* Posts by Charlie Clark

12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

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FWIW the Daimler brand is increasingly used for the trucks.

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Re: BMWs

In German: "Bring mich zur Werkstatt" (Take to me to the garage) because they have a reputation for unreliability. But that could also be due to the boy racers preferring them.

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Re: Most Autobahns are faster roads

The majority of Germany's motorway network now has speed limits but these vary and can be very confusing. I know a few stretches where there aren't any but they're only going to get you to the next traffic jam faster!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

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.

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They've also been collecting data from all their cars around the world for at least ten years. And they part own the Here navigation system.

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

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But at least they'd know they'd be safe because of the lack of meat in the, er, sausages!

Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari

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Re: Google's insistence on not learning from past mistakes...

eSIMs just give the manufacturers more power. I'll stick with one that I can control.

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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.

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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.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

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

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It's in the employment contract

so it helps if you can read.

Twitter loses second head of Trust and Safety under Musk

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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

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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'

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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.

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Stop

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

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I'm going to have to replace the battery on my S10e but, apart from that it's still a fantastic device.

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

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FAIL

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.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

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

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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

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Re: Making files smaller therefore helped to shrink download times…

Agreed, but compression has also moved from the disk to memory.

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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.

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Modem compression depended heavily upon the quality of the phone line: in the US calls were already compressed which meant the signal was poor so compression was not really possible. Lines in Europe were not compressed so speeds were generally better.

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Gzip has been around for many servers (http, ssh, ftp, etc.) for years and it's often smart enough to know what to try to compress.

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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

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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.

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Re: Its not just that....

We were given a defective screen assembly last year and are still waiting for the replacement that works…

Samsung's screens will check your blood pressure if the movie's too scary

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Re: Interesting opportunities...

Without optics resolution and range are going to be poor. But I think it's safe to assume, where you can put a camera, they will.

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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.

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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

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Goodwill is always a pain for shareholders. While Facebook, mainly Instagram, continues to generate cash, almost all of its purchases have turned out to be duds.

Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek

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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/

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Re: Capital idea comrades!

Except he's not giving them a vote.

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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.

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Re: Seriously?

Worse, quality soon starts to suffer, accidents and absenteeism increase.

Python Package Index had one person on-call to hold back weekend malware rush

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Stop

Registry not repository

The Python Package Index (PyPI), home to more than 455,000 Python code repositories

The repositories for the code are almost entirely elsewhere. PyPI holds software releases only.

Intel abandons XPU plan to cram CPU, GPU, memory into one package

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Don't forget Apple

… has been selling their ARM-based packages for a couple of years. They're not in the data centre game but have shown what's possible.

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

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The C-Suite is protected from anything apart from legal action, and, even then there's usually a lot of leeway.

One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned

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Stop

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.

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Re: Blockchain not at fault

While I can understand the attractiveness of a chain in a discrete transaction – say a shipment – I never saw the point of either endless chains or distributed ledgers, except as memes to feed techno utopians.

China seeks space cargo launches well below prices NASA pays SpaceX

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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

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Re: The reward for your support

Lots of countries have ID cards and aren't totalitarian disasters. The problem isn't with the card themselves but how they're used, especially when you're required to use them.

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

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Indeed, genre fiction is very formulaic. Many authors will own up to this and milliions of readers of romantic, crime, science fiction are more than happy with it. Same goes for half the production on TV.

Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained

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Boffin

You're right, of course, and I'm happy to stand corrected. But just trying to think of the conditions necessary for that kind of fusiom makes me cry for my mummy!

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Fusion is always a producer of energy. Any net losses are associated with scale but really, if you can reliably fuse deuterium, then this is the way to go. Pretending it's a short cut to Helium 3 is suspiciously magical.

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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

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FAIL

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

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Re: Former Palm Stylus User

I'm staying with my corporate rate deal for $50 per month 25Gb Data 5G US\Canada calling.

How much? Wow, they really know how to charge across the pond!

MariaDB CEO: People who want things free also want to have very nice vacations

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Stop

Re: "finding the balance between its open source roots and the needs of investors"

Selling the company to Sun, flush with cash from the Java hype, is not the same as selling the software. This can be seen from the failed efforts of companies trying to go this route.

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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

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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.