* Posts by Charlie Clark

12086 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

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.

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.

Adobe warns of second critical security hole in Adobe Commerce, Magento

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Sadly, my company are magento heavy...

It got in there because it ticks the boxes for a "web shop", a bit like Drupal for CMS. Non-technical manglers appreciate the value of a company that can afford a sales department and has references they might have heard of. And they may also be wary of the IT department, for which there can be good reasons.

I've never worked a web shop but had discussions with people who've thought getting one. As with so many things online, they almost always forget that generating orders is the easy bit, fulfilment, returns, etc. are what take real work.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
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Re: So Magento has been fully integrated now

Well, that and Brainfuck, et al. You'd need a preprocessor to generate it but it's technically possible.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So Magento has been fully integrated now

Don't forget, like Flash, they bought Magento. And, as it's written in PHP, validation issues are to be expected. Yes, anyone can write good code in any language but for years PHP favoured convenience over best practice.

Escape from The National Museum of Computing

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

IIRC the museum is largely run by volunteers and, at least when I was there, the relationship with the Bletchley Park museum is not as good as it should be.

It's well worth a visit, though you probably need to bring a bit of understanding of how computers work and how they've developed. Personally, I found looking at the electronic parts, some of which are now more than 40 years old but I remember from my childhood, less rewarding than the older stuff where you can see something's going on. Maybe that will change over the years.

Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent

Charlie Clark Silver badge

That's the point I was making, though I'd never describe any of them as perfect. The US system is flawed by design because it benefits directly from granting patents and by implementation due to the Munro doctrine and US extraterratoriality. This may change over time given the number of patents that China now has on key areas of technology; along with its own myriad bogus patents created by its own flawed system. Once a few US companies have been successfully sued, and this is probably only a matter of time, then there might be a move for a more cooperative system over time. Banning products is only going to give temporary relief there now that China has both the market size and the technological sophistication to drive new standards forward.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Just because the US patent system is fucked, doesn't mean everyone else's is.

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Stop

Re: Ban software patents.

The existence of PRIOR ART should have prevented the award of the patent in the first place. But the US patent system has been issuing such patents for years. The problem is that you then have to litigate to get the patent withdrawn.

In many jurisdictions software patents are not possible but the importance of the US economy and the tendency for US extra-terratoriality means that the rest of the world tends to live in fear of a district court in the US boondocks. This is a drag on innovation, development and commerce.

But the underlying problem is that all software patents are essentially the expressions of mathematical formulae, which are not patentable.

Chromium-adjacent Otter browser targets OS/2

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Re: Get the facts straight

I think you're right about most of the decisions. Of course, it couldn't have been 32-bt from the start, and initially it was too tightly tied to the MCA of the PS/2, which while better than ISA, wasn't sufficiently better for anyone to want to license or copy it, if IBM refused to license it.

By the mid-nineties the game was largely up. Those companies who'd invested in OS/2 knew their investment was safe and wouldn't have to replace it for > ten years and in the meantime they'd profit from "a better Windows than Windows", which it was. This is, at least, what Lou Gerstner later said when he pulled the plug on it. But it wasn't the development of the OS itself as much as spending money on marketing and getting application developers on board. At the time IBM was making more money than Microsoft by selling applications for Windows NT. IBM was later to drop the ball on Lotus Notes in much the same way, which let Microsoft sell the cancer that is Exchange to corporates.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Pint

Re: A few more pedantic details

Thanks for all the extra details OS/2 could have been great if neither IBM nor Microsoft had had anything more to do with it!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Get the facts straight

The OS was compatible with some Windows drivers, but Windows 3.x did so well that the IBM/Microsoft partnership dissolved in unhappy circumstances in 1992.

I'm not sure what the first phrase is supposed to mean because OS/2 required its own drivers for all hardware. One of the reasons Windows 3.x did so well was that large companies could run Windows 3.x applications in OS/2 with more memory and fewer crashes, because each application effectively got its own VM. OS/2 pioneered software virtualisation. But the reason why the partnership between IBM and Microsoft was dissolved was that Microsoft was working on a competing OS called Windows NT. Outsourcing the development of OS/2 to Microsoft was a terrible decision and indicative of IBM's management at the time.

Emergency updates: Adobe, Chrome patch security bugs under active attack

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Credit where credit's due

I don't use Google Chrome but nice to see Google eating its own dogfood with the security team finding bugs in Chrome and the Chrome team fixing them quickly.

