Posts by andybird123

The truth about Apple's mind-boggling low tax rate

Re: Simplified taxation

we already do pay tax on takings, it's called VAT

Re: Not quite

it still happens after the quarter end though, so it's not an estimate of future income it just means you have to do full accounts on a quarterly basis and you still get 4 months after the quarter end to actually make the calculation/payment

"For example, thanks to a one James Gordon Brown, here's how the UK system works: the taxman will ask you, "How much do you think you're going to make this year, and why don't you send us that?" You even have to pay interest if you get the calculation wrong, such as if you have a good last week of the year or something."

erm... what?

corporation tax is based on your last financial years actual profit figure, where did you get this statement from? because it makes no sense to me

HTC sues fans for premature unboxing

what country is this?

because a quick check of orange in the UK and AT&T in the US show multiple HTC handsets available...

UPDATE: GAGA team hunts down grass-smoking ROBOT

but...

my mum has a gardener go round every few weeks to mow the lawn, he charge £10 an hour and it takes him a couple of hours... that's £360 a year

is it really worth all the faff and hundreds of pounds of kit to avoid paying less than £400 a year to help out a local small business?

I'm pretty sure whatever kit you end up with it will need fixing/replacing every few years anyway

3D: 10% of LCD TVs in 2011, 25% in 2012

Re: Aware but not interested.

active or passive?

active gives me a blinding headache, passive doesn't

although as mentioned elsewhere there isn't very much 3D content about yet

Intel pushes Ivy Bridge out a little further

it's funny because...

all the hardware forums are advising people to not buy sandybridge and wait for ivy... thus causing more delays to the sale of ivybridge

Brilliant!

Beer because it's Friday

IT guy answers daughter's Facebook rant by shooting her laptop

Quadrangle buckshot would be my anti materiel ammo of choice :)

Don't bother with that degree, say IT pros

Please

Don't

Never

Throw

Sausage

Pizza

Away

FASLE!!

I started work straight from school with not even bedroom coding practise and by 20 I was an "Associate Systems Engineer" at EDS, by 21 I was a full Systems Engineer and I was training 22-24 year old graduates who were on about 10K less than me... I had no debts where as they all had crippling student loans even when there were no tuition fees to cope with

all it really takes to get on in this world is a serious desire to succeed and the tiniest bit of luck... mostly all it requires is standing up and saying "I can do that" whenever you hear someone saying they need something doing - even if you don't know how you can quickly find out how and get the job done

It's official: Journos are dumb as a bag of IE users

if chrome is so great...

why doesn't it support touchscreen properly (finger to drag highlights text instead of scrolling, "back" flick goes back 2 pages instead of one, making chrome un-usable on touchscreens)

previously i left mozilla because it had become a resource hog, however with the latest version and these issues with chrome I've had to switch back

Does a flash motor make a man more desirable?

sports car?

depends on what your definition of sports car is

ferraris, lambos, top end porkers, are all proven fanny magnets, I think the key is that the car has to cost at least 100K when new and be a household name

I've had various fast Japanese cars and women don't bat an eyelid (until I step out of it obviously, they are only human)

you win...

gravel rash, well done you

Modern Warfare 3 teaser trailer reveals terror on the tube

easy, don't buy MW3

BF3 is having loads of extra time put in to making sure the PC version is the shiniest BF yet, the last 2 COD games have been straight console ports pretty much

although, I would also suggest that you try hooking up a PC and an Xbox360 to the same monitor (e.g. hi def TV) and compare the two... I borrowed an xbox recently because my friends were trying to convince me to join them in xbox multiplayer and I shit you not, PC looks fine and lovely with black ops at 1080p, switched over to xbox and I thought I'd loaded LEGO Black Ops by mistake

PC players don't have it quite as bad as they think, even with console ports

PS3... really?

1) Ubuntu doesn't do half of what I need my PC to be able to do (but you get what you pay for)

2) because you can't get decent headsets for PC? And if you have problems setting up a headset on a PC then you really shouldn't be allowed to have a PC

3) personal preference obviously, but given that Microsoft gave up on cross platform multiplayer due to the fact that in testing PC gamers wiped the floor with console gamers... I prefer KB and mouse

4) bohoo, £150 every 2 years is such a hardship to save £10-20 on every single game you buy

5) erm, so don't have a tiny emasculated box to play games, get a real PC that can run large near silent fans

oh yes, and when was the last time EVERY game on PC became unplayable on line because they were all simultaneously hacked and took weeks to bring back online?

PARIS team to tackle the ultimate post-pint snack

anything in breadcrumbs...

is still quite bad for you, the breadcrumbs soak up quite a lot of fat

bacon and cheese aren't that bad for you as it's "natural" fats, where as most people will probably fry in "vegetable" oil which is high in trans-fats which are the new satan sauce apparently

ditch the breadcrumbs, keep the bacon (my new motto)

or...

deep fried mars bar

positively farking disgusting to eat by the way

easy...

money?

