* Posts by Mark 65

3432 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

Mark 65

Re: Around 95-99% of professional users

@Snake: Likely a case of picking your battles. The professional market could stay in a holding pattern whereas fighting competition in the phone/tablet market couldn't.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Mark 65

Re: Can it do orange?

This does all seem rather pointless. I can see the difference in every picture, but that's because I'm using an Eizo monitor that is designed to do so. Most people won't be able to. Most also won't give a shit.

Europe publishes draft rules for coronavirus contact-tracing app development, on a relaxed schedule

Mark 65

Re: iOS update would be a blocker on the Apple–Google scheme

Neither is coming up with shit solutions.

Mark 65

Re: I like what I read in this article

it took China less than four months to flatten the curve

Only if you believe their numbers and, frankly, there’s more than a hint of bullshit about them.

Mark 65

Re: iOS update would be a blocker on the Apple–Google scheme

At the point at which Apple force a spyware update to my phone against my will the phone will either be jail-broken or physically broken. They do not have the right and I will not tolerate this power grab bullshit. It doesn’t work and it won’t work. I go out without my phone, my phone runs out of battery etc etc, what then? Idiots.

Mark 65

Re: The Oxford paper doesn't say 60% is really enough

Although they may have spit-balled something idiotic, you do realise that herd immunity also comes from vaccination, right? The fact is that this virus is going nowhere and herd immunity will be the only way out, however it is achieved.

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

Mark 65

Re: Patrolling supermarkets

Proving that no matter where you are in the world the local plod are just power hungry control freaks.

Mark 65

Re: Another thing...

The world is full of thick c*nts that need an outlet. This is their opportunity.

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Mark 65

Re: Trump's Base

To be honest, I don't se what the problem is. If we have truly descended that far when it comes to intelligence that you have to explain to someone "no, don't ingest or inject disinfectant" then it is clear the gene pool itself needs disinfecting. If someone is stupid enough to inject or ingest cleaning agents in the hope of killing the virus rather than themselves then, frankly, Darwin has his man/woman. As a species we are snowflaking ourselves into oblivion.

HMRC claims victory in another IR35 dispute to sting Nationwide contractor for nearly £75k in back taxes

Mark 65

Re: Wait? I'm a contractior now?

Australia also uses multiple income sources as the indicator

'Optional' is the new 'Full' in Windows 10: Microsoft mucks about with diagnostic slurpage levels for Fast Ring Insiders

Mark 65

The one area where you do get issues is with modern laptops and their soldered on PCIe SSD drives. Often they require bespoke drivers that are not available for OSes other than W10. You can get Linux compatible Dell laptops if you can find them in your jurisdiction - I wasn't able to in mine and the latest Linux versions I have on my Multisystem USB simply don't see the storage.

Review of IR35 is in: Quelle surprise, UK.gov will forge ahead with controversial tax reforms in the private sector

Mark 65

Re: We need more tax...

However, under today's tax rates a contractor running this model still pays less tax overall than if they were taking all their money as a salary.

But they also receive no benefits paid for by the contracting entity and therefore their limited company needs to foot the bill for this. You cannot just compare the tax paid whilst not accounting for the benefits one receives over the other. 4 weeks paid leave would certainly account for a chunk of that "less tax".

Mark 65

Re: You're not supposed to kill the goose

It seems like typical Government can-kicking. I cannot help but think that somewhere down the line we will have many more people on zero rights employment which will end up with a much larger social benefits/welfare bill down the track.

Mark 65

Re: You're not supposed to kill the goose

I always contracted because it largely kept me out of the office politics. Not being an employee I generally didn't have to perform all the HR nonsense tasks and was just allowed to get on with the job.

Mark 65

Re: HMRC : Singlehanded incompetent.

I guarantee they take less sickies.

Mark 65

Re: Not really a suprise.

For all this I say "follow the money". The Government loves outsourcing its IT and those companies would love to see the back of independent contractors. Western Governments are corrupt to the core. Lobbying is, to all intents and purposes, bribery.

