* Posts by Nick Ryan

3751 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Microsoft plans St Valentine's Day massacre for SHA‑1

Nick Ryan Silver badge

IIS certificate request management

Perhaps Microsoft would like to assist many web site managers and to support the generation of certificate requests within IIS using something other than SHA-1.

While certificates can be requested using the certificate manager MMC plugin, IIS offers a far simpler service for the relatively narrow requirements of https certificates that is less prone to mistakes - either change it to support something other than SHA-1 or remove it altogether.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: All together, now!

Can we get rid of Flash at the same time?

...and Silverlight as well. Same unnecessary rubbish, same problems, similarly unwanted.

However silverlight is still a "recommended" update for making a server less secure... To add to the non-joined up stupiditity should you click on an error link on a Windows server OS it will take you to the MS website which will then fail because JavaScript and Silverlight are not installed/enabled on a server's browser. Yes, we shouldn't really be using a server in this way but it happens...

New state of matter discovered by superconductivity gurus

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Some element of logic would indicate that there should be some state between structurally different states, for example, solid and liquid because during this transition the structure is changing from one very different structure to another. Whether or not this transitory state is a state that the matter is stable enough in so it can be "persuaded" to remain in for any period of time is likely a very different question.

Barnet Council: Outsourcing deal with Capita has 'performance issues'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: translation of strategy into delivery

By definition, what the customer wants is what it states in the contract. However, that may not be what the customer needs.

True, although I did write it as "actually wants" meaning this but "needs" would be more brief and probably more accurate... Although often an end user "needs" a slap but is unlikely to want one... :)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: translation of strategy into delivery

Or more likely:

Do as little of what the customer actually wants as possible while pointing at the contract, laughing and running to the bank.

Microsoft's cmd.exe deposed by PowerShell in Windows 10 preview

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Problem of interfaces

What's most annoying about the interface problem is that the problem was "solved", to a certain degree, many years ago: REXX. All an applicated needed to do was to expose a REXX port and it could be remote controlled.

While it's possible to create your own PowerShell extensions, these are a bastard to deploy easily and require that your application is cobbled together in .net - which for lean or efficient applications is just not possible.

User needed 40-minute lesson in turning it off and turning it on again

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Witless idiots

"Error message? Yeah something popped up but dunno what it said - I just hit 'Cancel'. So why doesn't it work?"

I once had a dumb-arse IT support guy working for me who would do exactly that. Every bloody time. He always failed to look at why something wasn't working and concentrated on the end result of the failure... So on the monitor fault front he'd spend ages going through the monitor connections, power status, fuses, power switches and everything else before finally being prodded into the general direction that turning the computer on as well would be a good start...

NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Speak to Hillary

You sir, seem to have mistaken this website for some other site.

Here we lambast pretty much everyone, although usually from the technical point of view ("where's the IT angle") but not always as we don't want to restrict ourselves too much. Therefore we have articles pointing out holes (and making fun of) both Trump's useless website and email configuration and Clinton's personal email server.

Trumped? Nope. Ireland to retain corporate tax advantage over the US

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Mandate from the voters?

The majority voted for someone else.

It's more correct to state that the majority did not vote for Trump.

The voter turnout was only around 60% (rounding up somewhat) which means than 40% of the eligible voters did not vote. As a result, Trump (or Clinton) have/had at most 30% of the overall vote of eligible voters.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Seems to me ...

Owning a business or two, corporation tax is a bloody imposition and is the case of double or even triple dipping on a company's money for tax purposes...

Tax is paid for the purchase of services or supplies. Tax is paid for the sale of services of supplies. This leaves a somewhat smaller amount of money from which operating expenses are paid, e.g. utility, staff, insurance and other costs.

Out of what's left a government will then arbitrarily decide to take, for example, 40% of it. Just because. There's no "we're saving for a rainy day", or "we're saving for a new factory or office", just a 40% grab of whatever's there. After which the company may pay shareholder's dividends - which are also taxed at source and the shareholder will likely pay tax as well.

In other words if, as a business, you want to save for anything you can't because the powers that be have decided that you must instead borrow the bloody money instead. At poor rates, and only if the lender feels that they can make an immediate profit and therefore may lend to you.

I do have some sympathy when corporations do their level best to not have all their profit swiped before even more taxes are paid. On the other hand, rules are rules, even if they are unfair and barely justifiable and as is the case with many things, it's the smaller players that tend to suffer.

