Posts by Charlie Clark

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

Re: Remember

The same could be said of newspaper proprietor — Beaverbrook, Hearst, Murdoch, Bezos — to name just a few. How long before Musk decides he needs one too?

Re: Cake – it's a made up drug

I was hoping for that! Nonce's are closer to crabs than humans…

Back in the day when this satire and not the main content of news and current affairs programming.

Cake – it's a made up drug

I'd love to see an AI-enhanced version of BrassEye!

Nice to see you again, Professor Burkiss…

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

Re: SQLite

NoSQL originally meant "Not only SQL" and referred to ACID + various combinations of key/value, document and graph databases for particular domains and since then we've seen a revived interest in column storage. The fundamentals of relational calculus that underpin relational databases are what guarantee its superiority for general use and make it essential for reliable transactions or analysis and other systems suffer a significant penalty when they reivent the wheel in the query engine rather that data definition. Denormalising for specific purposes – whether buckets for ephemeral and irregular data or materialised views for analaysis – have always been an option.

But what I find most interesting is MS contributing openly to a liberally licensed open source project which Postgres being BSD. This gives the lie to the notion that only GPL software will receive contributions from commercial users.

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

Re: Although Albert is still on the job

I think there's also a paradox in there about how you'd prove it…

I think that, one day, we might find effects that look like FTL communication might be possible but it'll turn out to be a "dimensional issue" or never applicable so getting the results of the 3:30 at Chepchester before the start of the race is still a no-goer.

Re: across two meters of optical fiber

There's a conspiracy to keep it only for the Lizard People!

Groan

I believe this is yours – it's got a copy of Puns for Dummy in the pocket…

Re: Physics A Level

The quantum stuff is a mixture of extremely advanced maths and finding the abstract ideas to interpret the results, which probably excludes most physicists out there who are happiest when working with the physical world.

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Re: Computers in the 1950s

But that's the whole point of digital computing using binary devices where you can easily detect on/off states. The first ones were indeed more or less cobbled together but this allowed for continual improvements, and occasional step changes, along the whole chain. But the principle – that any equation that can be expressed using binary logic can be automated – meant that calculations that had previously taken days, could be done in hours, if not minutes. This was required for a military increasingly keen on understanding fluid dynamics and, er, other things, but also potential commercial advantage for businesses.

The innate "fragility" of the equipment, of couse, was the direct genesis of the term "bug" that we still use. But it also encouraged the development both of more robust – solid state – components but also of resilient strategies so that less would be lost the next time a butterfly got in the wrong place of a valve failed.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

I was quoting from, an admittedly imperfect, memory because I have actually weighed a few eggs. Can't check at the moment as used the last egg up yesterday for SWMBO's full English…

You don't need a large saucepan but you will want to keep the heat going for a while. Eggs are around 20g, most of which is water and heating that is where most of the energy will go.

And now you realise why we keep the channel between us: what you describe is simply barbaric! You'll be saying you don't boil beef next!

Re: Faster, faster

Steam is just as hot as the water that made it

This is wrong, steam is hotter than the water it has just boiled out of: the transition usually isn't at the surface but at the base as the superheated steam bubbles it's way up and out. As you only want around 90°C, you don't really want to produce any steam at all.

Re: My own method

Haven't you ever come across and egg piercer (or a drawing pin)?

Re: "a total duration of 32 minutes"

Didn't know that, but the eggs get chilled for a minute after boiling, which seems to help with that.

These amateurs…

The table is incomplete and needs to include the times for poached and coddled eggs at a minimum and we need to know more about the toast: how thick is it, how much butter (and what sort) is on it and how long it's in the toaster for.

Honestly, they seem to handing out academic titles to anybody nowadays.

Yours sincerely

Prof H. Helibecnof

Re: "a total duration of 32 minutes"

It's seven minutes here for a nice, soft-boiled egg. That is: the egg goes into water that has started to boil. This is the most accurate method for me, but I know some people put the eggs in the water before they start heating it.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Tesla was all about PR

My understanding is that turbines have greater efficiency than ICEs – but it doesn't really matter, something that relies on oxidising hydrocarbons to generate power – the important thing is separating power generation from the drive train. This allows for modular systems and, therefore, potentially greater improvements of their various components.

