Posts by Charlie Clark 12180 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
The German Constitutional Court has already agreed in several instances that sovereignty may be ceded to the relevant supranational institutions: UN, ECJ and the ECB being notable examples. Brexit is a problem, but for the EU fortunately only for a couple of weeks. After that the rules can be redrafted so that the UK isn't a compulsory signatory but can join as an observer (similar agreements with non-EU states exist).
I'd be interested to see just how may people actually would go back to Opera were they to release the much maligned integrated mail client. I'd bet not that many after all.
Probably not many, though I think Opera Mail (which itself borrowed many ideas from BeOS) was great. E-mail, for those of us still using it, is moving towards things like Spike, which follow a similar view not folder-based approach with some ML thrown in supposedly to make our lives easier.
Personally, I think it's got better by focussing on being a better browser rather than trying to do everything. It's noticeably faster and more reliable since they switched to the new engine. This doesn't mean I agree with the dumbing down of the UI, but, on balance, I think they've got most things right.
Vivaldi is probably still the only browser that's trying to cram more and more features into the browser but, because they messed up a few things and have consistently failed to deliver the promised mail cient, I jumped ship to Firefox and MailMate, which I even pay for. I used to pay for Opera and would consider paying for Firefox if it meant that I could get real support.
Google doesn't actually care: it uses licence agreements to enforce GMS. If Samsung has a deal with Facebook to install its shit on phones, then Google can do nothing about this.
But Google isn't the right person to talk to about this. This can, and should, be handled by consumer protection legislation. Unfortunately, in the US at least, this usually means post facto injury suits targetting limited liability, because consumer protection exists in name only, because everyone hates regulations, right?
I can't drink black tea without milk or lemon juice: the physical reaction is simply too strong. Never tastes greasy to me, but, in hard water areas it's likely to taste sweet because of the lactose in the milk. NB. without some kind of acid regulator, it's not so good for the teeth.
Black tea also has anti-oxidants and, as long as you don't drink it with sugar – which only perverts do – has long been considered to be "beneficial". Or at least not harmful. Fermentation is a trade off: personally I find green tea very harsh. I seem to recall that tea is also a good source of fluoride, but could be wrong.
The entry-level Mate X model retails at roughly $2,500 — or nearly eight times the monthly minimum wage in Shenzhen, where the company is headquartered.
Yes, it's expensive so average earnings are not really relevant for comparison. More important are the number of people in China earning say USD 200,000 a year, that can afford such status symbols. This might only be a tiny percentage of the working population to still be a significant number of total sales. For example, assume there are around 800 million working Chinese, you're looking at around 0.25 % of these keen on having the latest shiny, shiny, ie. a high-end flagship every year, especially if it's something that other people don't have.
I think the number of fatal accidents is still low in absolute terms, though there have been some impressive records: first fatal accident in less 48 hours when they were introduced in Sweden. But the injuries are nearly always worse than for cyclists travelling at similar speeds: different centre of gravity, shorter wheelbase with much smaller wheels, different stance. Unles involving a motorised vehicle most cycling injuries are superficial. On a scooter they almost always break of fracture something badly.
“E-scooters are a fast and convenient form of transportation and help to lessen traffic congestion, especially in dense, high-traffic areas,”
Nope, there's no evidence to demonstrate that scooter journeys replace car journeys. Instead the evidence points to scooters replacing public transport, walking and cycling but also new journeys for generation fun. So more traffic. Oh, and the average life expectancy of the non-recyclable toy is 12 - 8 months.
Microwave ovens work by exciting the O-H bond, which is why it's effective on carbohydates, but also great at drying stuff out until it's inedible. But this is hardly the kind of radiation that causes spontaneous genetic mutations that lead to things like infertility. The culprits for this are far more likely to be in the pseudo-hormonal compounds found in almost every modern product. So probably simply holding a phone, even while it's switched off, is probably riskier than its microwave.
But try telling that to the tin hat brigade.
As always, you have to look at where the population in growing. In rich countries it's ageing and at best stable. But in large parts of Asia,and in most of Africa it's continuing to rise and increasing the pressure for resources. What's it to be? Babies or safari animals?
Working with bytes isn't any more difficult in Python 3 than it was with Python 2 except it's now more explicit and you can no longer even try to encode already encoded strings. But allowing us to use the u-prefix in 3.3 did make it a lot easier to make the intent clearer where code was likely to use both unicode and bytes a lot.
but future macOS releases won't ship with any scripting language by default
Apple's justification for this is apparently that such languages were required for "legacy applications". If so, I'm not sure what PHP was being used for. Apple was infamous for releasing doctored versions of these languages, like Python and not maintaining them between major OS releases, which is why the PSF maintained its owned versions of Python for MacOS, and developers used MacPorts or Homebrew to manage them. Anyway, it's basically just another brick in the wall around the garden. I suppose we can expect them to remove support for command line tools in future versions of XCode. :-/
And why not, if you know what you're doing and particularly if it's not "internet-facing". Lots of internal systems will continue to run happily for years with Python 2.
New projects, however, should be done using Python 3 unless you have a good reason not to do so: I know of a couple of libraries that are Python 2 only, largely because the developers have not had the time to port them to Python 3. I suspect that, where the need is great enough, other people will take on the work either, where the source is available, or a clone where this isn't the case. This has happened in the past: Pillow replaced PIL after it was effectively abandoned.
Just to be clear: caveat emptor is no defence in cases of fraud*, which is probably why HPE is trying this on. However, the whole idea of due diligence is to provide the purchaser with the necessary tools and resources to uncover any such practices.