Firefox, you know you tapped Cloudflare for DNS-over-HTTPS? In January, it briefly knackered two root servers at the heart of the internet

Mark 65

Re: But

More likely at least for the non technical users is they would probably switch away from firefox because it's not working

Maybe, but given they don't know it's a DNS issue many might just end up paying $$$ for support they don't (or rather shouldn't) need. They could at least make it default to a "use X if present else behave as previously"

Talk about making a rod for your own back: Pot dealer's seized €54m Bitcoins up in smoke after keys thrown out with fishing gear

Mark 65

Roll up the paper and insert into one of the rods - multi-part rods effectively have a receiving whole on the end top of each receiving pole. Doubt they'd be looking into such a place for pot so would have missed it.

My money is still on this being BS though.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Mark 65

Re: Anonymous Contractor

I was one of those contractors earning 3x what the permies got. Why? I was once one of those permies and got fed up with the situation so joined them. Moral of the story is that if you don't have the stones to make the leap then keep quiet and take your lower risk income.

Mark 65

Re: Anonymous Contractor

Hey, I demand the right to be able to claim my 65" TV against tax as it is a computer display.

Cops storm Nginx's Moscow offices after a Russian biz claims it owns world's most widely used web server, not F5

Mark 65

Depends on how his employment contract reads. In the West you certainly get ones that state all works created whilst employed by X are the property of X (including outside of office hours) - don't see why Russia would be any different in this regard.

Apple sues iPhone CPU design ace after he quits to run data-center chip upstart Nuvia

Mark 65

Re: It would be nice

My concern is that people so intelligent were using text message and not at least using Signal to communicate. If you want the information to be secret (you are discussing the start up of a new tech company after all) would you not resist the urge to send messages in the open?

PSA: You are now in the timeline where Facebook and pals are torn a new one by, er, Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen

Mark 65

Re: not quite

@stiine Take the example of Facebook. Whilst they are not initially responsible for the views I espouse, once they promote them and use their algorithms to allow me to target them towards certain sectors of society then they do bear responsibility.

Belgian city slurps mobile data to track visitors

Mark 65

Re: With enough controls

@Alister: Given the UK is the home of GCHQ they already have all the mobile phone based data and metadata they could ever wish for. They just don't publicise it.

Apple insists it's totally not doing that thing it wasn't accused of: We're not handing over Safari URLs to Tencent – just people's IP addresses

Mark 65

Damned with faint praise

"But Tencent isn’t Google," he said. "While they may be just as trustworthy,...

Ouch.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Mark 65

Re: Apple is deprecating Macs

Dell XPS is probably the nearest comparison, as is the price.

Mark 65

Re: Apple is deprecating Macs

Agreed. My iMac 2010 is on High Sierra, a not great but still supported OS. The first time this is out of support and a critical and never to be patched vulnerability arrives I'll have to consider what to do with it.

As a 2.93GHz i7 with 32GB RAM and an aftermarket 1TB SATA SSD this thing has plenty of life in it. My first choice would be to install Linux on it but Poettering seems intent on p*ssing in that particular pool for everyone. MX Linux may be viable though.

Mark 65

Re: You're holding it wrong!

Whooooooosh

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Mark 65

The problem on Lennart's laptop is the sack of s**t that sits in front of it

Hinkley Point nuclear power station will be late and £2bn over budget

Mark 65

Re: Maybe China should build them instead

Workers are also seen as a little more expendable which helps. As does scant regard for the environment.

Got a pre-A12 iPhone? Love jailbreaks? Happy Friday! 'Unpatchable tethered Boot ROM exploit' released

Mark 65

Re: Interesting twist ...

Any ideas as to whether such a modification would persist past a restore/OS reflash?

I would have thought any such person likely to be targeted would take a reset device through customs, reflash at the destination, then login to download data and settings from the cloud if they value security.

Brave accuses Google of trampling Europe's GDPR with stealthy netizen-stalking adverts

Mark 65

Blocking

Makes a pi-hole server look a better investment day by day. Phones (and devices) are the big problem point though and the advertising scum know it. As you're generally kept out of the system gubbings there's not too much you can do. You can likely rely on Apple to fight against it, but only because they want you viewing their ads not Google's.

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

Mark 65

Re: But everything's OK.

Err, no. Customers who lost data most likely have backups just not real-time ones. If you backed up at midnight and had a failure at mid-day, for example, there will be a portion of your data that is not backed up hence you suffer data loss. It wasn't because you don't have backups though, just the timeliness of them.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Mark 65

Re: So, to sum up. . .

