Posts by Mark Leaver 57 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2006
I think that it is a lot easier done than said really.
The government should pass a law stating that all money earned within the country is taxable at 25%. If you try to move the money out of the country, then you have to pay a standard monetary exportation fee of 50%.
Unless you are buying goods from the recipient and then we will tax you at the same rate as normal but will charge you a 25% tariff on the goods you are purchasing from the other company. If you are buying the goods from your parent company, then the tariff is 50%
However, the first thing that the government should do is write a law banning lobby groups. But thats where it all falls down because I dont think that any self respecting politician is going to write into being a law that will cut into their chances of getting employed by one of the companies that the lobby group represents.
And as for making Google and Amazon unpopular... just start spreading the rumours that the benefit reductions are all because Google and Amazon wont pay their fair wack of tax...
I wear size 12 shoes. The number of places that have shoes that fit me properly is minimal. If I go into a place and they dont have any shoes in my range, I will sometimes try on size 11's just in case they have a pair of slightly larger 11's that fit.
If my local shoe store decided to start charging a 10er just for asking them about shoes and trying a few pairs on, they wouldnt be getting my business again until such time as they started stocking large sized shoes.
if she doesnt know what forking a repo is all about. If she thinks that it is something sexual then I am wondering how she has managed to retain a tech job for so long and to progress to the level of developer evangelist.
And what would have happened if the guy had pulled out a 64Gb USB drive, which someone else mentioned these days is referred to as a dongle, and presented it to the organisers stating that here was his big dongle.
And while I am at it, I have to say that she appears to have some of the worst spelling/grammar problems that I have ever seen. And her writing style is so jumbled it appears she is more interested in putting people to sleep rather than putting her issues out there in a sane legible fashion.
At the end of the day... the guy making the joke about the big dongle is guilty of one thing... having bad taste in crappy jokes that are well past their use-by date.
What she is guilty of is another whole world of hurt. In her own words, she said that she took the photo and posted it to twitter first. Then appealed for assistance from her twitter followers and then approached the organisers after already vilifying the two gentlemen on twitter.
She has left herself open to a number of law suits the least of which would be the loss of earnings one if the guy can prove that he made the comment as part of a private conversation in a public place. If she tries to sue her ex-employer for wrongful dismissal, she then opens the can of worms that as their representative at Pycon, her actions in taking it to twitter and putting up a pic of 7 men without identifying the two gentlemen behind the comments has opened up the possibility of lawsuits from all 7 men for slanderous remarks made by their employee who was at the conference as their rep.
I read something that some ambulance chaser over in the states posted up saying that it would be hard for her ex-employers to defend against a wrongful dismissal case. I reckon that it would be relatively easy. Her actions polarised a large segment of the community that she is supposed to be evangelising to against them and has led to attacks against their corporate infrastructure damaging their reputation in the industry. Those are two massively powerful defences really.
Lets see... do we keep the woman who has potentially opened us up to a number of lawsuits, potentially alienated our future clients and workers and has cost us a large amount in dealing with DDoS attacks caused by her actions... or do we give her a DCM (Don't Come Monday) slip and have security escort her off the premises.
I think that they went with the right option for the betterment of the company...
while all those feckers are busy bouncing their money between the various companies in other countries within their group to reduce taxable income is a bit of a joke really.
I would like to see a flat rate corporation tax introduced of 25%... if a company makes 1 pound, it owes 25p to the government. If it tries to move the money to another country to reduce their tax liabilities, tax them 30% on the money being transferred out of the country.
I can pretty much guarantee that they will stop avoiding their tax bills at that point.
And dropping 1p off the duty on beer... bit of a joke really... in cold weather, you can usually get a couple of good p's out of a pint... especially after 10 or 12 of them.
Well, I have the readies in my pocket... well in my bank... want to order a nexus 10 fondle slab so that it is waiting for me at home when I get back from working in Ireland and stupid bloody google play doesnt even bother to find out if I actually live in the UK or I live in Ireland and geoblocks me from buying one.
Twats... Someone at Google needs a boot to the bollocks for that little stuff up. The bastards would have had 400 quid off me (for the 32gb version) if they hadnt blocked me!
