Posts by steogede
419 posts • joined Wednesday 28th November 2007 16:52 GMT
So how does it work?
Would you give the tax man a few chips? I have an idea, rather than pay the tax man money, I'll use a small amount of that money to buy potatoes and oil, make chips, by which time the value of the potato will have increased (after all chips are more expensive than potatoes) and I can give the tax man the chips and keep the rest of the cash. How does this affect soup kitchens? Will the destitute be required to fill out tax returns for the soup they consume?
How about if the tech companies opened up their canteens so that anyone with access to the site could get free food - employees, contractors, customers, tax inspectors. If it is available to anyone, then it is not a staff benefit - at least, not any more than using the loos or breathing the air conditioning is.
Re: Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear....
Indeed thorium is looking like it will be the technology of the future. Just a shame we (as a planet) wasted so much time and money on uranium.
Re: Re: Price...
>> It was far too expensive for a games console, perhaps yes, but for many it was also the cheapesst
>> blu-ray player at the time, so actually made economical sense to get one.
>>
>> Or at least, that's how I rationalised spending that much money to myself.
That's the key. All they need to do is think of something new that nobody wants or needs, make it really expensive and include it for less on the console. Can't go wrong.
Re: Coming soon...
>> when he accidentally walked in for a pee.
Why would little Jimmy "accidentally" walk into the bathroom for a pee? I could understand if you said he 'accidentally walked into the kitchen for a pee'.
No harm no foul?
He was getting the work done, to a high standard by all accounts and they have sacked him? His greatest sin was giving a third party his access details - he should have setup a VPN on his home system, and had the Chinese connect to via his home VPN into his work VPN.
Re: How difficult....?
>> But it's also not very difficult to mug a defence-less little old lady, however that doesn't mean one should get away without prosecution for doing it.
So, when are they going to rename the DoD to DoDLOL (Department of Defence-less Little Old Ladies). Or perhaps they could call it the Defence-less Department of Defence - DDoD
Remember the Ray Gun articles?
Do you remember the 'plane mounted laser/ray gun articles El Reg used to run? Maybe the should combine the two. Give the commercial airliners ray guns so they can fight matches with napalm.
BTW, my take, there are 10 incidents per day, 3,650/year, yet no substantiated reports of real damage. I think this is just something that annoys pilots more than anything, perhaps because it interrupts their sleep.
>> That's wide enough to light up an entire cockpit, with an intensity that's comparable to a camera flash.
So pretty much like drive down an unlit motorway, and having an idiot with full beams on behind you? Or driving down a dark road, when a speed camera flash someone on the opposite side of the road? - except that there is nothing to crash into and you have autopilot to do the real work.
Re: [no VM customer receives download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s].
>> no VM customer receives download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s
I am sure lots of VM customers get less than 15 Mbit/s. Whether or not they expect to is a different matter. , my 60 Mbit/s connection has dropped to less than 2 mbps on a few occasions - generally fixed after a few weeks.
Perhaps it should be "no VM customer expects to receive download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s". Or "no VM customer receives download speeds of less than up to 15Mbit/s". Or "no VM customer pays for download speeds of less than 15Mbit/s"
Re: "Could"
Difference between "up to" and "could" is that someone, somewhere, will be getting the "up to" speed. However they cannot say that you will never experience buffering again, as that is entirely out of their control. There will always be at least one streaming service which does not have sufficient bandwidth to meet its users needs. Unless of course they mean 'say goodbye' in the same way that you say goodbye to your kids when you drop them at school in the morning - i.e. in the full expectation that you will be saying hello very shortly.
That said, I often go for days or even weeks at a time without seeing any buffering on my VM connection. But a few hours on the phone to India and a couple of days waiting in for the engineer, usually fixes that.
Obvious Failures
1. The sender should be able to decide on a package by package basis whether to allow it to be delivered to a neighbour.
2. In this day and age, you should be able to designate a trusted neighbour. Postie can then look it up on their PDA.
3. You should be able to get a sticker saying 'Do not disturb'.
4. There is little point to this with Royal Mail, most people live within a few miles of their sorting office, unlike courier depots who can sometimes be 60 (or more) mile round trip. What would be useful is if the collections office was open longer (currently mine is open 10.15 till 10.20 every fifth Tuesday of the month).
5. You shouldn't need stickers, postie carries a PDA.
6. RM should be campaigning to prevent couriers from being able to do this, not joining in with them.
7. Whenever possible, I choose to get stuff delivered by Royal Mail, because the sorting office is nearby and they don't leave stuff with the neighbours or in the greenhouse or on the door step or in an unlocked porch.
