FWIW the Daimler brand is increasingly used for the trucks.
Posts by Charlie Clark
12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
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Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State
The car lobby's power in Germany has to be seen to be believed. A general speed limit would definitely reduce emissions and the amount of fuel we have to import from dodgy regimes. It would almost certainly reduce motorway accidents and probably also increase average journey times (traffic throughflow correlates inversely with speed because of the distance between vehicles). In towns, it is illegal for councils to set general speed limits, many would like to have 30 km throughout the town. But the traffic ministry won't let them. This means that you can easily have different speed limits on the same road with the same insensity of buildings.
We have also have far too many, too heavy lorries on the roads. The roads can't take 40 tonners, so roadworks are more frequent, and it's even worse on the bridges. There aren't enough parking spaces for the lorries and there aren't even enough drivers (more and more are in from central Asia or even further abroad) and many are forced to live for months out of their cabs. Makes a mockery of Germany's much vaunted ecological and labour claims.
BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business
Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari
Re: Google's insistence on not learning from past mistakes...
My phone has an unused SD slot in the SIM tray. That's likely to stick around as long as SIMs are around. I'd like a removable battery but only really because I need to replace mine after four years, otherwise a power bank makes more sense. 3.5 jacks have always been a nightmare on phones because of the leverage they can exert, their tendency to snag, and the difficulty in making them waterproof. I've been using Bluetooth headphones for 15 years and have never looked back.
Re: Webp?
Phones will use whatever format the manufacturer favours. Apple is already nudging users towards HEIC and Android supports WebP. Hardware-compression: h264, h265 and AV1 are key as video trumps photos on phones. Google will presumably have data on AV1 use from YouTube.
As for websites: compression ratios are still key. Most people are looking at images on small, probably smeared screens in bad light with not necessarily great connection speeds, so quality and fidelity are not that important. It's like trying to put a high fidelity audio system in a car: an expensive waste of time.
Re: Webp?
Yes, but Apple refused to support it for years. Even now it won't work on many Apple system like mine. JPEG-XL doesn't offer enough over WebP for websites to consider wholesale adoption.
At some point Webp will no doubt be replaced by AVIF, though I expect this to happen transparently, ie. WebP could become a container format.
Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week
Twitter loses second head of Trust and Safety under Musk
You care that much too keep watching? I only come for the snide comments and am looking forward to the inevitable rebranding before it finally gets shut down. I guess it may have one final hurrah in what promises to be a very polarising US election season (elections aren't until next year, but the games have already started). Although I think that the companies won't be making as much money with their nowtrage fuelled ads as they did a few years ago.
Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in
Re: Two words for Microsoft:
We're not far off from Cortana/CoPilot offficially being renamed HAL. This will shortly be followed by Microsoft rebranding as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation so that "Your plastic pal that's fun to be with" will also be the one telling "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that." Before it turns of your life-support systems… Two dystopias for the price of one.
I can see the BOFH needs to get in on this!
Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'
Re: Would it not be cheaper for Google, AWS, Alibaba
Yes, I'm well aware of that. But, for companies that have already gone that way (putting everything on rented hardware), they're finding it hard to hear anything over Microsoft's siren song of: "cheaper licences with us". Embrace, extend, extenguish redux.
Re: Would it not be cheaper for Google, AWS, Alibaba
So, your argument to the board begins with what they won't be able to use under your plan? Thank you for your time.
To get anywhere, you have to at least convince them that there are financial benefits to the proposed change, which is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
Smartphone recovery that's always around the corner is around the corner
Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support
Re: Itanium had one real aim: kill DEC's Alpha chips and it succeeded in this.
Being bought by Compaq was partly because of the failure of the Alpha. While NT did run on Alphas, Microsoft wasn't keen on the work needed to maintain it and developers couldn't simply recompile for Alpha or ship fat binaries. NT was supposed to provide the hardware agnostic base so that the chip architecture wouldn't affect applications but, by NT 3.51 this had been ditched to make x86 run faster (and less securely). Windows on ARM only looks okay because modern chips are so fast, the underlying problem of needing to compile GUI apps for specific architectures has not changed.
Itanium had one real aim: kill DEC's Alpha chips and it succeeded in this. Other than that, Intel knew better than anyone else that keeping x86 largely the way it was, was the best to way to enforce lock-in. Switching architectures imposed huge costs for developers and users, who were supposed to be the same software twice. Even now, with heaps of excellent compilers, it's still by far the dominant desktop and server chip because migration on Windows is not entirely possible, expensive and not necessarily faster.
Microsoft is preparing for an x86_64 only world with probably only the huge investments that companies have made around 32-bit version of MS Excel holding it back. That, and people still wanting to buy their own machines rather than renting them from Microsoft.
Amazon to shutter its Chinese Appstore – the one used by hardly anyone, anywhere
Re: Does anyone even use Appstores on smart devices anymore?
Yes, I still use appstores (both Play and APKPure for geoblocked stuff). I have bought very few apps - mainly OSMand which is certainly worth it. But I also recently bought a years's subscription to Windy (outside the store no 30% for Google), which is unbeatable for doing anything outdoor.
Microsoft finally gets around to supporting rar, gz and tar files in Windows
As libraries went, I found JQuery reasonable both for functionality and size. It was popular because it provided a lot of extremely useful functions such as feature detection that were essential as we moved away from purely desktop websites. As time went by, less was required and it became more modular.