Hopefully, no Tories or Brexit Party

So you think Labour have been doing such a wonderful job? Hardly.

Mark 65

Re: So, to sum up. . .

Likewise Remainers will need to be a lot clearer about what remain means. The EU has been quite clear in recent years that it was unwilling to accept the current UK status of "slightly outside pissing in" and that the overall direction of the EU would be closer integration. Therefore remain is not "as it is now" but is also something that needs to be outlined for those voting.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Mark 65

Re: People can feel insulted by anything if they want, it is their choice and it is their right

Justice?

Mark 65

Re: Eh?

What the hell is an ableist insult?

The sort of language used by a PC soft-cock that wants to change the name of a long established item lest someone somewhere be offended.

Harvard freshman kicked out of US over OTHER people's posts on his social media

Mark 65

This highlights 2 points:

1. Border guards aren't very intelligent.

2. Don't use social media

UK cops blasted over 'disproportionate' slurp of years of data from crime victims' phones

Mark 65

Re: Stop using that phone

This is positively Orwellian

I read this bit

The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) instructed cops to stop seizing phones under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984

and thought "Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984", are they taking the piss?

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

Mark 65

Re: Foxes and dogs

My guess is that if ketchup is effective you could just use vinegar which is likely the active ingredient.

When Harry met celly: NSA hoarder thrown in the clink for 9 years – after taking classified work home for decades

Mark 65

Re: I Was Young & Stupid; God Knows I Have Learnt My Lesson, And Will Never Ever...

Hillary was guilty of being stupid, but she lacked intent had rank...

FTFY

ALIS through the looking glass: F-35 fighter jet's slurpware nearly made buyers pull out – report

Mark 65

Re: F35

It's like Facebook in that it is a giant turd.

Backup your files with CrashPlan! Except this file type. No, not that one either. Try again...

Mark 65

You use their client to perform the work. It filters them out before encrypting then sending.

Mark 65

Re: Whatever happened to three copies ?

I would suggest to you that if they were following the rule I quoted and lost one copy, those people would not be going around like a bunch of whinging babies crying from the rooftops on twatter.

There's a certain inconvenience to uploading multiple TBs of data to a new provider. It is likely this 'new requirement' to start over again that pisses people off. That and the moving of the goal posts.

Let's check in with our friends in England and, oh good, bloke fined after hiding face from police mug-recog cam

Mark 65

Re: What the heck

TBH he could probably appeal the fine and win as long as he didn't swear at the Magistrate.

Upgrade refuseniks, beware: Adobe snips away legacy versions of its Creative Cloud apps

Mark 65

Re: What are you waiting for?

Luminar is another possibility.

Mark 65

Re: To be fair to Adobe ....

the Adobe subscription does actually deliver amazing value for money if you use even a quarter of it

Only if you fail to value the fact you are locked into a system with ever increasing fees, forced upgrades, and proprietary storage of your data (especially the layered modifications to photos etc).

Mark 65

Re: Dear Valued Adobe Creative Cloud Customers,

As soon as they stopped releasing perpetual licensed versions of Lightroom despite stating only months before that they would continue to do so you could clearly see the greed in their little piggy eyes for the perennial software rental model. I will never rent software, especially software that doesn't use a truly open format thereby allowing me to still access my work down the track.

Talk about a ticket to ride... London rail passengers hear pr0n grunts over PA system

Mark 65

Re: Train Strike - next week

What happens when wages are so low you have to use food banks just to feed your family because rent is taking all your money?

Doubt it justifies wanking at work

Backup bods Backblaze: Disk drive reliability improving

Mark 65

Re: Three HDD makers left when there were dozens in the 80s

Owing to the lack of availability of HGST drives these days I ended up going with the Seagate Ironwolf. I had moved to a WD Gold but found it ran way too hot - 5-6 degrees above the surrounding HGSTs. Red Pro were quite expensive and I didn't want 5400RPM (mixed spindle speeds) or Intellipower (had circuitry fail in the past) drives.

Ironwolf going ok and figured after at least 7 years of steering clear it was worth another shot. Time will tell. Toshiba looking like an option but availability is not as great. Seagate are really pushing the new branded drives.