Posts by Charlie Clark

SAP slaps down Teradata's 'trade secret' sueball with sick burn

I'd side with Teradata on this one

SAP's contracts, like Oracle's, are about as good a definition of lock-in as you'll come across, which is why so much of them are redacted if they ever get to see the light of day.

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

Re: How is it Google's fault ?

In Luxembourg I can tell you that if you have a criminal record, you will not be setting up a company

Luxembourg has more than enough wheezes for financial companies including the new "freeport" thingy, which is a classic "don't ask, don't tell" wheeze.

Re: Right to be forgotten

Criminals are both self selecting and stupid enough to get caught.

That's a bit sweeping. You can get a criminal record for a fairly minor offence. Or keep one after a change in the law (Alan Turing springs to mind).

And society judges people rehabilitated once they have served their sentence or paid their fine, and criminal records in many cases are expunged after a certain time, assuming no new convictions. IANAL so I'm probably wrong on the details here.

Criminal records are public so that it is possible to check them without using a search engine.

That said, this chappy does seem to be on a hiding to nothing and is likely soon to have his name splashed all over the interwebs precisely because he does have something to hide.

Lyon for speed, San Francisco for money, Amsterdam for fun: the best cities to be a techie

Re: Another dumb "top X" list

Not everyone considers money their #1 criteria

But he didn't… he put the possibility of getting other similar jobs in the same place first, and regarding money after costs which includes healthcare, rent and insurance (including pension provision).

As for the other criteria: in Amsterdam no one needs a car.

Hello 'WOS': Windows on Arm now has a price

Re: Local video playback

I'm not conviced hours of local video playback is a very good indication of CPU power efficiency.

ARM is less about the CPU and more about hardware acceleration anyway. Even if we know nothing about the x86 emulation 25 hours video playback on a 1.2 kg machine is impressive.

Re: Plus ca change...

So what's changed?

Windows RT was Microsoft's attempt to have its cake and eat it: cheap devices that wouldn't cannibalise sales of Windows. But the absence of any kind of emulation meant that no one would buy Windows RT, because there was no software, and no one would develop software because no one was buying the hardware. Emulation, especially in hardware, changes everything.

Re: Be careful what you wish for...

a global monoculture (ARM everywhere)

Not so much because of the different nature of the different ARM designs and custom extensions. More importantly ARM is already a fairly open architecture with lots of companies designing their own chips based on ARM designs which makes it easy to put design specific hardware for specific tasks (encryption, encoding, etc.)

So, the real risk is fragmentation so that stuff optimised for a Snapdragon may not run at all on Exynos, or a Kirill or an Apple A10 or a Mediatek, etc.

Re: "Now all Intel can do is watch from the sidelines"

Qualcomm is a preferred supplier for the US military so no sale without their approval.

Anyway, that ship has more or less sailed: there are too many ARM licencees, including Intel, out there now with the right to design their own ARM-based archs.

Re: Intel sueing in 3... 2... 1...

The original x86 patents expired a quite some time ago and they're the ones that matter. Licences may still be required for some of the extensions MMX, SIMD, etc. but those aren't likely to be such a problem.

Anyway, the real fun will come on these machines with Windows removed so that no emulation is required. I assume we can expect bootlockers designed to prevent this.

Re: How much?

@jmch

Yeah. -) I have days where the spelling just goes like that. I think it has something to with language cross-coding that buggers up whatever checks we run when spelling homophones.

Re: How much?

I can get a monster battery pack for my slow-sipping Asus X202E

And what does the thing way with the extra battery?

Re: How much?

The chips are cheaper, but you can expect to pay a premium for the combination of low weight + good battery life. 25 hours for a 1.2 kg device is very impressive. People who want something light but with good endurance won't mind paying a bit. If the numbers do hold up then Microsoft has definitely stolen a march on Apple.

It's official: Chocolate Factory anoints Tink crypto as Google project

Re: Great, but...

