Posts by Charlie Clark 13433 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
As primarily a hardware company, Apple uses versions to deprecate old hardware to encourage users to buy new stuff. I expect that to be around for a while, even though I appreicate that it does have a reasonable record at supporting older hardware, at least when compared with other consumer products.
Discord, LastPass, AWS Client VPN, Microsoft To Do, and Microsoft Teams
At least a couple of those are wrapped web views and one is just a configuration tool, hardly major headaches to port, compared say with Adobe Photoshop or OpenOffice, or anything that uses some of the kernel extensions that Apple has decided to outlaw.
While Apple has been trailing the APIs for the change for a while, it's going to be more than a simple recompile for many developers and Apple knows it, which is why the committed to 5 years support for Intel Mac. In the meatime there are a whole heap of bugs as a result of the change to the new architecture. This, along with waiting to see how much of a walled garden MacOS an ARM is, is what is stopping me from switching to MacOS 11.
Sometimes, it's great that the software hasn't been updated in the last 20 years. Quite often that means that it works well enough and all of the bugs associated with updates could be avoided. Banks have known this for years, which is why they're still running mainframes…
Lots of developers at companies and even a few CTOs know about and appreciate open source but they are not generally interested in being able to fix any bugs themselves. What they will have come across is outdated and buggy software that is no longer maintained but the opposite is even more common: frequent updates that break things and changes in the licensing. Oh, and vendor lock-in, which RedHat is just as good at as the rest.
You make some very good points but I think you're not the target group. Google wants Flutter to span the mobile/web divide which isn't so easy with C++. Also, along with Apple's Swift, it's trying to lower the barrier to entry for new developers.
But your main objection about how committed they are to it is probably the most salient. Even though Google has shown admirable commitment to many projects, notably Chrome, it has also probably dropped more.
The most recent example that springs to mind would be the reaction to J K Rowling's most recent Robert Galbraith novel, where some bookshops decided to boycott the book because it was allegedly "transphobic". It isn't – there is a murderer who occasionally cross dresses, not least to gain victim's trust – but the possibility seems to upset more people than the graphic descriptions torture, rape and murder…
But I think this logo is just a gaff.
While it doesn't look to me much like Hitler (the tache is too far above the "smile"), I can see why it might be construed as such. And, in a commercially sensitive environment such as the one Amazon operates in, you can easily weigh up the costs of the change (miniscule) versus the potential damage to the image of trying to sit it out.
This kind of sensibility is older than Twitter. Don't forget that, in America, many buildings don't a have a thirteenth floor because enough people are superstitious so that it makes business sense to pander to them… Palm never released the Palm IV because of Asian sensibilities. But Fiat pushed ahead with the Punto and London 2012 doggedly stuck with Bart / Lisa logo.
On the other hand, Apple has just shown how much they can squeeze out of ARM's architecture, and while I doubt Apple are feeding any of their in-house improvements back to the community,
Apple is a good example. At some point it might become good enough at chip design to want to everything in house but that would mean having lots and lots of chip engineers doing nothing but design chips and document their work. Difficult to see where it's going to find and train these engineers, even if the company can easily afford to do so. But tweaking existing designs and, especially, adding custom hardware is classical value adding. And there will be two-way traffic: not least when asking for support: we'd like to add a vector unit here… And a lot of the general improvements, let's say on video codecs, are solutions to general problems: Apple's entire product strategy is to buy as much as possible from the market and add value through customisation: it doesn't make memory chips, voltage regulators or even touch screens. This is why it's been more than happy to buy from its competitorts, but it makes sure it has more than one supplier. This is how many industries, including the car industry work because it's almost impossible to be optimise every step in vertical integration.
I think you're forgetting the principal-agent problem. As long as ARM is not competing with its customers than all customers have a vested interest in ARM producing as good designs as possible. ARM has a vested interest in gaining new customers and keeping existing ones happy; low licensing costs are a key part of this.
