Posts by Charlie Clark

Gartner squints into its crystal ball: A pholdable phuture is very far away

Well, the would say that, wouldn't they?

Gartner has predicted foldable phones will capture a puny 5 per cent of the flagship market by 2023.

I guess they've got to say something but at the moment I reckon it's too difficult to call. If they're reliable then then screens and devices could take off, otherwise they will perforce remain niche. I also think that future trends will increasingly be driven by Asia and China and these are notoriously difficult to predict, but it was definitely the Chinese preference for huge screens that prompted Apple to adopt them in order to stay in the market. And Shenzhen's ability to develop should no longer be questioned: when Samsung first teased their folding screen I think most people imagined they might have a monopoly at least for a year or so. Instead we're going to see at least three companies release foldable screens about the same time.

I guess we'll know more towards the end of the year once people have had some of these devices in the pockets for a while to test their usefulness and their reliability.

If there's 5G connectivity but no 5G devices on it, does it make a sound? Wait, no, that's not right

Re: Why the comparison with wifi?

News just in: lots of cars have had SIMs fitted by the manufacturers and reporting back to base for years. Don't need a new networking technology for that.

There are lots of situations where running wifi over a large area is a real PITA (think crop or animal sensors) but possibly the only choice due to the lack of network coverage. Difficult to see 5G helping there, unless you can buy lease the kit from the networks…

Where 5G might make a difference is where you've got an awful lot of devices in a small area that need to be online a lot: every item in a supermarket. Yeah, I'm not that convinced that 5G is anything other than another marketing excercise for the mobile networks.

Re: Somebody needs to tell the marketing department

Want to bet the next demo will be at some kind of sporting event?

Why the comparison with wifi?

since it outclasses Wi-Fi in almost every way

Why the comparison? Wifi uses unlicensed spectrum which means you can set them yourself if you want. And with mimo they'll give you pretty good data rates.

With 5G you're essentially paying for the network management (and guaranteed spectrum for less congestion).

Google Pay tells Euro users it has ditched UK for Ireland ahead of Brexit

Re: So this has nothing to do with ...

When it comes to finances London already offers very favourable terms, but other EU countries (Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg) have even tastier tax deals for those that want them.

Re: We'll see more of this

three years of non-stop negotiations

This needs some qualification: negotiations didn't really start until the autumn of 2017 and even then they were led by Mr David Who-Needs-Briefing Davis, they were then essentially wrapped up by Christmas with the infamous declaration. Since then the government has essentially contented itself with rearranging the deckchairs.

Chinese hackers poke the Bayer, but German giant says it withstood attack

Re: Korean Chinese speaking cybercriminals?

No, and that's not what I said. Online games are nearly all browser-based.

Re: Korean Chinese speaking cybercriminals?

Why were Bayer employees connecting to game servers on company time?

German law actually lets people use company computers for personal stuff: for example booking holidays, checking the weather and you have to have grounds for suspicion to check up on this.

Bayer has had a Cyber Defence team for quite a few years now, partly down to legal requirements and partly down to concerted DDoS attempts in 2010 and 2011 and the increasing numbers of phishing attempts that proved the need for a dedicated team and for liasoning with the police on attacks.

Of course, talk to anyone in security and they'll admit there are two types of companies: those that know they've been hacked and those that don't know it yet.

Google pholds! Just kidding. But Android Q Beta 2 drop supports those cool bendy mobes

Re: Forget the hand movements

And did I detect a pony tail for maximum hipness?

Re: Usual horseshit

If you could be bothered to watch the video you might understand what's meant. Whenever a manufacturer introduces a feature that is not provided by the OS, developers must follow the manufacturers API. Both Samsung and Huawei allow multiple app windows on their devices and for developers to take advantage of this in their own apps, they may have to work with different APIs. The speed with which the change has gone into Q suggests that this isn't rocket science and was also presumably done in conjunction with the manufacturers (means they have less of their own code to maintain, document and support).

AI API

Andrew, given how much you love the use AI across Android devices I'm surprised that you didn't give the new APIs a mention! ;-)

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

Re: How come it's assault?

Consent, even if it can be demonstrated, does not mean something isn't a crime. For an example, consider statutory rape of minors. But also, what would have happened if things had gone wrong and the demonstration had led to severe injuries or death?

The police were called out and had a duty to enforce the law as they see it. Note, just that they've been charged doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a trial.

Re: Old Hat, done on UK TV years ago.

The accomplice was presumably a trained marksman*, wasn't using a semi-automatic and the inventor had signed a waiver.

* In America this can be done while having a burger, because "Burgers and Bullets" is a real company and who cares if 9-year olds shoot people when given automatic rifles?

Re: Even ....

To some of us in the VERY deep south, these guys are idiots.

And potential voters… as long as they can produce id, or are white.

Re: real men test bullet proof vests

Indeed, we should be grateful to them for it!

(I think some people may have missed the irony on this).

Re: Willy Waving

Yeah, and semi-automatics at that.

Maybe next time they'll do us a favour of streaming it live so we can all take notes.

Re: Ferris and Hicks?

