* Posts by Charlie Clark

12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Happy

Cue the adverts for Chesters Beer with Dawn French… sadly I've not been able to find them, but along with they're up with the old Boddingtons ones. Personchester wouldn't be called Personchester without Chesters. And to think, back then, that was funny. No doubt there people with too much time on their hands willing to pounce on such obviously sexist place names and they'll probably hold up the supposed origin of Mamcunium (fort between the breasts - the mounds in Castlefield) as evidence!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

You're probably right, but I'm stuggling to think of a police force that might be considered better. Certainly not the Met. They may never have had James Anderton but it's difficult to beat their record of institutionalised graft, racism, sexism and violence.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

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Stop

Bait & Switch

I suspect the whole thing is an attempt to stop people who've ordered one from cancelling their orders and thus making cashflow even more difficult. Talk up the product to keep the suckers attention. What will the next wheeze be? That, with a small modification or add-on, it can fly?

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

There's always been competition for private hire services, which is what Uber provides. Taxis are considered in many countries as part of public transport and regulated accordingly. It's true that in some countries, restrictive practices such as the artificial limit of licences apply but the solution to that is simply to change the practice.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Because do what I say not what I do is part of the pathology of narcisists. They really don't think the rules they propagate apply to them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Didn't Herbal Life do just that?

I seem to recall that US advertising is generally a free for all with the truth being the first victim. However, regulation means that companies can be held liable for their claims. This is what leads to the schizonphrenic world that is at the same time paranoid about what the FDA might say about the publication of trial data and the massive advertising campaigns for drugs once they've been approved.

Generally unlimited liability tops free speech and the current case against Purdue and the Sackler family may reassert this.

Android iMessage app Beeper releases working update of blue-bubbled tool

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Being able to reverse engineer protocol and encryption that are both proprietary suggests that neither are secure.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

What is competitive about Apple's messaging app? In fact, this is anti-competitive behaviour.

Add to that, if someone has managed to reverse engineer message protocl and encryption, anyone using them should be worried.

Microsoft to intro dedicated mode for Cloud PCs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Windows 365 Boot?

Lots of companies already use RDP / Citrix, etc. This can reduce maintenance and data centre overheads. The risks include putting all your data onto someone else's servers. But when has that ever stopped the beancounters?

Theora video codec to be coded out from Chrome and Firefox

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Good god! Let's keep the W3C and its glacial decision making process out of this!

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

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Re: Wow!

And they normally have something to offer them. Consider Mr Slant in Ankh-Morpork…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Wow!

Yes, but they generally have good relations with Lawyers from Hell. Otherwise, how do you think they would survive so long?

Musk takes SEC 'Twitter sitter' consent decree appeal to US Supreme Court

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What's the problem?

The SEC regulates public companies: it sets the rules and listed companies agree to abide by them. Musk broke the rules and agreed to the deal in lieu of a court case – as most companies to to avoid further liability cases. Courts have thus far upheld the decision because Musk entered the agreement voluntarily.

In summary, this looks more like childish thirst for vengeance than a credible legal strategy. Indeed, continuing to pursue it could lead to action from shareholders concerned that the repuational damage is affecting their assets.

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

Charlie Clark Silver badge
FAIL

Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

You have got this totally wrong. Go back and read up on the facts. And while you're doing that, you might want to check on the similarities and differences on unions in Scandinavia versus those in the UK and the US. Union membership is common in Scandinavia, but days lost to strikes are very low.

Musk's position is that, as he's such a great employer, no one needs collective bargaining. This is sophistry at best, cynical bullshit at worst. His libertarian capitalism is predicated on extracting the maximum added value from employees and the supply chain and he will sack anyone who disagrees with his decisions on this matter. He will always argue from the position that capital is better than labour.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

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Re: With the death of WordPad

RTF isn't a plaintext file format. Just use ReST or Markdown and pipe the result through a syntax highlighter, Sphinx or Pandoc.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Options for MacOS

I generally use TextMate on MacOS as it supports an awful lot of text file formats and comes with some pretty useful commands, including copying highlighted code as RTF for KeyNote. It does struggle with very large files and won't reclaim memory. Other people prefer BBEdit, though this doesn't know ReST which I use for documentation, but it's nice to have a choice.

Notepad++ is self-contained and can be run from a stick which is always useful.

