Posts by Charlie Clark 12170 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
The upcoming soccer World Cup
World Cup has been trademarked so you have to write it and announce it always as the MAFIA™ World Cup.
I do like watching a good game of footy, whether it's a couple of amateur teams, or Platini's* France, as long as they're really having a go. But recently I really can't be arsed. Money has turned the players into mercenaries and tournaments into bazaars.
FCUM
* or other equally stylish playmaker: Best, Cruyff, etc.
it's forbidden to drive one on roads (when electric bicycles are allowed, don't ask for MPs to be coherent)
Well, there is history: everything used to be allowed to use the road until they were so many cars that this was no longer safe. Bikes and horses were allowed to stay.
It's pretty elementary road safety: bikes have reasonably low centres of gravity which means that the users fly off them less often and less far in accidents. E-bikes are pedal-assist only or need insurance…
Every now and then there is a new form of transport whose fans think it should be allowed to be used on the road. Then there are the accidents… and the next fashion.
Here in Düsseldorf we're seeing the usual explosion on rentable bikes crowding out parking spaces for bikes – Mobike has just arrived – but with little use. But we've also got electric mopeds. These are provided by the local utility company and seem like a good idea. First of all, there aren't that many of them but they do seem popular with young adults as a better fit than either a bike, not least because you can ride tandem on them, or a car which you need a licence for. Based on the anecdotal evidence of what I see on the streets I reckon they have the best utility rate of all the options.
Information, in Jorman, if you're interested in the details.
If that's the case, it was a pretty good price.
It's a big if, so the jury's still out on this until, if ever, it becomes clear what was sold.
Chinese companies routinely pay over the market price for assets as this gives them ways of moving capital around the usual restrictions, ie. they're not idiots when it comes to negotiating.
If a company is using it then its not legacy. Its thats simple.
Have an extra upvote for this. Asserting something is "legacy" is trying to shift the blame. From day one when you own it, it's your responsibility and failing to grasp this was at the heart of the problem. Why did your company not continually invest in keeping its security systems up to date? Why did your company not handle the software of any acquisitions better?
And what's worse, it would make their hardware cost unjustifiable.
Nah, the hardware prices are determined by what the market will bear. It's just retrospective justification to try and link thet two. Apple keeps expanding in the services area (music, film and tv, maps, health, home automation, automotive, payments…) and uses user data for this.
It's more like WinNT on DEC Alpha. OS/2 on anything was hobbled because OS/2 was a great OS for running Windows and DOS applications because you could give them each more RAM than they could ever get on DOS. The meant nobody bothered to develop native OS/2 apps regardless of what instruction set they were compiled for, but also that Windows on OS/2 on Power would be a dog without both Windows and the apps being recompiled for Power.
Intel effectively got Microsoft to kill WinNT on DEC by getting them to move off HAL. This meant more work for porting to the undoubtedly better hardware at a time when Intel was able to regularly boost clock speeds.
Given how compelling these devices look, I suspect full Linux builds will be available soon enough.
The lack of a need for binary code compatibility or emulator make these particularly suitable for non-Windows machines. As always, it will be the quality of the drivers, especially power management, that make or break them.
But my favourite OS is still Snow Leopard
I found that to be awful initially with lots of issues related to switching to x86_64 as standard and it seems they've continued to fuck up Bluetooth since then on a regular basis. The few releases have been pretty smooth except for the dumbing down: I switched to BusyCal atfer Calendar became too clever and the Disk Manager thing has become a toy.
Why can't I just type in 01234 567 890 or 010 56 52 58 and the app accepts the spaces for what they are instead of deleting them.
It doesn't actually delete them, which I would understand and it definitely does some normalisation so that it can check them against I-Message (which I never use because I'm never logged in). But more control would be welcome: options for as entered, country standard, personal standard would be my preference.
All they want to do is make as much margin for as little cost base as possible.
Is true of pretty much any manufacturer. But you forgot to throw in the walled garden, where they have even higher margins.
But the hardware is generally excellent. Last year I bought a new MacBookPro and went with the 2015 model which isn't full of stupid. At the time, there was nothing with comparable hardware specs (particularly battery and weight) for the price and I currently use all the ports with the HDMI suprisingly producing a signal good enough to survive transition via a DVI KVM to drive a 4K monitor. It's the hardware and the UnixOS without a relatively stable UI that makes it an attractive proposition for developers.
But I've never had and I-Phone or an I-Pad. I love my Kobo Aura One, my Samsung S5 and my new Planet Gemini, even if the latter could do with some of Apple's fit-and-finish.
I do think that Apple does need to up their game and get back to innovating, but with the money they're making they must be doing something right.
I've ben using BitBucket for years (before there was GitHub), initially because it was the service I was recommended and it used Mercurial, which I prefer but YMMV, but later on because I compared the T&C's and business models: BitBucket always had a revenue stream which gave it focus and less of a need to pimp user data; GitHub's business model was always hoping to find a way to monetise user data. And now it looks like they've succeeded. You can do a back of an envelope calculation as to how much MS thinks your code and programming metadata are worth for when they fold the service in LinkedIn and try and sell metrics to employers.
GitHub used to have the richer ecosystem for things like CI but these are now generally available for any (git) repo and BitBucket has continued to add its own features such as Pipelines.
XP and everything after still has the NT spaghetti-code kernel
NT's kernel wasn't that bad until they decided to put all the drivers in it so that it would run faster on x86 hardware rather than get Intel to make better chips. Still, it's not the kernel that's the problem but the multitude of APIs they've added, changed and broken over the years.
