Posts by Charlie Clark

UK.gov urged to ensure punters can 'still roam like at home' after Brexit

Can't certainly say that for the others, but i suspect they love having customers more than anything else.

Who'll leave if they all introduce "necessary charges"?

Re: Oink, oink, flap, flap.

That's strange, my mobile provider allowed me to 'roam like at home' long before any grandstanding from the EU

Grandstanding? The EU launched an investigation into collusion over roaming charges about 2002 and quickly came to the conclusion that they were profiteering and should be scrapped. It was national governments, including the UKs, that lobbied against this. Without the investigation and the pressure then wholesale prices would never have fallen enough for providers to be able to offer you the kind of deal you have.

Here's some sand for you to stick your head in.

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

I'm using my current RPI3 as a Kodi box

Which it's great at even though it has a problem with audio dropping out when starting playback.

Re: Dates

MM/DD make much more sense than DD/MM

In which context? In any technical context they are both bad because they're ambiguous (as are year abbreviations YY) and this is the big problem with Americans using the abbreviation in technical contexts and why we have an ISO standard (of course, not without its own problems). Outside of a technical context then you might as well write out the month name or three letter abbreviation. MAR-14 or 14/MAR or whetever.

s it a lack of a built in PCIe bus

Yes, you want something like a Banana Pi for a faster bus. Surprised to see a chip update at all considering how little Broadcom cares about the chips.

Poop to save planet as boffins devise bullsh*t way of extracting gas

Re: Crap Digesters

So you just fit the cows with a reverse gas mask

One suggestion is to cut holes into their stomachs and collect the stuff directly…

Lots of methanation processes are already in practice and, a bit like biofuels, they sort of rely on subsidies to turn the hydrocarbons used to make fertilisers into hydrocarbons for fuel. This is financially not sustainable on a large scale but can make sense in some situations.

Speaking as a bit of a hippy: we really do need to clamp down on some of the subsidies for renewables which are having lots of unintended consequences such as pricing food farmers out of business.

Re: Ok, but...

Economics already dictate that artificial fertiliser made from oil — oh the irony! — is cheaper than recycling shit, which is why countries like the The Netherlands and Germany are busy poisoning their water table with nitrates from the run-off. And if you think NO_x is bad in the air, just wait till it gets in the drinking water!

Fun fact of the day: Voice recognition tech is naturally sexist

Re: sex sells

Maybe they should be aggressive?

Ahem, you seem to have missed the point: man hears another man and hears a potential threat This is hardwired into our brains so difficult to mimic. One of the reasons why some women develop deeper voices when they work with a lot of men; Maggie was apparently coached for this.

"Frying" is the partially the result of untrained attempts of women to lower the pitch of their voices.

facial recognition programs have trouble with black faces because they scatter less light

This isn't true, they just scatter it differently. Some other commentard was able to provide a bit more information on how this is dealt with in the photographic industry.

But the general point stands that there may well be technical factors that cannot be effectively compensated for. This leads to opportunities for those wishing to seize them: either in the market place or on the PC gravy train.

Re: Quieter???

Volume != pitch

Re: sex sells

And thirdly, people tend to be more compliant accepting instructions from women.

No, they find female voices less aggressive so their response is differently primed.

Re: Female voices...

Don't worry: cognitive psychological research suggests that men tend to find female voices* more soothing that male ones and, partly as a result of this, difficult to pay attention to for long periods.

* As long as they're not "frying" their vocal chords or doing Mickey Mouse impressions.

NASA on SpaceX's 2015 big boom: Bargain bin steel liberated your pressure vessel

A slew of successful launches since then means there won't be anything to worry about when Musk starts playing with really big rockets in 2019.

Because lightning never strikes twice?

Blowing up a $ 200 million satellite has an immediate and lasting affect on insurance premiums. The Falcon Heavy is a new rocket and needs to establish its own track record before companies will think about putting their even more expensive satellites on it. Not that Musk really cares because the Heavy is less suited to launching satellites than flinging people at Mars.

Mozilla wants to seduce BOFHs with button-down Firefox

Re: Put it out of its misery

Once I worked out how to disable "recommendations" I much prefer the newer version, possibly because I don't have any incompatible add-ons. On the whole since they stopped fucking around with the UI and concentrated on browsery stuff they've done a good job. Good enough for me to switch back from Vivaldi which is going down its own rabbit holes.

Mozilla sends more snooping Web APIs to smartphone Siberia

Re: the user is king

As for the header, what if someone messes with it via a malicious proxy?

API access requires https so that shouldn't really be a problem. GDPR says, however, that blanket permissions cannot be asked for in any case.

