* Posts by Charlie Clark

12084 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Meta to squeeze money from WhatsApp with Cloud API for businesses

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I don't use it and find it irksome when companies that have moved over to it entirely (KLM, I can't fly with you because you seem to require it). If you're going to use additional channels then make sure you use at least two different suppliers… Also, compared with Telegram the API really is fairly basic which just shows the ones calling the shots don't seem to use it.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: In all seriousness, people still use WhatsAPP?

They haven't yet gone through with those changes which would allow them to merge data from the various platforms and sell it to advertisers. I know quite a few people who will delete it if they're ever required to agree to the new T&Cs.

Technically, it's not a very interesting platform but at least it uses Signal's protocol for encryption. If you compare it with Telegram then you can see what happens once big companies buy these things up. Telegram continues to improve scale and firewall evasion while adding goodies to the clients. Yes, I know encryption is neither brilliant nor is your data secure unless you enable private messenging for everything.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Even when the Web existed...

Gopher was great for the hierarchiacal kind of information that academic institutions produce: course lists, faculty lists, etc. The breakthrough with WWW was about publishing articles where cross referencing was required and it was a simple step for an IT lab from publishing an article on particle-bashing to publishing the canteen's menu.

Since then, even though we know all about the problems associated with taxonomies – those that from afar look like flies – we continue to return to classifications to keep our heads above the water!

Broadcom in talks to buy VMware: multiple reports

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Share price

VMware or Broadcom could have let the news out, to test its impact on share prices.

The SEC would want to have a word if they did this. Any pubically traded company has to follow the rules about disclosing anything that might affect the share price and any kind of speculation is strictly off limits, or leaves them open to class action suits…

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Question

Didn't BSD switch to LibreSSL a while back because of the problems with OpenSSL?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I'd have expected CTRL-left and CTRL-right to switch between shells/sessions. Keybindings in many Linux installs have been broken since the Windows convention for copy and paste was adopted. Not sure how you interrupt a process now that CTRL-C is used to copy…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Question

I'd have thought that BSD binaries would probably run on MacOS with the same kind of ABI shim that lets Linux binaries run on FreeBSD. But, in practice, it's easier to build them or get packages from MacPorts.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Question

The kernel is different but much of the "system" is the same, the driver model is also different. However, as MacOS is very much a consumer OS, most people will never use the command line or see the system files.

Apple has added some cruft to try and make things more "secure". In practice this can mean some tinkering so that you can admin your own system.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The BSDs all have the same userland and library paths. That makes admin a whole lot easier. In practice, however, you're only likely to come across FreeBSD and OpenBSD, with NetBSD being a niche for those with very exotic hardware.

Package management has gone through several evolutions, but make install from the relevant port directory always works.

Every time I have to do some admin on a Linux system it seems like things have changed just enough to annoy me. Then there's all the fun of Debian vs. RedHat vs. SuSE vs. Gentoo, etc. and all the buggering around with packages that distros seem to love.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Might be my next print server

I'm looking for something to run on an RPi so that I can move my printer from the desktop. This should be possible in theory with Linux on an RPi but, unfortunately, the printer drivers (Samsung FWIW, it was free at the time works fine with MacOS) can't be installed on the Pi and the quality without them isn't acceptable. It looks like the BSD drivers are in a better state.

BSD is a server OS, which is why it likes to own the partition (it has its own volume manager which has meant flexible volumes for years).

No licence flim-flam, stable as a rock. What's not to like?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

No, software. Software, including things like TCP/IP, that was developed at Berkeley to work with the then AT&T Unix™. Over time this became so extensive that effectively replaced the original OS, though it took years of going through the courts for this to be establised.

Surf the web from your parked Renault: Vivaldi comes to OpenR

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Megane specs kneecapped for UK models.

German wine did indeed used to be terrible but things have improved markedly over the last few decades. And there has always been some good French beer.

Apple scraps 3-day return to office amid COVID-19 cases

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

Your post sounds like a case of confirmation bias to me.

Not if you read the conclusion, it isn't. I was just providing and additional view on the situation.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

Sounds like a case of confirmation bias. I know several companies who are working hell for leather doing in-person stuff to catch up on the stuff that they couldn't do for the last two years.

Remote working works better for some people and situations than others.

