* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

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"Unless that user is stupidly out of date."

Or just middling stupid & won't try 'cos it's not .docx (really stupid won't notice & just blindly click it anyway along with anything else they receive).

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Re: Its the updates

Quite often the problem isn't that the bleeding edge version is needed, it's just the one specified in the bleedin' config file and something antique would do perfectly well.

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Re: Scientific Linux?

Yup, recently. Coincidence?

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"Circuit designers dont have Altium."

I'd guess that in CERN they might use KiCAD instead. After all, they maintain it.

Underground network targets Salisbury: Not the Russian death crew, this time it's Openreach laying fibre-optic cables

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Re: Who Micro-Trenches These Days?

I don't know the technology but our gas supply must have been installed with something of that nature possibly in that sort of timeframe - there's certainly no sunken remnant of a trench like that for the drain, water & phone. Possibly also the electricity supply and that must have been installed in 1968.

Get this: Mad King Leo wanted HP to slurp two other firms alongside ill-fated Autonomy buyout

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"simply one person's opinion"

The one person who happens to be the CFO, the person whose opinion should count.

Behold the might of dynamic crimefighting duo Captain Met Police and the Microsoft Kid

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"Technology gives our evidence greater integrity and gives us greater legitimacy."

How does that work? Your US-based vendor is open to demands from US authorities. I'd hate to think what your ideas of less integrity and legitimacy might be.

Google: We're not killing ad blockers. Translation: We made them too powerful, we'll cram this genie back in its bottle

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Re: Firefox's change to WebExtensions kills adblockers?

No I will not. I'll just keep using a mixture of Mozilla derivatives.

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Re: No need for flash/java!

Why not block any ads that were not just a single image plain text.

FTFY

After all the "simple image" can be an animated GIF. In fact, it was a particularly annoying animated GIF as whch made me installan ad-blocker years ago.

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"There’s been a lot of confusion and misconception around both the motivations and implications"

Translation: Shit, they spotted it.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

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Re: Optional

Upvote for Heisenconnections. I shall try to remember it for future use.

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Coat

Now they have a knob on the keyboard.

OK, OK

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Re: Posted before, but worth posting again...

You've told prospective customers something about the service they can expect from you if they buy. But was it what you wanted to tell them?

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Re: Optional

"Dell machines are designed to be repairable"

Doesn't that count as cheating? At least in Apple's view?

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"use of external monitors and keyboards is blocked until you login"

Doesn't that also make it tricky to diagnose the laptop's own keyboard or display?

Own goal: $280,000 GDPR fine for soccer app that snooped on fans' phone mics to snare pub telly pirates

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"AEPD has not made the necessary efforts to understand how the technology works"

GDPR isn't concerned with how it works, it's concerned with what it does.

Alexa, are you profiting from the illegal storage and analysis of kids' voice commands?

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"most people believe that when they speak to an Alexa-enabled device, it converts their voice into a set of digital computer instructions… They do not expect that Alexa is creating and storing permanent recording of their voice."

Really? I wouldn't trust any such device not to store it. Not even if the vendor outright denied it. (Never believe a rumour until it's been officially denied - Jim Hacker)

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"The internet goliath says it does this to improve its service"

That's what they all say nowadays. Has anyone ever seen this improved service?

This is grim, Vim and Neovim: Opening this crafty file in your editor may pwn your box. Patch now if not already

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"it is still a good idea to update your copy of Vim or Neovim to the latest version"

Or switch to nvi instead.

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

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Re: To keep things simple...

"or is it myelin?"

Yes. Mylar's a plastic!

Nice post - that must have taken a while as well.

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Re: SOLUTION to POLLUTION is DILUTION...

No radon?

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The trees are a regular crop and not a problem. The standing crop is temporarily sequestered carbon so growing trees for paper is mildly beneficial.

It's the lack of thought about incidental effects such as transport, processing and disposal of a totally useless batch of leaflets by a group who ought to be against it that's the objection. That and the keep-your-filthy-hands-off-my-car issue but as it happened they'd already done their round of the car park when I got there and didn't come back again.

