* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Imagine OLE reinvented for the web and that's 90% of Microsoft's Fluid Framework: We dig into O365 collaborative tech

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It's not OLE, it's VCS + notifications

OOXML already provides the foundation for sharing components, but it isn't pretty, and has rudimentary support for versioning, though in practice this can't be done without some kind of server such as, eugh, Sharepoint. This sounds like an extenstion or transition of this to use HTTP2 and HTML5. Clients are all registered so changes can be signed and the VCS handles the merging. I suspect "collaboration" will be less important than plugging in remote data sources for dashboards.

Watch Waymo's totally driverless self-driving car cruise around, how the US military wants to use AI ethically, etc

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Did any one else notice

This particular model maybe, yes, but I wouldn't expect that to be the case always.

There will no doubt be attacks on the cars but it's difficult to see why there should be of these already and that Google will be powerless in such cases. Around here car theft is already mainly limited to stealing the sat-nav systems because these have the highest resale values. Stealing a car just for its scrap value, which is what you're suggesting, is unlikely to make the perpertrators rich, and, as the owner Google can install and activate all kinds of disincentives that car manufacturers normally can't.

Vandalism (the yoof will often trash anything whatever its worth) may be another issue, but again, Google can quickly cut its losses and, presumably, get good at working out where such things are likely to occur: in the true tradition of the internet, I'd expect the engineers to see such hazards no differently to difficult driving conditions.

But I guess, as with so many things, we'll just have to wait and see.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

The pursuing driver was, in fact, on the wrong side of the road.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: US Department of Defense has drafted its own AI principles

IIRC the stated objective was to destroy IS/DAESH.

US foreign policy, including all those expensive wars, is largely dictated by economic concerns: if others hadn't already done so the US would have invented gunboat diplomacy as yet another expression of the Monroe Doctrine, when Coca-Cola diplomacy fails.

"Rebuilding Americas Defences" made the oil-based case for invading Iraq long before the event.

Syria is a bit more compicated because it has less oil but it does have a border with Israel, not just an ally but a useful R&D site for some of DARPA's more dubious projects.

Trump doesn't care about American lives, but he does care about winning elections: any blowback from Syria is unlikely to hit the US before next year's election.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Did any one else notice

Not really, the car can be built to be largely useless if hijacked and the components are worth a lot less than car manufacturers would want us to believe. The cars belong to Google so they can be remotely bricked and, of course, Google gets to decide whether somewhere is safe for their cars to go.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The uniquenesses.

You got that far?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: US Department of Defense has drafted its own AI principles

Betrayal, particularly of the Kurds, is one of the few constants of the Middle East. Sykes-Picot being a notable example of Anglo-French cooperation in screwing the Kurds but there have been many others. However, in this particular case the DoD was dead against the decison which was the Orange One's alone, who also only knows why he gave the order: to please Putin, to deflect from impeachment hearings, to shore up his base, because he was bored.

It's not that US hasn't abandoned allies in the past, but it rarely does so with so little upside: Erdogan gets to like a hero, Putin a statesman, Assad gets some oil revenue and Iran gets a little close to Israel.

US intervention in Syria had thus far been relatively cheap (both in men and money) and reasonably successful. Compare and contrast with the morass that is Afghanistan.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Did any one else notice

Yes, we all noticed the obvious. NB. the wasn't a demonstration video, just some footage from an interested driver. We don't know anything about the journey itself and what it may or may not have been testing.

Google has chosen Phoenix for several reasons: cooperative state and council and predictable roads and weather. As for hostile driving environments: forget London, and pick anywhere in South Asia or Africa.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Prety neat driving

In many of the places in the US I've been to there are no pavements and there seems to be little distinction between them and wildlife.

Maybe it's just the perspective of the camera but it seemed quite a bit further into the road than in Europe. Then again, here, you'd generally expect to move to overtake cyclists.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Prety neat driving

But the car seems to be a long way away from the kerb. Maybe that's standard for the US?

PowerPoint! Word! Excel! Lens! By your powers combined, I am Captain Mobile Office

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: PowerPoint! Word! Excel!

With Samsung's Dex I can connect my phone to a big screen and keyboard. And Word is great on my Gemini.

Not that I'm keen to edit Office files on it, just pointing out that there are more options than you might imagine.

