* Posts by Charlie Clark

12082 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: There's nothing particularly wrong with it except for its hardware requirements.

FWIW, Android will happily accept multiple users for the Playstore. I think most data grabbing (location, SSIDs, location, etc.) is done for aggregation for selling elsewhere, e.g. in search suggesting when certain places are busiest. Google goes a long way to force people to use Chrome, Maps, et al. where accepting ads is part of the T&Cs to be able to use them in a way that the device account does not.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Start right, now

The pricing is a mix both of additional real costs and developers wanting to push people towards higher volume units. Many changes that would have an effect could be done at minimal marginal cost. And, again, anything you can do to reduce aggegrate demand effectively reduces future energy prices.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Capacity

As the temperature drops, the pump has to work harder to extract energy from the source. This drives down efficiency and increases electricity use approaching 1:1, from 3-4:1. At which point it would be better just using electric heating directly. As electricity prices vary widely between countries, it's impossible to say any particular system makes financial sense. However, from a neutral perspective, it's reasonable to sugges that any system that uses power from the grid isn't helping to reduce aggregate demand.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
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Re: Capacity

Thanks for the link: Norway has, of course, very cheap electricity compared to other countries… Also, the ground-sourcing (GSHP) has to be deeper: 2m is recommended here, which makes a big difference. It's then largely a matter of digging a big hole in the ground and laying the pipes; the paper goes into detail about more sophisticated and expensive pumps. But these only make sense on a street/district level, which may be less relevant in Norway due to the lower population density.

From the conclusion: GSHP technology requires a high initial investment, while it can be more economical in the long term…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Our boiler has separate outputs with different temperatures. As the boiler itself heats water to the same temperature anyway, it usually mixes cold water to achieved the desired temperature for the relevant circuit. BTW at least here in Germany 55°C is the recommended temperature to prevent Legionella. Have legions of thermostats and hygrometers in the house and a strict regime about how to open windows (only ever fully) to ventilate.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I think a key point is not letting the house cool down too much: 16°C is considered the minimum to avoid problems with damp. You normally use more energy trying to warm something up that you let go cold rather than just keeping it warm.

Other than that: lucky you! Our place seems to require quite a bit more than that but then it is 100 years old.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Technical question - advice politely requested

Panel heaters only when alternatives are not available: all that power incurs additional but hidden capital costs required to generate it all. So, heat pumps, preferably ground-sourced, and solar thermal have important roles to play in reducing total aggregate demand. One idea that has been floated is making utilities the owners of the equipment and requiring that they fit it. This would have the advantage of spreading the capital costs across all customers (and paying to reduce max capacity makes sense for us all) and rollout much more structured. We are talking enormous sums of money but not that much more than, say, building a few new nuclear plants and it starts paying off much faster.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Technical question - advice politely requested

I love induction. But using electricity to heat anything is usually the worst alternative, which is why it's generally the most expensive. Though gas turbines are vastly more efficient that a gas cooker, you'll still find it cheaper to use gas.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Start right, now

Yes, building codes can be changed for much better thermal efficiency at relatively little cost. But this will only affect new buildings. It's possible to follow the German model and extend it to cover existing properties when these are sold or rented when "energy passports" are required: this is good at encouraging insulation, better windows and more efficient boilers over time.

But, as recent German politics have shown, this is nothing like enough to make up the shortfall and it also presupposes equipment and technicians in numbers that don't exist yet and cannot be created organically in the appropriate time.

But there are many other approaches that can reduce the total energy requirements. Proto-hippy, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has for years being arguing that giving the poor energy efficient tech is in our own best interests, because anything that reduces generating capacity will, over time, reduce costs. So, LED bulbs for everyone. Washing machines should all have hot water intakes. Electric water heaters should be replaced. If we can start reducing our need for power generation, we will find transition a lot cheaper. NB. this probably means finding an alternative for batteries in vehicles because EVs are a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Capacity

Under what conditions can they produce 16 kW? They can only extract energy from where it is and there isn't a lot in air < 4°C.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Capacity

No, CO2 can catalytically reduced to CO forms hydrocarbons with hydrogen at the right temperature and pressure. This has potentially much higher yields than electrolysis. But there are also some Perovskites that will reduce CO2 to C + O2 in the right conditions.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Capacity

Hydrogen doesn't even need faults to leak, which is why all the pipes and all equipment would have to be replaced. Fortunately, however, there's no way of producing and storing the hydrogen required.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Capacity

It was a clear example of magical thinking to look good while kicking the can down the road. All the science says that hydrogen is useless for anything but transforming at the point of use. Add to this the enormous problem of how do you produce all that hydrogen. This is why ammonia is being touted both as the way to transport hydrogen over distance, and even as a fuel source: apparently Toyota has an ammonia engine ready for cars.

