Posts by Charlie Clark

It wasn't really that long ago when that was pretty common: fresh small beer was a lot safer than much of the water.

Re: i need to get out more

So much beer is kept under pressure (CO2, etc.) now that it can't oxidise naturally nor does it provide a particularly good environment for the few microbes that can tolerate the alcohol.

Re: It's probably not actually "bad".

It's not light in general, it's UV that's causes changes in bottled beers. So the trend for clear glass for "lighter" beers, popular with the wimmin for the same reason that "light" cigarettes are, for taking to picnics is ironic. Then again most of those "light" beers are pretty tasteless anyway.

Re: Useless

The importance of a coronavirus vaccine is equal to the importance of any other flu vaccine.

I agree with this.

Never forget that the mortality has been overrated for other purposes.

While there has been some overstatement, particularly in Italy in the early days, there has also been some understatement, particularly in care homes before mass testing became available. With so many patients having other conditions it's also difficult to call in some cases. But, never suspect a conspiracy when incompentence will do.

And "malicious"?

Re: Other ways the world would be safer....

1) Locking people up at night.

Except that most acccidents happen in the home… Shoot everyone now and that will put a stop to that, and infections!

Re: Run-away techies pipe dreams meet problem-o-phile reasoning

That's how you get messes like the GDPR.

GDPR isn't a mess. It is largely an update of existing laws with new sanctions. You want some examples of sloppy laws where tech had an input? DMCA, Safe Harbour.

Re: Piper paying

Yes, but what he says seems to imply that the EU's GDPR isn't a problem but that other legislation inspired by or derived from it may have unintended consequences. For instance, the German phone networks have been providing anonymised phone location data to the Robert Koch Institute to help their modelling for months now and this is okay within the bounds of GDPR, but this might not be possible in other countries.

Elsewhere it should be noted that Google and the other titans have been lobbying intensely to get hold of patient data. This is, in my opinion, an accident waiting to happen as.

As for off-premise commerce: it's been happening for decades with things like catalogues. Just took a bit longer to happen. And we could have had video conferences since the 1970s except that no one thought they were worth the price. Even now, where they are nearly free, it's hard to argue that the video part really adds much.

Re: Here's an idea

Bugs traditionally refer to code not doing what it is supposed to do. For a simple example, consider a birthday calculator that does not take leap years into consideration: works well most of the time so not necessarily easy to spot.

Hacks are also known as exploits because they often exploit the side-effects of well-tested code doing what it should. This is very often related to permissions but also underlying flaws (memory, timing, etc.) and is difficult or almost impossible to avoid in modern OS with internet connectivity and multimedia. We're learning all the time how to provide advanced features such as GPU acceleration for video chat without compromising the hardware.

Re: Here's an idea

How about paying people to find the bugs before release?

It's worth noting that not all exploits stem from bugs, quite often they come from finding different ways to use "good" code. This is why pen-testing is a separate discipline from both testing and QA. That said, there's no doubt that Apple's software management could and should be improved: less secrecy and some degree of peer reviewing would be possible. Maybe even their own Project Zero team?

20% is statistically too small to give you any reliable prediction. It will certainly help tracing infection chains but you will be missing so much other data that you're still in the realms of anecdotal evidence when it comes to transmission in the general population.

That is only because of the measures taken to limit contact and reduce the rate of transmission.

As we do with flu: annual vaccination campaigns and residual immunity in the population.

Without these measures, we could expect to see a death rate somewhere between x10~x44 higher.

Based on what particular empirical evidence? Certainly not the case in Sweden, which has some of the least restrictive measures. At the moment we have some assumptions and some correlations.

using contact-tracing app are seeing the results and are "flattening the curve"

Except they keep seeing new outbreaks (new one today in South Korea), which are to be expected in any kind of epidemic. It's a fallacy to expect any technological solution to the problem.

In mid-March, a close friend lost both her parents, ten hours apart, to COVID-19 in TWO (2) days after entering a NYC hospital.

Every death is one too many, but we're still looking at something comparable to a severe flu season.

Re: Best option, cheapest option

You must have been watching Russia Today or something as other reports from Russia suggest that people who ask for the test don't necessarily get it. But the testing regime of most countries (Iceland seems a notable example) seems to be fundamentally flawed: testing resources are limited so priority is given to those with symptoms. This means it's always behind the curve and still only gives you snapshot of a particular moment in time. Research indicates that a large number of those infected develop little or now symptoms so your sample in skewed. So, over time the only really useful testing will be antibody testing, which is currently not reliable enough. Nobody is admitting it but I think policy is moving towards the Swedish model of letting the virus spread through the less vulnerable parts of the population during the good weather so that the potential wave in the autumn (combined with the flu) will be less devastating.

Fortunately, though pretty infectious, it looks like only around 60% immunity is required (as opposed to > 80% for measles) but this is unlikely to happen organically this year or the next, but in some key areas (such as hospitals) it could be possible, which should limit retransmission to some severely vulnerable groups.

Re: Another problem for the solution?

Contract tracing requires employing and training people to do the work. This costs money, so even if there are several new centres opened to the relevant media fanfares, you can be sure that they will be funded only as long as anyone is looking (3 to 6 months normally).

Re: Same as the Nebraska meat packing plants

Hey if you're prepared to keep a meat factory open riddled with Corona Virus

At least in terms of food safety this unlikely to be an issue: the virus cannot multiply in dead cells. The real issue are the working and living conditions of the people who work there.

Re: Hmm

Yes, but that doesn't detract from the assertion that SQL is a programming language. It's not a particularly good one, but it is one.

Re: Hmm

Not a lot apparently because HTML is also listed as a programming language.

Re: silly names

Thanks for the correction. I can still do the maths for the alkane (CxH2x+2), alkenes(CxH2x) and alkyne(CxHx-2) chains but do mix them up when converting back from the "old" style names!

Re: Seems like a losing battle, and there's an elephant in the room

Some of LO's problems with OOXML (Office OpenXML) are self-inflicted because it consistently produces files that do not comply with the specification. There is no need for this as the specification is freely available. It's inconsistent and often unclear but there is an ISO working group which maintains it and they are responsive to feedback.

As the specification doesn't cover visual represenation itself directly there are always going to be differences, not least because the file format does not equal the object representation within the applications.

This is why PDF is still so popular as Postscript describes exactly how things should look.

Re: Cloud is a joke

While containers aren't a joke they are definitely overrated and often incorrectly used. The main reason behind them is being able to deploy specific services quickly, and in exactly the same way on multiple machines. Of course, this is almost identical to deploying VMs but the start up time and resources required for a container is less.

Agreed, containers are merely "lightweight" VMs. Lightweight only refers to the way the virtualisation is implemented.

What about the Corona surcharge?

Apple turned the computer into a consumer device. As such they were able to sell them to people who wouldn't have bought a computer otherwise. Removing stuff such as ports and floppy drives made them attractive to a lot people: SWMBO hates my electronic gadgets because of all the cables. SGI was in a completely different market but Apple, like Microsoft before them, managed to use the consumer product to drive business sales.

Personally, I never liked the IMac but putting the computer into the screen also made it a much more portable solution.