Posts by Charlie Clark 13433 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Not a Ruby programmer myself but it's good to see it thriving: competition is good. The syntactic sugar looks like it could have come from Python. This is good as it shows how the developers of the various languages are not to proud to see what the others are doing. The only thing I really don't like is the ternary operator as you can quickly write fairly impenetrable code with it. I find Straight boolean evaluation (even chained) preferable but better still is using dispatching.
I do the same with my cookie settings in Opera. Doesn't that make us the clever ones? But, even with getting close to 20 years experience of the WWW, there are times when I'm not sure which cookies to accept and for how long and there are many times when I have to go back and adjust settings or when, like El Reg, they don't work as they should. It's entirely understandable that most people have no idea what any of this is about: when I drive a car I don't sweep it for GPS trackers.
Third-party, cookie-based advertising on the internet is, I suspect, doomed because it has been so badly handled and abused by the industry. Of course, almost all of what the industry does can be achieved by slightly less intrusive means: they just need to provide decent APIs for an exchange between website owner and advertiser.
As an immediate improvement I'd love to see cookies must come with a manifest explaining what they do and how long they need to be valid for, and we need to come up with a sensible expiry option for never-ending sessions.
Can't seem to reply to or download the drivel.
I for one welcome any democratic government's attempts to curtail the thieving, tax avoiding, and criminal activitoes of Google.
Typo's aside, tax avoidance is not illegal. It can be argued that the UK's synthetically low corporate tax is in fact an invitation to it, okay the EU tentacle of Google is registered in even more accountant friendly Ireland but for the same reasons. Google does not engage in theft. Be interesting to know what other "criminals activities" you think it's involved in, bear in mind that this would leave you open to charges of slander in the "any democratic government".
Not that I'm whitewashing Google - the collection of WiFi data certainly does not fall into the category "do no evil" but it wasn't necessary illegal either hence no criminal charges.
No, the problem for the newspapers is that they have for years failed to come up with a viable model for the internet. Laws like this or the DMCA are only sticking plasters that will invite abuse whilst at the same time fail to protect the underlying business.
It's based on the mean and while there are all shapes and sizes out there, there's a reason why the result is close to the mean for young American women. Interestingly, it's probably closer to the norm than a similar comparison of fashion models. What does that tell us? Men who watch porn are less likely to be surprised by the real bodies of women if they ever meet them but girls reading Vogue are doomed to eternal disappointment?
Anyway, who ever really bothers to look at the faces? And where's the bukake icon?
No conspiracy here: it's just a poor comparison. Companies are happy to pay ARM's relatively low fees for chip designs just like they are apparently happy to provide developers for a better basis for their own Linux. "The give back to the community" is the usual sop to fools like our own dear Eadon.
The ARM ecosystem is so varied that one size definitely does not fit all (whether to have networking in the kernel or userland is a good example) but there are plenty of common problems. Linaro performs a similar function as any good industry body where it makes sense to pool resources but none of the companies are in it for the philanthropy, it is purely "enlightened self-interest" in an area where the benefits of co-operation are greater than risks of competition.
I guess it's largely prejudice but I am struggling with DBA and VB in the same context.
Otherwise bang on - if you all ready know what you are looking for then you're likely to best-served by a relational system with the right collection of analytical and statistical tools and skills (eg. knowing what normalisation of both data and distributions are). Otherwise, say you're looking at the background radiation of space, the big data tools have some interesting approaches to finding out what might be interesting.
Amen to that, brother. One of the keynotes from PyCon a few years back was from Bitly's Chief Data Scientist and I've viewed the term with disdain ever since. I saw Mr Matt "Buzzword" Asay was banging on about data scientists the other day* which I guess is further evidence of the meaningless of the term.
* I've long given up on reading the badly thought-out, poorly written pieces I just them to prime my internal spam filter.
It does beg the question as to what exactly Linux skills are. From my perspective it is the ability to install and manage preferred distro only and a good example of how the IT industry continues to sell deskilling as desirable.
I guess it's broadly to be welcomed that Linux is being accepted as a standard server OS and licences aren't just being paid for pretty logos but any companies running anything important on those servers should be prepared to pay for proper sys admins who can install from source, including patching if necessary.
On Mac OS X I'm still using the unbowdlerised (pre-Ebay) version of Skype which has a sensible interface and does all I need. A few years ago I install Messenger for Mac and found it also usable even if I didn't use it much because most of my contacts were already on Skype. One thing I did discover about Messenger that I liked is that it can connect to Lync and, as I have customers on Lync, find this pretty good. So, I was sort of looking forward to great convergence. However, the new Skype client is a huge disappointment: firstly, it keeps trying to promote calls with it to me - I've got a phone flatrate and find phones easier to use so no thanks - but what is really the crowning turd in the waterpipe is the need to switch between Skype and Microsoft accounts and even then still not be able to talk to Lync. Oh, and Microsoft logins are exclusive so logon on one device and you're logged out of others. This is so much fail in one product that I think we've found the team that was previously working on IE. And that was after spunking, what was it, USD 8 billion? on the company. Way to go, Stevie B!
