Posts by Charlie Clark

Fusion won't avert need for climate change 'sacrifice', says nuclear energy expert

I don't see one in the conclusion: the subsidy industry is up and running and, largely, driving policy.

Re: From the cheap seats: NO SACRIFICE IS NEEDED (and you KNOW China will not do it ANYWAY)

Mixing half-truths generally produces bullshit and that's what you've managed to do here.

There are lots of aspects of climate science which should be treated sceptically; but this doesn't mean they're fundamentally wrong.

For example, CO2 is no longer in equilibrium because we're burning fossil fuel faster than the released CO2 can be recaptured. Over time, and we're talking geological time, a new equilibrium will probably be established.

The temperature of the ocean is less relevant for how much CO2 can be dissolved, though note that this also contradicts your point about equilibrium, than what temperature increases actually represent: energy stored. Though current changes are to surface temperature. This is why apparently minor changes in temperature can lead to greater storms and also why greater absorption is also making surface water more acidic.

China is going hell for leather on renewables, not least because it's getting worried about potentially more catastrophic weather events. It will take a while to get there but it has already started to affect its coal-based generation capacity. And, in any case, it's not that much more of an emitter than the US was.

But all this doesn't detract from the answer to parliament: even if we can get fusion working soonish, we won't be able to build up capacity sufficiently before 2050 to meet our goals; whether these are related to climate change or energy independence.

We've never even built datacenters using robots here on Earth

If you look at some of the projects, especially the science fiction ones, that get silly money thrown at them, $ 5 million is chump change. Think cryogenics, ticket to Mars, and the rapture. There are enough Yanks with the cash lying around to have a bet on it and there are more than enough loons desperate to stump up the cash to get off this satanic orb and they're happy to start with the photo and MP3 collection.

Actually, lots of these projects are essentially risk-free for the promoter: you sell heavily discounted bits of products to early investors to generate the cashflow to get the ball rolling. There are no guarantees but this also means that proper investors can offset the charges against tax while everyone else gets a raffle ticket. And everyone likes a raffle!

Broadcom's stated strategy ignores most VMware customers

Re: Hyper-V isn't a replacement for VMware.

There's also the risk of sticking more eggs in Microsoft's basket only to be forced onto its cloud when they choose.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

For a while it was common for the RDBMS to own the file system, some even had their own file systems… While that didn't make backing things up any easier, it also made deleting stuff harder.

I've hosed a Postgres DB in my time (always able to restore the data) and was surprised at how well I was able to restore from a disk backup.

But what got me about the story is that the update instructions included a DROP DATABASE. That's a mistake in any language. At the minimum there should be backup and restore steps. Don't touch it if there aren't! But, also, where was the test? No production system should be changed until everything has been shown to work on the test. If manglement won't approve this then it's time to get out because you will get the blame when it inevitably does go wrong.

We have bigger targets than beating Oracle, say open source DB pioneers

Re: Oracle and MySQL

I wouldn't quite say that. The truth is that MySQL was never going to replace Oracle. Not only was it too buggy, it just didn't do the big things well. And, then there was the dual-licensing. Oracle definitely has improved the engineering and fixed many long-standing bugs. But the licensing has got more complicated, as with all the open source stuff that Oracle has kept. The real winner in that fight was Postgres which picked up developers and customers while MySQL's attention was elsewhere, being bought by Sun and then Oracle. I suspect existing commercial customers were happier with the changes. Elsewhere, the deficiencies in MySQL have offered opportunities for companies like Percona to help set up and run environments.

But the article is really a collection of quotes. And, yes, SaaS does make some comparisons more difficult but Oracle will still want to earn as much in rent as it did with licensing.

If you're using the ctx Python package, bad news: Vandal added info-stealing code

Re: This should not have been possible

Hindsight's a great thing isn't?

AWS puts latest homebrew Graviton3 Arm processor in production

All chips do this to avoid overheating, which can damage them and also lead to inaccurate calculations in some cases.

More and more data centres have their own, often renewable, power supply so electricity costs are less important than they used to be.

The Graviton doesn't have as much oomph as a Xeon or an Epyc so a direct comparison isn't possible. However, data suggests a convergence of power/task across most of the architectures. Arm has some advantages but when you want grunt, you'll need juice. And the prices indicate this much. Arm has an advantage of size, which is why it's the dominant platform on mobile devices.

