* Posts by Charlie Clark

12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Software issues cost Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess his job

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The Germans were never great at software

Fair enough but then look at how many companies did. Then look at the competition, if you can find it before they've bought it up.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Stand by for subscription services like the ones BMW recently announced.

Already exists. A friend of mine has an Audi and she would have to enable subscription to get updated maps for the sat nav. Audi's are the worst because they come with their own software so you can't even use Android Auto.

SWMBO's Skoda Fabia came with outdated maps last year and the satnav that insisted in giving instructions in English even though everything else was in German. Strangely disoriertating hearing the local place names mangled in a way and English person probably wouldn't! That fortunately got fixed when the car went in for a service. But if you want new maps you need a special SD card that costs € 300 from a dealer, though you can at least update the maps once you've bought it. € 40 for one from Lithuania does the job just as well and at least we know that Android Auto now supports Here.

Automotive software development and deployment does have a deservedly terrible reputation but when I look at the software industry in general I don't see much "failure is not an option".

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Not just software

Industry insiders have commented that failure to get Cariad back on track is a major contributor to Diess's departure.

Partly, though that was after years of all the German car companies sticking their heads in the sand safe in the knowledge that the German government would keep them safe from any nasty legislation and let them keep making high margin SUVs. This also meant they could reduce spending on R&D not only on EVs but also on alternatives fuel cells.

But the main cause for the departure was the usual one with VW: failure to get agreement with the works council on cost cutting and job losses.

Cheap cellular data list is out: And US doesn't make top 200

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Poor basis for comparison.

Yes, lots of countries have MVNOs and I agree it's largely segmentation. In Germany, the telcos are still very much more expensive for data than SIM only deals. But, in general, prices have hardly moved the last 5 to 10 years. The only thing that continues to change is the number of people going SIM only and not relying on a contract when changing the phone.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Poor basis for comparison.

Well, apart from the fact that the US telco market is not competitive and has been expensive for years, that is because of the exchange rate. The Economist has for years used the price of a Big Mac to demonstrate the effect of PPP. Currently, the pound is around 14% undervalued and the Euro 7.5%. NB the pound is also undervalued compared with the Euro…

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Poor basis for comparison.

If prices are compared in dollars and, as has been the case for the last year, the dollar has strengthened signigiciantlly and the Euro has fallen faster than Sterling, then most countries will seem cheaper than the US than last year. As such the prices should be weighted to reflect this or expressed using some form of PPP (purchasing power parity).

In addition, consumer price inflation does not affect all areas of the economy equally. Energy, transport and food have got more expensive but these are not the main drivers of cost for mobile networks: power is important but quite a few base stations are self-contained, not least because this reduces the cost of a mains connection.

Like for like? The cost per GB also ignores whether you can acutally use what you pay for: having the capacity in the network both where you need lots of it (stations, football stadiums, etc.) and covering large areas (mountains, fens, etc.) are key determinants of costs. But these are primarily capital and not operational expenditures and as such less subject to fluctuation. The other main determinants are state support, especially for rural areas, and competition, with many studies suggesting that at least four providers are required for a truely competitive market.

Prices for services will go up as wages go up but, at the same time, capacity will probably continue to grow faster. This is why cost per GB is so much lower now than, say 20 years ago.

Is the Apple car real? These patents suggest yes

Charlie Clark Silver badge

"While 248 patents is a lot…"

Excuse me, have you looked at how much stuff goes into a car? There are probably around 248 patents for the glove compartment alone!

There's no doubt that Apple wants more of the value chain but that's a very long way from building its own car. As for AI-driving, the competition now has years and millions of KM more data and is pushing ahead with driverless cars.

This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Hmmm.

The market is for those already using embedded x86 devices. Power consumption and size make it a non-starter for anything that isn't dependent upon the x86 stack.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Do we need leap seconds?

They make little or no difference for us on earth but they make a huge difference for anything that uses the position or the orbit of the earth for reference such as all our navigation systems.

Apple forgoes cooling systems in M2 MacBook Air

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Apple probably knows what it's doing

Everything they do is about maximising profit but, in this case, I can understand the thinking. The Air is predicated on maximum battery life, not data crunching and it's much, much easier to throttle chips than run a cooling system. This also makes it more reliable,because there a fewer moving parts, oh, and the fan doesn't need to be powered. And, with lots of cores and unified memory, the user is unlikely to notice cores being slowed down or switched off. Guaranteed that people who buy them will trumpet the battery life, lack of noise, heat over whether it has the best frame rate in a particular game.