Fortunately, I did my tests in a Windows VM so my Skype 2.x is still pristinely usable. I guess it's only a matter of time before Microsoft starts trying to wind down the old Skype logins (makes sense for them). In which case I think I will move to Wickr assuming it ever becomes available for anything other than the I-Phone.
The people responsible for this threatening behaviour are possibly the saddest people I have EVER come across. This is beyond ridiculous.
I agree, maybe they'll reconsider and withdraw the trademark application. Oh, you mean the script kiddies who seemingly took down an ISP without much effort? Not very impressive on both sides I'd say but if it was my company I'd be doing my damnedest to make sure there couldn't be a repetition otherwise who is going to want to do business with me?
All they had to do was roll out a slightly faster/better version of Win7 and they would have sold as much or more than Windows 8 has. Perhaps even had a version of Windows optimised for touch or an option built in for defaulting to Touch/TIFKAM or Classic styles, but forcing TIFKAM on buyers has not really gone down well has it?
Spot on. Windows 8 with its clusterfuck of Metro, Secure Boot and a new version of Internet Explorer has probably done more than anything to damage Microsoft's reputation with the CTO's of the world.
Adding the bells and whistles as a service pack or even a paid for Windows 7 R2 would have reassured users that they weren't about to be thrown under the bus of the next fashion wave. Instead people actively want to avoid Windows 8 on the desktop with the result that they will be avoiding Windows 8 tablets.
Hold on there! Palm is really the genesis of the smartphone, especially once handspring came long.
Hold your horses young fellow me lad! Psion/EPOC/Symbian were in there at the beginning with Nokia's Communicator the first integration of a PDA like the Palm with a phone. What Palm did do very well was concentrate on a task and touch centric GUI.
A lot of the companies that are still on XP and are planning to move to Windows 7 (and there are quite a few) this year already have their software distributions sorted and that includes IE 8 / 9 plus either Firefox or Chrome on Windows 7 with no plans on changing that before rollout is complete.
Not releasing IE 10 for Windows 7 at the same as it was released for Windows 8 was a total fuckup. I can imagine some companies might bring forward migrations, assuming IE 10 can still be used on their fucked app "web apps" that require IE 6, but for the rest even Stevie B on his knees in a gimp suit isn't going to move them.
Yes, because the OS performance on the same disk deteriorated significantly I should buy new hardware?
To clarify - the problem doesn't seem to be performance of the disk at all but down to scheduling: as soon as two apps want the disk then I can go and make a cup of tea. This is particularly noticeable with virtual machines. Under Leopard I used to run two VMs quite happily while I was working in Mac OS. Not been possible since and I have a faster machine, more RAM and a bigger disk.
Well, I'm still not tempted to "upgrade" my 2009 MacBook Pro. Disk performance post-Leopard is still dismal and while a higher pixel density is always "nice to have" that's all it is.
Probably going to need a replacement this year of next but at the moment it won't be a Mac. With all the inconvenience of moving to a different OS (probably PC-BSD in my case) I'm going to stick with what I've got as long as possible.
That struck me too as odd.
Since 3.0 (Honeycomb) and definitely 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) I don't think Google has had to commit too many developers to Android. Google more or less understands how open source works and plays very nicely on a lot of projects. You can have the OS for nowt with no support if you want or you can buy a licence, get some spangly apps and support.
What does cost money is the account infrastructure and the app store (fucking sue me, Apple) but that is probably now breaking even due to paid apps.
Is the metadata. Some of these companies really have got the art of working out who is connected to who down to a fine art. Frankly it scares me who I find suggested given how I little I have entered into my profile. So, while recruiters will remain the primary scavengers of the site I think they are all tooling up for "added value services" such as credit rating (article on The Economist). The maths behind it are quite interesting because they can even work out quite a lot out about people who think they are off-grid. For all of us who think we are being careful with quite what we put online we have many acquaintances who are busy uploading their address books with our names and addresses.
Berkeley Software Distribution. Had separate ways to update the OS and applications pretty much from the word go, though they have changed over time.
Typical system upgrades might look a bit like this:
1) sign up to the relevant mailing lists, e.g BSD security
2) have a backup strategy and only update when you have to
3) freebsd-update fetch install
Depending upon your environment you can also run this in jail to see whether your system will be adversely affected - this rarely happens with system updates but applications can and so step on each other's toes.
