this could make me give up my 5800

N900 - had one of those - great computer, great screen, great apps, too bulky, shite battery life - went back to my 5800 - still amazing after all these years

Oh to get back to a phone you own rather than one you share with the OS provider; my €100 is creeping towards the website

"You thought only Google dodges UK taxes? So do all the Brit firms"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/14/uk_firm_subsidiaries_tax_havens/

It turns out that companies use tax law to minimise their tax bills - who'd have thought that then?

If the tax code were less complicated with fewer political wheezes designed to make headlines (which every politician does and crosses their fingers that someone will believe them that somehow these wheezes will generate economic growth) then there would be fewer places to hide.

If PAC and or Margaret Hodge have evidence of evasion then they could cut to the chase and pass it over to the Police and/or Director of Public Prosecutions.

Of course if Google (others) are just avoiding tax (hands up who has got a tax-exempt ISA) then we are free to dislike them. However, perhaps someone could deal with this (unfortunately, I could not find any left leaning newspaper criticising Margaret Hodge, for some reason or other):

http://order-order.com/2012/11/21/margaret-hodges-multi-million-pound-stemcor-trusts/

"Margaret Hodge didn’t take too kindly to being accused of tax hypocrisy by Priti Patel yesterday. The litigious Labour MP and ardent anti-tax avoidance campaigner insists she has done nothing wrong with her shareholding arrangements at 0.01% tax rate paying Stemcor."

or this

http://order-order.com/2013/04/26/a-cosy-relationship-hodge-the-dodge-ignores/

Apparently the Big 4 accountancy firms have an “unhealthily cosy relationship with government”, saying it creates a “ridiculous conflict of interest”. Readers will know of Hodge’s great expertise in this area, given that she worked for one of them, Pricewaterhouse, before she became an MP. Not to mention that Hodge’s friends on the frontbench such as Chuka, Balls and Rachel Reeves have all had PwC analysts on their payroll. Guido can reveal that Labour’s Shadow Treasury ministers Chris Leslie and Cathy Jamieson also currently have PwC employees working in their offices.

or this

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2230915/Margaret-Hodge-Multi-millionaire-Labour-MPs-family-business-paid-just-0-25-tax-profits.html

Analysis of Stemcor's latest accounts in today's Daily Telegraph show that the business paid tax of just £163,000 on revenues of more than £2.1billion in 2011.

spork spork spork

Possibly Windows 8 was cooked up in this kitchen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY_Yf4zz-yo

by selling assets to its UK pension fund

Article about it in yesterday's financial press, aimlessly reading it while waiting - selling something (photo booth/print thingy business? for £650m in kind + £350m in cash, might be $, all from memory) to its UK pension fund already in deficit - pensioners taking 10% (? again from memory) haircut. I wonder how they feel about it?

But luckily a US corporation is coming out of bankruptcy in the USA - so that's all right then

£29 e-reader dodgy marketing?

ASDA had none in stock in store last night, out of stock on line

B&N had problems on line today

John Lewis - out of stock online

Argos - 10 nearest store have none to reserve/out of stock on line

Got bored looking

just a thought

<--- not

Surely my security should be my problem?

Nominet offering increased security as a service, at the margin, will increase complacency leading to greater insecurity in general.

I would draw parallels to all the regulation for cattle/beef/food signalling that caveat emptor is no longer necessary.

the unbelievable truth

While I've been using openSUSE and its predecessors since 1999 it remains true that I chose it for being European and that I could buy the 6 CDs and the manual for £20 or something from the bookshop near where I worked. I'd never heard of KDE per se nor Gnome. Luckily (IMHO) I got KDE and I've used it ever since. I'm used Gnome occasionally, elsewhere, I still like KDE. I could go on about that but not now.

I think the best advice in this article was choose your desktop.

All these performance benchmarks are largely tosh unless you are doing video processing (from experience) or 3D design/gaming (apparently) but I'm using a ten year old computer with 200 MHz DDR2 recently upgraded with an SSD because they've got cheap, and all's well.

I don't understand why people "test drive" distros but its their decision. I got lucky with S.u.S.E. Over time I've got to grips with how it's organised. They've got good core and community support. I now consider myself a power user. It's the one I recommend to other people because I'll be able to help them.

As far as I can see most distros are the same at the core and similar at the edges.

KDE

Yes, I've been using KDE since 1999, no I've never experienced this particular bug. (Don't get me wrong, there have been others...)

For me the point of the story is that the bug was noticed by someone with the skills and inclination to fix it. He didn't have to sign an NDA or otherwise trip up on someone's licence. He just fixed it.

No one has mentioned the three hottest women on the planet

step forward: Harmony, Melody and Rhapsody - surely the role models for Kelly McGillis in Top Gun

Another El Reg opportunity - a clearing house

I'm sure we've all got piles of shit that in the right circumstances could be useful to someone else for the price of collection or postage.

