Posts by paulf

Re: So in summary....

@ Lost all faith...

"...if you are a rich foreigner, despite living here for 15 years, you don't need to pay the full tax rate.

But the poor plebs at the bottom of the rung do, from day 1. Got it."

Got it spot on in one, I think. Considering the hardships many have suffered over recent years I can't help thinking out-law are, at best, unreasonably sticking their neck above the parapet with a bleadin' hearts story about how the 1% may flee elsewhere with their sacks of cash if they're asked to pay 0.2% tax instead of the current 0.1%. It's amazing how much squealing these people (and companies) do (and how deafeningly loud it is!!) at the slightest hint they're not paying their fair share towards the infrastructure and society that enables them to do their thang (be it create jobs, create wealth, or just piss about in their millionaires playground).

Re the article I also pay VAT when I buy stuff. Does that excuse me from paying the full amount of income tax and NI too? Thought not.

Apple seems to think the state of the art is products that lack certain compelling standardised functions unless they have a plethora of reassuringly expensive adaptors dangling off them (e.g. Lightning to Ethernet, Lightning to 3.5mm jack, Optical drive).

To clarify: 1. GbE is preferable to Wifi because it doesn't suffer the same contention as Wifi does from other adjacent users and networks. 2. The 3.5mm jack port may be an old standard but unlike floppy disks it isn't obsolete. Some may consider swapping passive headphones for Bluetooth equivalents that need regular charging to be a retrograde step. 3. Just because you paid again to stream everything from iTunes over your ubiquitous 5 bar 4G LTE connection doesn't mean we all can or want to.

Re: What I don't get...

@ It wasnt me "Seriously, whats so difficult?"

Brown envelopes full of money/company directorships/Knighthoods (<coughs> BHS <coughs>) etc is what makes it so difficult to change these things. Otherwise your analysis is spot on.

Re: Irish politicians will need to fight this ruling...

It's also worth noting Ireland asked the EU for a €90bn bailout in 2010. Would that have been necessary if the big multinationals like Apple were paying tax at the published rate everyone else had to pay?

Unfortunately companies like Apple (I know there are others who do this, but Apple is the subject here) always use the same defence; that they've paid all the taxes due by law, carefully sidestepping the fact they're wealthy enough to exploit a loophole most workers and small companies cannot.

I wonder how Irish tax payers feel knowing they were, in effect, subsidising one of the biggest and richest companies on the planet? That's what happened when the Irish state decided to accept lower tax revenue by offering a special deal to one company that one assumes wasn't available to most others.

Re: Let's get this straight

@ Mark 85 "More like market manipulation..."

You're right. By means of an excuse, I wrote that comment at 0500 (long story) on BH Monday and as I'd only had one coffee by then the brain was more sludgy than normal. Icon - what I enjoyed several of that evening after a long day.

Re: Raising the White Flag

@ Steve Davies 3 "Bought myself a MacBook to run Photshop. [...] Runs with an SSD and thanks to TimeMachine moving from spinning rust to SSD was easy."

You don't even have to bother with Timemachine. I moved my MBP to SSD last year without it: Plug SSD into MBP using a USB adaptor, Reboot Mac into Startup Manager in the EFI, Use Disk Manager in that to clone one drive to the other, power off and swap SSD into Mac (or do what I did and boot from the SSD via the USB adaptor until you are happy all is running fine).

Re: oh dear

@ Tessier-Ashpool "Imagine if they made the phone as thin as a playing card."

Please don't give them ideas! Without some kind of miracle revolution in battery technology you know that would be achieved at the expense of battery life. Also it would be curtains for the lightning port - if the rumours are to be believed they're already gunning for the headphone socket in their quest to save another 0.1mm (which makes as much sense as shaving 1mm off the MBP only to leave it marginally too thin to support GbE port).

Re: Prroof! That Demons exist!

Perhaps not demons but certainly Zombies as a bunch of PhD students at CERN made a zombie apocalypse film back in 2012. It's pretty good considering the amateur shoe string budget production.

Decay film

Re: Wow.

@Novex "I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago."

"I note Microsoft's attitude to how well my machine works will be governed by the nature of my interest in taking forced updates without question and would therefore be grateful if you would inform me what Microsoft's attitude to forced updates would be, were they to learn that the nature of my reply is as follows: fuck off."

With apologies to Arkell v. Pressdram

Slightly off topic but I like the way Viz usually get away with the kind of outrageous claims that would land other publications in the dock - they just attribute everything to an unreliable, ficticious source:

"Our source was on his twelfth pint when he made the completely untrue claim that <insert celebrity name here> liked to have sex with goats on a regular basis. 'The <celebrity> also has sex with rabbits', he lied to our reporter."

Re: quality..