Re: the user is king

Possibly to avoid the "Vista" effect of confronting the user with so many permission requests that they just give in and accept them all: anything for a quiet life.

Finland government buys a slice of Nokia

Re: Are they crazy?

What's wrong with having a sovereign wealth fund investing in a local company?

Anyway, how much of a stake did the UK have in ARM? Compare any profit on the sale with any foregone future tax revenues when the IP and the brains move.

Broadcom's buyout of Qualcomm bogs down as DC blocks merger

No hidden agenda: the DoD was never going to let Qualcomm be bought. Expect Broadcom to come up with another scheme to keep the money guys happy.

Are you Falcon sure, Elon? Musk vows Big Rocket will go up 2019

Re: Musk really does see himself as the Saviour of Mankind

To make it self sufficent just in air and food you need plants.

And something like a magnetosphere and ionosphere. A lot of the building could, in theory, be done using robots that get dumped there (just like Starcraft or The Martian) but it's going to be fun keeping any kind of complex control systems going in such a harsh environment. Okay, some of the rovers have done remarkably well but they mainly trundle around a bit and take photos.

But, if you want to talk up the value of your company SpaceX, talking about settling Mars is exactly what, ahem, "investors" want to hear.

Re: Closing down sale?

I think by then most of the ISS is probably not going to be worth keeping so you'd basically be left with just the super structure. But there are probably good reasons to have a moratorium on proposed manned trips to Mars in any case: expensive, dangerous and of little value.

Re: Musk really does see himself as the Saviour of Mankind

I don't get this.

Possibly because you're thinking logically. For Mars read "El Dorado" and how this was used to sell colonisation of Latin America to poor citizens of the Spanish empire. Rinse and repeat for subsequent gold rushes and bubbles.

Re: Musk really does see himself as the Saviour of Mankind

No, the reason Mars is the place to be is it can be self-sufficient.

Only in SF books. In practice it's about as difficult to make Mars habitable as it is to make the moon habitable.

I certainly like his style, the company finances less.

So more Musks and fewer solitionists and data-grabbers, please.

Intel ponders Broadcom buy as Qualcomm's exec chair steps away

Intel's entire business has always been been about the x86 architecture and just look at those profit margins. Not only does it know how to design good chips, it knows at least as much about making them. The server market is moving towards the cloud providers who won't need to promise compatbility to be successful.

Re: The elephant knitting lady will have a field day

Playing for time. Broadcom's leverage will get more difficult all the time especially once it relocates to the US, which it says it plans to do. Intel could probably buy Broadcom at a discount and asset strip it and sell the rest to keep the regulators happy for once. Nice to see the table turned on the private equity lot.

Get tooled up before grappling with Google's Spanner database

The advantage of relational databases…

… is that they're based on relational algebra and thus have a solid mathematical foundation. Removing redundancy via normalisation gives the reliability and flexibility of predicate logic. JOINs themselves are an artefact of SQL, which is itself is not relational – there is no room in relational algebra for NULL – and gets a lot of things wrong as a result. Modern relational databases can provide incredible performance (things like Swarm64 are aiming for 30 m rows/s @ 40 byte writing) which should be sufficient for most transactional workloads but this requires local clients. Worldwide replication will inherently introduce some latency. Chances are, however, that if you're hitting those kind of limits you already know these things. Unless you're doing NoSQL because "webscale" and wondering why your data keeps getting corrupt or deleted.

The use of a dedicated network with synchronisation via atomic clocks is useful in its own right and possibly the most important aspect of the implementation.

Defra to MPs: There's no way Brexit IT can be as crap as rural payments

Re: quite the contrary

A good example is fracking and Russia/Saudi- fracking

Oh, some alternative facts!

FWIW fracking peaked after demand, particularly in China, had started to fall. It didn't have much direct effact on world oil prices because the US has a law that prevents oil from being exported. Exemptions have recently been granted for LNG.

But, hey, as with all populists why bother with the details?

Re: quite the contrary

Do you disagree that the ECB is the official bank of the EU?

Most certainly. The ECB has no relation to European Commission or any other EU institution, hence, the somewhat difficult legal wrangling as in 2011. The ECB is responsible to the member states of the Euro Group.

Re: quite the contrary

Codejunky talking shit as usual:

Advantages of a single currency? Tell that to Greece, Italy, etc.

Greece would most certainly have had to go to the IMF for a bailout without the Euro and, as I noted, Italy has had a discount on interest rates since joining the single currency and even more so since 2011.

You seem to ignore Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia's experience of adopting the currency despite the problems.