The reason for Amazon pushing its own silicon is purely self-serving as the chips are a lot cheaper to buy. Also, as they're smaller, you can cram more of them in a rack.

The discount is hardly sufficient to warrant such trials. But, as usual, the CPU is only a small part of the picture: unless you're transcoding video, etc. RAM and IO will be more important.

And citing Snap as a customer is hardly going to inspire anyone; Snap who?

Patch now: Zoom chat messages can infect PCs, Macs, phones with malware

Browser-only for me

Not that I think it guarantees security, but seeing as most of these clients are using WebRTC, staying in the browser makes more sense.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Re: Crap article

Microsoft hardwired IE into the OS so that you couldn't remove it and made it the default browser with every update.

Re: Ker-Ching!

Have you ever heard of choice?

Not that I like Flash, but If Apple had allowed it, Flash could have used hardware acceleration. It was banned to stop Adobe building its own content and app store.

The same is true for browsers: Apple prevents other developers from using hardware acceleration for graphics and JS engines.

Re: Ker-Ching!

Apple insists on keeping certain APIs, including hardware acceleration, private and usable only by their software.

Re: Lousy web design

When the browser doesn't follow the rules, it's not the web developer's fault. Apple have repeatedly introduced Safari-specific features with new versions of IOS and expected developers to use them rather than discuss the features with other makers.

Re: Meh

I fail to see why that is a reason for inaction against Apple.

Meta to squeeze money from WhatsApp with Cloud API for businesses

Re: "Back then, the service had 450 million users and was losing millions of dollars

Is it still losing millions of dollars?

No, it's now losing billions but doesn't have to disclose how many.

I don't use it and find it irksome when companies that have moved over to it entirely (KLM, I can't fly with you because you seem to require it). If you're going to use additional channels then make sure you use at least two different suppliers… Also, compared with Telegram the API really is fairly basic which just shows the ones calling the shots don't seem to use it.

Re: In all seriousness, people still use WhatsAPP?

They haven't yet gone through with those changes which would allow them to merge data from the various platforms and sell it to advertisers. I know quite a few people who will delete it if they're ever required to agree to the new T&Cs.

Technically, it's not a very interesting platform but at least it uses Signal's protocol for encryption. If you compare it with Telegram then you can see what happens once big companies buy these things up. Telegram continues to improve scale and firewall evasion while adding goodies to the clients. Yes, I know encryption is neither brilliant nor is your data secure unless you enable private messenging for everything.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Re: Even when the Web existed...

Gopher was great for the hierarchiacal kind of information that academic institutions produce: course lists, faculty lists, etc. The breakthrough with WWW was about publishing articles where cross referencing was required and it was a simple step for an IT lab from publishing an article on particle-bashing to publishing the canteen's menu.

Since then, even though we know all about the problems associated with taxonomies – those that from afar look like flies – we continue to return to classifications to keep our heads above the water!

Broadcom in talks to buy VMware: multiple reports

Share price

VMware or Broadcom could have let the news out, to test its impact on share prices.

The SEC would want to have a word if they did this. Any pubically traded company has to follow the rules about disclosing anything that might affect the share price and any kind of speculation is strictly off limits, or leaves them open to class action suits…

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

Re: Question

Didn't BSD switch to LibreSSL a while back because of the problems with OpenSSL?

I'd have expected CTRL-left and CTRL-right to switch between shells/sessions. Keybindings in many Linux installs have been broken since the Windows convention for copy and paste was adopted. Not sure how you interrupt a process now that CTRL-C is used to copy…

Re: Question

I'd have thought that BSD binaries would probably run on MacOS with the same kind of ABI shim that lets Linux binaries run on FreeBSD. But, in practice, it's easier to build them or get packages from MacPorts.

Re: Question

The kernel is different but much of the "system" is the same, the driver model is also different. However, as MacOS is very much a consumer OS, most people will never use the command line or see the system files.

Apple has added some cruft to try and make things more "secure". In practice this can mean some tinkering so that you can admin your own system.

The BSDs all have the same userland and library paths. That makes admin a whole lot easier. In practice, however, you're only likely to come across FreeBSD and OpenBSD, with NetBSD being a niche for those with very exotic hardware.

Package management has gone through several evolutions, but make install from the relevant port directory always works.

Every time I have to do some admin on a Linux system it seems like things have changed just enough to annoy me. Then there's all the fun of Debian vs. RedHat vs. SuSE vs. Gentoo, etc. and all the buggering around with packages that distros seem to love.