With regard to the phantom cardings - I used to have a real problem with Amtrak 'carding' me when I was in and waiting for the delivery. It was probably the work of one lazy driver, it happened every time for months, most of the time they didn't even have the courtesy to pretend and leave a card. I'd be sat by the front window, refreshing the tracking page and all of a sudden it would pop up 'delivery attempted' - no sign of any card or van in the vicinity.
URI
>> As El Reg reported on Tuesday, a flaw in Samsung's dialing software causes its phones to execute some tel protocol URIs (universal resource identifiers) without the user even pressing the Dial button. At worst, this allows a remote attacker to send the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code that resets the phone to its factory state, wiping all the data in the process.
URI, that is the bit that you felt needed further explanation?
Also what's with the 'without pressing the dial button', isn't that the usual practice - you enter the code into the dialler and it performs the associated command, I don't recall ever pressing the dial button. The flaw is that it is taking the code from outside of the dialler and processing it as though it had been entered in the dialer - then again with smart phones, you'd have thought there would be a better way to do this than the *#.... codes
Posted in Apple iOS 6 review
Re: Re: Mutual Benefit
>> I can't believe these kinds of features are only just being implemented on modern smartphones.
Samsung TouchWiz has had this for a while now.
>> I'm pretty sure the auto reply with text feature was available on my Ericsson T28 if not it was definitely on the T39.
I don't remember it on the T28 - never had a T39 so I couldn't say.
Posted in PC share of DRAM biz falls below 50%
"The "consumption devices" tend to be heavier on flash memory than traditional DRAM."
I think most devices are heavier on non-volatile storage than volatile. In fact the ratio is usually much lower for "consumption devices" than "creation devices", which is why they use flash memory rather than (say) magnetic disks.
Re: Great artery-clogging food
>> Panceta = Spanish for QUALITY Bacon.
High quality Spanish bacon is still Spanish bacon.
Re: Re: A friend of mine works for Samsung
>> Apple's patents were all software and Samsung's patents were all about boring shit like chips.
>> All of the innovation is in the software, the chips are just the mechanics.
> You owe me a new Ignorance-O-Meter. Mine has just exploded.
As ignorant as it seems there is a valid point in what he is saying. You can't (yet) use hardware without a user interface (personally, I'm hoping my off-spring will evolve this ability). So if Apple can get patents on all the most intuitive (and therefore obvious) UI designs, it doesn't matter how good your hardware is, the user experience is going to be crap, and no-one is going to buy it. Hardware patents might be difficult to work around and come up with alternatives, but at least you can generally do so, without it noticeably affecting the end user.
Re: Flash..........
"Yes, we spell it "saviour" round these here parts ;-)"
That's fine, but was it written round these here parts?
Teapot
More teapot, than chocolate teapot. i.e. Might not be useful if you drink coffee, or brew tea in the mug, but it's hardly useless.
These would fit Dell C5000 series quite nicely e.g. 12 servers, each with 4 x 2TB (96TB) in a single 3U - hardly a chocolate teapot.
What next?
Once they have ported all their games to Linux, they could then port them to Linux on ARM. Then they could release a Steam 'appliance' (i.e. console) built out of commodity mobile mobile phone hardware. Or they could release the games for android - as a mobile gaming device that you can plug into a HDMI/MHL telly and bluetooth controller/keyboard and mouse.
Re: Harms the freemium game market
Freemium? What you mean those free games aimed at children, which entice your child to hand over the GDP of a Central American country, for a few pointless virtual trinkets? The apps which only continue to make money because people don't know (how) to make there App Store settings sane before handing their phone over to a child?
Android recently had a colouring game that was a great example of the worst sort of freemium. Appears that most/all platforms are afflicted.
BTW, I wouldn't use, recommend or condone the use of this crack, for many reasons. However, if it kills the freemium model, that has to be good.
Re: Wearing glasses
I think you have your stereotypes confused, it isn't that women can only be intelligent if they are wearing spectacles. The stereotype is that (otherwise) attractive people can only intelligent if wearing spectacles. Infact, the general rules are "attractive != intelligent", "spectacles != attractive" therefore "spectacles ~= intelligent" sex/gender doesn't come into it - other than that most women portrayed by the media are attractive.
Re: "Phones"
Yep, me too. Mine is basically a very nice PDA/mediocre portable gaming device, with the benefit of being able to make phone calls.
Re: I'm no Apple fanboi, but...
>> they could already donate huge sacks of money (or pro-bono work, or whatever) to charity.
Indeed, they may look after it, keep it in working condition and then bequeath it to charity - for them to auction off.
Re: Really?
