Posts by Charlie Clark

Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

The majority is all that matters. The real question is why do investors choose to buy into companies with this kind of share structure?

Car industry pleads for delay to post-Brexit tariffs on EVs

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Probably not on cold, dark nights when all the heat pumps have drained the batteries…

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

Agree with everything apart from the last bit about encouraging elss car use. I've seen no evidence of anyone even thinking of that. Premium prices mean higher VAT, eventually higher duty and bigger corporate tax returns.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

I never suggested hydrogen because I know it's not practical. That's not stopping the the "hydrogen industry" from holding out its hand for billions…

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

This is a false equivalence. Electric motors are indeed significantly simpler that internal combustion engines. Batteries, on the other hand, are considerably more complex than fuel tanks. What I personally hope to see is a shift from dead-end batteries to fuel cells that are both more efficient and energy dense than either alternative. By then we might even be producing hydrocarbons from renewable sources at competitive prices. Though I wouldn't count on this given how hard to industry is avoiding the issue and clamouring for subsidies for almost anything else.

The gift that keeps giving

The real issue is needing to untangle the sophisticated supply chains between the EU and the UK after Brexit. For many years now parts have gone to and fro before the final product emerges. This is no longer possible because the UK no longer wants to be part of a customs union. Hence, to prevent vehicles made elsewhere from entering the EU via the UK under preferential terms the tariff is applied.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

Re: While the world slowly turns n burns.

Doesn't sound like you're a fanboi. I've never owned or wanted an I-Phone but I do think Apple do a good job on the components and the software. They're too restrictive and expensive for me and has been following other manufacturers in most areas apart from the cameras for years, but it obviously works for a lot of people.

Re: While the world slowly turns n burns.

My Samsung S10e is from 2019. It's going to get a new battery and LineageOS, because Samsung stopped updates in March.

Even my brother who's up there with the best of the fanbois says the new I-Phone isn't that interesting.

GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

Re: The Law of Unintended Consequences

The compiler maybe, but the licences are less and less relevant.

Re: RMS contribution

MacOS is still a lot more like BSD than Apple would like anyone to believe. It's just that it's run by another bunch of people who are scared of the shell. As a result, Apple has repeatedly had to reinvent the wheel of software releases, which is one of the reasons why it has such trouble providing patches at short notice.

Re: RMS contribution

Still essentially uses the Mach (from Carnegie Mellon, IIRC) kernel, now touted as Darwin. The kernel's fine but x86 is shit at context switching so things could be different on ARM chips.

Re: Minix 3

This argument against permissive BSD/MIT licences has never made sense.

Firstly, the authors don't care what you do with it, ie. they don't want to have to deal with it. Secondy, and perhaps more importantly, if you don't add much, you have no added value to sell. And, if you do invest heavily but don't contribute upstream, you're going to have more and more work to keep in sync. I've seen this in companies a few times which think they can suddenly own a piece of open source software by forking it and keeping the fork private but I've never seen this work.

Not sure how you defined success for Haiku but it's been usable for years.

Re: A Complicated Man

The FSF was political from the start and has never made any bones about it. Fortunately, the war is largely over with most recent projects avoiding the "free as liberty" licences.

You're probably right. But, if it hadn't been for that AT&T lawsuit against Berkeley, things could have been very different. As it was, that lawsuit drove people to look for alternatives that were not subject to litigation.

This is not an attempt at revisionism merely highlighting one of the major boosts to the GNU profile: it was clean room code.

Re: A Complicated Man

I've met him and wouldn't want to work with him and met others who have had and largely confirmed my suspicions. I've also met Eric Raymond and he's also a dick, but he's also contriubuted a lot. This is not uncommon amongst people with the "messianic" touch. Over time only their work will remain, which is probably best.

37 Signals says cloud repatriation plan has already saved it $1 million

Re: Is it comparable?

How does the flexibility in the cloud help the flower shop? Does it provide more workers to buy the flowers to make the bouquets and then deliver them?

Re: Is it comparable?

You're not making a like-for-like and lifecycle comparison. Sure, for any kind of flexible load these services are great. Most businesses have fairly predictable loads with equally predictable spikes where extra capacity is bought in: think of fruit-pickers in the summer or extra deliveries in the run up to Christmas.

But some of these deals are essentially loss-leaders designed to trick you into moving your data onto their platform. But how much is going to cost you to get it back or switch providers? This is stated in virtually every quarterly report to investors.

Re: Is it comparable?

Years ago, the people from StackOverflow posted why and how they moved from AWS. You always pay for what you provision, not what you use. The cloud providers attempt to ellide this but the costs are concealed in the charges that give you so much flexibility.