I think BoringSSL inherits some design problems from OpenSSL and can't necessarily be changed as desired.

HTC U12 Life: Notchless, reasonably priced and proper buttons? Oh joy

Re: Notchless

The photo is a convincing demonstration of how a notch would help.

No, it doesn't. Sounds like you want full screen mode so you can read El Reg without being interrupted.

Re: Notchless

Why? All the notch does is highlight the fact that it's a cut-out.

But, if you like it so much, you're spoilt for choice with this year's crop from Shenzen.

Re: Gets out key spec list needed for me to upgrade...

I could live without NFC and even a removable battery if the one in the phone is big enough, though I have 3 for my S5. SD card, good OS updates and speakers: the stereo on the HTC is pretty good for a phone.

Re: Honestly.. this is the problem with the Android phone market

The USP of this handset is practically non-existent.

I dunno, a device at a reasonable that's been thoughtfully put together seems pretty rare nowadays. I suspect the biggest problem may be that people who like the new range don't buy new things as often: it is sometimes easier to sell the expensive stuff to the people who do want a new one every year.

A decade on, Apple and Google's 30% app store cut looks pretty cheesy

Re: amazon is charging 30 % too.

This is effectively a cartel. The T&Cs probaly prohibit offering lower prices on other platforms/stores.

Re: No surprise...

Google will at least let you install and trust other stores, most notably Amazon for film and music. It's also pushing "Progressive Web Apps", ie. it's perhaps more interested in the advertising revenues that what it makes from selling apps, though I'm sure it doesn't mind that.

Re: What's the situation in China?

Just because Google is blocked doesn't mean there will be more competition. People get a phone with a suite of stuff that replaces Google Play Services.

I heard there's more malware in China…

Moving the app store to add-ons for apps won't necessarily make anything safer. Piracy and knock-offs are common in China so people have less of a problem installing less legitimate stuff.

Re: Apples and Oranges

One does meaningful human audits of every app uploaded

For a given value of meaningful: the value of Apple's checks was debunked a while ago. I have a couple of apps on my Mac went back to selling directly beause the App Store was so shit.

Of the two Apple is definitely the most anti-competitive. Android will let you use and trust other stores and also let you install your own browser, mail client, etc.

Stores should be opened up and, if there is no fixed price for books any more, there shouldn't be for apps. Developers should be able to sell directly but there should also be some thought given to avoiding a race to the bottom.

Huawei elbows aside Apple to claim number-two phone maker spot

Re: Lacking any kind of incentive to upgrade constantly

Same timeframe and similar number of devices. Hagenuk (first phone with internal antenna), Ericsson R520 (lovely bit of magesium!), Ericsson T68, Nokia E6, Samsung Wave, Samsung S4 Mini (got nicked), Samsung Rugged, Samsung S5 (2nd hand), Samsung S5 (also 2nd hand, screen on 1st has a hairline crack, so it's now backup), Planet Gemini. There was a company Motorola in there somewhere but I never worked out how to use it.

Are we twins separated at birth? And, if so, who's the evil one?

Anecdotal evidence

My hairdresser was proudly showing me here Vivo today: Notch knock-off with 128 GB for about € 280. She's from Shanghai so got it from her brother. If she's anything to go by, and I'm not suggesting she is, then Apple might indeed need to start worrying as the Chinese phones have essentially caught up technologically and, more importantly, the market is starting to believe this. The Orange One's cack-handed trade war won't help here either: if China Daily suggests that I-Phone's are somehow unpatriotic then sales will plummet (form here for Korean or Japanese products).

But, thus far, Apple's brand is holding up well with fans and the Hotel Cupertino walled garden makes it difficult to leave.

Give yourselves a pat on the back, top million websites, half of you now use HTTPS

Alexa data set is poor

Not least because it contains a lot of duplicate hosts but also because it's not very representative httparchive recently switched to using the CrUX dataset, which is both more representative because Google has all those websites providing the anonymised data, and doesn't have duplicate hosts. This data set puts https at around 75% websites.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Re: Money all spent

There's no funds left to refund.