Cyber-security super-brain Rudy Giuliani forgets password, bricks iPhone, begs Apple Store staff for help

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Personal lawyer

As an adviser on cybersecurity to President Trump and more recently as his personal lawyer

This phrase gets bandied about a lot in reference to Giuliani but I don't think it means what most people think it means, specifically Rudy Giuliani is not being retained as a criminal attorney for Donald Trump, ie. client-attorney privilege does not apply.

Amazon is saying nothing about the DDoS attack that took down AWS, but others are

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The bigger they are...

To be fair to both Amazon and Neustar, bringing outside specialists is often exactly the right thing to do. Neustar does have experience in this area and I suspect we'll see more of this kind of attack as more and more "endpoints" get added.

WTF? Apple iPhones shrank by more than $22bn in fiscal '19

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The miracle of cheap debt

Just like they're self-financing the share buy backs?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: They don't value their own products

Isn't the XR the one they can't give away? I seem to remember sales for the X and 8 being significantly higher.

Anyway, Apple doesn't really care now about now it's managed to convince people to buy products with even higher margins: audio toothbrushes.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The miracle of cheap debt

Elsewhere in Services, Cook also confirmed Apple Card customers will be able to use it to purchase a new iPhone and "pay for it over 24 months with zero interest". They'll also get 3 per cent cash back on that phone purchase and pay no fees.

So, a differential price cut that the accounts can be offset against profits, ie. the taxpayer contributes. Nice.

Remember the big IBM 360 mainframe rescue job? For now, Brexit has ballsed it up – big iron restorers

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If you can get something into a container,

So, a long enough ramp or a couple of pallet movers can do that job.

Even that's not going to be easy with something like a System 360. Whichever way you look at this, cheap and easy aren't on the options.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I thought, and was kind of hoping he'd actually keep this particular promise, that he'd do us all a favour and be dead in a ditch by the end of the week, so the next idiot can get a chance.

How does the saying go? Don't put your trust in princes, or sons of Eton?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

If you can get something into a container, you can move it to pretty much anywhere on earth. But if you have special requirements, as this shipment does, then your options wll be severely limited. And you won't just any charlie behind the wheel or operating the thing.

That said, Germans ship heavy machinery a lot so should be possible to find a suitable company though it won't be cheap.

Trello starts waving AI around as collab outfit hits 50 million registrations

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It's okay

But I don't know much how much value I see in it over any other simple task manager.

Biggest problem is that I don't trust any Atlassian any more after they fucked us all over Mercurial. Could so easily be something like Trello or Pipelines next.

GitLab pulls U-turn on plan to crank up usage telemetry after both staff and customers cry foul

Charlie Clark Silver badge

VC born and bred

On the other hand, GitLab CFO Paul Machle said: "This should not be an opt in or an opt out. It is a condition of using our product. There is an acceptance of terms and the use of this data should be included in that."

Worth noting that he's right that they can do this. GDPR quickly loses its teeth for anything that requires a login, unfortunately. Tells us a lot about what the investors who currently own GitLab are interested: you are not a name, you are a data resource.

We can go our own Huawei! Arm says it can flog chip blueprints to Chinese giant despite US trade embargo

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Unintended Consequence

I think people missed the irony in your post. Intel-based mobile phones? Not even Intel believes that any more. Mind you, the way US industrial and trade, ahem, policy is headed there won't be any need for electronic communications as it's back to the 1890s…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Well, that would be a case of the biter bit, because US companies do indeed profit handsomely from special vehicles for IP. I suspect the case here may be a little more complicated but transferring the IP to an non-US domiciled company would seem to be a possible solution. The thing you have to factor in is that US protectionism is pretty blanket in requiring a certain amount of US based input in any product. There are ways around this using countries with the right kind of trade deals, but expect this to add more friction (aka higher prices) for US trade.

This is what you get with an administration that is big on gesture, low on policy and almost non-existent on detail.

Teardown gurus plunge screwdrivers into Google Pixel 4XL: Check out the speedy display from, er, Samsung

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: a lot of glue...