Re: Tesla was all about PR

We should give credit where it's due: to the engineers for their hard work, but also to Musk for his nous, conviction and even his ability to ensure cheap finance for the company. But, as others have been saying for years: where's the next version? The Chinese have been working on all aspects of the chain for years and now lead in most of the technology. And now they have by far the largest domestic market which will help work on fit-and-finish, routing and automatic driving.

That said, I think battery-driven cars are a dead-end due to the limits both of the chemistry and the means of delivery: charging networks. Electric drive trains are almost certainly the future for most of us, I suspect they're likely to be powered by hydrocarbons either as turbines or fuel cells for a while yet.

Re: Ferdinand Porche?

Won't help much here in Europe… and tariffs are already pretty high. Increasing them further is unlikely to have much of a substitution effect.

Re: Ferdinand Porche?

I know a few people who wouldn't care either way but say that BYD makes cheaper and better cars. And, while Musk might be able bluster out a PR malheur, unflattering car reviews will be harder.

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Reminds me a bit of the end of Toy Soldiers

…only I'd have had them signing off the contract for reequipping the Situation Room at the White House. Complete with rubber mattress, of course!

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

Clear conflicts of interest

There are several statues which will limit both Musk's access to data and ability to act and Trump cannot remove these by decree. Elevated security clearance and access will require Senate confirmation and the Emoluments Act may well come into force for many of the "cabinet", even though Trump himself is now probably immune. It will all be a big distraction from the business of government, though that may be just what some of those involved want.

Re: It does'nt matter

No, you're conflating his personal immunity from prosecution with the legality of his decrees. Courts can, and are, already ruling against some of the degrees. For example, Trump could pass a law requiring the death of left-handed people and start the ball rolling by cooly shooting one. SCOTUS brainfade probably means that nothing would happen to him but the decree would be ruled unconstitutional and the protection would not extend to any lackeys that tried to enforce it; though Trump could, of course, pardon them and I think we may see an awful lot of pardons over the next few years.

Googlers asked if they'd like to bury themselves next to Stadia, Chromecast, DropCam

You forgot the hairdressers and the telephone sanitisers! You can't run a sinking ship properly without telephone sanitisers!

Mine's the one with the book with "Don't Panic!" in large, friendly letters on the cover.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

Sales are one thing, profits another an Tesla made most of its profits from emissions certificates. As it can no longer do that and is facing competition from cheaper and better vehicles

"Hey, Elon have some more of our money!" said a guy in a red baseball cap…

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

Also, is there any information on the higher maintenance costs of supersonic vehicles? My understanding is that pressure waves can stress even the most resilient of materials, but I'm happy to be corrected on this.

Re: My opinion

The economics and laws are different: getting funding for the MVP beloved of Silicon Valley is almost impossible in Europe and the idea of being able to scale up quickly to dominate the market doesn't make sense. And a safety-first culture tends to lead to overengineering before any product is launched, whereas US companies will often happily pay to see things crash and burn and equally as happily go bankrupt if claims against them stack up too much. They can walk away and start a new company immediately.

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

Re: Awesome...

I also like the opportunities for arbitrage in data centres. Tariffs like those proposed would make them immediately uncompetitive in America but you could be build sham ones and run the calculations elsewhere, even in Europe. Difficult to prove otherwise.

As others have mentioned: Motorola still made phones in the US until recently but these were ones with the most problems… Apple could lauch the A-Phone along the same lines…

Re: increasing self-sufficiency

It worked out pretty well for Germany: free trade tends to favour specialisation. This could be agriculture in countries with lots of sunshine and water; it could be manufacturing with good logistics, energy and skilled labour force; specialisation solely over cost of labour has rarely lasted for long. When one country focuses on one or two areas to specialise in, it invariable opens other opportunities for others in other areas and net exports usually run into problems as to what to do with their surplus: Germany has for years being investing its profits in stupid American schemes – infamously writing an already bankrupt Lehman Brothers a big fat cheque.