I went from working a well paid salary job to a contracting role just outside of London where I was making... roughly the same amount as what I was making in my permanent job. Then I got offered a really well paid job... in Ireland. So every Monday morning, I pack my bags, go to Gatwick and take a flight to Dublin. Then every Friday afternoon, I reverse the trip and spend the weekend at home on the south coast.
I was thinking of heading back home to Australia to try and get a well paid job over there, but when I was back there a couple of years back, I was shocked at the cost of living out there. Yes, I would be making a load of money back in Australia... but when you are paying out around 1k-2k/month in rent in addition to the cost of your utilities and then having to buy food on top of that (and paying out $10 for a pint of lager... where is the fun in that). I figured that I wouldnt be making any more really than I am making now.
Now... where is my cheap beer?
Joust was such a good game that it even got a special zone in World of Warcraft - Cataclysm :)
There was a plethora of games that I miss from my youth. Crazy Climber, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Defender, Scramble, Streetfighter(any version), Galaxians and Galaga, Asteroids, Tetris, Lunar Lander, Frogger...
Ahh... the hours (and dollars) spent wasting time playing those games... I think that I might have to go looking for some classic arcade machines :D
Because if they did try to go Cisco for a massive amount as it seems that they should, then Cisco would pull out all the stops and do some serious smashing of their own. And those 4 patents would all be cancelled and then Microsoft and Apple would both turn around and demand their money back...
Which I think would have quietly disappeared into a Cayman bank never to be seen again!
Mines the one with the Cayman bank books in the pocket...
That the previous government signed with the yanks, we have loads of American companies coming into Australia trying to sue Australian companies that have been established for 40-50 years for infringing their 'IP' when the companies they have targeted existed long before their company even did.
And now we have examples of dodgy US patents being introduced into Australia to try and force more Australian companies to hand over their existing IP to US companies for nothing.
The only thing that will correct this issue is for the current government to rip up the US trade agreement (it's way too one sided for my liking) and tell the US that they are now at the back of the queue in terms of favored trading partners. The US might jump up and down a bit and scream a lot more, but considering that their banks screwed our banks with their toxic sub-prime loans... feck em.
I'm a software developer so I dont really need a lab at home. But I play around with network administration and security as a hobby and so I usually have 5-6 boxes floating about in the house acting as servers. Usually when I upgrade hardware in my main desktop, I will get a cheap case and migrate the old hardware into that and use that as the base for a new server.
I need to get myself some commercial grade networking kit so I can start playing around with Cisco gear and getting my skills up in those areas.
For me, the home lab is a nice to have but isnt essential to my career moves.
Politicians used to get into the business to try and make a difference for the common folk who share the same beliefs they did. They would try and introduce laws that were based on common sense and would work hard for their money. They actually had some respect in the community
These days however, most politicians are getting into the business for the high salary, the overpaid pension when they are removed from office (if elected), the chance of rorting the system with dodgy expenses and the chance to get on the book circuit after they retire from politics. Modern politicians are the best that money can buy... just ask most of the big businesses around the world and have them trot out their collections of brought and paid for politicians who will pass any law they want. And any modern politician who goes into the business with good intentions usually finds out that the only way to get ahead is to give head... to the lobby groups and special interest groups who will help them get elected again if they just push through this silly little law.
These professional politicians are harder to get rid of than herpes... and illegal to kill.
for the guys over in China to connect to so that they could then VPN into Verizon.
Would have been a much more secure option all round. Firewalled on both sides so that you can monitor whats happening in both directions. And with his multiple jobs, he could have set up a terminal server farm of virtual machines with the firewall routing all VPN traffic to the required TS.
If he had done that, then he would still be quite happily sitting at home coding away making a mint.
However, now that he has been caught, I suspect that he might be in line for a lawsuit for gaining money by deception.
I am on the verge of buying myself a new laptop. As most of the ones that I am interested in these days is Winblows 8 only, I can see myself buying a copy of Windows 7 to install on the thing or downloading a copy of Linux and then I may consider running Winblows 8 in a virtual machine. And as I usually build my own home PC's I would seriously consider dumping Windows 7 on the home machine and going full Linux and run Windows 7 in virtual machines for those times when I have to do something in Windows...
