Posts by Tim99

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

@h4rm0ny

Good comment.

I got into computing via a back door, writing programmes for use by myself and colleagues in one of the fundamental sciences in the 1970s. I am retired now but I still mentor people and assess them for technical competence for a national accreditation body.

My (generally middle aged or older) colleagues and I have noted over the last fifteen years or so that the education system has failed our younger colleagues in one important respect - The (usually highly intelligent) people that we see are unable to put the subjects that they have learnt to practical use. In many cases, younger professionals are unable to function without direct supervision or instruction, and that any initiative that they might show is discouraged by their management (who generally have little practical experience themselves). I believe that this is because schools, colleges, and universities now train people to pass exams and not to think . Someone who has been taught to think can solve problems, someone who was trained to pass an exam may well be lost when they have to go outside their syllabus.

Even if we thought that this style of "education" was the best option, I have personal experience of students who were unable to pass the exam being "helped" because they had spent a lot of money to be on the course. The powers-that-be do not want their course to be thought difficult because few students will want to apply. Fewer students means that there is less money available to the department, and its power and importance in the institution is therefore reduced.

This might be the ravings of an old fart, but I am seriously worried about the competency of many of the people in the professions who will be running everything as I continue the gentle decline into senility.

iTunes radio tunes in to Australia for first launch beyond USA

Re: I buy those old-fangled CD things.

John, by-and-large you would be right, but not in my case.

An advantage of living in our retirement village is that our unit has an NBN connection: 50+Mbps down and 20+Mbps up, with unlimited downloads. I have lots of CDs too, but internet radio is what we generally use (Tin roof, so crap radio reception and we don't want to pay for an external aerial). So far, the couple of iTunes channels that we have tried today have been OK...

Woz he talking about? Apple co-founder wants iPhones to run Android

Re: I know people who'd buy an android iPhone

@Azzy

I was going to stay out of the "My Android phone is better than the rubbish iPhondle thing that fanbois use" debate (I use a 14 year old Nokia), but your comment:

Within my circles of friends, I don't have trouble finding someone who prefers the design of the iPhone (even with the small screen and second rate hardware specs)...

- Could be seen as ironic, uninformed, or taking the piss.

There aren't many 64-bit Android phones now, but they will obviously be superior to the current second-rate 64-bit iPhones really soon: phonearena.com.

Wrong Company?

@cs94njw

Well.. they could follow Microsoft mentality.

Embrace and extend. Take Android, fork it, add usability, and slowly make it incompatible with other Android devices...

It seems that was what Samsung was doing. Maybe they will fall back into line after Google got rid of Motorola: digital trends.com, but It would be foolish of them to drop plan B: kdramastars.com

We really need a Google icon, unless this one will do for now? >>-------->

Bill Gates to pull a Steve Jobs and SAVE MICROSOFT – report

Re: The huge difference...

@Shultz

I think that BG may use the odd expletive. He was famous for berating staff with "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!"

Although that might not go too well with the new kinder image of Bill Gates that his philanthropy seems to have bought.

National Broadband Network (NBN)

Home NBN

I live in a retirement village. We have the NBN. Currently it is not as fast as advertised as we "only" get about 52 Mbps download and 18 Mbps up. It seems that we will get the theoretical 100Mbps when our contractor upgrades their "temporary" equipment.

Still very fast (and extremely reliable) compared to the iinet ADSL2+ connection at our previous house. It was about 450m from the exchange, we got ~11Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

The wiring in the house is Cat 5e going to a 4-port 100M router in a cabinet in the garage. Wireless is served through two Airport Express units (also connected to HiFi and set of speakers). All is good, with ping times in the order of 16ms to the provider's DNS through a wired connection, which goes up by 1.4ms for wireless.

CEO Marissa Mayer puts on brave face as Yahoo! shows another loss

New logo

So the "whimsical, yet sophisticated." new exclamation logo hasn't immediately created BEELLIONS of dollars of new profits.

I am surprised. See relevant ICON >------->>

Stephen Fry rewrites computer history again: This time it's serious

Re: Erm, no

@handle

Erm, yes. I am even older than Fry, and went to a British school where people cared about that sort of thing. We used the OED - A successor of which still allows "licence" as a verb - Oxforddictionaries.com

Note that in British English licence is the correct spelling for the noun, and is also an acceptable variant spelling of the verb. In US English both noun and verb are spelled license.