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Re: What's in a name...

Indeed, and some of the changes can be very confusing: Antwerpen/Anvers, Leuven/Louvain, but Lille/Rijssel!

Corrections can also get OTT: all the gaelic signage in Edinburgh, for example.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Re: You know, bad weather can sink bad ships

"innocent" owners? New to the shipping business are you? All these ships are being registered with the help of some think brown envelopes. Owners will try as far as possible to aim for plausible deniability and, since ship registration fees became an issue, registrars will turn a blind eye to the ships and the crews. That is until someone mentions sanctions, ie. problems for all ships registered. The only exception thus far was the Chinese ship with the Russian crew. The Chinese refused to cooperate but we haven't seen many of their ships doing the same route. For all its bluster about the South China Sea, China is extremely keen on maintaining a general freedom of navigation because it has so much to lose.

Re: You know, bad weather can sink bad ships

Most of the ships in this shadow fleet are pretty much scrap, so it wouldn't be a great financial loss. Bringing it into port and finding out as much as you can from the ship and crew and putting the "Maltese" owners under pressure might bring greater reward.

Re: But are they accidents....

You're quoting from The Bezos Bugle?

Fear of the unknown keeps Broadcom's VMware herd captive. Don't be cowed

I don't see how Broadcom can expect to be able to segment the market so neatly.

The charges will force some customers out and prevent new ones from joining. Difficult to see how this isn't going to introduce a new generation that doesn't know VMWare fairly quickly and the know-how for migration will continue to spread amongst those who must or would like to.

Also, as others have said, this might give the impulse to some to ditch at least part of their farms of VMs in favour of containers, where this makes sense – I know containers aren't that much different and memory, and particularly IO, will limit what you can do, but in some situations you can drastically limit your footprint this way.

Apple plugs security hole in its iThings that's already been exploited in iOS

Nice to know Apple continues to break stuff: my external webcam is no longer working on my MBP 2020, though it works fine on my MBP 2016.

the reference to core *nix distributions is simply erroneous here. Multimedia systems are much more susceptible because they invariably interact, at some point, directly with hardware.

If you're talking about the many eyes make shallow bugs ideas, this is a fallacy. While I'm a big fan of open source, making the source open does not avoid bugs, where open source does come into its own once a bug has been identified.

Apple's developers have made a common mistake that probably could and should have been caught by code review, testing and static analysis. But Apple steadfastly continues to refuse to improve its release and update procedures, so that, instead of frequently releasing minor patches, it prefers to release monolithic sets updates and new features once a quarter, which often and unsursprisingly introduce new bugs because of their scope scale. But they can point to millions of satisfied customers – I've got a Mac myself but no I-Thingy and I prefer not to live on the bleeding edge, usually keeping at least one major version behind – no matter what we say.

Google takes action after coder reports 'most sophisticated attack I've ever seen'

Re: Interesting

And my Google Titan no longer wants to work with Firefox or Safari. Support… don't even bother. :-(

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Lean innovation used to be a thing

and it fed the PC revolution. Well, maybe not PCs, but Amigas and Ataris fed off being able to do more with less.

The India took it up for pharmaceutics, engineering, rocket science and lots of other fields. I guess outsourcing encouraged them to become slow lazy but it's nice to see an area where the economics will end up favouring efficiency over network size.

Re: Censorship

Not the Marx Brothers' film?

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

Re: I'm confused!

In the world of the big 4: PWC, E&Y, KPMG and the other one… sign-off terms are in the secret codicil to the initial contract, the one that details the pay-off fee and which golf resorts are used for negotiations. Striking gold is having a copy of the codicil…

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Re: Typical Trump – don't look there, look here

Martian in this case…

The ultimate Instagram moment! I know that short stories about such stunts have already been written…

I love Andy Weir's book The Martian which has sufficient science in it to be "plausible enough" for a story whilst highlighting just how difficult life on other planets is going to be: things need to do go right nearly all the time and even then you're likely to die horribly.

VMware users gripe over 3-year commitment to renew licenses

Re: VMware waz a rare beast in software dev...