Air-sourced heat pumps are a bad idea for anywhere that gets cold and doesn't have oodles of cheap energy. Yields decline quickly as the temperature drop because water vapour in the air is the main source of energy for pumps. Ground-sourced heat pumps are a much better option for northern Europe, but only then where plots are large enough. Where possible this can be combined with solarthermal heating and solarelectric for power. This could make a lot more residential properties self-sufficient. But it's pretty useless for cities.

I'm still hoping that we'll learn from nature and develop closed-loop e-fuel systems for individual or district use. These will use the abundant energy in the summer to produce hydrocarbons that can be used in the winter. Any excess can be sold off, but it has to be at market prices. But I'm open to alternatives that follow the same principle: make hay while the sun shines.

You snooze, you lose? It's not quite as simple as that

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Clock

While I agree that everyone has a different clock, most of us are disposed to sleep as sunlight decreases so "being awake until 3 am" is probably not natural*. However, lots of people have trouble getting to and then staying asleep. I've definitely got better at getting to sleep by having fairly regular bed times, but I still frequently wake up sometimes for hours in the middle of the night and that make some snoozing in the morning invaluable!

* I've that my body clock ajusts quite clickly to the solar one on holiday in the countryside where additional stimulants are minimal. Short post-prandial naps also feel very natural.

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Thermodynamics

I think the key measure is whether the energy management system kicks into throttle the CPU if it gets too hot.

As for heating the local environment: electricity is usally the most expensive way to heat and this only makes sense when it's cold. So best avoided where possible.

X marks the bot: Musk thinks spammers won't pay $1 a year

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: You'll like this...

That's because it's not about the bots. They're just an excuse for some market research.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "It is not a profit driver"

The $1 probably won't cover the associated costs so this is more of a filter to see who's prepared to pay. Once that's been determined, the price can be increased to the appropriate level of pain.

Musk understands loss-leading as a way to gain market share but I just hope more people realise that all these services are pretty much interchangeable and switch.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Thanks for the belly laugh, I needed that

Bill Gates was one of those who suggested charging for e-mails. This was after discovering the internet couldn't be owned and that Windows machines were particularly susceptible to infestation. Solultion: make the victims pay!

As it prepares to abandon its on-prem server products, Atlassian is content. Users? Not so much

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Several issues....

Right, but the export step can't be the reason for choosing Confluence. Curently, moving a DOCX to ReST, so I can manage the damn thing over time and sphinx + rhino to create the PDF. Elsewhere the network ports are in Confluence… In another project, the developer documentation is in Confluence. Call me an old stick in the mud, but I text helps me concentrate on the content and quite a few editors provide the tools to make editing easier. Maybe if Confluence would deign to store stuff in ReST I wouldn't complain as much.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Peak cloud ?

I suspect SaaS bills will get a lot of scrutiny over the next few months as the beancounters start looking for ways to save money.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Several issues....

I'd be interested to know what Confluence is good for beyond wikis, or, as in the case of anything technical, ReST or Markdown files that sit in VCS. Exporting from Confluence is a particular nightmare with only two formats offered: PDF or Word.

I've currently got a project that has the repos on Github but uses Jira and Confluence for management and documentation, with some additional stuff scattered over Sharepoint. And no repo for the database schema!

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Priority check

It's very difficult to burn hydrocarbons completely efficiently, though modern turbines are very good. However, the idea behind SAFs is that the carbon comes from the atmosphere so the CO2 will eventually be recycled. Lots of caveats, but significantly better than burning fossil fuels.

Carbon released into the upper atmosphere will not cause breathing problems for us on the ground but the carbon does act as a seed for contrails, which are the biggest problem associated with aircraft emissions.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Corn source a bad sign

I suspect for your farm you probably can produce enough bioethanol from waste matter. This is also common in rural France where the tractors (and the farmers) will run on pretty much anything.

The bigger problem is when areas are devoted to crops for bioethanol and other products for fuel. These schemes almost invariably involve using synthetic fertilisers, made from petrochemicals, which means they're effectively obfuscating the source of the fuel, and negating any notional carbon offsets. As these schemes are nearly always subsidised they can also drive up land prices as subsidised corn for fuel has higher returns than corn for food. This is certainly the case with E5 / E10 in Europe, something to which some Greens – notably Robert Habeck in Germany – have belatedly noticed, but proposals to scrap the schemes were knocked back by an industry grown fat on subsidies. Similar things are also happenin with solar farms, even though mixed use (raise panels over crops) and in many cases even desirable.

Sigh, the field of good intentions…

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Deja vu?

Yes, I don't think I'm suggesting anything really new but I would argue that the tools now available are better at helping non-technical users through the discovery process: ML models that "understand" data structures from descriptions combined with generative ones for more probing; essentially imitating the interview process but allowing the user to set the pace.

