Posts by aks

EU wouldn't! Uncle Sam brandishes 'up to 100%' tariffs over France's Digital Services Tax

Re: Wrong argument

Define "pay ridiculous amounts for that IP". If the local company calculates it can make a profit by paying that amount, then it's not a ridiculous amount.

Re: Wrong argument

They do, that's the point. They achieve low taxation in those countries by having non-USA operating companies pay heavy licensing fees to the head office. That's the result of using astute accountants to make sure the profit in those countries is low. The accountants read the rules and obey them to the letter.

There is also the question of who's paying the VAT that's levied on most purchases. That goes straight to the government (but of course, it's the consumer who actually pays it).

Android 11 Developer Preview 3 allows your mobe to become a router via USB Ethernet – if you can get a decent signal

Re: Hasn't it been able to do this for ages?

If you're talking about making your phone or 4g tablet into a hotspot, Windows 10 certainly does allow you to mark the connection as metered. It also allows you to tell it how many gigabytes per month and when the renewal date is.

The other "new" thing here is to be able to connect by USB to a magic box and attach other devices such as HDMI screen and USB keyboard and mouse. That's not new. I've had that capability for years with my Lumia 950 XL.

US judge puts Amazon's challenge to Pentagon JEDI deal into force stasis

Star wars Jedi versus Star Trek's Klingons (version 1).

?

Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service. Older coders: Who's laughing now? Turns out we're still vital

Re: Mindset

It's necessary to exhume the body to be able to cut off the head and put it on a pole outside Westminster Hall for the next 14 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell#Death_and_posthumous_execution

Still my hero.

Mayday! Mayday! The next Windows 10 update is finally on approach to a PC near you

Re: daubing the veteran OS with the Fluent Design brush.

Find someone who will provide you an alternate skin.

Personally, I much prefer the flat Metro design, but then I hated Windows XP by comparison with Windows 2000's much plainer approach. Windows for me is a tool. I don't want a pretty hammer or screwdriver, so why would I want a pretty operating system.

Re: Updating Cortana

we're not all corporate users.

let the local bofh play with it for a while, break it, then wait for the fixes.

never let a new release be rolled out corporate-wide. are you mad, or something!

Re: Just wait

me! me! me! i love the excitement!!!

(not on my main machine, obviously)

Star's rosette orbit around our supermassive black hole proves Einstein's Theory of General Relativity correct

Re: Theory?

This is the original meaning of the words "proof" and "prove", meaning "test".

Still used with this meaning when referring to proof-mark, proving guns, and proving ground.

If something passes a specific test or tests, it has been proven.

Proven has never meant that something is true, only that it has passed the tests.

First it was toilet paper. Then pasta. Now Broadcom suspects hoarders are behind its surprisingly good-looking Q2 sales

Re: Roll on pocket PC

how much storage do you want in your mobile? 256gb microsd cards are common enough nowadays.

my mobile has a separate very small box that allows the attachment of hdmi screen and usb for keyboard and mouse.

we're already living in your proposed future.

what we really need is the walnut-sized computer described in "Bill, The Galactic Hero" by Harry Harrison where the computer showed the screen on a convenient wall and a keyboard onto the desktop.

Talk about ill-gotten gains: Coronavirus KOs Xerox's $30bn months-long hostile takeover bid of HP Inc

Re: aren't they doomed anyway ?

The more interesting question is who's got the money to buy Xerox now that it's cheap.

China?

16 years and counting: How ESA squeezed oodles of bonus science out of plucky Mars Express probe

It's a headline. They're always compact in the extreme. In newpapers, the headline is normally written by a different team that the one which writes the articles. That's one reason why there's often a contradiction between the headline and the content. As for [The] Register, I'm not at all sure but we're likely to find out.

Want to see through walls? Electroboffins build tiny chip in the lab that vibrates at just the right frequency to do it

Re: Kapton tape, sapphire substrate, gold or tungsten and titanium

everything brand new will be expensive. as this technique expands, a million possible uses will emerge. lasers were very slow to be adopted for real-world use but now they're everywhere.