We get the privacy we deserve from our behavior

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Why regulation is required

While I understand the thrust of the argument – if people are careless with their data, they should live with the consequences or learn the hard way – this can be applied to all kinds of areas where we have regulation because people either can't be trusted or don't understand. For example, in most places we have speed limits for cars because driving at high speed increases the chances of accidents and injury; we also restrict access to certain chemicals or medicines because too many people have been poisoned in the past, etc.

Add to this the devious or at times malicious practices of the data merchants with claims like "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" and the case for regulation is even stronger. The economic argument that advertising allows services to be free to use is also fallacious because it ellides the fact that they are paid for by data. You could argue for this, if user's were able to set the price for their privacy after they have been shown market rates. This would be a useful excercise but would also destroy the market.

But even the best regulation can, and probably should not even purport to, prevent all abuse. GDPR has some great principles such as "privacy by design" and "privacy by default" which attempt to instill correct behaviour in developers and service providers, but will almost always been chasing developments. So, we as users and consumers must also play our part and learn to be a little less promiscuous.

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Alas poor SOAP!, I knew him

Not sure about the "all APIs are hard" bit, can you give an example?

I mean creating nice APIs. Like naming, it's one of those bits of IT that is often overlooked but when you're developing software, you often do it for yourself and know how you want to use it. The API, a bit like grammar in human language, only becomes necessary when someone else wants to use it.

Then, once something has been released, you realise all the things that should have been done differently and would like to change: can you change the API?

You're right, of course, about some of the ideas that companies had for extremely low value services that would then be proprietary but SOAP failed really because despite it's complexity it couldn't deliver anything very useful, not least because XML is shit for typing.

The API stuff came on top: each online weather, travel, etc. service had a completely different API. JSON ended up promising less but delivering more (yes schemas are a problem, but at least basic types were supported) by being simpler a hell of a lot faster.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Alas poor SOAP!, I knew him

SOAP failed for more reasons than poor tooling: it was both bloated (because, well, XML) but also incredibly limited. There was the hope of universal mini-services that we'd all end up using but that was before people realised that nice APIs are hard™. Actually, all APIs are hard, nice one are even harder.

Dido Harding's appointment to English public health body ruled unlawful

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Guilty of not doing a equality report

Kate Bingham's experience in pharmaceuticals was certainly important but it was he contract negotiations for which she has received praise, and this is definitely management. She got pretty good deals done quickly, which is more than be said for some of the other appointees. Not that it really matters because nobody is going to take the rap for this and no doubt things will be pretty similar next time.

OTOH, as was said at the time, the negotiations were not that much better than others but being first out of the gate was always going to look good.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Guilty of not doing a equality report

I've met one but even though he was great, I remember my boss at the time saying it still wasn't worth the money.

Microsoft Teams unable to send and receive calls for some after update

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Re: 270M - bull

Given the number of companies and institutions that have drunken the koolaid and forced it on users because it is part of the Microsoft 24//7/365/na subscription.

I don't like it, not least because it keeps wanting to use my camera, but I do think it has improved over the last few years. Then again, I would never use any of this shit for working with the PSTN.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Teams has lept 2 organisations I work with afloat through Covid

All your IT are belong us.

Apple emits emergency fix for exploited-in-the-wild WebKit vulnerability

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Re: Questioning Standards

Mozilla attempted to reimplement the browser in Rust, but then mysteriousy stopped this effort.

This isn't true. Mozilla developed Rust initially for systems work and then implemented some browser features, I think the CSS parser is one example, but not the whole browser and there are no plans to do so.

Remote code execution vulnerability in Samba due to macOS interop module

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Meanwhile in other news…

Apple has released security updates for MacOS and Safari. Behind the curve as usual but better late than never.

Users sound off as new Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

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Re: MS Is Loving This

Unlimited personal cloud storage for qualifying plans for subscriptions of five or more users, otherwise 1 TB/user.

Sounds very similar: terms and conditions apply and can be changed at any time… Basically no company can afford to provide unlimited anything (except perhaps ads and bullshit for free). All you can eat offers almost invariably lead to some kind of restriction because 5% of the users tend to use 95% of the resources.

Google's approach is clumsy but understandable: through the offer it's got a much better idea of what kind of storage requirements universities have. And for many universities even a subscription service is likely to end up cheaper and quicker than getting the overworked IT department to provide something similar, especially if the data is supposed to be available for other users. However, those T&Cs should always be considered and you should always have an exit plan in case that becomes necessary (for financial, regulatory, etc. reasons) including paying for Google to dump that data onto SSDs as TB/PB transfers over the internet are not advisable.

