Posts by Charlie Clark 12180 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
I've never been very comfortable with the use of dark to express "unknown", "missing" might be better but we really need something that is both expressive but not everyday so that it can't crop up in other contexts. As has been said, they're placeholders for observed phenomena (rotation of galaxies and expansion) that can't account for with current theories.
My phone's IP is public IPv4 but the cable connection is public IPv6. From the same provider… The 6to4 gateway is handled by the network and this is the way it should be.
The transition to IPv6 is important but it's even more important that it should happen seamlessly with the great unwashed masses not needing to know or care.
It was never essential except for the idiotic "social media managers" that thought it was. Once it turned out you could automate the publication of press releases to Twitter, there was a wave of pink slips.
Instagram and since then TikTok showed where the real money "brand awareness" was: product placement and endorsement by people with body image issues.
Weirdly, it's both: price caps also mean less investment. Though I'm not sure if price caps were removed there would be more investment.
Basically water, like most of the privatised utilities, has suffered from poor and inadequate regulation since privatisation: water meters should have been made compulsory; companies measured on the quality of their supplies and waste water treatment. Instead regulation focussed mainly on making the companies more attractive to investors.
I agree that he's not a complete idiot and he's been prepared to put his money into companies that the rest of the investment industry wouldn't touch: SpaceX and Tesla and not Uber or Groupon. But many of the investments have benefitted significantly from the cheap cost of debt since the financial crisis. This has made risky investments, well, less risky and it's no coincidence that his businesses flourished only after this. The buyout of SolarCity would have bankrupted him at another time and his debt-driven business model has allowed him to compete favourably with competitors. Hence, as interest rates rise, his companies margins fall as he starts to compete with competitors who finance their businesses from cashflow.
As for Twitter, I hope it fails and he and his fellow investors take a bath. It might teach others a lesson, for a short time at least.
I don't see your comment being relevant here, so it just sounds whiny. The vast majority of criticism of Twitter before and after Musk is not ideological: shit business model, platform full of crap, beloved by journalists because of the low barrier to entry.
Sure, whenever anything vaguely political pops up the flame wars tend to start, even more since the Americanisation of El Reg. But I find that there's still lots of people making good or at least humorous points. When that ceases to be the case I guess I'll move on.
You could argue that bird song is short and users identified with idea of being like the birds in the trees, though I always found it a bit naff. The 140 character limit stemmed from the restrictions in SMS, I think. Once you've established the brand it doesn't really matter, which is why rebranding is usually an expensive mistake, though tweaks are common: both Twitter and Dropbox got agencies to polish up their original ideas and Coca-Cola went through many iterations.
From the article I understand that the authors are proprosing yet another vulnerability database that authors are supposed to pay attention. So more work with no payoff. Seems like they don't understand open source development. Furthermore, it signs like it's based heavily on static code analyses and could, therefore, simply be part of any CI if it isn't already. And it's yet another Github-based project, meaning it will miss a lot of quite important open source libraries and all the proprietary ones.
At least Google's OSS Fuzz actively tests for exploits.
There's definitely the temptation to use the off-sheet funds for pet projects but there isn't that much available given what it's already been earmarked for. The military spending shortfall has little to do with Ukraine and everything to do with procurement at the MoD. They've been trying to reform this at least since Ursula von der Leyen was defence minister (she spent an awful lot on external consultants). But there is also a lack of production capacity for all the things they know they need to replace.
Intel renegotiated the deal to adjust the gearing so that Germany takes more of the risk, not surprising given how its sales have started to develop. The subsidies don't make sense: I think it's about € 1 million per job. But the real problem, which can't be solved by money, will be the ground water with Sachsen-Anhalt already effectively in permanent drought. This is a specialised fab that will have little or no resale value should Intel ever decide to walk away or, heaven forfend, go bankrupt. We've got several of these white elephants elsewhere in eastern Germany.
