Posts by Charlie Clark 13458 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Following indicates that prices are artificially high
Please define "artificially"? DRAM has traditionally been a great way for companies to lose money followed by price fixing. While price fixing is generally* illegal I do understand why companies might engage in it: these factories can be fantastically expensive to build.
* We tolerate it with oil even though it is far more fungible but that's only realy because the only way to enforce it would be war.
Um, don't think so. Put an IP address on blacklist and you're done.
I didn't say ip-address, I said ip-traffic. An awful lot of sites are now dynamically hosted and dodgy ones will happily go through loads of domains. The internet was built to be extremely resilient when it comes to routing traffic which is why restricting it is so hard and done so rarely: China, Iran, Saudia Arabia, etc. And only Chinas is really effectively able to block traffic without unplugging the pipes.
It doesn't matter which sites the subscriber views, they still get the same income.
Not entirely true: depending on where the traffic is from and its volume they do pay. But this is only really noticeable for streaming video and not visiting the 1001E64 sites selling fakes and forgeries.
The increase in premiums is to cover extra cost *AND* provide an incentive to lose wieght.
The problem with making the insurer do this is that it is more or less an invitation to "death panels". It's also inflexible and slow.
The traditional approach is to apply "sin taxes" at the point of consumption, such as duty on tobacco and alcohol. Experience shows, however, that governments like to set such duties to optimise revenue rather than reduce consumption. Such duties are evidently (we have years and years of evidence) not sufficient on their own; the reveues rarely cover the cost of care and never the loss of earnings to the employer. There is a mooted sugar tax but Coca-Cola et al. have already successfully lobbied against this. And if you think the UK and the US are bad, wait till you see Latin America!
So you need additional measures including education, including labelling, and possibly even bans, assuming you have legislation the lobbies can't sue you over. It would also be nice to reduce subsidies (both tobacco and sugar have direct subsidies, alchohol indirect). Even then you'll have to fight tooth and nail: the public health arguments against tobacco were no longer disputed by the 1970s and it took nearly 40 years to get the legislation that made a significant reduction in the number of smokers.
But at the end of the day you're also going to have to live with and budget for a part of the population with unhealthy life styles. Paying them to go for a 2 km walk everyday is about the best you can hope for.
That would knock a good 10% of the cost.
Apart from the ethical and practical issues of what you suggest (what conditions, behaviour, genes, etc. do you take into consideration? How often do you do it?) there's also the simple problem of the maths: charging fat people more won't reduce costs, just increase the budget
What they should do in the electoral commission is make it an offence for a politician to lie in order to gain a vote
This is neither practicable nor desirable in a democracy: the commission doesn't get to decide on truth. While there should have been intervention over some of the more ludicrous claims, such as the infamous bus adverts, this is more a question of liability of the organisation. More standard approaches, especially financial sanctions and right to reply, would probably have sufficed but only if they were extended to social media. Companies like Facebook have for years been acting as publishers and happily monetising the brainspew of the masses while at the same time pretending to be completely independent of it. Introducing some degree of liability to the platforms and, by extension, to their users is what's required. It's not easy to get the balance right, as the new German law shows, but it's something we've got to think about more.
It is easier to find the raw information on the web than it was 25 years ago or at least reports much closer to the source.
This is probaby true: more information is being published openly but I'm not sure if it's that relevant within the discussion of news. For years there has been a drift towards dumbing down, sensationalism and triviality in the name of ratings and giving people what they want.
A good journalist will want to challenge their audience. If they're not doing this they're not providing value. There have always been those who've not wanted to follow the argument, preferring the headline to the article before going to the sports pages or celebrity gossip. The mistake has been that, in chasing this audience, its tactics have been adopted.
Facebook was the main arena. Twitter has been mainly one-way for years (politicians, celebrities, etc. marking a splash) along with the slackivist dream of saving the world one hashtag at a time.
I think the main effect was to help discredit "classical" media sources such as newspapers by providing ammunition for those who wanted it. Conspiracy theories have always abounded but social media, especially Facebook, have allowed them to flourish in echo chambers and Russia was happy to back the side of opinion over fact.