In summary, for any kind of aaS: egress is the biggest risk.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
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Re: Eligibility

I really like your post except for this sentence

The NAS is also used for everything that should have moved to SharePoint …

I have never found SharePoint to be useful or reliable. And, again, how can you be sure you'll ever get your data out of it?

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

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Re: Has ....

I'm not so sure. He's obviously met someone who also knows how to play THE GAME and he forgot the oldest rule in the returned product category: palm it off on another mug. This is obviously the only way to avoid electronuclear war here. The question is, how can it be made to work for both sides? Obviously, i11s require special RAM, but that isn't quite enough… maybe beancounters can be traded at the DMZ?

Use Zoom on a Mac? You might want to check your microphone usage

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Zoom.....

To be fair, this could be said about most video conferencing clients. I can't think of many that haven't been riddled with bugs. But I'm still suspicipus about Zoom's business model, so I've deleted it and only use the browser now.

Top Chinese Uni fears Middle Kingdom way behind on tech – and US sanctions make catching up hard

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Wait, what ?

Linus Torvalds is the only person I know of who could be called excellent at OS kernels.

This is silly. Torvalds only manages the Linux kernel which hardly makes him an expert on kernels, per se. But there are plenty on the kernel team who understand how it works.

However, there are also plenty of other OS kernels out there and good people working on them, though it's not a partiucuarly well respected or funded area of research and it's not really something industry is really interested in. They want generally want to be able to write drivers for their kit.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Controversial opinion

I think you're forgetting the sheer size of Chinese academia. While much of it is about turning out graduates for industry, there's no doubt that research into all kinds of areas has increased significantly over the last couple of decades and there are areas, including mobile phone networks, where China is acknowleged to be among the leaders.

Of course, nationalism and needing to toe the party line do hinder international cooperation, but things have changed almost immeasurably.

Securing open-source code isn't going to be cheap

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: pride incentive

Very true. But there is also undeniably a problem with some of the larger corporations as staff and teams are moved around with fewer and fewer people in a position to understand the codebase. This is certainly the case with MS Office.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Keep on spreading this nonsense...

Whether code is open or closed source matters little when it comes to finding exploits. While can find some standard vectors (SQL injection, poor hashing, etc.) with some static analysis, it's usually easier to run the various toolkits against the executable.

You can look at the change logs for open source for clues, the same goes for release notes or CVE notices. But the really nasty stuff tends to comes from labs where there are lots of eyeballs paid to look for, but not report, exploits.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Keep on spreading this nonsense...

That's a poor analogy. It's more like being able to fix some farm machinery because you have the manuals. That sounds great, but without the right tools and understanding of how the machinery works, the potential may never be fulfilled.

And, to give the thing some perspective: back in the day AT&T, IBM, et al. did use to provide manuals for all their mainframes, because if something did go wrong you were expected to be able to fix it yourself. At least with IBM this continued well into the PC era, which is why, if you paid, you could get the relevant manuals to look up those error messages that would occasionally pop up in OS/2.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Keep on spreading this nonsense...

What if B comes with a support contract but A doesn't? That would make B preferable for many users.

I'm all in favour of open source but it's not a solution in itself.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It's not an open source problem

Everyone is bad at security in software; it doesn't matter whether its open or closed source. And some things can't be solved easily because security is difficult™. Something that is considered secure today might be considered insecure tomorrow because someone discovers a new kind of attack.

But the major problem is misaligned incentives: no software maker is under real pressure to fix bugs because they are largely exempt from liability. It's fashionable to bang on about flaws in open source libraries but what about last year's clusterfuck that was Hafnium? If Exchange came with strict liability then Microsoft might well have been bankrupted by claims. Instead, it continues to make record profits.

Oh, companies do love freeloading: last week I got an e-mail from a company wanting to know whether one of my libraries was subject to US export restrictions! Yeah, like I'm going to spend unpaid time or effort on any kind of indemnification!

Samsung reveals new smartphones, tablets... and yes. The S22 Ultra is undeniably good

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Asian market first?

The phones look very much like the sort of phone that Huawei et al like to sell in China. I'm happy to stick with my S10e for a few years yet.

