Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The real question is how much tax would they have paid and how many austerity cuts could have been avoided?"
?
What do you mean "how much tax would they have paid?"? In what circumstances? If you mean in circumstances that wouldn't have attracted them here in the first place the answer is simple: none. I'll leave you to work out the effect of that on austerity.
I wonder how many of the critics here, at least those living convenient to cross-channel services, have made trips to France to buy booze and/or fags. It's the same thing. If it becomes possible to make international choices then tax rates become a competitive market.
If a country decides to go the high tax route to gather as much tax as possible from those who aren't mobile there's absolutely no justification sitting and howling* about injustice if tax-payers, individual or corporate go to Hong Kong, Ireland or anywhere else. The decision should have considered these factors.
By adopting more generous rules to high net worth individuals the government has, over the years, gained more tax than it would have done if those individuals hadn't chosen to be here. There are only two questions here:
Does the presence of those individuals with their spending power distort the local economy to the detriment of the rest of us, e.g. in the housing market?
Will these changes lose more from those who move away than it gains by increasing taxes on those who stay?
*Except, of course, the justification of political theatre; shift the blame from the politicians who made the decision in the first place.
"It's the Unix outdated permission systems with scripts run as root and software that must drop privileges itself because of lack of a more granular permission system on processes and files."
No, it's developers* wanting to run their database engines with root permission when they shouldn't need to. There should be a $DatabaseEngine user and group. They can own the scripts, data and everything else to do with the engine. You're obviously unaware that such setups are not only practical but that they've been in use for decades.
"Of course all the downvoters have no clue about a proper permission systems."
No. We're the ones who actually do have a clue. And practical experience.
*Oracle have been around long enough to know better.
Now we're getting to the stuff that matters. Bandwidth to the ISP is one thing. What the ISP does with that is another. Traffic-shaping, for instance. When my old ISP fell into the clutches of TT they traffic-shaped Usenet out of existence for part of the day. And the first rate customer service had been wiped out by a previous owner - I still don't know whether it was run by a chatbot or humans that had failed the Turing test.
These are things which are under the control of ISPs and going to be experienced uniformly by all of the ISP's customers.
"As has been mentioned previously, the BT Openreach estimator that's available to wholesale suppliers is pretty accurate."
The speed I'm able to get in the middle of the afternoon here might be a good deal more than what I'd get in the evening if a lot of people down the road start streaming stuff when they get home from work and my bits have to share the infrastructure with whole lot of others. It might also be better or worse than my neighbours; all our connections come from the same point on the buried cable. Mine comes underground, theirs are overhead from a cable running up a pole, some of them distributed direct from that pole and others from a second pole linked to the first. Clearly there are various options for water penetration, different wiring choices (Al vs Cu) etc.
I got as far as "Wilczek considered a group of atoms in their ground state moving in perpetual circular motion, which is considered an impossible idea because ground states do not have enough energy to spontaneously move."
If I skip everything else I didn't understand it seems to mean that Microsoft are proposing to go round in small circles.
"Now, if HP wanted to license HP-UX, and resume the port to x86, and then hire some quality software developers to upgrade the CDE interface and the available tools ... but that will never happen."
In part because HP-UX is owned by HPE and laptops etc are made by HP Inc. But what a thought.
"cheap components that won't last 2 years"
The trouble with getting this sort of reputation is that even if you turn things round it takes years to get back to where you were. I'm currently on my 2nd HP laptop in the best part of 15 years with no troubles. I also have an all-in-one laser printer which is pretty substantial, has lasted with domestic use for many years and is still going strong. But having seen the HP printer my daughter's firm supplied her with (and looked at what's on the shelf in Staples) when I decided to get a colour laser there's no way I'd have bought it from HP.
I'd really like to see them regain their reputation but in order to do that they really need to face up to how they lost it in the first place. A puff-piece based on what seems to be a shininess comparison isn't convincing evidence that they've done this.
I'm no Apple fanboy - never owned any of their products but:
"The original MAC All in one Computer :vs Commodore PET"
Really! 68k :vs 6502?
You might have said Apple ][ :vs PET but even there Apple was innovative - an open architecture for plug-in boards followed up with the Woz floppy drive. Admittedly they dropped all that later but back then they were innovating. It's just that not many of us are old enough to remember.
