Posts by Charlie Clark

Logitech Zone Vibe 125: Weightless comfort on the ears that won't break the bank

That sounds a profile/setup issue rather something inherent in Bluetooth itself. I suspect you might be able work around it with a mute function.

UK signs deal to share police biometric database with US border guards

The US Supreme Court did not remove any rights. It clarified them, based on an improved reading of the law.

This is partial and factually incorrect. To state that the recent decision was somehow better than in 1973 actually undermines the court's authority: why would the constitution be better in 1782 than in 1973? And removing a "constitutiional" right to abortion is still a removal even if it's based on sound legal reasoning. The same goes, just the other way, for gun laws in the states: the judges decided to limit states' ability to legislate over gun ownership. In a sense, this is both having a cake and eating it. Both decisions also blithely ignore the importance of precedent in the US legal system, which is well established.

The age of the constitution or its amendments shouldn't be an issue. In fact some US court decisions even take English Common Law and the Magan Carta into consideration. A greater problem is the selective blindness of the most recent decisions: states rights behind the decision to uphold bans on abortion, states rights ignored over firearms legislation. The fetish for textualism which chooses to ignore context and indeed other text: the right to bear arms is about the right to raise a militia against an unjust monarch and not a general right to waive them in public.

At some point the legislature should do its job and pass relevant laws and even constitutional amendments. But this will only happen if they can get past their football fan partisanship. So don't hold your breath.

However, I have too many American friends to want to let that get in the way and it wouldn't stop me visting the country.

The data grab is illegal under existing data protection law and the UK and EU countries should be doing everything in their power to stop it.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Re: Make sure to FLOSS to keep your ecosystem healthy.

I think that's both a misinterpretation of liberal software licences and what the tool does. I've not looked at CoPilot and, thus, not at its licence or copyright, but BSD/MIT and other licences are very much about letting people look at the code and use bits of it without any kind of restriction. It's a bit like a lecturer asserting copyright over a CS class when covering memory management, or loops, etc.

In fact the BSD court case was mainly about this with AT&T asserting copyright infringement only to be found to be guilty of it itself.

Copyright in liberal licensing only really comes into play when entire libraries or applications are used, ie. not Oracle's API assertion. But it would be a different thing if Microsoft were to assert copyright over anything produced by CoPilot.

So, while I think the SFC has a point, I also think they're protesting too much and about the wrong thing. I don't host anything on GitHub myself, mainly because I started, and am sticking with Mercurial, but also because of the GitHub's terms and conditions, Being taken over by Microsoft didn't help either but that was long after I'd made my decision. And I'm also not a fan of monocultures: when everyone else gets malaria, I'll be the one holding out for Dengue fever!

Microsoft teases Outlook Lite for Android

Re: Outlook in a smaller app size

IIRC Outlook is a webview based client so you get all the fat from an embedded browser and no functionality.

K9 was abandoned for a while. I switched to Fair E-Mail and can heartily recommend it, though some of the settings can take a while to understand. See above: for the one Exchange account I have, I use Nine but that is as much to keep up with trends as anything else: I made sure that IMAP was left switched on the Exchange server for my desktop client: MailMate on MacOS.

Re: The main benefits of Outlook

Last year's attacks on Exchange were facilitated by the use IIS to "secure" access. IMAP can be made just as secure as any other protocol* but its use also prevents Microsoft from forcing everyone onto Microssoft 365 which is a security disaster waiting to happen.

* Sensibly you don't try and do it all in the protocol but work with other systems that do little else but authenticate.

Re: The main benefits of Outlook

True, but most people stick with Exchange for the calendar stuff and that's proprietary.

Outlook for Android is truly awful. I think it was something Microsoft bought, badged and forgot about hoping that the name alone would suffice. It has some classic "this icon doesn't do what you think it will".

For those that are required to work with Exchange, the Nine suite is worth a look. Yes, you have to pay for it but for a work device that's reasonable.

Microsoft plans to dig through your Edge Collections to make suggestions

Re: Free choice is a wonderful thing

See that little 'sign in' option (and the 'sync' option) in the top-right corner of Edge?

No, because I don't use it and I personlly don't know any companies that have made it their standard browser. That's either Goolge Chrome or Firefox ESR.