Google Pixel pwned in 60 seconds

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Cheaper to pay bug bounties...

Mistakes can happen but the biggest improvements come from compartmentalisation and sensible coding and testing. If a unit of code has clearly defined actions and inputs and outputs then this compartmentalisation allows the code to be tested. Wider ranging logic failures can still happen but at least the building blocks should work as expected.

I've always worked on the "trust nothing" approach and while I taught myself this from the age of 9 (I really should have got out more) it was demonstrably evident how much better this worked when it was time for computing coursework time at around the age of 15 as mine was easy to test/debug therefore I got drafted in to help with other students...

A simple example (bare in mind that these were primitive systems used in a primitive manner because the teachers didn't understand anything more), but 80% of the software that was written made assumptions about the state of variables before a block of code was entered. So instead of initialising flags at the start of the block it was relied upon that every block of code reset the flag once it had finished with it (you should be able to see where this is going). These were global variables on a system with tight constraints on the memory available and given the weirdo manner in which this language worked (global vars unless specified local) and the teachers lack of understanding of functions, despite them being in the language, students were taught GOSUB based code instead. Nothing overly wrong with this and everything worked fine as functionally clearing flags after you're done with them does work and is in fact slightly more efficient than initialising flags that were initially set to zero to start with. Until, of course, one function doesn't reset the flag in which case it was a pleasant experience checking all 5000 lines for the same flag just to see which was the last one that didn't clear the value.

Trust nothing. Assume all input to be bad and work from there.

Robot solves Rubik's Cubes in 637 milliseconds

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: World Wide Jungle

Yep, and it's same old bullshit pedalled on each one... "you won't believe what happened next", "millionaires hate you knowing this secret", "this woman in X makes Y per day working at home" (stop yer tittering at the back) or "How to buy X, Y or Z for unbelievable prices" and so on. Repetition: the underpinning of brainwashing. The more "reputable" (hahaha) sites foist this bullshit on every page the more the gullible believe that any of it is remotely true and not just click bait shit.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: “large number of unanticipated sensors”

"Oh, look here, I've got a sonar sensor! Crap, a laser rangefinder too! What am I going to do with these?"

Attach them to sharks of course.

Rolling out flash in the enterprise? It's a matter of application

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Facepalm

Hmmm. On the workstation front I was on the indirect receiving end of a numpty seller who was trying to tell their clients that there really wasn't much of a performance gain in using an SSD in a workstation compared to a HDD. Windows spends an inordinate amount of time reading and writing small chunks of data from arbitrary locations on a volume and this won't be improved through removing the mechanical action of forcing the damn drive head to move from one physical location to another. Repeatedly. Seriously?

While caches can be overloaded on an SSD but this is no real difference to HDDs which commonly suffer from cache overload situations that force the IO subsystem to wait. Not that storage systems couldn't or shouldn't be optimised for their intended purposes but for most operational situations an SSD is better than an HDD and the remaining cases are usual financially motivated rather than operational.

What do you give a bear that wants to fork SSL? Whatever it wants!

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Joke

Re: 25KB or RAM

How do pictures of snakes reduce storage? :)

Why Apple's adaptive Touch Bar will flop

Nick Ryan Silver badge

The windows tablets of 15+ years ago (or whenever it was) generally weren't bad systems overall, although I only got to use a few of them.

The key downsides were the price and the rather less than stellar touch screen experience which was stylus driven only which also lagged in time behind presses and the rather poor handwriting recognition - it was inaccurate and slow therefore it was easier to use the on screen keyboard instead.

The main and simultaneous advantage and disadvantage was that it ran a largely standard OS and applications and while some worked with what was effectively a single button mouse, many didn't.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Apples and Lemons?

What? So you DO look at the keys then?

My whole point..

If it's dark and I have to find the bloody thing I'll be looking for the laptop itself and not just the keys :)

I don't know if I'm alone on this but I can can touch type happily on a normal keyboard with a normal set of keys however when it comes to hitting function keys I tend to look at what I'm doing because firstly they're not normal keys to press (and function keys are aligned differently on many keyboards) and secondly because function keys tend to have rather more "interesting" functions therefore I'd much rather that I pressed the correct one first time. Even though the Escape key is generally in the top left of a keyboard it's action is often more dramatic than just a normal key press therefore I'm likely to find myself looking at the keyboard to check this one as well.