Caching (both on the client and server) has always been the best strategy to handle resource contention and quite a few servers effectively cached compressed versions of files. The problem with websites that were heavy users of Javascript was more related to limits on connection numbers, especially for blocking requests. With a little thought it was possible to optimise most of this so that the website would render quickly while some resources continued to load. Of course, lots of "theme" based websites will still chocka with Javascript and CSS they never needed. http2 solved most of the problems by providing persistent and reusable connections, which meant additional requests had a much lower overhead.
Making files smaller therefore helped to shrink download times…
Only for some files, mainly text. But you could also just enable compression on the transfer. What compression/archiving did provide was all the files at once, Windows had to use Zip because it didn't support tar.
Compression made sense when disks were small: before we had compressed folders, we have disk compression like stac. There's generally a trilemma: diskspace, CPU power and bandwidth. CPU power is probably the current bottleneck as the price per GB continues to fall.
Lenovo profits sink 75% as PC demand continues nosedive
Re: We need to be careful here
It was both: deaths and sickness caused by pandemics also affect the economy. This was exacerbated by some of the policies in some countries which depressed demand in some sectors while accelerating it in others. Excessive monetarry and fiscal largesse, especially to companies, also fueled inflation.
Samsung's screens will check your blood pressure if the movie's too scary
Re: Really?
I'm not in anyway suggesting this stuff should be in consumer devices. I've had several Samsung phones but have stayed clear of their services, which are normally provided by third parties. The one Samsung TV we have, most infamous for privacy breaches, isn't on a network.
This looks like a medical device. And you should really look at the data that the big providers are already collecting and not even providing to the medical staff.
Re: Really?
You'd be surprised at quite how much data the manufacturers of medical equipment already collect.
About ten years ago Samsung announced it was going to into the medical equipment business, presumably because of the huge margins and long-term contracts. This looks to be bearing fruits. Samsung has probably done the most work on OLED screens and have come up with some fantastic things are a result.
Meta forced to sell Giphy, takes 87% loss in Shutterstock deal
Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek
Re: That said
Well, it is the machinery operators. And the pints are pints of vodka…
Despite the fact that article 37 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation stipulates
that “Every citizen has the right to work in conditions that meet the requirements of safety and hygiene”, according to the Federal State Statistics Service more than 47 thousand people are injured every year at work, from about 2 thousands of them die. Quoted in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347621934_Obtaining_statistical_data_on_industrial_accidents_in_Russia/
Re: Seriously?
They've been doing this for several months for the munitions factories that went to three shifts. Yes, production increased, but the failure rate increased significantly faster up to 20%, I think. But don't quote me!
And in Russia, you have to factor that drinking spirits on the job is more than just tolerated, it's the norm. It's the main reason for severe industrial accidents in the afternoon where the muziki come back from lunch drunk. If they can't drink, they won't work.
Python Package Index had one person on-call to hold back weekend malware rush
Intel abandons XPU plan to cram CPU, GPU, memory into one package
Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity
One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned
Re: Blockchain not at fault
I've seen copyright assertion by the image big boys like Getty who helped write current legislation. The answer every time is: pay now before it gets worse.
Oh, you're a small time artist? Well, hard luck because the laws weren't written for you. Assign your copyright to one of the big boys and, for a fee, they'll be more than happy to pursue the matter.
That aside, how on earth can something as dumb as blockchain ever be expected to enforce copyright? Minimal changes to anything digital would immediately invalidate any kind of hash upon which a chain could be built.
China seeks space cargo launches well below prices NASA pays SpaceX
The metric tonne - 1000kg
Really, it's easy to use existing spelling which clearly differentiates between the notionally imperial "ton" (how much is that exactly?) and the metric tonne. It's also worth remembering that engineering around the world has been using metric/SI units for decades because it's the best way to avoid multitudes of errors. If the spellchecker still complains then get it fixed!
Either that, or stick with El Reg Standard Units with which the world + dog are intimately familiar.
UK's GDPR replacement could wipe out oversight of live facial recognition
Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months
Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained
That struck me as well. The Helium-3 stuff does sound an awful lot like a magic bean. Still, I'm glad some of Sillycon Valley's money is going into physics for a change and not another (advertising-based) "disruption".
ITER should have some news over the next year or so. And, for all its problems, it's the closest to getting fusion at scale of any of the approaches.
SCOTUS rules Google and Twitter didn't contribute to terrorist attacks
The ruling has no effect on content moderation at all. The platforms are free to do this however they please as guaranteed by the terms and conditions that all users have agreed to abide by.
What it does do is reaffirm the right to free expression in the US. Incitement remains a crime but it is notoriously difficult to prove. Other countries have other laws.
Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note
MariaDB CEO: People who want things free also want to have very nice vacations
Admitting Postgres is better?
As well as forming a commercial offer to PostgreSQL users, the move will see MariaDB increase its contributions to the PostgreSQL open source community, Howard said.
That sounds a lot like the prospect of being a services company is more appealing than one that develops its own open source database. And, indeed, caught between Oracle's improved MySQL and Postgres doesn't look like a good place to be.
Upstart encryption app walks back privacy claims, pulls from stores after probe
Re: It both is and isn't a hard problem
Any encryption algorithm that can be broken is as useless to the spooks as it is to anyone else. They've learned the hard way that the best algorithms are those devloped openly under peer review. When it comes to interception they know that there are plenty of old school methods that will get them what they want.
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