I've got a pile of AGP graphics cards, a couple of PCI-E, a box full of old memory 128K to 1G, several sound cards plus a load of other stuff.

In my minds-eye there's a school somewhere that could upgrade their old computers, more memory, better graphics, sound. Then there's all those leads, ethernet cables...

Of course it might just be better to grow up and throw it away.

Google..

<--- humour

They can probably defend themselves, however...

Every year since whenever they have spent $millions supporting F/OSS projects though GSoC, developing and supporting the ecosystem and demanding no say over what and how is developed

http://code.google.com/soc/

as evidenced

(1) http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2012/Projects

(2) http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/soc/

(3) http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GSOC

(4) http://www.gnome.org/news/2012/03/gnome-to-participate-in-google-summer-of-code-2012/

(5) http://dot.kde.org/2012/10/02/kde-celebrates-2012-google-summer-code-success

Economical with the actualite

"The Skyscape contract is a major step for HMRC in moving away from traditional ways of working with large service providers. And it’s a great example of how we’re exploring smarter, more innovative solutions that make life simpler for us and help us provide a better deal for our customers."

size matters

http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/09/government-digital-service-g-cloud-log.html

they're just lying

http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/09/whitehall-apology-they-havent-gone-mad.html

Whitehall SNAFU

http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/09/g-cloud-gds-hmrc-and-skyscape-company.html

five questions

http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/09/five-questions-for-g-cloud-team.html

Patriot Act

http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/09/g-cloud-gds-hmrc-skyscape-and-usa.html

penultimately

http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/10/skyscape-whitehall-have-no-excuse.html

and finally, in unrelated news on government contracting, was Branson right?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/9583316/Cancelled-FirstGroup-West-Coast-contract-will-cost-40m.html

meanwhile, elsewhere....

BBC You and Yours discussion of online fraud and LloydsTSB.

A Doctor and his wife each had their accounts hacked in circumstances in which the fraudsters somehow obtained:

- BT land line number, BT account number, home address

(for divert, so could confirm setting up a payment )

- mobile phone number, presumably some other details (for divert)

- bank account details of both adults (two IDs; not the account numbers, two sets of memorable details)

this was presented as a bank security issue

let's hope that the g-cloud isn't shared services on steroids

http://www.dmossesq.com/2012/07/francis-maude-and-economies-of-scale.html

"Shared service centres have failed to deliver the savings they should have. They cost £1.4bn to set up, £500m more than expected, and in some cases have actually cost the taxpayer more than they have saved. I welcome the Cabinet Office's ambitious new strategy for improving shared services. But unless it learns from the past it will end up making the same mistakes again."

link says it all

http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/13/ifixit-tears-down-the-new-retina-macbook-pro-calls-it-least-repairable-laptop-ever/

I have no view on others finding Apple desirable. My test market of three relatively sensible teenagers/young adults tells me that all of their Apple laptops have suffered component failure (it's how I found out about iFixit) and each of them have "consumed" at least two iPods.

The changing nature of the power supply connector is in marked contrast to, e.g., most mobes

http://www.reghardware.com/2011/02/09/ec_common_phone_charger/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/09/miniusbs_and_common_connectors/

You don't have to be a Greenpeace nutter to wonder if this is great.

Looking forward to using the flames for the govt's renewable heat initiative.

There's a very good reason for the delay...

...they're going to take account of the findings of their open standards consultation.

one thing you missed from his cv

He still got performance bonuses while all that didn't happen.

Not sure I'd want their shares in my pension plan

What Linus Torvalds didn't say...

Bell [added] that having “access to source code where you can go in and really work with it” is a massive advantage.

Bell was more tight-lipped on the open source dogmatic aspects of working with Android. Asked if it was feeding back its innovations on the platform, he said that it was doing so "where it [was] required", but added: “[I] don’t like doing R&D for my competitors.”

It should not have been done

The problem with the app is not that it isn't comprehensive, nor that whatever it cost to produce was four times what it should have, as the total cost was a very small drop in a very large bucket.

The problem is the underlying approach to expenditure which this app represents. It is another form of vanity publishing which one can find throughout sectors spending other people's money. Do they ever ask themselves the question "if it were my money, would I use it in this way?"

For example, a better calculator has long since been available here:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/tax-calculator/ and it didn't cost the taxpayer (including the ones that didn't want it in the first place) anything.

The Treasury expenditure options appraisal requires proper consideration of "do nothing" not that you'd notice.

And of course the IT crew would not be able to self-actualise at our expense by producing apps for the iPhone

let's hope...

... the Commission notice the attitude and add it into their treatment of UEFI