Posts by Roland6 10727 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
>And this is a bit of a lie to say that a cheap SSD would not be better than a HDD
Not really, you only need to look at the specifications. Also SSD's are just like USB and SD cards; the cheap versions are much less performant than the more expensive ones. From their specifications I'm sure some cheap USB3 flash drives are just the cheap USB2.0 device with a blue USB3.0 plug.
>120GB SSD for $40 ... $60 gets you 1TB [HDD]
Add on to this the move towards quiet and fanless laptops and concern about price points and you can see why OEM's will go for the $40 SSD...
>I don't see disks disappearing any time soon.
I do expect to see certain form factors - especially the 2.5-inch form factor used in laptops to start going up in price and disappearing as vendors stop buying them in the quantities necessary to maintain economies of scale.
I suspect that given the wide use of the 3.5-inch form factor in data centres and desktops and their price/capacity advantage over SSDs, I don't expect these to disappear anytime soon.
>Done properly, the IR35 tests WILL correctly identify disguised employees and distinguish them from genuinely independent consultants
No problem with this aspect of IR35, just with the way HMRC has decided who pays most of the penalties arising from 'deemed employment'...
>Mr Pavilicec will of course be very pro IR35...
This should be people's greater concern. They should be lobbying HMRC to bring all arrangements in scope, so those foreign workers could be (and probably are) deemed employees so requiring the liability to fall wholly on the UK employer and agencies...
I was on a total 'salary package' including pension, holiday, NI, tax, take-home pay etc of just over £25k, a contractor doing *exactly the same job* was on just over £45k. ...
This sort of comparison is quite telling about a person's mindset.
It is clear, that this person clearly thinks firstly it is okay for their employer to pay two people totally different rates for the same job: £25K and £45k and secondly, it is the contractor who is in the wrong for willingly take £45K from the employer, rather than the £25k they are being paid...
I bet if the other person was also an employee, this person would either be straight into their managers office demanding a pay rise or calling up their union demanding representation...
"I see we're still confusing legitimate contractors with the people IR35 explicitly targets
...
Can't believe we're still arguing about this shit. The law is clear. It doesn't affect all contractors. It affects employees posing as contractors.
"
The reason we are still arguing "about this shit" is because of the way IR35 is currently being enforced, deeming the contractor to be the party liable for the unpaid PAYE and NI.
Firstly, I agree if an employer is defining and treating a job post as employment, then that post should be taxed and benefits paid as if it were employment. The question now arises about the actual contract between the employer and the holder of the post. I just don't see contractors "posing as (a) contractor", a person is either an employee or a contractor; although I do accept that long-term contractors can go native and forget they are contractors and not employees, and that some employees can see themselves as internal contractors whilst maintaining all the perks of employment.
This leads to my second point, who is responsible for the situation where an employer engages a contractor to fill an employee job post, and thus becomes a 'deemed employee'? I suggest the party carrying primary responsibility is the employer, a secondary party will the agency who took the job description and put contractors forward for consideration, finally the contractor who accepted the post.
All good so far, until we look at how HMRC determine who pays what...
HMRC has todate determined that it is the contractor who is wholly liable for the employee and employer NI & PAYE owed, not the employer and so required them to be taken out of the monies paid to the contractor's company.
However, I suggest, if HMRC had done the sensible and deemed the monies paid to the contractor where equivalent to the net monies paid to an employee and thus the employer was wholly liable for PAYE and NI on the invoiced amounts, there would be less of a problem with IR35 - since employers and agencies would rapidly get their act together.
I see the main reform due to come in April 2020 is for the liability for employers NI to fall on the employer and/or agency and not the contractor; a small step in the right direction...
>This is a disguised ad for an outsourcing company
Not sure if I would use Granite BPO as a result of this article - the quotes don't inspire confidence in them.
A quick lookup and I'm even more concerned at the other companies 'sharing' the same directors:
Granite Locums Ltd
Granite Financial Group Ltd
If you only have one client, and expect to turn up at that client 9-5 Mon-Fri for the foreseeable future...
