Posts by Charlie Clark 12196 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Liquid soap is very common in Germany, probably because it's less messy than bars of soap. Fortunately, you can get refills in thin polythene containers. But then, seeing as one bottle lasts me more than a year i'm not that bothered about the plastic bit. As you note, recycling isn't that easy and currently not really financially viable. So most of the waste plastic here is also burnt as in combined plants, and the waste is less than one might imagine.
The best soap should have a pH below 6, which rules out the standard stuff, which leaves my skin dry and prone to breaking (I have to use rubber gloves for the washing up). Unfortunately, most of the liquid soaps also have all kinds of shit that you don't need along with the perfume that many consumers insist upon.
In many situations water is sufficient to remove whatever is on the skin. Where it is not, I do find the pH 5.5 soaps okay but have also used olive oil to remove oil and grease: will be absorbed quite quickly or can also be washed off reasoably easily.
I've got a bit more than "fuck all space" because I got in early. But I've recently noticed how stuff is being scanned – I mainly use Dropbox to sync music and books between devices – and am not looking forward to preemptive DMCA notices on my stuff. Basically I feel I'm being told: if you don't encrypt it, you're inviting us to look at it. That's bad enough for private stuff, but totally unacceptable for anything business like. And the Yanks are trying to tell us we should worry about the Chinese?
NextCloud / OwnCloud looks like it could be sufficient for my needs. And NordVPN has started trailing its own encrypted storage. I guess we all need to face up to paying for service if we expect to be around next year. And the year after that.
Yes, it's not as if these places only employ boffins.
There are other "groupware" solutions out there, and no one should object to paying for some of the service. Be interesting to see if any of them see some traction after this.
Normally MS probably wouldn't care but the CERN name will echo far and wide. Someone's bound to get sacked for this.
Not really, because although the edge-to-edge OLED screen is not real innovation, at least IMO it's well worth the price premium over the 8.
Interesting. After posting I realised what I'd forgotten to say was: Apple is going to have work harder and harder to convince people that an I-Phone isn't just another phone, which is the kind of argument you're giving and hence, why you're prepared to pay that for it. I think you can see for yourself that Apple are finding it harder and harder to justify the high-end prices.
Personally, as someone who drops things a lot, I think that "infinity" displays are structural weaknesses just begging to be tried out, so I'd generally avoid them. As for aesthetics: the notch is a definite no-no for me.
Over the weekend I was with someone who's thinking of switching from Apple to Android. And, because she's not heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, the switch should be fairly easy. Interestingly, she'd heard of Xiaomi, in particular about the quality of the photos…
Fears of the imminent demise of Apple are overblown but they are going to have to do some work to keep their nimbus: functional equivalence can be a real bitch.
Boot note: People who compare Apple phone to Android phones solely based on specs/price
I agree on this but I think this increasingly less the case. We're getting used to looking for a newer version of what we've got, ie. functionality over spec which has a dramatic effect on how we perceive value.
I use a Mac but have never been tempted by the I-Phones. My second-hand Samsung S5 is waterproof and doing just great on LineageOS: includes security updates from 5th June 2019. I never stream stuff but do sync music and pictures over the internet and, if I want to I can plug my phone into a TV or even just screenshare.
I might well replace the phone at some point this year but, if I do, it won't be with a flagship crammed full of stuff I don't need. Waterproof, good battery life, SD-card and a good screen and support for LineageOS is what I will be looking for.
As for your replacement devices: wouldn't you prefer to buy an I-Phone 8 rather than an X?
Apple notoriously avoids this. Like many premium players it prefers to destroy stock than let customers anticipate fallling prices. But you can probably expect to see more disguised price cuts through trade-ins and combi-deals. Although, as the article says, these have so far failed to create much excitement.
If XUL became unmaintainable, it's because Mozilla let it get that way in the first place.
Sometimes you have to admit that an idea wasn't that great.
It was Netscape at the time and then it became open source… Browser development was stalled for much of the first decade so that by the time it came round to working on a common platform for extensions, generally a good idea, none of the people who'd worked on XUL during the XML hype were around any more.
But all this is largely implementation details. I definitely agree that Mozilla dropped the ball for a couple of years chasing unicorns with things like Firefox OS and then aping Chrome's UI.
Can't see much room for improvement on stability.
The move to one process per tab makes a difference there and I'm occasionally grateful of it when for some YouTube slows everything down. But, basically, the move away from plugins to native has given the biggest boost to stability.
YMMV but FF post-Quantum on MacOS is noticeably snappier than before.
They could make a few bucks here with minimal effort. Heck I imagine a recent port to Windows XP would be quite trivial
Maintaining old software can often be a lot more work than many people imagine. And, I'm pretty certain that some of the more recent attack vectors would rip through some of the older browsers, because the problems with memory leaks were one of the main reasons for moving the parsers to Rust.