Might be my next print server

I'm looking for something to run on an RPi so that I can move my printer from the desktop. This should be possible in theory with Linux on an RPi but, unfortunately, the printer drivers (Samsung FWIW, it was free at the time works fine with MacOS) can't be installed on the Pi and the quality without them isn't acceptable. It looks like the BSD drivers are in a better state.

BSD is a server OS, which is why it likes to own the partition (it has its own volume manager which has meant flexible volumes for years).

No licence flim-flam, stable as a rock. What's not to like?

No, software. Software, including things like TCP/IP, that was developed at Berkeley to work with the then AT&T Unix™. Over time this became so extensive that effectively replaced the original OS, though it took years of going through the courts for this to be establised.

Surf the web from your parked Renault: Vivaldi comes to OpenR

Re: Megane specs kneecapped for UK models.

German wine did indeed used to be terrible but things have improved markedly over the last few decades. And there has always been some good French beer.

Apple scraps 3-day return to office amid COVID-19 cases

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

Your post sounds like a case of confirmation bias to me.

Not if you read the conclusion, it isn't. I was just providing and additional view on the situation.

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

Sounds like a case of confirmation bias. I know several companies who are working hell for leather doing in-person stuff to catch up on the stuff that they couldn't do for the last two years.

Remote working works better for some people and situations than others.

Elon Musk says Twitter buy 'cannot move forward' until spam stats spat settled

Indeed, the potential pay off of USD 1 billion if things don't go through is a lot less than the loss in value of his Tesla stock that is being used to guarantee loans.

The SEC should intervene because interventions like this during supposed due diligence quite clearly move the stock price by interested parties.

Pentester pops open Tesla Model 3 using low-cost Bluetooth module

Re: PIN to drive

Welcome to California, the home of unlimited liability: it's not enough to recommend people don't do something stupid!

Python is getting faster: Major performance tweaks on horizon

Re: The McDonald's of programming languages

The article mainly covers issues related to the GIL, but these affect parallelism not speed. Much performance critical code is already in mainly C (eg. regex handling, XML parsing) with Python-specific overhead such as loops and function calls around 50% slower than C. This is good enough for the likes of CERN.

That said, the changes to the language as part of the move to Python 3 did slow things down, especially switching text from bytes to unicode. Things have improved with each release since about 3.4 but 3.11 is noticeably faster in general use.

Better support of multiprocessor architectures and asynchronous work are required to take advantage of modern CPUs, which are no longer really getting faster. Some of this is really hard to do but the improvements in both since Python 3.6 are impressive. Asyncio is getting more and more popular and better as a result.

Re: The McDonald's of programming languages

Criticiscms of Python's speed are rarely grounded in fact. Yes, as an interpreted language it has an overhead in execution speed when compared with a compiled one: every run requires compilation; higher memory use, etc. However, in many situations where lots of work is being done, the work is being done by C, C++ or even Fortran libraries with the Python code just moving the data around. And this is the recommendation for anyone writing large systems in Python: prototype, profile and then write relevant extensions. It doesn't work in every situation but it works more often than not.

Bloomberg is onboard because the financial services industry has adopted Pandas and Jupyter over Excel, never known for its speed, en masse and Python has become the goto environment for machine learning.

The comparison with PHP is really limited to web stuff. It is the large number of great domain specific libraries (from biology to engineering to machine learning, etc.) in Python that make the difference.

Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

Re: Design Flaw

Dark matter is what's used to explain the rotation of galaxies, dark energy is used to explain expansion. They're both poor names "unknown 1" and "unknown 2" would be just as useful!

Re: Design Flaw

If it were perfectly organised, it would keep winking in and out of existence due to matter and anti-matter annihilation. But that didn't happen, mass isn't distributed evenly and things are speeding up…

Re: Pah, They set the constraints for a black hole. And a black hole was what they got.

The terms "black holes", "big bang" and "plate tectonics" were all coined derisively in response to observations that turned out to be correct*. The theories and the supporting maths all came later and have since been validated by more observations.

* Well, better or more suitable than previous ones.

Re: Design Flaw

Well, that's the relavistic explanation of gravity. Still working on the necessary quantum one…

Re: Design Flaw

if you assume light dissipates its energy as it travels

We don't. Relativity pretty much proved that this isn't the case and lasers are pretty good example of light as a beam. The red shifts observed by Hubble et al, eventually led to the "big bang" theor. Observations since then suggest that expansion is accelerating so that galaxies will eventually achieve "escape velocity" from each other. However, since we don't know what is driving the accleration, we don't know if it's permanent meaning at least two outcomes are possible: heat death through unchecked expansion; collapse back into nothingness if gravity regains the upper hand.

