Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: “Minimal adjustments”

I think one of the things you're missing is that more and more C code is now being maintained by people who may "understand" the language but didn't grow up with using it for everything and are, therefore, less aware of the many potential pitfalls that have been with C from the start. Compilers have been demonstrably better at creating machine code than people for well over a decade now and it's reasonable to start with a high-level language and rely on a compiler to produce fast but safe code.

Re: computers on wheels

I think you're missing an essential economic point: the change in policy to favour larger and more expensive cars also removed the need to drive down unit costs, which had dominated the industry since the 1980s, even through various phases of innovation, which is why Japanese manufacturers expanded so successfully: there were making better cars that were also more affordable.

The tax breaks have allowed manufacturers to add components, particuarly for data collection, without needing to worry about the costs or the utility to the driver. Without the financial incentive, we'd have smaller cars with better safety features.

Re: A Mystery to Me

The Silicon Valley playbook requires that you achieve market dominance before you think about making money. As such, the plans are similar to those around Uber a decade ago and, unsurprisingly, investors are on board throwing cash – which might include your or my pension fund – at the problem. And as long as cash is available, either directly from investors, or via the stockmarket, this will remain the cash and divert resources away from potentially more efficient approaches. Access to capital is thus being used as a barrier to entry and making a mockery of the idea of "creative destruction".

There was a good interview yesterday on German radio with one of the people behind NX AI on their non-transformative approach, which is apparently both significantly faster and more efficient that that used in the LLMS, but also the decision to avoid language processing precisely because the market is being crowded out by investors.

Re: Hallucinations matter

I think someone may have been testing a model to come up with the bullshit.

Re: Hmm.

Oh right. Thanks for the update. And who will we always have been at war with tomorrow?

Re: margin up by 70%

They're counting on you not having that choice.

We'll see how things are in a year as more companies approach licence renewal or migration.

Re: Tracking

You can impose sanctions on any business that trades in your jurisdiction and, anyone selling advertisting in your country can be held liable. This is why the EU was so effective with it's "opt-in" approach.

Re: Neat

Stiff but also telescopic? Nice if you can do it, but probably better to go for something that locks into place and has no ability to move independently so that you have only the main satellite to worry about. That's probably possible using the same kind of origami approach they used for James Webb. But, no matter how stiff the arm is, I'm sure it's still going to have more wobble in it than is acceptable. And, if it's really all about the occlusion, then best do away with the connecting arm and its potential for feedback loops, especially if you add in damping, because this is in space with Newton's first law keen to remind you that it's there all time – resonant vibrating bridges spring to mind – and use a second satellite, which is what they're doing.

Total launch mass is probably the least of their worries.

Re: Ron knew more than he was telling

YMMEV: Liam Gallagher credited being hit on the hammer with unleashing his musical genius…

Re: IBM, Boeing, Intel...

Too true: sack the engineers and look for ways to manipulate the market to reduce competition. Intel's tick-tock approach was okay, but agreements with manufacturers meant they were able to take their eyes of the competition. And, sadly as with Boeing, et al., investors are all in favour of jam today.

Re: This is how America works

US elections have been a combination of state fair and outright bribery for most of the country's history. The state fair bit is the snake oil salesmen do their bit for the voters. The money spent on advertising, etc. and now lotteries is really only the tip of the iceberg and the ticket to the Lobby for the real bribery: legislation, where billions can be spent on a single bill. As a result, while the Democrats may have lost the election, the most important donors have made sure the right people have got their visting card. The, er, House always wins. Okay, it's the Senate that makes the money, but this is the better quip and people like Mike Johnson do have some impressive PACs with some rather shy donors.

It did get rescheduled for later in the same day.

Like I said, are other countries that much different? Yes, we all know about SpaceX, but SES seems to be following the same tried and trusted path that was established in the 1960s.

And ESA and NASA have a lot in common down to the politics, funding and the awarding of contracts. It's a miracle that anything gets built at all, and yet they stilll manage to get some very good stuff done. I'm not deeply au fait with the details but I seem to remember that it was about 10 years ago that it all went to hell in ESA and lots of projects went into stasis or were asked for very expensive overhauls.

You can knock Ariane but, for a while, it held the most impressive record in reliability. Going forward, they will have to embrace both faster innovation and more private enterprise and cooperation with other agencies. I won't be holding my breath for great achievements, but I think things will improve.

Oracle to Postgres migrations have been possible for years – won't always work, of course – but you can get professional support if you're interested. And, of course, since Amazon did the same thing the other year, it's also happy to help.

The process for any reasonably maintained* environment will be the same: check whether particular features are available on the target platform; define performance metrics; see what works automatically (could be most) and what needs to be done. In 2010 this might have been considered risky, but now I think there are plenty of examples showing that it's fairly straightforward and things often work better than before.

* Yes, I know that PoS that was done by cheapr outsourced from contractors a few years ago might be a bit of a challenge.

Re: It's not just Brits...

In which case they're all in deriliction of their duty to inform the public. However, seeing as the integration was probably set up years ago by some PFY who's since "moved on", they don't have any idea how to change it.

Re: How did the company manage to last this long?

What do you mean "record your presence"? I can do this with a press of a button on my watch, but all my apps have options to record the current position, eg. car parking space.

While it's true that most of Intel's problems were of its own making, we shouldn't ignore the deals it cut with manufacturers to make sure there was Intel Inside™. AMD remain cash-strapped because it was barely keeping its head above water in the fight with Intel.

Going forward, nVidia should be looking over its shoulder at anything that is "nearly" as good, but as uses less power as its main customers all have more than enough cash to build entire data centres using different architectures if total power consumption is siginifcantly lower.

Re: For clarification: This is an old SUN Microsystems Trademark from 1995

A more modern one would be "to google". As I said, I'm not sure of US practice here: in the UK Hoover famously lost its case, for both reasons: genericism due to lack of assertion. I think, but could easily br wrong, Scotch Tape and Kleenex have both successfully defended their trademarks. You can normally tell by mentions in TV shows.