Posts by Lord Elpuss

A hotline to His Billness? Or a guard having a bit of a giggle?

No. Don’t be a dick.

Not anything like this but when I was a junior salesdroid I went to a client (big international corp, makes headphones & speakers much favoured by travelling salesdroids like myself) to meet with somebody low on the IT ladder to talk about a minor deal. In the cafeteria having a coffee with their IT chap when the chairman came in with entourage including legal, finance and a scribe. He was over from the States, had heard that the 'vendor' was in the building and thought he'd take the opportunity to air some grievances and exert some pressure regarding our ongoing global relationship.

Cue some rapid downloading of brownware and a quick return to the office to return with some bigger guns. And new undergarments.

UK spends £36m on 18 little 'bullet-proof' boats to protect Royal Navy assets

Re: Well tried and comprehensively already field tested .....

Sexy looking boat that Barracuda. Shame about the shockingly low quality promo vid on the website - complete with English-as-a-foreign-language titling. Pedistel, Inovative and Costal anyone? I presume Pedestal, Innovative and Coastal, but really... who knows when the marketing is this bad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tech contractor loses IR35 tribunal appeal: 'Right' to substitute didn't mean he could, say judges

Re: A couple of things here I'm surprised about

I realise I may be sinking (parts of) my own argument here, but there's a truism in contracting circles; you're worth as much as you're paid, no more and no less.

In the case of the contractor in my first comment at the top of this thread who's effectively been a fulltime employee for 25+ years at three times the normal permie rate; the team thought he was mediocre at best but SOMEBODY thought he was worth the money - or couldn't be bothered to look up alternatives. Could have been because he was delivering value and we couldn't see it (unlikely, the work wasn't rocket science), because he'd pulled the wool over some decision maker's eyes to convince them he was worth it, or because he's delivering 'value' in other ways. Like sleeping with the boss. Or boss's wife. Or both.

Anyway point being: if you think you're worth more, go out and get it. If you can't be bothered, you're not worth it. If you're trying but nobody's prepared to pay your rate, you're not worth it.

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

I'm not UK based so no IR35, but we do have mutuality of obligation built into the contract. Reason being that I'm currently performing a critical function and am in theory not easily replaced (although I suspect I'm easier to replace than they think, they're just lazy), so they wanted a 3 month notice period.

Also no timesheets. It's a fixed-term employment contract with a defined end date. I'm not going to get into details as it could make me identifiable, but where I currently live the law allows for up to 3 fixed-term employment contracts before the company either has to offer you fulltime employment or not employ you for a calendar year.

The concept of risking being told 'we have no work for you' and shown the door is alien to me. I'm sure it happens, but it's not a contractual basis I or my employer would be happy with. I presume it works both ways, in that you can also walk away with same-day notice?

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

My contract doesn't allow a zero notice period except in disciplinary situations. If yours does without a very good reason, you might want to have somebody to look at it. I've certainly never had a situation where I've been asked to leave *immediately*, at least not without pay; I think my shortest ever notice period was 30 days, and now it's three months.

Re not being paid for four months; when I was a permie one of my team was sent on assignment from his extremely-low-cost home country to a country with one of the highest costs of living in the world. His assignment wasn't set up correctly (thanks HR) so he ended up not being paid his assignment salary uplift for 2 salary cycles, and had to cover several thousand pounds of living costs for that time. He could claim back of course, but expenses were paid back with salary cycles and so it still (temporarily) destroyed his savings, current account and credit card just to stay afloat.

My point is: sh*t happens to permies too.

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

” It's quite telling that even contractors inside ir35 who ARE paying the same tax rates as a permie still get this mild abuse because they STILL take more home than the permies they work with.”

I can only speak for myself, but I have no problem with a anything up to 30% uplift for contractors doing the same job, to cover the relative difference in T&Cs. No abuse from me there. But as soon as we start talking about integer multiples of salary, they lose my sympathy.

Bear in mind also that ‘what they owe’ has been determined by the judge here to be significantly more than ‘what they’ve paid’ - so here at least, it’s mot just an emotional argument.

Re: I'm going to go out on a limb...

@ratcatcher67 not sure what you’re calling junk, nobody’s arguing you do get job security as a permie. In fact the posts above state the opposite.

I'm going to go out on a limb...

