* Posts by Charlie Clark

12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

ReactOS shows off SMP support in open-source take on Windows

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: IT OS need Versus Machine tool need @Nate Amsdem

I've successfully managed to use Windows VMs for this kind of thing.

While I admire the developers of ReactOS for their tenacity and dedication, the problems of completely and reliably replicating a closed source and largely undocumented OS are manifold. This is great research but don't use it in production.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: IT OS need Versus Machine tool need

Why is virtualisation not an option? Or is XP running on the machine tools themselves?

Microsoft proposes type syntax for JavaScript

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Copied from Python

Python introduced type hints some time ago with the same syntax, which I personally find extremely distracting and unhelpful. There supposed to be "optional" but the syntax is in your face and some companies are mandating them. Looks like the same thing for JS.

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: It's the wingeing

Will, that roll of carpet you ordered has arrived. Ugly stuff, can't imagine what you'd want it for…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Simon is on form, these days!

I'm slightly worried that no mention was made of what's happened to Carl's Alexa™ – because he's bound to have one along with a Ring™ – and the strange shopping orders that are about to be delivered.

Then there's the GBs of illicit material that has somehow made its way onto the computer. This can only be removed by agreeing to cover the Mission Central tab at The Slaughtered Lamb for the next 10 years…

Why, thank you Carl. It's so nice to be appreciated for the work we do!

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Pint

Statistical risks of inverse association

IIRC the geographical indications are associated with the location of people who with similar DNA who have also been sampled. This immediately introduces bias because the survey is not geographically uniform and the bias is probably greater than the margin of error.

Anyway, it's Friday and I can't believe I've taken time off drinking to think about statistics. Kippas!

Moscow to issue HTTPS certs to Russian websites

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "Z" for zombies

Sanctions are always a broad brush. At the moment disruption of everyday life is one of the most effective options in a country where the only legally available information is telling people that everything is fine. When this clearly isn't the case then some people might start trusting government media less.

Regarding encryption: most Russians have for years been using Telegram et al. to avoid interception and blocks by the state. Eventually Vlad gave up the attempts to cut it off. So the police are resorting to stop and "unlock your phone" tactics to find out what people think. Or maybe to find out themselves what's going on: the draconian clampdown of the media is the biggest indication that things are going as planned for Russia.

Why Nvidia sees a future in software and services: Recurring revenue

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Liability

They can't have it both ways. Thus far the software industry has been able to avoid the crippling lawsuits related to faulty products. But a play like this would make them just as liable as the manufacturers for the costs associated with recalls, accidents, etc. I hope she mentioned how the company is going to hedge against those kind of costs.

Oh, and another piece by Agam Shah that consists almost entirely of quotes from other people.

Cloudflare, Akamai: Why we're not pulling out of Russia

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: The Mother of all Bombs

While there wasn't anything like the same degree of coordination there were indeed limited sanctions on America by some of its allies. France's position led to the introduction of "freedom fries" for some flag-wavers but also some companies also ditched US suppliers.

The invasion of Iraq was indefensible and ultimately self-defeating as we're seeing now. It was pushed for by a group of Neo-Cons around Bush with the ultimate aim of destabilising Saudia Arabia. This made little or no sense then, the only real sense being that Saudia Arabia did indeed pose a threat through its funding of terrorist organisations. But it was just as likely to be the search for a new enemy after the end of the cold war. There were almost certainly war crimes committed by US troops for which they will not be held responsible.

However, pointing out what was wrong then doesn't really help now. You might want to argue about the reasons for the two situations but the only one that really matters is that Ukraine borders several NATO countries and escalation is considered by many to be only a matter of time.

DBAs massively over-provision Oracle to protect themselves: Microsoft

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Oracle has nothing to do with the headline

Are we missing the irony about the army of beancounters required to enforce the penny pinching?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: fair assessment and reasonably accurate recommendation but..

The hidden cost of any migration – is getting away from it. And this seems to increase with the cloud with the costs of getting your data back downright punitive, even when compared with Oracle / SAP licensing.

As for calculating capacity, not having enough oomph is almost always going to lead to higher operational costs than the capital required for more headroom. Exceptions prove the rule but it should generally be possible to calculate the grunt needed for DB work reasonably well, unlike say videotranscoding.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla agree on something: Make web dev lives easier

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

It's not always a binary choice but, for example, I'm not convinced that the video tag and the eventual adoption of unencumbered codecs (even if DRM is still very much a thing) can be considered a bad thing. Prior to this multimedia on the internet required proprietary solutions that were not known for their security. The same has happened with video conferencing which is now, generally, implemented using WebRTC.

