* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Several issues....

I'd be interested to know what Confluence is good for beyond wikis, or, as in the case of anything technical, ReST or Markdown files that sit in VCS. Exporting from Confluence is a particular nightmare with only two formats offered: PDF or Word.

I've currently got a project that has the repos on Github but uses Jira and Confluence for management and documentation, with some additional stuff scattered over Sharepoint. And no repo for the database schema!

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Deja vu?

Yes, I don't think I'm suggesting anything really new but I would argue that the tools now available are better at helping non-technical users through the discovery process: ML models that "understand" data structures from descriptions combined with generative ones for more probing; essentially imitating the interview process but allowing the user to set the pace.

For reliable data processing of the sort discussed in the article, the schema must be rigid. So the kind of human detection/intervention you suggest only comes into place when data is provided that doesn't fit. Now, it could then very easily be down to transposed columns that can be fixed just as easily; and perhaps a monitoring system could make the suggestion. But the important thing is that the data wouldn't be imported automatically. I.e. this is about combining ML and human approaches effectively while avoiding the mistakes of trying to automate everything.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I don't why she swallowed a fly

Sorry, but while I agree with the diagnosis, the proposed solution reminds me of the old rhyme (sung forever in my mind by Burl Ives) of the old woman who swallowed a fly.

What you actually describe is a failure to enforce the data model and the solution for this would be to help users to model the data they want so that this can be enforced and deviations immediately raise errors.

Spreadsheets are great for ad hoc reports but absolutely terrible for storage and workflows, so anything that uses them should remove all processing from Excel, leaving it to be a GUI for looking at tabular data. It's very good at this, which explains its enduring popularity.

From a programmer's perspective we think it should be easy to define the schema, implement whatever workflows are required and forget it. But decades of experience have shown us that many business are unable to do something like define a schema (and let's leave out some of the trickier questions of data types and indices), though they can come agonisingly close. We do now have the tools that give users more expressive power, I'm thinking here of the combination of Jupyter notebooks and Pandas. How about at adding some kind of iterative process allowing them to specify the schema by answering business questions? This allows them to bring their knowledge of the situation to the table rather than hoping ML will spot random anomalies. AI could certainly help suggest questions and drive a graph that would lead to the right kind of schema.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Invalid comparison with Microsoft

The tactic worked, so Microsoft did it again, with the new .DOCX format in Office 2007… presumably realizing that its new "ribbon" UI would hinder adoption.

No, Microsoft was proposing a new DOC version for Office 2007, but was forced by several governments to switch to an "open" file format that would become OOXML, which is essentially an XML version of the previous BIFF one. Though it should also be recognised that Office 2007 and later did need a format to support some of the new features, such as much much bigger worksheets in Excel.

I think the Gnome fuckery is closer to Microsoft's fiddling around with APIs and desktop layouts in Windows, so MFC to .NET to whatever it is today. A royal PITA for a lot of developers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Coming to a fork in the road

I'm trying to think of a situation where you'd be so heavily invested that a move to one of the BSDs wasn't possible and the only things I can think of are hardware support, because there are Linux drivers for pretty much everything; a heavy Docker/Kubernetes environment. For servers the differences are marginal and the BSDs consistency and stability would be a welcome change.

But as this isn't really my area, I'm interested to learn more.

MariaDB ditches products and staff in restructure, bags $26.5M loan to cushion fall

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: forced to explain to customers...

I'd certainly agree that Postgres has got faster, better and more features, especially the ones for bigger commercial users. This is why there is now a reasonable commercial ecosystem around including migration off Oracle.

But while MySQL has become less buggy under Oracle's stewardship but to suggest it's anything like near Postgres' features is nonsense. Oracle, which is still doing the majority of the development, is never going to give MySQL most of the features that it can charge customers a small for fortune for OracleDB. It essentially offers MySQL plus support contracts. It was always going to be difficult for MariaDB to get anywhere in this environment if it was hoping that the never-Oracle crowd would also contain people prepared to pay for support and maintenance.

Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Video bloggers for Jira

I'm not entirely opposed to the idea but I'm wondering if this is really anything more than what millions of YouTubers seem to have mastered in a myriad of How-To videos? Some of these can be very useful but the tools are far less important than the ability of the person to create a coherent narrative.

US venture capitalist spending continues to slide, hits six year low in Q3

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: To be expected

"almost zero interest" decribes what's called fiscal repression where savers are effectively penalised for not spending, while creditors see their liabilities decline and are encouraged to borrow (effectively seize) more.

The VC is much vaunted in the press but the numbers don't look so good over time. We've just had 14 years of unusally good conditions for it which has justified all the growth at all costs strategies.

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Shareholders invest only once when shares are issued.

Lots of companies don't pay dividends and shareholders are happy to go along with this if they think the share price will go up. They also tend to approve of the actions of the boards that are detrimental to the company, such as leveraged buyouts that many telcos have been involved in. Only fair that they should also pay the price for the consequences and stop rubber-stamping board decisions so often.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I'd quibble at the term "closely-regulated". Can't remember many of the regulators really doing much since privatisation. It's usually been pretty light touch: "let us know whey you're doing something you shouldn't".

To your main point: the utilities are generally required to provide common access so that the road doesn't need digging up when the service provider changes. This obviously doesn't apply to mobile networks which initially used network coverage as a competitive advantage. However, for a while now many mast sites are shared to reduce costs and, indeed, some of them no longer own the network or mast sites. This means there is little to be gained from additional consolidation or things like roaming where one network has coverage and another doesn't.

Three, that's the number, providers isn't enough to provide competition, but two would just be a prelude to price hikes. Rather than getting the customers to bail out the greedy shareholders, it would be better for the networks to find ways to reduce their debts such as forcing creditors to swap debt for equity Or shareholders to accept the writedowns they've been avoiding for years.

Microsoft drops official support for Python 3.7 in Visual Studio Code

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "Python has moved to an annual cadence for end of life"

Agreed that most of the recent changes have had little effect on existing code. There's a lot of new stuff that people may never need or not for a few years. The exception is perhaps extension writers because the C-API has seen, and will continue to see, a lot of changes. That said, I'm not that keen on the change to yearly releases. None of the changes justify this and there is a cost in assessing new versions and running tests. And, people who've worked with the newer versions might struggle with the challenges of integrating new language features into an existing codebase.

And now for something completely different: Python 3.12

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Ternary hell

In over twenty years of working with Python code I've never found this to be a problem. It happens occasionally and is easy to fix but most editors mean you don't have to think about it.

The people who complain about whitespace in Python are usually those who've never used it, but find their software stack is often full of Python tools.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Ternary hell

I think you answer your second question yourself.

I've never liked ternary expressions and avoid the Python version preferring full boolean evaluation. It's not much more typing but it is more explicit. Ternarys were added to Python because people kept demanding them but I don't think they're frequent in practice. Having read enough nested ternarys in my time, I'm very much against this kind of abbreviation over clarity. YAGNI is a good argument for not introducing something – I'm looking at the "walrus" monstrosity.

What I think will gain more traction over time is the newish match…case construction. Though this has quite a few quirks and gotchas in it that probably need working out first before it sees wide adoption.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: concurrency is not parallelism

I've been using the red-haired uncle of async: yield from for about a decade.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: You monster

I think the example is given to illustrate the quality of the parser now that the rules have been established.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The GIL was a design decision that made a lot of sense at the time. And it still makes sense in many cases now. Removing it will happen but it will take time to do it right. Larry Hastings gave an excellent talk on why, why not, and how at PyCon a few years ago.

5G satellite briefly becomes brightest object in night sky

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Astronomy tax

You're right in principle but wrong in fact. The light pollution on earth affects the man in the street and hobby astronomers, but not the main telescopes and observatories. These were placed away from built up areas to avoid those problems.