But I still want my cake!

however that shouldn't stop Germany from have a working army & airforce.

It doesn't but respect for countries like Poland and the Czech Republic do.

You forget Russia's recent actions all around its territory including annexation of Crimea and earlier parts of Georgia and even Moldavia.

Nope. But seeing as all the US' massive firepower hasn't dissuaded Putin from invasions, I fail to see what a few more German planes and tanks would do.

Putin's using the old tactic of foreign agression abroad to bolster his position @ home.

Yes, and finding out that it's bloody expensive (Crimea is a real money pit for Moscow). Russia can cause trouble and has enough planes and missiles to invade most of its neighbours. But it has nowhere near enough good troops to hold anywhere. Hence the stalemate in Ukraine and the not so subtle attempts for a rapprochement with Europe. Presumably before it all kicks off again in the Causcuses

I merely pointed out that Germany is not meeting its legal obligations as per an agreement it has signed.

Are you referring the NATO comminiqués about "2% for defence"? Firstly, these are statements and not binding treatments: the German government may not by law sign any such binding agreements because the army is responsible to the parliament only. And secondly, the statements have set 2% only as a target.

Re: Cooperation

I find it difficult to understand that the EU aren't happy to agree a simple treaty with us to continue partnership on this.

Why do you think the treaty would be simple? The rules for Galileo, including who gets access to privileged data, were drawn up with the UK's full involvement and approval.

Looks quite like toys flying out of the pram.

That would be the referendum and all the calls that "no deal is better than a bad deal!".

Germany in particular has had to train with broom sticks and barely has an airforce or tank regiment that works

Jesus fucking wept! Do you think there might possibly be a good reason for Germany having a shit army for all those years? And where's the threat supposed to come from since the Soviet army bankupted the USSR? De-escalation is a very reasoanable tactic.

Anyway, larger defence budgets don't mean necessarily mean safer. What have all those trillions (yes, 10^12 was passed some time ago) done for Afghanistan?

America's huge military presence has been used to enforce its global hegemony: having the world's reserve currency is very good for trade and keeps borrowing costs down a lot.

But isn't it more expensive to launch the further you are away from the equator and hence why Ariane launches from French Guiana rather than anywhere in Europe?

Depends where you want the orbit to be but for geostationery stuff, the equator has a higher angular velocity.

Re: £92m on a feasibility study

I could give them the right answer for a tenth of that.

Ah, but who would take you seriously? Got to be a serious figure and an appropriate volume of pages to show the public that the government is getting value for money.

Re: Wait, what?

£92m on a feasibility study?

Want to join my UK First GPS Feasibility Study Consulting company? Who cares how stupid it is: all aboard the gravy train!

Apple leaks rekindle some hope for iPhone 'supercycle' this year

In what way is an iPhone X a "copy of Samsung"?

OLED screen, Qi charging, waterproof…

Where's Samsung's phone screen running to all edges, including the bottom?

You mean how come the Apple phone doesn't have a screen that curves to form the edges? Prettier and more useful thatn a fucking notch, which is a design and usability fail.

The iPhone X pricing strategy was due to Apple finding themselves in a corner with regard to the introduction of new technology.

What was this new technology? The Apple Galaxy X is basically just a copy of a Samsung. With a notch.

Is China that big a market for dual-SIMs?

I've always understood other parts of the world such as India and Africa to be the real drivers for this feature.

Re: Apple will end up like Nokia

Symbian couldn't easily evolve to support things like GPUs and lots of RAM.

This is complete bollocks. Symbian's problems with hardware were basically limited to dealing with chips wtih bugs (TI, ST, etc.). The software-side was riven by the desire to be all things to all people, particularly letting the manufacturers control the GUI. As demonstrated once Nokia owned the platform and settled on QT for the GUI things moved along quite quickly. It was not technical restricitons but just too little resources, too late.