While the "browser as OS" – web Bluetooth, web USB, etc – stuff is arguably very niche most of the changes reflect what people want to do with websites and standardisation means fewer JS libraries to include blindly, though why datalist wasn't taken up more widely remains a mystery.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Chicken and egg

The specification was often written without the practical experience that could be gained from implementations – tables are an example of this. This is why for things to be included in the specification they generally require at least one, and preferably two, implementations using different engines. This helps assess the usefulness in practice but also iron out ambiguity and bugs in the specification.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Sorry, while I agree with some of the criticisms, I personally consider HTML 5 to be a considerable improvement on what was before. It was heavily influenced by Opera's MAMA study and does indeed make many common tasks easier, cleaner and more consistent. That was the main job. Since then there has been a certain amount of feature creep, mainly by Google, but this is better than the stasis that Microsoft forced upon HTML 4.

It should also be noted, that, if done correctly, the developments require less JS over time as stuff gets baked into the browsers.

Maxar Technologies: The eye in the sky tracking invasion of Ukraine

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Image quality

Corruption and inefficiency are part of the Russian system. They're usually balanced by a huge area, seeminly limitless resources and a pliant population. So, even when things don't succeed initially you either wait for more to come along or, if necessary, retreat far enough so your enemy now has the problem. Then you bomb the shit out of them.

In this context, wastefulness is just a means to an end. The playbook for Ukraine is, unfortunately, likely to be similar to Chechyna: bomb and blow everything up and give the winning warlords carte blanche.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Image quality / Shoelaces

ta, but for all your shoelace knot needs it's nice to know there is a website dedicated to them. Of course, there is.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Image quality

The trick is to ensure the knot itself is tight, rather than the laces being too tight.

Of course, tying laces with a bow is something slightly different. But I have observed with some shoes that no matter how tight I make the bow, it tends to come undone. This is invariably with round laces and I'm fairly sure that the "right over left" stuff has to take the way the laces are twisted into consideration, just that I've never figured it out myself!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Image quality

Very true. I think the real point may be about the length and number of fronts and being able to keep them all supplied. Oh, and having clearly defined and obtainable objectives.

The Russian strategy seemed to be about splitting Ukrainian forces between the east and the centre, seizing Kiev and installing a puppet government. As strategies go there's a hint of the underpant gnomes in this one, just as there was when the US went into Baghdad.

The front will get longer and may soon include parts of Belorussia and Georgia and elsewhere. At the same time, the limits of kleptocracy are starting to be felt in parts of the economy vital to keeping the army supplied.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Image quality

I'm OCD enough to have taught myself how to tie a reef knot on my dressing gown for the same reason. But haven't yet learned how to tie shoelaces that resist bows (I believe it's to do with the direction of the twist)…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Image quality

The Russian communication strategy suggests they're not at all happy with the US being so open about the Russian military: it's a crime to report anything about the war that is not sanctioned by the military.

The convoys weren't supposed to be necessary but they got off to a bad start and kept getting ahead of their supply lines.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Eye in the sky until blinded

Ukrainian peoples willingness to fight and die for their country…

Yes, but as with Afghanistan and the "tribal areas" in Pakistan, there are people outside the country who are also willing and able. If the conflict moves west towards the Polish or Slovakian borders, or south towards Romania, the risk of targetting suppliers on the other side of the border in a NATO country will rise. There is also the risk of an uprising in Belorussia, where Lukashenko is only just keeping a lid on things.

And the long term aim of Putin to establish at least a land corridor to Königsberg if not reinvade the Baltic countries.

And you can also be pretty sure that the CIA, et al. are looking at the Caucuses and beyond, with Putin's troops so widely spread: there's resentment against Moscow from their to Siberia.

Wars are always messy and escalation is almost always inevitable.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: Image quality

Or if you're wearing slipons…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Image quality

You can also assume that the images are provided with the consent and maybe even at the behest of the US military: they're for domestic consumption around the world to counter any suggestion by Russian trolls that it's just another training operation and that Ukrainians are welcoming them with garlands of flowers.

If Russia really is relying on convoys then it's asking for people to take pot shots.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Eye in the sky until blinded

Any attack on a US satellite would have to be by the Russian military and would, therefore, be considered an act of aggression and the US has definitely got the capability to react and take out Russian satellites, which it almost certainly depends upon for support at the moment.

Some kind of conflict is almost inevitable at some point, but Russia certainly doesn't want to draw NATO in yet: the last thing it wants is a no-fly zone.