Applications are managed separately from the OS and updates can be run much more frequently:
1) portsnap fetch update
2) portmaster -ad <- this will compile from source but also allow you to create packages for distribution if you have several machines
Separating the OS from applications might explain why applications on BSD are not frozen in lockstep with a version of the OS as they are on RedHat and Linux. Though to be fair that has something to do with the attitude of the package maintainers on Linux systems. BSD's ports are only metafiles which will allow apps to build but you are responsible for them running properly. Nobody's managed to explain to me why this means RedHat still ships with Python 2.4 (or at least it did the last time I was on a RedHat system), a version that has not been maintained by the PSF for over 5 years.
This might explain why BSD systems have notoriously long uptimes.
Yes but Because a consistent read is not isolated from those statements, using them on a table being dumped can cause the underlying SELECT statement of mysqldump to return incorrect contents or fail.
No the most encouraging thing to read about a backup program,
Anyway mysqldump still sucks huge balls. There is no binary format and copy support is limited to physical access to the server and doesn't support pipes so no compression is possible.
Considering that Oracle bought InnoDB back in 2005 progress has been remarkably slow: <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-file-defragmenting.html>you still <b>can't</b> recover unused space from at table</a>. There's probably more but I try and spend as little time with it as possible especially now that I can migrate data to Postgres pretty easily.
MySQL basically is a NoSQL system which supports SQL statements often more in name only. Yes, InnoDB is sort of ACID but it will also support Foreign Keys on non-unique columns. As changing indices imposes a table copy penalty they are definitely discouraged.
Thanks to the money printing quantitative easing of the last few years, debt is ridiculously cheap and this kind of thing is bound to happen, especially given the recent poor returns that private equity has been offering.
Note to Ms Parnell:
The gossip is that the companies will stick around £3bn of their own dosh in the deals
It's not their own money, it funds under management.
@Lusty
Why would Apple do anything?
I obviously expressed myself poorly. I agree that at the moment they have no need to do so. Apple can continue to "do nothing" (in reality continuing to update and expand their product lines) and still earn more cash than you and I can comfortably imagine.
However, innovation is about doing things when they don't appear necessary or obvious. Devices like the Transformer Prime are pointing the way and if Android gets proper mouse support then I can see people like myself abandoning notebooks for convertibles in droves: an extremely lightweight and portable device that is usable on the move with a sensible docking station solution.
Even though I don't expect MS to sell many of these - the problems of using the keyboard while sitting will be a significant problem for many prospective buyers - it will raise expectations by continuing to blur the difference between tablets and laptops/notebooks.
Many of us have been expecting to release an I-Pad Pro for a while which would be an I-Pad running Mac OS. Extremely good sales of both I-Pads and MacBook Airs have meant that they haven't needed to yet. Whether this has been for fear that ARMs don't have enough oomph, the problems of fat binaries/translation for existing apps, or Intel chippery needing too much power. Those problems are all likely to be resolved this year: the new ARMs are getting beefier all the time; OpenCL is encouraging use of the ubiquitous GPUs for calculations; and Intel and Apple have successfully demoed just how efficient x86 can be made to run. Much as I'd love to see all ARM-based hardware in this area I imagine that the inertia of getting software companies to recompile for ARM or adding a new version of Rosetta favour Apple continuing with their current strategy until they have enough "killer" I-Pad apps to warrant an I-Pad based notebook.
All things considered it's a bold move from Microsoft which I think will continue to ginger the market which should be good for customers.
re, the Stasi - indeed as a recent suspension of firemen in Düsseldorf for quoting disparaging remarks about the mayor on Facebook illustrates.
@John62
Absolutely, it was just a means to an end for Anderson who didn't get to do want he really wanted, work with real actors, until Space 1999 (and the other series, the name of which escapes me). Puppets let them tell the stories they wanted to tell and, like Aardman, they put had the gumption to pay the attention to detail that made the all too obviously puppet world come alive for viewers.
They'll have to work on some of the scripts to make them slightly less twee, give the women some better roles but kidnapping high-speed planes and putting bombs on them "Flight 787" could cause the biggest mass panic since the 1937 War of the Worlds broadcast!
Intel certainly has the cash to do so and with privately held companies the first thing you'd be likely to hear would be that the deal has been done. However, there is probably nothing that Intel could offer the owners of ARM that its licence-holders couldn't match or better. Even if Intel did win a probably ruinous bidding war it's almost certain that at Britain and the European Commission would raise the spectres of "national interest" (always a good one and if it works for yoghurt then it will certainly work for high-tech) or threat to competition.
You are doubting a moot point? Oh dear.