I won't be buying one of these myself because I think some of the other compromises would affect some of my work more, and I'm usually desk bound anyway, but I've seen far worse hardware compromises in mobile devices.

Tesla jettisons 75% of Bitcoin holdings, boosting cash balance by $936m

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Up and down ... and up again.

Yes, the "marked to market" accounting is the kind of thing that Musk would have pushed for to make things look rosy. Presumably he's been told they're best cutting their losses now before things get even worse.

In terms of Tesla's account, it's not that significant but good to get it done now while profits are still high because there are tailwinds ahead: blaming lockdowns in Shanghai as opposed to ever improving competitors won't work forever.

Judge approves Twitter's request to hurry along Musk trial to October

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Tesla lost money on bitcoin

Depends on how the accounting is down: is it an "asset" where you'd also expect some kind of return or is it just cash in which case they could argue that it's depreciated less against the dollar over the period than other currencies.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: seems so simple

I think the judge's comments over the expedition are also interesting: she's quite clearly considering the damages sustained by Twitter's shareholders. Not only will that affect the trial, it would open the door for civil actions.

Personally, I wish Twitter had ceased to exist years ago and would be happy to see it fold tomorrow but not because Elon Musk decided to play games.

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

I'm not going to defend the invasions by the West of Afghanistan or Iraq: I've protested against both. Syria is a mess that could have been avoided but Russia is more culpable than NATO both in the munitions supplied and in the aggression carried out including the targetting of hospitals.

Libya was yet another example of failing to think things through: getting rid of Gaddafi was probably unavoidable but more thought should have gone into what happens next than just hoping oil and gas would continue to flow.

Russia has been using cluster munition throughout the campaign in Ukraine.

The assertion that LPR and DPR have been attacked for the last eight years is not credible. They were never sovereign and Russian military and SFB were there from the start. Russia's acknowledgement of them was the necessary figleaf to cover the invasion, which, even if you think of it as coming to their aid doesn't explain the attacks on Kiev, Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, etc.

Ukraine does, as do many European countries, have problems with the far right. But it is wrong to extrapolate from that and say there is a "massive" problem with Nazis. That is nonsense in a country with an openly Jewish president and it's the Russians who've destroyed the holocaust memorials.

Russia has its own "Nazi" problem as demonstrated by the assertion that Ukrainians don't exist as a separate group. It's not me making comparisons with Peter the Great and the USSR, it's Vladimir Putin and the Russian nationalists and their talk of "New Russia". That really could come straight out of Mein Kampf!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

Russia is not in breach of the UN charter, they invoked their article 51 right to mutual self-defence

This is tautological: Russia "recognised" the republics as separate countries and then invaded a sovereign country in mutual self-defence.

And if you're going to talk about the Minsk agreement, how about the agreement around Ukraine's secession from the Soviet Union which Russia guaranteed to honour?

No one is claiming the Ukrainian government is perfect. No one is claiming the West is acting in any other way than "enlightened self-interest". But those things a far cry from Russia brutal invasion and butchery.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If....

Everyone in Russia, including the politicians, uses Telegram for messaging because, oh the irony, it's been shown to be impossible to block or sanction.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

"LPR" and "DPR" have always been Russian-supported pseudo-states, created as part of Putin's stated aim of preventing democracy in Ukraine.

Baidu crashes the cost of robo-taxis by 75 percent

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Let the Chinese Test This One

I think Baidu is considered to have the best facial recognition systems in the world

One key thing is that the Chinese authorities will be able to adjust traffic regulations, presumably prioritising robocars, quickly and easily. Meatware drivers around the world are bad in high traffic situations but we just refuse to accept this. They may also profit from the more predictable street layouts: Shanghai isn't Siena or Pamplona.

Intel’s first discrete GPUs won't be a home run

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Dodgy premise

You moved the goalposts: from "gaming" in general to "desktop/laptop" gaming.

Mobile gaming is bigger than desktop/laptop/console gaming and growing faster even if indvidiual titles have smaller budgets. Mobile phones might have physically smaller screens but they often push as many pixels as desktops and do this using a battery.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Dodgy premise

The addition of a third GPU vendor will also be a welcome sight after the semiconductor industry experienced more than two years of shortages.