I generally use Nano on unix as I can usually remember the keybindings I need or find them quickly. Neither vi nor Emacs are suitable for the casual user.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How much does FB benefit from nonFB users ?

That's not quite right. As I said, the contract is initially between your contact and Facebook. Certainly, they are then contractually obliged to store and process that data only in accordance with… and maybe they do: it's all hashed and used only to provide the services to the user…, or as many of us suspect, they're using the data to build their own shadow networks. Personally, I don't trust them, have never used any of their services, and have them blacklisted on most devices,

Have you been in contact with them to see what data they have on you? Somehow I suspect the conversations might be similar to those the FBI had with Philip K. Dick.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How much does FB benefit from nonFB users ?

The breach is technically being carried out by the person who uploads the data: we're all under an obligation there. After that, we don't have any proof as to what they're doing, though we suspect it. It's possible, of course, that they're using one way hashes which might get them out of the "processing personal data". I guess this is why we haven't seen any lawsuits.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How much does FB benefit from nonFB users ?

The shadow profiles they build are not necessarily a breach of GDPR: the data has been provided freely by other people.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I personally like to send and receive birthday and Christmas cards; I gave up giving them to all sundry long ago. And I very much dislike seeing the same trending clip or GIF repeatedly. It takes a couple of minutes more to send a card, that means you're making time to do so.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

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Re: Delusional narcissist

I certainly agree that his personality traits quickly come to the fore: he loves to attack, makes insincere apologies only when he thinks he has to, and quickly goes back on them.

What investors should worry about is that the companies who are withdrawing their accounts now, are the ones with the beancounters telling them to do so. Those with a conscience left a long time ago. Those who stayed, stayed because they thought it was still good business. Having seen a couple of commercial presentations from Twitter I at least understand the pitch they were trying to make. It was sketchy then and that was, for better or worse, when it had a near monopoly in some areas: politics, fashion, music. Fashion and music have left, leaving pretty much only the politicians and lazy journos. Difficult to see Disney's or IBM's target audience being there.

Goldman sacked: Apple 'wants out' of credit card collab

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For a while Google was threatened with being regulated as a bank because it was so cash rich.

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Re: I just don't get ..

Ah, so another loss leader to atract customers.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

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Re: Postal Service

It does say this: The Swedish Transport Agency has now received an interim decision from the Norrköping district court to consent within 7 days to Tesla collecting license plates directly from our sign manufacturer. It appears from the decision that our sign manufacturer has announced that it is prepared to provide the signs directly to Tesla.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Postal Service

Tesla can go and collect them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: FFS

In much of Northern Europe the governments prefer to keep out of collective bargaining negotiations. This means less politics and more leeway for unions and employers to find agreements that suit the situation. Consensus generally means higher productivity and fewer days lost to strikesWe had a couple of decades of government involvement and this didn't work very well: politicians often made bad laws to look good.

Don't forget that all tax returns are public so workers will know if they're earning more or less than their colleagues.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Tesla should deal

I'd question the veracity of such sources. Collective bargaining is standard in Sweden and this kind of posturing will do Tesla no good there. If Musk doesn't like the labour practices in the country nobody will force him to do business there.

FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Version numbers are not what you think

The pace of development of FFmpeg has been speeding up slightly in recent years, given that it took 13 years to get to version 2.0.

For a long time, you couldn't tell much from a software projects version numbering which many of them particularly keen to avoid major releases – think of the openssl scheme. But more and more have since adopted more lax definitions of major.minor.patch or have gone all the way to time-based-releases.

I would also question the author's assertion tht FFMPEG is used by the streaming services. They may well use it in some areas but only when they can't use hardware compression, which depending on OS and hardware isn't always available.

And FFMPEG, while great, is a beast so many of use frontends like Handbrake to handle most projects.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Pint

That's going to be a whacky off-licence when it opens!

What could be better than living above an off-licence?

Living in one!

My favourite Comic Strip. https://youtu.be/xtUPJZfHmz8?t=608

German budget woes threaten chip fab funding for Intel and TSMC

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Good

I don't mind subsidies for strategic challenges, but both these projects were going to just more expensive white elephants with subsidies per created job in the millions of Euros. That money could be much better spent on infrastructure, just not the roads.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Debt brake released

We've had lots of such declarations since the debt brake was introduced, this one will pass and be legal. The amount of borrowing for 2024 and beyond could be more difficult to obtain.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Debt brake released

Yes, but that won't give them all the funds they want for these jollies.