Money laundering and crypto-coin legislation could hurt open-source ecosystem – activists

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Re: Regulating the publication of open-source software?

Interesting link. Particularly interesting in the the word "software" isn't mentioned at all.

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Re: Regulating the publication of open-source software?

Parsing error?

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"What on earth were they thinking?"

Scope creep and over-reach.

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For many people then, and into the 1950s £5 was a high value note. Even 10 bob was serious money.

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Re: Is this

"She pretended to be one when she served under Cameron"

Quite. I'm sure that, like most people in Westminster she expected Remain to win & didn't want to end up on the wrong side. Her background in the HO would ensure that she would want to get as far away from the restraining influence of the EU as possible.

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These privacy coins the article mentions and the untraceable transactions. They sound very much like the bits of metal in my pocket and paper or plastic in my wallet, all bearing pictures of HMQ. Is the Treasury planning to outlaw them?

Give my regards to Reigate: Print biz Canon to up sticks in the sticks

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With a country hooked on cheap credit all that money had to go somewhere and that somewhere was property. If you got property prices returned to affordable now the mess left by negative credit on the banking industry would be even bigger than it was when dealer Brown left. And as the only remedy seems to be more and cheaper credit it's only going to get worse.

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Re: Ulterior Motive?

I remember Clarkson saying that if Kent is the garden of England Surrey is the patio.

UK taxman spent six times more with AWS last year than cloud firm paid in corporation tax

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Re: Corporation tax should be abolished

"A tax on turnover would be more efficient and harder to avoid though rather painful for companies that were genuinely loss making."

Genuinely loss making businesses are in trouble any way. A turnover tax would push a lot of genuinely profitable-but-only-just businesses into loss. That puts their employees out of work. That then increases costs for the country supporting the unemployed. That pushes up taxes so the turnover tax has to go up and make more businesses unprofitable.

Nothing's easy when positive feedback loops are involved.

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Re: hmmmmmm

"The fact that Lout Cook Islands is paying only £10 per box of turds means it makes most of the profit and pays none of the tax."

The reason it can afford to charge little or no CT, of course, is that it has a small population and the income it brings in is worth much more than is lost from the taxation it would have got from local businesses if it had tax rates comparable with the UK's.

Doctor Syntax Silver badge

You seem to be repeatedly missing the A/Cs point. Amazon has the reputation of reinvesting income to grow instead of taking on loans. That means that real profits, on which taxes are charged is a lower percentage of turnover.

You could, of course, replace taxes on profits with taxes on turnover but you then make businesses in markets that operate on low profit margins go under, either because they then run at a loss or they have to raise their prices and lose custom.

I agree that there are business models which rely on constructing internal trade so that the biggest mark-ups happen to take place in low CT countries and it may well be that Amazon's business model includes an element of that. I've also pointed out in another post that the competitive market in corporation tax on multinationals is tilted in favour of countries with a relatively small local economy and that's not something the UK should want to be in a position to take advantage of.

One point that is relevant in the present case is whether AWS (or, indeed any multi-national alternative) relies on performing the work in a lower tax country because that would mean transferring data and, given the nature of the data this ought to be a major concern. Given the US's attitude of "what's yours is mine" in terms of data there ought to be considerable concern about data sovereignty even if all the processing is carried out in the UK.

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Here we go again, having to explain the obvious about the fact that for multinationals there's a competitive market in taxation.

You attract business by having lower tax rates. If you're a country's finance minister you have to work out whether that's a good thing to do because your local businesses pay the same take rates as multinationals. If you have a large economy of local businesses lower tax rates mean you bring in less taxes. You might attract some big multinationals but their taxes won't compensate for the losses.

If you have a small local economy bringing in multinationals is a double win. The multinational taxes more than cover the losses from local businesses so you're in the black and the lower tax rates help local businesses become more profitable. Having a small local economy means either having a small population for that economy to support or having a larger but impoverished population.