IOS was released without 3G support and HTML widgets only. It took years to get multitasking and things like support for copy & paste, because Apple simply understood consumer demand better (Symbian as all about selling to manufacturers and networks) and then went all in with the resources.

All water under the bridge now but Symbian's failing was, as is often the case, not about the technology.

Keep yer plastic, says analyst: eSIMs aren't all they're cracked up to be

Re: Why does Apple want eSIMs?

The fact they don't shows that your paranoia is not justified.

No paranoia just healthy cynicism: it makes Apple the gatekeeper and takes power away from the user. If I travel outside the EEA I buy a relevant SIM: job done. If Apple was really interested in serving the customer it would reduce its margins.

Why does Apple want eSIMs?

Since Apple helped develop the original spec, presumably with saving space as their motivation

Nah, it makes the walled garden a bit bigger: operators get to bid to be Apple's provider supplier for its MVNO.

Redis has a license to kill: Open-source database maker takes some code proprietary

Re: "Google brought out and pushing Chrome that things changed significantly"

Mozilla reached 30% market share before Chrome became significant, and that was enough to break IE monopoly which was then about 55%. Probably Mozilla share would have increased, if Google didn't try to install Chrome everywhere and people believed it was a good idea to install it.

The latter was very much a case of the biter bit…

IE eventually lost to the other monopoly builders Safari and Chrome. The irony is that Mozilla and Opera, Opera's work on WHATWG cannot be overstated, did pioneer modern web standards but it was the combined might of Apple and Google that really got them established. Both Google and Apple are heavy users of open source software but I'd argue that Google contributes quite a lot more back.

Blink was forked not just by Google but by others who were disenchanted by Apple's stewardship once WebKit did everything it needed for the App Store: Apple also doesn't need to worry much about building for different toolkits.

Re: "Chrome was probably the biggest single challenge"

Sorry, Mozilla came first, and broke IE monopoly first

Not really. IE remained dominant in most countries before being overtaken by Chrome. No doubt that Mozilla and Opera, and to a lesser extent Apple, were instrumental in developing and adopting HTML5, but it was only really when Google brought out and pushing Chrome that things changed significantly. All credit to Google for continuing to commit, and yes influence, web standards, in contrast to Apple which continues to develop what it needs and hope that market share means adoption.

AOSP is fully open source and you can run in it without any Google sauce, though some apps might not like it and you will probably need vendor blobs for most handsets.

Chromium is no longer built on WebKit but on Blink. Chrome itself isn't open source but it also doesn't have that much more than is in Chromium: things like the Flashplayer, DRM shit and user tracking tools. Interesting but not really "business critical".

I am not in any way defending Google's monopolistic tendencies, over which it should indeed be challenged.

Re: "You might want to look again at the number of Google's own open source projects"

Google could be really scared some open source projects try to kill the outdated GPL clause

If the GPL became too difficult to work with then, as has happened with many projects, then they just pick another "unencumbered" winner. Every hurdle to using some software means losing users and, in the open source world, potential contributors.

Google gets way more from OSS than they give back.

This is a sweeping and essentially unverifiable claim. Consider three projects that Google has devoted considerable resources to: Chrome, WebM / AV1, and Android.

Of course, all three serve Google's own interests but that doesn't discount their value: Chrome was probably the biggest single challenge to a world dominated by Internet Explorer; WebM means that video is dominated by neither Flash nor pay-to-play MP4; and Android means some choice for mobile phones.

It also developed Go for inhouse use and made it open source, and this probably best illustrates how the company works: Go is key to Google's infrastructure but it isn't the key. This follows how IBM released some software that it didn't want to maintain on its own.

Re: Suicide

A fork of the last AGPL version sounds like the right solution here.