For reliable data processing of the sort discussed in the article, the schema must be rigid. So the kind of human detection/intervention you suggest only comes into place when data is provided that doesn't fit. Now, it could then very easily be down to transposed columns that can be fixed just as easily; and perhaps a monitoring system could make the suggestion. But the important thing is that the data wouldn't be imported automatically. I.e. this is about combining ML and human approaches effectively while avoiding the mistakes of trying to automate everything.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I don't why she swallowed a fly

Sorry, but while I agree with the diagnosis, the proposed solution reminds me of the old rhyme (sung forever in my mind by Burl Ives) of the old woman who swallowed a fly.

What you actually describe is a failure to enforce the data model and the solution for this would be to help users to model the data they want so that this can be enforced and deviations immediately raise errors.

Spreadsheets are great for ad hoc reports but absolutely terrible for storage and workflows, so anything that uses them should remove all processing from Excel, leaving it to be a GUI for looking at tabular data. It's very good at this, which explains its enduring popularity.

From a programmer's perspective we think it should be easy to define the schema, implement whatever workflows are required and forget it. But decades of experience have shown us that many business are unable to do something like define a schema (and let's leave out some of the trickier questions of data types and indices), though they can come agonisingly close. We do now have the tools that give users more expressive power, I'm thinking here of the combination of Jupyter notebooks and Pandas. How about at adding some kind of iterative process allowing them to specify the schema by answering business questions? This allows them to bring their knowledge of the situation to the table rather than hoping ML will spot random anomalies. AI could certainly help suggest questions and drive a graph that would lead to the right kind of schema.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Invalid comparison with Microsoft

The tactic worked, so Microsoft did it again, with the new .DOCX format in Office 2007… presumably realizing that its new "ribbon" UI would hinder adoption.

No, Microsoft was proposing a new DOC version for Office 2007, but was forced by several governments to switch to an "open" file format that would become OOXML, which is essentially an XML version of the previous BIFF one. Though it should also be recognised that Office 2007 and later did need a format to support some of the new features, such as much much bigger worksheets in Excel.

I think the Gnome fuckery is closer to Microsoft's fiddling around with APIs and desktop layouts in Windows, so MFC to .NET to whatever it is today. A royal PITA for a lot of developers.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Coming to a fork in the road

I'm trying to think of a situation where you'd be so heavily invested that a move to one of the BSDs wasn't possible and the only things I can think of are hardware support, because there are Linux drivers for pretty much everything; a heavy Docker/Kubernetes environment. For servers the differences are marginal and the BSDs consistency and stability would be a welcome change.

But as this isn't really my area, I'm interested to learn more.

MariaDB ditches products and staff in restructure, bags $26.5M loan to cushion fall

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: forced to explain to customers...

I'd certainly agree that Postgres has got faster, better and more features, especially the ones for bigger commercial users. This is why there is now a reasonable commercial ecosystem around including migration off Oracle.

But while MySQL has become less buggy under Oracle's stewardship but to suggest it's anything like near Postgres' features is nonsense. Oracle, which is still doing the majority of the development, is never going to give MySQL most of the features that it can charge customers a small for fortune for OracleDB. It essentially offers MySQL plus support contracts. It was always going to be difficult for MariaDB to get anywhere in this environment if it was hoping that the never-Oracle crowd would also contain people prepared to pay for support and maintenance.

Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Video bloggers for Jira

I'm not entirely opposed to the idea but I'm wondering if this is really anything more than what millions of YouTubers seem to have mastered in a myriad of How-To videos? Some of these can be very useful but the tools are far less important than the ability of the person to create a coherent narrative.

US venture capitalist spending continues to slide, hits six year low in Q3

Charlie Clark Silver badge
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Re: To be expected

"almost zero interest" decribes what's called fiscal repression where savers are effectively penalised for not spending, while creditors see their liabilities decline and are encouraged to borrow (effectively seize) more.

The VC is much vaunted in the press but the numbers don't look so good over time. We've just had 14 years of unusally good conditions for it which has justified all the growth at all costs strategies.

Brit competition regulator will make or break Vodafone and Three union

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Shareholders invest only once when shares are issued.

Lots of companies don't pay dividends and shareholders are happy to go along with this if they think the share price will go up. They also tend to approve of the actions of the boards that are detrimental to the company, such as leveraged buyouts that many telcos have been involved in. Only fair that they should also pay the price for the consequences and stop rubber-stamping board decisions so often.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I'd quibble at the term "closely-regulated". Can't remember many of the regulators really doing much since privatisation. It's usually been pretty light touch: "let us know whey you're doing something you shouldn't".