Governments have for years attempted to sway public opinion in other countries, usually with little or no effect: the Voice of America is still going strong. However, in terms of legality then any such attempts should be followed up with the same diligence as should be expected from voter fraud, bribery, etc.
But we all prefer grandstanding because, of course, we've still got the source, specs and replacement parts for all our 25-year old projects… plus a bunch of clueless politicians telling us what to do all the time, including closing down old projects, especially ones with no kudos in the current climate.
Resources – money and people, including anyone retired who worked on the project at the time are probably the biggest problem here. Signalling shouldn't have changed too much so they should be able to send an ACK signal fairly soon. Of course, the real fun starts if they have reconstruct the system locally for diagnostic purposes. But that should all be possible if they get a budget for it.
If G starts selling aggressively its hardware…
Nothing so far to indicate that they're planning to do this. They're buying engineers not sales and marketing people.
This could be exactly what it looks like: inhousing the prototype department so that they can release new products faster. Google wants its services on our phones and in our homes but it doesn't necessarily have to supply the hardware. But I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
other phone makers choose a different OS for their products.
What kind of competitive and well-supported OS do you expect to be available? No one has yet come up with one at a price manufacturers like.
Try to grade and encode 90/120min of RAW video on a tablet - if the software allows for it, and if you have enough storage.
IO will be the killer there but I can see the day when people do exactly that. USB 3 should be able to provide sufficient throughput. Course, the setup wouldn't really be that much different to an existing laptop-based solution. But that's the point.
But you can probably already shoot and edit 90 min of HD video on a mobile device. For editing you'll probably want a larger screen so a tablet makes sense but a phone would be able to do the encoding and decoding, probably need a power pack or better still electric connection.
he one factor you don't mention is processing power.…For example, editing photos, audio or video.
Phones can encode fullHD (and higher) in realtime. The GPUs on a lot of phones make those on a lot of laptops look positively wimpy and are more than suited for video and photo work, assuming the software is able to take advantage of the hardware.
The I-Pad Pro is definitely beefy enough for a lot of things, which is what Apple is pushing it for. But, what you don't always have on a tablet is enough RAM for everything you want to do, and IO is generally shit.
Probably Meltdown and Spectre will trigger a PC sales boost, as soon fixed chips become available. Hard to see this being more than a rounding error: if the problem is significant then the manufacturers could be obliged to do a recall; most people won't really notice because for years they've been working on overspecc'd machines.
Personally, I've already disabled Pocket and run an ad-blocker on all my browsers. I think Mozilla knows that a lot of its users will never like the idea, just like sites like El Reg don't try and force ads down the throats of those that don't want them.
But we are not everyone. That ads or recommended content are acceptable to many should be obvious. Yes, there are those that don't like it but don't know how to disable it. But there are also plenty of people who are comfortable with ads and this kind of service. A lot of websites are little more than thinly disguised adverts. There's an argument to be had that if something like this works well enough for advertisers, it will move money away from the more intrusive sorts.
The big issue for us all is the creation of extensive profiles of us by companies and we can't rely on self-regulation for this anyway.
Maintaining macOS Server isn't that hard for them. It's not like it actually does very much
…or earns them very much. Support means resources (people) and they need paying. If the server set is mainly based around existing open source packages, where's the added value for the administrator in comparison to BSD or Linux on good hardware?
Allo can be useful for getting in touch with people who might not using the same mesaging service as you. It's quite clear that Google has plans for the notification service it uses to do this.
Both Allo and Duo are also examples of making an app as simple as possible, although this is somewhat marred by including the Assistant in Allo.
I think one problem is that people are still confusing Google with Alphabet. The restructuring was designed to move some of the high risk innovative stuff outside of Google and off is balance sheet; Google could then focus on tuning its highly profitable money making activities and this includes culling projects that don't go anywhere.
This tech won't be able to escape forensic detection for some time.
Seeing as the approach – an "antagonistic" neural network – relies on a forensic AI evaluating its creations then I think you're wrong. The two work in tandem to create the convincing image. We're rapidly approaching the point where computer image recognition is more reliable than the human kind.
See this article for an earlier example and explanation.
And are you then saying that the car was in the right to continue regaining its lane and side-swipe him?