My pet hates: Laptops which swap the bloody Fn and Ctrl keys around (Lenovo) and particularly those laptops that decide that in order to use the normal function of a function key that we have to press the bloody Fn modifer key to do so. Because I'm really going to want to put my laptop into hibernate with the single press of a key. Idiots. I have the same level of hate to the idiot keyboard manufacturers who put power keys onto keyboards as well... usually just where the Insert, Home and Page Up keys should be.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Apples and Lemons?

Can you honestly say you can use unlit F-keys in a dark room?

Yes, because there's a source of light right above the things. If this is dark then the likelihood of me needing to press any function key, let alone a specific one, is quite low.

Five-a-day energy drink habit turned chap's eyes yellow, urine dark, caused anorexia

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Monster (other enrgy drinks are available, and probably much the same)

:)

To counter this, while I generally just can't drink red bull as it's foul all round although I have, of course, in the past drunk it with vodka in bars. On the other hand some of the no-sugar diet drinks are actually palatable with the M&S own brand particularly so with the Tesco own brand and Sainsburys own brand equivalents being reasonably drinkable as well. They're still probably dangerous as hell just for different reasons and compared to a coffee which consists of 75% sugar with a topping of caffeine and water probably quite healthy.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: What's wrong with coffee

And while we are on the subject: 'detox' diets are a waste of time. Discuss.

The value in 'detox' diets isn't all the horseshit mumbo-jumbo pseudo-science blabbering. It's the slight fact that while you're drinking all this super-wonderful-rainbow-unicorn-superfood tripe you're no longer eating and drinking to excess all the bad stuff. The lack of the bad stuff is what gives you the benefit, your body already the best anti-oxidant system in place already.

As long as you understand this and don't inflict fad diets like these on growing people (non-adults, breast feeding, pregnant, etc.) and only do them for a short time then they will work for you.

The down side of these fad diets is that your body will take sweet revenge on you during the week (constipation or other) and after the week is over unless you're very careful you will rapidly put the same or more weight back on... classic yo-yo dieting.

Ghost of DEC Alpha is why Windows is rubbish at file compression

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Yet another thing Microsoft sucks at

Microsoft also had code supporting specific features of the Amiga hardware in rather earlier versions of their OS. Annoyingly I couldn't find it the last time I looked for it (I found it by accident originally) but it was definitely there somewhere buried in the depths of the graphics handling code.

KCL out(r)age continues: Two weeks TITSUP, two weeks to go

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I'm rather puzzled... if there's something that was evidently this critical then why was it stored (from the description) on a RAID-1 array consisting of just two disks? Eeek.

Also, why wasn't the backup reverted to rather faster than two weeks? Yes, reverting to old data is a pain particularly when followed by a likely merge but it should be less painful than two weeks downtime. Also, why wasn't the backup period somewhat shorter - if the data is this critical then the question should have been asked "how much (time of) data are you prepared to lose?"

EU announces common corporate tax plan

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Well

I don't know if you noticed but we get to vote for our MEPs. Other representatives are selected by the governments of the member countries of the EU so while we don't have any direct say on who they select we do have a direct say on who the selectors are. Well, we would if we had a rather more democratic society where it wasn't all about party politics and we didn't have to vote for the one that we least don't want in. Even with this we're in a marginally better situation than the US where it's pretty much an institutionalised binary choice of one nutjob or another and despite this Hollywood is still trying to persuade the rest of the world that the US is a democracy...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: finally a brexit benefit (for EU)

To balance things a little, the Italian economy is generally accepted to have been a pile of lies for rather too long and moving to a marginally more accountable system is beginning to expose the institutional accounting shenanigans that exists from "commune" level and up. The Greek economy was a masterpiece of creative accounting and has been for rather a long while and how and why their self certified figures were accepted would make an interesting story.

Disclaimer: I don't live in either of these places, but I know people who do/did and their tales are quite interesting...

Smoking hole found on Mars where Schiaparelli lander, er, 'landed'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Descending from mars orbit wouldn't be soo bad if it weren't for the speeds involved. In other words, starting from stationary on the surface of mars, yes we could fairly easily create devices that could fly - while the atmospheric density is rather low, so is the gravity.