That has and always will be the case, and is why if the airlines and planemakers can use less they do
No, only post 1970s oil shock have they been remotely interested in greater efficiency but effectively only since Open Skies, incidentally forced through by the EU you seem to hate so much, and other deregulation initiatives opened up competition have they found it difficult to simply pass on extra costs to customers. The same applies to the energy generation companies who, through lack of competition and regulation, spent decades not investing in more efficient power plants.
Take the 787 - design work started formally back around 2003, so that's at least a decade from design to any number in service, but the work probably used prior thinking going back at least five years
The risks associated with the 787, and the A380 which preceded it and uses lots of the same lightweight technology, is why the airline industry is more interested in continual, gradual improvements in efficiency than huge leaps forward and one of the reasons they have such long term contracts for their engines. It is precisely such improvements that will benefit from an effective cap and trade system. But, as I said, it's too early to tell with the airline industry which is why it is a poor example for assessing ETS at the moment. Displacement and subsidy farming provide much richer criticisms.
Similarly, while an energy saving appliance used in the home might save you money as it may pay for its greater cost through lower electricity bills, it will not reduce carbon emissions. If less electricity is used, the power generation companies will have more allowances, which they will sell to someone else - airlines, maybe, or heavy industry - who will then be able to emit more carbon.
This is the principle of ETS which does encourage lower emissions by reducing the number of allowances over time. In theory, this will encourage industries that buy allowances to become more efficient as the prices of such rises. The scheme is set to avoid price shocks by reducing the numbers of allowances in the system only gradually.
The main problem, there have been smaller ones related to gaming the system as well, with the ETS is that there are too many emissions in the scheme. As a result there is little or no incentive to trade allowances which are below cost for those that need them. There are several reasons for this: firstly, effective lobbying allowed for very generous exemptions and allowances that were initially given to companies (but charged to customers); secondly, post-2008 recession; thirdly, faster than expected buildout of renewable capacity in Germany and elsewhere; fourthly, some but actually very little off-shoring of dirty production to countries outside of the scheme; fifthly, displacement to Poland which has massive allowances due to its traditionally dependence on coal for energy production and inefficient industry. Unsurprisingly, Poland is dead against any early reductions in the number of allowances.
Air travel is a poor example having only recently entered the ETS, something which China, India and the US contest is anti-competitive in itself. It's a moot point as to whether the gradual improvements in efficiency in the airline industry are related to this or just down to very high competitive pressures and the high price of fuel. As a recent entrant to the ETS the air industry has plenty of allowances of its own at the moment so we don't expect to see significant changes as a result of the scheme for a few years yet.
Yes, the slight decrease in the angle in comparison with using a mouse of the wrist makes a huge difference. I like the way I switch easily between absolute coordinates with the stylus and the relative coordinates of my fingers. My only gripe would be wishing to have a less sensitive mode for general desktop use: I often end selecting text in a URL link when I actually just want to click on it.
Firstly, whoever came up with this deserves recognition. I think that Microsoft has finally realised that its only choice at the moment is damage limitation: website developers are seriously fucked off by having to support such completely different rendering engines without the pain of users switching on "compatibility" mode for sites which are standards compliant. Oh, I know there is another flag you can set to stop that, except I there are other workarounds for IE < 9 that you need that disable UA-compatible="IE=Edge". A proper migration path for all current versions of Windows would have made this all unnecessary. But, okay, web developers will accept a certain degree of pain to support paying customers.
But it's those poor customers who are suffering most as a result of the extremely cynical migration path the Microsoft chose - no one forced them to limit Windows 2000 to IE 6 or XP to IE 8. One of my customers still has a "don't use IE (8) for the internet" because it's still unsafe. It has been considered too much work to migrate to IE 9 and shortly afterwards to IE 10, whenever it becomes available for Windows 7. In the meantime Firefox LSR has been certified and rolled out everywhere (> 100,000 machines). The result is that people have dropped IE for everything except the usual ActiveX infested inhouse "browser" applications and management has been given I-Pads.
Then there is the site itself with friendly advice like this:
We've found that you have vendor-specific prefixes causing compatibility problems. This can help minimize compatibility issues in Internet Explorer and other browsers.
Well, colour me blue and call me Nansen if those two sentences are contradictory. Vendor prefixes are a world a hurt in themselves but using them does not cause compatibility problems because they are, er, vendor specific. Anyway, the site I tested doesn't use any vendor prefixes.
I suggest the IE team start polishing the CVs as they're going to be needing them.
@ JDX
If what you say is really true then: firstly, it underlines quite how braindead Microsoft's browser strategy has been in the past; secondly, it's another reminder of just how important it was that the European Commission took legal action against Microsoft. Whoever decided to make DirectX 10 a requirement and not an option was a fucking idiot.
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