Don't charge for being a man? Doesn't really make sense, does it? And even slaves have a price…
In the age of serfdom English had different words for denoting different status, including "freeman". Other languages do, of course, have different words for "no charge" and "without obligation" such as gratuit and libre in French and kostenlos and frei in German. In English you have to use context to disambiguate.
Therefore people came up with local scripts which were supposed to edit your document tree locally.
This is a revisionist and deliberately simplistic interpretation. Javascript initially added some non-essential functionality to a static markup language. But by then the semantic aspects of the language had more or less been swamped by the graphic aspirations of HTML monkey and PHBs. HTML + HTTP opened a whole world to informational exchange. And the enviroment they ran on changed as they did.
I only read and write text/plain e-mails I'm not at all a fan of the SPAs (single page apps) but at some point we have to realise that we cannot put things back in the box. The openness of the web's underpinnings have revolutionised the dissemination of information and whether I think the approach is entirely right or not, it is understandable that it has formed the base of new UIs. While it has given us resource hogs and echo chambers and new robber barons, it has also enabled millions in ways that few if any foresaw at the time.
And the development continues with WebAssembly and Houdini being particularly interesting.
The move away from XUL was explained in detail, not least the fact that there was no one willing to maintain it. I'm not a fan of the dumbed-down UI but the Quantum-based versions are faster and more stable. But if you want it back, you can always make your own fork.
Developers have to live from something and it's reasonable to expect Firefox users to be a bit more discerning. However, it has historically proved difficult to get sufficient users to pay for services in sufficient volumens.VPN + secure online storage might tempt a few away from current "free" services.
I downvoted you for being off the mark (Silicon Valley fads) and then for being a snowflake. The body can use ketosis in extreme circumstances but it is not the norm and not something most people should been seeking to induce.
As for Steve Jobs, it's known, and perhaps understandable, that he engaged in a lot of quackery once he was diagnosed. Don't wish pancreatic cancer on anyone because the outlook is generally very poor, but quackery doesn't help either.
A whole month is just about doable.
I think a whole month should doable for most people. Depends a lot on your BMI when you start but your body quickly switches over to using reserves. It's a long time ago but I did at least three weeks whilst at university and could still cycle the 10 km each way, though really strenuous exercise and hard work can become difficult. I think I allowed myself cups of tea and even the odd glass of ftruit juice but it was essentially an extended fast. Given my current weight I'm sure I could manage six weeks!
There's a nice article over at The Econmist about the current fads: apparently Oura rings are currently all the rage. But, I'm increasingly coming to think of some of these people as I do of professional athletes: most definitely not normal.
Watch for oil deals in roubles and yuan.
There's nothing in Roubles – that really is a basket case of currency – but Russia does do some energy trading with China without using the dollar. But the Renminbi is also not suitable for international trade because it is not fully convertible and hence not liquid enough. This is why the EU, together with Russia and China (and others who are keeping very quiet about it) is looking to setup EU backed and cleared SPVs for trading with regimes the US currently deem fit. But don't expect to read much about this as they'll be trying to keep as much as possible below the radar to stop the US pursuing even more aggressive policies.
As for renewables: China is already the largest generator of both solar and wind power.
The US certainly traded more freely than the USSR. Yes, it wasn't afraid to apply pressure or meddle or interfere directly (there is no excuse for Chile, Guatamala, etc.), but by and large it was successful in international trade because it played by the rules. Admitttedly rules that it helped to write and which helped cement the primacy of the US dollar (Bretton Woods) but rules that supported reasonably free trade all the same.
Presumably, if it hadn't been for Mao's own assault on the countries limbs through the GLF and the cultural revolution (what great benefits that brought to science in China), China would have made even faster progress.
Even so, I think the bigger problem with the Big Baby's™ current approach is how it is driving current trade partners closer to China. The US can still apply a lot of pressure through the dollar hegemony, so it's obvious that everyone is now working out how to work around this.
America didn't win the cold war because it had better spooks, but because it traded more freely. Still you can't expect Mr Short Attention Span to appreciate this.
I can say I go shop and expect to be understood. But this is grammatically wrong because it is semantically wrong (grammar is subordinate to semantics). English, along with many other languages, has instransitive verbs that do not take direct objects and can, thus, be used without them.
Lots of Linux devs are presumably happy doing everything in the command line, or in the tools integrated into their IDE. For those that do want GUI VCS tools there are other options but the lack of a single GUI toolchain for Linux doesn't exactly make things easier for GUI tool developers.
I'm not going to bang Apple's drum but it does contribute meaningfully to several open source projects, such as WebKit and CUPS. The same could be said of behemoths such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft but the difference being that they're "cloud" services depend even more heavily on open source while not making all their proprietary changes available. It's the services that are now considered as the real risk to commercially based open source, ie. other companies trying to make a business with open source software.
The GPL, especially v3, doesn't really help because it just makes companies avoid it where possible because of the fear of litigation.