AWS, et al. have no interest in making your operations run more efficiently because the more you use, the more they earn. So, you'll get ElasticSearch on lots of nodes where a single well-designed Postgres DB server might suffice. Backup, replication and scaling are all good arguments but how to do this is now well documented and can be learned and most data centres can often help to set them up and run them, including the right kind of connections to relevant colocation servers. They also provide the UPS and other infrastructure.

Cloud promises flexibility and scale and designs products that make entry quick and simple because they know that once your data is on their infrastructure they have you: exporting data is dfficult, slow and expensive.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Follow the money

Musk probably knows that he'll never find enough users willing to pay to keep the service. So, why the announcement? My guess is that he's running through options of getting towards bankruptcy so that he can write off the money he borrowed to buy it in the first place, the interest payments being more than it costs to run the company. He'll then be free to do what he wants with the carcass and the Muskrats will hail him again as a genius.

Buiding Excel-like UI for Uber's China ops exposed Microsoft calculation quirks

Re: Is Excel really the right tool for numerical analysis?

Yes, but Excel uses it's own calendar based on the Julian with, in theory at least, an epoch of 1899-12-30 00:00. But in practice it's 1900-01-01 00:00:00

Re: I hear attack lawyers straining at their leashes!

Depends upon the jurisdiction. This is certainly the case in the US but not necessarily so in other countries.

However, I note from the codebase that the import code is missing.

Re: Is Excel really the right tool for numerical analysis?

I like how it deals with the start of the epoch: "0" gets rendered as 0th January 1900 and anything before then can't be rendered. This alone should preclude from any serious work…

But it's a reasonable format for exchanging report though, wherever possible these should contain no formulae.

Apples to apples: Boffins find a way to make e-waste edible

With hydrocarbons you only really need to look at the energy involved in a closed-loop set up as this allows you to take it out of the carbon cycle. Baseline comparison in this kind of chemistry is the energy associated with the end products versus simply burning it for heat energy and cleaning up the waste.

I think the key thing here is that it's done catalytically. If this is the case then the process can probably be refined to produce much greater yields: the set up is very much a lash up. And the energy balance needs to be considered as part of the cycle: what is the chemical energy of the resultant product.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

This does look like a good option for some routes.

Google wants to takes a byte out of Oracle workloads with PostgreSQL migration service

Such as? And which ones can't you implement yourself in Postgres via an extension? PL/SQL transition is already done by companies like EnterpriseDB.

Re: ... sigh ... if you have a simple DB you are likely already off Oracle

EnterpriseDB has been running the Oracle to Postgres transition for years. I think they have a PL/SQL backend which makes the prospect of all having to handle all those stored procedures less daunting, but it's still going to be to difficult persuading the C-suite, especially after their next round of golf with an Oracle VP…

Post-IPO, Arm to push purpose-built almost-processors

Re: RISC-V behind but catching up

Not sure if RISC-V is the threat that many imagine. Designs are licence free for desginers but that's not leading to "free" designs for all customers. How that develops may well depend on how much ARM wants to charge.

Having a limited instruction set also sounds like trouble for cheap workhorse CPUs in the future that just need a compile step. For many having as little work to adapt software as possible could be decisive.

Oracle cloud hardware to reside in Azure datacenters – and Microsoft's good with that

Vertical integration, don't you just love it.

Looks like Oracle is getting out of hosting then.

In a couple of years, all your DBs will be on Microsoft's platform. If they then, say, were to discontinue MS SQL… think of the higher licence fees synergies you can look forward to.

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

Always? AirPlay is DLNA with a couple of bits to keep it proprietary. I remember trying to share photos with people with I-Phones via Bluetooth years ago and it simply wasn't possible… In all these areas Apple follows where others lead.

Re: More discarded cables

Yes, most of the ones I've seen allow users to scrunch them into their bags and you can normally see the cable stress around the connection. See less of this with USB-C cables which tend to be a bit chunkier.

I quite often connect my phone to our TV using a cable as the TV doesn't support Miracast and it's the best way to transfer data from an old phone to a new one.

Re: milking the lightning cable royalties

I think the ruling probably stopped them from launching a new version of Lightning that would be USB-3 but not USB-C. I suspect that it would be difficult to argue in court in favour of a proprietary connection for phones but not for tablets and notebooks.

iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards

France also has some additional regulations on Bluetooth.

How to snoop on passwords with this one weird trick (involving public Wi-Fi signals)

Just another reason not to use unencrypted wifi.

In many countries it's now also illegal to provide unencrypted wifi services for customers. In your own home, of course, you can do whatever you want.

Oracle disappoints market with revenue miss as Ellison hints at Azure database move

Re: Just deliver shit that works

Why should they do that if people will pay anyway?

Re: Am I reading this right?

Sort of: those are the facts. But the focus on the recent price at which shares were traded and "market capitalisation" are just a couple of things that are wrong with the reporting of stockmarkets.