It's been mentioned before that the devices are usually warmed in special ovens to the right temperature should disassembly be required. Personally, I'm pleased that starving children will be burning their fingers trying to extract the valuable residue from my old trinkets. Because, let's face it, no matter how easy it is to repair these things in principle, they generally end up being dumped somewhere in the third world for "recycling".

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Apple only use stuff after the manufacturers agree that Apple invented whatever tech it is…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

And why not for server use? Though if memory serves, Google's one of the few customers that gets customisations on its chips because it buys so many. Then there's the Tensor chips for ML that they decide and get built.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The quantum computer is a complete red herring in this connection, but they have for years been building and using their own Tensor chips for ML, which means they probably know more about this particular area of chip design than Apple, which has focussed more on customising ARM and graphics.

No extra bank holiday for 75th VE Day, but the pub will be open longer

Charlie Clark Silver badge

You know Boris is just itching, and this time not from anything related to Miss Arcuri, for something that might actually get approval in parliament.

Lock him up!

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Been there...

Never did figure out what to call the Scandinavian "small o with 4 horns"

You mean "ö" or "ø" for Danish and Norwegian? Prepared to be disappointed because it's just an "oer" or "uh" from combining the o and e sounds. Same in this case as German.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Been there...

Of course, it's not rocket science, but I'm not a touch typist and I do switch between languages and OSes, so I do spend often resort to staring at the keys. I could get replacement keycaps but, let's face it, the Model M is damn noisy and I also personally prefer keys with less travel.

After the most recent disaster I was fortunate that one of my neighbours had just replaced his Apple keyboard with a Logitech…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Been there...

It's actually reprehensible how shitty current keyboards are and Apple's are particularly susceptible and basically not repairable even after a minor spill: lost my last one to tea after a sudden sneeze.

At some point I may go back to the venerable Model M I have. The only reason for not using this at the moment is the US keyboard layout.

Intel heralds record third quarter – despite being unable to meet customer demand for new chips

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: AMD angle

12,000 CPUs keep the fabs busy for how long? OK, AMD no longer has its own fabs, but it still needs volume to cover the development costs.

I'm not dissing AMD but if you look at the numbers their earnings are tiny in comparison with Intel's which is why competition from other sources is welcome.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: AMD angle

Sadly, AMD remains largely a sideshow, almost just an alibi, in data centers where most CPUs are not sold. The only real competition for Intel remains ARM, which has taken much longer to come up with a plausible server CPU strategy than many of us hoped.

In the consumer space ARM chips have for a while provided sufficient oomph for devices but a lack of OS choice on devices with larger screens has hindered the market from development. The I-Pad Pro shows what could be possible but Google's decision to only allow ChromeOS on notebooks and can any Android for notebook development is the real blocker. Maybe they'll change their minds in Windows on ARM becomes properly usable.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Things probably won't change until Apple see a decline in sales that kicks them into action. So far they seem to think decline in sales are related solely to hardware pricing.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Flame

I expect there are a few very important things that can only be done on Apple

In many situations it's one or two very important things, which is why people stay. I've yet to see comparable desktop apps for Linux, not least because GTK refuses to die and take Poettering with it.

If I do move, it will probably be to something running on Android. Samsung's Dex is a little rough around the edges but I can see where it could go.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Lots of reasons not to switch to Catalina, not least lots of perfectly good software becoming unusable including my printer and scanner drivers. Gee whizz, Apple, of course, I'll buy new hardware to use your latest dumbed down version. SWMBO's machine was also asked to leave the bus an update ago. I can understand the move to 64-bit but less the way it's been handled.

But I've also seen more serious problems particularly regarding logins and certificate management. The usual advice for any MacOS update is to wait at least a couple of patch versions (around the new year) while Apple continues fix all the stuff they've just fucked up. But basically with Catalina, just disable the notification that there is a new version.

Google warns devs as it tightens Chrome cookie security: Stuff will break if you're not clued up

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Finger Printing and The DMCA

In Germany the issue has been to court and decided in the users' favour. And GDPR does more of the same. But we won't see a significant change in behaviour until we see some stiffer fines handed out.

Google's argument about "fingerprinting" doesn't wash: such practices are a clear breach of data privacy legislation.

Chinese customers to unfold their Huawei Mate X on 15 November

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Well, I don't own a car – no point because it's gridlock central here – my point was that people choose different ways to waste money, including cars in general and car accessories in particular. And some people expect to change cars nearly as often as they change phones.