Microsoft is force-feeding lockin to Microsoft 365 but, for companies at least, Edge isn't the tool to do it. There's much deeper integration using Azure Active Directory when log on to the machine.

Re: Free choice is a wonderful thing

Once Microsoft gave up their own browser, why did they decide they needed another? If it was about the user, there were already sufficient choices. Edge is all about Microsoft getting back into the advertising game using its dominance in the consumer PC to do so.

Windows 11: The little engine that could, eventually

EOL the only thing that matters for enterprise

Anyone with more than, say, 50 machines will have custom images for their machines, independent of what the machine comes with, and they will stick with Windows 10 as long as possible. When Windows 11 was announced, Microsoft also announced EOL for Windows 10 and that is the only stick that matters.

How can we make the VC world less pale and male, Congress wonders

There are now numerous cases in US courts from asian Americans who are being unfairly hit by positive discrimination measures in education.

There is no doubt that african Americans as a group suffer from historical and systemic discrimination and that this does reduce their opportunities. However, positive discrimination is a cheap and ineffective solution, as are so many tokenist attempts (from both sides of the debate) in the US.

Chinese boffins suggest launching nuclear Neptune orbiter in 2030

If resources are the aim then there are so many other sources easier to get to and exploit, ie. the asteroid belt.

Re: Why?

Why not do what's already been tested and use the Hall effect in deep space?

China's scientific missions generally do share data. It takes a bit longer than usual but most of the scientists involved understand the importance of sharing the data and a mission to Neptune has no real benefit to China apart from scientific research.

Of course, the CCP could change priorities by then. And, if Xi is still in charge, it might be in for another bout of isolationist paranoia.

Ditching VMware over the Broadcom buy? Here are some of your options

Re: Thinking about my own options

Sounds a lot like this Onion article.

Good luck to you and your colleagues!

Restructure at Arm focused on 'non-engineering' roles

Re: Road to hell

Listing the company on an exchange is not the same as selling it: you normally choose how much equity you want to offer up and retaining a majority is common. It's almost always spun as raising money for the company listing, it rarely gets to see much of that. Given that the market is currently less frothy than it was a few months ago, SoftBank probably wants to raise some cash now and hope that it can raise more later. Some of the cash can be used to make the bride look better and keeping control is essential to be able to choose the timing for the next rights issue / delisting if the hoped for private equity angel comes along with suitcases full of dollares.

Re: Road to hell

You mean they won't be put "saving kittens and dolphins" into the company's charter? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!

The IPO is there to generate cashflow for SoftBank. The board will say and do whatever is necessary for this to happen.

Arm says its Cortex-X3 CPU smokes this Intel laptop silicon

Re: System targets

Why on earth would TVs need that kind of grunt? Specialised instruction sets for decoding AV1, 4K, 8K, etc. PiP is done through the GPU so no need for lots of CPU power.

Re: Girding of Loins

It's not mindshare, it's cold hard sales tactics. Intel offers deals to manufacturers to be more or less Intel exclusive and Microsoft does something similar with volume deals for MS Windows, providing each and every machine comes with Windows pre-installed. Given that Window on ARM isn't ready for primetime yet, that's not changing any time soon. Then again, these designs will be for next year's chips with PCs towards the end of the year.

Not much of this actually from 'China anymore,' says Northern Light Motors boss

Re: Question

Certainly the Reliant Robin suffered from the single front wheel but, of course, less stability means better turning… so you just need to solve the centre of gravity problem.

Re: Question

The engineering challenges! Including: 2 wheels at the front or the back, keeping the thing on the road, etc.

Re: How have they failed to learn from Uncle Clive?

Points taken but I don't think this is for the mass market.Like most Sinclair products, the C5 had lots of other problems other than the height. Recumbents can be perfectly safe, but with more power it's better to be able to carry more stuff over shorter ranges. 200 - 400 litre/kg capacity on a short wheelbase would make this interesting for the trade.

Re: Sourcing everything from the UK

The nuclear phase out was actually decided before Fukushima but Merkel reversed that decision and then did a U-turn with a plan to phase out nuclear faster and at vastly greater cost even though the Fukushima accident could never have happened in Germany.

