* Posts by Charlie Clark

12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: he cut off the Starlink connectivity

Starlink made an annoucement to the effect that it was restricting coverage.

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Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

Crimea is part of Ukraine.

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Re: Musk for President !

Give him an Oscar already for his crocodile tears!

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Ukaine has, as far as possible tried to avoid that kind of dependence. Don't forget that Starlink offered to provide the equipment, as long as the US DoD paid for it. Fortunately, in the meantime other companies have stepped forward giving them more options and great pictures such as the recent attacks on air defence in Crimea and Kherson.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars"

Or, the money from the US DoD was more than welcome. But using the network for military purposes: no way. That's a good definition of hyprocrisy.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The report is not completely accurate

What, take money from the US DoD, ask for more and then say: sorry, we don't want to have anything to do with armed conflicts. Yeah, really moral.

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

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Re: @JMiles

The end of UKIP?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: @JMiles

More hyperbole. The UK's growth rate has been lower than the EU since it left, inflation is higher, as are interest rates.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: @JMiles

No one predicted an apocalypse, just significant disadvantages as the two scientists were quoted to illustrate.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: @Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

A more detailed analysis can be found on the website of the Fraunhofer Institute: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2023/german-net-power-generation-in-first-half-of-2023-renewable-energy-share-of-57-percent.html

There has, indeed, effectively been some export of production such as ammonia to other countries due to higher energy prices and Germany is not alone in this. However, prices under the merit-order principle are set by the most expensive marginal producer. Capacity is down but so is load with renewables picking up the slack as nuclear and coal generation goes offline. And, after a lull, capacity, particularly, solar is increasing rapidly again.

Industry is suffering as a result of higher power prices but it's nothing like as bad as some, mainly lobbyists, would make out. Lots and lots of things still to sort out: storage, cheaper marginal production but hopefully reduced interconnection charges in areas with greater renewable capacity will start improving things.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: @Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

Source, perhaps?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The EU has simply responded to Switzerland's decision to breach agreements.

Europe's Ariane 6 takes rocket science seriously by testing patience before engines

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Re: Meanwhile…..

There's a lot to like about the Ariane series, including incremental developments. You're right to talk about politics within ESA screwing all kinds of projects. But this happens everywhere, especially in America. NASA's decision to put stuff out to tender was a fluke and almost didn't happen. Mind you, unfettered commercial exploitation of space is also something I'm not looking forward to.

India has a much, much lower cost basis and, while the most recent launch was a resounding success, don't forget the failure that preceded. Nevertheless, alternative launch providers are welcome to stop the next cartel.

Google Chrome pushes ahead with targeted ads based on your browser history

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: no change there then..

Take up, and I followed this very carefully at the time, was picking up long before Google adopted the shoehorn tactic, of which it was not the only example. The major change started in 2009 and can be traced back to a campaign on YouTube, which demonstrated that for many video was the future of the web: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-internet-explorer-6-kill-plot-engineer

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: no change there then..

Chrome became the dominant desktop browser largely due to Google's decision to develop a better browser and the resources to market from both sides: to users "as a better browser" and putting "works better in Chrome" on its websites after the success of the initial IE 6 notice on YouTube. Things would never have got this bad if Microsoft had given up its goal of ruling the browserverse (sorry) earlier.

Google is certainly monopolistic but it has kept Chromium open source and worked tirelessly to make browsers and the web better so that far fewer proprietary formats (Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, GoToMeeting, etc.) are required. Security and speed have improved as has developed.

In fact, given its dominance in search-based advertising it's a little weird to see it pursuing this contentious route, which is likely to see mired in litigation. But then I think of the screams of the advertisting industry over the end of the third-party cookie and the sound of massive cheques being written for an alternative. And I can imagine that, in the future, we might see more of this ad-based web similar to how commercial television or ad-funded streaming. I think that more people than we might imagine would be happy with that.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Enhanced Ad Privacy ..

Even easier: use another browser.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

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Re: It just keeps getting better

Interestingly, and this needs verification, but car manufacturers did get some exceptions for their own data collection via embedded SIMs. They don't need to tell you about these and you can't opt out. But they should, in theory, provide all the necessary data they need. They certainly don't seem to be doing much to improve the navigation systems if SWMBO's 2021 Skoda Fabia is anything to go by…

Google rebrands 'android' as 'Android' to remove any doubt about its affiliations

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Re: Logos

Didn't want to get into that and I've no idea why they did it unless they're preparing some kind of video or similar campaign. In general, stick with 2D and monochrome whenever possible. The droid is simple and easily recognisable. Maybe they consider it a bit too generic for a reliable trademark? Consider Twitter's bird before it was redesigned. If it was for any other reason then expect more josssticks and whalesong in future iterations.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Logos

Yes, but in this case capitalisation makese sense. Trying to enforce unusual case in a brand is always a nightmare and Apple must have teams making sure that the right people write iPhone™ and macOS™. But once things reach the real world they're lost: in English and most languages, proper names are capitalised and company and brand names should be as well. Only the trademarks are protected but that doesn't stop journos slavishly adopting them in prose, incidentally effectively watering down their protection whilst improving brand recognition.