Replacing the commercial entity ARM with a consortium is a recipe for disaster because the consortium would be the locus of competing interests, just without independent governance and the ability to determine its own goals. History is littered with quangos and talking shops like this.
No doubt, over time, RISC-V designs will continue to gain traction, which in turn should help improve design, but for critical time-to-market stuff, it's going to be difficult to beat the ARM model.
Even though a lot of work was done to improve scalability, there remain lots of elementary problems with PyPI. For example, I need to change the project homepage for one of my packages but I cannot do this through the website, I must create a new version of the package and upload it.
I love the Python language but it's an open secret that the infrastructure doesn't get the attention it needs. Instead we're being force fed things like type hints…
You're still going to want to transcode to different formats and resolutions: h264, h265, AV1, HD-I, HD-P, etc. Basically what Google does every time someone uploads.
But I suspect they have other workloads they want handling. It easy to imagine them wanting to do some near-realtime crunching of the logs because the Netflix client generates oodles of data,
I think the article is about the stuff they need to offload to AWS to crunch through, so compartmentalising for commodity processing on hardware you don't have to worry about is key.
But I do agree it would be interesting to see what they're doing with BSD, presumably for less ephemeral stuff on their own hardware. And isn't FreeBSD pushing for its own version of Docker?
The problem is that passwords are not really secret either. Using 2FA such as a phone is both easier to use and more secure. You can argue whether biometrics for the phone are sufficient or whether something like a TAN shoul also be required, but almost anything is safer than a password.
You're absolutely right: there seems to be a fetishism of linear evolution supported by a few fossils, even though interbreeding, which essentially makes a nonsense of linear evolution, is observed all the time.
All we really know is that our current theories are inadequate.
Rocket Lab already has an impressive record but the valuation seems trivial compared with more PR-savvy companies with US govt contracts in their pockets. It's a pity because it makes them easier targets – Elon probably only needs to flutter his eyelashes if he wants to do a buyout – but it probably also means they can just get on with their job.
The definition of strength for passwords is based on dictionary-based attacks and refers to the permutations afforded by the character set and password length. Hence, awarding marks for case mixing, numbers and non-alphanumerics. While I agree that this is not really a good way to determine password security, it's better than nothing for those situations where passwords are still unavoidable.
That'll happen as soon as distros offer the same kind of incentives to install their stuff as Microsoft and bloatware companies do. It certainly won't be demand-led because the demand isn't there: Dell tried it for a while and dropped it due to lack of demand.
And that's before you get into the problem of the drivers…
downloading a binary image for a Linux distribution…
If they're building their own distros, they'll be building their own binaries and putting them on their own repositories and configuring their clients to search there first. In exceptional circumstances the latest, greatest version might no be available but this is the point. This has been the way BSD admins have done things for, er, decades.
I don't agree. While this doesn't prevent tracking per se, it does significantly limit tracking across websites, which is what most of the trackers are interested in. Also, as a browser setting, it overcomes user inertia when it comes to handling cookie settings: most will go with "accept all" to continue with whatever they're doing.
* Is thusly a word?
It is if you want it to be. But as it means in this way there is no need to stick an adverbial suffix on it. I believe there is a subtle difference in its use as a conjunction – "Thus, we see that…" == "therefore" – and an adverb – "We thus see that…" == "subsequently" – though this could simply be convention.
Not sure which icon to go with…
It is probably only a matter of time before someone has an attack of fake conscience and decides to spend a shedload of cash "rebranding" the Apache Software Foundation into something vaguely progressive but essentially bland and innocuous…
Because rebranding the foundation is a whole lot cheaper than returning the land but makes still gives us a nice warm feeling about how much we do care.
Probably next year and possibly then only in the premium segment. But all modern phones already have great cameras in them. Performance in low light is the only area where they might disappoint, though, here too, things have been improving with each generation. Do some research and go with one of the phones with multiple lenses and you should be happy.
Best space probe footage ever.