Europe's Ariane 6 rocket rated 'ready to rumble' after passing hot fire test

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ESA in one of its regular, but fortunately not frequent, spats about politics and money.

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Re: Capacity that made it competitive with SpaceX's Falcon 9.

It's back-to-front, because the Ariana 5 has been going for so long. Ariane 5 was for a while to only alternative for commecial satellite launches and was itself the benchmark for SpaceX.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

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Re: Mmmmm

It sounds like you still don't understand that the OpenAI company is a subsidiary of a non-profit. This is why Microsoft never got a seat on the board.

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

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Stop

Re: Ariane 240/250

This contradicts what you say above.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Ariane 240/250

Being your own best customer isn't always a good thing: ask any barman! One of things it does do is muddy the accounts and this is true across many of Musk's companies.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

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OpenAI is not a company

Most coverage of this story, including this article, ignore the formal structure of OpenAI where the commercial entity is subordinate to a non-profit. Hence, Microsoft's investment is only within the commercial entity. But governance is important and it has long been reported that Altman's desire to raise the value of the commercial entity has put him at odds with the aims of the non-profit parent. This will make any resolution tricky and it also means that Microsoft might end up with another turkey: copyright suits against Microsoft can expect much higher settlements than against a non-profit.

Your password hygiene remains atrocious, says NordPass

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What about sites that force you to make it easier?

Note, the new authentication methods are not necessarily any better (and biometrics is particularly tricky) but they do change liability, almost invariably meaning that the provider of the service is never liable.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Trick question: both will turn up in rainbow tables for unsalted hashes.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What about sites that force you to make it easier?

Current BSI (German Office of IT Security) recommendation is 12 characters and no rotation: rotation being one of the reasons to choose simpler passwords.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's ejection sparks theories as odd as some ChatGPT output

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Eric Schmidt's VC Bullshit

Apart from a great name for a band, it's revealing to read how Schmidt views Altman: purely in terms of the valuation (not how much money it makes (or loses)) of the company he runs. Obviously, in the Valley that's all that matters.

Now, this is not an attack on Altman, who's talented and hard-working if more than a little odd in his outlook, merely an observation on how investors will do anything to make us think only about about the money they're making. OpenAI has certainly done a lot to make machine learning accessible but a lot of this was down to the non-profit status. Since then, there's been the massive potential copyright breaches of ChatGPT, DALL-E and the like. And this is typical abuse of the commons by companies to make as much money as possible before the world catches up and notes that it's had something taken from it. If high valuations are good, then the companies are good, right?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The board that sacked him would have to go before he returned.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft beams back a 'Hello' from 10 million miles away

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Re: Great work!

Just copying what the original article says doesn't make it right, including the moon-earth comparison, multiple of AU would have been better (about 9, I think).

And this isn't just dogmatic metric versus imperial; it's what's used in the field.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Great work!

Please, this standardisation on US units is insane when it comes to science which sticks with SI and derived units for a reason. 10^9 m should either be expressed as km or using astronomical units (light seconds, minutes etc.) when distances get really, well, astronomical.

But let this rant not detract from what really is a fantastic achievement!

Francis Maude mulls mulligan on muddled merger of UK govt tech services

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: David Cameron and those sunny coalition years

If you look at the actual economics, there never really was much austerity as the % of GDP spent on government services hardly changed. Not that many services didn't suffer from the lack of investment, because they did. But austerity was just never what it was supposed to be.

Philip Coggan wrote extensively and interestginly about this while he was at The Economist. Here's one example. Might be behind a paywall but well worth the read if you can get past it.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Francis Maude

Francis Maude! God another throw back to Maggie's boy middle-aged band of the 1980s. No redeeming qualities and I was surprised he was still alive when he was brought back into to cause trouble. By the look of him, I think he was too!

Wish you could sing like Charli XCX or possess any musical talent? YouTube AI might make that happen

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Re: Who?

Legend has been around for over 20 years. Hasn't Dylan already sold his back catalogue: he wants to live in the here and now, yeah baby!

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Happy

Possibly, though he's been a bit quiet recently. Is he off with Nige to Australia? Or will he be helping Suella with her leadership bid? Or is simply enjoying the silky prose of Nadine's The Plot?

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Happy

Rip van Winkle

Happy to wait a century or so!