This completely ignores enormous vast market for GPUs in mobile phones with ARM, Qualcomm and others, including Apple, developing extremely potent GPUs. Just because these are not available as discrete chips doesn't mean they're not affecting the markets for both gaming and machine learning.

Uber to pay millions to settle claims it ripped off disabled people with unfair fees

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

You might want to look up the definition of cartel. Taxi service regulation varies wildly from country to country as does experience with it. This is the opposite of a global cartel.

Uber's promise of cheaper fares was predicated almost entirely on lower payments to drivers by increasing the number of casual workers who don't get paid health insurance, etc. There was a lot of spin about differential pricing as the key to increasing capacity when demand surged but the data of the last five years have shown this be little more than an illusion.

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: And the answer to the question is

You are making some fairly sweeping assumptions about future improvements that might be appropriate for industrial production but really neglect the complexity not just of getting the telescope to where it needs to be and managing the mission. That's a great VC pitch, but not necessarily great science.

But you're also ignoring the growing problems of unregulated privatised space travel: who pays to clean up when things go wrong?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: And the answer to the question is

Although it was significantly delayed and over budget, it's clear that JSWT profitted from lessons learned on Hubble, et al. and is already providing information on to make future missions better. And the whole point about it being pioneering is that we don't know how valuable the information it provides is worth because it we be new.

Using the phrase "value for money" on pioneering scientific missions generally precedes the desire cut budgets and spend the money elsewhere, where it could be more "efficient" and there's always a list of deserving projects. But if you look at how money is actually allocated, you'll see that's a non-starter.

Yes, it's a lot of money. Yes, there has been waste (where hasn't there been) but given spread the budget over the lifetime of the project and compare it with any of the boondoggles the politicians, or the military, routinely come up with.

Thousands of websites run buggy WordPress plugin that allows complete takeover

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Built In

When people talk about static websites now, they're talking about the sort of thing you can get with Netlify, et al. Users just choose themes, edit text files and upload.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Built In

It's certainly a case study in poor API design, which is one of the reasons why the plugins can and do cause so much trouble.

It's all so deceptively simple until to you have to fix something and then you realise it's not just simple, it's dumb.

American Airlines reserves 50 flying taxis

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Greenwashing

Yes, but companies can choose where they buy their electricity and this has moved the dial a bit. It's quite possible that an airline could have its own solar supply for this kind of thing.

Perhaps more important: will these be new journeys? Or what are they replacing?

James Webb Space Telescope looks closer to home with Jupiter snaps

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: So this is what they spend our money on…

Er, asking for a friend, did people miss the irony in the post?

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: photographing a turtle

Is this coat with the Great Book of Trigonometry Puns in the pocket yours by chance?

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: photographing a turtle

You can't have it both ways: if the sun is that dangerous then we would be orbiting the sun as the heretics claim. But we all know that the sun is orbiting the disc…

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

So this is what they spend our money on…

A bloody expensive camera just so that they can spy on the neighbours!

What I was is a new airport, bridge or military base in our congressional district!

Mine's the one with a copy of "Lobbying for Beginnners" in the pocket…

Improve Linux performance with this one weird trick

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Hmmm.

Define crud for CPU. Generally, if you can get something to run in hardware directly, it will be significantly faster than doing it in software: encryption, vectoring, transcoding, etc. And that means more complex chips and instruction sets.

Some of the other stuff, especially speculative branch prediction, is trickier but almost essential to get things to go fast.

BOFH: Would I lie to you, Boss?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Missed a trick

There's never a shortage of bosses…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Bzzt

I didn't call you an irritating pedant!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I can't recall

Anmesia is the best way to avoid perjury.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Missed a trick

Surely, there's something to be gained for having the Boss arrested for several of the listed crimes for which the police are looking for suspects…

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'm surprised

Badenough is pro-Brexit, Anti-ECHR and Anti Green.

That's just for a start

only credible contender the conservative party can find is Rishi.

I think that's pushing things a bit. Sunak only looks less shit than the rest and was only popular when he was handing taxpayers' (obviously not is own) cash out.

What the Tories need is the equivalent of Labour's John Smith to do a hatchet job on the loons and keep the recent intake of rich city whiz kids in line. In the absence of that the next crisis is only a matter of time, which is why, I think a lot have kept their distance from what is obviously the poisoned chalice of a toxic party.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'm surprised

Not really a contest… I've got a sack of spuds that has more of a clue than Nadine Dorries.

