Posts by Charlie Clark 13433 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
He should really have launched a suit himself alleging negligence and used that to beat down the settlement. If this goes to trial he'll lose and will face costs, and potentially additional damages, though I suspect the real loss will be to non-material things like the ability to get good staff and investment.
It is weird. There is the BSI which produces bulletins on information security and companies in certain industries that are part of the critical infrastructure are required to follow the relevent information security bulletins. Hard to see Cisco's publically available WebEx getting a pass on this, not just for the hand "dial-in" feature, but also the guaranteed backdoor for friend and ally the USA and its collection of TLAs. Really, the work for secure end-to-end encryption calls has been done and at least two open source products are available and approved for use in Germany…
But the Bundeswehr, along with many armies around the world, is famed for out of date kit and IT practices.
The size and shape of the craft are driven by mission priorities and budget but the real issue is reducing momemtum in low gravity and no atmosphere so that the craft doesn't tip over. Anyone that can come up with a breaking system that doesn't need oodles of propellant and complicated guidance systems is going to be a candidate for a Nobe prize.
Your inane comparison of the Apollo programme with the two landers is really quite impressive. The Apollo programme started from scratch.
Better examples for moneypits would be the Space Shuttle programme, which while no doubt impressive, was flawed from the start and fatally failed to learn from its mistakes; and the international space station which does little useful science but is very expensive PR.
I think we'll learn the most from JAXA and they might be the first to produce a lander that goes exactly where it should and doesn't tip. Low gravity and no atmosphere make some of the things we take for landing for granted just aren't there. This is less of a problem when you don't really care where you want to land and get let the mini-gravity do its job, but becomes a bigger one if you want more control: the craft is too far away to be piloted and it's becoming clear that tipping is easier than anyone imagined.
This kind of arrangement is quite common in "no fee" class action suits and is, arguably (though I wouldn't argue this myself), a good deal for shareholders. Certainly a lot less than the $ 57 million they were on the hook for.
But US tort law really is fucked (and many law firms would agree with this): companies often prefer bankruptcy to damages. But I can't see the even more dysfunctional than usual Congress passing the necessary reforms.
Like most "network" platforms, the T&C's assign copyright to the platform and you agree to this when you sign up. Personally, given the nature of the content, which rarely contains any real IP, I'm happy with this as I've definitely profited from the help other people have given via the platform Stack provided. The IP is probably a lot less than people provide in their open source projects.
I know there's a lot of crap on it, but to my mind it's the best example of a crowd-sourced expert system out there. Not only is it content-driven, it's content-focussed and it doesn't doom-scroll or try and offer me stuff I've no interest in.
The driver behind this is the continued to desire to live without sysadmins but Kubernetes introduces heaps of complexity that, while shielding the users from having to buy and manage boxes, brings its own possibly bigger problems with it. I'm sure we will at some point see tools that can automate and simplify this kind of configuration. Who knows, we might even see a return to using more monolithic systems because in many cases, as long as you can easily reproduce them, they're all many projects need and will use considerably less resources than a highly abstracted "microservice mess"™.
I don't think you can get into the stack without access to all the mechanical gubbins, which is why Google was an early investor in driving cars around with cameras and other systems.
I suspect the end game may have been to get into some kind of premium "mobility service", think of how differently Apple would have run Uber. Having seen high margins failing to appear, they may have decided to get out. But they will probably be able to use some stuff to inflate their "Car Play" software which does turn a tidy profit thanks to all the fanbois keen to use it in their cans.
Automatic gearboxes used to be pretty inefficient and unsuited to lots of gear changes. Less of a problem in the US where petrol is cheap and most journeys involve few gear changes, more so in Europe's crowded cities and their narrow streets. Nowadays automatic gearboxes are probably better than most people at shifting and a prerequisite for safe-driving systems like tempomatics and distance keepers. In fact, they'd probably be standard if they weren't a way to charge a premium: Skoda used to offer them on its cheaper models but VW made them drop it.
Well, you'd have a bit more for the setup and regular data import, which is a real issue.