The difficulty is slowing down from orbital speeds, which even in this relatively sedate instance was 1700 kph, and doing this at the same time as controlling the rate of descent.

Lessons from the Mini: Before revamping or rebooting anything, please read this

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Are you saying the mini revamp was a success?

I was under the impression that the family car market has merged with medium sized vans, not small ones. :) But then I still consider this to be a small van!

As for a "success", possibly but only if you take out the measure that most were so bloody unreliable that they spent an unreasonable amount of time being "fixed". Only to then fail again for something similar or possibly unrelated within another month or two.

Banks don’t give a 2FA

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Blah. Whatever. In my experience (personal and observed), most of the bank security problems had no source related to whether or not there was two factor authentication in place or not - most of them were outside this as they were evidently inside jobs of some form or external systems such as 3rd party card readers. None of which a 2FA system on their website would have helped with at all.

What will happen when I'm too old to push? (buttons, that is)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Oh, Alistair...

Most don't even know what the "save" icon represents. On a website or phone app...

I think they're missed the bullet on this one!

Is this the worst Blockchain idea you've ever heard?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

All you have to do is read the Ethereum website's tagline to appreciate just how off with the cloud pixies these jokers are:

Ethereum is a decentralized platform for applications that run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship or third-party interference.

applications that run exactly as programmed. Err, is there any other way for an application to operate? These buggers don't write themselves and are not sentient - although some code I've come across may appear to have been written by non-sentients it's the code at question here and if you wrote code that is sentient then in practice that is OK because that's what you write. Except of course when hardware failures cause the code to do weird things due to spontaneous bit flipping and other thankfully rather rare occurences and all manner of other external and physical events.

without any chance of fraud. This can be achieved by never running the code and never letting anybody near the code should it happen to run. Did I enter my name incorrectly on the system? That's fraud to a certain level of fraud and on many online website registrations you're lucky if I enter that much accurate info. Was the transmission of data over a local network and all other networks (Internet) perfectly secure? Prove it.

without any chance of censorship. I don't know where in their budget that they're costing for an entirely independent and ubiased arbiter of non-censorship lurking next to every single user of these perfect applications double checking the screen display and the colour of the user's sunglasses (mustn't be rose tinted). Is there any other way of ensuring that there is no censorship whatsoever, ever, possibly, particularly when one might like to censor one's own personal details on occasion...

without any chance of third party interference. Erm, yeah. The thought police are at it again along with the above mentioned arbiter of non-censorship lurking next to every single user of these perfect applications. Who checks the checkers eh?

Meanwhile, in America: Half of adults' faces are in police databases

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: It will fix itself

Not cop's families... unfortunately it's more likely to be fixed if/when judges or politician's families (and in particular business acquaintances) are targetted by criminals.

However Ms Stasi May is way ahead on this front because her plan to spy on everybody (only scuppered by those evil communist hippies in the EU) already had the provision to spy on everyone except certain individuals... individuals such as politicians, their business acquaintances and whatever trash they define as "celebrities".

Here's how much HP's 3-in-1 PC replacement will cost you

Nick Ryan Silver badge

The per-user monthly pricing is $79 and $40, depending on how much Win32 you need. Both packages give you a dedicated two-core vCPU. $79 buys you 8GB of virtual machine RAM and 80 hours per month, and unlimited apps. The more basic “Essential" tier aimed at “mostly mobile” workers buys you a 4GB RAM virtual machine and 40 hours of app streaming a month, limited to up to 10 apps.

This isn't just not cheap, it's bloody silly. 80 hours... of what? If you assume that there are 21 working days in a month that gives 168 hours based on an 8 hour day. That's not a lot. Maybe it's 80 hours of CPU time in which case how is this measured considering that most software will maximise CPU usage given half a chance when it's the active process on a system.

$79/m comes in at $948/y and even if this includes "unlimited apps" WTF does this actually mean? That is has Office running on it? Well, you can get office 365 for somewhat less than this, let's assume $10/m, which leaves $828/y. So, enough to buy a reasonable spec laptop every year then. Particularly if you consider that the $79/m price only covers half the time that you are likely to need the device.

/confused

This speech recognition code is 'just as good' as a pro transcriber

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Bit of fun:

Thank you and I refuse to look at this site in case it also lists "Bill Odie, Bill Odie, put your hands over my body" and other gems. There's only so much that mind bleach can do.

