Posts by Charlie Clark

Sure, but how many do you think are doing so at the moment?

Re: Dear BBC

some news and current affairs coverage

I assume you're using the terms loosely as the quality of coverage seems to be declining almost while you read. The BBC News website used to be genuinely useful and interesting.

Re: Fascinating stuff

Mass-energy equivalence (e=mc2) precludes it. Anything with mass effectively gets heavier and heavier the faster it moves and at the speed of light, it would be infinitely massive.

Re: Another nutjob hiding behind the flag

He's certainly all in on Trumpism - in the last week on twitter he's said military should be involved in quelling the protests

And isn't this precisely the reason for the second amendment? The right to bear arms against a repressive government? The NRA should be all in on the protests then!

There's no real need to take Tom Cotton seriously at the moment as Congress isn't usually involved in arms sales, only procurement. But it's nevertheless instructive about how the US will conduct trade negotiations with the UK, where Congress will be involved. So, to the list of chlorinated chicked, higher prescription charges, privatised healthcare you can now add shoddy telecommunications technology with backdoors.

Re: New Icons, wooiaaahhh

Yes, but what else do you expect from this kind of report: new version gets installed without attendant changelog and developer event? It will take a while for anyone to export the ROM and do any serious comparison. So, in the meantime you get to see the A/B icon tests.

We could do with a snooze icon for this kind of thing! ;-)

Re: Would this be a good 'phone to have ...

Many countries have already planned the reallocation of 2G (& 3G) frequencies for 5G services as it's the only way to provide sufficient bandwidth and soon you won't be able to buy much new equipment for 2G services. Note, reallocating some of the spectrum for 5G doesn't mean the emergency services can't continue to use it, as they only need a small portion.

Re: Huh?

Software isn't a comestible like food or fuel.

Re: Two hashes are better than one

MD5 was deprecated at least a decade ago. Once an algorithm has been deprecated it should be considered unsafe and no longer used. SHA-256 and something like RMD-160 are now more common alternatives.

lame was one of many mp3 implementations that were technically illegal.

In which jurisdictions? IIRC lame is fine in Germany, where Fraunhofer is based, because software patents are not enforceable.

I use it only for sharing key chain for some accounts on different machines. 5GB storage isn't enough for anything serious and the silent transferral of local files to a remote server is unacceptable.

Re: Why bother?

Because, in the absence of a vaccine and a list of reliable and safe treatments, governments want to be seen doing something. And an app makes them look "modern" and digitally competent.

The rollout out for medical personnel also makes sense: a hospital is a great place to catch a diseaese, whether it's covid-19 or anything else, so you can imagine this, or something similar, becoming standard practice in future: instead of phones use some kind of badge for checking, controlling the hardware should improve the efficacy of any system because distance assessments should be more reliable.

But the general application of this app has moved further into the technological utopia.

Re: Scepticism...

The risks are not quite that simple and multiple sourcing will only mitigate some risks, say at the base station level. When it comes to managing the network, it's a different issue. But the risk is probably still closer to the GPS one: disabling or disruption rather than mass surveillance. If you want to spy on people's communicatins it's far easier to do it if you can install something on their devices, or listening at the edge, which is what GCHQ is for.

The Huawei spat is a mainly "made for Twitter" issue that portrays Trump fighting for American's freedom and trying to gain leverage in trade talks with China. However, seeing as most of America's consumer electronics and a great deal of other stuff is made in China, it's that not that convincing.

If America is really worried about China working its way up the value chain, then it should start investing in the relevant areas. If companies spent less money on advertising and lobbying, they'd have more money for R&D.

Re: It's UNIX

If you use something like MacPorts you can, indeed, replace a lot of components that Apple only updates with new releases. But much of the code, and all of the GUI, is Apple's own and it is frankly pretty shoddy. For the last three months I've been trying to confirm my Apple ID so that I can use FaceTime to chat with my nephew: no dice. How about replacing it? Again, no dice.

MacOS is for many people and many tasks a great OS, but it has definitely suffered from Apple's recent attempts to turn it into an extension of IOS.

Re: Competition

My residence is very fortunate to have two providers available.

That's so weird! Here, in "socialist" Europe there are a plethora of providers due to open access policies. Note, this doesn't mean that capitalism is dead as it still allows sports channels to earn lots of money through subscription, it just makes rent-seeking for the cable owners a little more difficult.

Re: simple shit so much easier with cmd

See also the related unix discussions about replacing Sys V init with things like systemd: some of this stuff may be 40 years or older and, while there have undoubtedly been improvements since then, in the world of system administration "working" trumps nearly everything else. Especially when you have systems that have up times for 10 years or more.

Re: Ooh, fun!

Yes, a culture of accountability should apply to all. Then again, I've yet to see anything from any leading UK politician that comes anywhere near the shit the Trump posts on a daily basis.

In the long run, I don't think it matters that much, because I don't think a lot of people take Twitter that seriously. Trump seems to use the medium to court controversy which ends up shoring up his base.

Re: Why wasn't it in by design?

Somewhere on El Reg is a nice story of how Intel got Microsoft to delay versions of NT/2000 for Alpha, which helped kill it.

Re: Minimum spec?

Please define efficient. Modern operating systems are very different beasts from the kind of control systems that were used for, say, early space exploration programs where everything was constrained by the available memory. Even for FORmula TRANslaton (writing the code that let computers do complicated mathematical equations), the advice was to use as much memory as you can. And once we got beyond simple mechanical computations it soon started to make more sense to let compilers and profilers do the optimising. Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't a load of inefficient crap in modern systems, just that it's differently inefficient!

You'll get similar results with a good Wacom tablet. But, I agree, if it helps you do your job then it's all good.