By allowing the core components of Windows to be open source, it'll help to create unofficial 'bare bones' forked editions of Windows which is fully legacy-compatible
This contradicts your initial in two ways: firstly, the unofficial versions would either be licensable, in which case they would compete with revenue; or not, which would make them useless for most users. Anyway, adding stupid UX shit to Windows has been common practice by OEMs for years.
More sense might be to open source the kernel, like Apple has done with Darwin. But seeing as Microsoft did make the whole source code available to selected users und the "shared code" initiative, it might be a bit moot as to whether this would be beneificial.
Windows update comes along and it will fix some bit of bad code…
Drivers have had to be signed since Vista so the old excuse of blaming developer isn't really available. For the customer it doesn't really who broke what but that something is broken. If this was because developers did something that they could get away with then Microsoft is just as much as fault for making this possible in the first place and presumably not by documenting correctly and signing the driver.
I suspect security versus is at the basis of this particular issue, as it is for so many.
Plenty of issues going from XP to 7
Not something I commented on, I was referring to updates over the lifecycle of the OS. Anyway, strictly it was XP to VIsta, which told you your hardware wasn't good enough, to 7. If the hardware was good enough for Vista abysmal presentation manager then 7 should have been a breeze.
Windows 10 seems to have had a lot of problems. I don't remember Windows 7 being so difficult. I only run it in a VM but it seems pretty stable.
The most recent Windows 10 release was a pig. A friend of mine spent some considerable time trying to find out why she could no longer scan using her Samsung/HP All-in-One. Eventually HP's support admitted that the scanner driver was broken by the Windows 10 Update.
Most mini-cab and taxi drivers are also self-employed. No different to Uber, etc.
Except for the small matter of being able to set their fees: Uber drives fees down by encouraging more drivers. It's good for Uber and possibly good for passengers, unless they suffer at the hands of one of the unlicensed drivers…
The practice of auctioning taxi licences is iniquitous but Uber and co is not the solution.
I thought research was suggesting that laughter fulfills a social function and is not restricted to primates.
Certain forms of humour do rely on fear – Feydeau said that the difference between farce and tragedy is timing – as exemplified in slapstick: we anticipate the custard pie or the anvil… That is laughter and humour are related but not the same.
A true AI would look at one video, then play the game several times to get the hand of it.
Have you ever seen kids learning like that? I see lots of very basic repetition.
Just as we don't need to overvalue Machine Learning, there's no need denigrate it at every opportunity. Personally, I can lots of opportunities for this kind of technology in taking over routine and repetitive tasks currently performed by people.
Yes, ITU is probably wrong. So is IP6, we need an IP8, with security & privacy designed in.
This brings two things to mind: the ilusion of sunk cost; and the illusion that the next version will solve all the problems of the current version.
There's no doubt that IPv6 isn't perfect, but, as the implementations show it does at least work and we have worked how to have both protocols working together.
Regarding going back to the drawing board I suggest that not only would this lead to the same kind of delay that we've seen with IPv6, but also that it wouldn't get traction. IPv6 installations are already big enough to dominate the near future, ie. industry will enforce IPv6 as a de facto standard. Much better to be thinking of ways of updating the protocols in the future with less disruption.
Hm... faster by design? Or a separate stack which is practically empty all of the time?
The "stack" is conceptional only – you're still moving electrons, photons or radio waves through the same propagator, with the same constraints.
It is certainly possible that a pure IPv6 setup could be faster due to better routing, but I suspect anecdotals comparisons are likely to have other causes.
So v6 can continue to grow at that rate
This is a dumb assumption. I think the only safe thing you can say about IPv6 adoption is that it will be erratic. Some carriers and countries will adopt wholesale while others avoid it. At some point there is likely to be an (or many) inflection point where adoption picks up significantly. This could be for technological (end of the road for NAT), regulatory, or financial (it becomes cheaper to run only IPv6 kit), but the important thing is minimal disruption to users.
Declaring that the suit cannot cover future actions seems a bit of sophistry and to fly in the face of other consumer protection legislation. Does anyone know whether it's possible to appeal against the decision? Otherwise I suspect an initiative to improve consumer protection legislation in the Netherlands is the way to go. This is going to happen sooner or later as software gets into more and more products. Giving manufacturers a get out of jail free card like this isn't going to wash forever.
As I understand it Russia's GDP is about the same as California's, or Belgium and the Netherlands combined.
More significant is the very poor distribution of that GDP, much of which finds its way into overseas accounts pretty quickly. This significantly limits the disposable income of many.
Going after Telegram is about the signal (sic) it sends to other rich ex-pats: we know where you live.
The most recent stats show decrease of alcohol consumption per capita by a factor of more than 2.
Last stats I saw showed that the average life expectancy for men was still in decline and significantly below OECD norms. But this stuff is all relative. Putin has weathered the double-whammy of lower oil prices and sanctions reasonably well and most Russians still compare their situation with 1990 – 2000. The cloud on the horizon are those born after 1990, but they're still a tiny percentage and, of thouse, a signficant number are of the usual nationalist persuasion.
Are there european social networks that would explode over night?
I'm not sure there needs to be. Growth over the last couple of years has been in messengers, particularly WhatsApp, and fashion-darling Instagram. WhatsApp is currently limited by use of the Signal protocol as to what Facebook can mine it for, though that is changing, but there are numerous drop-in replacements. For YouTube there is Vimeo.
Basically, it would be bad business to let users find out that they can live quite well without the snooping.
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