I have a similar story to that one... except that it involves a new computer that someone doesnt know how to operate and a son who has a friend who is a computer expert. All set back in the days when DOS was king and Windows 3.11 was the new prince.
I got a phone call a couple of days after the nice lady had purchased the computer from the company I was working for at the time... seems that it had stopped working and had a single line message on the screen... cannot find command.com.
I got her to bring it into the shop which she did. Loaded up the recovery disk we had and booted the computer. I did a dir /s *.com and couldnt find a single com file anywhere. I also did a check for .dll as well... nope... nothing.
Asked the lady about it and she said that her son had brought around a friend who know everything about computers and he said that he would get it running really fast by cleaning out all the unnecessary files. So they let him go for it. And he cleaned out a load of stuff. So I explained to the nice lady that her sons friend was an idiot who didnt really know what he was doing and that he had deleted a load of files that were needed for the computer to work properly.
I reflashed the drive for her to load dos and windows back onto it and told her not to let her sons friend anywhere near the computer again.
Unfortunately I should have told her not to let her son anywhere near the computer because she was back in a couple of weeks later with a shed load of viruses that her son had installed after getting a bunch of games disks off his friend.
The company I used to work for has our servers hosted with Phoenix's hosting services (we signed up with them before Phoenix brought them out. The thing is that the company I used to work for are credit insurance brokers and when I noticed that article on el reg about them getting rid of 300 staff and going into major cost cutting measures... I talked to one of our staff members who does the credit checks... Pheonix were not looking in good shape back then and so we put them on our monitor list to make sure that our websites would be safe. I think that they will be watching Phoenix a bit closer now.
I have used OS/2 2.1, Warp 3 and Warp 4 and I feel that if IBM had given their bastard child a bit more love and attention, it would have really crapped all over Windows. But the lack of driver support and application support was the killer for me. I loved that it was a proper 32 bit operating system at the time when you either had to use a 32 bit windows shell over DOS 7.0 (Windows 95 & 98) or you had to go to Windows NT 3.5/4 for a proper 32 bit operating system. NT was good but didnt have the application support from Microsoft and the majority of other application developers were still farting about writing code for DOS and Windows 95.
In the end, Microsoft won that battle because they took all of their cool code that worked on the PC-Compatibles and put out Windows NT (Microsoft's version of OS/2 3.0). And with their access to the undocumented Windows API 32 bit subsystem, they had a lot more application support than IBM allowed.
It's a shame really because I really thought that OS/2 had the legs to really make it.
So she clicks on a torrent to download a copy of the song... and doesnt have a bit torrent client on her Pooh laptop...
Is she still sharing out 99% of the "failed download" with anyone else?
I am willing to bet that she didnt have a copy of any bit torrent client and therefore was physically unable to share the torrent.
If she is unable to share anything, then it was an attempt to download that failed and therefore is not an infringement.
"There is no Harry potter style waggling of a wand at the screen and shouting Fanboi chants.
THE REG... Please stop publishing utterly inaccurate and badly researched articles."
I do believe that he actually published a well researched paper on the usability of Windows 8. It is not up to Windows fanboi's like yourself to try and shout him down in a torrent of abuse. It is your position in the argument to either ignore articles like this that point out some serious deficiencies in the Windows 8 desktop operating system in terms of usability or to try and post legitimate responses that detail your research into how usable Windows 8 is. Unfortunately, it appears that the average intelligence of the Windows supporters seems to be dropping faster than Apples share prices are.
When you can postulate a legitimate argument against Mr Nielsen and you have the credentials to equal his in his selected field, then you have the right to go around saying that he is talking utter rubbish.
Outside of that ever happening, if ever, feel free to rant and rave and look like a complete muppet.
I have a qnap ts-410 4 drive NAS. I had one glitch with the drives in it, when I got it a couple of years back, in that I was using drives that werent recommended. However, I did a scan on the drives and everything came good again and it is now going great guns. I also have a D-Link DNS-323 2 drive NAS and I quite like the D-Links as well. However, the Synology has an added feature where you can add in a 2 or 5 drive expansion box and just plug it into the back of their NAS's and it allows you to add to your existing structure without having to setup a whole new NAS. If I was starting all over again, I would either go for a HP Microserver and FreeNAS or I would go for the Synology option.