"Printing is stupid and primitive"
You are making the common mistake of thinking that everyone else has the same life as yourself.
I've just been printing the handouts for my wife's sewing class. I don't think taking a laptop & showing round would be as useful. That's just one of the very many use cases that you don't happen to have.
"Interesting to see HP moving more to hardware with this and its selloff of its software division."
You missed the split. There are now two HPs. HPE sold the software division. HP inc, which is the hardware and printer ink business, is the one which made this purchase.
Given that goods made all over the world are imported into the EU under the CE mark it doesn't seem to be a critical factor. Unless the standards change what you're making now that meets them will continue to meet them unless you change the product. If the standards change then, irrespective of whether we're in the EU or not the product might have to change to meet them. This is Brexit-neutral as far as selling into the EU is concerned.
What wouldn't be Brexit-neutral would be a UK-only standard which is incompatible with CE in some way, then you'd have to make two different products to sell into different markets. Do you think that's a likely event? Or do you think it more likely that the CE standards will continue to be accepted in the UK, either under the CE mark or some UK-only mark with equivalent standards?
Not being in the customs union would appear to be the real problem.
"life would be a *lot* simpler if so many of the retail sites didn't decide we needed a password and login for *everything*."
My solution is to set up a temporary email address every few months for these wankers and then tear it down later. Their spam just gets bounced.
"And it annoys me that if something like this were to happen today (the taking of a horrifying photo of a child that represents everything wrong with a nations behaviour) everyone would complain that it was too gruesome and they would have to draw a picture."
That would have been the expected result at the time. I'm sure it took a lot of courage to print the picture first time out. And, of course, the result was that public opinion was directed, rightly, at what lead up to the picture and not at the picture itself. It was that ability of the picture to change public opinion that made it iconic.
What we're now seeing is a generation, or at least a sub-set of a generation, who lack the cultural education to recognise what they're looking at and to respond accordingly. It's deeply worrying - those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it.
"with sub average intelligence."
Maybe FB's problem here is that they're trying to do this not with sub average human intelligence but with AI which is well sub sub sub intelligence in practice so now they have to put exceptions in. Because of the scale at which they operate that's what they have to do.
But they do need to get a handle on the fact that when the AI gets it wrong they have to move quickly, intelligently and with good cultural knowledge. The AI isn't going to get things right first time every time but the humans backing it up need to, either by taking appropriate action where they're authorised or in escalating PDQ to someone who can make decisions. If they don't have suitable escalation procedures they're not alone - it seems to be SOP these days for almost any business.
AFAICS from the article he wasn't content with getting the cost of the Windows licence, he went for damages, maybe from greed, maybe just to make a point. Assuming there was the equivalent of the small claims court in his jurisdiction he should have gone for that. Now he's created a precedent which is probably the very opposite of what he intended.
"I think you'll find that the range of models/suppliers this is available on is very limited and it is actually quite difficult to but a laptop now that is compatible with linux."
How many people go round butting laptops?
Buying laptops compatible with Linux doesn't seem to be a problem, however.
"Does he for example go into car showrooms and try it on the sales staff there?"
I have gone into a car showroom and after waiting an unreasonable time for attention, left. And I was seriously looking to buy a new car - which I did from the showroom across the road.
"Sure, you can easily buy a barebones laptop and mod it."
There's a bit of a giveaway in the article linked to. The OS was Vista. That article was written a long while ago. Things have become tighter since then but there are still the sort of options available at vendors such as https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/
The main difference of desktop vs laptop is that the former has a range of cases to take standard components whilst the latter has to have a good proportion of the components, especially the mother board, designed around the case which itself is styled as much as designed. When you don't have a choice of motherboard there's a limited amount of options available to you.
A laptop case designed to take the latest thin mini-itx boards would be a good start.
"Our role in terms of consumer engagement, people are still getting the benefit of the smart meter. It will still be the right decision for a consumer to take a smart meter"
I'm not sure what this bit of verbal compost was supposed to mean but it gives me a sneaking suspicion that his terms of engagement are that he keep the numbers up so that for him its the right decision. Am I being over cynical?