For a while I ran a local fork of the old httparchive code, which was very poorly modelled (used manually created hashes for indexing!) and thus very inefficient. Even then, I only ever worked with the pages tables. Once I'd optimised the import scripts, imports took about 30 minutes for each data set on my laptop. Nearly (anything except full text domains searches) all subsequent queries were very fast, which is what you'd expect for a properly modelled DB.
But the current engine uses map/reduce on the reports, which gets very expensive if you run queries that cover any period of time, because you quickly start analysing terabytes of non-normalised JSON. I think exports to CSV are still possible and these are the way to go for any kind of extensive research. The "free" units per month are a good way to get a feel for the service and writing the very-nearly-but-not-quite SQL of Big Query.
Google is effectively sponsoring the project, which I still consider to be a great resource to have an idea how websites were built at any one moment in time over the last 15 years or so, but GCP really is a challenge for new users, especially budget management. For new users, it would be nice to have some kind of rate limiter that you explicitly have to deactivate for work.
It's also worth noting that this is the first time this has come up since reports switched to Big Query.
Even before everyone has a battery pack we'll have exhausted generation and network capacity.
But electric motors are a great idea, nothing to stop manufacturers moving toward turbines to power them rather than direct transmission: separate power generation from power transmission. However, we normally have to wait for the industry to decide when they've had enough subsidies from plan A before they propose plan B.
Well, you need to know what the decay products are and energies released.
And we should probably compare this with some of the shit that is routinely discharged into the environment from industrial processes: as many have pointed out, burning coal releases quite a lot of radioactive nasties on top of the soot, ditto with most metal processing and that's ignoring all the crap used to extract the ores. In this respect the Chinese are guilty of do what I say, not what I do.
When I look at what companies* do I think this kind of delicate rebranding after 75 years is fine. Yes, it does nothing to improve the morass of whalesong bullshit that runs with the logo but it still needed to be done.
* The BBC's infantilist and self-parodying rebranding a few years ago springs to mind. I bet Perfect Curve are gutted that they didn't get the account.
Even with something as patently obvious as the tower, there is a certain logic in not including some items on maps of the quality of Ordnance Survey. Particularly in the time before GPS. It meant any potential miscreants would have to have to do the work of plotting its position themselves. Not particularly onerous but something that would require reccy near the building.
An example of where security through obscurity can help, like when the Czechs took down street signs in 1968 when the Russians invaded.
I was using PagePlus for my assignments in the early 1990s. At the time it was really the only option on a simple Windows machine. It wasn't perfect, but for many projects, including my dissertation, it was good enough. I revisited it a few times via a Windows VM and found it still usable and many of the older quirks had indeed been resolved. If I had the need for something similar again, I'd have no problem buying a new version, whether for Windows or Mac. Given the ability of the market behemoths to dominate and squash competition, it's really quite amazing it's still out there.
For Photoshop-like work I use Photoline.
Documenting and publishing the details of the file format is time-consuming and expensive and I'm not sure how useful it would really be for those few users of the software: they'd still need to develop parsers and converters. There are other alternatives migrating files to other software.
I would say that comparing the situation now with how things were a decade ago is a little unfair. Since then there have been few changes in the OSes that needed vendor support. In addition, Google's Project Treble really did a good job in keeping devices reasonably up to date without vendor support. And we have an increasing range of things like Revanced to reduce the snooping.
Devices that support LineageOS tend to get support for quite a while until things like hardware support in the OS become a problem to support. The drivers in the vendors blob are usually all that's a required. A bigger issue for some is that some software complains about rooted devices. My S10e will get LineageOS soon so after when I'll be able to say more.
This is really a question of getting the regulation right to make the market work properly. As long as it's cheaper to send kids to mine for whichever minerals we need, then that's what we'll get. The proposed EU rules might help because they should encourage manufacturers to consider repair and recycling in design.
I can do the maths. 3 years + -2-3 years with a new battery is very appealing for anyone with a premium model.
Regarding IOS support, I know about this. However, a mate of mine who's been drinking at the koolaid fountain for a while says that older phones generally struggle on newer releases of the OS after a few years and many apps insist on the latest version of the OS and use changes to ask for new licences. Never come across this on any Android device. Still, as long as the users are happy with it, it's okay.