I have worked for a company brokering credit insurance (finance) to companies who are selling their goods on credit (i.e. the suppliers who supplied Comet their goods on credit) and I can tell you it is a damned complex process. As the article says, it's usually the banks who are supplying the credit to the companies who are selling the goods that push for credit insurance. After all the banks want to get their money in the end. This indemnifies the guys supplying the goods on tick against a company going bust suddenly and leaving them holding a note for hundreds of thousands of pounds (dollars, euros, yuan) and having no way of recovering that money which in turn could send the supplier bust.
A lot of times, the underwriters we were dealing with would supply a limit lower than the amount asked for, which would give an indicator that there was something wrong with the guys you were selling your stuff to. This would in turn dictate your policy terms for selling to them... meaning that if you had in the past given them pretty good payment required terms (60-90 days or even 120 days), you might suddenly change your terms with them to 30-60 days or even tell them that they cant have the goods unless they pay up front for them.
If you ever want to know information about a company and any problems they might be having, check out Dun and Bradstreet (www.dnb.com) and get a credit report of them.
8 years ago, I went back to Australia for a few years after spending a few years in the UK. Shortly after I got back, the hard drive in my mothers computer bit the big one. Fortunately she had an extended warranty on it and got it replaced. I knew straight away that there would be a good chance that the box would come back without an OS (mainly because the company she brought it from is well dodgy) and sure enough it didnt.
When the computer came back without the OS, I called HP support in Sydney and ended up talking to a muppet with him telling me that I would have to pay for another copy of XP because they didnt ship the media with the computer (instead installing it on a recovery partition on the drive that died). When I explained to him that the drive had died, he basically said tough, you should have made the recovery disks (my mum was 60 and is about computer literate as a rock). I explained to him that I would hang up on him and call Microsoft and explain to them that HP had been trying to force me into buying a whole new licensed version of XP when we had purchased a licence with the computer. He ask me to hold for a couple of minutes while he consulted with his supervisor... and when he came back, he told me that he would ship the recovery media out to me free of charge.
The whole gist of the story is that HP support is a rip off joke...
I am on a short break from the game while I am working in Ireland (and using a crappy laptop that doesnt run the game at all well) but once the break is over, I will be spending time levelling, gearing up and then getting out and raiding. But, as I said, for now I will keep playing and when The Elder Scrolls Online comes out, I will be giving that a serious look because for me at least, WOW has become too child-like and is dumbed down dramatically. I started playing not long after TBC and continued through Wrath and Cata and while this expansion seems pretty... it has also removed a lot of the stuff I loved about the game. The complexities of getting your character the best combination of gear, enchants and gems to go raiding. It will just have to wait and see what the future brings for it all.
I build my own desktops and I never buy off the shelf systems unless it is for the company that I am working for. And with that in mind, I wont be upgrading from Windows 7 any time soon and when I eventually have to (IE: I buy a laptop that comes with Windows 8 installed) then I will be looking at moving to a *nix based operating system.
I have had a quick peek at Metro and I am not that impressed with it for the enterprise environment.
I think that Ballmer is pushing Microsoft into the grave with this attempt to get into the mobile market.
and @durbans... ever since Microsoft nailed their networking stack onto the side of windows, their operating systems have never been secure.
I think that in cases of cyberbullying, this would be a good law to have. However, the number of celebs/media whores that are starting to whinge and complain about anyone saying anything about them is on the increase and the cops are starting to get involved and targeting people who just post vitriolic comments about oxygen thieves from the reality tv genre shows expressing their dismay that people are still allowed to inhale food and oxygen while people from third world countries are dying of starvation.
That being said, I think that I may need to go and clean out my personal blog of a few comments questioning certain 'stars' ability to walk and breathe at the same time. I'll just get my coat
Started programming in basic 32 years ago in high school (punch cards being taken to the local uni to be run as a batch for us).
Went out into the real work to work as a manual labourer for the next 10+ years. Then 20 years ago, decided that I was going to get out of manual labour and start learning how to program in real languages.
Started off learning Pascal to learn proper structured programming then moved to C, ASM and CoBOL in that order. C stuck as my preferred language.
