* Posts by xyzw

14 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Apr 2014

Post-Brexit UK.gov must keep EU scientists coming, say boffins

xyzw

Close the borders!

I thought the whole point about Brexit was to close the borders?

I thought "Britain is too lazy and too fat" and the point of Brexit was to actually force pure British people can develop the UK to a new empire fit for the 21st century!

Free Windows 10 upgrade: Time is running out – should you do it?

xyzw

Re: I wonder

I am not sure what you mean by dodgy version.

I made the move a few weeks ago for a new pc and an old latop.

I simply downloaded win10 iso from MS website and created a bootable usb and in both cases, wiped clean.

On the old laptop, I used an windows 7 home OEM key (not even from this laptop!): it worked like a charm (all drivers ok). Booting speed is faster.

On the new pc (nuc6i7kyk), I used the licence key from my windows 7 ultimate box: it worked (there was no "standard" driver for the network card, I had to install them from a usb after downloading on a different pc!).

Google UK coughs up £130m back taxes. Is it enough?

xyzw

Re: The article author is part of the problem.

"This is incorrect. Companies DO NOT PAY VAT."

I am almost 100% this is not technically correct either. It varies with the company size and the country.

Companies:

- do not have to pay VAT on some purchase (if both side have a VAT number and can sell VAT free for the good concerned). This gets even more complicated for purchase across countries

- have to pay VAT on certain purchase, but can claim it back on their VAT balance with the tax man.

- cannot claim back VAT on all expenses (e.g. it used to be the case to not be able to claim back VAT on French motorway tickets and I think, still to date, you can only recover a part of VAT on petrol in travel expenses)

- in the UK, on small companies, you cannot claim back VAT on many expenses (I am just thinking of some expenses where we cannot claim VAT back with building free-holding company I belong )

Here's your Linux-booting PS4, says fail0verflow

xyzw

Re: Great News

I'd like to be a bit more precise: The CELL was not "used by the GPU".

The CELL SPEs were used, among other things, to process geometry because the RSX was REALLY poor in term of vertex shader processing (mostly, <shortcut> because of the way it was fetching vertexes </shortcut>).

Fork off! FFmpeg project leader quits, says he's had enough with these forking AV libraries

xyzw

Re: Slightly off-topic

Not really a field favored by French univ as far as I remember my studies.

It can be challenging in term of signal processing, and French engineering school are rather good at maths (e.g. Fabrice Bellard, the guy mentioned as the founder of ffmpeg, went to ecole polytechnique, see his homepage for the rest of his top notch works: http://bellard.org/).

Also look at INRIA if you wonder why some French people are rather good in image processing/rendering (INRIA is a good contributor to siggraph)

French privacy cops snarl at websites over crap EU cookie warnings

xyzw

Amazon utilise des cookies. En savoir plus.

"Amazon utilise des cookies. En savoir plus" is all you get from amazon.fr

Amazon does even tell you you could disable them (and how).

Full law here: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm

They even provide tempate and some kits (http://webtools.ec.europa.eu/cookie-consent/documentation/)

WikiLeaks docs show NSA's 10-year economic espionage campaign against France

xyzw

Re: This is not a news

@Anonymous Coward: Everybody knows your "friends" are spying on you for economic reasons.

Everybody strives to have better tool than their "friends".

When you lose, well, you swallow it up and move on.

When you lose publicly (in the media), you are forced to declare your outrage, and eventually, you need to send to friend's ambassador back to his country (slap on the wrist are not allowed!), and then? ......................... Business as usual!

What makes you think people were complacent? Trust me (well... you don't know me), they are not.

