Posts by hollymcr

Re: Wait.... they did not have that?

I've always avoided owning a Toyota Silly Car

Re: Oracle "those number things are hard"

Or they know there's worse to come?

Re: demon.sadnews

Ha! I wish. I do have fond memories of CS, which could be summed up as "leaving it"

Re: Remember Dave Lister using his dead clone's hand to open a door in Red Dwarf?

I logged in for the first time in ages to upvote it, so....

In Roman numerals IV is 4 (1 less than 5) so I figure 10X is zero.

A lot of applications start at version 0 and progress to version 1 only when considered "finished". So maybe Microsoft have belatedly embraced this versioning scheme?

Re: 2009 called.....

Is this about stimulating the economy or stimulating votes, though?

Of course the same arguments applied to EXT4 when it was new too.

You're wise not to adopt early. But without early adopters (and even now is rather late to be early) it'll never reach the level of stability that has you say the same of ZFS as you say now about EXT4.

Re: Since Fortnight is dodging the Google tax...

.. which is the real anti-competitive bit here.

Do we, as consumers (or the EU, as our "champion"), really care whether the game developer can avoid paying the store tax if it can't pass it on to us, the consumer?

Google have their faults but in this situation, Apple are the problem. Other app stores *are* available on Android, and they're not hard to install. If a third party app store could set up offering all your favourite games at 15% discount compared to Apple/Google by offering 20% lower fees to the publisher to do it, then *that* would introduce competition. However, that wouldn't currently be possible if you wanted to sell the game on iOS as well.

Re: Wrong again, again.

Ubuntu's year-month release date version numbering makes perfect sense to me. I'm surprised it isn't more common.

Missed it, was it hidden behind the courgette?

Free cash?

On the other hand, handling cash isn't without a cost either. Your insurance will be affected by how mush cash you have on the premises, and you need to pay someone (staff, Securicor, whatever) to take it to the bank. At which point any fake coins will get removed from your total. The reason that supermarkets started offering "free cashback" was because it was a convenient way to get cash off their premises and reduce their costs.

Yes, credit and debit cards come at a cost to merchants, but they do also bring monetary benefits. Fees, even for small shops, aren't that high these days (unless you just walk into your local bank branch and take whatever they offer you).

Re: Nobody likes being tracked, but...

You say that, but where's the sensible alternative?

What I said was that it needs people like us to come up with the alternative (ie the sort of tech people who have a chance of implementing something).

The subscription model doesn't work in general: it's fine subscribing to a handful of sites but doing it with every site you might ever want to access, including every forum that might just happen to have the answer to a question you need answering but will never visit again, just isn't feasible.

One solution I have come up with would be a Google "subscription", such that all Google ad's vanish, but the sites that use them will get a proportional share of the revenue from your subscription. That would solve many of the problems but won't work for anyone who doesn't trust Google, and would still require that they track you to the degree necessary to know not to show you the ads. Maybe there's a space for another third party to come up with a similar scheme - if they get a guaranteed payback for each (subscribing) visitor to the site in return for not showing any adverts then many will be prepared to change their sites accordingly. That third party would still need to track you in some form though, so whether "it's not Google" is enough of a reason to trust them I don't know.

Regardless, not liking ads without proposing an alternative method of funding is like saying you don't like tax but still using the education and health services provided by them. If you don't mind non-targeted ads instead, that's great as long as you accept you will have to be presented with a lot more of them to generate the equivalent income for the sites you visit.

I'm not surprised my post got downvoted (actually it got fewer than I expected) but seriously: what would the Internet be like if the only viable websites were ones who could support themselves without advertising? Or if they could only do it by having ten times the volume of ads they have now?

Re: The power of open source

Surely the point here about open source is that a user of the software (not its "owner") found the problem, created a fix for the problem, and released the fix making it available to other users.

Finding a problem in (eg) Windows isn't hard, but the next two steps would be impossible as an end user.

That's the whole point of phishing. You send it to enough people and you're going to hit people who have just had a blood test. It's no different from targeting <insert name of bank here>

Re: For those who can.

Why would anyone downvote a recommendation to install dd-wrt when the manufacturer supplied firmware has a major security flaw for which there's no current fix (other than replacing the firmware with something better)?

Re: Blatant law abidance by international corporation shocker

@Robert: "All totally illegal, and clearly so"

You speak with the certainty of someone who knows the law inside out, but without reference to the acts in question, which makes me suspicious.

If they are breaking the law, and if (as you say) HMRC have decided not to go after them, then there are plenty of other organisations (press amongst them) that will do the investigation and make the results public.

I believe that a lot of people want this to be true, almost certainly enough people to vote for a government to make it so. Governments (of all flavours) are either incompetent or complicit - I suspect the latter.