Pure snobbery of course (like Fry?). We also used spellings liike unionized, so that people could be confused by the chemical or political usage...

Re: he sort of reminds me of a polished Boris

El Reg, and Fry are British - Licence is spelled correctly for the UK and many of the former Colonies. IBM and Microsoft are USAian, they would spell it license...

Office 365 Microsoft's fastest growing business, ever - Microsoft

"...and how many of them have a thousand users, and how many have three?"<br>

Microsoft's reseller documentation states that the average Office 365 deal size is 141 seats....

So, accepting Microsoft's estimation of 750million users (up from 500 million) - At this rate, it will take them over 14 years to get everyone to "upgrade"?

Reply IconIt's 1,000 customers (companies) a day you retard...

...and how many of them have a thousand users, and how many have three?

THOUSANDS of UK.gov Win XP PCs to face April hacker storm... including boxes at TAXMAN, NHS

@websey

Or we could maybe for once get someone in public office who knows what the fuck they are going on about.

In my experience in the public service if, by some mischance, a senior administrator type was placed in a position in which he had significant expertise he was quickly promoted out of the way...

NSA refuses to deny spying on members of Congress

Re: It’s different when it’s happening to you.

@John 98 @Irony Deficient

As you are aware, the "power tends to corrupt" quote is from a letter from Acton to Mandell Creighton:-

...I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it...

We now think of this as being about political power, and it is, but originally it was about Papal Infallibility (which needless to say, Acton was against) and the first Vatican Council. The bit I always remember is "Great men are almost always bad men".

CryptoLocker creeps lure victims with fake Adobe, Microsoft activation codes

Re: Bastards....

You do know that the NSA et al rely on the fact that it is a mess out there to keep a lower profile and hide in the rivers of crap to carry out their sacred work on keeping the free world 'safe'?

HP: This Xmas, get the SACK... and not the one filled with presents

I used to like HP

Quite a while ago I found that HP had decent management, competitive products, good support and were generally pleasant to del with.

Then they took many of the bits that I liked and put them into Agilent...

Wait, that's no moon 21.5-inch monitor, it's an all-in-one LG Chromebase PC

Re: It's not the concept, it's the vendor ...

[...LG - an unethical company...]

Unethical compared to whom? I don't recall too many IT companies that I, as a customer, thought were even vaguely ethical since the days of DEC.

Excise Xmas prezzie indecision MISERY with El Reg’s gift guide²

Re: Nest Protect

@Great Bu

Er, no.

I used to analyze combustion products from furnishings in test rooms. The heat from combustion quickly causes strong convection from the source up to the ceiling, but the ambient atmosphere mixes quickly with the combustion products as they rise. You are correct in that leaving the room by crawling along the floor is the best way to escape, but this is because the fire is usually in furniture etc. which is above the floor - The convection current usually sinks to near the source. You are usually killed by suffocation or poisoning, but scalding of the interior of the windpipe and lungs can also occur, so the relatively cooler atmosphere would help you.

As an aside, before the change in legislation, I have seen people who had been killed by smoldering foam furniture caused by a dropped cigarette. They had invariably been dozing and had been overcome by combustion products before the fire took hold. Sometimes people would ask why the victim had not been awakened by the fire, we explained that they were probably dead, or deeply unconscious before any flames were visible. In my house (designed for retirees) we have infrared fire detectors, as well as the normal ionization type smoke detectors.

As you say, the density of CO2 drops at higher temperature, so at ~300C it is roughly half of its density at room temperature. The density drop is similar for N2 at -300C, which is as you know, is ~80% of the original air. The drop in relative concentration of O2 as it is consumed by combustion would reduce the density of the atmosphere (at any temperature) by only 3%. In the unlikely event of all the O2 reacting to form CO2 the density of the atmosphere would increase by roughly 17%, if only CO was formed the density would decrease by roughly 3%. However all of these numbers are very approximate and vary considerably depending on the fuel, rate of reaction, draught from outside the room, and the temperature at the reaction front.

