Posts by Charlie Clark 12182 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
You can be upset all you like, but it comes down to common sense, and understanding that governments will always protect themselves and their people.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions…
The US Constitution is also replete with examples of why you cannot and should not blindly trust the government.
Except they're made of METAL.
Not really a problem if they're in something that is metal or has electronics: an electronic car key, for example.
Except, as is standard spy practice, the spy will never being carrying sensitive information with them because, even if it's encrypted and you don't have the key, the authorities might well consider beating the crap out of you to get it anyway. Meanwhile the mule, who the spy doesn't know and doesn't know the spy has carried whatever is needed through or around screening.
The problem is that if designers follow current best practice, which in part derives from the kludge than Apple introduced with the I-Phone then the screen size will be incorrectly reported and this may lead to content being off-screen. In typical Apple-style they launch a device with a kludge and expect everyone to do what they want.
I suspect some kind of tweak to IOS Safari will allow users to toggle screen size to include the notch or not.
Uber has exposed an anachronism in taxi-licensing in the UK. The solution is to close the loophole and remove the synthetic distinction between Hackney carriages and other vehicles, and work on ways of avoiding exploitation of drivers (and fares) and relegate Uber to the dustbin of history, where it belongs.
My S5 is more than fast enough for me. Could always do with more battery, but now I've got two spares and a power pack I think I'll manage.
I will admit that the camera on the I-Phone does some very nice things: slow motion,, time-lapse but nothing I feel I'm desperately missing. Give me a grand and I'll find other things to spend it on.
Inasmuch as government application for tenders have to be made public you'd have thought so, cf. the "bargain" deal the government's getting for Hinckley Point. It's a sleight of hand to hide the embarrassing details behind a commercial contract and should really be tested in the courts, as they have successfully in, for example, Berlin. Okay, different jurisprudence and jurisdiction but the principle applies: the Berlin government sold off the local utilities using contracts with guaranteed price rises that it, for some unknown reason, wanted to keep secret.
No need to bash them needlessly here. Just as with Apple TV the sales are relatively small but the margins are nice: lots of people like these products. Just possibly not enough to change the world.
A lot of the features are sort of amateur but to be fair they've always been prepared to talk about these things as a sort of hobby. Just wish I had a hobby that brought as much cash in!
There are definitely risks in focussing too much on the "5 % problems" of the people who go for this kind of thing. None of the "smart" watches I've seen has really intrigued me but the Withthings stuff is getting close: good battery life and incremental utility. Rather than pissing around with LTE I can see a market in a flexible OLED touch strap (definitely not always on!) but Apple has absolutely no IP in that area.
That's because Apple and the network are trying to manage two devices or endpoints with one (IMSI) number.
You can see the advantages of being able to tether the devices by the mobile network but this should be done by the watch being a dumb slave to the phone. Would the networks play along? Quite possibly if a special contract was required for say $5 a month. They would still own the customer's contract and tying up with Apple should bring them customers because of the USP. This is how the I-Phone worked initially.
But the downsides are multiple: LTE is still far from ubiquitous and getting good cellular radio reception on something like a watch is a far cry tethering it to the phone via Bluetooth, and will no doubt be reflected in battery use. Then there are the multiple potential vectors: if both devices can send and receive calls, then this is begging to be used for eavesdropping.
But yeah, leverage over the supply chain is important.
As is the retail operation.
Google is going to continue to develop and sell hardware but I expect it to be happy to remain a niche player. Lobbing out devices to showcase the services to encourage the market is very different from running warehouses and bricks and mortar shops full of "geniuses".
Nobody mentioned Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired in 2011 with the intention of building its own handsets
Google never stated that that was the intention. It was always a defensive move to stop some of Motorola's patents landing the in the hands of the competition of trolls who would sue, sue and more sure.
Won't be the same with HTC but little reason at the moment to suspect that Google wants mimic Apple, because control of the supply chain and customer service is more important than hardware designers. It might be all about kickstarting other product lines such as VR, where HTC is less of an also ran.
his company popularised the use of PCs by providing an easy to use interface
Nonsense. PCs became ubiquitous because the clones made them cheap, despite the many acknowledged design flaws. When it came to the interface MS was always playing catch up with Windows versus Amgia/Atari/Apple and even things like GEM for the PC. Playing catch up involved stupid decisions like "Program Manager" to avoid legal spats with Apple…
Gates did do much better work on the programming languages side with things like MS-BASIC. But it was his eye for the deal with DOS and later NT that made him all the money.
The Gemini did crowd-funding in March and more than hit the target of $500k and is on target to deliver phones by the end of the year — all crowd-funding projects carry a degree of risk. It is aiming to do this by using as much off-the-shelf equipment and software as possible, and this will undoubtedly include BLOBs for some stuff.