Because of learning how to program in C, every other C based language is learnt in weeks, if not days because of the basic syntax and semantics.
I started using unix based OS's about 20 years ago as well. Before that, it was the ever dodgy (Q)DOS as supplied by good old MS. To be honest, I think that Unix hands DOS a serious arse kicking.
return (dmr != null ? 'Hello World' : 'Goodbye World');
That isnt so bad... when Wrath came out, I levelled my 2 old mains from level 70 - level 80 in my karazhan gear without changing a single thing. This time around, my druid was wearing Cataclysm blues and greens by the time he finished levelling.
And my two old mains... they are still mosting wearing their T10 stuff and possibly wont have any new gear until they hit 85.
My O2 contract runs out in a few months and I am thinking of binning the 3G I have and going back to a normal type phone... One that doesnt have all sorts of ads appearing when all I want to do is check a location on a map
And when the contract for my N97 runs out... that one is not getting renewed.
Instead of giving kids new gadgets and dumbing down the world, teach them how to read and get out into the world and socialise.
While they are at it, they can also teach them how to accept responsibility for their actions by actually punishing them when they do something wrong instead of just slapping them on the wrist lightly.
The country I call home is rapidly become more screwed up by the day thanks to a bunch of muppet politicians who should be the first against the wall come the revolution.
What it basically means to Australia is that you cant take pictures of your kids in the bath to send to your parents. You couldnt even take pictures of your toddlers running around in the backyard nekid.
There is a reason why, when Australia became a federation, that we put our capital city right out in the sticks well away from the two main cities of the country.
It was so that we knew where all the politicians who were supposed to be running the country in a sage sensible manner could be found at quick notice by an determined mob.
After all, it takes a couple of hours to get there from Sydney and a few more hours than that to get there from Melbourne and peoples initial tempers will have had time to cool down and they can deliberate on the manner of disposal of the useless politicians that they had come looking for.
Failing that, we could always tell the Americans that they can practice their bombing in the region and get rid of a pack of useless public servants at the same time.
The only downshot is that we would then have to rebuild Canberra (no great loss there) and elect another pack of useless politicians... who would be slightly more circumspect than their immediate predecessors.
I must remember never to take my camera down to Kent.
At 6'1" tall and 21st and built more like a front row foward than the michelin man I suspect that the coppers would be busy calling out the riot squad to arrest me if I was taking photos.
The absurdity of things these days where the police think that they have the right to detain someone for persuing their hobby of taking photographs of interesting architecture and people who just happen to be in the shot is unbelievable.
I am waiting for the days when the police think that they have the right to grab people who look different off the street, whisk them in front of a judge in the middle of the night and they disappear off into a resettlement camp. Then I know it will be time to find a nice big hole in a country far away and go there.
They are basically talking about low-jacking all cars on the road…
fsck me… big brother here we come…
I can just imagine a phone call to a car owner one night going something like this:
“Hello sir, I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, but this is constable <name> of the <insert police district> police, is this ” <persons name>
“Err… yeah, it is”
“Sir we would like to confirm that you are the owner of a vehicle with the tag number of “ <insert registration here>
“Err… yeah, that’s my registration”
Sir, we are currently showing your car parked at “<insert random dogging site>”, is this correct?”
Err… it could be parked there
Sir, as of <insert date> due to complaints by residents of the area we have installed CCTV cameras in the area and are currently monitoring the occupants of the said vehicle acting in an illegal manner. We would like you to know that if the car is there without your knowledge, the occupants will be arrested as soon as the patrol car gets there and that the video of the performance of the occupants will be posted on the internet.
And I am very much against the censoring of the internet in any form what so ever.
And if anyone wants to accuse me of being soft on child porn and having a pro-paedophilia agenda, I would like to point out to them that I have 2 sisters who were sexually molested by a member of the roman catholic church back in the late 1970s.
If anything, I feel that the laws and society are too lenient towards the rockspiders and they should be treated like any other criminal.
All this sort of treatment is, is a blind attempt to keep the general population of the world dumbed down and blindly watching the latest edition of a popular reality tv show while the government gets you all lubed up ready for your next anal probing.
Pirates... because in most cases, the government hates the competition...
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