EU cuts off key Russian banks from SWIFT system

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Their EU subsidiaries are already declaring bankrupcy

Well, if the subsidiaries declare bankruptcy their local creditors will struggle. Bank insurance will cover some of their losses but seeing as it was a political decision to impose sanctions, the government will probably cover the rest.

The thornier issue is managing cross-border banking licences in the future.

The zero-password future can't come soon enough

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Security keys aren't expensive

There are free apps for iPhone and Android to implement that.

That implement what exactly? One of the points about confirming identity is that it isn't a purely technical problem. The risks are well understood and none of the proposed technical solutions is without its problems as the post attempted to spell out.

And are you seriously suggesting that Apple and Google be given even greater power over devices?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Everyone knows that good passwords should only be used once…

As you say, we've yet to come up with anything better that is as universal.

ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What about IPv4?

Why take the wager so literally? It seems to me to be a philosophical justification for erring on the side of caution.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What about IPv4?

There are certainly elements of this, which is probably why uptake was initially so slow. However, nowadays you could consider adoption an example of Pascal's wager. At some point IPv6 may well be dominant so why not get on board now? If you're going through a network upgrade anyway, being able to run IPv6 outside your network isn't going to hurt.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What about IPv4?

Have to agree that full IPv6 addresses are easy to misread (though jumbling numbers in IPv4 is also really common), but I think a lot of the time you can get away without prefixes which makes things a lot easier.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What about IPv4?

The reason IPv4 still dominates is largely down to IP address depletion not affecting everyone equally. If IPv4 addresses had been allotted equally be country initially, the US would also have started to run out. IPv6 solves some of IPv4's problems, including address range, and is seeing increasing adoption within the networks and service providers with end users hardly noticing: their mobile network is probably already IPv6 and more and more providers are now 6to4 rather than allowing users to go 4to6. The transition will continue to be gradual and may never be complete. But this is true in other areas: altitude for planes is still in feet, speed of ships is still in knots, and some engineering is still done in thous…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: There is no such thing as a prototype

Given how much computational code is written in Python but essentially running in Fortran, the usual approach is to prototype in Python but write real thing in Fortran or C++, or use any of the existing libraries.

Python and other similar languages have proved a godsend for all kinds of work because they let talented scientists do stuff they'd never otherwise be able to do without first getting a Comp Sci degree first. And at least 50% of this is down to providing bindings for decades of excellent Fortran and C++ code…

Apple has missed the video revolution

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Apple had spectacularly bad timing

Thanks for the additional info. The M1 was released really for the Air crowd – maximum portability and battery time but not a lot of oomph and it was clear that any software that required hardware acceleration would take a while.

But I know people who for years have been doing video on Macs because of the hardware/software. For a while it was either Mac or Sony because of Firewire. Apple has definitely neglected third-party software by pushing its own audio-video solutions, but there are still plenty of media companies dependent upon solutions built on them.

But the article seems specifically to be about the Twitch/Influencer brigade. It's a mistake to consider this the future of video.

Good: People can spot a deepfake video. Bad: They're not so hot with text

Charlie Clark Silver badge

From the Department of the Bleeding Obvious

Even if this seems obvious to you, at least someone's done the study. That's science.

Really, thank you for telling us!

The relationship of sound, text, video to plausability has long been studied. Video is often abused/recruited to support a particular point of view. There are infamous clips from Gaza but really the film "Wag the Dog" does a great job in showing how media can be manipulated for particular purposes. And then there is Orson Welles' legendary broadcast of War of the Worlds. Sometimes people won't believe their own eyes.

Escape from The National Museum of Computing

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: You know you've got the right job...

I think this is why Tron hit such a nerve: an attempt to show what was going on in those new fangled electronic gizmos that were popping up everywhere.

But there is something about seeing the various electric and mechanical memory devices that were trying to solve the problem of persistence for the state machine. It was only when my dad demonstrated the rebuilt Baby at MoSI that I understood how DRAM really worked. A classical boffin hack but good enough to still be in use, in principle, in all today's systems.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

I find it hard to imagine Trump would have allowed such a screwup in leaving.

Which part of his 4 years of government didn't resemble a screwup? In particular, his relationship with the military was fraught because of his failure to appreciate that details matter in military planning.

In the end, it didn't really matter because the fundamental mistake was assuming the Afghan military just needed proper training and equipment. There's at least one lesson there.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

It's true that in the frozen North there aren't many options for power. But that doesn't make nuclear any "greener" than other sources of power. It remains very expensive and the waste problem is as unsolved as that of burning fossil fuel. For decades it has been promised that the next generation will be cheaper and cleaner. That might happen but that won't solve the problem of all the mess produced over the last 60 yeards.