Can't agree with that. Every mission is fantastic for its time. But, for me, it's difficult to top the footage from Cassini-Huygens. Though, if we ever manage to do something on Venus or in any of the oceans on Titan, Europa, Enceladus, etc., that would certainly count.
Landing a robotic rover on Mars is no easy feat; about 50 per cent of all attempts have ended in failure before Perseverance, it's said.
It's not just said, it's true. However, this is over the whole history of sending probes to Mars: the first few were basically carefully aimed rockets. Recent missions are much more successful with NASA 3 for 3, I think. Even so, each mission is still essentially a prototype building on the previous ones: this one is the first to have a pinpoint landing; and it has a helicopter for the first time ever on such a probe. But, the next one is an even bigger challenge: not only getting safely to the right spot but launching a rocket back from there.
Seems like quite a leap of faith and not backed up by the numbers: compromise the build servers and there'd be meeelions of compromised machines. Easy to wait for DNS or certificate SNAFUS and MITM. Better still: trick the user into installing whatever it is with maximum permissions.
When it comes to security breaches the numbers don't really matter. What's more important is how the breach works and what the consequences are. While Apple generally does a goob job of securing the OS even for the dumbest user, some of the changes of the last few years that are supposed to provide more security, have actually eroded it. Or at least provided new vectors because permission escalation is a necessary evil for most software.
The car industry makes a lot of money from the various MoT schemes: have you seen the price of "original" spare parts? This is where the printing got its ideas from.
5 years mandatory for consumer electronics is illusory and it's not and probably wouldn't make much of a difference to the market. It's far more important to make the damn things easier to repair and, when they do reach end of life, have better programmes for recycling.
the last four years in the u.s.?
You've had it for a lot longer than that. Hence, the "subprime" mortgage fiasco and Boeing's self-certification of the MAX and all the other wonders you get.
Though, to be fair, I wouldn't put the omnishambles in Texas in that particular bucket. Texas has deliberately opted to avoid the national grid, which is why, when the Texan generators of all sorts went down, it wasn't possible to pull in power from other states. No, I don't expect that to change anytime soon either.
It's true that, when it comes to the engines, Boeing and Airbus are effectively just renting space to the engine manufacturers and the airlines get to choose these.
And, dramatic as both events were, it says a lot about the industry that they weren't worse and that the precautionary groundings* are standard procedure.
* Though I'm sure Ryanair would like to be able to offer passengers to choice…
The I-Phone 12 was also a heavily touted "supercycle" update for users who'd held off from some of the poor decisions in the 10 and 11. And, no doubt in the US, there were some people wondering what to do with their governement cheques.
All great phones, but are not reaching the point of peak utility? Obviously not if people are still prepared to hand over so much for a beautifully packaged computer they hardly ever use.
but what is interesting is that a) an Uber ride is usually about 2/3 the price of the equivilent taxi ride
It's not that interesting when you know it's done by not paying for the driver's health care, pensions, holidays, etc. And the company is still making huge losses.
This doesn't detract from the fact that, in many countries, the taxi business is a cartel and needs a shake up but that's a separate issue.
Indeed, but then the whole case is an abuse of the extradition arrangements. The fraud case should be tried in absentia in the US and, in the unlikely* case of a guilty verdict, extradition procedures could be started.
* Very few cases like this go beyond some kind of deal where guilt is never admitted, especially if HP's board and the auditors were to get dragged in as co-defendants as seems only reasonable. You only seem to do time in the US for large scale fraud if you act as a whistleblower!
The dock is pretty awful but seeing as I have it set to autohide it rarely figures. Not that I'm cheerleading for MacOS design: it has good phases and bad phases (skewomorphic, yuck!) with the control panel currently a real collection of design ideas from the last twenty years – I haven't switched to MacOS 11 which is supposed to have cleaned this up a bit. The point being that most UIs borrow and inspire though I've yet to see a GTK-based one I didn't hate.
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