Re: Nest Protect

Air has a vapour density of ~14.4. Carbon monoxide has a vapour density of 14, so they are roughly the same. Carbon monoxide in a fire will quickly disperse to all parts of a room including near to the ceiling. I think you meant carbon dioxide which will tend pool on the floor, it has a vapour density of 22.

Gases produced by burning household furnishings can be very poisonous and usually contain hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. Typically people who are killed in household fires are poisoned/suffocated by the toxic materials in smoke - You will generally only have a few minutes to escape.

The vapour density of a gas is ~its molecular weight divided by 2.

Yes, you ARE a member of a global technology elite

Re: Now consider...

@AC 08:06

Sturgeon's Revelation applies: 90% of everything is crap.

MPs: Ancient UK Border Force systems let gangsters into country

NZ

I expect that it is just a coincidence that NZ is one of the least corrupt countries?

Link transparency.org

'Climate change is like Y2k!' - Oz senator

Re: I wasted nearly 500k trying to prove we ddn't use any dates

So none of your stuff used a non-compliant BIOS? Including Windows and *NIX 486/P5/P6 systems?

We found that about 60% of our user base were not Y2K compliant. Changing the hardware fixed a lot of problems. Getting them to switch from versions of MS products prior to Office 95, and then patching the 95/97 versions solved many of the other issues. Code that we had written was OK.

A whopping one in four Apple fanbois uses OBSOLETE TECH

Re: Android fragmentation

All right Mikel. I volunteer to be the down-vote sacrifice: Link developer.android.com

...This data reflects devices running the latest Google Play Store app, which is compatible with Android 2.2 and higher. Each snapshot of data represents all the devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 7 days

....

Data collected during a 7-day period ending on December 2, 2013.

Any versions with less than 0.1% distribution are not shown.

Note: Because this data is gathered from the new Google Play Store app, which supports Android 2.2 and above, devices running older versions are not included. However, in August, 2013, versions older than Android 2.2 accounted for about 1% of devices that checked in to Google servers (not those that actually visited Google Play Store).

The quoted numbers do indeed show ~74% have version 4+, over half of which are still on Jelly Bean 4.1x.

In total for the 2.2+ - 4.x group only 1.1% are on KitKat, the latest version.

Inside Steve Ballmer’s fondleslab rear-guard action

Re: No, Liam, I won't be using a fondleslab as my primary computer.

@Trevor_Pott

It is evening here (early morning where you are?), and I am tired, so I don't know if you are taking the piss or not. One of your worst spelt posts, perhaps you did it on a tablet? :-)

If there are any mistakes in my post, I wrote it on an iPad Air...

Microsoft 'cautiously optimistic' about Christmas sales

Re: A casual Observation

@Kevin Johnston

Oh crap, I feel old, I remember when I bought a 25MB 19" rack-mount Winchester drive at £200 per MB, and telling my colleagues how cheap it was...

Consumer disks trump enterprise platters in cloudy reliability study

Re: Size?

@pklausner

Extrapolation. Many 3.5" drives were initially made for desktops most 2.5" were not...

Size?

I was told by somebody in the trade to use 3.5" (or even 2.5") drives instead of 5.25".

The rationale was that even though you need fewer of the bigger drives, the overall reliability of the smaller drives was much greater because they were designed for laptops where they would be expected to receive rough handling - The larger drives were for desktop use where they would "not be subjected to abuse".

Apocryphal, but they claimed to have evidence based on warranty returns.

Brit inventors' GRAVITY POWERED LIGHT ships out after just 1 year

To much SciFi

I must improve my brain. I was a fair bit into the first sentence before I realized that it was not about star-ships.

The only way is Office: UK Parliament to migrate to Microsoft cloud

Beyond parody?

In answer to my own title, no it is not. I worked with people like this in Government. It is the new version of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM", but sometimes people get sidelined or promoted out of the way.

What lies beneath Microsoft's Cloud OS?

Re: End Game

@Getriebe

Thank you for your reply. In my career, I was one of the steam train people, generally being at the forefront of changes in IT over the last 40 years.