OneWeb is even more ambitious. Still the problem, known as the tragedy of the commons, is well understood. Unfortunately, as has been demonstrated many times, we usually have to wait until resources are either depleted or polluted so much as to be nearly irrecoverable before we change our behaviour; and so far I don't see any reason why this nascent commercial exploitation of NEO will be any different.
The only thing we can hope for is that this satellite-based internet turns out to be the next great white elephant. The demand for mobile telephony and data around the world is being met almost everywhere by low-cost, low-tech solutions.
Yes, I've heard from people working on standardisation that ODF itself is somewhat rudderless. MS has been reluctant in the past to support work OOXML but have recently really improved in this respect.
I agree with your assessment: lots of stuff works very well but there's a lot that the developers just don't care about. I work almost exclusively with XLSX so everytime I see worksheets set to 1024 x 1024 dimensions I know they're from LO. Sigh: it's an optional element so better left out altogether.
Coordinate systems in OOXML (used when positioning graphical objects) are a complete nightmare!
Excel 2016 does contain significant performance improvements (fully 64-bit, multihreaded calcs) over previous versions, but use whatever works best for you. Not sure what you're doing with the CSVs subsequently but many people I know just use Pandas for the heavy-lifting and save to Excel for the manager-friendly reporting.
it wouldn't surprise me at all if MS switched to ODF at some point – it's a better format – but politics will probably stop that happening. While I do think that, by and large LO has got reasonablly compatible with OOXML, there are still longstanding bugs in some of the code that the developers seem to have little interest in fixing.
I think the importing to any kind of digital format requires, of course, that the blacked out text really is removed and not merely concealed, and you also want to keep the flow of the document the same (not all letters are equally spaced). But this should indeed be possible when exporting to PDF using a graphic filter and LaTex presumably also has some filters that let you substituion.
… to get people to change their habits. Being as good as Google was never going to be good enough and Microsoft never got that far. So even those people who tried Bing, either wittingly or not, went back to using Google. It's damn hard to beat Google at their own game, because the magic they use for searches is what underpins their advertising, so they have an incredible incentive to be the best.
You'd have thought all the MBAs at MS would have thumbed through their copies of The Art of War to look for other tactics, such as what does Google not provide or not do well. Eventually they seem to have found that they had it all along: MS Office. Okay, Cortana actually has some very nice technology but Amazon worked out that people wanted voice control but didn't want to have to pick up their phone or shout at their computers to use it.
It actually says stand rather than arm so the counterweighting is a lot easier: it just doesn't need to tip much. I have a 27" hi-res Acer that comes with a fully adjustable stand that even supports rotation, not that you need to adjust much once you've set your workplace up, and the whole thing was about € 400.
And my 10-year old 46" Philips TV came with a stand that could be converted into a wall-mount, because they wanted to show green credentials. Wonder why Apple hasn't done that here? Obviously, these things are designed to be used in showrooms only.
Actually, I have a MacBook Pro (2015). When I bought it a couple of years ago I was annoyed at its lack of upgradeability (disk, RAM) but, all things considered, I found it competitively priced for the performance/weight/usability when compared with similarly specc'd machines. I didn't think so of the more recent models and I don't think so about the consumer stuff, which is why I don't own any of it. But each to their own.
The "idiot tax" moniker has always been tongue-in-cheek. Wouldn't suprise me if most of the Reg's writers use Apple products.
Interestingly, I also have a t-shirt that says "I'm surrounded by idiots". I wonder if you'd be one of the few people who takes offence at it.
Of course, at those prices then you can also be pretty sure than they still make a profit on every one they sell, even if they're built to order.
More worryingly perhaps is that these products will push more professionals away from Apple for good. This is a pity because there are some areas where Apple workstations are the best tools for the job. And for a while, because Microsoft was too busy fucking around with the UI, it looked like Apple was going to keep this market for itself. Now, I'm not so sure, and I'm writing this on a Mac.
Ballmer's revenge?
Actually, the subtext is: using the new features will let you charge users for the upgrade. A mate of mine with an older I-Phone has been moaning about this for years.
On Android I can only think of one app that I dropped over the last year (Mort) because it didn't support the more recent API for accessing external storage.
I own a Mac (but no I-Phone) but have no problem with the term. If you consider there is value in the proposition then you should be able to laugh with us. If, on the other hand, you do feel that some of the stuff you bought is more than a little overpriced… then could it be that it's too close to home?
Apple's iOS Updates and Upgrades kill those, too.
Apple's record on security updates is woeful as it relies heavily on known issues from being disclosed: updates are often months after reports have been submitted.
With Android Google has moved from the state of requiring manufacturers and sometimes networks to push updates to a much more discrete process that allows security updates at least to be pushed out to all compatible devices quickly. There are limitations and caveats but in this respect Google has learned and improved.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