Elon Musk says Twitter buy 'cannot move forward' until spam stats spat settled

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Up

Indeed, the potential pay off of USD 1 billion if things don't go through is a lot less than the loss in value of his Tesla stock that is being used to guarantee loans.

The SEC should intervene because interventions like this during supposed due diligence quite clearly move the stock price by interested parties.

Pentester pops open Tesla Model 3 using low-cost Bluetooth module

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: PIN to drive

Welcome to California, the home of unlimited liability: it's not enough to recommend people don't do something stupid!

Python is getting faster: Major performance tweaks on horizon

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The McDonald's of programming languages

The article mainly covers issues related to the GIL, but these affect parallelism not speed. Much performance critical code is already in mainly C (eg. regex handling, XML parsing) with Python-specific overhead such as loops and function calls around 50% slower than C. This is good enough for the likes of CERN.

That said, the changes to the language as part of the move to Python 3 did slow things down, especially switching text from bytes to unicode. Things have improved with each release since about 3.4 but 3.11 is noticeably faster in general use.

Better support of multiprocessor architectures and asynchronous work are required to take advantage of modern CPUs, which are no longer really getting faster. Some of this is really hard to do but the improvements in both since Python 3.6 are impressive. Asyncio is getting more and more popular and better as a result.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The McDonald's of programming languages

Criticiscms of Python's speed are rarely grounded in fact. Yes, as an interpreted language it has an overhead in execution speed when compared with a compiled one: every run requires compilation; higher memory use, etc. However, in many situations where lots of work is being done, the work is being done by C, C++ or even Fortran libraries with the Python code just moving the data around. And this is the recommendation for anyone writing large systems in Python: prototype, profile and then write relevant extensions. It doesn't work in every situation but it works more often than not.

Bloomberg is onboard because the financial services industry has adopted Pandas and Jupyter over Excel, never known for its speed, en masse and Python has become the goto environment for machine learning.

The comparison with PHP is really limited to web stuff. It is the large number of great domain specific libraries (from biology to engineering to machine learning, etc.) in Python that make the difference.

Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Design Flaw

Dark matter is what's used to explain the rotation of galaxies, dark energy is used to explain expansion. They're both poor names "unknown 1" and "unknown 2" would be just as useful!

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Design Flaw

If it were perfectly organised, it would keep winking in and out of existence due to matter and anti-matter annihilation. But that didn't happen, mass isn't distributed evenly and things are speeding up…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Pah, They set the constraints for a black hole. And a black hole was what they got.

The terms "black holes", "big bang" and "plate tectonics" were all coined derisively in response to observations that turned out to be correct*. The theories and the supporting maths all came later and have since been validated by more observations.

* Well, better or more suitable than previous ones.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Design Flaw

Well, that's the relavistic explanation of gravity. Still working on the necessary quantum one…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Design Flaw

if you assume light dissipates its energy as it travels

We don't. Relativity pretty much proved that this isn't the case and lasers are pretty good example of light as a beam. The red shifts observed by Hubble et al, eventually led to the "big bang" theor. Observations since then suggest that expansion is accelerating so that galaxies will eventually achieve "escape velocity" from each other. However, since we don't know what is driving the accleration, we don't know if it's permanent meaning at least two outcomes are possible: heat death through unchecked expansion; collapse back into nothingness if gravity regains the upper hand.

But lots of other things are possible as we simple don't know enough.

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Strawmen

Slowly but shortly, the open-source community is becoming a kinder, gentler, and better one.

I think it's just getting bigger and more varied. Lots of people turn into arseholes when doing tasks to which they are not suited or when things are done the way they like. Mailing lists expose this but it goes on all over the place. And women can be just as bad as men when it comes to hurting their colleagues.

As for codes of conducts: in my opinion they are passive-aggressive manifestos from the jobsworth brigade.

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Yes, but he still has to get out of the building (and the cark park) alive…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Wouldn't let me on the cardiac ward

Maybe being plugged into one machine(with a cattle prod) led to being plugged into the next?

Microsoft tests ‘Suggested Actions’ in Windows 11. Insiders: Can we turn it off?

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: Clippy

More likely to be HAL…

Google shows off immersive maps, AR-flavored search, Pixel 7, and more

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A slight misquote

Or, a new twist on the old phrase that helped Reagan win in 1980:we're from Google and we're here to help.