* Hence lots of consumer protection legislation expressly designed to protect purchasers. But then buying a software company cannot really be compared to buying a child's toy. I guess the closest parallel is probably buying a house and deciding whether to get a survey done or not. Even the best survey won't necessarily protect you from all risks, especially if the seller refuses to disclose them. But the first port of call for regress would normally be with the surveyor, who has to have professional insurance as a result.
In this case then HPE either has to demonstrate negligence on the part of KPMG or that Autonomy deliberately prevented KPMG from doing its job, in which case the sale should have fallen through. That they haven't gone after KPMG is hardly a resounding endorsement of the strategy and, hence, of their corporate governance. The fear of being gazumped encouraged them to rush the deal through against better sense and even, IIRC, the advice of KPMG.
Chances of BOFH or PFY not finding out about the printer within an hour of it being on premises: if it's wifi, then happily announces itself to all local networks, and honeypots. If it's not wifi, because the lusers think they're being clever, then the driver download request gets picked up by the network traffic sniffer. All this assuming that the Boss can setup a wireless printer or plug a USB device in correctly, other than an official IT department keylogger USB stick, without the help of the ITdepartment. Yeah, right.
In which case, I'm surprised the skunk works printer hasn't already been adapted to give unsuspecting users the cattle prod treatment. Presumably this is for a future episode when the brave fools return from hostiple with a cunning plan…
I think that Apple also owns a part of this, with a few people I know addicted to the simplicity model. But the interesting thing is that it has spawned some improved competitors (I switched to Busy Calendar when Apple dumbed the calendar down too much).
There are two problems for anything that targets Linux primarily: the age old problem of which particular GUI toolkit they should use and who the feck is prepared to pay for it?
i work on some open source software and use loads of free software but in the Linux sphere there are simply too many people who think paying for software is morally wrong. If only they could get out of their bubble chamber, they'd see people desperate to pay money for usability and reliability.
File corruption used to be quite common with the BIFF file format but I've yet to see it with OOXML files. Excel will occasionally complain about files but it can "solve" the problem by ditching the parts it doesn't like. Haven't had a crash with Excel in years, had my most recent one with OpenOffice last week.
This in spades. I stick with OpenOffice because of the repeated fuck ups in the LO interface. The original StarOffice approach to documents is superior but you can suffer from the Photoshop problem of too many widgets, but the developers really do need to spend some time on real usability and not just switching to theme du jour.
As someone who works with the details I'd say that ODF is by far the better file format but, particularly since Office 2016, MS Office is the better desktop application and the only one for mobile.
Doing some stuff in charts in MS Office can be a bit tricky, but the results really can be significantly better than LibreOffice. And, Execl is now faster and more stable on large files. In fact, LibreOffice has become known for being unstable, even the versions that are supposed to be stable. I use OpenOffice for most of my private use, and I'm not keen on the SaaS model for MS Office, but credit where credit's due.
You're talking about workbook and worksheet "protection", which are just GUI settings designed largely to make data entry easier. Workbook encryption as practised by MS, does indeed encrypt the whole workbook, which is then no longer a zip file, and is non-trivial to crack.
That's just wishful thinking. What happened is what always happens because, as we've seen here, the consequences for individuals are limited: no one at Boeing, the FAA or Congress will go to prison over this. Shareholders have taken a hit but their representatives on the board were happy with the way the company was run.
If there is a risk to a company in the defence industry like Boeing then they just talk about the national interest and pressure is applied to the regulators to wave them through. Rinse and repeat for opioids. The reason is that, generally, there's more votes in talking about jobs than there is in the tragic deaths of some "darkies" – US law infamously treats all non-US citizens as at best second class. In fact, it's possibly only because there were some US citizens involved in the Ethiopian crash, along with the response of European and Chinese regulators, that the issue got taken seriously at all.
At the FAA it's a combination of regulatory capture after Congress continually cut funding. As a result the FAA didn't have the resources to do certification testing, so it let the plane makers self-certify.
And, as much as I agree that it should take as long as it takes to solve the problem, Boeing and Airbus, and for that matter Bombardier and Embraer, have incredible safety records. But the 737 Max was attempt to bend the results to speed up time to market and charge of criminal negligence shouldn't be ruled out.
This is really the RedHat part of IBM speaking. RedHat managed to make a business out of selling services based on open source, in much the same way that Google and Amazon have done. True, it has committed resources to some projects such as OpenStack, but the business contracts are often as restrictive as the competition.
Signal is acknowledged to have the best encryption protocol, which is why it has been adopted by WhatApp, Google and others. Unfortunately, partly because of the quality of the encryption, group management has traditionally been difficult as groups are essentially a series of individual chats. This is due to change soon as a now have a way to secure accounts with even less metadata. Both articles of full of technical detail but worth reading if you're interested in the kind of problems they're looking to solve and the solutions they've come up with.
Wire is okay but suffering from having no real USP. Threema, also based in Switzerland, offers stuff for businesses.
But for basic group, particularly when you want this to be public, and chat stuff Telegram is about the best, especially as WhatsApp is soon due to start including advertising.
One of the things the frameworks face is being replaced by native functions in the browser. This is to be welcomed, because over time it will simplify some of the stuff that is currently way too complex, but imposes a higher maintenance cost. And, as we all know, many many websites are barely maintained once written.
I've been advising on this for years and feature detection is the easy and safe way to go. This can includea a cut-off for non-standards compliant browser, basically IE < 11, but the rest should be handled by feature detection.
A bigger problem is keeping a codebase that allows you to jettison framework code as native support becomes available: jQuery is no longer required for many things it's been used for for years.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
