have the necessary skills. But the risks of benefitting from an outsourcers economies of scale need to be offset against the risk of lock-in; or, and this is more common decline in quality of service as the outsourcer continues to try and save money by cutting costs and replacing trained local specialists with cheaper ones in Elbonia.
Vendors like subscription because it provides regular cash flow. It potentially also reduces competition and, thus, price wars once customers are locked in. Companies will generally go with what's most tax efficient and there is huge pressure to go from capex to opex for all manner of purchase. But they also like being able to outsource and offload the maintenance of devices: subscription can also include onsite replacements which don't need negotiating separately. You can see why third parties don't like this, because they get cut out. For customers the net effect may initially be small. But, as we can expect additional concentration in the industry, we'll no doubt see potential savings on the manufacturers side only and further concentration of capital.
The tax effect is to shift the write-offs to the manufacturers. This first started with the card industry in the early 2000s with leasing the preferred way of disposing of fleets of cars after that particular financial crash. And car manufacturers discovered the joy of regular cashflow combined with the ability to write off the excess vehicles it was producing.
Have you tried installing another OS on an I-Phone? Have you tried using a different browser engine on I-Phone? Have you managed to buy an app for an I-Phone than anywhere other on the Apple App Store? Apparenty this is all for our safety. Sounds like Steve Jobs wasn't a fan of Benjamin Franklin…
Apple's very own version of lockdown is coming to Macs.
I'm certainly not. Given and local access to a machine that has a recovery mode, then exploits are inevitable and Apple must be aware of this.
But the main reason for them using such chips is not to prevent hackers from breaking in, but to prevent users from making changes such as installing other OSes or removing some of the many restrictions in IOS that we'll no doubt soon also see in MacOS.
64 bit is an overkill on current smartphones
That's debatable. We're really talking about industrial rationalisation rather than the benefits of particular architecture. The improvements in architecture and manufacturing processing are significant and probably dwarf anything that can be gained by reducing the footprint of the code. Plus, compilers nowadays can produce code that is demonstrably more efficient (for the relevant architectures) than anything you could write by hand. But the main thing is, it doesn't really matter about the CPU: smartphones for the last few years are encoding 4k with HEVC in realtime using hardware acceleration. Likewise encryption is handled largely by the silicon. This saves much, much more power than writing more efficient CPU code. And this is what people do with their phones: they record and watch stupid hi-res videos that they share over 2x (transport + network) encrypted connections. They don't have to, but they still do.
If the problem was that the instruction set was outdated that would make sense.
This is indeed what the article says. Support is being dropped because all code nowadays is compiled so there is no need for hand-crafted assembly, no matter how efficient it might be. ARM never had the same problems with 64-bit that x86 did, but rationalisation for the silicon being produced now does make some sense.
And 4g is 3g with bells and whistles.
Not really, LTE switched from a connection-based approach still used in UMTS to TCP/IP. So, it's not about how the radios work but the processing the signals the radios send and receive. Packet switching didn't make much sense before about 2010 as the vast majority of traffic was voice that wouldn't tolerate the latency that this would involve.
Switching to TCP/IP was designed to make future upgrades of the stack much smoother with no need to run parallel infrastructure or force people to buy new devices – by this point the networks had realised that they don't benefit from people buying new shiny things.
The UK Government and mobile service operators should continue investment in OpenRAN technology and work to make the UK a global leader, not just in technological development, but also in production.
More like cloud-cuckoo land. Where, apart from a massive subsidy bucket, is the incentive of operators to invest? For years customers have been voting with their wallets, which has kept revenues well below expectations. Huawei and others have working kit now in which the UK government's own agencies cannot find any backdoors.
The UK doesn't have an electronics industry anymore so it's not going to start producing radio kit. And the government doesn't have anything like the cash needed to set one up, apart from the fact that it's also busy spaffing cash that is doesn't have on other pet projects. And this is supposed to be government by a party known for its financial responsibility.
With that kind of history in pain and suffering Oracle can frequently look easier/cheaper because MBAs expect a working solution will always cost more than one which doesn't
Companies like Oracle rely on this kind of approach knowing that manager's will seek safety in buying from a big vendor. "No one ever got sacked for buying IBM" may no longer always true but it does shift the game: get a committee to approve the decision and the relevant manager is off the hook. Not the case for someone running and inhouse project, which may or may not be merited. If the project is big enough, it can be taken out of standard expenditure and given its own budget as part of "extraordinary items". More than a few managers have fallen up once their failures crossed the £ 100 million barrier. After all, they must be good if they can manage projects of that size. Even if "managing" means blustering, blaming and bullying – The 3B™ method of management!
The problem with NIH (not invented here) is that there is no reason to think that your own code will be any better or safer. While it's naive to assume that that package you depend upon is bug free and secure, it might well be better tested (both functionally and securitywise) than your own.
Python seems to do well, possibly because many of the potential problem areas are handled by extremely robust parts of the standard library. It might also help that so many pentest tools are written using those self same parts of the standard library. Unit testing, which as any fule no, doesn't prevent any bugs or exploits but can be mighty useful when fixing them, is also pretty pervasive and this together, with a long-standing open source culture and liberal licensing also means that many key libraries are routinely scanned. This also helps in situations where code audits are required.
Yeah Germany has done a very good job in phasing out its nuclear stations.
Well, it would have if it had stuck with the initial deal struck with the industry. But Mutti Merkel decided to cancel it, then sign new contracts with the industry that included compensation if it was phased out again, which it was in the next year… So, we're getting to pay more for the privelege. Just as we are with coal.
However, France is already grateful to be able to import cheap German power in the summer when it gets too hot to cool its nuclear plants and even Poland is starting to consider the advantages of cleaner generation. I don't expect much to change overnight but reckon in ten years things will start to look a lot different.
the silent conversion of large integers into exponentials
You forgot the important bit (sic): converted and truncated: Excel is limited to 15 digits of precision unless you keep it as text. Had this recently relating to customer and card numbers. Oh, how we laughed…
Still, as interchange format I see fewer problems with Excel because you do have typing and can add data validation, which generally leads to less of a mess than if you give someone a CSV…
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