Badenoch may be right on this but is a whole different can of worms.

Crypto lender Celsius in Chapter 11 deep freeze

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I am misunderstanding something (please dont shoot)

Bankruptcy is about protection from creditor demands, including account holders. This will go to so much per dollar payouts. Expect at least 20% write downs, possibly more depending on precedence.

Twitter claims Elon Musk bailed from sale with 'invalid and wrongful' reasons

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Pay up + interest

The HP case, dubious as it is, doesn't provide a precedent here. The argument was that, despite "due diligence" Autonomy hid relevant information from them. And it was HP that launched the case. Musk waived the right to due diligence, ie. was seemingly happy to buy sight unseen in which case it's caveat emptor. Elsewhere people have posted some good links to interesting articles about Musk's potential motives and how the lawyers are trying to get him off the hook.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Pay up + interest

When it comes to publically traded companies you don't have much protection. Musk initiated the proceedings and was happy to sign the contract under the terms negotiated with Twitter. Legally, that doesn't give him much to work with, which is probably why he's not going to court but Twitter is. He may hope he can sit this out, and maybe he can, but his actions may well turn out to have to be shown to have affected the share price in a "pump and dump" way, which would leave him personally open to civil suits from Twitter shareholders.

Personally, I don't care much for Musk or Twitter – why does it still exist as company, but then again why is Groupon still going? – but there are rules in place for this kind of thing. As for bots, of course, there are millions of them. I wrote my own Twitter bot back in 2011 and had some fun with it annoying people who took the thing seriously and it still has followers!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Twitter has been more than generous to him ... they've humored his games anyway

Depends if it really goes to court. Musk has already done the damage and propbably has little to fear: a slap on the wrist and a fine. Meanwhile he gets to mine the incident for more cheap PR.

Amazon gave Ring video to cops without consent or warrant 11 times so far in 2022

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: This is just one of the many reasons why European data is not safe in the US

And yet it's Europe where every city center has more CCTV cameras watching you than a reality TV show and where ANPR tracks every car on every major road.

Nope, that's pretty much limited to the UK. Elsewhere number plate recognition systems are highly regulated and a court order is required for access for anything other than traffic offences.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

This is just one of the many reasons why European data is not safe in the US

In Europe privacy is a fundamental right that is enshrined in most constitutions. In the US it's usually waived for the highest bidder or whoever can operate a fax machine. Even the fig leaf that Amazon "checks" is bizarre as this puts the decision in the hands of a commercial organisation with no little or no training and no liability. This is just bad lawmaking.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Depends

It's a fundamental tenet of the legal system that the police don't get to decide, that's up to judges. If you don't separate powers, you always get overreach.

EU court says it can probe M&As even when one party has no European operations

Charlie Clark Silver badge

We all know pharma loves to charge over the odds for products, particularly in the US due to lax regualation. But what does that have to do with the proposed merger?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Sauce for the gander ?

It's not even the kind of extraterratoriality that the US routinely goes in for (Magnitzky Act, etc.) as one of the companies is based in Europe. It's actually a quite simple test: could the proposed merger limit competition in Europe by removing a potential competitor?

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: constant problem

It's not the processor in your telly, it's just the software developers and the companies who employ them. My 2010 Philips will still work with the most online services from the broadcasters. For other stuff I used Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, the video add-ons aren't perfect but usually good enough.

Choosing a non-Windows OS on Lenovo Secured-core PCs is trickier than it should be

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How

And there was only anti-trust proceedings in the US after the EU took up the case. In the US "good for the consumer" only exists on bumper stickers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So vendors are content ...

Well, when it is a requirement for the volume discount licensing program that saves them millions. The requirement is buried in the agreement which has to be kept confidential because it contains business "secrets" (Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour). Considering that > 99% of all users will want to use the pre-installed Windows on the machine, it's difficult to understand why Microsoft continues with this strategy.

UK Info Commissioner slams use of WhatsApp by health officials during pandemic

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Why has IT not locked Access to these back doors?

But you can't stop "pondlife" from using their own phones or gov provided mobiles for their own purposes.

Government or company provided phones can, and should, be restricted in the apps that are installable. Using a private phone or e-mail for company/government business is usally a breach of contract, as well as any data privacy issues and can lead to sacking. It does happen and I think we've probably all experienced situations where it's been required. Difficult to see this in any kind of context in terms of the pandemic and really a dangerous erosion of data security and sovereignty.