The bottom line is that generally speaking these large corporations *are* paying tax on their profits. They're just being selective about where they pay them, and taking corporate profits makes this possible.

IMHO, taxing activities taking place in the country (employment, sales, etc) is the simplest way to ensure that tax lands where it "should".

Re: Dumb

It would be great if El Reg had an option to pay to remove ads, with the only other benefit being maybe an extra "no-ads" icon to use when commenting.

That way all the people who like to whinge about advertising funded services can choose the high ground, and those who refuse to pay when given the option can be called out for the hypocrites they are.

(Can't imagine I'm going to make many friends for saying so though!)

Re: incompatible

So an app that could tell if a drivers attention is drifting away from where it should be, or that spots a driver falling asleep, or that gauges how close the vehicle in front is and how quickly the gap is closing, would automatically and by definition be bad things?

Seems a little shortsighted to me.

Re: I'm no expert, but...

Actually I think AC might be right. Most Android phones at the same price point as an iPhone have considerably better specs. So this mythical Android phone with only the same spec as an iPhone but at the same price would probably not sell well, leaving the iPhone to outsell it (but with both being outsold by the better Android phones at that price point).

Re: Bleurgh

@chr0m4t1c

You have a few errors in your maths. Corporation tax is paid on profits, so in your first example the "profit" is only 50p therefore tax is 5p. But the rest is ok, leaving the company with 45p. However, the problem is that if you are Starbucks, the cost of delivering a £1 coffee is, allegedly, £1, so the corporation tax is zero. The question is how to force Starbucks to pay that 5p.

A sales tax of just 5% is enough to collect that 5p. As to where it comes from: Now that as part of the same tax changes corporation tax got reduced to zero, Starbucks magically discover that they can sell a £1 coffee for costs of 50p after all, so they have plenty of margin to pay the 5p. If they decide to increase prices instead they can, but they won't be competitive against Costa, who are also paying 5p sales tax but didn't increase their prices because they also saved the 5p corporation tax they were paying. Because let's face it, if Starbucks can put 5p on the price of a coffee and still sell them then they're going to do that, regardless of a change in tax.

The interesting thing is that now it makes sense to bring all EU sales though the UK because our sales tax only affects UK sales and our corporation tax is now zero. Whether that's a good or bad thing is another matter.

The problem with all of this is more subtle. A company that makes £1m on sales of £10m currently pays the same corporation tax as a company that makes £1m on £100m, but with a flat sales tax one will pay 10x what the other pays. The latter company is only making 1% so could not swallow a 5% sales tax without increasing prices. This would mean we'd need different rates of sales tax on different items to maintain the status-quo.

Re: race to the bottom

@AC 20:01

So the argument is that competition results in a race to the bottom, except that because of self interest it doesn't? Isn't that just a long way of saying that competition doesn't result in a race to the bottom after all?

Companies like Starbucks will move money around for cheaper tax rates, but realistically it isn't going to be worth it when you're trading in a country that has low tax rates, even if not the cheapest rates. On the other hand, it is worth avoiding the highest tax rates. There are plenty of things to compete on and price is only one of them. It's not clear cut but surely the idea that a cut in tax necessarily means less tax collected (or an increase in tax rates necessarily means an increase in tax collected) can be consigned to the dustbin now?

Re: Does nobody know how to administer a site anymore?

"Just to re-iterate, there's no technical difference between the header being sent from IE10 and from any other browser"

I don't see why you see this as an argument in your favour (also not trying to score points...). If MS choose to implement non-standard behaviour then they should use a non-standard header. Like others, my brief experience with installing W8/IE10 never lead me to a point where I was given a choice about this setting, so my view is coloured by this. We clearly disagree about whether IE10 uses DNT in the same way that other browsers do.

"I don't get your premise that it is used in a "different way to all other browsers". The only difference is that ..."

It's that "only difference" that I consider makes it "different".

Ultimately one of two things will happen as a result of this. The setting will be ignored by the majority of websites (whether just for IE10 users or in general), or sites will use the setting to direct people at a paywall or subscription service. The first seems more likely, at least in the short term, and means that anyone hoping to make use of DNT will be disappointed. The second is probably inevitable in the longer term, which will likely result in fewer independent websites and more large web brands, which is a shame.

I do get why people don't like being tracked but nobody seems to have come up with an alternative method of paying for content on the web. The sort of tracking we're talking about is little different from using a credit/debit/loyalty card in a supermarket and maybe as paywalls spring up for people with DNT enabled more people will turn the setting off.

In effect, IE10 pushes things too hard in a direction that's too fast for "the web" to cope, thus making DNT a lame duck. It's unlikely that this wasn't MS's intention (after all the next step after "embrace" is "extinguish", right?)