* Posts by Dan 55

15337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

COVID-19 contact tracing apps were suggested as saviors. They sometimes delivered

Dan 55 Silver badge
Big Brother

Privacy fears

If you flew you needed to fill in a passenger location form to enter the destination country. This has your passport number, an e-mail address, and a phone number.

In other countries this data was collected, processed, and held by their health service/department, in the UK this data was collected, processed, and held by the Home Office.

Enough said.

Infosys quits Russia, ending UK political and tax scandal … maybe

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Perfect timing

And FWIW, Labour have been bleating about this for many, many years, but never did anything about it when they were in power for 13 years.

They raised the cost of non-domiciled status, which is better than nothing at all.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Perfect timing

Clearly you've not been reading or listening to the news recently or you'd know that being "non-dom" doesn't mean you don't pay taxes at all. You have to declare *where* you are domiciled for tax purposes. That makes it harder to avoid the taxes where you *are* domiciled.

I didn't say that at all. Please re-read.

Then read this:

How the UK’s non-dom status works

And to spell it out, you are a UK tax resident, you declare you wish to avail yourself of non-domiciled status, offer supporting evidence (e.g. you are from another country and intend to return, or you inherit this status from a parent - this is actually a thing).

You are still tax resident in the UK, from your home country's point of view (e.g. India) you are not tax resident.

You end up paying tax on your UK income to the UK, £30K/year for any and all worldwide income to the UK, and you don't pay inheritance tax to the UK.

She would pay tax on Indian earnings (if she has any) to India but that's it.

Now imagine she also has income in the Cayman Islands, just to choose somewhere random on the globe. Works out quite well, doesn't it?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Holmes

Seems odd that Sunak's and Javid's tax affairs come to light in the week that Johnson looks to be most in trouble, leaving only Raab and Truss to choose from, and then there's suddenly a chorus of the best person we have is Johnson (and don't you know there's a war on).

Dan 55 Silver badge

The whole non-dom status was designed by the last Labor government (surprised?) to attract rich foreign people to live in this country without the fear of the tax authorities digging into their tax affairs to see whether there is a buck or two more to extract.

No, what Labour changed was charging £30K/year for non-domiciled status, it's been around for 200 years.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Perfect timing

1. She is a billionaire, that requires a revenue stream.

2. Who says taxes are due in India? She is a UK resident, she is tax resident in the UK, and her status is "non-domiciled" - that doesn't mean she's an Indian tax resident. "Non-domiciled" is just a way of reducing a UK tax bill with a flimsy excuse, basically a hangover from the British empire that is still alive today.

Neither her or her husband has categorically stated there is income in India, they've only talked about "international income".

3. Seriously?

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: take a look at some of what's been lost since Snow Leopard

If you highlight Snow Leonard's UI as being retrograde, could you please highlight what is an improvement about Monterey? As far as I can see there are just a series of arbitrary UI decisions (removal of color which helps distinguish areas, removal of title bars, hiding UI elements until you know how to make them appear a la Windows 8 charms bar), removal of long-standing UI workflows such as Save As, iDevice-isation of the UI, dumbing-down of the bundled apps and iWork, then finally for the coupe de grace running iOS apps with Catalyst which brings even more alien UI elements onto the macOS desktop.

Dan 55 Silver badge

You are holding Linux to the Mac's standards as they were, not as they are now. A lot of frog boiling has happened and you probably don't even realise it... Compare present-day macOS with Snow Leopard or System 8/9 and you'll find present-day macOS is a mess.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How about Quicken?

How about importing your Quicken files into HomeBank if GnuCash is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You have hit the Linux wall. Eventually nearly everyone does.

Mac's not that good either, take a look at some of what's been lost since Snow Leopard (still the bar by which all future versions of macOS are judged and found wanting).

Apple iOS privacy clampdown 'did little' to reduce tracking

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How is Apple supposed to prevent use of email addresses to identify people?

Why would Hide My Email not work with El Reg's profile edit option?

Safari on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Mac when filling in a web form or creating an account for an app or website that does not support Sign in with Apple

Google to sell replacement Pixel phone parts via iFixit

Dan 55 Silver badge

Wholesale

Right to repair is more than just selling parts to end customers at a reasonable price - will repair shops be able to buy them as well and will schematics and technical manuals be made available?

Vital UK customs system outage contributes to travel chaos at its borders

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: ...

However it seems a government of ravingly inadequate fools who are solely out for their own pockets and in the service of their class is what the electorate wants and they like them and they choose not to get rid of them. It's a sad state of affairs when spitfires and bunting outweigh being a modern functioning boring country where things work.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sounds about right

They're saying it's back online but carry on using paper till next week.

