Posts by Charlie Clark 13433 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
I suspect more people like these "digital assistants" than we imagine. Personally, I don't and get annoyed every time I hit the key by accident when I'm trying to adjust the volume. It should be optional and the button could be better positioned but, in a sense, the more different providers there are, the better.
There's obviously still a market for them – 8 million units aren't to be sniffed at – but the difference between the Note and the other Galaxy's is much less marked. Doesn't mean they'll stop selling sensitive styluses, but these may just become accessories for the flagship.
NT was cross-platform and very easy to port
That was the the idea but it was only really possible for low level parts of the system and nothing that relied on MFC. This why versions of NT for the Alpha were always late and why DEC also invested in providing x86 support on the chip.
Later on, things got even worse as the kernel was optimised for x86 quirks, which is why Microsoft struggled with the x86_64 transition and later with the move to ARM. It had a definite interest in supporting as few architectures as possible and Intel kept promising that the next generation of chips would be faster… But how much was really a plot and how much was just "stuff" we'll never know. In the end, a bit like VHS versus Beta or VESA local bus versus PCI, the better technology looks like it will win.
Itanium was HP's last throw of the dice. The real damage to alternative architectures had been done by Microsoft's shafting of Windows NT for the DEC Alpha. The Alpha was so much better than x86 at the time that Intel really was worried.
By the time it came to the Itanium fabs were getting so expensive and TSMC et al. weren't able to step in, that HP had no choice but to go with Intel, who managed to get enough IP out of the deal to stick in future less-x86 x86s.
Very good nonsense if you ask me. Don't like hard yolks. For variety, if you're in Manchester, I can recommend the "Manchester Egg" which uses pickled eggs, which always have soft yolks, and black pudding.
Keep the hard-boiled ones for hurling at the clueless hordes of government ministers.
Yes, there is a lot of money being thrown at this. But costs per treatment are very low – AstraZeneca's will be around $ 5 per treatment, or 1/1000th of those for Remdesivir. Compare that with the juicy recurrent returns for statins, etc. and it's easy to see why Big Pharma still doesn't like vaccines.
All the more credit to those companies like Biontech, Moderna and AstraZeneca, et al. for putting the work into platforms that allowed for the rapid development of vaccines and, even more importantly allow for production at scale. This goes back to the scares around the so-called avian and swine flu a decade ago and depends upon the continuous advances in DNA analysis and manipulation.
I wasn't going to mention vaccines but if you look at the list of companies with advanced phase 3 trials, you'll see Big Pfizer is largely conspicuous by its absence. Yes, Pfizer is there but that is because it partnered with BionTech, which actually did the research for the platform.
When it comes to dissing innovation, Big Pharma is probably worse than IT because of the even cosier relationship it has with regulators. Remember Remdesivir? $ 4500 a pop and now considered to have no significant benefits. Compare this with the out of patent dexamethasone and Astra Zeneca's proposed pricing $ 5 per vaccine and you can see why. Why take on the risk of developing something new at such low prices when you can buy a company that has a new heart pill ($00s per month), or cancer drug ($000000s per treatment)? This is also one of the main reasons why US healthcare is so expensive and has such poor outcomes: vaccines are socialist by definition.
Maybe Salesforce has just figured out it will be easier to buy than build?
Pretty much sums things up and is why US corporations have slashed R&D so much. Outsourcing product development like this is much more expensive even though Slack's revenues hardly justify it, but seeing as the money is largely being transferred between pension funds, no one really seems to care.
The problem is that telco companies are luring people into contracts where they get a new phone every two years or so
That's been the model for years but is increasingly less the case as more and more users switch to SIM-only PAYG contracts, which are generally much cheaper and keep their "old" phones for longer, because they're generally still more than good enough.
5G was dreamt up by the networks in the hope that it would turbo charge the refresh cycle but this doesn't seem to be having that much effect. If you already have a good 4G signal, 5G doesn't offer very much and if you don't have a good 4G signal you almost certainly won't have a good 5G one!
5G has the same level of security as 4G, which is probably quite a bit above what most broadband has. All US network companies put backdoors in their kit when the NSA asks them to. But, so far, no one has been able to prove that Huawei does for the Chinese and they provide access to their kit and the source code.
Looking forward to giving it a test myself, but at least for MacOS I can recommend MailMate as having many similar features as M2 so it becomes a doddle to write a filter to, say, delete all e-mail from mailing lists that are more than a month old and which you weren't involved in.
It seems you took the red pill. While there is a lot to admire Elon Musk for, his ability to play the capital markets is probably his greatest skill.
He’s already single-handedly shown us that you can mass produce electric cars
Nope, I think you'll find other manufacturers have built more. But he managed to make them desirable. Whether Tesla has net positive effect on emissions is debatable but there's no doubt it's moved the discussion and he's being given ridiculously cheap access to capital as a result. Incumbents did drag their feet, but so did governments and regulators.
Maggie's gambit actually caused more problems than it solved. It pushed many like-minded countries towards the federalists because that's how they could get most out of the situation. Once it became clear that the British approach would always be to demand an opt-out, the others simply engineered situations where making a small concession would keep the Brits happy, and the rest could do the horse-trading in peace. Game theory in practice, really.
It's a figleaf. It's not as if the Ministry for blah, blah, and also Sport has the staff or the equipment to do the checking, but the legislation will give them the ability to snoop at will without having to "waste time" with tiresome things like "due process" and getting a judge to issue a warrant. I mean, won't someone think of the children?
You haven't been able to do anything with the notebooks for more than five years now. It is annoying. However, apart from being able to run more and more VMs at once, RAM use on MacOS has been reasonably constant for the last 10 or so.
