Posts by nick soph

Please send more tax than our rules say you should.

Do we really think the NHS would be in its current state if MP's were obliged to get all their health services from it?

That you were speaking to Margret Hodge and didn't discuss her families use of offshore shell companies to pay less tax, shows you didnt do your research and I doubt you think people should pay as much tax as they feel morally obligated to do. So are you really making a story of about a fishing millionaire (who didnt pay more tax than she needed to) who says "Amazon didnt pay more tax than it needed to!"

Margaret Hodge's outrage and most of this article is deflecting from the real questions about how to change the laws.

Symantec - a reliable source of twaddle

If anybody has any reason to believe Symantec is capable of carrying out an investigation into anything but money I'd be obliged for the links.

Missing the point

Creation of WSL had a primary function - to reduce MS embarrassment when at every dev conf they hold, nearly all the devs are on macbooks. If you are going to a MS event, don't forget your mac.

Could an American company report the bad things it thinks American security agencies are doing? Likewise for a Russian/Chinese/North Korean co. Truecrypt was closed down by persons or persons unknown without any explanation and before its final security audit was completed. The final comment from the anonymous Truecrypt authors was that Truecrypt had a fault and they made a recommendation to use Microsoft's Bitlocker instead. There is an interpretation of these events which goes - the security services used secret laws (Do we have them? How would we know?) to stop any further dev of Truecrypt because it worked, and Truecrypt's 'use Bitlocker' statement was made as a obvious false flag (It is widely assumed that Bitlocker has a backdoor available to US agencies). It seems likely there is a difference in the form of pressure exerted by states on the companies that work within their borders but the effect is the same and the reporting by a company of the misdeeds of its homeland's government is discouraged and the opposite for the reporting of misdeeds of other countries. The US's public defamation of KL should be regarded as a compliment to KL (at least as far as US produced nasties are concerned), the sad thing is that the Russians have not similarly endorsed any US security products in return.

We just need to wait for the exploits. Once we have a few million PC's pwned by the baddies, action will be taken: until then Intel is solvent.

Guam - because he will later be released to the Russians to prevent the release of videos showing an orange bloke and a young girl.

Mute button next

TV remotes often have buttons to change to another channel or mute their TV's. Whilst this is a perfectly acceptable use of the remote control for a TV, I've noticed several people also using these controls to temporarily change channel or mute sound whist adverts are on. This should be stopped and requires only simple reprogramming of the controller to prevent these harmful, unwarranted and unjustifiable acts.

Sweepstake

So can we guess a date for Kik's demise by password theft or DoS attack?

Im picking April 3rd.

A question - what does this do for VM's running containers?

Symantec - nee Norton

Was a great company till Peter Norton left - downhill ever since - I wouldnt touch anything from them now.

Ban Windows, OSX, Linux and Android too

These operating systems (and several others) are favored by pirates who install add-on programs which they then use for infringing copyright - this shirley should not be allowed and Im sure that if we ban the selling and distribution of operating systems we can significantly reduce piracy.

Calculating a fair fine

Number of calls to people who didnt want them, times

time in seconds it took them to answer the call and hang up and get back to what they were doing, times

the average wage per second.

The information gathered will supply more accurate info but;

Working on 6 million calls a day, with just 1% of the calls being to people who didnt want them and 2 mins of their day wasted at £10 an hour, comes to £20,000 per day or about £5,000,000 a year.

Really? This is The Register! If I wanted to read press releases Id go to the BBC. The headline sucks too.

Nexus 7 2013 - upgraded to Lollipop on release day from the factory images. The only significant issue with the original Lollipop machine images Ive seen has been that the tablets with the larger memory capacities were all set up as if they only had 8GB, which Google issued a fix for, apart from that I noticed some misaligned text on something in settings. The few people I know who have the same tablet have not had the OTA update pushed out to them and it seems that only those who have hacked the OTA update to install manually have had problems.

I was never that bothered by it's name. Can't we just agree to call whatever follows something else - 'Elisabeth' maybe?

A Guide For Users - Dealing With Technical Support Staff

Rufus brings up an interesting point, how to treat customers who are both open topped and not phesant. but I'd rather start a conversation about what we would like our customers to do to make it a better interaction.

A Guide For Users - Dealing With Technical Support Staff

Please be aware that computers are immensley complicated - more so than engineers.

If the computer has developed a fault, it is often best to turn off the machine and restart it before calling the support line.

Even if the rebooting solved the problem the problem should be reported.

Helpdesk staff are rarely experts in all the areas that relate to your issue.

Mention early in the call if the item has ever worked and try and think if anything else might be relevant, eg. there's a powercut or you dropped it down the stairs.

Follow instuctions and report back on your progress with plenty of verbal confirmation and interaction.

If you want to know, ask and if you are uninterested try and be polite - sometimes engineers need to talk things thru to clarify their own thoughts and are rarely gifted with the ability to properly judge the level of detail each caller would like to hear.

Please add/amend