I love some of the technology behind the Samsung Fold and similar devices but I don't think I need one and am not planning to buy one. But, particularly in Asia, where huge phones are, er, big, I can see demand for these being quite strong: a tablet that you can keep in a handbag.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Let me guess your age. 25, and 10 stone in weight.

Wrong and wrong: I've had a mobile phone for about 25 years. Not sure what it has to do with the price of fish.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

£ 2000 is far more than I'd want to spend on the phone but I do at least find the idea of a foldable screen interesting. And I can imagine a heap of users going "this is exactly what I want".

Can't say I think the same when it comes to cars: people seem to prepared to spunk £ 2000 on the wheel rims alone.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Alternatively

Sticking your own OS on an SoC is not as easy as many people seem to think and I'm really not convinced it's necessary. AOSP with a good Terminal / SSH app should be sufficient for most sys admins.

Tesla has made a profit. Repeat, Tesla has made a profit – $143m in fact

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Leasing versus sales

Many lease cars now. It can be the most economically advantageous method, even if you've got the cash to buy outright.

They can be economic for end users because they can walk away from them as soon as they don't need them any more. They're less successful for manufacturers which turn to them when there's a glut. Hence the hit on Tesla's bottom line. For manufacturers, renting aka MaaS (mobility as a service) is the new hotness.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Leasing versus sales

Looks like you drank more than one bottle of Musk Aid™

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Leasing versus sales

Sales down, profits up. What does this tell us about the business model? And why is a car company selling solar panels? Apart from Musk bailing out another of his companies?

Tesla blamed the drop in revenue on a tripling of leased vehicles compared to the same period last year.

You know things are looking down when leasing rates spike: leasing is less cash now with the leasing company sharing the risk.

Haxis of evil: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are 'continuous threat' to UK, say spies

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Benjamin Franklin seemed to think that sacrificing freedom in the pursuit of security would lead to the loss of both. So, when it comes to snooping, there probably isn't much difference. And, when it comes down to standing up for individual freedoms, well, it's not as if we've got a stellar reputation there either, at least not where expect to make money.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Cue Blackadder sketch about spies because of coure the guys and gals in GCHQ and the NSA are brave and tireless heroes, whereas the weasels working for the Chinese, Russians, Enemy-of-The-Week are filthy and underhand. It's not as if the US itself partial to industrial espionage

In the meantime, more and more Americans believe that evolution is a hoax and that vaccines are part of a conspiracy theory. I mean, do we really need the Russians and the Chinese to meddle when we seem to be doing such a good job of fucking stuff up ourselves?

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: TL;DR

Sure, I blame the EU for mad cow disease. If the EU hadn't allowed Maggie to reduce standards before feeding processed sheep to cows then it would never have happened.

Luckily we can start looking forward to having our farmers compete with free marketeers such as the US. With out ballooning budget deficit we're well equipped to stand by our farmers…

What really gets me, BoJo is such a terrible speaker off-the-cuff and seems to have no grasp of policy or procedure why is this entitled bumbler and the rest of the B-team so popular?

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: TL;DR

For every non-EU person I decide to hire, I have to put together a justification document, listing the details of least three EU nationals considered for the post and reasons for rejection.

This is not an EU requirement but devolved to national governments who never ceded control. If I look at the software engineers in the companies round (Huawei, E-ON, Trivago) here they are teeming with non-EU nationals. This is also why Kensington and Chelsea is teeming with foreign oligarchs: the UK says you're very welcome if you spend more than £ 1 million on property.

The last time I sent someone non-white

And yet you put your faith in people who crow in parliament over how much better Eton is than Winchester? As Rees-Mogg did earlier this year.

For many, though certainly not for all, racism was one of the reasons to vote to leave the EU, viz. at least one poster suggesting a horde of a million Turks eager to move to the UK.

Like Visual Studio Code and your data lives in SQL Server? Microsoft has something for you

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Valentina Data Studio

Over the last few months I've been very impressed with Valentina Data Studio for general database work.

Mark Hurd is dead

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: More accurate

To be fair, he was just one of several CEOs that nearly ruined the company. But as long as shareholders give boards such an easy time this will continue.