But lots of other things are possible as we simple don't know enough.

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Strawmen

Slowly but shortly, the open-source community is becoming a kinder, gentler, and better one.

I think it's just getting bigger and more varied. Lots of people turn into arseholes when doing tasks to which they are not suited or when things are done the way they like. Mailing lists expose this but it goes on all over the place. And women can be just as bad as men when it comes to hurting their colleagues.

As for codes of conducts: in my opinion they are passive-aggressive manifestos from the jobsworth brigade.

BOFH: You'll have to really trust me on this team-building exercise

Yes, but he still has to get out of the building (and the cark park) alive…

Re: Wouldn't let me on the cardiac ward

Maybe being plugged into one machine(with a cattle prod) led to being plugged into the next?

Microsoft tests ‘Suggested Actions’ in Windows 11. Insiders: Can we turn it off?

Re: Clippy

More likely to be HAL…

Google shows off immersive maps, AR-flavored search, Pixel 7, and more

Re: A slight misquote

Or, a new twist on the old phrase that helped Reagan win in 1980:we're from Google and we're here to help.

Elsewhere: call quality can't get any better, cameras are already fantastic. Bascially, the phone is done but our customers, the device makers, need our help to convince you to keep buying new phones…

4G to dominate cellular IoT until 2028, when 5G takes over

Projection defies historical mean

First of all, 5G is largely marketing blurb. The real change was to packet based infrastructure via LTE / 4G.

The research is reasonable but the chart has an uptake of 5G that is significantly faster than any comparable changes in the past. That raises a few questions.

Again marketing is in the lead here. WiFi 5 & 6 along with "5G" are driving convergence for wireless technologies: my phone already has the option to use a WiFi connection for calls where available, which is a good way to boost call quality in buildings where cell coverage will naturally be lower. Convergence should effectively increase cell density by blurring the boundaries. Higher cell density is really the only way to improve speeds for everyone.

Email out, Slack and Teams in for business communications

Re: Old School.

I think there's a classical trade-off here. Once e-mail became ubiquitous it became a flood and people started looking for alternatives. Messaging is great for small groups and small things but can quickly become much more difficult to manage as messages grow.

What I do like about some of the messaging systems is support for conversational interfaces via bots/agents. The new Telegram API looks very promising in this regard. But interoperability and data sovereignty will remain a problem.

Re: Except I don't use SLACK

Messaging is complementary to e-mail and can indeed be useful. However, you quickly enter area of incompatible protocols, data privacy and security and what to do with all the data if you want to change providers. Moreover, arranging appointments gets more difficult the more people you try to include. This is cumbersome anywhere where "I can't do Tuesday, Bob can't do afternoons, …" comes up. Conversational interfaces for calendars are the best solution, and it would nice to see better protocols for this. But this still won't resolve all scheduling problems!

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Re: @Loyal Commenter

That's the same false equivalence of the paper that volume equals competition. The paper, however, says fewer apps but that does mean there is no competition, just fewer competitors. And in many markets there is an optimal number of competitors: adding more just means spreading resources more thinly. There are plenty of examples of this: TV channels, mobile phone networks, etc.. Oh, and all these markets are regulated.

The costs of doing business

The paper does some quantative analysis to come up with some qualitative results. This is flawed methodology but beloved by some economists who find it difficult to get other data. There is also the flawed premise that more is better. In fact, in many markets this leads to an equilibrium known as "more of the same", ie. less information because there is less profit to be shared.

But the biggest problem with the conclusion is that is regurgitates Silicon Valley's most pernicious mantra: regulation is evil and the best markets have the least regulation.

There are plenty of examples that this is not only untrue but that proper regulation provides more choice and lowers costs. For example, safety requirements in road vehicles are mandated. Not only does this mean fewer road deaths but it also, in many countries at least, reduces the risk to companies because the state indemnifies them to a certain degree if their products meet safety standards. However, modern investors only seem to care about profits today because if a company has any problems they can just sell their stock; it's the inverse of the principal / agent problem. Shareholders are not liable so the worst that can happen to them is company bankruptcy. That might sound bad, but losing equity is a damn sight cheaper than having to accept liability.