Well firstly you need to define "one client" in the way HMRC are applying it for IR35 purposes, which as we've seen is as per contract/assignment, so you can be part-time at a client (9-5 mon's) and working concurrently with other clients, but due to the contract, HMRC could deem that specific contract to be within IR35.
Perhaps the utilities should sell off their poles - yes you dear citizen can own your own utility pole, for which we will pay you a small consideration... Now the pole is no longer owned "by the city", so not subject to the FCC ruling.
The second thing is to start getting creative about unbundling the charges: the provision of a reliable power supply is not 5G tech, the exact place on the pole you wish to occupy isn't 5G tech, it is just the 'apartment' you are renting to put your 5G tech in...
>Unusually, the FCC seems to be doing its job here, lowering the barriers to tech rollout.
Has the FCC also capped the ground rent land and building owners can charge for hosting 5G tech?
I suspect the idea of even having a price cap only occurs to people when they are considering the use of public land and other assets and how they might be used in the pursuit of profit by for-profit businesses.
Mind you I can see the Conservatives doing this here with the compulsory property purchase compensation - fastest way to lower the total cost of HS2 and other major infrastructure projects...
This seems like MS introducing yet another proprietary scripting language to encourage application lock in, not just to Excel, but to a specific implementation of Excel.
It would seem MS have no intention of maintaining the offline versions of the O365 applications beyond October 2020...
I just feel it would of been nice for MS to release a service pack that one could download as one big EXE, that had EVERYTHING (for that OS). Something that could take a windows 7 system from any patch level to the most current.
Well you can roll your own by downloading WSUSoffline and setting it to build a Win7 update archive.
It seems to capture most of the updates, as a final check run against WUP tends to result in a few further updates being advised.
>but Microsoft does have a stable Windows 10 version. Unfortunately it's not available for mere mortals and its name is Windows 10 LTSC
But given a key issue is having the correct version of the servicing stack, I suspect only builds of W10 LTSC released subsequently to the 2019 servicing stack update - and thus fully supporting the use of SHA-2 code signing can reliably considered as being "stable".
>How about high-throughput networking which requires very low latency to avoid choking?
Simple: Follow what we did in the 80's; then we had the network stack running on the network adaptor. Suspect now it could be run within its own VM/container on its own thread/physical cpu with similar performance gains, without the costs (and security risks) of having an intelligent network adaptor...
Err no, it confirms the commonsense rationale in the decades old 4-ring OS security model (and supported by the 286). Can't think of a modern mass market OS - including WIndows 10 that supports more than a 2-ring model - conclusion all mass market OS's are inherently insecure...
>Hardware vendors can't be trusted to write secure drivers, and can't be relied upon to update them when exploits are discovered.
?
OS vendors (eg. MS) can't be trusted to write secure drivers, and can't be relied upon to update them when exploits are discovered.
Application vendors (eg. Adobe, MS) can't be trusted to write secure drivers, and can't be relied upon to update them when exploits are discovered.
Better stop using these things called computers...
Actually this exploit nicely illustrates another aspect of the security problem - preventing the old insecure stuff out-in-the-wild from executing.
It would seem that code signing, whilst giving confidence in the providence of a driver, isn't particularly useful when you need to revoke that driver's security clearance. Not saying that revoking execution rights isn't going to be a minefield, just that it doesn't seem to be possible to do today at the granularity of a single driver version.
>a wifi pineapple mounted on a drone would do the same thing, only more expensively.
Well given the quality of super glue and other attachment mechanisms - just have the drone stick the pineapple on the outside of the building - out of the eyesight of people working in the targeted offices...
>With home routers, you're lucky if they're not accepting telnet connections on the both the WAN and WLAN with hardcoded unchangeable password 'root'/'root'.
Remember, for ease of out-of-the-box configuration many enterprise routers ship with default 'admin'/'admin' style of credentials and the telnet ports on the LAN/WiFi enabled. Just another reason to change the default passwords and access settings...