>> as P.J.O'Rourke succinctly put, "to punish success and reward failure"
That would be true if those earning £20,000 paid 10% tax (take home £18,000), £50,000 65% (£17,500) and £100,000 83% (£17,000). That would punish success and reward failure - if earning £20,000 PA were considered failure.
Any scheme where the percentage of tax increases and the amount take home still increases is more akin to 'lessening the harm of failure by reducing the rewards of success'.
Where I take issue with it is, if everyone were to pay a fixed amount (i.e. cost of public expenditure divided by number of public) then someone on minimum wage would probably come home broke after working 70 hours a week at minimum wage. Okay, perhaps I'm plucking exaggerated figures from the air... but the point stands that I reckon companies can only get away with paying only minimum wage because they are subsidised by the tax system.
Re: Really?
> his own money at a very risky and uncertain time
A whole 1,000USD of it - he probably drinks that much in a single night now
> a business which now employs 1000+ people and will continue to employ more into the future
Not to mention all the people gainfully employed due to the inefficiency created by other people using FB at work
Posted in Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs
Re: *I think I paid around £27 with vat and shipping.
"It seems impossible these days to mention smoking without some smug arse having to chip in about the healthiness of the activity."
One day you will give up smoking and become that smug arse.
Posted in iPad 3 'first tablet' with Bluetooth 4.0
Re: Re:
>> ... at least once every 3 months for the past 4+ years
Given the transfer rate of Bluetooth I'd be surprised if you could manage to transfer more than one file every 3 months.
Posted in iPad 3 'first tablet' with Bluetooth 4.0
Re: Re:
>> ... at least once every 3 months for the past 4+ years
With the transfer rate of Bluetooth I'd be surprised if you could manage to transfer more than one file every 3 months.
Re: Friggin' theives
>> 30% is absurd.
It's a lot more generous than a bricks and mortar would be with their suppliers. You should see the charges that Tesco demands from their suppliers for the privilege of letting them use Tesco shelf space - and that's before you start talking profit margin.
I have a Panasonic BluRay player with VieraCast and thought I might look into writing an app. for it, they want £x00's/year before they will let you even use the SDK.
Re: Are they merging with Apple?
> AppGoo
I prefer Goople, but yours is more descriptive.
Posted in Apple to Google Maps: ‘Get lost’
Re: Google is special
>> Come on, you do all realise that Google don't actually do any mapping? That they buy the maps? You do, right?
I just wish TeleAtlas or Google bought their maps from OS
Posted in HMRC cuts IT spending in half in 2 years
I'll believe it when I see their working.
Do they seriously expect us to trust their sums? This is the same agency who spent most of last year issuing corrections for tax miscalculated over a five year period. Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to believe they made an error in their favour.
Re: Which version?
>> they taste like camels arses.
Camel's Arses? Why would Camel come up with an unflattering product name?
Wasn't one of the big features of Win 7 the tiling and placement features? What makes more sense than getting rid of all that and calling it new and improved?
Re: Getting there
>> That means that you don't get concrete, shit, dirt, diesel, whatever on your shiny shiny phone screen and make it unusable.
Yeah, because buttons work so well when caked in the aformentioned. Surely better to wash your hands/take your gloves of and ring them back.
Re: tarded
Yes it is.
@jai
>> and lets face it, these guys aren't soldering the components, it's fitting together parts into the ipad casing. so you can probably build 10, 20, 30 a day? once you get used to it, I think 20 a day should be easy. so that's quite a good wage then, by comparison.
I would be very surprised if they are assembling a complete iPad. They will be perhaps 1 of (say) 25 cogs in a wheel. Assuming all 25 cogs are the same size, 20 a day would mean repeating their task 500. Sounds reasonable. $160/day seems like a reasonable wage.
The only way to come to this figure is to make a lot of assumptions - as many others have pointed out, the article is lacking on details. But even without the efficiencies of a production line, I reckon I could build 20 iPads/day if I were doing it day in day out (and I'm a stubby fingered westerner). It would be one every 30 minutes on a ten hour shift.
Ofcourse when they say $8 per iPad per worker does that equal take home pay per assembly worker? Or are there overheads which need to be paid out of that $8 first e.g. power costs, admin/support/cleaning staff, robot maintenance... - so, tell us how much per hour the assembly workers are getting, and maybe then we can comment on it.
Crux of the problem
>>The Recording Industry Association of America and other music industry groups are backing a proposal for a highly regulated ".music" top-level domain.
The crux of the problem with the RIAA and their partners is that they think they own all music. Why don't they register .air and .water whilst they are at it. As others have already said, .riaa or .mafiaa would be much more fitting.
Posted in Ten... Valentine's Day gifts for her
£72!!
For a 1TB 2.5" externable HDD, you'll be lucky. You may get the 512MB version if you are lucky.