But light pollution does have measurable effects on insects and birds. This could be solved with laws, ordinances but the arseholes responsible tend to get all high and mighty about having their freedom restricted.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Astronomy tax

A tax or levy is probably a great idea. It could be used to help pay for cleaning up the mess. The problem is: who gets the money? And how you get all launching countries onboard?

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Have you ever seen what Google Chrome "prefetches"? That alone is a reason to avoid it.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Jira is the single source of suckage

I've never liked Bugzilla which looks like it was designed to force someone to make it look better.

I've not used Jira much but find it too much for issue tracking, which is all many people need.

Confluence is probably the worst wiki tool I've come across and a terrible idea. Documentation is much better use plaintext and build systems like Sphinx + Read The Docs. But the C-Suite will always prefer to buy and seems impervious to the idea of vendor lock-in.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re: Though for no obvious reason.

The Nazi comparison is own valid in the rather disturbing trend towards denunciation in the name of progress. Stating biological facts and quesitioning interpretations has led to criticism, threats and even unemployment for some scientists.

But this has nothing to do with Twitter.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If you think X commentary is bad and misinforming .......

You are H L Mencken's ghost and I claim my $5! :-D

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: And Yet

Agreed, it's because journalists are lazy. However, I have noticed a decline in such citations over the last year or so. This is as much down to the rise of other platforms, especially Telegram and Instagram, as to whatever Musk is up to. He's managed to annoy advertisers but lazy journalists are not that easily dissuaded.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Twitter / X is a sewer

This is what most of the subscribers want.

Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Possibly, but also the increasingly nepotistic (investors themselves sit on the boards of other companies) and monopsidic (owned by fewer and fewer but larger and larger funds) ownership structures.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The majority is all that matters. The real question is why do investors choose to buy into companies with this kind of share structure?

LG has its own folding PC now, but good luck getting your hands on one

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Surely this is just a fad

I don't think the comparison with 3D TVs is at all valid, not least because this is really a step change in production, whereas 3D TV screens were essentially the same as before. The phones selling very well in South Korea and the users are very happy with them. As the technology becomes more mature I can imagine it feeding into other less premium products. Then we can all wait for Apple to invent it! :-)

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Probably not on cold, dark nights when all the heat pumps have drained the batteries…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Agree with everything apart from the last bit about encouraging elss car use. I've seen no evidence of anyone even thinking of that. Premium prices mean higher VAT, eventually higher duty and bigger corporate tax returns.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

I never suggested hydrogen because I know it's not practical. That's not stopping the the "hydrogen industry" from holding out its hand for billions…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

This is a false equivalence. Electric motors are indeed significantly simpler that internal combustion engines. Batteries, on the other hand, are considerably more complex than fuel tanks. What I personally hope to see is a shift from dead-end batteries to fuel cells that are both more efficient and energy dense than either alternative. By then we might even be producing hydrocarbons from renewable sources at competitive prices. Though I wouldn't count on this given how hard to industry is avoiding the issue and clamouring for subsidies for almost anything else.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The gift that keeps giving

The real issue is needing to untangle the sophisticated supply chains between the EU and the UK after Brexit. For many years now parts have gone to and fro before the final product emerges. This is no longer possible because the UK no longer wants to be part of a customs union. Hence, to prevent vehicles made elsewhere from entering the EU via the UK under preferential terms the tariff is applied.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: While the world slowly turns n burns.

Doesn't sound like you're a fanboi. I've never owned or wanted an I-Phone but I do think Apple do a good job on the components and the software. They're too restrictive and expensive for me and has been following other manufacturers in most areas apart from the cameras for years, but it obviously works for a lot of people.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: While the world slowly turns n burns.

My Samsung S10e is from 2019. It's going to get a new battery and LineageOS, because Samsung stopped updates in March.

Even my brother who's up there with the best of the fanbois says the new I-Phone isn't that interesting.

GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The Law of Unintended Consequences

The compiler maybe, but the licences are less and less relevant.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: RMS contribution

MacOS is still a lot more like BSD than Apple would like anyone to believe. It's just that it's run by another bunch of people who are scared of the shell. As a result, Apple has repeatedly had to reinvent the wheel of software releases, which is one of the reasons why it has such trouble providing patches at short notice.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: RMS contribution

Still essentially uses the Mach (from Carnegie Mellon, IIRC) kernel, now touted as Darwin. The kernel's fine but x86 is shit at context switching so things could be different on ARM chips.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Minix 3

This argument against permissive BSD/MIT licences has never made sense.

Firstly, the authors don't care what you do with it, ie. they don't want to have to deal with it. Secondy, and perhaps more importantly, if you don't add much, you have no added value to sell. And, if you do invest heavily but don't contribute upstream, you're going to have more and more work to keep in sync. I've seen this in companies a few times which think they can suddenly own a piece of open source software by forking it and keeping the fork private but I've never seen this work.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Not sure how you defined success for Haiku but it's been usable for years.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A Complicated Man

The FSF was political from the start and has never made any bones about it. Fortunately, the war is largely over with most recent projects avoiding the "free as liberty" licences.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

You're probably right. But, if it hadn't been for that AT&T lawsuit against Berkeley, things could have been very different. As it was, that lawsuit drove people to look for alternatives that were not subject to litigation.

This is not an attempt at revisionism merely highlighting one of the major boosts to the GNU profile: it was clean room code.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A Complicated Man

I've met him and wouldn't want to work with him and met others who have had and largely confirmed my suspicions. I've also met Eric Raymond and he's also a dick, but he's also contriubuted a lot. This is not uncommon amongst people with the "messianic" touch. Over time only their work will remain, which is probably best.

37 Signals says cloud repatriation plan has already saved it $1 million

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Is it comparable?

How does the flexibility in the cloud help the flower shop? Does it provide more workers to buy the flowers to make the bouquets and then deliver them?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Is it comparable?

You're not making a like-for-like and lifecycle comparison. Sure, for any kind of flexible load these services are great. Most businesses have fairly predictable loads with equally predictable spikes where extra capacity is bought in: think of fruit-pickers in the summer or extra deliveries in the run up to Christmas.

But some of these deals are essentially loss-leaders designed to trick you into moving your data onto their platform. But how much is going to cost you to get it back or switch providers? This is stated in virtually every quarterly report to investors.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Follow the money

Musk probably knows that he'll never find enough users willing to pay to keep the service. So, why the announcement? My guess is that he's running through options of getting towards bankruptcy so that he can write off the money he borrowed to buy it in the first place, the interest payments being more than it costs to run the company. He'll then be free to do what he wants with the carcass and the Muskrats will hail him again as a genius.

Building Excel-like UI for Uber's China ops exposed Microsoft calculation quirks

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Is Excel really the right tool for numerical analysis?

Yes, but Excel uses it's own calendar based on the Julian with, in theory at least, an epoch of 1899-12-30 00:00. But in practice it's 1900-01-01 00:00:00

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I hear attack lawyers straining at their leashes!

Depends upon the jurisdiction. This is certainly the case in the US but not necessarily so in other countries.

However, I note from the codebase that the import code is missing.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Is Excel really the right tool for numerical analysis?

I like how it deals with the start of the epoch: "0" gets rendered as 0th January 1900 and anything before then can't be rendered. This alone should preclude from any serious work…

But it's a reasonable format for exchanging report though, wherever possible these should contain no formulae.

Apples to apples: Boffins find a way to make e-waste edible

Charlie Clark Silver badge

With hydrocarbons you only really need to look at the energy involved in a closed-loop set up as this allows you to take it out of the carbon cycle. Baseline comparison in this kind of chemistry is the energy associated with the end products versus simply burning it for heat energy and cleaning up the waste.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

This does look like a good option for some routes.