These subsidies won't create meaningful jobs and will effectively just hand money to corporate shareholders. We had this all before after unification: lots of promises, lots of subsidies, no significant jobs, companies pissed off when the tax breaks ran out. Magdeburg is also a terrible site for the Intel plant and will end up buggering the water table.
What annoys me is the apparent addiction journalists have for it, mistaking for something like a newswire but apparently unable to conceive that other equally questionable services are also available. I can't wait for the day when I stop reading "said on Twitter" on articles.
Given all the shit that's happened since he took over, I'd be surprised if revenues are only down 50%. That would sort of suggest he got things right: reduce operational expenditure by 80% but revenues only dip by 50%. The debt payments are irrelevant, the only thing that matters is that it's no longer his personal debt and now it's a problem for the accountants.
But none of this changes the fact that there are now more competitors out there providing a better service: Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, etc. are eating Twitter's, er, lunch.
At the end of the day, would the world end if it shut down tomorrow? No, thought not. Bring it on.
The real problem is the lack of liability: if companies using the nightmare that is Outlook + Exchange were able to seek redress from Microsoft then it might be forced to improve the products. In addtion, it uses proprietary protocols to restrict access by competing products to services.
The case is a waste of time – malice can't be demonstrated and "fair use" doesn't exist on the internet – but the court was chosen because it routinely sides with plaintiffs in the most ridiculous of cases and the aim may simply to tie up companies legally up and force them to settle out of court.
Depends a bit on the app. Signal detects a change of SIM card and will wipe existing messages even for the same phone number. However, BoJo had lackeys for that sort of thing and will have had to hand over his passcode in order to continue to do any kind of government business with the phone.
Once the discussions get down to the fee, even with residuals, then it's a done thing.
Mind you, I wouldn't mind if they started with sport: replacing the likes of Chrisitan Ronaldo with a digital twin can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned! :-D
Filming is one thing – but just because it's a public place does not give you the right to film whatever and whomever you want, which is why there are things called permits – but publishing is another. As long as something "is in the background" you'll usually be okay but if you film someone doing something you will very much need their permission to publish it.
I dunno: the practice of writing a bar above a "u" to distinguish it from an "n" can easily be mistaken for the diaresis of an umlaut. German road signage is awful. In fact, a lot of rules (and DIN norms like the one for telephone numbers) are defended to the death in the face evidence that they're over thought and often impractical.
Verdana has to be the worst of Microsoft's typeface disasters. Arial was used, I believe to avoid licensing costs, so it's a deliberately broken copy of Helvetica. Helvetica requires proprietary rendering which is why it still looks different on Mac than it does on Windows, and it's really shit on phones, which is why I stick with Lucida Grande which was developed for screen use.
Just don't put the device on the internet, or at least put a firewall (PiHole) between it and the internet. I also think the EU legislation can already be applied to some of these "premium" services. I guess we'll see some test cases in the courts over the next few years.
PS this is one of the few cases where it's "rein" not "reign".
Yes, a bit like Trump he thrives on publicity. This is a meritless case that ought to get thrown out. In some jurisdictions this can also carry a fine for wasting the court's time but I think US tort law is too screwed. If nothing else, it might make his future lawyer's fees even higher.
I don't see why they'd need to do this to write a review: these are summaries and not "new" works being passed off as original. Furthermore, if you think that this kind of negotiation is quick, cheap or easy, where have you been living for the last two decades? YouTube is full of far more egregious abuses of copyright, even in "transformative" works. One of the justifiable reasons for safe harbour provisions is that rightsholders can be considered to be guilty of restrictive practices. No, the solution here will be about ensuring attribution and defining fair use. Otherwise you just can bury the result behind a process that looks like humans are involved in The GPT Literary Review. Once some kind of process for attribution has been established then you can go after any "publisher" that fails to provide it with the full force of copyright law. As anyone who's ever a received an e-mail from Getty Images knows only too well!
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