Posts by John Brown (no body) 25336 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
In some cases, yes, that's exactly how it works. Some department stores contain franchises which operate under the banner of the department store name and use the stores tills and billing system. Although to be fair, I'm not knowledgeable enough to confirm how they are charged for rent.
I'm referring to the UK here and in particular how House of Fraser (used to?) operate.
It does ratrher sound like Yet Another Disrupter that is going to burn through $billions in VC, subsidising operations until they kill any traditional competition and maybe in 10 years they might IPO before going bust.
What happened to looking at a service or product and finding a useful niche and hopefully making a decent living out of it? It seems every New Thing has to be world beating and grow huge as fast as possible, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. I wonder how many startups go bust trying to be the next MS, Apple, Uber, Facebook etc that might have survived and turned a profit if not for the unrealistic expectations?
"Completely and utterly pointless waste of capital and resources."
I'm not sure about the economics of the operation as described. It depends on exactly what the article means in reference to what the "flight operations" staff do. Are they controlling each flight individually from launch to pick-up, drop off and return to base? Or is it a case of the drones being left to their own devices at stages of the flight while the operator is looking after other drones? A flight operator probably gets paid more than a block on a bike or even a van driver. Each delivery is almost certainly going to be very low value, so delivery charges have to be low.
"During The War articles like this woulde never have been published."
Well, duh! If it was "secret", do you think the Boeing PR office would be announcing it? It's not as if El Reg went in under-cover to "break" a story. All they did was take the PR announcement and pad it with other public info and opinion and maybe direct interviews by email/phone/zoom/whatever, just like most other stories they write.
I was going to suggest that they could reverse the old joke, an use Essex as a replacement for ethics but, of course, the sex part of Essex is probably already in the filtration system. Likewise, as we all know here, not only is there a lot of collateral damage from word filters from the outset, but people adapt words that are not filtered and "weaponize" them. Dorthy is a perfectly normal name that can be used as an insult by some. Maybe all those Jeffs at Amazon need to just Bezos Off and stop and thinking about using amazon technology to prime the workers?
I hope the articles author is reading the comments here. Many have mentioned the local "spending power" which will drastically alter the order of the rankings. The closest he got to acknowledging this was a quoting the reports comments about recent variations in some currencies which affected their rankings.
Considering this is El Reg, we expect better :-)
Yes, LDIR and LDDR. If you're partially overwriting the source with the destination, make sure you use either incrementing or decrementing as appropriate! Useful for loading tape based games into a system upgraded to use disks (TRS-80) or microdrives (Sinclair) as the OS extensions were sitting where the games expected to run from. Dump to disk or microdrive with a prepended loader to load it high then block move it to correct location, killing the DOS extensions, then jump to the original entry point :-)
Or as somebody else put it, "Don't put up road-signs that say 'keep going straight'."
On the other hand, a road sign which is effectively telling you to "keep going straight on", something like "Edinburgh 115 miles" is useful because now you know you don't need to keep looking for your exit every time you come to another junction.
For added farting around, including machine code into TRS-80 BASIC was even more fun. Probably the most efficient way, assuming the code was shorter than the 250 or so characters available to a string variable, was to put the hex or decimal into BASIC data statements, locate the LET statement that assigned the string of spaces or whatever, and POKE the values directly into the source code. Next, back in edit mode, delete the code that put the m/c into the string along with the DATA statements and SAVE the program which now contains a LET statement with a weird looking string assignment that usually won't even LIST properly because it likely contains control codes interpreted by the LIST display parser. IIRC you could create up to 10 m/c USR calls if all you needed were some short, separate routines. Also, it was quite easy to add to BASIC, either by being clever and intercepting the syntax error call, or, if not using a DOS, tapping into the DOS BASIC extended commands which, without DOS booted, just had a jump instruction the SN ERROR routine
I'd not be surprised to find that sort of licencing transfer is not covered at all yet. It's only become a growth industry during the time we were in the EU and wasn't an issue at all. Now we out of the EU, it could be a significant trade issue. It's might be on the radar now thanks to the "IP transfer" shenangans of the likes of Starbucks, Amazon et al claiming their "sales" take place in other countries and "rental" payments for Trademarks and so on eats all their profits. MS and other software licencing payments "import taxes" may get rolled into any future legislation to close those loopholes.
It could also come back to bite them
From the article "Microsoft Ireland is the entity through which the company grants licenses in the UK and EEA."
The UK could theoretically impose import taxes on those "goods" coming from the EU since they are a "third country" from our perspective. Just as the EU like to keep reminding the UK :-) I wonder how long it would take MS to suddenly allocate MSUK as the source of MS licenses to UK customers?
(No, I wasn't in favour of Brexit, but it's something we all have to make the best of nowadays)
I must admit up front that I rarely use "fast food" takeaways these days. Back in the early days of being on the road, I used MacDonalds a couple of times a week until one day I realised that this new fangled "fast food" is often not very fast at all. A traditional fish'n'chip shop, although not called "fast food" is invariably quicker than than MacDs. I get the feeling "fast food" was a US marketing term invented by the likes of MacD's/BK/KFC, possibly because to them it was a new concept, while here in the UK we've had that sort of thing for many, many years without needing to label it as such.
"In a way that is VERY good when the unions are forced to make themselves valuable to employees in order to keep them as members."
I totally agree with that. Closed shops are what lead to unions corruption and abuse of power. They should be regulated like businesses such that they need to have something the "customer" wants if they want to continue to exist and be relevant. Things have changed a lot since the days of The Tolpuddle Martyrs, thankfully. (On the other hand, a free trip to Australia might not be such a bad thing these days :-))
"Sometimes listening to both Americans and Brits you get this feeling that they genuinely believe half, not my half, but that other half, have plans to destroy the whole country."