As I lack false modesty :-) I should tell you that I saw, and took advantage of many opportunities - Large systems replaced by fridge-sized and desktop minis, C and BASIC instead of FORTRAN, PCs replacing Minis, *NIX replacing VMS, NT and Linux displacing *NIX, Oracle replacing Rdb, Microsoft displacing providers like Novell and Sybase - Mostly increasing computing power and generic systems allowing the introduction of higher-level languages and more complex structures. I have also avoided stuff that looked as though it was going nowhere like the original SaaS frameworks. The last stuff that I did involved tablets and phones connecting to the main business, instead of laptops/desktops (Yes I bought the original iPad on the day that it came out, realizing that it was, potentially, a game-changer).

I, too, have worked on production lines before my first "real" careers, generally there was a possibility of progression for some; and for those whose job was boring, they created a life outside of work. I think that the insight that I can offer is that I have actually done most of this, including running technology/science based businesses for business types like bankers; and later setting up my own.

As I said, I suspect that there will be many fewer jobs in IT. You are right about the need for soft skills, but many of the people who got into the IT business did so because they really don't have that type of personality.

I am actually an imposter, my qualifications include Chartered status in one of the fundamental sciences, so I often think that my career was based on an objective analysis of the use of IT to actually get the work done. Least-ways that is what one of my bosses told me, because I did not automatically recommend whatever was hot in IT, and therefore something that would be deployed for my own career progression - Also not having my mind contaminated by COBOL and batch job processing :-)

I suspect that my gift, and my curse, was being one of people who were taught to actually think, so that we could all take advantage of the "white heat of technology".

Do I think that for the majority of humanity things have got better? Yes, particularly if you live in China or India. Do I think that things will get better for the majority of people who work in white-collar jobs in the developed economies? No, and it will be poor for most of them who currently work in IT.

As an aside, look at seeing what work you CAN do without needing to work for a large conventional employer - Cooperatives of peoples with many skills might be a way to go (until somebody decides that they need to be "in charge" to "get things done").

Re: End Game

@AC 07:51

Too right, renting stuff to people is actually evil. I wrote this on my own server, powered by my own power station...

Funnily enough, I do have my own server, and power station (Solar Panels). A DCF analysis has shown that is not worth my while going completely off grid - We only get an average of 7.9 hours of sunshine a day; but as I am retired, I can use much of my electricity while it is being generated by sunlight.

Not to be too smug about it, I worked hard and am enjoying the benefits before I cark-it. I hope that you are not relying too much on IT as a long-term career. If you are, MS and the rest of the rentiers will try and eliminate your job soon. I'm sorry to say that this may well apply to most of the management droids, spread-sheet jockeys, marketers, sales people, network software support, database admins and general admin bunnies too. It may even apply to lawyers (Most of their work is already carried out by software and paralegals at <$40/hr). Perhaps it has something to do with nearly half of the workforce aspiring to an NQF level of 5 or above. In the 1970's this would have been equivalent to less than one in 10, because most of us did not need it.

I was told in the 1980s (When I was implementing and managing this stuff), that it was all for the good of humanity - We would all be working <20 hrs a week, our standard of living would be much higher and, that because of this, leisure industries were the way of the future. They lied - Work has become the art of more and more with less and less, supported by at least 10% structural un/under-employment. The majority of industrial jobs have gone - Or haven't you noticed the general "dumbing-down" of work. Decisions are now only made by a very select few, whilst the rest of the workforce do what that are told. Market forces and iability avoidance suggest that the people who have power and capital will soon destroy many of the "middle-class" jobs that El-Reg readers rely on. This makes it a bit easier to re-introduce C19th employment practices when your labour pool is a fungible commodity.

I would not have thought that as I got older I would start sounding like a reactionary socialist, normally people become more conservative in their views. Don't believe me - Google "Amazon working conditions"...

Re: End Game

Trevor,

Some people call this rentier capitalism - Wikipedia Link.

Generally, the idea is that you invent something once and then continue to be able to keep charging for it. If you are powerful enough, you can get legislation to help you - An example would be Disney still having almost exclusive rights to selling Mickey Mouse products. Another way would be to become sufficiently powerful in the market to be able to buy or undercut any prospective competition to your model.