In most places, wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear, which is why they're displacing it for baseload production. What's missing is effective storage (neither hydro nor batteries are really suitable) for surges in demand.

The fight over labels shows just how many vested interests are chasing the subsidies.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

Easy enough to invoke anti-terrorist legislation as was done against Iceland after the 2009 crash. That didn't make any real waves in the courts but doing it against Russia would be even easier to justify.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

The Finnish greens have traditionally been open to fission reactors, though their fervour seems to be dimming.

Really, until we've solved the problems of nuclear waste, fission isn't an option: it's a differently deferred problem, that's all.

But this isn't all about gas. It's about depending on relatively cheap source of energy without controlling their production.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

I'm not making predictions, but I think it would be naive to assume that the status quo in central Asia and the "Stans" as Russia turns it eyes westwards. Many of the seasoned troops due to be engaged in Ukraine are from that area and we've already seen Russia intervene in Kasaschstan.

I don't think we can rule anything out.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

Afghanistan was incompetence after incompetence but it was Trump who essentially set the timetable for the withdrawal.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I know all about the borders being redrawn during and after the second world war. None of it can be considered fun. However, acknowledging the the borders has become a tenet for European peace. By going against this, Putin has effectively declared war on Europe, though some might not have noticed yet.

Unfortunately, it's probably only a matter of time before there is escalation beyond Ukraine's borders.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

Cost of extraction versus cost of synthesis. Russia has relatively high extraction costs.

Synthesis isn't cheap yet, but then again, we haven't really put much effort into it because industry has prefers other bigger handouts like batteries and "clean" hydrogen.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It spent the last 400 years part of russia and was only really recreated again under Kruschev

You obviously don't know any Ukrainians. Like much of the former Russian empire, Ukraine, which has a longer tradition of statehood than Russia, with the Kiever Rus actually giving Russia its name, was subjected to various bouts of russification with Tsars banning the use of the language and Lenin stamping on the newly independent Ukraine in 1918.

But Putin has made it clear he won't stop at Ukraine. So, at some point, as the song goes, then they came for me.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: left him too long

That always sounds good but regime change is always difficult to engineer.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re. more blankets

The initial decision to phase out nuclear power was taken at the start of the millennium. And, if anything wasn't rational, it was rolling that back and letting the power companies draw up new contracts with left them with fewer liabilities and a higher payoff when the inevitable shutdown came.

Putin has been playing with the gas tap all winter, but, while reserves are low, winter is coming to an end and new sources of supply such as US LNG are becoming available. This makes it largely a matter of price, which the West as a whole can easily afford. This suggests that Vlad's timing was poor.

Russia can try selling gas to China, but China will dictate the price. China might like annoying the US but it certainly doesn't want an aggressive and impulsive Russia.

Shutting the Russian government off from the bond markets is going to cause a lot of problems as is moving all those trained troops from the Caucuses and central Asia. Even Afghanistan could become Russia's problem again at the Taliban look for sources of income and power.

Google kills download-shrinking Lite Mode browser tech

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Obligatory XKCD

Speed is only part of the problem. 3G is being replaced by LTE and more around the world. But even if the handset does 4G, it may well be underpowered for all that JS that it has to compile, even if it may never run it. This is why Opera's proxy strips out all the JS and does some rendering on the server. This and a good ad-blocker is the way to deal with the bloat.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Mobile pages optimized

I've seen the same thing, even significant drops in performance as some nice (and clean) optimisations were removed when changing CMS and service supplier. The data on httparchive.org also confirms that websites are getting fatter and slower.

JavaScript survey: Most use React but satisfaction low

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Representative?

Considering what Javascript was initially developed for and what it's now used for and you can cut it some slack. In fact, given the speed with which it was released and, despite the fact that I don't like it personally, it was remarkably well done.

But, more importantly, static typing is not strong typing. Static typing gives the compiler some optimisation options and might catch the odd bug but won't solve any real problems. But if you want types for your front end web development, go with TypeScript.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Representative?

Really, who cares about the gender distribution in self-reporting studies? Like other bits of web progamming, JS development has for years been outsourced to the cheapest bidder, so the survey is largely reflecting the career opportunities and choices in those countries.

But if you want more evidence that the survey is not representative then look no further than the number of respondents who want static typing! In Javascript? As if there aren't other, bigger problems with the language. But also with TypeScript there are alternatives for those who crave the staticness.