Coal is being phased out, actually the industry wants to close plants faster than planned. Hydro isn't really an option given the geography and population density (almost a complete inverse of Norway) and nuclear has lots of unsolved problems including the original barmy compromise that waste disposal would be as far as possible from the plants. The high population density does make nuclear power, reprocessing and storage quite an issue.

Excess energy in the summer is less of a problem as France is happy to take it when it can't cool its nuclear plants properly in the heat, but high density storage would be better.

Personally, I reckon syngas would solve lots of problems and it's getting close to the necessary scale. However, the gas liquefaction industry has been better at lobbying, which is why money is being poured into this instead of improving the efficiency of syngas and working on fuel cells.

Re: Sourcing everything from the UK

It is mainly wages but there are also subsidies and cheaper regulatory costs to consider. And shipping is dirt cheap. For example, and from few years ago, it costs about £0.09 to ship a bottle around the world. Once it gets on the road you'll cost per km…

Luggage size?

Given the limited range, I'm not sure of the appeal of the recumbent design for this kind of vehicle except, of course, that's where it's coming from.

Where I expect to see demand pickup is for small factor vehicles with reasonable storage for tradesmen (tools, etc.)

Re: "a 1.5kw hub motor and 48 volt 20AH battery"

Can you factor elevation and luggage into those calculations?

Startup rattles tin for e-paper monitor with display fast enough to play video

Re: MicroUSB

Because it's standard for e-readers and easy to use for the demonstation. Assume any actual product will be USB-C

PocketBook have a reader designed for music (X or Lite). As the screens get bigger, I think weight becomes more of a consideration and the first plastic-based screens make this possible.

Hangouts hangs up: Google chat app shuts this year

Wrong

Google Hangouts was designed as an instant-messaging app operating across multiple platforms for its now defunct social network platform Google+

Hangouts is older than Google+; Google+ was essentially a single sign-on service with a social network tacked on. While the network had some nice features, it never really gained traction and so Google did what it often does, took what it thought worked well and put it in other things and closed it down.

Hangouts has always had very good support for voice calls and Google put some of this into WebRTC.

I only have one contact that I still use Hangouts for, but conversations are mirrored on Google Chat so that should be fairly transparent.

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

Re: nginx russian origins

That's probably because the kind of dweeb that complains about 7-zip has probably never run a web server, let alone a Postgres server with all the great work done over years by "the Russians" – the collective noun affectionately used by Postgres developers to refer to the many Russian and ex-soviet developers who have for years contributed to it.

Something on a clickbait website incites arguments…

NFT

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

Re: Target spotting and authentication

It's done in combination: high-level drones and satellites are providing reconnaissance where the Russians can't exert air superiority. Once you have a good idea of where something is, it is fairly easy to target.

Russia initially expected to achieve air superiority easily and discounted the threat of Ukrainian drones. Then the Russian air force went missing and the Ukrainians were able to destroy tanks at will. In the Donbas Russia has coordinated defences a little better and the range is greater, which is why Ukraine wants to be able to take out Russian reconnaissance drones so that it can target the enormous artilley pieces.

"lean" innovation

The Ukrainian engineers are demonstrating exactly what this term is supposed to mean. In the field you don't want politicians and generals impossible wishlist but something that works as simply as possible and is as cheap to make as possible.

Ukraine still needs lots of financial and military (anti-aircraft defences would be good) aid but have from the start demonstrated that they have remembered the lessons of WWII that produced the AK47.

Intel is running rings around AMD and Arm at the edge

Nothing to see here

The article covers it later on but really this seems to be all about definition. A few years ago, "edge" was used to refer to devices running on large networks, such as CDNs, that were offloading processing such as DDoS attacks to nodes topologically closer to the client and these were of necessity small devices that, for example, could be fitted into DSLASM cabinets. As they never needed to run x86 code, x86 was not a popular architecture given the power draw. So talking about Xeons and edge really is something else. As is doing telemetry.

Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'

I think the kernel developers have identified certain areas where they think an implementation in Rust will be of benefit.

Re: Why does modern hardware not facilitate "safe" software?

