Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Venus and Mars

Not the same but comparable: low gravity is one of the reasons for little atmosphere, which does more than give us something to breathe: space is a hostile environment!

Re: Venus and Mars

Gravity is so low on Mars as to make the comparison reasonable: human life on Mars is nothing but a fantasy.

Re: The German one seems to work

The German one cost a mere € 20 million. Mind you, it was developed by T-Systems and SAP so what do you expect. As to whether it works: only time will really tell. They might help a bit.

But these apps can never replace testing. The faster you can test people, the less contact-tracing you have to do. But testing is more expensive…

I'm sure people have been doing this with mutt since the 1970s…

I'm currently using MailMate on MacOS for this kind of thing and Andew Cannion wrote a nice article on how to do the kind of things with MailMate (and SaneBox for the pattern-matched based stuff)

Re: Email already passé?

E-mail really just works. If you don't like your provider it's pretty damn easy to move all your old e-mail as long as you control the domain. This is example of why standard protocols are good.

Some people think that these IRC-like services will solve the problem of too much e-mail. Until the network effect kicks in and you're back to square one. Or worse, because chat is really inefficient. On a service which now owns your data: lock-in that you pay for.

Some companies (KLM) are trying to move to WhatsApp for customer service, probably because they benefit from the metadata that Facebook can provide them.

Re: I'll take the "small" one

In the Far East, many people really do all that on their phone and it's a huge market.

Whatever happened to phone docking stations? That's the obvious answer - bung your phone in a cradle and use it to power a monitor, keyboard, mouse.

Samsung's DeX is excellent.

Re: I'll take the "small" one

screens so big you need a bloody handbag just to carry em around.

Because that's the main group of people buying them. Particularly in the far East the smartphone maybe the only personal computer people have,

Re: 30% is outrageous

30% is supposed to cover not just distribution but also advertising costs. The real problem is the exclusivity clause.

Re: @Chris G - Terminate

Shutup 10 does the job, and more. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Re: What's an "un-carrier"?

They came up with it after that, and probably after the failed merger with AT&T when they started going after marketshare by offering "unlimited" deals, in comparison with the eye-wateringly expensive deals of the other networks. This was successful enough to make Sprint want to merge.

Re: Possible reason

Probably not the case: the network went down in large parts of Germany today as well.

Re: Visibility over Bluetooth

The generate and transmit random ids which are kept on the phone until someone tests positive, receives and activates their account at which point their ids for the relevant period are distributed to every phone who check the list against ids they've received. The hashing has been reviewed but, as with all these things there remains a slight risk, which is why some journalists and lawyers have asked for some exceptions.

BTW Bluetooth is only entirely invisible when it's disabled, which is why it's used in some shops for footfall detection – there's not a lot of identification you can do without people logging in: wifi and IMEI's from nano cells are more useful there.

Is there a genetic element on the viral side to asymptomatic infections?

As with most infections this does appear to be the case, though it's difficult to make out amongst all the other data: age, gender (men are more susceptible), existing conditions.

The last data I saw on how infectious people without symptons are didn't look like there were many "covid Molly's" around. People with viral infections are often infectious without symptons early on as the virus multiplies (this itself is a key part of the strategy).

As you say, testing is key. As is properly funded primary care.

FWIW, Intel did most of the work on the move to x86 to make things work as well as they did.

Quite a few of the Xiaomis have support for LineageOS so you can remove all the crap permanently, if you wish – though most people don't seem to care: they don't tend to buy cars only to remove the seat coverings, either (yes, I know it's not a 1:1 comparison). Otherwise just installing Blokada will solve a lot of those problems.

Re: Please El Reg ...

So, really you just need a modem for some kind of device. Nothing wrong with, that but not really relevant for this kind of phone.

BTW. it's not as if I spend all the time on my phone watching videos, because I don't. I've rarely come close to using my massive 1 GB a month data usage, but I there are some things other than phone calls that I do use my phone for.

Re: Please El Reg ...

Bluetooth is not a batery sucker unless it's doing something and if you don't want internet connectivity then don't buy a smartphone: the screen is going to use most of the power when it's on.

I've tried Java and tomcat and TBH, PHP kicks its butt.

Not that I like Java but that's not a fair comparison: Tomcat is a framework for turning Java applications into websites with everything that implies: you get scalabilty but you also get verbosity. Certainly won't get you up and running very quickly.

But what else can you use PHP for? Of course, it's not strictly limited to being embedded in the web server's process, but it's what it's most suited for, which is why it runs WordPress and not Spotify.

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

One reason why IPv6 hasn't exactly taken the world by storm is its not a very good solution to the problem of extending the address range of the Internet.

I'm sure there is a term for this kind of argument. It's like waiting for a bus but having a reason for igoring every one that comes along. Sometimes perfection isn't possible. IPv6 isn't perfect but it's the best solution we have and some of the problems associated with IPv4 are only going to get worse the longer it takes to transition.

The main reason that adoption has been so slow is that in countries, particularly the US, that dominate much of the practical aspects of the internet, a lot of these problems don't exist. The US has so many IPv4 addresses that it really doesn't understand what the fuss is about. Add to this that IPv4 is "good enough" so neither network operators or users have an incentive to change. Ideally, of course, users should never notice the change.

Governments could improve matters by requiring devices be able to support IPv6 in order to gain certification or connect to an interchange and I think we'll see more of this.