A clear case of nomen est omen.

When is Bubba going to get in on the act? Presumably after a row with Mary-Ellen-Sue…

Re: All you need to know about Arkansas

Nice to know that there are places more backward than Alabama!

Astroboffins may have cracked the mystery of where the photons from weird gamma ray bursts come from

Re: Meaning of words

Things that radiate are not necessarily electromagnetic radiation.

True, alpha and beta are notably not, but when talking about gamma, there should be no ambiguity.

Re: @ Charlie Clark

Thanks for the correction.

Indeed, not least because the collapse will lead to hf emissions (X and Gamma) of its own but possibility not of the same scale.

Also worth noting that the collapse is also responsible for gravitational waves and the conjunction of the two are now being used to infer more about the original events.

Boeing nowhere fast: Starliner space taxi schedule slips once again to August

Re: BS

Much as I think Boeing is likely to be found at fault with the 737s, I don't think the problems are related. The space programme work is entirely separate not least because it's for the government.

No Widevine DRM for you! Developer left with two years of work stymied by Google snub

Re: excessive copyright duration?

DRM locks content out of public domain forever, except the pirate copies.

Separate issues but an important point: items automatically pass into the public domain when the copyright expires and most countries have mechanisms for facilitating this (national libraries, etc.). DRM can restrict users from legitimately accessing their own licensed content if, for example, the keys are revoked, some kind of server is unavailable, device no longer works.

It's for this reason that I strip the DRM of everything I have, if possible (Epubor has some good tools for this), and avoid streaming services, which, as Andrew Orlowski has noted elsewhere, generally pay the artists less.

Re: DRM and excessive copyright strike again!

And this is why, again, we are stuck with the only option of drastically cutting back copyright durations. 15 to 20 years should do the trick.

Any film older than five years is largely TV filler material, for sports the limit is probably six months at most. But I'm sure quite a few living authors, artists and musicians would disagree with such a drastic restriction. Note, these aren't necessarily the people lobbying for copyright and DRM as the publishers have been stiffing them for years.

At the time of the introduction of EME (the blackbox that browsers have to use) there was extensive debate about how evil the approach was and how it wouldn't stop determined pirates. But, at the end of the day, many considered it the lesser of two evils, with the alternative being the persistence of tightly controlled and entirely proprietary solutions such as Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight.

DRM does punish law-abiding users while failing to prevent piracy but I think it's going to be a long time before the content owners realise this, and even when they do, admit it.

Re: Is it really a DRM issue ?

DRM is required by the content owners and they rely on the various vendors of DRM technology to enforce it. As the article notes, Apple and Microsoft have similar solutions tied to their browser / OS / hardware, with Widevine the only generally available solution. As can be expected with such a gatekeeper function, licensing isn't straightforward: you must sign and NDA and convince the licensor that you will implement the DRM layers, eg. no high resolution for a software only situation. Vendors are under no obligation to license their software and you can argue that there is a market for DRM solutions. But given that they can only use a DRM solution that content owners approve of, and also want something that "just works", you can't see any distributor complaining about the lack of choice or even of licence fee.

Over time we've seen a move away from DRM for music and, to a lesser extent, e-books, so we might see this at some point with video, though I for one won't be holding my breath. Content owners might indeed over time be making themselves dependent upon the developers of DRM (you can see how Google and Apple might get preferential rates) but as long as they're being paid they probably don't care.

Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata

Re: Why use Postgres

Not missing it at all, Oracle would happily license MySQL to Amazon. Or Amazon could use MariaDB (would probably also require a commercial licence) but neither would be a good fit for the probable use case.

Re: For the cost of an Oracle license

You may be right for some features of the very high end. Otherwise Postgres has most definitely caught up in many areas and has its own advantages in others, not least in the flexibility of the backend. Ever since Sun bought MySQL there was an uptick in companies actively engaging with Postgres either through code, sponsoring feature development or paying for professional support from companies that do develop the DB. And after Oracle bought Sun that uptick really ticked up.

The fact is that many companies buy something like Oracle believing there going to need every feature only to find out that they don't actually need them and that there are cheaper alternatives, even after taking the costs of migration into consideration. Companies like NTT wouldn't be playing around with Postgres if it didn't work for them.

Re: Sale of the Century

You obviously missed the line about this now means that Amazon has developed a competing product.

Re: Sale of the Century

I suspec that licence fees for Amazon's infamously low margin shopping business are more than pocket change. They're probably also not knee deep in the some of the stored procedures stuff that keep many companies tied to Oracle. It's also worth noting Enterprise DB has made a business of migrating smaller companies from Oracle to Postgres.

Oracle used to have a significant edge when it came to scale, performance and support but they've basically pissed away much of the technological advantage – for OLAP there are now a lot of alternatives, and pissed off a lot of the customers with the changes to licensing while winding down support.

Re: AWS Postgres Aurora....

The licence is designed to allow this. If they are using Postgres code and not contributing anything back then they're going to get into some kind of maintenance hell trying to manage their own code with upstream changes.