...and say good. This sounds like the right judgement; and I'm no fan of HMRC.

The gentleman was an employee in any legitimate sense of the word; he was attempting to get tax relief based on an unexercised and impractical technicality, and he was spotted.

I'm contracting now, but I've had my share of years behind me working alongside contractors who were earning twice, and in one case nearly three times* as much as me for doing exactly the same work with (for all practical purposes) the same contractual conditions. The argument that contractors had less job security went out of the window years ago; these days you've no more security in full employment than a contractor.

* The three-times guy worked remotely from home in London - way back before this was 'normal'. He never came into the office, never met with the team, produced mediocre-at-best work (in the team's view), was eminently replaceable from a skills perspective, and yet had been with the company for 25 years. I left a good few years ago, but last I heard he was still there. He survived multiple redundo rounds, and had seen most of his team decimated around him. He stuck around like a stubborn skidmark; we all figured he was sleeping with somebody senior as that was the only remotely explainable reason for him still being there.

Not bitter AT ALL (I keep telling myself) that he found a way to rake in such a huge pile of dosh for doing very little.

Stob treks back across the decades to review the greatest TV sci-fi in the light of recent experience

Brilliant. Verity's after BOFH's throne, I see.

Intel adds a new device – the ‘IPU’ – to its must-have modern data centre stack

Re: I can't help but wonder

I came here to post the same thing. Another attack vector to keep track of, and if it's background and not 'actively' managed then there's a distinct possibility malware nasties could sit on it for a while before being spotted.

An anti-drone system that sneezes targets to death? Would that be a DARPA project? You betcha

Did anybody else feel sorry for that poor drone trying desperately to right itself? It looked like it almost had it for a second, until one of the props gave out completely...

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

"Bah, who is Black"

No, he's black.

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Re: no point

"The context is "That's how much it takes to run the store" which quite a few people are using as a defence for the 30% cut that apple take."

I submit that your 'context' is completely made up. What is 'quite a few people', and where is it documented that they're linking it to how much is needed to run the store? Of course that's not the case, because it's not a silo; neither Apple nor (more pertinently) Epic or any other competitor are suggesting that this is the case.

He wasn't asked the question; he offered the statement. Out of the entire phrase "forced to concede", the only accurate word is 'to'.

Re: no point

"As soon as they linked the store profits to developing new hardware like the M1 chip then statements like the one you make above loses credibility"

How so? Is Apple not allowed to use profits from one division to fund another? Crikey. Must inform every single Fortune500 company out there that they're ONLY allowed to have divisions run as individual profit-and-loss silos and there must be NO cross-funding between them. Dear oh dear.

Definition '...too much' means there's no business justification for an excessive profit margin. Companies owning divisions where sales of one product funds the development of another are NOT 'too much' - in any way shape or form. Half the companies on the planet would be out of business if that were the case.

You may well be right, but that's not the article quoted or linked in the Register article.

That said, your link does talk about malware on MacOS, and it's fair to say he acknowledged a malware problem in the article you provided.

Looks like Reg linked the wrong article to support the premise.

Re: no point

"Just greed. 30% is to much"

How do you know? It's a lot, certainly, but do you have insight into Apple's costs of maintaining the ecosystem, plus the costs of achieving the same marketing reach through other means?

Most products out there are priced way beyond the wholesale commodity cost of the product itself, and you're paying for a 'value layer' around the product because most of us don't have the skill or can't be bothered to put all the various bits together for a complete solution.

Apple offers that complete solution, and until you've analysed the economics it's not accurate to say 30% is 'too much'.

Re: "Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

"I think that that is way too much for a platform that is done and dusted and resells the same bytes over and over again 24/7."

It depends on the costs incurred, and also on the relative market costs to achieve the same publishing reach by other means. That 30% also gets your product marketed to hundreds of millions of potential punters; if you're Epic you might have a similar kind of reach, but for the vast majority of app publishers 30% is a steal compared to what you'd have to pay to reach the same client base through other means.

"Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of Software Engineering, was forced to concede that MacOS has a malware problem."

He wasn't 'forced to concede' anything of the sort, and twisting the sentence "Apple blocks billions of dollars of fraudulent transactions" into the implication that MacOS has a malware problem is an epic (pun intended) mischaracterisation. Almost libellous in its deceit. That Apple won't take your calls is no excuse for lies and petty jealousy Reg; people come here for the unvarnished truth, and not unrecognisably biased spin.