<OLD FART's RANT>

One of the reasons for my cynicism is that I was around in this business when Gates and Allen were still running Traf-O-Data. In the early 1980s I worked for a very large public utility where I helped displaced some complex and expensive mini-based scientific applications with cheaper MS/PC-DOS systems.

When Windows 3 came out we started to move everything over to it. I had lunch with our MS Rep (No, I am not Mike Cox), over coffee we gave him a bad time about Windows 286 and some of the 2-steps-forward-one-step-back "upgrades" to MS-DOS. Someone around the table asked what MS slogan was. The Rep was baffled. We said, you know, like DEC's is "Honesty and respect for customers and employees"; or IBM's "Think". He blurted out "Bill said $100 a year from everybody, for ever". Laughter all around the table. As Windows 3 became 3.1/3.11/95/98 etc, I realized that this was essentially true, and that Microsoft was a "Service" company. You only thought that you owned something.

I set up a company that (amongst other things) wrote Windows software. It became obvious to me that the MS idea of only supporting the current and the previous version of Office and Server Applications with each version of Windows; and requiring you to upgrade from older versions of Windows to use later Office and Server products; may well have been driven by this simple thought. This certainly appeared likely with NT 3.1/3.5/3.51/4.0 multiple service packs/2000 multiple service packs etc.

So, in conclusion, In My (Not So) Humble Opinion, this is not new. Microsoft are now formalising their existing long-term business strategies. They have managed to stay on top by clever marketing to developers, "lock-in" monopolies, a functional and "standard" suite of Office products, very strong developer tools and an ecosystem that relies on almost everything being MS based. If I was still running this sort of stuff for people, I would be worried. As the "Cloud" (horrid description) is deployed in more applications, Microsoft may not be your long-term friend.

</OLD FART's RANT>

Online shopping tax slug not worth the effort: National Australia Bank

To big-note myself

To big-note myself Link - TheRegister, I previously wrote:-

Goods & Services Tax

... we who are fortunate to live in the Antipodes do often get ripped off. Some of this is because of our relatively small population, some of it is because of our long supply chain: As explained to me many years ago when I imported goods: a $100 item imported into Oz may have an importers markup of 30%, a distributer/wholesaler markup of 30%, then a retailers markup of at least 30%. Now adding local taxes could give a final price to the punter of ~$250. A direct import from an internet supplier including shipping would have the final price of ~$130 (At the moment, a personally imported item of less than $1000 has no tax payable).

....

I want to play with VMs

Re: I want to play with VMs

@Neoc

Thanks. Licensing is not a problem - I have a few old WinXP licences from dead machines, a spare Win7 Home licence, I play around with Linux/BSD and I think I have a disk with MacOS X Leopard on it with two spare install licences - although I understand that last OS may be a moot point in terms of install on non-Apple hardware.

Licence compliance is one reason why large consultants "justify" their prices, although they often get licencing deals that you can't. While it is a "home setup", it is unlikely that anyone will care too much. If you try and charge money, things can go wrong quickly.

If you do earn a crust from this, the Mac Licences are more than a moot point, they are not kosher. Check that the WinXP licences are retail, because otherwise they are probably OEMs and are not transferrable to other machines. The Linux stuff (unless it is, say, Red Hat, or Oracle commercial) is probably OK - You may need to be a registered developer though. The BSD stuff is likely to be OK.

Your power bill may be a bit more than you think too :-)

Assange flick The Fifth Estate branded 'WORST FILM OF THE YEAR'

Re: « Films about people sitting at computers have always been a hard sell »

Not when it was Sandra Bullock sitting in front of it. :-) :-)

Perhaps Whoopi Goldberg as well? I thought the shredder bit was pretty good, but I was going through my mid-life crisis at the time...

Just who is Apple's most frustrated fanboi? Surprise – it's GOOGLE

Re: They should be forced to use

@DainB

My down-vote was because I have never seen an installation of an "out of the box supported" version of Windows, other than that for home or small business use...

Oh! Perhaps you meant that you could use expensive ^H standard ^H third-party tools to run out Windows in the Enterprise.

Is that you, HAL? No, it's NEIL: Google, US Navy pour money into 'associative' AI brain

Skynet?

Is Carnegie Mellon funded by Cyberdyne Systems?

See icon.