Being in the EU there's no legal reason why we couldn't lower our CT rates to compete with Ireland or Luxembourg - after all, those two are also EU members. If we'd tried it in the past HM Treasury would have been greatly out of pocket because of the lower tax take from local businesses and VAT and/or income tax/NI would have had to go up and I'm sure you'd have complained about that.

You could, however, be right about our having greater freedom outside the EU. Remember that the precondition for making money from multi-nationals is to have a much smaller local economy and if the population size doesn't change that means they each get poorer. Are you quite sure that's that you want to do?

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Re: And so it goes on...

"The denial and hypocrisy is astounding."

Or sheer ignorance. Once you think you know the answers why go looking for facts?

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"Our procurement decisions, including contracts with Amazon Web Services, are based on value for the taxpayer, capability, security and reliability of service."

No mention of data sovereignty there. Why not?

DXC Technology exec: What should our brand be known for?

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WHy am I reminded of..

Irate customer: "Do you know who I am?"

Waiter: "Sorry, mate, can't help you. Try looking in your wallet, your name should be on your credit cards."

'Cynical and bullying' TalkTalk hackerhacker getsgets 4 yearsyears behindbehind barsbars

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Why did it take 2 1/2 years after a guilty plea?

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Re: was said to have cost TalkTalk £77m to clean up

It probably included everything they should have spent in the first place to secure their systems.

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Re: "Reach out" makes me retch...

Should have been worth 6 months on the sentence.

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Re: Skilled cyber-criminal left traces of own IP address

Being a cynical criminal is.

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Re: Skilled cyber-criminal left traces of own IP address

"prolific, skilled and cynical cyber-criminal,"

It's more or less part of court ritual. Prosecution will present the offender, however inept, as a criminal mastermind, defence will present them as an innocent abroad and easily lead by the bad crowd they unknowingly fell in with (or Aspergers for shorthand). It's all aimed at determining sentence.

No backdoor, no backdoor... you're a backdoor! Huawei won't spy for China or anyone else, exec tells MPs

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"f we did that, we wouldn’t be in the telecommunications business, we would be in the software engineering business."

I'd have thought that if you're in any business, telecommunication included, where software provides a non-negligible part of the product you are in the software engineering business whether you like it or not or whether you realise it or not. Not realising it is a bit of a worry.

TSB appoints new tech transformation chief cuz last tech transformation went really, really well

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"Unlike Curran, Crosbie put in over 20 years of service before stepping into the TSB CEO's shoes"

Huh? The figures given in the next para amount to 10 years experience. 10 years isn't inconsiderable and perhaps is appropriate for a job two levels down. In some shops 10 years is enough to be moved to a desk next to the door while the employer looks for "younger, fresher" and, coincidentally, cheaper talent.

You're responsible for getting permission from subjects if you want to use Windows Photos' facial recog feature

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Re: GDPR

"'Facial groupings "are not accessible beyond the context of the device file system' and 'AI used on your local device to help tag photos'"

Look carefully at what legalese doesn't say. Note that your quote doesn't say processing is local. It says something quite convoluted which might lead you to think it does but it actually doesn't.

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Re: My first thought (could be an overreaction)

2002? That's almost last century.

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"Facebook (of course) uses facial recognition ... but allows you to opt out."

And just how do you opt out if you don't have a FB account and cive FB you picture? The sooner GDPR catches up with them the better.

Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings

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Re: Oops.bat.

The Unix equivalent is

cat a >> a

where a is a non-empty file. Or at least it used to be - maybe the cat's been neutered but for some reason I haven't checked for a good while. Handy for overwriting disks before returning a rented box.

Judge slaps down Meg Whitman for accusing Autonomy boss of being a 'fraudster who committed fraud'

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Missed opportunity

“one of the biggest [revenue] misses I’ve seen in my career,”

You've had a lot of revenue misses in your career, have you?

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Re: Wow, that certified software has really had to prove itself.

Oh, no. That's what applies to the little people. It's even more straightforward for CEOs.

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