This phone will be more expensive and without the USP of a real keyboard and will take much longer to develop (nothing due before 2019). In summary something for the true believers: unimpressive hardware at a premium price at some point in the future. Good luck with that!
On the other hand, AT&T and Verizon would likely use their significant lobbying budgets to lean on regulators to kill the merger
There's little evidence to suggest this. A three-way spilt would probably suit all three more than the current situation where T-Mobile is aggressively trying to gain market share.
Consolidation in industries is the hallmark of the US economy over the last few years and is the reason for corporate profits (and prices) continuing to rise. Cf. the current round of consolidation in the aerospace supply industry. Over a wide range of industries the US is significantly less competitive than elsewhere in the world.
… not.
Legacy specialist applications will include drivers for specialist hardware. I seem to recall someone mentioning drivers for tasers but it could be all kinds of stuff. This should be doable with virtualised and locked down setups but that is going to take time and expertise to set up correctly. Meanwhile, since 2010 the police force has been busy shedding personnel and doing additional anti-terrorist stuff. At some point something has to give. Ditto for the rest of the public sector.
They already know it won't work fully on some machines so prevent those machines from loading the free software.
It would work fine if they included the drivers. If the hardware doesn't support a particular feature (and there hasn't been much in x86 since 2008 to warrant this) then that particular feature can be disabled.
Apple frequently uses system upgrades to fix bugs in existing releases that it subsequently no longer maintains. The Bluetooth bugs in Lion that were only fixed in Mountain Lion are an example, but there are plenty of others.
The free upgrade strategy fits in well with built-in obsolescence: your system is more than five years old so you should buy a new one. While it certainly makes commercial sense there's no denying that this is annoying for customers. And older installs are often in places with multiple machines. I only recently ditched my 2006 Mac Mini that I kept around as a potential backup device. Selling premium hardware on the basis of its quality and then denying it upgrades will degrade the image over time. Not that Apple cares that much for users since it discovered consumers…
Previously Apple (and Android still does) have had to include both 32 bit and 64 bit libraries
Nah, Android comes in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours and most apps have their bytecode jitted to native.
That said, you're right that the 64-bit / 32-bit issue is generally misunderstood. Practically apart from drivers it shouldn't make much of a difference.
Except that this week it's up against both the weakening Dollar and Euro. Though it has not yet recovered to pre-June 2016 levels. I'm not in the markets but there could be several reasons for this: changes in the UK's position on the negotiations; anticipation of tighter monetary policy from the BoE to combat inflation; a sustained uptick in economic activity. I suspect the exchange will react to Treesar's speech on Friday, the Tory Party conference and particularly whether the EU Council of Ministers greenlights trade talks in October. Particularly the latter will increase both political and economic uncertainty so hedging is likely to increase.
Of course, if the prices of imports were to rise less quickly as a result of a higher exchange rate you shouldn't expect the savings to be passed onto consumers.
My immediate impression was that there's now very little distinction between a Phablet and a plus-size handset
So don't use it. It was made up by marketers and largely ignored by the populous.
With its phones Samsung has pursued a strategy of continual improvements. There's been the odd tick-tock: the Notes get something special or the Galaxys do. Over time high-end becomes standard: high-res, edge-to-edge screens, wireless charging, etc. This is how consumer electronics works and why Samsung is doing well at it. That it has managed to throw in some significant changes: split screens and DeX spring to mind, shows how hard they're working on next-gen stuff.
The stylus is nice to have for most of us but essential for some which is why the Notes continue to sell well despite the price.
Sorry for the mixed metaphor…
Bojo lost the Tory leadership election last year and probably knows he won't get another chance. But he's getting board being a Minister with not a lot to do: most of the main aspects of the Foreign Office have been given to other departments.
There's not a lot of mileage in the £350 million a week line anymore, viz. UKIP's collapse in the recent general election. The point of the article was to stir things up before May's heavily trailed speech in Florence at the end of the week. After that Bojo is likely to act as a stalking horse for someone like Rees-Mogg once it becomes clear in October that wheels have come of the Brexit bus: no progress on citizenship and no progress on the budget mean no chance of a trade agreement before March 2019.
Wow thats a new narrative. Wasnt it really that Obama wanted a successful deal, the EU was gagging for it as it isnt a bad thing to want…
No, the EU gave up TTIP (please do try and get the abbreviations right) as a botched job because the European Commission, at the behest and with the full knowledge of member states and the USA, tried to conduct negotiations in secret. This backfired badly and is why Dan is quite right to point out the political price.
This was all a long time before the US presidential election by which time, of course, public opinion in the US had moved against international trade deals. Less of an issue for TTIP than for TPP, where China was given a golden opportunity to take the lead in regional trade agreements.