While I agree with pretty much everything you say, I feel the quoted point above is changing. The US seems to be growing more and more politically polarised while the UK, a generation or two after the demise of the big unions and the big industries, seems to be mellowing a little.
eg, I'm in a area which until relatively recently, would have voted a stuffed dog in so long as it had a red Labour Party badge. The "workers" were staunchly Labour, no matter what. Their kids grew up indoctrinated the same way. The grandkids, however, seem to be voting more along the lines of what's best for them. My local MP is still Labour, but margins are much reduced.
"neither should an employee be forced to join a union."
Now that I think about it, I wonder if that's part of the US problem with unions? ISTR seeing a documentory about large building projects, and at least some of the teams of workers were union teams. often father/son pairs in the teams. And you hire the whole team, not just some employees or contractors. It sounds like the ultimate closed shop. Not only do you have to be a union member to get the job, you need to be family or friend of a member just to get in.
"Everything in balance. Having unions can be good (and looks to be very much needed in Amazons case), as long as it's not taken too far: 1970's in the UK, if you know what I mean."
You're spot on. What happened in the UK wasn't just about strong unions and the leaders being dicks. They only got that power because the members were being treated like shit in many cases so the unions had "grievances" to rally the members round. Where it works well is when the bosses aren't being greedy at the expense of the workers. In that situation, the union doesn't have as much power, but is there to support the members as and when required. Unfortunately, because the power swung so far to the Unions side back then, we have some pretty strict laws hog-tying the unions to some extent now. I'm not sure exactly where the balance is at the moment, but I feels it's more in favour of the employers than the unions. On the other hand, we still have some pretty decent employee rights legislation on the books (for now, anyway), which on the whole maintains the balance. P&O may think they found a loophole, but it's looking like the law courts will get to decide if the loophole is real or not.
"I hope this is the first of many Amazon facilities to go union. Well done."
Maybe they should second some UK or EU Amazon management over to the US to teach the local managers how deal constructively with unions instead of assuming all unions are the spawn of Satan and must always be treated as the enemy?
"There will be many people between him and the lower management who are driving the business the way that they are doing as their salary and bonus are thoroughly dependent upon it."
Considering how Amazon started, I suspect this is a company culture fostered right from day one of the founding of Amazon. There is an overwhelming disdain for the bottom ring workers and a desperate need for profit at any cost because that's the sort of people the growing Amazon hired.
"I like the idea that amazon has to deal with a unionized workforce."
In other parts of the world, Amazon already have to deal with a unionised workforce. They have no legal power to stop it happening, and are legally obliged to recognise them. I don't get why it's so different in the USA. Are companies really so afraid of their own employees? Are unions still run by or linked to the Mafia or other organised crime?
"bad actors will have the incentive to develop all sorts of acoustic countermeasures. "
That's how offensive and defensive weapons technology has worked since Ug first realised he could throw a rock. It's all about developing a lead in one area, keeping said lead for as long as possible, all the while working on the next advance because that lead will be "countermeasured" at some stage.
"Every administrative task should always be actively authorised at the recipient side, so updates should be offered but not automatically installed."
By the owner? Maybe the kit is leased. That make either the ISP or ViaSat the owner.
"with some Basic knowledge."
I initially read that as "some BASIC knowledge". Writing an OS in BASIC? On the other hand, the first iterations of The Last One were written in BASIC and produced BASIC apps.
On the bright side, for most *nix users, it will only be the one or two relevant libraries that need updating. Windows users will more likely have a much tougher time of it as "shared libraries" are often statically compiled into each app, necessitating all of those apps to be updated.
EDIT, I see from comments further down this is a bigger can of worms than I suspected and not only Windows users might be in a world of pain thanks to programmers cutting and pasting the code in locally instead of calling the system library.
"In this case the iPads etc were simply vehicles for fraudulently moving money from Yale's bank account to hers and her associates'."
Isn't that the theft component though? Yes, the iPads were the "vehicle" that enabled her to steal $millions. The oddest thing about this case are the amounts involved and the sheer length of time before it was noticed! If she'd just gone for enough for a nicer car and an extra annual skiing holiday, instead of being greedy, she might have got away with it for years longer, or maybe never have been caught.
"by banning everything that doesn't conform to their narrative. if anything this shows western hypocrisy - they only want to hear there own voice."
And yet, people in "the West" can still access the Russian side of the story, albeit, depending on the source, often plastered with "FAKE" and some very plausible reasons why it's so labelled, eg demonstrable proof a video was made years earlier in a different country.
Meanwhile, in Russia, if you don't know how to use a VPN you are almost exclusively limited to the Kremilin vision of the the "Truth".
"The amount of cost and effort needed when trying to control everything is not going to be small when you try and scale it up to billions of users."
And yet, the likes of Facebook are trying very hard to do exactly that all over again.
"They used an unshielded cable to transmit RF between devices (which must therefore be broadcasting crap all over the place) and didn't protect the same devices from any outside interference?"
Aren't there regulations for RF interference from/to device too? ie, they should not produce (too much) RF interference and also be able to ignore outside RF interference/ This sounds like it might be a major regulatory fail.
"A couple of previous programmers generally used swear words as lables and program names... along with opinions of the manglement/customers in the comments"
Some years back, the suggestion was mooted that customers should have read-only access to their call-outs in our service and maintenance database. It was pointed out that those who came up with the idea should have a read through some of the fault resolutions entered by field engineers. IIRC, the eventual decision was that the time to sanitise the engineers comments would cost more than the projected customer benefits might be.
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