Why use Postgres

it was running Aurora Postgres (it could hardly use MySQL, after all)

Well, they could, or MariaDB, but if this is for OLTP you're going to want something that handles transactions and data integrity better than MySQL does.

Re: AWS Postgres Aurora....

Once you have enough data in anyone's cloud migration to anywhere else becomes practcally impossible whatever database they're using.

Don't be an April Fool: Update your Android mobes, gizmos to – hopefully – pick up critical security fixes

Re: All done

Samsung are pretty good with keeping phones up to date these days

Ah, but for how long do they support their devices? Used to be 18 months and then you were on your own.

Good news, Man City fans: You can watch your team lose the title in on-demand 3D

Pricing

Would you pay £5 a month to be able to watch your team however you want whenever you want?

I probably would but there is no way the clubs will want to charge so little, even £5 a match is below their expectations, and pay per view is where they want to go.

Apple redesigns wireless AirPower charger to be world's smallest, thinnest, lightest, cheapest, invisible... OK, it doesn't exist anymore

If they could get away with it they'd lock out bluetooth to only work with Airpods as well.

Apple pretty much crippled Bluetooth in its phones at the start: try sending a VCF or photo from any other device to an I-Phone.

Re: The 'AirPower' name always implied where they wanted to get

Hopefully the distance charging work is still ongoing

Would you like some spotted paint while you're waiting? The last time this came up someone with the right chops wrote an extensive take down of it as snake oil.

Re: Kudos to Apple…

Doesn't Samsung's S10 charger let you charge multiple devices at once, if you must? I think all buds without some kind of cord are a design fail and usually have too short a battery life for most practical use.

What Apple really wanted to do was what they normally do with standards: add a couple of bits to make it proprietary (DBLA -> AirPlay) and licence it to accessory makers but they were just too late to the game for wireless charging. No doubt they'll still earn a tidy some from companies wanting to stick something like designed for I-Phone™ on the box

BOFH: Tick tick BOOM. It's B-day! No we're not eating Brussels flouts...

Re: Plausible deniability

Medication, not shampoo. But you're probably safe with saying Lithium or ritalin.

Re: Poor Marksmen

A victim spared is a favour owed…

I wonder how many rounds are in this set of favours. Also, don't forget they're all from HR and probably more than happy to, ahem, lose the odd report for harassment…

Workplace Accidents and How to Engineer Them by Simon Travaglia et al.

Just got the latest edition!

Re: Poor Marksmen

Never heard of sequels?

Here's a race condition we can get behind: Neural net learns to keep up with 'skilled' amateur track driver in robo-ride safety experiment

Re: Control of a vehicle in varying driving conditions

Car manufacturers started introducing precisely such data collectors on their cars a few years ago and it's basically what Uber wants human drivers for.

Re: Control of a vehicle in varying driving conditions

And your point is?

Re: Control of a vehicle in varying driving conditions

So, they keep training and testing, making the environments increasingly more difficult. The system never "forgets". No doubt we'll soon see some kind of competition for self-driving snowmobiles, if we haven't already.

The crash you linked to was largely caused by the driver disabling the automatic safety features. So, yet more human error.

Xiaomi's Mi-too attempt at a pholdable: Not one, but TWO creases of fail

Re: Am I the only one...

There's no point to THESE folding phones

You seem pretty sure of yourself. We now have at least three different phones demonstrating folds in both directions so any kind of geometric format is now possible. My guess is that it will take time for the market to decide which arrangements it prefers: outside has lots of appeal but some obvious downside, inside looks physically more robust but some people won't like the idea of secondary screen. Current prices would indicate that it may take a while for mass uptake, if indeed this ever happens. On the other hand, this is the kind of design change that could become popular very quickly, as opposed to a gimmick like the notch. For example, if a company decides that field reps are to be issued with them. Price will only remain a problem if there is a real constraint in the components such as the screen itself, but multiple vendors with differing designs suggests this is not the case and we could indeed be looking at typical price developments (> 40% discount after 12 months).

Of course, another issue is getting the software right.

Oracle asks Supremes to snub Google's Java API copyright protest – and have a nice cuppa tea, instead

Re: Nuff said

My understanding is that Google routinely tries to patent such stuff largely to prevent patent trolls from having the same idea, because the US patent system is such a mess. The On8 and On9 codecs were done with this in mind and AV1 has been done in exactly the same way. Don't know the details on this but I'd be surprised if it wasn't another defensive patent.

Google thought that Oracle's case had no merit. Maybe they should have settled for a few hours worth of revenue, but if they were convinced they were in the right, then the courts were the right way to go.

There is an obvious explanation for the documentation to be visible: it is that its owners, Sun, might have opened their books during the Apache Harmony project.

Well, the thing with copyright is that there are rules and if you make those files available for one project, you have essentially made them available for everyone. Not that I think that the issue will be decided on this, but worth noting. Google certainly hasn't covered itself with glory either. It could probably have got official blessing from Sun for its approach at the time, but seemed determined to want to avoid this.

The potential fallout for making a public API entirely subject to copyright (you get to decide who can implement it and how) is huge and something that Oracle should itself be worried about: there are bound to be parts of its database code built in a similar way.