But since we wont be within the cartel we wont need to punish the poor globally and instead will see prices falling as we dont need to freeze them out of trade any more. This is something that worries the EU as any trade deal with them could give us the best of both worlds which is why they are desperate to demand we cant be allowed a competitive advantage.
It doesn't worry the EU at all because the UK will at best get access to the single market on current terms.
But you're promised lower prices might well worry the low-skilled who've seen their real incomes decline over the last few years… How about replacing EU migrant workers with those from China, Vietnam or Angola? Sounds like a real vote winner to me!
Oh, and, of course, we know there's £350 million a week been found behind the same sofa that found extra money for Northern Ireland…
Sigh, strikes me as insane to be touting a market that is an 11 hours expensive flight away with a massive culture and business law difference to your home country as opposed to somewhere nearer.
Well it did work for Norway's salmon and Scotland's whisky industries… but those are admittedly special cases.
Elsewhere, as you're presumably aware, the Japanese have been unusually forthright in expressing their views on continued access to the single market.
I believe Bojo is also organising a jaunt to the gulf to promote British oil and gas…
Going to Finland and Sweden can only be trying to lobby for special access to the EU markets for UK financial products and services once the UK leaves the single market. Only about a year too late with all these countries actively looking to poach what they can from the UK. Expect lots of nods and sympathy and polite explanations that that chap Barnier in Brussels is handling the negotiations.
Do you know why May is going to Canada now?
I think the main reason is to try and persuade the US not to consider Bombardier's C-Series planes as being unfairly subsidised. If the Americans do decide this then it's job losses in Northern Ireland, where the wings are made. Not that Treesar is worried about votes in Northern Ireland at all…
According to Chiou and Tucker, data retention periods didn't affect the flow of traffic from search engines to downstream websites.
Google doesn't really care about downstream websites. What it is interested in is demonstrating the efficacy of its search algorithm to advertisers and it doesn't look like this was covered in the study. To demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm it constantly needs to check that the results it provides are indeed what users are looking for and constant perusing of the logs is one of the ways to do this, though I suspect aggregation of search terms is main benefit.
I suspect that Google itself knows the value of the data it collects, including the problems associated with ever bigger haystacks. You can see how they do some of these things with Google Trends or the N-Gram research.Trends allow like-for-like comparisons over time, eg. the much touted early indicators of autumn colds and flu. That's gold dust for some but only makes sense with aggregated, anonymised data. I suspect they would probably already pour cold water on the value of ever greater personalisation of adverts, which is where Facebook seems to be going. I think we're going to find out that influence, the holy grail of advertisers, is best reached by the right combination of adverts and content.
Even on a decent Linux distro the real problem is that pip is braindead and often overwrites system packages with incompatible versions of its own devising.
Cart before the horse: it's the distro's that mess with Python's packaging and then expose it to users. Setup correctly and pip will install to the user's home directory and they'll never have to fuck around with apt-* which should only be used for system stuff. Separation user and system packages? We've heard those BSD guys do that but we can't be bothered…
The point is that Linux is a rewrite and its now the most used version of Unix in the world.
Maybe (could get into arguments as to whether Android is Linux, etc) but what does that have to do with your argument?
A better example would be something like LibreSSL or BoringSSL vs OpenSSL. Forks, ports and rewrites all have their place but how often do you want to rewrite a sorting algorithm?
And who do you think is going to do any of this? Not that I think anyone really gives a fig about the weighting on PyPI. I think it was added at the start when people thought these mattered. I suspect that nowadays most PyPI packages are installed automatically as dependencies and CI systems.
It would be far better if some kind of static code analysis could be run on every uploaded package but, again, who's going to set this up and pay for it?
So he thinks one should never rewrite code from scratch?
Stop being disingenuous: he said rewrite everything from scratch. Reuse or rewrite is casting build or buy in a different light and should be assessed for each project. This notwithstanding: PyPI is full of fairly pointless libraries. Rinse or repeat for all other public repositories.
The success of Linux was as much a happy accident as anything else. If BSD Unix hadn't been mired in a legal case with AT&T for years, Linux would probably have remained an unremarkable Minix clone.
The real solution for most people is to install from their Linux distro's repo
I don't agree with this at all. Distro's packagers often get it wrong and Debian abuses Python's packaging so much that it causes problems for other libraries. I have had to deal with this a couple of the times in the past and it is infuriating! Furthermore, user project installs should always be separate from system ones.
But your main point stands: typos are an established attack vector.
Apple is the company trying to break this down so that mobile operators actually have to behave more competitively.
Only in your dreams, fanboi. Andrew is entirely correct to suggest that Apple wants as much control of the device as possible. Control the SIM and you can run play MVNO. Any money saved by playing networks off against each other will go to Apple not to customers. Not they seem to mind, however, seeing how much Apple charges for the stuff.
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