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

Re: RE: snmigueelbeer

Technically, a Corporation is legally a person. Thats what the word incorporation means. "made flesh"

World's smallest violin to be played for opportunistic sellers banned from eBay and Amazon for price gouging

Soap is more effective than sanitiser, according to this experiment.

https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0320/1124367-explainer-soap-or-sanitiser/

Re: Price Gouging: the free market libertarian perspective

The failed socialist experiment in the UK following WW2. The USA did not follow that trend and boomed.

With its stores outside China shuttered, Apple ditches two-mobes-per-customer limit for online shoppers

Sales tax: New Jersey, Jersey, Guernsey

UK 20%

New Jersey 6.625%

Jersey 5%

Delaware 0%

Guernsey 0%

It's time to track people's smartphones to ensure they self-isolate during this global pandemic, says WHO boffin

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

I don't trust The Epoch Times as it's the mouthpiece of Falun Gong, a truly weird bunch of religious nutters. Banned by China.

FYI: You can trick image-recog AI into, say, mixing up cats and dogs – by abusing scaling code to poison training data

GIGO

Surely this is simple garbage in, garbage out

Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, surely has no frozen water, right? Guess again: Solar winds form ice

Re: Temperatures can soar over 400C

Remind me again where Farenheit was from. Germany, wasn't it?

The Unihertz Atom XL: An iPhone SE-sized rugged phone that's also a walkie-talkie

Looks very like the CAT phones my son prefers. I'm sure he hammers in nails with it.

In-depth: Deloitte and accounts expert both cleared what HPE described as 'contrived' Autonomy sales

Re: Is this the best HP have?

Does the fact that no "product" was delivered to the VAR during the short interval in question make the question of failure by Kraft to buy the product moot? Q4's figures would have taken a hit but that's all.

Google to appeal against €7m fine from Swedish watchdog for failing to remove search results under GDPR

Almost by definition, it's people who don't want you to know about their shady past who're demanding this kind of take-down.

Anybody got a direct link to this legitimate information?

Come kneel with us at UK's Cathedral, er, Oil Rig of the Canal: Engineering masterpiece Anderton Boat Lift

It's called a floodplain, the one we've reused for housing and then put barriers around to keep that nasty water away. The law of perfectly predictable consequences.

Don't be fooled, experts warn, America's anti-child-abuse EARN IT Act could burn encryption to the ground

Re: I don't have a problem with this

Didn't you read the article? This is a bi-partisan move, not down to Trump, Obama, Clinton, etc.

Huawei to the danger zone: Now Uncle Sam slaps it with 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, money laundering, theft of robot arm and source code

Re: Business as usual

Nothing new here. Edison stiffed Swan for the invention of the electric lightbulb in exactly that way.

Dual screens, fast updates, no registry cruft and security in mind: Microsoft gives devs the lowdown on Windows 10X

Re: Its not windows as people know it - Change the name...

So what happens to the promise that Windows 10 would be upgraded rather than for us needing to pay through the nose for each new release?

Re: Dual screen?

Many valid points.

Microsoft have track record of putting older versions of the OS in a black box. Remember XP as a guest VM inside Windows 7? Not actually necessary if you go through all the exe files and adjust their compatibility settings.

Personally, I prefer the flat UI/UX. Hated XP icons. Hate Android and Apple icons. Too decorative. Solid colour desktop. No animations. Why not allow alternative decor? We don't all like the same thing. For me, operating systems are my daily workbench, not my place where i relax.

Former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'submits himself' for arrest in central London

Re: Again, and again, and again...

Lynch could have done that at any time. He clearly believes he can win.

Contractors welcome Lords inquiry into IR35 before tax reforms hit private sector but fear it's 'too little, too late'

Re: When is a duck not a duck?