And yes there are transfer arrangements, they pay federal tax's which redistributes from richer to poorer states…

Typos, factual inaccuracies and false comparisons all in one sentence! Your handler won't be pleased. While the EU does have official redistribution policies, including the CAP, regional development and cohesion funds, the US doesn't: federal taxes pay for federal obligations. See the discussions over Obamacare for a more detailed explanation of how it works over there.

Having a currency too high is what pushed high unemployment in the Eurozone and the ECB is struggling to devalue the currency to fix the economic problem.

Unemployment in France, Italy and Greece was high in 2008. Again, as I noted, the lack of wage restraint and economic reforms caused unemployment in these countries before the crisis. Or, if a high currency caused unemployment then why does Germany have low unemployment? Currency devaluations do not solve structural problems, which is one of the reasons behind a commons in the first place. Currency devaluations are generally followed by inflation, which quickly negates any price advantages of a deflation, and debts not denominated in the local currency will become more expensive. Greece, France and Italy have repeatedly devalued over the years and never solved problems as a result. In France in fact it was only when Delors introduced effective wage restraint in the 1980s that the devaluation-inflation cycle was broken.

People being given less money than before is a serious problem economically while devaluing the currency has the same real effect on the take home pay but less damage economically.

Which is why Lithuania chose internal devaluation prior to joining the single currency? Internal devaluations may be politically unpopular initially but avoiding a wage-price spiral has advantages.

But Italy is still an issue. And politically have moved anti-euro.

Again your handler won't be pleased by the grammatical error. But what is your point? France elected its most ardently pro-European president ever last year. The two winners of the Italian election have since revised their stance on the Euro saying that "now is not the right time to leave". Leaving now would mean no one would be buying Italian debt and interest rates would spike leading to a recession much more severe than that in Spain during the crisis. Italy needs economic, legal and political reform and won't see any improvement without it.

Re: quite the contrary

So the Euro isnt the official currency of the EU?

Er, only for accounting purposes. As a suprantional organisation the EU doesn't have a currency only member states do.

And the ECB being the official bank for the EU?

Again no: the central banks of the member states issue Euros directly and, more importantly, conduct financial transactions on behalf the ECB.

Re: before the EU existed

Yes, and now we're 50 years further on, and Labour still hasn't got a clue about the economy.

And neither does the other lot.

Re: before the EU existed

That doesn't mean, of course, that the Pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued

You are Harold Wilson and I claim, er, my 5 pounds. Not sure they're going to be worth much, though!

Re: quite the contrary

The currency is both undervalued and overvalued depending on which member state you are in but had no fiscal transfer system to support the overall area and so is extremely vulnerable without considering its years behind economic recovery

The same could be said of the dollar: California is much more expensive than Missisippi and has no transfer arrangements. But the advantages of a single currency within a single market are that it increases the efficiency of the single market by reducing currency risk.

Anyway economically the comments of undervaluing or overvaluing are incorrect: those countries that didn't exercise wage restraint simply priced themselves out of the market. The bigger problem is the ECB's monetary policy is that by holding interest rates down not only does this lead to a transfer from savers to debtors, particularly governments and of these especially Italy, the repression is causing increasing problems in the pensions, insurance and savings industries. But it is politically easier to blame austerity imposed from outside rather than government failure. For example, Italy's total debt would lead to default at some point and this, in turn would lead to austerity imposed by the creditors. By joining the Euro it got some insulation from the credit markets (you can see the interest rates on IT debt dropped significantly on joining the Euro and has since stayed below historical levels ever since) that successive governments failed to take advantage of to reform the economy, particularly two-class employment practices.

Re: They're probably right

It will be easy because there will be no replacement and no money for farmers. The plan is not to tell them until it's too late. Anyway, they're likely to be too busy looking for people to replace them immigrant labour anyway.

Cash payments to non-farming landowners but can probably done by tax rebates.

I wish I making this up.

Good news: Apple designs a notebook keyboard that doesn't suck

I still have my stupidly-white and crumb magnet I-Mac keyboard because it's great to work with. YMMV because I know some people hate them. If this one ever breaks I do have a reconditioned Model M…

A smartphone recession is coming and animated poo emojis can't stop it

The bleeding obvious?

Seems like the chap has been reading the forums a lot: a lot of us have been saying for a while that no matter how wonderful the technology of the flagships is, we've already generally got something wonderful enough.

Still, a couple of things do spring to mind: even if it's no longer growing much the market for phones is still huge and thee's plenty of money to be made as a result; people might keep their phones for longer but are still likely to replace at some point; there is now space for niche products like the Gemini. Got mine on Saturday and am very happy with it. Thanks for the tip, Andrew.

Android P will hear no evil, see no evil, support evil notches

while the world waits for it to earn a confectionery-related name

It isn't you know. I suspect we'll increasingly see references to major.minor.patch versions instead of the marketing friendly launch name.