To your main point: the utilities are generally required to provide common access so that the road doesn't need digging up when the service provider changes. This obviously doesn't apply to mobile networks which initially used network coverage as a competitive advantage. However, for a while now many mast sites are shared to reduce costs and, indeed, some of them no longer own the network or mast sites. This means there is little to be gained from additional consolidation or things like roaming where one network has coverage and another doesn't.

Three, that's the number, providers isn't enough to provide competition, but two would just be a prelude to price hikes. Rather than getting the customers to bail out the greedy shareholders, it would be better for the networks to find ways to reduce their debts such as forcing creditors to swap debt for equity Or shareholders to accept the writedowns they've been avoiding for years.

Microsoft drops official support for Python 3.7 in Visual Studio Code

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "Python has moved to an annual cadence for end of life"

Agreed that most of the recent changes have had little effect on existing code. There's a lot of new stuff that people may never need or not for a few years. The exception is perhaps extension writers because the C-API has seen, and will continue to see, a lot of changes. That said, I'm not that keen on the change to yearly releases. None of the changes justify this and there is a cost in assessing new versions and running tests. And, people who've worked with the newer versions might struggle with the challenges of integrating new language features into an existing codebase.

And now for something completely different: Python 3.12

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Ternary hell

In over twenty years of working with Python code I've never found this to be a problem. It happens occasionally and is easy to fix but most editors mean you don't have to think about it.

The people who complain about whitespace in Python are usually those who've never used it, but find their software stack is often full of Python tools.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Ternary hell

I think you answer your second question yourself.

I've never liked ternary expressions and avoid the Python version preferring full boolean evaluation. It's not much more typing but it is more explicit. Ternarys were added to Python because people kept demanding them but I don't think they're frequent in practice. Having read enough nested ternarys in my time, I'm very much against this kind of abbreviation over clarity. YAGNI is a good argument for not introducing something – I'm looking at the "walrus" monstrosity.

What I think will gain more traction over time is the newish match…case construction. Though this has quite a few quirks and gotchas in it that probably need working out first before it sees wide adoption.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: concurrency is not parallelism

I've been using the red-haired uncle of async: yield from for about a decade.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: You monster

I think the example is given to illustrate the quality of the parser now that the rules have been established.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The GIL was a design decision that made a lot of sense at the time. And it still makes sense in many cases now. Removing it will happen but it will take time to do it right. Larry Hastings gave an excellent talk on why, why not, and how at PyCon a few years ago.

5G satellite briefly becomes brightest object in night sky

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Astronomy tax

You're right in principle but wrong in fact. The light pollution on earth affects the man in the street and hobby astronomers, but not the main telescopes and observatories. These were placed away from built up areas to avoid those problems.

But light pollution does have measurable effects on insects and birds. This could be solved with laws, ordinances but the arseholes responsible tend to get all high and mighty about having their freedom restricted.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Astronomy tax

A tax or levy is probably a great idea. It could be used to help pay for cleaning up the mess. The problem is: who gets the money? And how you get all launching countries onboard?

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Have you ever seen what Google Chrome "prefetches"? That alone is a reason to avoid it.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Jira is the single source of suckage

I've never liked Bugzilla which looks like it was designed to force someone to make it look better.

I've not used Jira much but find it too much for issue tracking, which is all many people need.

Confluence is probably the worst wiki tool I've come across and a terrible idea. Documentation is much better use plaintext and build systems like Sphinx + Read The Docs. But the C-Suite will always prefer to buy and seems impervious to the idea of vendor lock-in.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: re: Though for no obvious reason.

The Nazi comparison is own valid in the rather disturbing trend towards denunciation in the name of progress. Stating biological facts and quesitioning interpretations has led to criticism, threats and even unemployment for some scientists.

But this has nothing to do with Twitter.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: If you think X commentary is bad and misinforming .......

You are H L Mencken's ghost and I claim my $5! :-D

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: And Yet

Agreed, it's because journalists are lazy. However, I have noticed a decline in such citations over the last year or so. This is as much down to the rise of other platforms, especially Telegram and Instagram, as to whatever Musk is up to. He's managed to annoy advertisers but lazy journalists are not that easily dissuaded.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Twitter / X is a sewer

This is what most of the subscribers want.

Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Possibly, but also the increasingly nepotistic (investors themselves sit on the boards of other companies) and monopsidic (owned by fewer and fewer but larger and larger funds) ownership structures.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The majority is all that matters. The real question is why do investors choose to buy into companies with this kind of share structure?

LG has its own folding PC now, but good luck getting your hands on one

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Surely this is just a fad

I don't think the comparison with 3D TVs is at all valid, not least because this is really a step change in production, whereas 3D TV screens were essentially the same as before. The phones selling very well in South Korea and the users are very happy with them. As the technology becomes more mature I can imagine it feeding into other less premium products. Then we can all wait for Apple to invent it! :-)

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Probably not on cold, dark nights when all the heat pumps have drained the batteries…