Your statement is correct but it does mean that it's impossible to obey the law that hasn't even been written yet.

Is Chrome really secretly stalking you across Google sites using per-install ID numbers? We reveal the truth

Re: Ad flinger makes browser, ad flinger needs to track you

What would you break out?

If the Chrome browser no longer enabled targeted ads, it would no longer have a reason to exist.

Open-source browsers exist. Use them. I do.

Fingerprints that are only available to Google are automatically available to government agencies when requested.

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

SQL is not a "proper database" but a collection of similar but different extensions to a basic set of clumsy scripts to access and manipulate utterly different underlying data-storage systems.

Believe me, I've been there, done that, and have the T-shirt. Writing code to query the provider for its name, version, and locale before knowing which dialect to use in driving it is decidedly non-trivial.

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

With or without roaming, UK rates are lower than many other countries. That's what competition and market forces deliver.

Re: TL; DR

Learn to enjoy it! :D

Re: Transition Period?

Article 50 also forbid is from signing deals with anyone else. After tomorrow, we can sign what we like with anyone.

Re: Transition Period?

Politics shouldn't be a career. That's a major part of the problem.

We need MP's who have actually worked in the real world before pretending to represent us.

Silly them. Otherwise, get an EU SIM for use abroad, just as we used to do.

Just more Project Fear.

Fuming French monopoly watchdog is so incensed by Google's 'random' web ad rules, it's fining the US giant, er, <1% annual profit

Re: "Google said it will appeal the ruling against it"

Not only Google

'Buyer's remorse' drove HP's legal crusade to go after Lynch, High Court told

Re: Buyer's remorse?

Apparently, Oracle did have a look but decided the price was way too high.

Re: Sold as seen

What HP really want is a win in this civil case (balance of probabilities) to use in their upcoming criminal case (beyond all reasonable doubt). Doubt if they'll get it.

Homeland Security backs off on scanning US citizens, Amazon ups AI ante, and more

You think you can walk into *any* country while wearing your burka? Is that what you were wearing when you had your passport photo taken? Iris and retinal scan, anyone?

The real issue is whether the facial recognition captured at the desk is retained for further use or erased once you've been identified as safe to enter the country.

They're making the investments so they can copyright it and make money. That's what drives everybody else.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

Re: you never know when your SSD might be used in a time machine.

We always referred to it as packed decimal. Two decimal nibbles in one byte with the final nibble being the sign. C for positive, D for negative and F for unsigned. Eight bytes is 16 nibbles giving 15 digits plus a sign. That datatype exists in SQL on all platforms. I'm not sure if it's implemented in all providers but certainly in Oracle and SQL Server. The sign related to the encoding of 80-column Hollerith cards.

Take a Big Blue cheque and go: IBM settles 281 UK age discrim cases

Those dollar signs look like an admission of guilt to me.

Yeah but, no, but... 'Overpaid' Boeing snaps back at NASA's watchdog

I do commend what the Indians *have* achieved.

It woz The Reg wot won it! Big Blue iron relics make it back to Blighty

Re: olden days

Creating tidy JCL and decoding core dumps were the fun bits.

Cut my teeth as an operator on a 360/30 with 32KB and the much more powerful 360/50 with 256KB. Teletype machines using paper tape to send and receive data with far flung places such as Turkey.

Why can't you be a nice little computer maker and just GET IN THE TRUNK, Xerox tells HP in hostile takeover alert

Re: Time to get the popcorn!

Which one is Godzilla and which King Kong?

Re: But HP are shift.... and I may be completly out of the loop here.

You'd assume that the combined companies would have a superb skill-set but from their deteriorating financials, maybe not. The question for the future is whether they have the IPR's to grow. I suspect that the majority of their patent portfolio is now very long in the tooth.

Re: HP insisting on due diligence?

Shite because of the auditor they chose. Shite because they only wanted a provisional DD. Super-shite because they didn't even read the contents of the DD before flinging gigabucks at it.