Posts by Charlie Clark 12172 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
Also, Branson and Bezos should a great deal of confidence in their company's designs to go up themselves.
You do know that Branson has been selling his Virgin Galactic shares?
While there is some impressive technology involved, these are largely vanity and some of these projects have unresolved enviromental projects including: space tourism, really? Though what happens with the aluminium from Musk's satellite constellation is probably a more pressing problem.
You're misapplying the term reservoir here, which is normally used to mean a self-replenishing source. But the aim of vaccination is to reach herd immunity where this is effectively no longer the case.
Of course, random mutations will occur in every infected person, but there will be less selection pressure in the unvaccinated. At one point it will just become yet another endemic disease.
Much as I dislike the masks, I'd have to disagree that their usefulness has been disproved. Their effect is marginal but not revolutionary, ie. symptomatic wearers are around 15% less infectious with them than without. In many situations this makes very little difference but in some it can be crucial, which is why they are standard practice in many hospital situations.
Masks lose their effectiveness over time, particularly as they become damp. They're pretty much useless outdoors but, where good ventilation and distancing is not possible, then they can make sense for a limited time but if you're going to spend any time with someone indoors then don't bother. More importantly, however, avoid crowds and, if you've got symptons, stay home. It's a pity these simple instructions are not repeated more often and clearly.
10:1 ratio correlates strongly with the vaccinated: non-vaccinated ratio and this is likely to be the key figure. In the US it is reported that over 99% of all recent deaths are of non-vaccinated people. While I suspect there may be some fun involved in that number, it's around what we expect so expect the pressure on the unvaccinated to increase.
The communication around mask wearing is, I think, somewhat deliberately more than a little mixed. Initially, they were supposed protect those around a person but not the person themself, assuming the wearer is infectious. This was later extended to suggest that they do offer a degree of protection for the wearer. While the data does suggest that masks can help reduce the spread of infection, in some circumstances, it's marginal rather than advanced and there are all kind of caveats, especially over time. But what isn't in doubt is the visibility of them, which has made it easier to make them an item of faith.
In a sense this is quintessentially a question of philosophy: how much can we trust each other to do the right thing? If this is combined with the opinion polls suggesting a majority in favour of restrictions, then you might expect most people to continue to follow most of the rules. And this is how society generally works.
Personally, I think a more graded set of restrictions rather than a big bang probably make more sense and might all stand the test of time for the next epidemic. But, basically, we've bet the bank on vaccination so at some point* the restrictions do have to come off.
* Feel free to make this up for yourself: 80% of the eligible population being fully vaccinated might be a place to start.
You're only right about the 85% having had one jab. You're wrong on the rest: unvaccinated people can be infected but this doesn't mean they'll act as a reservoir and most certainly not one where new, vaccine resistant strains can arise. Once the illness has run its course through someone they are clear. Selection pressure (viruses can't evolve in the same way we do) suggest that mutations are most likely to arise in people with poor immune systems where it takes longer for the body to clear the infection. There is even some suggestion that in the UK the treatment of patients with antibody-laced plasma may well have been the source of the alpha variant.
we are getting closer and closer to microwave
Been there for years.
I think that there should be massive testing done to find out how high wi-fi and cell phone frequencies can go
Technically, there's no upper limit and high enough (X-ray or Gamma) you don't need to worry about attenuation so much…
The key issue, as the article mentions, is to use directional, or focussing antennae so that, for the same power output, you have more efficient transmission by using beams rather than simple radiation. Efficiency in this sense also means not frying the meatware as much…
PDF cannot escape its Postscript origins: it will always attempt to create fixed sized-pages.
EPUB would seem the most reasonable format: this is essentially a subset of HTML with a resource tree. Authoring tools are now pretty reasonable and, for those who want it, DRM is supported.
Still, I bet the guy loves all the attention he's getting!
Can an industry group get together and come up with an identical radio standard to Wifi, except instead of using the hot mess of an unlicensed space, carve out some licensed frequency
Er, that would be the mobile phone networks and they exist already and convergence, at some point, is very likely.
What's your point that that a licensed frequency product is not called WiFi?
Well, we could use the various IEEE specifications but WiFi is easier to remember.
It's great because it's unlicensed so no one has to ask permission and it's bad for exactly the same reasons. However, contention between neighbouring networks seems to have got better, at least in my experience – it's on the way to a managed network – via smaller but more powerful cells. I've lived in densely populated apartment buildings with well over 20 networks visible and rarely seen many problems except with dweebs who think they can manage channels better than the silicon: if you can go with 5 Ghz which does have enough bandwidth.
In which case it wouldn't be WiFi any more… Those who want to use amateur radio for data have been able to do so for decades.
WiFi was supposed to be available to all, or, more accurately: some clever manufacturers saw an opportunity in unlicensed spectrum, which is why the first few years were such a mess of incompatible devices.
I'm not sure what particular part is nonsense. In terms of the radios, LTE and WiFi are already very close as I can confirm with the way handover works between repeaters in the network here. LTE has different bands because and more (licensed) spectrum than is available to WiFi. But contention is always a problem for wireless networks. It has better user management, with or without charging, but when it comes to "pico" cells you really can't tell the difference any more.
The WiFi meshing has got a lot better over the last few years.