You seem to mix two different things regarding the NSA spying involved:

- the allegedly illegal one that allegedly happen on american citizen

- the allegedly legal one that allegedly happen on non-american targets (for economic reasons or not)

You might have a chance to get the NSA accountable on the former (and dream on, GCHQ :)), but as fast as the latter is concerned, I wish you luck as you will be opposed, with reason (which you will not know), some very powerful shields (like official secrets acts and equivalents).

xyzw

This is not a news

USA using military spy on France (or other countries) to help their industry has been known for a long time. It was already the case with the Echelon program as far as I remember

Quick google search gives you: "In 1994, the CIA and NSA intercepted phone calls between Brazilian officials and the French firm Thomson-CSF about a radar system that the Brazilians wanted to purchase. A US firm, Raytheon, was a competitor as well, and reports prepared from intercepts were forwarded to Raytheon""

Spaniard sues eBay over right to sell the Sun

xyzw

Re: Oh god

"his solicitor advised him that the light from the Sun takes 1000 years to get to the Earth"... It is actually around 8 minutes...

New EU security strategy: Sod cyber terrorism, BAN ENCRYPTION

xyzw

Re: It is unacceptable

Ordering online is one thing, but it now seems simpler to 3d print weapons to get around border control.

Star-trek teleporters are not yet available for your last point (immigration)

'Rowhammer' attack flips bits in memory to root Linux

xyzw

It looks like a version of Gehot's hack on PS3

[back in 2010 I think]

Report: American tech firms charge Britons a thumping nationality tax

xyzw

The reality of prices..

First, Brits and Euro citizen are usually happy to pay more.

Then, there are a lot more consideration... (I have been there a few year ago, so, let me try to remember...)

When comparing the prices you must make sure you do not compare US price before sales tax versus the UK/Euro price with VAT. It's ~20% of the difference you can explain.

Then, you have other tax cost (like local tax office charging vat or taking a cut of your profit before shipping the rest abroad, etc). Maybe around 5%, but it really depends on your legal setup.

Then, you also a problem of harmonization or prices in the Euro+UK zone. The consumer see the final price, but VAT varies between 15% and 25% in Europe, so, you adjust your Euro price, so all customer sees the same price, but you protect your profit margin.

With the UK at the top of that, you set a price for a year, estimating roughly (with a margin) what will be the parity of the currency against the bigger Euro market (because consumers usually compare at product launch the cost, usually the current spot rate, without considering VAT etc).

Eventually, you can add other costs:

- mandatory translations (depends on countries),

- ratings,

- compliance tests (e.g. electrical).

etc

All you see as a parent company is a profit margin you'd like to make per product, so, you adjust the sale price in function of those numerous "extras".

AMD demos 'Berlin' Opteron, world's first heterogeneous system architecture server chip

xyzw

Re: computational density...

It's because you need more transistors for FP64 to make "the same operation" as FP32.

To make a simple example

- a FP32 is [A]*[B] (where A and B are 32 bits quantities),

- a FP64 is [CA]*[DB] = A*B + (CB+AD)*2^32 + CD*2^64 (A,B,C,D are 64 bits quantities)

This means a (full) FP64 MUL requires 4 times more transistor than a FP32 MUL... or you can reuse some existing circuitry, and the cost of lower performance when using FP64 operations

If you are manufacturing video games card, you only (mostly) care about FP32, but can give away some FP64 capabilities without hitting you cost.

If you are manufacturing card for GPGPU in finance, it is likely your buyer will care mostly (only?) about FP64 capabilities and is "happy" (historically!) to pay a premium to get more transistors, i.e. more FP64 performances (it's not totally true today).

France bans managers from contacting workers outside business hours

xyzw

The article is misleading

There was an article about France forbiding working to check email after 6pm and now this one (and comment about 6-5): these are not the reality.

What was agreed in France, between "social partners" (employees and bosses unions), was to amend the Syntec "social convention". A social convention is something that is added to the law, for some particular area, here, syntec is a engineering social convention (used in software among other areas).

The convention is mostly for "cadres" (lose word for "managers").

These people, under the convention, are paid for a set number of working days during the year (max is about 210-220 days, so, 365 minus week-end and bank holidays and vacation), instead of being paid hourly.

It also state that there is a minimal "daily rest period" (usually, consecutive hours) of around 11 hours (at the top of my head), and 13 hours for the week-end (so, you can be asked to work 13 hours a day).

I guess limit Euro limits apply at the top of that.

This new text wants to enforce disconnection, to make sure people are having their mandatory rest period for the 210-220 days.