Who killed Cyanogen?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Seen this so many times before.

Modem? :)

Hahah, or in my case when I'm in the same situation and I present the usual elementary finance questions such as "Where's the income and who's controlling it?" Can't answer this? You will fail*

* OK, there is a very, very, very slim chance that you'll muddle by somehow and attract some VC to pour money down the drain but otherwise yes, you will fail**.

** Unless your intention is to provide it as a free-time hobby in which case as long as it stays this way you'll be fine and with good planning you'll have a great time.

NHS patients must be taught to share their data, says EU lobby group

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I've nothing against medical corporations making profit and covering their costs - and modern drug treatments and the research behind them can be incredibly expensive however they have a history of charging that the market can stand and not a fair price for the drug. This isn't conjecture, this is from personal experience and trusted colleague experience who have seen the pricing decision making process from the inside where the development costs are often entirely unrelated to the final pricing.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I'm very accepting of the fact that the more medical data that is shared the more medical science can progress.

What I'm not accepting of is the fact that medical corporations will take public money and my personal information and then make phenomenal profits by selling symptom masking drugs at price gouging prices.

Linux Foundation whacks open JavaScript projects umbrella

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: The problem with JavaScript in web pages...

Performance. Which benefits those on low bandwidth. I take it you are aware of offline applications?

Web browsers already do a very good job of optimising content. It's called caching. If the caching mechanism isn't broken by the web server/site then the number of repeat downloads is quite low and this makes it very suitable for slow or low bandwidth connections.

Applications. These are very different to the majority of websites. Offline applications are a great idea, shame about the ball ache of browser compatibility.

Yes, I have heard of the History Web API. It can be useful, however good luck with mobile browsers and many toolkits just don't even support it. Unfortunately because the toolkits don't support it usage is low and then there are the security and privacy problems of history manipulation...

I can take a Stradivarius and play the Paganini capricci on it. The result is guaranteed to be shit. Must be that stupid Stradivarius.

I'm not sure what bearing this analogy has. Could be that many toolkits are poor because they are designed not to enhance basic web functionality (which is accessible and usable) with enhanced features but to instead replace and supplant the basic web functionality? Yes, some toolkits are better than this than others but a great many of them are appalling and cause many usability issues particularly when developers try to enforce desktop application paradigms onto web pages. I still come across copious examples fo dumb developers who want to prevent user's closing browser windows, navigating forwards and backwards through their history or just make reckless and stupid assumptions about screen orientation/space and DPI.

Do you realise that paged (or otherwise filtered) results can be obtained via AJAX methods just as easily as via any other method? It depends purely on the server implementing the appropriate endpoints.

Yes, but the point is that this does not really make any improvement in overall efficiency. It usually kills usability, accessibility and standard web navigation and when the caching mechanism isn't broken the server load and data transfer difference is trivial. When a page pulls down all of the data in one hit and this is manipulated by JavaScript there are genuine performance gains at the client end however these are offset by trashed usability and accessibility.

...seems to be a spontaneous rant about something not related to JS at all?

I am sorry, but I get the impression that you are criticising something that you're not very familiar with.

Then comes over that you are clueless and blinkered - sorry if this is wrong but it's the impression I get from this... Create an application using a toolkit that replaces the standard interface objects because you want some "consistent" (consistently awful) user interface? Try to maniuplate the browser windows and interface to delude yourself that your application is running as a rich desktop application and not within a web browser? They're different, plan and design applications differently.

As for my experience... hmmm... let's say I've been through every iteration of web stupidity from the start so get to see the same dumb things being repeated over and over. And I'll admit that I did many of them myself before learning better. There's little practical difference between what many stupid developers did in the past with Flash through using it not to enhance a website but to replace every part of it leaving just a single page that loaded the flash object and what the same, or similarly stupid, developers are trying to do with JavaScript.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: The problem with JavaScript in web pages...

Completely.

For most websites JavaScript should be there solely to enhance the website experience. It shouldn't be there to replace perfectly working HTML solutions, just to enhance them. Why? Because almost without fail every time some idiot developer replaces working HTML solutions with a JavaScript alternative usabilit and accessibility suffers and usually the only "benefit" is a few transitions and a few less server requests (the latter can be important, but given most websites really isn't for most).