As we're only temporarily where we are and the internet connection is in one of the most remote corners of the building, WiFi was the only way to go. 2 x 1200 Repeaters + 1 x 600 + 1 x DECT required in total mean that everywhere has about the same speed as our downlink.
My biggest beef with WiFi is the shared password malarkey, I'd much prefer individual access in any managed environment and leave ad-hoc to the guest network. This is currently causing havoc at a client's network as deploying personal certs to mobile devices without an MDM is a PITA. So, guess what, everyone's I-Phone is on the guest network which, of course, restricts access to certain resources such as the mail server…
Long term I expect WiFi and LTE to converge.
Security update are more important than version updates, though that shouldn't be as onerous for manufacturers as it used to be. But, perhaps even more important, the Xiaomi phones seem to be well supported by LineageOS making you even less dependent on the whims of the manufacturer, especially once they've decided they no longer need you.
To a certain degree in China (and India) those engineers are being churned out of the universities at a sufficient rate. But more importantly, this isn't a new development and thus there is already a market of skilled and experienced engineers as demonstrated by the rising wages in China.
Fairphone's work has been well documented. For example, they admit that it's almost impossible to get untainted minerals. But the bigger problem with mass adoption is that the phones are considered several generations behind.
RTF is okay. But CSV is a PITA as soon as you have non-ASCII because you have to get the encoding right. And then you have to do the type inference…
Guess who got a non-ASCII CSV in his e-mail this morning?
But I got the biggest laugh recently with some kind of export to Excel including \200e characters around dates which were subsequently cast to text. Oh how I laughed as I reached for the cattle prod…
Microsoft's programs are particularly dumb when it comes to file extensions so an xls renamed as xlsx will not be opened. In fact, you can't mix and match xlsx and xlsm. I'm not sure if this is by accident or by design but I'm pretty sure that the number of infections due to the office formats declined with the switch. That, and the fact that it's easy to get people to click on links in e-mails…
As someone who works with the specification I know how awful it is. Still, it is at least there and Microsoft does contribute actively to improvements in the documentation, though these generally affect the strict implementation although the world lives with the transitional specification. But you can do an awful lot with just the schema.
ODF is definitely a better format – XLSX is largely an XML form of BIFF – but it's not without its problems and it is not really being actively maintained.
XLS is limited to 256 cols and 65,384 rows…
LibreOffice et al. has had some long-standing bugs in handling XLSX files that could easily have been fixed if they'd read the specification, which was at least published, unlike BIFF which was never published.
It's not that simple. Using open source because it's free to use is one of many reasons for using it. But occasionally being able to tinker with the source (say one in a hundred libraries) is also a reason for many. In fact, open source projects often demonstrate greater responsiveness than commercial offerings.
Releasing software as open source is a separate topic. For many, it's actually cheaper than setting up the infrastructure for licensing, but the main reason has always been peer review and the ability to walk away at any time. This has increasingly come to dominate software development which is why we're seeing more support contracts for open source: companies that are not prepared to contribute in some way to key software products are asking for trouble. The current situation is far from ideal, with many of the benefits of the model now accruing to the cloud providers, but is better than it was 10 years ago.
You're right to say that people generally can't afford to live off open source, but, in many cases, the people working on an open source project are domain experts and, as such, likely to find their knowledge and skills in demand.
Postgres, either with extensions or in the form of Enterprise DB seems to tick all the boxes without all those licence problems. If it's a business DB, paying some kind of fee is fine but SQL Server seems to be about the additional Windows licences you need and all that extra RAM.
SQL Server's general licensing terms are a pain even on Windows, I've got several instances I'd love to replace with Postgres just to reduce the hardware demands. But, as they're "embedded" databases, I'm entirely dependent upon the developers learning to work with a DB they can't just click together.
C has been around for 50 years and people, including experienced and skilled programmers, are still making the same mistakes. Does that tell us anything? In many situations that might not matter, but in systems you really want to avoid those if at all possible.
Sticking with plain old C is the safest bet
Given the number of known errors in C code, this is plainly not true. Rust is very C-like but was built with a view to reducing some of the known common errors in C code. It has been adopted by several projects for this reason and, thus far, people seem to be happy with the results. In many ways it's a bit like a pre-compiler, which is why it's suitable for an alternative implementation: many of the existing tests should be usable.
The quotas have been demonstrated to be a poor way to reduce overfishing: ships just dump the excess but dead fish in the sea before making port. The Icelandic system, which gives fishermen a stake in the fishery, seems to be a better approach but is probably more difficult to role out across multiple states.
Still, we haven't got rogue Chinese trawlers fishing there. Yet.
If it's standalone, why should it be electronic?
The problem with the forged certificates is that they're based on something that was never designed not to be forged. But it would be easy enough to the use technology of id cards, drivers licences, passports, etc. for a new document that would be sufficiently difficult to forge to eliminate most forgeries.
You missed out the real memory hog which was Windows Vista. That needed 4GB to be usable at a time when that much RAM was expensive. Once they put the XML-based window manager (what was it called? WPF?) on a diet things improved a lot and I regularly run Windows 7 VMs in 2 GB and can work quite happily in them.
It's what the lawyers advise. A regulatory fine is always preferable to an appearance in court, which is why so many settlements are made out of court. In some US cities plea bargains are so common that they're taken by the demonstrably innocent who want their lives back.
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