Elsewhere: call quality can't get any better, cameras are already fantastic. Bascially, the phone is done but our customers, the device makers, need our help to convince you to keep buying new phones…

4G to dominate cellular IoT until 2028, when 5G takes over

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Projection defies historical mean

First of all, 5G is largely marketing blurb. The real change was to packet based infrastructure via LTE / 4G.

The research is reasonable but the chart has an uptake of 5G that is significantly faster than any comparable changes in the past. That raises a few questions.

Again marketing is in the lead here. WiFi 5 & 6 along with "5G" are driving convergence for wireless technologies: my phone already has the option to use a WiFi connection for calls where available, which is a good way to boost call quality in buildings where cell coverage will naturally be lower. Convergence should effectively increase cell density by blurring the boundaries. Higher cell density is really the only way to improve speeds for everyone.

Email out, Slack and Teams in for business communications

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Old School.

I think there's a classical trade-off here. Once e-mail became ubiquitous it became a flood and people started looking for alternatives. Messaging is great for small groups and small things but can quickly become much more difficult to manage as messages grow.

What I do like about some of the messaging systems is support for conversational interfaces via bots/agents. The new Telegram API looks very promising in this regard. But interoperability and data sovereignty will remain a problem.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Except I don't use SLACK

Messaging is complementary to e-mail and can indeed be useful. However, you quickly enter area of incompatible protocols, data privacy and security and what to do with all the data if you want to change providers. Moreover, arranging appointments gets more difficult the more people you try to include. This is cumbersome anywhere where "I can't do Tuesday, Bob can't do afternoons, …" comes up. Conversational interfaces for calendars are the best solution, and it would nice to see better protocols for this. But this still won't resolve all scheduling problems!

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: @Loyal Commenter

That's the same false equivalence of the paper that volume equals competition. The paper, however, says fewer apps but that does mean there is no competition, just fewer competitors. And in many markets there is an optimal number of competitors: adding more just means spreading resources more thinly. There are plenty of examples of this: TV channels, mobile phone networks, etc.. Oh, and all these markets are regulated.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The costs of doing business

The paper does some quantative analysis to come up with some qualitative results. This is flawed methodology but beloved by some economists who find it difficult to get other data. There is also the flawed premise that more is better. In fact, in many markets this leads to an equilibrium known as "more of the same", ie. less information because there is less profit to be shared.

But the biggest problem with the conclusion is that is regurgitates Silicon Valley's most pernicious mantra: regulation is evil and the best markets have the least regulation.

There are plenty of examples that this is not only untrue but that proper regulation provides more choice and lowers costs. For example, safety requirements in road vehicles are mandated. Not only does this mean fewer road deaths but it also, in many countries at least, reduces the risk to companies because the state indemnifies them to a certain degree if their products meet safety standards. However, modern investors only seem to care about profits today because if a company has any problems they can just sell their stock; it's the inverse of the principal / agent problem. Shareholders are not liable so the worst that can happen to them is company bankruptcy. That might sound bad, but losing equity is a damn sight cheaper than having to accept liability.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Great news

They've overlooked the fact that it's effectively a zero-sum game

Seeing as the value of customer data to advertisers is unquantified – they don't tell you how much money they're making – it's possible to argue that charging directly is the cheaper option.

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A great tool

I've no beef with BASIC – it introduced me to programming when the alternative was ALGOL. VisualBasic less so. But Access did have lots of problems being yet another nearly SQL implementation, with the nearly part confirming the "miss is as good as a mile" aphorism: data corruption was just too easy and it was too closely tied to MS Office and the Windows Registry.

Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Firefox is dead

Everyone was crying out for a browser that worked well overall for the majority of people

I don't remember customers crying out for a new browser. Post-2004 the web was made for IE and, despite the best efforts of Opera and Mozilla, nobody seemed to care. Chrome didn't really take off until Safari did via the I-Phone. Both companies were keen on a replacement for Flash for multimedia, What was that you were saying about facts?

I'm big admirer of what Google has achieved with Chrome and how, despite relative dominance, they continue to play reasonably fair in the development of the web. But make no mistake: Chrome is very much a means to an ad-dominated ends.