Yes, but that period ended years ago with the various purchases and flips. EMC, Dell, private… with someone skimming something off the top each time.

Re: There's a theme here

I think it's naive to think that the largest companies will just suck it up and absorb the costs. Sure, they might well decide that a migration can't be rushed and will have to live for a while with higher prices, but if they haven't already started to look at migration, they will now. And I think the may be the start of price rises across what is now a pretty consolidate industry.

Re: Look to the past to see the future

True, but I think many will find three years okay. What they won't like, if they don't then work on a migration strategy, are the next terms which will combine a heft price increase with an even longer licence period. Businesses that let this happen no one else but themselves to blame.

We're up for renewal in just over a year, but I'm pretty certain we won't be renewing.

Biz tax rises, inflation and high interest. Why fewer UK tech firms started in 2024

Re: Easy to address, actually

Tax-based solutions tend to run out of road fairly quickly, but you can introduce some element of time to prevenr, or at least reduce flipping. However, at the root of many housing bubbles has been reducing borrowing costs and standards, which has enabled people to spend more on an essentially static asset and thus keep prices rising. Increase minimum deposit requirements, scrap all forms of loan subsidy (whether it's MIRAS or "key worker" loans or whatever) and make sure lenders understand they won't be backstopped and you might see changes fairly quickly, though there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as people see the value of their "investment" decline. You can also investigate how much empty buildings are taken off the market in order to maintain prices – this can be an effective tax optimisation for many who declare loss of earnings as a result.

Re: This is a tough one to adress

But this really is about economics. From the article With weak economic growth, high interest rates and high inflation also known as "stagflation" and entirely expected after the mismanagement during and, especially after, the pandemic. Poorly thought out but headline-grabbing subsidies and stimulus packages, led to an economy that was bound to overheat as economic activity normalised. Central banks around the world were asleep on the job and failed to raise interest rates soon enough so that inflation, which couldn't be "temporary" in this case, was allowed to rise. Interest rates will have to stay higher for longer as a result, or we have to be prepared to live with higher inflation and the associated problems: a seance with Dennis Healey would be instructive!

Taxes in most countries have largely been about reallocation since it became fashionable to tax activity over income with VAT increases disproportionately affecting those with lower incomes:we were supposed to rejoice over reductions in income tax but not notice increased . Lobbies have pushed for, and largely got, lower taxex on capital gains and corporate incomes which, again, tend to favour capital intensive companies and government expenditure eschewed investment over deficit reduction during the long period of low interest rates financial repression. To be fair, there were those calling for investment when debt was cheap (savers were effectively paying off debtors), but they were largely ignored. And now the bond markets have woken from their sleep, done their work, and realised that there might be problems. They even noticed the size of central banks balance sheets!

More investment is required, and social spending, despite the routine calls, cannot really be cut further, so additional sources of revenue must be found. Some subdsidies could be cut – and I refer to the point made years ago by Andrew Orlowski about green subsidies often being handouts to the middle classes – but some taxes will also have to be increased and we can stop giving massive tax breaks promising huge investments and "jobs": I can't remember a single such scheme ever providing a net benefit for the taxpayer.

Oh, but don't say it loudly, improving trade relations with the EU would make businesses lives a lot easier!

Google DeepMind CEO says 2025's the year we start popping pills AI helped invent

Re: "Hurrah"

You might want to read up on the reasons for the Nobel prize awards, but also the law: in most jurisdictions molecules themselves cannot be patented. The patents are almost invariably for the method to produce them. I know this routinely comes up, particularly with US companies, hoping to patent molecules they find around the world, but thus far largely unsuccessfully.

And it's not just be about being cheaper, it's about doing some tasks that could not be done in the lab otherwise within a reasonable time frame. For Google, in an analogy with the gold rush, this is more about selling picks and shovels, than gold nuggets.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

Re: Sounds really good...

Russia has done some interesting work in the area in the past, and for a while at least, was constructively engaged in international research. Even now most Russian scientists are keen to exchange ideas with the rest of the world whatever their Czar thinks.