@ Frenchie Lad

"Exactly the reason why my house wiring, circa 1910, still uses ceramic fuse wire holders which renders the sound superb, naturally using special copper wire fuses to ensure purity of electricity throughout."

That's all well and good but if you haven't upgraded to the properly shielded Titanium fuses (£1000 each) you just won't be able to fully appreciate the purity of the music. Make sure you upgrade all of your fuses otherwise some impurities can echo back along the wires from your light bulbs.

Re: Revenue dropped by 2%

@ Lars

"So should we weep and should we not understand that they like to merge in order not to have to compete."

Exactly this. As I've mentioned before the £10bn O2 acquisition money (plus the various monies for advisors etc) would buy Three massive customer service and network improvements plus the savings of not having to merge the O2 CS operations into Three not to mention the myriad complexity of having the O2 half of the network in Cornerstone (with Vodafone UK) and the other half in MBNL (with BT-EE). That kind of competition would put a serious rocket under the other UK operators. CS quality and coverage seem to be the biggest gripes so if Three could become best in class for CS it would be a major selling point, with improved coverage/capacity the icing on the cake.

Unfortunately CKH/LKS clearly decided the £10bn only had a compelling RoI if it also came with reduced competition thus increasing their pricing power over muggins!

Re: Proof! that! Yahoo! not! really! dead! (Sponsored)

And by selecting "Hide all ads from..." you're playing right into their hands of sorts as you're giving them more information on your advert preferences (other than the one you'd really like to give which is stuff your ads up your chuff, Zuck) which makes their targeting even more valuable (or so the theory goes).

Abolished or just a combined price

Exactly. All they've done is combine the line rental aspect with the rest of the charges into a single monthly price, and they'll be obliged to this soon anyway. Also they haven't suddenly decided to provide Naked DSL.

Come on El Reg - even Auntie Beeb was brazen enough to call them on this rather than regurgitate the Voda press release verbatim: "However, some experts said the charge is being merged, rather than abolished. "To be clear, Vodafone isn't really abolishing line rental charges, it's simply combining the charge into its fibre pricing," said broadband expert Ewan Taylor-Gibson from uSwitch."

@ Commswonk

"Harry Beck's design is the only "handy" map in existence."

The Harry Beck design is a diagram, not a map, as it's not geographically accurate. (Among other things Zone 1 is shown disproportionately large due to the density of stations).

Re: Getting things under control

I think if those fixes take much longer they won't survive to reap the promised benefits. A company that deals with bad numbers each quarter by cutting stuff each quarter is a dying company in a nose dive spiral. Cutting today's R&D means fewer products to sell 1-2 years down the line which means lower revenues, which means bad quarterly numbers (wash/rinse/repeat).

Re: Doesn't strike me as a good idea at all

You make a very good sub-point. When a domain is acquired by a new owner any request they make to remove pages from IA should only go back to the point they bought the domain - it shouldn't remove content that predates their ownership of that domain.

I've also seen the complete and only archive of a site removed from IA simply because the new owner of a domain (that had otherwise been dormant for 10 years) decided they didn't want any of their content archived. Having their new content omitted from IA is fine, if that's what they want, but they shouldn't be allowed to tell IA to wipe historic data of that domain that predates their ownership (content they had no hand in creating).

Re: A bit paltry

If you think £11m is "A bit paltry" I'd love to have some of what you're smoking as it's more than I can hope to earn in my lifetime of being an Engineer. Maybe you think £11m is pin money but I could retire immediately with no money worries ever again on that kind of cash (and I'm sure I'd survive without a posh London pad).

I assume you refer to this "Chief executive Simon Segars will land £11.36m...". Simon Segars has been CEO of ARM for just over three years so £11m in what I assume is long term shares isn't that bad considering he could have got through those three years as CEO just by coasting on the successes of the pipeline established under the previous incumbent (although I'm not suggesting he's done this).

ARM's profits always seemed a bit low compared to its importance - in 2015 their revenue:net income margin was 35% - but it's worth remembering it's only one link in the chain. Others have to take the IP, customise it, turn it into a SoC, get that SoC working, then then sell it for use in products which in turn have to be sold to end users.

Re: Ofcom - they love their stats, but completely miss the point.

@AC "that's before I even start downloading the 4-6GB Windows 10 ISO."

I think someone is trying to send you a message about your Windows 10 upgrade plans (or they're trying to help you avoid it).

Same here. We're with one of the newer, smaller, suppliers - they send me an accurate bill every month, send a blokey to read the meters 1-2 times a year yet still cost less than the big suppliers I've checked. I haven't contacted them for at least two years - they just get things right so no need to other than a quick email at fixed rate renewal time. Considering the massive clusterfuck of poor customer service, crappy billing systems and general all round asshattery at the big six I've got no interest in switching to any of them - I don't care how much "cheaper" they think they are. As another commentard says above - cheaper isn't always the best choice.