What’s new in SQL 2014?

Re: I hate the abuse of the SQL = SQL Server

You mean like MAPI vs. IMAP; Open Office XML vs. Open Office; or Active Directory vs. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol?

@AC 14:56

I speak as a user of and fan of MySQL, which I've been using for years, but outside of the core database engine, it's just not up to the level of the commercial packages. From my experience with the others FOSS alternatives, the same applies. Hell - Most of them don't even have backup agents for Networker/NetBackup/TSM, and this is a very good measure of readiness for Enterprise use.

As you are a fan of MySQL, perhaps you have not tried Postgres. It does the Networker/NetBackup/TSM backup thing. Writing as someone who has created Oracle, Rdb, Informix, SQL Server, Sybase, and other SQL based business applications, I have been favorably impressed by PostgreSQL - MySQL, not so much...

BOFH: Resistance is futile - we're missing BEER O'CLOCK

Re: Irony

Problem with clouds is there's nothing holding them up .

Except hot air?

Pro-fibre-to-the-premises protestors call NBN Day of Action

@mijami

There are actually 75 premises connected to the NBN in Western Australia.

You what? You really should not believe this rubbish.

I live in WA on the Perth/Mandurah NBN segment. My street has 87 premises connected, with a further 14 being built within the next couple of months. Admittedly, because of a problem with the contractor, we "only" get about 44Mbps down/14Mbps up.

Re: Suck it up Australia,...

Combat Wombat. Thanks for your reply.

I suspect that the truth is more nuanced than either of us first thought.

The election data from the ABC (Vote Compass?), is self selected. It may be that it is biased in favour of the old and the young, compared to the majority of the population. Older people, in spite of their perceived under-utilisation of technology have more time to fill this stuff in. Younger people may have the time, and are generally more likely to engage with social technology.

When I looked at Vote Compass Link ABC Important Issues my immediate reaction was that the economy was much more important to all respondents than asylum seekers. The young and old had ranked similarly on asylum seekers ahead of the 35-54 demographic. Broadband was generally of less importance than asylum seekers; but as we might expect, was considered to be more important to those aged 18-34. These statistics are based on what the respondent thought was important, and not their actual opinion on each topic.

There is more information on Vote Compass data by importance here: Link ABC

If we look at the ABS age demographic date Link ABS it shows that of those who were able to vote only ~19% of them were over 64, so other issues than the perceived biases of older people about migrants were more likely to have influenced the result. It would seem that what got Abbot over the line was the economy. If we do take the ABC data as valid, the economy was of much more importance to retirees (This might support your "getting the most out of their retirement" idea).

If we ignore any political biases that we may have, the implied perception that Labor are bad economic managers could be thought ironic when we consider the LNPs indifferent performance in this area. One of the more inspired tactics of the previous Howard Governments was to tell us how well the economy was going and then to reinforce this by repaying our heavily taxed dollars to the aspirational (West Sydney?) voter as "middle class welfare".

A cynical person, like me, might think that what got the LNP over the line was actually Murdock's media.

Re: Suck it up Australia,...

@Combat Wombat

Mine was a "Grey vote". You might be surprised to know that many of us want FttP. I am fortunate to have the NBN where I live. We use it to FaceTime/Skype our friends and relatives and watch movies.

Many of us (particularly migrants) don't have a problem with brown people. The guy who just came and replaced the screen on my iMac was Pakistani, pleasant, and competent - Admittedly he was over 50 :-)

I am self-funded, so I don't know how your 'getting the most out of their retirement' bit applies. I take little responsibility for the unfolding disaster. I, and many of our retired friends, did not vote for the Mad Monk and his idiots - It would seem that many of those who did vote for them were from the younger "aspirational" group who generally do better under the Liberals than retirees...

You come over as at least as narrow-minded as your assumed target group.

Jury: Samsung must cough $290m of $379m Apple wanted - NOT in 5 cent pieces

Re: Samsung Ordered By Jury To Pay Apple $290M In Patent Damages

Bit of a step down from $1.05bn verdict, though

Iain, another masterly subheading. It would seem that so far Koh has awarded 0.89bn of the original 1.05bn. I know that to many of us $160,000,000 would be real money, but Samsung or Apple might be able to find it down the back of the sofa...