However, the worm spreads by trying to connect to WiFi networks by brute forcing their password/security key. Likewise for shared drives discovered, so the credentials of the router itself, don't seem to be part of the problem.
>Short answer is yes
Depends on your definition of 'easy'...
Compared to using network analyzers like wireshark to simply sniff unencrypted packets and reading credentials etc. directly off the screen, none of the attacks against TLS 1.n are easy, they all require some forethought and the laying of a trap.
Sometimes security only needs to be good enough to act as a deterrent...
>Developers need to make decisions - or change doesn't happen.
The question is are they making the correct decisions...
I can see the rationale for the out-of-the-box configuration and download, as used by most of Joe Public to be updated and for that version to have 'legacy' stuff depreciated, given this will largely be used on the public Internet. However, I question the way the developers have decided to depreciate legacy TLS support, there are much better ways than the one they have chosen.
So because of Coronavirus factories producing servers are being shut, resulting in a supply shortage, which can only mean if the demand is there for a much larger production, a sellers market - so canny manufacturers (not based in China) can expect an increase in revenues and profits...
>The advantage of modern components is it's low power usage compared to even five years ago
Yes, it is a bit galling that modern computers tend to both consume less power and so are less noisy than those of 10 years back - in my home office, you know when the dual Xeon X5650 workstation is running...
>what sense could this possibly make?
Lots to be bean counters...
Suspect it will only really be applied to/enforced against refurbishers...
Remember MS has a similarly daft licence demands whereby PC refurbishers cannot reuse the Windows licence attached to the box by the OEM, they have to: completely wipe the HDD (destroying any other licenced software), remove the OEM COA and install a "Refurbished" COA; whilst also paying MS for the privilege of doing so.
>It's correct that Tesla probably have a legal figleaf for that.
Not really, if Tesla supplied the car to the auction...
Remember, Tesla admit to auditing and removing the software after the auction.
First rule of auction, the lot is sold as-is, hence why they allow viewing, which can include starting the thing up and inspecting the installed software.
There is another important aspect to this, if I leave say some gold bars hidden in the vehicle(*) then after the auction they belong to the buyer...
(*) In the real world case the buyer did deposit the gold bars with the local police , reclaiming them a few months later when the police had confirmed they had no evidence they have been stolen.
Well the Tesla one's look hideous - particularly the one where the Tesla guys have simply bolted a circa 10 tablet to the dashboard. But then Mercedes, like other automotive manufacturers have decades of experience of designing dashboards. So it is far more likely that Tesla is the one doing the copying and doing it poorly...
Timing...
Currently, things are decoupled, so it is possible that the extradition request gets a legal sign-off before the UK judge delivers his verdict in this case...
However, it is possible that the extradition request (and all its supporting documentation) can be taken to be new evidence and so cause the current case to be re-opened...
>In it's current form, the "slowdown" feature only activates if the phone shuts down unexpectedly due to low voltage.
Personally, I see this as a benefit, as it allows me to carry on using the phone without too much inconvenience until I can arrange to have the battery replaced.
So does the phone now tell you that the "slowdown" feature has been activated (along with periodic reminders) and advise you to have the battery replaced?
Currently none of my family's iPhones and iPads and later have flagged battery issues.
What timing!!!!
Want to "Fire up Your Quattro"?
Gene Hunts Actual Audi Quattro From BBC's Ashes to Ashes Series
Auction starting price £15,000
FYI, the other Quatrro used exclusively in the first series and wasn't shot up, was sold in 2014 for £38,598
>I bought a Logitech Trackman Marble FX, somewhere in the 1990's. ... No microswitch problems at all.
Given the prices they command on ebay, your experience is typical.
I wonder whether any of the more recent Logitech Trackman have similar build qualities...
>I am the point of having one or three hairs left... it looks horrible!
Well on the way to becoming a zed then...