As the AGPL apparently hasn't helped the company achieve its aims then this suggests that you can't do this by pimping the licence. Open source software that comes with strings is basically just lawyer bait.

You might want to look again at the number of Google's own open source projects and the ones it stewards. I think it's a pretty astute anaylsis: if, as a company, all you do is develop open source software then your business model is flawed.

Winner, Winner, prison dinner: Five years in the clink for NSA leaker

Re: I find it hard to credit the 'printer dots' with her indictment/conviction

So after you sign the American version of the official secrets act, its ok to spill the beans…

Public interest is an acceptable defence for this: it was evidence of attacks on the democracy. It is not about approval but what would think about it if it were evidence of a crime, say murder or child abuse?

Intimidation of citizens through cases like this is the sort of thing that Benjamin Franklin warned against: suppressing dissent is one of the first steps on the road to totalitarianism.

Tax the tech giants and ISPs until the bits squeak – Corbyn

Re: Boo Hoo

Even Theresa May is a better Prime Minister!

Are you sure? While I still remember her admirable speech to the Tory Party when she was chairman, she has been totally inept since she became PM, particularly in failing to set the government's agenda.

In any case when it comes to the current crop of muppets, comparisons are meaningless. Thought experiment with Bojo, Corbyn, Rees-Mogg™ 1775, Gove, et al. at the helm would things be any less shit?

Personally, and I'm not a Tory, I'm expecting Osborne to make a comeback, and I've been quite impressed by Ruth Davison, though I suspect her sexual preference could be a problem when people stop blaming foreigners for everything!

A digital licence fee, supplementing the existing licence fee, collected from tech giants and Internet Service Providers

This would make it a levy or a tax and not a fee. And, as it could be offset, it would effectively be revenue neutral, or a subsidy from the taxpayer to the licence payer, depending on how you view it. Better, and simpler, to extend the licence fee to cover every household with an internet connection as has been done in Germany and elsewhere. Yes, there'll be the usual gnashing of teeth that I don't watch the bloody BBC… but this applies to pretty much every charge (I don't drive a car but I still help pay for the roads…) and ignores the point that the licence fee is about the only way to ensure independence in the media.

Oh, and the next time the government gets to appoint someone to the BBC Trust, or whatever the governing body is called, make sure they choose someone who cares about journalism.

Unpicking the Pixel puzzle: Why Google is struggling to impress

Re: (whispers) Google aren't a very good product company ...

Google aren't a very good product company

You probably want to change that to hardware company or consumer business.

I think Google often does things for reasons other than we anticipate. It clearly isn't very interested in becoming another Apple and the pricing also shows that it's not following Amazon's loss-leader approach. The role of the Google-branded hardware has changed over the years but might now be coming to an end. Initially it served as an incentive for manufacturers to produce Android phones with some kind of guaranteed volume, more recently it's become a chance to showcase newer features. But with the betas becoming open to other manufacturers this has less relevance. My guess is that we won't be seeing many more of them. Android is established and most Android's run at least one of Google's data-grabbing services.

Re: Going the way of Redmond....

You seem to be ignoring how successful Amazon's extremely intrusive speaker lines are.

Heads up: Fujitsu tips its hand to reveal exascale Arm supercomputer processor – the A64FX

Re: Why no ARM servers?

This is where open source applications have the benefit. If you have the source code (assuming it is pretty much architecture independent)

The open source claim is a red herring here; open source has its own benefits but architecture independence isn't one. More important is whether the source code contains optimisations for the architecture and how good the compiler is at optimising. For example, I've seen benchmarks where Intel's compiler produces significant improvements on x86 over gcc.

Still, LLVM and other initiatives have brought general improvements for all and we're reaching a point where compilers can always produce better results than people: optimisations can generally be formalised which makes them a good subject for automation.

But, as others have noted, it's not just about optimised code: drivers for storage and networking have to work just as well and this is easier on "industry standard" x86 than for any particular custom ARM SoC. Fortunately, things are improving here, too.