I think the reason the tablets are so expensive is the sceeens: full size notebook screen but AMOLED and on the way to a proper Android notebook.

Joint European Torus more than doubles fusion record with 59 megajoules

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There are lots of situations where fusion will make more sense than the alternatives, plus it might allow us to suck more of that CO2 back in.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

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Re: Dead Cat

I'm not sure if Grauniad readers really froth, but they certainly do like to take the moral highground and I find the paper has been unreadable for decades as a result. The Mail and the Express were built around outrage: they give their readers what they want.

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

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Re: Why not borrow from the NHS Brexit bonus ?

What we need our some magic Brexit beans that can be given to the NHS, the farmers, fishermen, regional transport bodies, scientists, etc. without ever running out.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Funding

Wealth taxes, per se, tend to be inefficient because accountants quickly find ways around them. But increasing the tax take by, for example, reducing tax breaks and adjusting thresholds can work quite well. Still, the UK's science problem (and other areas requiring highly skilled and educated workers) won't be solved by money alone.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Brexit got done

Horizon is an EU programme. The EU has lots of initiatives that allow other countries to participate in research, but it sets the rules. Switzerland has managed to get itself into a similar position to the UK after voting to terminate treaties with the EU, with places like ETH Zürich desperate to avoid being sidelined.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Coat

Re: Funding

I believe there is going to be a new research programme for Imperial sub-atomic particles. We can obviously keep the Higgs but neutrinos are suspicious and quarks quite obviously foreign…

Mine's the one with a copy of Finnegan's Wake in the pocket and some of Dr Gell-Mann's extra strong lozenges…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Equality

Improved access to research paid for by public funds is something that many scientists have been pushing for many years now and one of the reasons for the pre-publication servers like arxiv.

But, when it comes to building whatever gizmo is required for the research or the computers required for the analysis or whatever, the funding needs to come from somewhere and the various EU programmes have a pretty good track record in both pooling the funding and in allocating reasonably fairly – some kind of horse trading has to go on.

Chip supply problems might mean Wi-Fi 6E is skipped over for Wi-Fi 7, says analyst

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Dell'Oro Group are obviously trying to talk up the next "new shiny"

True, but the network infrastructure is likely to have a longer refresh cycle. So, if as we are, you're looking to upgrade it this year, 6 is probably the way to go. 6E sounds like it was rushed out of the door to trumpet higher theoretical transfer rates through more unlicensed spectrum, when many of the advantages of ≥ 5 are down to better management on the way to a cellular network: more cells using less power means better coverage with less contention.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: WiFi infinity

It doesn't seem to do so here: two wifi repeaters in the house. Never have problems with my Android devices but all the Apple gear has to be cabled for when DFS kicks in and 5 GHz channels get disabled at the behest of the local airport.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: WiFi infinity

It's one of the "benefits" of LTE / WiFi convergences. Phones will know already use WiFi connections for calls if they're available with the reason being that WiFi is likely to better indoors than the local LTE signal. The next step is for even more integration so that the networks can use more of our gear for their signals. So get on and install that WiFi-repeater in your garden!

Arm's $66bn sale to Nvidia is off: Deal collapses after world's competition regulators raise concerns

Charlie Clark Silver badge

ARM was doing fine as a public company before it was bought by Softbank for a classic public/private/sale flip.

The market continues to grow and, if it can stay independent, it acts more or less as a licence pool for its licencees. This is less spectacular than other models but has served it and its customers very well over the last twenty years and as long as licence costs don't dominate the BoM there is little to fear from RISC-V, which the company can also participate in.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

They'll want to do it as quickly as possible before interest rate rises deflate the market. And, of course, taking it public is probably just a precursor to a tie up with nVidia at some point in the future.

That's a signature move: How $320m in Ether was stolen from crypto biz Wormhole

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Total scam...

Or, "anything complicated enough to look like magic is probably a scam". Cui bono should apply but this is one of those things where people are prepared to believe in magic.

Cryptocurrencies, etc. seem to feed two urges in people: "mining" feels like money for nothing; unregulated means the government can't get its hands on it. You'll never stop people piling into something for the first and as for second: while it's certainly true that banks get up all kinds of shenanigans, the reason we have regulation is because before it things were a lot worse!

Out of beta and ready for data: 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is here

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Re: A silly idea from a silly person...

For most things an RPi4 is as fast a fairly modern notebook. It has lots of cores so can handle lots of processes with aplomb. But you won't find one with 32 GB RAM.