Footnote: the linked article says this about Apple/fraud/malware detection: "Apple announcing earlier this week - the timing was impeccable - that it blocked $1.5bn in potentially fraudulent transactions during 2020, with more than three million stolen credit cards blocked from the platform.

The iGiant also claimed to have blocked 215,000 apps for privacy violations, as well as 48,000 apps containing hidden or undocumented features, ultimately resulting in 470,000 developer accounts terminated."

Apple is happy to diss the desktop – it knows who's got the most to lose

Re: "Apple is, after all, the professional’s platform"

More than you know. Nothing to do with Macs though...

Re: "Apple is, after all, the professional’s platform"

"Yeah, but Mac lusers are most likely to sue"

I've never met a Mac luser. Worked in a company with 430,000 Mac users though.

iFixit slams Samsung's phone 'upcycling' scheme for falling short of what was promised

Re: Its a problem of volume

”…apple was no longer updating that hardware's firmware with new iOS releases or some such“

The 6s is still fully supported. Not bad for a handset launched in 2015.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe3fa5df43/ios

Re: Its a problem of volume

It's not me voting you down - I can see where you're coming from. Might be a factor of the fact that at any given time 17% of the world's population is buying a new smartphone, but of course that's not cumulative and will be strongly centred around first-world economies. Maybe 15% is first-world, and 2% the rest. Something like that.

Re: Its a problem of volume

It's closer to 1.3bn in 2020, but the number is more or less correct.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share/

Re: But what about Apple?

"Apple's recycling scheme is actually quite decent..... Last autumn, I got £560 towards my new iPhone for the previous year's iPhone 11 pro. I got £250 for my two year old Apple watch"

I love Apple, as regular commentards know, but their recycling scheme is a pile of crud. You would have been WAY better off selling your <1yr old iPhone 11 Pro on the second hand market; you would have got far more money for it, and it would have gone to somebody else who could continue to use it; which is the ultimate form of recycling.

Re: "You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another"

Downvoted for being smug. And irrelevant.

As another vendor promises 3 years of Android updates, we ask: How long should mobile devices receive support?

Re: Two years is not enough

Two years isn't enough. Six years is fine. Like every single iPhone out there. Not that the Register will EVER tell you that.

After six years technology is likely to have moved on sufficiently that most users will have a legitimate need to upgrade, even if there are a percentage of stick-in-the-muds who will always bleat that "SMS was good enough for me". The World wouldn't advance at all if it waited on these people.

Batteries don't need to be replaceable in the 'click on, click off' style of the old feature phones (they last WAY longer now than they used to, and most will last the lifetime of the handset) but it would be useful if they were 'replaceable with minimal user effort' - e.g. unscrewing a backplate. This would kill design though, and ultimately that's what most users value above absolute replaceability.

Once again, not a word on Apple's '5-year plus' support for handsets.

Reg your anti-Apple crusade is getting more and more ridiculous. You've lost all credibility with me now.

Perl changes dev's permaban for 'unacceptable' behaviour to a year-long lockout after community response

Re: Banned from attending any Perl conferences or events

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sarcasm

Googler demolishes one of Apple's monopoly defenses – that web apps are just as good as native iOS software

"Viable distribution alternative" - Apple/Tim Cook

"[Apple claims] that web apps are just as good as native iOS software" - The Register

These two statements do not say the same thing.

Samsung stops providing security updates to the Galaxy S8 at grand old age of four years

See also... Apple still supporting* 6-year old iPhones.

* and 'supporting' doesn't mean "One update + a few security patches". It means full OS updates and patches, for upwards of six years after purchase.

4 years is disgraceful. If this was an Apple device, you'd be ripping seven shades of sh*t out of them; not praising the longevity.

For shame, Reg.

Australia probes app stores, politely suggests Apple and Google could try being nicer and more careful

There's an order of magnitude difference between instances of malware of malicious apps on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Apple's security and privacy models are so far ahead of Google's that there's simply no comparison, and to imply both are equivalent in these respects is perilously close to slander.

Lego's Space Shuttle Discovery: No trouble with Hubble, but the stickers will drive a grown man to insanity

Re: Nothing there...

Why the f*ck do you even exist, dude. Seriously, if you're only here to snipe and bring people down, feel free to jog on.