Who knows, maybe Apple will let people swap the SoC in a year or so from now. For a price, of course. But in the meantime there's no denying that they have a fairly compelling value proposition: improved performance and significantly improved battery life. That said, I certainly won't be switching to Big Sur until I know what the restrictions are and when they've really fixed all the bugs. I've skipped versions in the past when it was clear they were too buggy.
The Java Virtual Machine has, over a couple of decades, been provided with a wide array of performance optimisations, including highly optimised low pause garbage collectors, JIT compilation and global code optimisation.
The same is now largely true for PyPy.
Strictly speaking __init__ isn't the constructor. You have __new__ for that. The magic methods convention is just that, a convention; though a really useful one because, along with descriptors it means you can provide useful functions without having to worry too much about the method names. This facilitates a certain degree of orthogonaliy across libraries, which is nice.
Because so much stuff is being done in Python, Microsoft is seriously considering allowing to be used for extensions. So, instead of some horrible VBA blackbox, people who really want to, will be able to write macros in Python.
Guido certainly isn't doing this because he has to but because he wants to and thinks he'll be allowed to make a difference. Something which he famously wasn't allowed to while at Google where his Python for Android was taken out back…
* The stupid indent syntax
This complaint seems to come from people who've not actually worked with Python a lot and who miss their braces. Indentation is a fairly neutral and natural way to structure blocks: as would that bullet point list of yours look, if you've written it in HTML. It means the structure is visible without having to read the code, and it also suggests that if you're three or for levels in, you might want to think about refactoring.
This is why Python has become so popular with non-CS people. They understand the importance of being able to express their intent in code clearly and easily and appreciate the excellent libraries for their particular domains without having to know or care whether they're in C, C++, FORTRAN or whatever.
Where Python is struggling is native and indepth support for multiprocessing and asynchronous work, though async is improving. Some of this is legacy and some of it is because it really is quite hard to get right™.
I've never liked the ternary operator. It was indeed shoe-horned for people who want to do as much as as possible in a single line. Nothing wrong with if/elif/else chains. For very simple logic I personally prefer boolean evaluation if A and True or False. And, of course, switch like functionality generally gets implemented using dictionary dispatch.
Most code isn't doing a lot of processing for a long period of time. And in Python, if that's likely to be the case, you're likely to be using some optimised libraries just like Raymond says, which is what all the machine learning libraries, etc. do. The same is true for physicists at CERN: they process a lot of data in Python that in the backgrounds hands off the processing to some C++ or FORTRAN libraries that they don't need to write.
BTW. I've met Raymond and he's both nice and smart with a lot of programming experience. As a core developer, he spends a lot of time working in C so he is qualified to make the comparison.
Or is there an API for the domain to allow reading input of new passwords before they are set ?
There's certainly something that is required to enforce the policy where previous passwords are not reused but unless it's self-contained it's an attack waiting to happen.
Papa can identify base words that are used within an organisation and see how these change over time
Without more details this sound like BS. Or Windows security is worse than we thought. If passwords are properly salted and hashed this isn't possible. However, I have recently read some reports on domain passwords leaking…
No sensible person buys a mac for themselves
I'm no fanboi but I currently have two MacBook Pros (2016 and 2020 because I'm worried about potential restrictions on the ARM machines) and SWMBO has an 2020 Air. Depending on what you're doing the MacOS value proposition is not bad: a lot of power in a compact device with useful integration. I use the command line a lot and this is still way easier on MacOS than in Windows.
Comparisons with cheaper Intel notebooks without high resolution screens and similar weight/battery performance are misleading, even if my machines are generally attached to external screens and keyboards. When you need them for travel: weight and battery life suddenly become very important.
When it comes to phones, I couldn't agree with you more: you can get equivalent high-end phones but generally a budget one will be good enough for nearly everyone.
Where they are still in a league of their own is with the high end tablets. Google has fucked up here by not making Android more suitable and Microsoft is still favouring its own devices here. Again the ability to travel light is very appealing.
This whole losing money hand over fist thing bemuses me as well. I remember how much Amazon lost before finally turning a profit and I wonder how many investors went bankrupt or never made their money back, let alone a profit.
There are several things to consider but the main thing driving these platforms is the expectation of growth leading to monopoly or at least dominance of the market. Then, there is the financial engineering to consider: Amazon expressly pursued a growth instead of profits strategy, which many investors liked. Profits incur taxes and dividends in turn, at least in the US, incur higher taxes than share sales so many were happy to not to receive dividends and just see the share price rising. Nevertheless, it took a long time before initial investors saw a return on their investment. AWS and the other digital investments have redressed the balance somewhat. Though, while Prime fits in the strategy as guaranteeing long-term cashflow through long-term subscription, it's difficult to fit AWS into this model.
Higher share prices also mean that a company has a lower cost of capital than companies who borrow from banks. This is really skewing some markets as investors consider their bets "too big to fail": Tesla is being given far easier terms by investors than its competitors. If the money was coming from banks rather than from the capital markets, foreclosure would have had to happen long ago.
Even though Uber is currently burning money through the usual borrow from investors to buy customers ploy, any projections over future profits are assuming that margins will stay at whatever fantasy level they've currently come up with: they won't. Takeaway restaurants know all about margins and will be easily able to replace one service with another (with possibly the same driver), because exclusive contracts don't make sense for them.
The biggest problem is that Google is not very keen on supporting Android for this kind of use and currently expects them to use ChromeOS. So support from the OS isn't brilliant and, hence, few manufacturers have invested in the products. Samsung might be considered to be the exception with DeX which allows you to connect the phone to a screen and gives you a desktop. This is great as a replacement for a docking station but not usable whilst travelling.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