For example, what real benefit is there in having a JavaScript provided data grid that pages through a dataset compared to requesting the page from the server controlled by URL passed parameters? The JavaScript page is non-bookmarkable, usually fails basic accessibility tests and on many occasions is bug ridden with the single plus side being that the page request is sent once along with a single request for all of the data but this starts to fail on large datasets where paged results are more efficient.

The other serious problem is where developers who could barely vomit up a usable User Interface in a Windows (i.e. rich) client application just don't comprehend that a web page is fundamentally different and must be built differently. Instead they go to great lengths to break the entire browser experience to try and replicate their own personal hell of a User Interface. Typically rammed in the top left hand corner of a much larger browser window with custom interactive components (why use the standard browser/HTML provided controls) and entirely non-scalable or liquid layout compliant of course.

Google: We look forward to running non-Intel processors in our cloud

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Plus ca change: 48V

48V is also the "normal" voltage for PoE (PoE provides 15.4W, PoE+ provides 30W). I doubt if these bits of kit will run over PoE in a fully loaded configuration, as in with the PCIe buses fully populated, but it may possible that the basic configurations could particularly as Google and others tend to spec low power kit both for energy cost and heat dissipation reasons. Also, running a consistent power supply voltage makes the deployment of power rather simpler and less prone to potentially expensive mistakes.

GlobalSign screw-up cancels top websites' HTTPS certificates

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Browsers

I'm intrigued by the difference in browsers as well - particularly if this was a browser implementation issue, a server side issue or some horrible combination of the two. From an experience point I'd usually lay the blame on the Microsoft front and their implementation of "standards" however on this one it feels a little muddier than that.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Browsers

For those that don't know, this issue primarily affected Internet Explorer and Edge. Most other browsers seemed to work fine with the borked cert chain.

IE did it's usual of hiding any overly useful information. Amazingly Edge provided a little more information in that it stated that the cert had been revoked (not identifying which cert of course) and even gave the option to proceed to the website. Which in true and traditional Edge style didn't work and simply redirected the user back to the same error page.

Smell burning? Samsung’s 'Death Note 7' could still cause a contagion

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Disagree with general consensus here...

The "it must have a removable battery" brigade are sounding more and more like a religious belief system.

Seriously, I really don't understand it. External battery packs are considerably more convenient and safer - easier to charge and safer as you don't have a relatively naked battery lying around. They're also somewhat more "future proof" as batteries are only suitable for a single revision of a mobile phone. I've done this, been there and I've moved onto external battery packs. Yes, they're not quite so glamorous as we have to have a cable connected but I can at least charge and carry them safely.

Majority of underage sexting suspects turn out to be underage too

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Mrs May, why are you not using an anonymous commentard account or one in your real name?

/shame on you

Facebook pays, er, nope, gets £11m credit from UK taxman HMRC...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I'm not even sure that this is anything bad. I've yet to really work out how Facebook make a lot of income, let alone profit compared to the prodigious amount of storage and computing infrastructure they require.

I'd say that it's a huge amount of up front investment with the potential of getting returns that may repay all of this back. Eventually. In this case building up losses to offset against tax the following year (or years, depending on how you account for it) is perfectly correct and above board.

I'd never thought that I'd be defending Facebook, but on this point given their infrastructure costs compared to the likely trivial advertising income (at one point AIUI they got most of their income from idiots paying for in-game items in click-fest games), I'd not say that it's unreasonable. Unless of course they're making a pile of cash in this country and then "purchasing" services from another arm of the same group which is just a way of shifting profit from one tax regime to another.

Device-as-a-Service to make life simple? Nope

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Arrrrgh

It reads eerily like mainframe or "supercomputer" billing methods moved to desktop systems: "here's the hardware, you can use some or part of it and we'll charge you for configuration changes that a monkey could make using the configuration software. We're also going to make it very hard or expensive to downsize."

Four reasons Pixel turns flagship Android mobe makers into roadkill

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: It's the age old problem...

Unfortunately in all these years what Samsung have comprehensively demonstrated is a total and utter inability to write software that on any reasonable measure is usable, good, stable or in a good spot on any other positive outcome measure.

'Please label things so I can tell the difference between a mouse and a microphone'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Engineers!

Being an arse, when in a sales demo and upon coming across a prompt to "press any key" I'd press a key modifier key such as Ctrl or Shift instead and ask them why it didn't work. The response was often went "any key except that one" followed by myepressing a different key modifier key instead...