[ https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/miscellaneous/oXdhvfnY-if-only-zeds-could-be-like-what-dr-seuss-had-imaged-it-would-be ]
The professor actually said 1.21 jigowatts....
Short piece here about the BTTF's use of jigowatt in the scripts: https://community.telltale.com/discussion/20054/gigawatt-jigawatt-or-jigowatt
.
>The biggest problem with the fused design, apart from adding to the size, is that it's useless for the vast majority of devices with insulated cases as it will never be needed.
Appliances with double insulated cases don't tend to use the earth connector, they do however still use the fuse...
>We even developed standards for language, but hey, that delivered no benefits to anyone, either.
I don't know, it has allowed for much banter across the pond; now should I be using an 's' or is it correct to use a 'z'. The laugh is that the Brit's in deciding on a Standard then decided there were words that didn't conform and so there are legitimate uses of 'z' in UK English where the uninformed would use an 's'...
But when I realised it only affects mixed content, that's not so bad at all.
But the intention isn't to just affect "mixed content"...
Reading the linked Google articles, I would be relatively happy if it was just about "mixed content", so that all the ad's, scripts and other stuff webpages download (to the browsers cache) just to be displayed, had to come across https sessions because in the main today these get filtered out by AdBlocker/uBlock et al. The problems arise when Google say they will also block content I want, which seems to imply that if I explicitly click on some element that permits me to download an iso, zip, doc, xls, pdf etc. (to my preferred download location) Chrome will by default prevent/block it.
>New owners of lagging behind systems still has lagging behind systems trumped...
Remember the 5G network infrastructure is only part of the piece; the potentially larger market is the 5G enabled market, which I suspect the US wants a large slice of. By slowing the deployment of 5G infrastructure, buys US companies time to get in on this market, before non-US companies can get too far ahead and established...
That's because after China, Russia et al. the Republicans are shit scared of a Europe independent of the US; probably one of the reasons why Trump wanted the UK out of the EU in a way most likely to cause offence and discord between European neighbours...
They are probably okay about Samsung, as a result of a behind the scenes US-Samsung deal associated with the Australian-Samsung 5G deal...
>One way or another, you are still likely to pay tax if you have an income high enough to pay for cruises.
Depends on how well your PEPs, ISAs and endowments have done - all of these if held for sufficient time and correctly drawn down (ie. not converted to an income), are free of capital gains, income tax and NI...
There is a difference between relying on a system never going down (ie. unplanned outage) and hence (should have) been designed to be resilient etc. and letting a system run for years without being turned off.
In general I suggest the more reliable and resilient a system is and the bigger the pain of doing an upgrade, the more likely it will be left to run...
Personally, I wouldn't want to be living within a 100km radius or less than 2000km downwind of any nuclear reactor that was running critical systems based on an MS OS and receiving updates every month.
Interestingly, I suspect, if you walk through all the updates to any MS OS (eg. XP, W7) I expect you will only come across possibly one or two that actually fix truly broken OS functionality, that impact the functionality of an application tested on and running on the original OS release.
SCO was very useful back in the early 90's, it allowed the deployment of commodity hardware into locations where such hardware stood a reasonable chance of being repurposed, given that whilst PC's were 'cheap' compared to pure Unix boxes, they were still expensive for Joe Public...
For some reason putting an unfamiliar or non-MS OS on the box massively reduced the likelihood of the box being either relocated or repurposed to run games etc. - massively increasing systems reliability...
>It IS "progress" that we should not let systems run for years on end without getting patched.
How does that work with nuclear power stations with a life measured in decades?
The main problem with having systems running for long periods of time is that it really tests the quality of the applications. I seem to remember that many patches over the years have been for applications leaking or hogging memory and generally degrading system performance...
Reading this it does seem we need an independent body to run the TPC-C benchmark on the cloud services that people can buy, so all optimisations are ones that you can select through the control panel etc. then we can build a database of readings just as we have with CPU's, broadband, mobile data etc.
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