No, the conclusion is that the motorcyclist acted dangerously and tried to overtake before it was safe to do so. In this interpretation it was the bike that did the swiping. But IANAL and would expect this go to trial to get a precedent juddgement.
self driving car hitting another vehicle is a problem.
I don't agree on this. This may well become a test case for the manufacturers. If GM pursues it and wins, then it will set a precedent. Assuming they have sufficient telemetry I think they'll happily go to court over this.
Developers must continue teaching cars to drive defensively but, as the numerous "what if…" questions demonstrate, you cannot anticipate and prepare for every possible eventuality and there will, inevitably, be accidents. In such situations the law must be the same for people and computer drivers.
Insurance companies and legislators will be watching this carefully.
TBH sales of Samsung's S6 did show how much the market prefers the premium model with "something special". Samsung underestimated demand for the Edge version and had to adjust production accordingly.
It's early days for Apple yet but 30 million at around $ 600 profit per phone is worth having.
Not sure how to interpret the speculation that the X will be canned. It could be that everyone who wants, and can afford one, has one. But it could also be that they will squeeze the components back into a more standard format later in the year and it's really just the "notch" that gets the chop. OLED, wireless charging, waterproofing and everything else Apple copied from Samsung are here to stay.
You're right: it's tokenism. Nothing will save coal as long as shale production is so cheap. But the fuckwits in the Appalachians are too dumb to realise this and will continue to think he's "on their side". Trump wants right-wingers to win the primaries in the run up to the mid-terms so he has a House full of single-issue loons.
@Doctor Syntax true though we can expect more to come. There's an interesting article on this in this week's Economist which bases expected advertising rates on current share valuations: effectively an "adpocalypse"™ with spending rising to consume nearly all profits.
Discount fests like the stupidly imported "black Friday" are one-way bets. They might move the needle temporarily on cashflow and market share. But can also end up costing more than they bring. It was surprising but refreshing to read comments from some retailers that they might scale back such activities in the future.
Things are a bit different in the US where the potential credit risk, traditonally high because of lenient bankruptcy laws, is sold on to some sucker almost immediately.
So, go on, make that appointment for the test drive, you know you want to…
however routing didn't turn out that way,
I think the answer to this is: where didn't it turn out that way? An awful lot of transatlantic traffic is hub and spoke via London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, CDG, et al. And traffic in Asia is growing at a rate we Westerners don't really understand and over greater distances. This is why Emirates is happy to continue growing its fleet.
Plane list prices are always a bit of a joke, volumes are often so low that traditional "marginal pricing" doesn't make sense.
Emirates seems pretty happy with the A380 for many of its routes but it needs Airbus to keep making them. Airbus has cashflow and can afford to continue investing in the product line. Presumably meaning there will be a NEO version at some point. There are still lots of potential routes for this kind of plane and demand, particularly in Asia is growing.
For the old type bicycle cranks that attach to a square section bottom bracket, a torque wrench on the 8mm Allen key was recommended. In most other situations though just a bit if mechanical sympathy is all that's needed.
Torque is always useful when you have steel bolts in aluminium threads. Turns out to have been essential for the seat-tube mounted rack on my girlfriend's bike as otherwise one bolt invariably wore loose and I didn't want to tighten all the way to 11 and risk ripping the thread. Could have just taken the bike down to the bike shop but now I have my precious!
Recently swapped my existing power strips with ones with built-in USB ports. Yes, I still have the old ones but I've thrown out a couple of the older and larger USB-chargers. Turns out you can run lots of things like radios on 5V.
Did get a power socket / USB combo for mounting in the desk but it needs a bigger hole, so replaced it with a USB-hub (USB-3 no less) for charging and possibly eventually connecting to my 4-port KVM (only USB 2). Anyone without a KVM can't really call themself a geek!
But my proudest one-off buy was a set of allen keys with torque settings! Give me MOAR!
All of this is nothing compared to my dad. How's about 45 oscilloscopes for starters?
The problem with all things microwave is getting the dosage right. 3 minutes for how many grams? Get it wrong they'll be worse than anything you boil or steam. Cooking things in water gives you greater control as the hordes of sous-vide fans will tell you.
I do use a microwave for spinach for which it's excellent.
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