If you write "any key" damn well make sure that you really mean any key.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I've watched somebody hold a mouse at 90 degrees to how it's meant to be used, contorting their fingers onto the buttons in a ludicrous manner as well. This came about because one user couldn't understand instructions referring to the left mouse or right mouse buttons... turns out that if you're a complete fuckwit and hold a mouse sideways it's not obvious which is the left or right button.

No surprise: Microsoft seeks Windows Update boss with 'ability to reduce chaos, stress'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: This job should not exist

"our best ever" always rings oddly with me as it's a weirdo marketing statement of nothing much. As in, it's stating what should bloody well be obvious and always the case. Similar to other gems that I've seen recently for example, "architect designed" on a new block of flats... who else would design them?

However the one that's a gem to watch for is "now our best ever" which really is an admission that what was being peddled previously really wasn't very good at all.

Oops: Carphone burps up new Google phone details

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Swappable Battery

Eeek. I'd manage to block that pain out of my memory... I had to battery remove reset my S3 on occasion as well. I think there was a fallback power off function on the thing as well but just removing the battery was easier and given the quality of Samsung software, most likely required as well.

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Go

Swappable battery

Seriously - phone's don't need swappable batteries. The additional interconnects, shape and therefore space and design issues and dust/water ingress that removable batteries entail just doesn't make them economically or design-wise viable. I've had phones with swappable batteries, and gone through the battery swapping and charging rigmarole and external battery packs are easier to use, usually cheaper with better capacity, easier to store and charge and can be easily used with a new phone or even shared with others. A reasonable quality phone battery should easily last 3 years without too much noticeable loss given a decent charging circuit and it's generally accepted that most phones are changed at least this often and usually rather more often.

SD Card

I'd rather have much higher capacity without being price gouged on it. The number of times that I swapped SD cards was minimal and again this inflicts space and design issues on the entire phone design as well as dust/water ingress. I can pick up a 64GB class 10 card for £15 yet the bastard phone manufacturers often feel the need to charge hundreds for this extra capacity. They could even market it them as something like "64GB phone with 256GB media storage capacity", but no...

Decent camera that is fast rather than a giga-pixel pretend SLR

I'm still waiting on the "next gen" vertical stacked sensors to be put into production :( The more pixels there are doesn't always make for a better image but unfortunately that's what the public expects. The other side is down to the optics and the slight physics challenges of fitting in lens and focus arrangements in just a few mm. Fast response, optical stabilisation, great low light response and a colour range more similar to the human eye is all I'd want :)

Headphone socket

Totally with you on this one. Another device to charge and manage for little benefit but enormous cost really doesn't do it for me. Shame about the socket being a great way to let in dust/water but we can't easily remove all of these problems.

Bluetoof, Wifey, GPeas of course and NFC for Android pay

LED Flash cos I use the torch function a lot

Definitely - these seem to be standard features these days.

Nice to have

FM Radio

Why bother? Seriously. More and more places are dropping FM radio and switching to DAB. Or there's Internet streaming and this is another arial circuit that doesn't need to be in the phone (affecting the others as well). OK, so DAB's often hit and miss as is Internet streaming, but why isn't DAB built into modern phones? While it might seem like a fair idea, it's possibly worth considering the change of radio given the Internet and how it's use is steadily dropping. Except in cars of course.

Water Dust resistant

I'd rather have this than swappable batteries or SD cards. And I'd like this without annoying rubber flaps as well.

Infra-Red Blaster for remote controls

I'm not sure how useful this would be and I'd find it more of a gimmick. I suppose if a phone that had it then I might use it but the last time I looked most IR apps seemed to be some ill conceived attempt to replicate a bloody physical remote control on a touch screen they tend to dimish the experience somewhat. Dependency on IR and line of sight comms (but keep the sensor clear of sunlight) is something I'd rather be past now.

OTT

Pretty much my point about FM radio :)

Big HD screen pretending to be a telly

Just install Kodi. Or maybe we could do with a built in projector function? :)

Stereo speakers pretending to be a Hi-Fi

If you want a stereo sound experience from something only a few inches from end to end, wear headphones or use external speakers. You'll piss off less people as well. While doable on a larger tablet held relatively close anything else just doesn't enough of a stereo effect to matter.