Popular gamers 'should play for free' – Valve boss

problem is...

there are plenty of "get your friend to sign up and we'll give you free month/vouchers/other gubbins types schemes out there, kind of surprised no one has thought of applying it to MMO's before

what he seems to be suggesting too though is "get x number of people to sign up and you play for free indefinitely"

personally I'd get pretty irked if one of my mates got me to sign up to something at full price and then he got it for free indefinitely as a result

they would also have to link your accounts so that if people only paid for 1 month then quit you'd lose your Free for Life status or they'd end up with a game with 100% free for life accounts and no one paying pretty quickly

largely irrelevant to me as I refuse to sign up to anything with a subscription anymore anyway having played and gotten bored of so many mmo's

what would possibly entice me back is a lower cost option where you get x hours for a smaller fee so that if I get a new FPS and don't play all month I don't get billed, then when I come back for a bit I can do so without getting charged the full £10 or whatever and having to remember to turn it on and off, rather than getting billed for 2 months at full whack where i don't play much and then realise I'm wasting money and quit the game altogether

like the underground oyster card - if you only make 1 journey you only pay for 1 journey, but if you make loads of journeys you still only pay the "day travel card" rate

iPads mooted for Qantas flight manuals

the world we live in...

browsing a paper menu at a restaurant (ok pub), wife comments that main X sounds nice... I can't spot it... it's on page 2, half way down... still can't see it; "damn it, where's control F on this thing"

DARPA: Send limbless troops back to war with robo-arms

10 ms latency?

I don't think the 10 millisecond latency mentioned in the spec is intended to suggest that it will make human reaction time quicker... it means that the interface itself should *introduce* no more than 10msec additional latency over and above that which is inherent in the operators normal reaction time

First reports on XM-25 Judge Dredd smartgun in A'Stan

you might have missed in the article...

the Taliban are using full power 7.62x54 rounds in the PKM machine guns to harass US and UK forces

the AK47 uses a 7.62 Kurz (or short) rounds, which do have an effective range not much different to our 5.56 weapons, but the main problem in A'stan is the PKM not the AK

the US have been talking about an intermediate round for years, which is kinda rich considering they made us change away from a .280

in much the same way as they looked at replacing M4's with the SCAR, but in the end it came down to cost and they're not replacing M4's at all (just suggesting that soldiers use more lubrication)

both the US and UK forces have just placed large orders for 7.62 marksman rifles which will be hitting the country shortly though

Video games go off quicker than tomatoes

have they not heard of ebay?

I bought a copy of black ops as my wife had decided to buy an xbox with kinect and my friends were all playing it... bought it with a £20 off voucher for £25... decided I didn't like it and sold it a week later on ebay for £31.99

BT fibre-up-your-exchange poll in 6-way Mugabe style pileup

pointless anyway

I've got Infinity and after 5pm (e.g. any time you actually want to use it) it's worse than the 2-4mb broadband I used to have... I "upgraded" after asking a load of questions of their sales staff - as I'm 4.5km from my exchange FTTC was my last best hope of getting a decent broadband connection

it's great during the day with download speeds of 4MB (32Mbits), but roll around to when I get home from work and I can't watch iPlayer and direct download speeds are lucky to hit hundreds of Kb, and I can't play online games because I'm constantly disconnected from from the servers (primarily because the 3 or 4 games I play online BT have seen fit to class as "non time sensitive" e.g. BitTorrent traffic and refuse to do anything about it)

I'm still waiting on about 10 calls I've been promised to either fix the issues or get Infinity taken away so that I can go back to the flaky 4mb internet that actually used to work occaisioanlly.

Magnetic vortices research uncovers a cool place to put data

but...

your analogy has a flaw, sighted humans can't perceive radio or x-rays either and we've managed to do stuff with them perfectly well through the use of tools

the same is true of the particles and effects they are searching for with the LHC, they have, are or will develop sensors to detect that we cannot

lots of things have been discovered whilst looking for something else and we end up seeing something we never expected

Prosecutors kick Phorm case upstairs

they're still at it

I've been having loads of speed issues this week and when I run a traceroute I can see that all of my traffic is being diverted via network nodes operated by a company called "BareFruit"

when you look up what this company do, they have a close relationship with BT (in that you can opt out of their service via the BT website), they offer "monetisation of DNS and HTTP errors"

If BT have a tie in with this company I can see why some traffic would go through them, however from what I can see ALL of my traffic is being relayed through the network of a company I have no direct connection with

which is pretty outrageous

BT accidentally chokes bandwidth to 'superfast' customers

Oh no it isn't....

I went home to check at lunch time and although my throughput reports as being higher than 2mb, I still can't use iPlayer

also, where as speedtest.net normally correctly identifies me as being somewhere near Maidenhead, it currently thinks I'm near manchester and that (routing wise) maidenhead is 200 miles away from me

something is still seriously wrong in BT land