Posted in What's in the box, Windows sysadmin?
No contradiction
>> if their software runs on Windows or Mac-operated-by-attractive-blonde.
Since Apple jumped ship to Intel, many Macs operated by attractive blondes have been running Windows.
To all the the naysayers
Something that the naysayers don't seem to have considered, is that for all they know this laptop might have been running Vista.
BTW, regarding "deadly weapons" - he could have put it in the bath tub and that would still have been a potentially deadly weapon (only takes an inch and a half).
What difference
What difference does it make that he used a gun? If he had used a hammer, would that be a reason for some people not owning hammers? What if he had sold it on eBay? What if he had confiscated it and stored it in a safe?
If you think what he did was wrong (and I'm haven't made my mind up) - surely that is more of a reason why some people should not be allowed to 'own' children.
@Chris W
>> not because of his nationality but the clothes he was wearing, heavy coat in summer
Yes, so much better, because he was wearing a heavy coat in "summer" in the UK.
>> Perhaps you could tell us all when an incident occurred prior to that, there hasn't been one since.
You mean there hasn't been one since yet. We won't count Mark Duggan, because he might not have been entirely innocent.
Posted in HUD's up! Ubuntu creates menu-free GUI
Appropriate names
>> One of the biggest complaints neophytes have with command line interfaces is they are NOT very discoverable
A neophyte discovers a command by typing in what they think it might be called or what they want to do - so long as the command is sensible named and they show it in its context (i.e. the breadcrumb/hierarchy) I should be easy to find, find as you type goes a long way to helping with this. Failing that, I am sure the menu will be there for those who need it.
Presently a neo-phyte, thinks what they want to do, then they think about what heading it might be under and what the command might be called, then they search for it. "HUD" allows them to do the same thing, except it searches for them.
"HUD" reflects the way that I already use my web browser (vimperator/penta-dactyl), search engine, and the unity desktop search. I have been wanting to be able to do this with desktop applications for years. There is nothing more annoying than know what you want to do, having a good idea what the command might be called and not being able to find it without searching for ages.
Research?
The details of this man's previous conviction (18 months previous) for GBH on his partner, who was then raped by his accomplice, were published in the local paper (probably along with his photo). It is in the public domain, you can't expect jurors to be unaware. She shouldn't have researched him (and she claims she didn't, directly) and she shouldn't have told the other juror's what she found - but could the judge have really have been so niave as to presume that non of the jurors were aware of his previous (quite high profile, in the locality) conviction.
I think that the principal of not making jurors aware of previous convictions is a sound one ,they should be judge solely on the evidence related to the case at hand - though if the defence attempt to bring in character witnesses, then past convictions should be (IMHO) revealed.
Finally, if they don't want jurors to be influenced by past convictions, why are the papers allowed to print the details of convictions and (concluded) trials? Now that this case has been published nationally, can either of them ever be tried fairly again?
DR, what DR?
>> What needs to be stressed is that Tieto's DR processes were dreadfully inadequate and obviously untested for the eventuality of such a failure. Lawsuits over data loss and business interruptions at Tieto's affected customers are bound to follow. ®
I suspect that they are probably better at writing disclaimers than they are at developing DR plans.
@APA
>> Unlikely. She died during post-production of the last Star Trek film...
Would that be an obstacle for the almighty Google?
Re: True
>> my handy lump hammer here will do a great job of cracking open a nut... I'd need to keep replacing the dining room table after each nut...
A lump hammer (used with a chopping board) can be quite a careful tool for cracking nuts. A better analogy might be a pneumatic drill/jackhammer.
@Jon Green
He's teaching computing not English. You might be forgiven for expecting impeccable English from all teachers whose first language is English. When the teacher has already stated that he(?) is based in the Netherlands and English probably isn't his first language, it seems a little unreasonable.
That said, most people who learn English outside of the English speaking world seem to get a better education in the language.
Posted in Bo Peep insures jubs for $1m
Seems a little short sighted (couldn't think of a good pun)
She's insured her breasts against any injury/malfunction which prevents her from working? Isn't that a bit like insuring your car tyres, incase you have a tyre related problem which causes you to have an accident or prevents you from getting to work?
Wouldn't it make sense to have a more rounded policy that offered broader protection incase of lose of earnings? Surely an injury to her leg or back etc. would result in the same loss of earning. Or do her breasts require an additional coverage because they aren't original equipment?
Posted in Bo Peep insures jubs for $1m
>> Chargeable time
>> it's considered "not on" to be looking at titties on chargeable time.
But it's okay to read nonsense redtop websites (no offence to El Reg) on chargeable time, because no-one will notice?