ArcaOS 5.1 gives vintage OS/2 a UEFI facelift for the 21st century

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: OS/2 and IBM?

At OS/2's launch, Windows didn't exist.

IBM in the 1980s was a complete mess of a company that had lost all notion of customer focus. This is why, despite an abundance of trained and talented engineers, it outsourced software development to the upstart Microsoft in the first place and kept renewing the contract even though Microsoft was working on, and prioritising, a rival product.

By the time IBM was in a position to do the development itself, the race was essentially lost. OS/2 was the better Windows, so much so that it was better at running Windows, which meant companies stayed with OS/2 to maximise the return on it but they continued to buy software for Windows. Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM at the time, realised this wasn't a race worth winning and did the right thing. Even now, thirty years on, the Windows API dominates application development.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Looking forward to that "more in-depth review"!

Could Win2K virtualise hardware ports like OS/2 could?

As for NT your history is revisionist: it only got faster by moving more things into kernel space, which made it inherently less stable. Microsoft should have bought DEC and stuck with Alphas! ;-)

The only thing launched for Amazon's Project Kuiper is a lawsuit

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Government contracts are regulated differently to private companies. Companies can, and frequently do, award contracts to their friends.

The lawsuit is, however, effectively about an attempt to defraud investors by not including, ahem, Company X, in the list of potential bidders. This sort of thing is what AGMs are for and I wouldn't be surprised to see the court make that point: if you don't agree with what the board is doing, you can vote against it.

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So LibreOffice it is then.

Transitional is still OOXML. Some companies have moved the settings of MS Word to strict by default.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So LibreOffice it is then.

Microsoft did indeed use the lack of forward compatbility to force upgrades on users. But this stopped with Office 2010 with the proper introduction of OfficeOpenXML. Many of the bugs you see in LO are down to a rushed and in part incomplete specification but some are down to seeming obstinacy by the LO developers.

Microsoft billing 3 cents a minute to revisit tedious Teams meetings via API

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"because he can"

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

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Coat

Re: I am sure

Or, in Russia on free-diving from sealed ones…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Quirks for jerks

Those chairs are great for the living room but terrible for desks: you can feel the muscles around the pelvis relaxing as it has they're stretched.

At a desk you really just need something that stimulates muscle use, eg. a slightly unstable position which will encourage your body to move constantly and thus reduce muscle cramp. This is also the theory behind the bouncy balls or standing desks. The key is there: either or but not both. Those from the Midvale School for the Gifted (The Far Side) will generally ask for both…

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Quirks for jerks

I've no problem with sensible requests for ergonomy: desk at a comfortable height, good keyboard, good screen at a reasonable distance, countoured mouse or trackpad, etc. And I limit my own screen time in the evening because it does, to me at least, seem to affect my ability to get to sleep. I'm sure you can all add your own items to the list: don't cost much and make everybody's life just a bit easier.

Then there are the numpties who want the convenience of wireless but without the waves; the standing desk and the bouncy ball to sit on… who in my experience are useless at what they're supposed to be doing. It's as if they parlay these needs at the interview stage into an impression of competence. If we're really unlucky we have to share a room with them. That's when Workplace Accidents and How to Engineer them comes in handy. Or so I'm told.

bzzt…

This profiler chatbot promises to help speed up your Python – we can believe it

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Usually not a good idea

PyPy does just that. It's a JIT written in Python and is able to reduce memory use, loop and function call times significantly. And these are the main areas where Python is slow.

But something that does profiling might also pick the bits of code that should either be cached or written to run only once.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Strange that Wall Street is investing so heavily in Python then, though maybe this is before the extremely well-paid analysts were doing everything in Excel, which really is slow.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

If you don't understand the advantage of encapsulating high performance C, Fortran, Rust, Java, etc. so that non-programmers can use it, then you're not a real programmer either.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

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Re: Care?

I believe it was the recent body that the decided this based on the sediment found in a Canadian lake. Lots to debate about the causes and effects but, geologically speaking it's already, ahem, settled.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: This is actually a devious plan .....