Re: "Simultaneous use of multiple cameras at once"

Sounds more like a chat / WebRTC extension so that you can both see the person you're talking to and what they're looking at.

Up to 25% of new builds still can't get superfast broadband – study

Re: So my mother...

Is Openreach supposed to be forced to lay fibre and install a new cabinet because the existing one is 1/2 km away?

And what about, gas, leccy and sewage? Should the developer be forced to pay for their access as well? Sheesh, how do you expect property developers, and your mum, to make obscene profits a living?

Re: I don't care about running water, where are my internets?

Wimp! ;-)

Re: Used or available?

What else would expect from a lobbyist? Sort of odd that there still seems to be a monopoly of supply, which can only drive up costs on new developments, whereas pretty much anyone qualified should be able to lay the fibre and the provider can be put out to tender. Also, seems to imply that homeowners are either aren't involved or don't care: what kind of utilities would you like in your new house?

Now, be a good boy and try out my revolutionary new tobacco ingestion device: studies show how much healthier it is than comparable models and how much happier new smokers are.

Sorry, couldn't afford a dig at the tobacco lobby: cunts.

Re: Superfast

Welcome to term inflationism…

Swiss see Telly Tax as a Big Plus, vote against scrapping it

Re: Foreigner Tax

The problem with this is that 25% of the Swiss population are foreigners (like myself), most of which dont have any vote on this matter.

As if that were the only thing that the Swiss discriminate over… or as if it was different in other countries. The whole point of the licence fee is to take it out of direct political debate because it is not a programme subscription, ie. paying just for what you want, but media infrastructure including programmes you might not want but need.

Re: BBC from the days of Yes Minister and Spitting Image - yes

I once heard the argument from a media type that, by not selling advertising and taking a chunk of that finite pool of money, the BBC was in fact supporting commercial broadcasters.

Based on the experience in other countries there is an element of truth in this. For example, in Germany the public stations do carry some advertising (before 20:00) and when it was suggested that they stop this, it was the advertisers who complained that it would both deprive them of some of the market; and drive up the overall cost of advertising by reducing the number of providers. This was the argument when the number of commercial channels was limited but I suspect it still has some merit even in our brave new multi-channel world.

I'm all for a blanket ban of advertising of advertising and sponsoring on all public service broadcasting services.

When is a tax not a tax?

The case for a mandatory tax - which is what a licence fee is really

It isn't unlike pseudo-taxes such as tobacco duty or national insurance because the money doesn't go to the exchequer but to the broadcaster. This is the key difference and why the model has been admired and adopted worldwide, because at a stroke it insulates the broadcaster from the government and gives it a basis for financial planning.

A reliable budget and a good charter are essential for programming diversity* and an independent broadcaster also allows for other forms of differentiation other audience size. It has been argued in the past that this is especially important for journalism which is still trying to find it's place in the world of the internet echo chamber.

* ie. not just sport, reality shows and comedy

SCREEEECH: US national security agency puts brakes on Qualcomm takeover

Re: Exactly as predicted

And I think I made similar noises myself a while back. Qualcom is an MVP (player) for the US military so the deal won't happen unless the men in uniform are happy they can get their suppliers to do everything they want. Broadcom has increasingly been acting like a private equity vehicle loaded up with debt and looking for a quick profit. Difficult to the see the generals and the spooks liking that.

Google Flutter hits beta: Another go at cross-platform mobile dev

Re: Although it's Google

What's the chance of Dart and Swift meeting at some point? Google definitely wants a way out of Java for strategic reasons.

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

Physical limits

At the recommended distance between eye and monitor of around 70cm, then a 27" screen is about the perfect size for you to all four corners without moving the head. Consequently for anything larger than that you'll probably want to pin stuff to different parts of the screen so that you only move your head when changing focus. 49" sounds bit like what you see in financial centres where each screen is generally given over to particular data streams.

If you're worried about having to move a mouse a lot then use a graphics tablet which maps any screen area perfectly to the tablet's area, better for the wrist as well.

Wearables are now a two-horse race and Google lost very badly

Maybe Google decided it wasn't a race worth being in

Sometimes the best business is the one that realises this early enough. Such as Lou Gerstner's decision to get out of operating systems.

Of course, as long as Apple is still piling on the millions it might seem to be a good thing but it is also an example of Apple taking its eye off the ball. The market for car systems and home automation is so much bigger and Amazon, Google and Baidu are already well ahead of Apple there.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the Swiss manufacturers have managed to get smarts into watches for those that want them. But otherwise a fitness band and a headset would seem to be about all you need.

BTW. I like the Withings for a something between a band and full-blown thing with a tiny screen.