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!
Posts by Charlie Clark
12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
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Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up
Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck
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
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
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
Microsoft to intro dedicated mode for Cloud PCs
Theora video codec to be coded out from Chrome and Firefox
BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus
Musk takes SEC 'Twitter sitter' consent decree appeal to US Supreme Court
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
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
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
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.
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.
Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos
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
Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz
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.
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.
FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic
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?
German budget woes threaten chip fab funding for Intel and TSMC
Europe's Ariane 6 rocket rated 'ready to rumble' after passing hot fire test
Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing
SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion
OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?
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
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's ejection sparks theories as odd as some ChatGPT output
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?
NASA's Psyche spacecraft beams back a 'Hello' from 10 million miles away
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
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.
Wish you could sing like Charli XCX or possess any musical talent? YouTube AI might make that happen
Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU
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