It's Bavaria only. Elsewhere in Germany wild board is regularly on the menu and in the butchers: lovely colour and taste.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

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Re: The bubble has burst

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The bubble has burst

Certainly not my area of expertise but I believe bubble sort used in some cases by the sort algorithm in Python and that's considered to be pretty amazing.

Nvidia just made a killing on AI – where is everyone else?

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I think manufacturing capacity probably is the limiting factor. While things like ChatGPT may be fundamentally flawed (not least because they're always behind the door), there's no doubt they're inspiring further research and investment.

Less grandiose work using machine learning before it got cute enough to be called AI is seeing adoption in certain fields. Google and others want to be provide it as a service for verticals, especially healthcare, where domain knowledge trumps general knowledge.

But it seems excessive hype is necessary for investment, especially now that debt is no longer free. So I think we can expect a lot more techno-utopia stories before reality sets in.

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Nearly half the web?

You can check the data from The Web Almanac which regularly surveys several million websites. WordPress is definitely the most common system in use, not least because many providers offer it. It was designed to be easy to set up and, while this has made it popular, it also enables many of the attack vectors. I haven't looked at the source in a long time but it was pretty awful.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: You might be better putting the money elsewhere

You want to calculate using the real (what the banks offer minus inflation) rate. Risk free investments are designed to maintain the value of capital.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Wordpress or ???

And asking for money from the DoD is civilian in what way? Musk wanted to use the stunt for publicity and as a way to get more money from the government teet.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one

What, like DEC?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one

I know it's not an American concept but "creative destruction" is more common in the US. It's probably easier due to more companies being publicly traded. Things have changed somewhat elsewhere since capital went global but most European blue chip companies are pretty old, much to chagrin of many investors.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one

"Whether it's giving a newborn the special gift of a domain and lifetime home on the web…"

Get me a fucking bucket!

As for companies lasting a hundred years: this is very much the exception in America. One or two a generation. The rest are usually bought by their competitors or run into the ground by greedy managers. Or both.

Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Increasing costs of customer retention suggests one or both of the following:

  • customers have wised up to the fact that new customers get preferential terms, which get paid for by existing customers
  • customers have realised they don't need the bells and whistles of a two-year contract and opt to go pre-paid.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Contagion

This was bound to happen. In virtually every country where the number of networks has dropped from four to three prices have risen. There was some logic about the tie up being allowed (Sprint was on a technological road to nowhere) but the the FCC should have started looking at ways of increasing competition. But seeing as this hasn't happened anywhere else, I won't be holding my breath over it happening in the US either.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Why is it the company's responsibility to make backups of the customer's data?

A lot of the data is stored only on the servers of the service provider which makes. There are all kinds of problems, including legal ones, if you try and make a regular backup of that on your own local systems.

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

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Re: I miss ClarisWorks

And it's a lesson that the developers of Pandas understood.

Microsoft teases Python scripting in Excel

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Something libreoffice can.

Actually, it was developed by language experts for novices and ended up being hated by both. I wrote my first ever code in BASIC and have always liked it as a language for novices. When Microsoft went all .NET it decided that VisualBasic had to as well and suddenly forced a load of new constructs and syntax onto people that didn't help them one bit. After that VB and VBA fell quickly in popularity because, if you're going to use static typing, etc. you might as well use C#, Java or even C++. But the majority of users where overwhelmed and looked for alternatives; it's no coincidence that Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks were developed with the Excel community in mind.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!

I can give an example from our developers this morning: sets of poorly curated, incomplete and non-normalised customer locations from business to be imported into our database. Developer converts to CSV, loads in Pandas, cleans up, normalises and imports. Leaving aside that the conversion to CSV wasn't necessary and is IMO never advisable (lose types and character set becomes an issue), this is a task that can largely be performed by business in the future. Yes, a heap load of provisos but we will be able to write the functions that they run directly in Excel.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Pandas and Anaconda

Pandas uses Numpy for all its data structures but it is terrible at indexing, which is why it's usually better to create new dataframes. Polars (written in Rust) uses Apache Arrow for dataframes, which means no memcpy(). The API looks a lot cleaner than Pandas all singing and dancing one.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Something libreoffice can.

VBA may have been well-intentioned but it's probably one of the worst decisions Microsoft made with Office. Too difficult for the Office-scipt kiddies and too much of a toy for the programmers. The limitations are one of these reasons why tools like Pandas were developed. Since then Excel has become less and less of a runtime and more and more merely a reporting format.