So it's not back online.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Amazing isnt it

CDS, the replacement system for CHIEF, planned for 2019 will be released in 2023. Possibly.

Launched the year Netscape Navigator was born, the UK's CHIEF customs system finally has a retirement date

Unsurprisingly if you take a 27 year old system designed for life inside the Single Market and Customs Union and try and scale it up to cope with everything everywhere, it regularly dies on its arse.

GVMS is shiny and new though and is probably agile and cloudy. Surely nothing could go wrong there...

Russian media watchdog bans Google from advertising its services

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Fascism 101

Apparently all the lies and denials from Russia are intended for the people back in Russia who are only fed state propaganda. Nobody in the west believes a word the Russians say any more.

Unfortunately people in the west are spending time and energy debunking this bullshit instead of just saying "that's bullshit, you drunk lying genocidal fuckers" leaving it at that. I guess this time and energy has to be spent to try and keep down the number of feeble minded followers of George Galloway and Tucker Carlson and similar who somehow believe it too.

Amazon internal chat app that censored talk of unions and ethics may 'never launch at all'

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

"inappropriate and undue influence by the [National Labor Relations Board]"

From the NLRB's website we can see the kind of thing Amazon deems inappropriate:

The National Labor Relations Board is an independent federal agency that protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions.

Federal law gives you the right to form, join or assist a union; choose representatives to bargain with your employer on your behalf; act together with other employees for your benefit and protection; and choose not to engage in any of these protected activities.

The law we enforce gives employees the right to act together to try to improve their pay and working conditions, with or without a union.

The National Labor Relations Act forbids employers from interfering with, restraining, or coercing employees in the exercise of their rights.

So with its latest outburst Amazon has still not disabused anyone of the notion that it is a poisonous viper's nest.

Bank had no firewall license, intrusion or phishing protection – guess the rest

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: the Andra Pradesh Mahesh Co-Operative Urban Bank

They're supposed to learn the hard way at audits, not by losing a tonne of money.

So the regional/national regulator seems remiss in their work as well.

The march of Macs into the enterprise: Demand is on the increase

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: I can see the appeal. Walled garden,

On ARM, macOS is absolutely a walled garden, it will only run notorised apps with an Apple signature unless it's an Intel app being emulated on Rosetta.

There are workarounds, some easier than others, but they're all aimed at raising the bar just high enough so users are herded to Apple's App store, making developers pay for a Developer ID and the 30% tithe to the church of Apple.

Zlib crash-an-app bug finally squashed, 17 years later

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: FOSS community?

The other great complaint about the FOSS world is there is too much choice, you're saying here that there's not enough. Oh well.

Why would anyone fork zlib or any other project which works well now? If the two original writers of zlib hang up their keyboards then I'm pretty sure someone would pick it up, and the code is available to be able to do that.

Imagine what would have happened if zlib were a closed-source library and the company had folded five years ago. That's the difference.

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Irony

Ah, you mean the library written by two people in their spare time, then these billionaire multinationals come along and copy-paste the code without auditing it or coughing up a penny, then when a bug is found the FOSS community gets the stick? That library?

xkcd 2347 - A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.

SerenityOS: Remarkable project with its own JS-capable web browser

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Where is the low end for Linux?

NuttX?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Just for fun"

I do wonder, however, whether that time would've been better spent, improving the offerings we already have.

Apart from having fun, proving it can be done, improving your skillset, an exercise in learning, and so on, the problem with improving offerings we already have is that they often don't want to be improved because they do things their way... until, of course, they see things can be done better elsewhere, then they may consider doing the same thing themselves.

So I'm all for Serenity, helloSystem, BSDs, and so on showing there are better ways to do things.

With 90% COVID-19 vax rate, Intel to step up return-to-office

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's about conversation

There's a thing for newbies, it's called training and documentation.

Alternatively management could throw everyone in the same open-plan office and leave it to the wheel of fortune about who's in/who's sitting next to who/who's friends with who over whether a problem gets solved or not, then pat themselves on the back for getting the big decisions right.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: BCPL over C

Here's an interview with one of the developers of TRIPOS, written in BCPL, which he ported to the Amiga (i.e. AmigaDOS). It also goes over what he did afterwards.

Interview with the creator of AmigaDOS

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Declarative

The DoD mandated POSIX (C is part of that, UNIX isn't) This is why MS gave Windows NT a POSIX-compliant API.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Jupiter ACE

I don't know what its minimalist OS was written in.

In Z80 assember, like its Sinclair cousins.

I say cousins because it was designed by Richard Altwasser (hardware) and Steven Vickers (software) after they finished working for Sinclair.

GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Waiter! There's an ad in my gnome!

Firefox originally took great pains to follow the OS' theme then the UXers took over the asylum.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I struggle to understand how this is the conclusion you came to after carefully reading the article. You did carefully read the article, right?

Chinese drone-maker DJI denies aiding Russia's Ukraine invasion

Dan 55 Silver badge

"One retailer – Germany's Media Markt – stopped sales of the drone-maker's products."

This should be done for as many businesses which continue to profit from Russia as is practical.

E.g. UK public sector contracts with Infosys should be rescinded, but maybe Sunak's wife wouldn't like it. Sunak wouldn't know anything about that of course.

China's top e-tailer sends sacked staff a 'graduation certificate'

Dan 55 Silver badge

The problem with the Chinese is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur?

UK Ministry of Defence takes recruitment system offline, confirms data leak

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Crapita is our IT defense against Russia

Or Atos or Sophos or Accenture or Deloitte or...

We're doomed.

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How often do we get to hear "Sorry"......

Now Google have the passwords for most APs in the world because Android syncs a backup copy, but it seems nobody cares about that.

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Deleting macOS

Yes, it seems he was.

Linus Torvalds would like to use an M1 Mac for Linux, but…

Torvalds explained he has "fairly fond memories of the 11" Macbook Air (I think 4,1) that I used about a decade ago (but moved away from because it took Apple too long to fix the screen - and by the time they did, I'd moved on to better laptops, and Apple had moved on to make Linux less convenient)."

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not a convincing argument

Who's going to be the first to invent a language which enforces explicit parallelism in ifs in source code? I guarantee that language is going to gain about as much traction as a Russian tank.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Not a Language?

No, the middle word is French.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: FALSE

And now it is not available or supported. None are apart from the last one, which is an pre-alpha Rust copy of UNIX.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: FALSE

Only one of those might have a chance of being usable for doing work on sometime in the next decade, and that's because they copied UNIX's homework.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

RAII and stl couldn't disagree with you more.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Programme in C, think in C -- sad but true (for any language, actually)

And yet whither Pascal?

By the way, the calling conventions that were lost to the mists of time were Pascal-based and those didn't allow for function overloading either. In fact they didn't even allow for variable arguments, unlike C-based calling conventions.

LLP64 is because MS wanted 32-bit ints with 64 bit addresses. That was yet another MS "backwards compatibility above all else" choice, not a C choice, and it's unfair to blame C for that.

So in other words C is getting the blame for being the successful language. If Rust ends up beating C a decade from now then its calling convention and linker method will become the standard. Or perhaps in some future utopia C++ and Rust compiler and language gurus will sit down and work together to come up a standard way to mangle names that works for all languages. However complaining right at the start that everyone else is wrong when Rust hasn't even proved itself yet is a bit too much.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: C int

Then again, if you're dealing with code which used time_t you got a 64-bit upgrade for free whereas if for some reason dealing with code which used int32_t you're screwed.

I say "for some reason" but it's always because the genius that originally programmed it didn't separate types for data external to the software from types for internal variables, so instead of just changing the bit which deals with file or network format you have to go through the whole lot.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not a Language?

No worse than French. And we all like French don't we?

RIP: Creators of the GIF and TRS-80

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Loved my TRS-80 as a kid.

That'll teach you to run a TRS-80 emulator on a MacBook with a butterfly keyboard.

EU law threatening 'commercially painful changes' for tech out tonight

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

Re: I assume

"The EU is anti-democratic and scary. The UK is democratic and not scary. We can prove this by lobbying the British government so they do this good thing they are already doing in the EU."

I mean, what?

US is best place to be a software engineer, salary survey finds

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Erm...

It's almost as if Covid precautions have been turned into yet another part of the culture war and not accessible to people on low wages rather than sensible health guidance for all to follow.

Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "typically seems to involve being sent an SMS"

Recurring payments are authorized in a different way i.e. SEPA Direct Debit.

The Epson service uses recurring card payments and the recent SCA change in the UK is about card payments.

Requiring a card reader is very uncomfortable for the customer - does one carry it around?

If the customer wants to use an offline card reader because it's the most secure option, yep.

Thr problem is banks are only offering apps or SMS as options.

Anyway, I have to repeat it here, the actual regulations require an authorization code that is tied to the actual transaction, and thereby can be used only for such transaction.

So? How do you think offline card readers work?

Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So what's the GDPR fine

Thruppence ha'penny, if Ireland's DPO has any say about it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

That rogue programmer again

Let me guess, he put the data collection in the apps and forgot the opt-in toggles.

Bet that rogue programmer has a Sailfish phone.