When companies don't meet expectations there is almost always an automatic sell-off due to options that were written based on the expectations. Add to that the fact that many share prices are forward looking: buy the shares today in expectation of future profits and you'll realise the movements are often essentially random. Longer term factors such as P/E ratios just aren't as newsworthy.

Such nice people

As we continue to benefit from economies of scale in the cloud and drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards…

We will continue to use our near monopoly position to increase prices till it hurts.

Chat2024 stuffs US election hopefuls into generative AI so you can be an 'informed voter'

Re: Interesting but…

Joebot versus Trumpbot? Joe would probably like to sleep a lot, as Reagan did in his time. Donald would probably like to engage in watersports…

Interesting but…

… the answers reflect what the scriptwriters write not how the people speak. Biden stumbles into incoherence whereas Trump never attempts coherency. In the. First placely.

Morgan Stanley values Tesla's super-hyped supercomputer at up to $500B

Re: Pump and Dump

Sounds indeed like Morgan Stanley is indeed hoping for some kind of equity deal on the back of this.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

There's a truism that managers are promoted based on the size of their project budgets but not their successes…

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

The methodology is totally irrelevant. ERP projects can almost never be properly specified in advance and are often sold as "customisable", which means implementation will run and run. As will the billing.

A bigger problem is forcing these projects to be put out to tender for everything at once. The way this is done means that the procurement department is essentially sidelined by politics and forced to deal with the fallout once the deal has been signed. So, even if the department is, say, perfectly able to cope with the building of new school or traffic light system, it won't be involved in the planning. In addition, financing these projects is generally more difficult than many imagine because council funding is largely dependent upon central government, which can and does adjust grants at whim. The contractors know this is and make sure the contracts are written to make sure they get their cut whatever.

And then there are the councils such as Woking (and Krefeld*) that decide moonshots are the only way forward and borrow excessively to pay for whatever their friends in the utopia and whalesong development agency suggests, because jobs.

* https://surfpark-krefeld.com/ - in German but the KPI is the proposed charge of "around" € 50 an hour… But the Congress Centre in Bonn and the serial failures at the Nürburgring and Hahn airport spring to mind to show that this not limited to the UK. And, yes, procurement of IT systems is just as shit.

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

Short-selling is part of capitalism

I'm no great fan of short-selling but it's just as much as part of capitalism as the kind of debt-bingeing or "over-selling" that Musk has repeatedly engaged in to finance keep his businesses from failing. In fact, it's a necessary corollary. Musk goes to the capital markets offering his shares in his dreams as collateral for cheap cash, Gates and the like act to stop this being a one-way bet.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

It's the Libertarian paradox: people are supposed to be free to do whatever they want but money is also right.

Musk, Peter Thiel and others have some pretty weird ideas about what all their money allows them to do and nothing, especially not government or international regulation should stop them. But, in their own little kingdoms they expect to be able to rule absolutely.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

I didn't say post-1945 borders were unalterable but that they were respected by treaty, including the one that Russia signed when Ukraine gained independence. You could point out that, of course, Kosovo was effectively given independence due to NATO intervention. There were exentuating circumstances, which would never have been necessary if the West had taken Putin Mk I, Slobodan Milosevic seriously in his dreams of a Greater Serbia. Croatia was forced to resolve border dispute before it could join the EU. Cyprus was supposed to do the same but was allowed to renege… So, far from perfect but most treaties that were drawn up after WWII have been pretty successful, especially when you think how arbitrarily and ahistorically some of those borders were: Königsberg, Poland's borders with Ukraine and Germany.

But it's simply bollocks to even suggest that Crimea should be Russian if not Ukrainian. If anything, it should be independent or at least autonomous.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

NATO has an open door policy: any country can apply to join. The West did make assurances, Russia broke treaties. Big difference.

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

Re: new to IT

You're trying to put a positive spin on what is generally accepted as poor security behaviour by Apple. 0-day exploits are the only ones that are known about. NSO is only one of many possible actors searching for and potentially exploiting such issues and they all have a vested interest in keeping such issues quiet. As Apple seems to think so as well. There have been many reports of Apple not responding to reports in the hope that security through obscurity will help.

They should be learning from others (except Microsoft perhaps) in the software industry that have established procedures for reporting such issues, developing and providing patches and informing their users. Unfortunately, however, patch releases like this are the exception rather than the rule. Users normally have to wait for the more or less regular OS updates which often contained poorly documented information about patched flaws.

Software can't be perfect and exploits will always been found so it's essential to develop a culture that accepts this and policies to mitigate consequences as much as possible. Apple still has a long way to go in this respect.

Re: I agree

You're assuming there are only two horses in that race… Even then it's not as simple as you think: NSO finds many exploits itself.