My S10e got a new battery last year and is all the better for it.
My main point is I suspect that Apple's halo may fade if phones in general become less interesting, as my own unscientific reporting suggests.
Most of the people I know have got off the upgrade / replacement cycle and have phones ≥ 4 years old and for many a new battery seems the only thing they want. While the Fanbois do seem to be the ones to replace more frequently, I wonder how often this will occur as the caché of owning the latest and greatest phone starts to decline.
Still, given total volumes, it's not as if any of the large manufacturers need worry.
While I despise Oracle's sales practices, I think that, as a business, they've done a reasonable job with MySQL: there's still a free version but maintenance and documentation have considerably improved under Oracle's stewardship. Of course, they want you to pay for stuff and the licensing has been tightened up, but that was clear from the start and for any businesses who really need MySQL that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
You'll see what real sharks look like if this deal goes through. As for the DB itself, well, without a company like MariaDB plc doing most of the development, I wouldn't expect much. Fortunately, there are now quite a few alternatives out there. And, if needed, companies that can help you migrate.
Time to bring back the RIP icon?
I wonder what you base your assertion on. My understanding is that a social context (may or not be competitive) is the key driver for most people to do some exercise: go for a walk, ride, swim gym class with a friend. Gameification tends to become relevant for those who do exercise and I do collect some data on the things I do, but again the relevance tends to correlate strongly with whether your friends do. As for any medical benefits: the advice for those who don't do enough exercise is rountinely: little and often.
However, the big issue, is who else has access to that data? My weight is between me and scales only. My bike computer is as dumb as they get, but at least it shows me the time.
Most companies tend to prefer market access over Balkanisation and are, therefore, generally keen on seeing countries adopt existing legislation, even if it might restrict them. They know they'll still be able to lobby for liberalisation in the future in invariably secret trade negotiations.
While I do remember notices on some US websites a few years ago I don't recall having seen any the last couple. IIRC there was a bried period when GDPR applied in the EU and there was nothing equivalent in the US. Then California introduced it's own "I bet you can't believe it's not GDPR" and the Brussels effect went into force. In any case, if you're a publisher, third-party cookies are not your friends.
However, I do believe that some US residents in some states reportedly can't access some websites in other US states.
Most European countries have strong constitutional protection of citizens privacy, which is why the courts continually block any such laws.
Doesn't stop the snooping, of course, but it does limit its scope and potential use in court cases, which law enforcement types tend to approve because they don't have the resources to snoop on everyone all the time, though the NSA might disagree. Much better to use standard techniques and get court orders when you know who you want to snoop on.
You're missing the point, which is expressed differntly elsewhere along the lines of "if you want to know how civilised somewhere is, look at how it treats the poor". The UK did not like being forced to give prisoners their right to vote back.
Back to refugees, I have no doubt that, at some point, European legislation will be updated to allow for more stricter definitions – and the EU already has two classes of refugees based on the way it classifies Ukrainians. It's arguable that this is closer to the spirit of the law as it was drafted after WW II. However, the law is law and it's the courts job to enforce it and politicians to respect it, even if they intend to change it. But even after such a change, the handling of migrants will still require bilateral agreements to reduce trafficking and process returns. Numbers crossing from France tend to decrease when relations with France are better. I wonder why that is?
What could be done immediately would be to improve the crackdowns on illegal employment and thus exploitation of migrants.
Buried in all the hype, which skirted over tax breaks and other inducements, was the fact that only around 3,000 jobs will be created. I don't know where the rest of the money is going but from the announcements a couple of data centres and solar parks wouldn't be it. And I wonder how many jobs Microsoft hopes to destroy by getting more companies to use its infrastructure and services?
FWIW I use both and pay for Windy (annual subscription) and Today Weather (one off). Windy is a geek's dream but Today Weather has a the Hitchhiker's Guide UI that is very appealing and broadcasts local weather warnings.
But looking for long range forecasts, I recently discovered MetCheck, looks like hours of endless fun!
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