Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Machivelli says

I don't think there's any suggestion that he was mad, but The Prince has been given such bad press by the usual crowd who can't differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive.

Re: BEV's are a dead-end; HEV's are the future. Discuss

or at least no worse than that of a battery.

Batteries have shit energy densities when compared with LPG or liquid fuels. These will not be replaced on a large scale by anthing that doesn't have comparable energy density.

Your electrolysis filling station is similarly whacko: all current examples are just there for the handouts. Machines may run on hydrogen but storage and transportation will be in another form.

Re: You can't really hold SAP responsible for the pollution their customers produce....

I'm sure there's a law that states that any fucking awful product will, at some point, be replaced by something equally bad, if not worse. If there isn't such a law, they should be one! :-)

Re: BEV's are a dead-end; HEV's are the future. Discuss

And what about storage? Almost anything is easier to store than hydrogen, eg. methane or methanol. As soon as you can produce below cost you have the solution to all our energy storage needs.

Re: "the company realized $3.8bn in AI-based revenue"

It's basically Mobileye.

Re: He's not wrong

I don't think there ever was an an "OSS Community" that wasn't project specific.

Re: PL and TL

Any project needs a way of taking decisions: this doesn't need to be a hierarchy but the concept of "benevolent dictator" is common for this very reason.

Re: Not just open source

People publish Open Source software because they're hobbyists who think others might find their work useful.

I am serious and I do run a reasonably popular open source project. Communicating clearly why your library works they way it does means you don't have to continually explain and justify it.

Not taking any shit from your users does not mean you have to treat them like shit. See the Mark Twain comment as to why this is important. The vast majority of users will be happy with what you have but some may well take the time to make worthwhile suggestions or submit patches / pull requests. The trolls are best just ignored (or banned).

And the software for my printer and scanner? Apple seems to want us on I-Phone refresh cycles for everything… Again, whatever you think of the merits of the approach and of the relevant developers, it's customers who're actually getting punished.

I'm sure Apple will miss you. Not.

Yes, because I'm the only person who's pissed off at this kind of behaviour. Look through history at how well companies have done with this kind of approach. A 32-bit VM would have been a cheap and easy way to solve this for everyone.

Re: Confusing.

but it requires the OS to contain (and maintain) mountains of code to allow cross-compatibility.

For x86 and x86_64? Not really. It's always more work for the application developer. But this is really more about Apple's fairly rapid turnover of APIs in the last few years and it tries to force MacOS into an IOS corset.

Re: Mixed messages

The big change over the last 25 years is available memory. If this is at a premium you have to write very different code.

Re: Mixed messages

I've software from companies that went App Store only and then back because the App Store is so fucking unreliable. I've had several instances of having to nuke software and reinstall because the App Store wouldn't update it.

You really can't say that they didn't give enough notice.

It's not just the ability to compile to x86_64 but also the changes in the APIs, which have been extensive over the last few years. I have quite a lot of software that will not run on Catalina and don't expect to use it as a result. But this is fine by me: I don't have any iThingies, don't use any of Apple's online services so the walled garden of convergence holds no appeal for me.

This approach, which punishes the user, is actually untypical for Apple. The shift from PowerPC to Intel was handled much better, but there remains a fundamental problem with the value proposition: porting costs money and on its own brings no discernible beneift.

Re: Still my number 1 (only just though)

I'd be interested to see just how may people actually would go back to Opera were they to release the much maligned integrated mail client. I'd bet not that many after all.

Probably not many, though I think Opera Mail (which itself borrowed many ideas from BeOS) was great. E-mail, for those of us still using it, is moving towards things like Spike, which follow a similar view not folder-based approach with some ML thrown in supposedly to make our lives easier.

Re: Step up the game

Actually, Netscape made the mistake of going down the Suite route and XML all the way down. This made "Communicator" a bit of a hog in comparison to Microsoft's crappy IE – IE 6 was the one that really got traction.

Re: Still my number 1 (only just though)

has screwed up any site that uses Recaptcha

Haven't you got that backwards? Recaptcha screws every user who comes across it and forces them to train Google's AI services. It's long-known to be useless against bots and a terrible user experience.

Re: dwindling pool

Personally, I think it's got better by focussing on being a better browser rather than trying to do everything. It's noticeably faster and more reliable since they switched to the new engine. This doesn't mean I agree with the dumbing down of the UI, but, on balance, I think they've got most things right.

Vivaldi is probably still the only browser that's trying to cram more and more features into the browser but, because they messed up a few things and have consistently failed to deliver the promised mail cient, I jumped ship to Firefox and MailMate, which I even pay for. I used to pay for Opera and would consider paying for Firefox if it meant that I could get real support.

Re: ECJ juridisction

though isn't it a basic law and not a constitution

It's both: Grundgesetz == basic law and Verfassung == constitution. The two are used interchangeably.

There are several issues where the GCC has unequivocally ceded sovereignty to the ECJ. The ECB judgement made reference to it – the ECJ sits above the GCC – but the ECB was trying to do things that weren't covered by its mandate (buying national debt directly is explicitly prohibited) so that the Bundesbank could, and is, restricted in its asset purchases. The rulings from "Karlsruhe" as the court is also referred, though another court also sits there, are usually very well worth reading.

Re: ECJ juridisction

Getting the rules amended sans UK and approved is likely to be pretty easy. The UK won't have much say in the matter and is likely to like it if it wants any kind of trade deal. Welcome to asymmetric trade negotiations.

Re: So, Google is pulling a Microsoft ?

Reworking a Chrome App into a PWA is mainly about packaging and, to be fair, Google is only depreacting a proprietary format because it supports an open one.

I don't know about you, but I only ever used one Chrome App, and that was to see what the fuss was about. It's pretty much the same story with Web Assembly replacing NaCl.

Re: "most commonly found on cheap handsets"

Much less so than it used to be.

Google doesn't actually care: it uses licence agreements to enforce GMS. If Samsung has a deal with Facebook to install its shit on phones, then Google can do nothing about this.

But Google isn't the right person to talk to about this. This can, and should, be handled by consumer protection legislation. Unfortunately, in the US at least, this usually means post facto injury suits targetting limited liability, because consumer protection exists in name only, because everyone hates regulations, right?