Apple faces €1bn tax probe in Italy, claim legal eagle insiders

What is the rate?

Apple will be investigated in Italy for allegedly owing almost £1bn to the Euro nation's taxman, it was claimed last night............ It's claimed Apple is accused of understating its Italian revenue to the tune of about €1bn, which works out to £840m or $1.35bn. According to anonymous legal system insiders, Milanese prosecutors will claim Apple failed to declare €206m in 2010 and €853m in 2011.

I don't understand - The way El Reg has reported this, it implies that the Italian rate of tax is ~100% of revenue.

Is Australia backing away from 'fair use' proposals?

It's payback time?

It might be said, by cynical observers, that this is one of the first of the favours that the LNP owes to Rupert Murdock's 21st Century Fox and News Corp businesses for the very favourable pre-election coverage?

Thought you didn't need to show ID in the UK? Wrong

Re: @AC 12:47

You know that the Cabinet believe in a classless society? They don't care what class you were in at Eaton.

Mine's the Savile Row British Warm...

Tech today: Popular kids, geeks, bitchfests... Welcome back to HIGH SCHOOL, nerds

Big boys aren't always the best solution for most businesses

Trevor, an interesting article. I would go further, big boys are never needed for the majority of systems.

By majority, I mean small businesses (<20 employees) and medium businesses (<200 employees) [Ref: Australian Government]. Small businesses employ almost half of those who work in industry and contribute over a third of industry value added. For service based businesses the proportion is even higher. When taken together, Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) employ more people than large businesses and generate more wealth (similar to Canada?).

I have seen many "big boy" systems installed in medium businesses (and even occasionally in small ones). It might not be popular to say this on El Reg, but for them, consumer level systems are often adequate.

Need a switch? Buy consumer/entry level 8, 16 or 24 port 1Gb devices - They will cost <$200. If it is "mission critical" kit, buy two and put one away. For firewall/routers/WiFi kit companies like ZyXEL are OK. Even Apple is OK for WiFi for 50 or so users. If you have to, buy NETGEAR stuff, you can get it from your local consumer warehouse.

For an entry level server, an HP ProLiant MicroServer is fine for 5-10 users (~$400). For more shared storage a QNAP 4 Bay Hotswap works (~$600). Want an easy to use general server for <50 users - An Apple Mac Mini for $1,300 will do almost everything that the average SMB needs (If you need more capacity, buy another one and migrate your intranet or mail server to it). Whilst not necessarily popular in these fora - For SMBs who are buying iFondle devices the Apple route is a no-brainer; particularly as they may now only be using desktops and laptops for a couple of people providing admin/clerical support or business spreadsheets...

If your medium business has more than, say, fifty employees, you may be particularly vulnerable. The smaller business can use its flexibility and lower costs to compete with you. Large businesses may use their power with legislators to pile on administrative and compliance issues so that you cannot compete with them. It is an unfortunate fact of life that organizations do not necessarily become more efficient as their size increases.

If you can't do this stuff yourself, most of it can be done by a small business IT solutions company to look after it for 1 day a month. If you are a one of their customers, ask yourself whether your solutions company is pushing you towards customised specialist solutions. Can simple CalDAV / cardDAV systems do all you need? If so, this gives a lot of flexibility and stops you being reliant on your contractor.

In my (not so) humble opinion, systems for SMBs can, and should be, put together cheaply and reliably using consumer and entry level equipment. When I did this for a living, we realised that as soon as you could buy a tech item from your local superstore, that was the time to get out of supplying and servicing it.

Snowden: Oh, PLEASE let me come to Germany and help Merkel with her phone

Re:AC 11:37

Is that you Matt?

Infosys set for $35m fine over US visa naughtiness

To quote Rockhound in Armageddon when they're sitting on the launch pad:

"You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"

I think that this is art following life. I remembered a similar quote from John Glenn talking about what Alan Shepard had said:

"People asked him [Alan Shepard] that [question] after the flight," Glenn noted. "And Shepard said: `I wasn’t scared, but I was up there looking around, and suddenly I realized I was sitting on top of a rocket built by the lowest bidder.’

There was a thread from QI about it a while ago.