Docking £500k commission from top SAS salesman was perfectly legal, rules judge

To be a little pedantic; "Clause gave a capped commission of 300% of OTE" isn't accurate - commission wasn't capped at 300%, just that after that it was subject to review by PHBs.

Microsoft calls time on Timeline: Don't worry, more features that nobody asked for coming your way

Having never used Windows, is Timeline similar to Handoff on Apple devices? I find that very useful as a feature, so either people like me on Windows represent a use case too small to bother with, or MS's implementation was lacking. Either way I thought the idea was decent.

NASA's Mars helicopter spins up its blades ahead of hoped-for 12 April hover

Re: Nothing there....

Fair enough. How's this.

https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/inside-blm-co-founder-patrisse-khan-cullors-real-estate-buying-binge/

https://www.the-sun.com/news/2675013/na-patrisse-khan-cullors-houses/

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/black-lives-matter-founder-patrisse-001000383.html

https://www.theblaze.com/news/investigation-demanded-black-lives-matter-co-founder-real-estate

Re: Nothing there....

Differentiating here of course from the principle that Black lives do matter (the origins are genuine, honorable and founded on absolute necessity), the fact remains that the BLM movement itself is a con. A politically motivated, corrupt monstrosity just like Extinction Rebellion.

Even if it's just called Mars Helicopter 1; that's still freaking cool.

Re: Nothing there....

There are a number of possible scenarios where it would be advantageous to send all of (what's left of) humanity to go and live on Mars. It's happened several times before.

Note that 'possible' doesn't mean 'likely'. Google Extinction Event for more of an idea.

Re: Nothing there....

"That might well improve the world more than a picture of a rock would."

Sure it will. Keep funding the machine.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/10/black-lives-matters-patrisse-cullors-ripped-for-bu/

Re: Nothing there....

"Perhaps consider what the "thing" that is there is instead.

That would be a rock, and this will get a photograph of it from about 5m away."

The 'thing' is never a rock. It's what the rock represents. This could be anything from helping us to understand better how our universe works, to figuring out where we can best dig on the Martian surface in order to build an underground habitat in the future, to finding an alternate home for Humanity if you believe - and I'm absolutely certain you do - that climate change is real and potentially catastrophic.

Re: Nothing there....

Like what, another BLM protest?

Apple's pending privacy clampdown drives desperate marketers to overwhelm domain database

"Two weeks ago, Jothan Frakes, senior product manager at PLISK and PSL volunteer..."

Wasn't he the bloke in Str Trk?

No, no, let's hear this out, says judge waving away Apple's attempt to kill MacBook Pro Flexgate lawsuit

"nothing promotes planned obsolescence like a very expensive repair which costs close to, or better yet, more than the value of the product. It's a win-win situation"

It's not win-win, it's lose-lose and in nobody's interests to 'engineer' this kind of sh*t in. The consumer loses, but ultimately Apple does too. The reason they're a $2tn company is because the majority of their customers are happy with their CURRENT product, such that when it dies they want to buy a NEW one rather than switching to a different brand. If customers were treated as a one-time hit, then Apple would be far less successful.

Android, iOS beam telemetry to Google, Apple even when you tell them not to – study

Re: Surprised?

Yup. The reason they had FaceTime and iMessage removed was because they couldn’t snoop on the encrypted connections...

Re: Surprised?

Not sure why the downvotes, but in my case I'm not differentiating between sharing with the manufacturer, and sharing with the network provider.

In my case I trust Apple a hell of a lot more than my network providers, who between them have done everything they possibly can to destroy any concept of 'relationship' they ever had with me. Lock-in, dodgy billing, extra mandatory 'services' and 'value layers' that were neither needed nor wanted, sneaky-bastard handset customisation and firmware mods (then denying it was them when the manufacturer refused warranty*) and so on.

*Dubai. Network provider modified the firmware on my new iPad to remove iMessage and FaceTime, no mention of this on the retail packaging, Apple said it was effectively a second-hand product as a result of the mods and initially refused a warranty replacement, but to give them credit they did eventually agree to replace as it was clearly a misrepresentation by the shop that sold it.

Re: Linux phone... here I come...

Good luck getting a phone that doesn't share any data. Hint: they all do, that's how the GSM protocol works.