Because the need for speed drives the market. There are several academic designs for such CPUs but nothing you can buy.

Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?

Comments in Perl are likely to be ironic: what did you think `!{}=?` means? Presumably, you can even run in it in ironic mode where the comments are taken into account! ;-)

Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?

I think one of the issues is that modern machines are much more complex than they used to be and modern programs and OSes are much more sophisticated. This means there are risks for even the best programmers on their best days and I think there are enough examples of this. Actually, any time a programmer thinks they're great is probably a time to be wary.

Rust seems to be following the "building a better mousetrap" approach and has managed to chalk up some impressive results demonstrating effectively that it solves some common problems, without introducing too many new ones. Kernels are one of the areas where this kind of thing is really important.

In contrast, Perl follows the swiss army knife approach and tries to do everything and, while lots of people are very happy with this, I think there are lots of examples of why people have switched to other languages (Python, Go, Rust, etc.) for some of the tasks where maintenance is likely to be important.

It's a crime to use Google Analytics, watchdog tells Italian website

Re: Colour me confused.

Because it's open to interpretation. The US and the EU have come up with various wheezes to allow processing of data in the US and they have repeatedly been struck down by the courts as providing insufficient protection, not least from warrantless US governement request for access. Google has made a version of analytics that supposedly limits the data collected, but mere act of processing data in the US remains a problem.

UK's Post Office shells out for SAP software it thought it had

Re: Nice business you've got there squire...

They just own data and you get a licence to use it. C'mon, they're not stupid.

Re: Nice business you've got there squire...

You really need to talk to people who've "bought" SAP. Though, obviously they won't be able to tell you about the contracts because it's trade secrets. One of the best tricks, allegedly, is SAP owns any data processed with its products. Yep, you no longer own your own (sic) data! This goes beyond even Oracle's licence for switching the machine on.

Re: Nice business you've got there squire...

SAP and Oracle have obnoxious T&Cs that basically amount to being able to charge for breathing air. But nobody's prepared to challenge them in court for fear of their business going down the tubes while the case proceeds. Oh, and the monopoly commissions don't tend to get involved because the contracts are all under non-disclosure agreements.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Re: Stonkingly good episode

To be fair, it's probably just real life™ that has served Simon such candidates up.

Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

Pah!

Moving stuff around the warehouse is toy stuff.

I think it's Boston Robotics that has robots already in use by various parcel companies that can grab, twist and move and are already being used to load and unload vehicles.

If you didn't store valuable data, ransomware would become impotent

Re: So instead of...

Presumably the article is a prelude to some kind of product recommendation (Pesce has form) involving distributed personal data storage using a blockchain…

DARPA study challenges assumptions about distributed ledger (and Bitcoin) security

Oh, I think it remains "immutable", you can't change the history, but that, along with the distributed network, was supposed to prevent abuse. However, it's now clear that the network is nothing like as distributed as it needs to be and that communication between nodes itself isn't secure: are you sure the message was genuine?

Google, EFF back Cloudflare in row over pirate streams

DMCA safe harbour

In the US Cloudflare should be in the clear by claiming Safe Harbour, which was designed for something else but should easily cover this. The only aspect they're vulnerable on is failing to act on a cease and desist case if they've been instructed not to provide services for insert-name-here, but that would be contempt anyway.

DMCA was almost specifically designed to protect US copyright without penalising US video service providers, like YouTube. Non-US copyright holders have much reduced rights and non-US service providers find it harder to claim Safe Harbour. This is standard US trade policy via extra-territorial enforcement.

Re: about the aside

Google, and Yahoo encrypt email by default, provided the other party supports it.

Sort of depends what you mean by encryption: TLS, yes. But actual encryption of the e-mail at rest, no and Exchange is easy enough to hack. S/MIME isn't much better because, apart from the technical shortcomings, admins can easily read the e-mail. And none of the big players has gone far enough to support anything like PGP, even though they're technically in a great position to do this.

Note, that in some situations in some jurisdictions, it is a legal to keep archive, and thus, unencrypted copies of e-mails. But it's possible to think up ways of how this could be done: separate keys for certain communications and an offline archive.

Telegram adds paid tier as it cracks 700 million users

Re: I'm curious

Videos.