SoftBank aims to keep control of Arm after IPO – report

Charlie Clark Silver badge

ARM is already more profitable than it was when it was bought. But firm valuations are driven largely by the cost of capital and this is getting more expensive as interest rates rise and this is probably the reason for selling in chunks: some money now in the hope of more when interest rates fall again.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So the competition watchdogs

Seeing as the sale to nVidia was stopped because of competition worries, it's almost certain that Intel would not be allowed to buy it.

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Can someone do the math for me please?

The efficiency, or lack of it, is mainly in the production. Still, they're easier to maintain and swap out than generators.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Nuke

"as envisioned", ie. not available now. So, unproven and expensive. Do you see any insurance company signing off on this?

Either way, the backup stuff is probably less important than the power agreements where Google really is putting its money where its mouth is.

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Heres a suggestion

Oh, I use adblockers all the time and also find it despicable that paying subscribers are also supposed to be subjected to ads.

But that doesn't mean that Javascript per se is evil. For example, being able to validate forms during completion is a huge usability benefit. OK, arguably this is an example of one of the many deficiencies in forms, but current implementations require JS for real time feedback.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Heres a suggestion

Well, you can do that if you like but some of the stuff is useful and nice to look at. Life was simpler before there was TV, too.

If done correctly, the performance "hit" isn't significant. There's a huge difference between something like HTMX and many of the multi-MB "frameworks" that some lazy people favour.

Apple geniuses in Atlanta beat New York to the punch, file petition to unionize

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: It is interesting to see the moves to unionise

I'm all for unions and worker representation. No buts, no qualifications.

However, in the US, unions tend to favour closed shop arrangements and are often too close to politicians. For example, in the recent pandemic teachers unions in Chicago and California forced polticians into keeping schools closed, even though it was already known that this was extremely detrimental for many children. And, as data from Florida and elsewhere (and I think de Santis is a tool) showed, they were themselves at a lower risk of infection in school than out, and also a low risk of infection for teachers.

US tech companies love talking about the benefits of share options, et al. but love extending the working day even more. Normalised data on US productivity casts a dim light on this.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Most of us don't give a toss.

And, why is ENDING (apparently) POLITICALLY MOTIVATED BANS *BAD* for them?

At a guess, because they were being pressured by companies that advertise with them, but also by some of the "opinion leaders" that make the platform popular in the first place. Twitter doesn't offer the kind of granular demographic data that Facebook does that attracts the kind of niche (and political) adverts for whichever self-selecting minority is out there: "woke", Nazi, whatever.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Oh great. So "reasoned analysis" can be done in 280 characters, can it?

I don't mind message limits to encourage focus, which in turn might stimulate interest, but they are not suitable for serious discussion. Not that you can't thrash ideas out over a thread. But, again, this is hardly something Twitter has a monopoly on, which is possibly why it's struggling to generate sufficient revenue from advertising.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

it’s a great way to read swift and well-thought through analysis

In 140 characters? I think not! Anyway, it's not as if Twitter has a natural monopoly on expert group discussions.

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: GREEEEEED

Use 2FA to authorise the devices being used and limit/manage these.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: GREEEEEED

2FA is probably the easist approach. Network analysis is good to an idea of the scale of the problem but not so good for enforcement. Also, lots of people use VPNs because of geofencing.

Cheaper plans with ads will no doubt bring some new users, but then you are competing directly with whichever ad-funded systems are already out there.

I think the biggest problem that streaming services are facing is that creating lots of good content is hard. A few years ago, Netflix was on its own in showering cash on productions, in a way that HBO did 30 years ago. Now there is much more competition for not much more creative talent.

Apple dev logs suggest 'nine new M2-powered Macs'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

With its own silicon it looks like Apple is increasing the range of options: MacBook Airs won't be full of oomph but will have more hardware acceleration to make battery life better, which is a big selling point.

But for the highend notebooks there can never be enough power. It means more VMs and faster compile/test stages.

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: site stupidity.

This isn't about copyright because LinkedIn is specifically not trying to enforce it. Instead it wants to be able to pick and choose which sites can make use of the data without entering into individual copyright agreements.

Of course, if they do want to go with copyright then they might have to revisit the agreements they make users sign.