Posts by jonathanb

Re: Fraud, and the only punishment is paying court costs for the defendants?

I don't agree about 6 decades in prison. You put people in jail for one of two reasons, to deter others from doing the same thing, or for public safety, because if they are locked up, they can't harm the public with their crimes.

You can deal with the public safety aspect by banning them from practicing as lawyers ever again. 3 months with early release after 6 weeks if they behave themselves inside probably is enough of a deterrent for most lawyers who are thinking of doing the same thing, provided it is combined with criminal asset recovery and the lifetime ban on practicing as a lawyer I referred to earlier. You would leave them inside for longer if they don't reveal where all their assets are, that is pretty normal in these sorts of cases.

Re: This Annoyed the Hell out of Me

My timings are for downloading https://www.google.co.uk are as follows:

On Windows 7

Firefox - 1 second

IE 11 - 1 second

Chrome - 2 seconds

Opera (with turbo mode) 3 seconds

Opera (without turbo mode) 5 seconds

On Mavericks

Safari - considerably less than 1 second, but it seems to be preloaded, other sites aren't as quick

Chrome - 1 second

Firefox - 1 second

Opera (with turbo mode) 5 seconds

Opera (without turbo mode) 8 seconds

Re: Competition

In the UK, you do go to your bank if you want a card processing account.

Either way, there is an established mechanism out there to allow customers to pay retailers electronically using some sort of plastic card. Those people have an advantage over everyone else should they want to add the facility to pay using your phone to that.

As someone who sometimes pays using plastic cards, I would trust a bank supplied app for phone based payments more than I would trust some tech startup I've never heard of.

Re: What this really means...

Depreciation and amortisation are not allowable expenses for tax purposes. Instead you get capital allowances and an annual investment allowance.

Share based payments are not allowable for tax purposes except in circumstances where they are taxable income in the hands of the recipient - http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/budget2013/ct-relief-employee-shares.pdf

Virgin Media has massive historical losses going back to the NTL days. These can be carried forward and set off against future profits, so they are not going to be paying any tax any time soon. Any company that makes those sorts of losses and somehow manages to survive gets the same benefits.

Re: MicroSD slot?

It doesn't have one, and the article did say that.

Re: Beginning of the end?

Lots of companies are reshoring their manufacturing, not just Apple. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, thanks to fracking, energy prices are now much cheaper in the US than in China, so that makes the USA more competitive for energy intensive processes. Secondly, wage rises in China mean that the difference in salaries between Chinese and American workers isn't as high as it used to be.

Re: The old classic....

I recon you could get about 60 petabytes of 4TB hard drives in a Ford Transit. A bit less than that if you pack them to avoid damage en route. If you say 15PB and you can get it to its destination next day, that is a lot of bandwidth.

Re: I suppose...

If you want to play around with 150 slide powerpoint presentations, then obviously you would use a laptop, not an iPad. You use the right tool for the job.

How long does it take to reach out to your bedside table in the morning, pick up your HP slab, and check emails and news websites on it? From putting my hand round the iPad to having El-Reg's homepage open on it takes me probably somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds. On a laptop, it would take a lot longer.

Re: Is there anybody who approves of this?

To replace the battery? About once a year, though in my case, the only tools I need are a couple of fingernails.

Re: I'm Bill Gates...

I don't agree. Look at China, an example of a country that has done a pretty good job of reducing poverty. Don't you think the fact that people are able to make things and list them for sale on Ali-Baba and EBay might possibly have helped in someway towards reducing poverty?

The big problem I guess is camera shake in low light / long exposure photos rather than people not using autofocus.

Re: 500GB

Lots of laptops come with less than 750GB, but it is usually in the form of a solid state disk.

Re: Comparison of openness

I don't know about the Nexus 5, but on most Android devices, you can side-load apps from outside the Play Store, and that can include apps that let you buy stuff from other competing App stores such as Amazon's. That alone makes it much more open than iOS.

Re: Good work!

It is just you. It is the same size for me as it always has been.

Re: latency

There are some people who live in the Southern Hemisphere

Re: Edge Snapping == Fail

Mavericks doesn't do edge snapping, and I don't remember it any previous version either. I've used Tiger, Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion.

Re: Why not treat us like China then?

Remember that "pirating" probably includes parallel imports of stuff from other English speaking countries where prices are cheaper than Australia. 1 Australian Dollar is approximately equal to 1 US Dollar, but from the prices they charge in Australia, you would think it was more like 40 US cents.

Google wasn't listed as a browser maker on the pro-DNT side or as an ad-broker on the anti-DNT side. Which are they?

Re: @#$!!

You need an address to send them an invoice, and asking these people to identify themselves is a very good way to make them hang up on you.

Re: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The Chinese government did go to various American companies and ask that back doors be placed in their systems. Google said no, and decided to pull out of the country. Yahoo and Microsoft presumably decided they would comply with local laws and continue trading in the country. Chinese companies like Baidu, Renren and Sina Weibo will obviously comply with local laws and provide Chinese authorities with the information they ask for.

I believe you have to pay using Western Union or some similarly untraceable service, in which case it is cash or card at your local Western Union shop, it doesn't really matter as Western Union won't misuse your card information.

Re: Maybe they could learn something from the Raspberry Pi back-to-basics approach

I was quite happy with the BBC Masters (and Acorn Electon at home) back in the days.

And with physical access to the machine so they can run a live DVD or live USB operating system?

Re: Mixed signals regarding privacy

No, in the UK the age of consent is 16, however photos or videos of the activity are child porn if the people involved are under 18.

Actually, Microsoft's campus is technically in Sonning, still part of Wokingham Borough, not sure about the rest of Thames Valley Park.

Re: Not possible.

I'm sure I read at the time that it was a Toshiba part.

I don't know about that, but I do know that it is very very obese. I was looking at some WinRT slabs in PC World this morning. The 32GB models only had something 4GB of free space left on them.

Re: modern life is rubbish

iOS struggled with the change between Summer time and Winter time twice a year. I'm not entirely sure they have fixed it yet.

I have had two Android phones now, the original Samsung Galaxy S, and the Galaxy Note 2. I haven't had any problems with the alarm clock on either of them.

Re: Most annoying thing for me

If it is "taking care" of all the crapware HP shovels onto their computers, then I have no objections.

Re: Is it just me?

Out of interest, what is your problem with Office 2013? The only real differences between it and 2010 I've noticed is that

1. in Excel, spreadsheets open in different windows by default, enabling you to have two open side by side. You could do that in earlier versions of Excel, but you had to remember to open a separate instance of Excel for each sheet. They did the same thing for Word a while back, certainly it was the case in 2003, and I think before that as well.

2. in Outlook, you can have multiple exchange accounts set up at the same time. It was possible in the Mac version of Outlook, and Entourage before that for as long as I've used it.

The one slight problem is the default white-only colour scheme, but you can change that.

Re: not quite

Sometimes. relay.o2broadband.co.uk doesn't require a password if I connect to it from within the O2/BE network, and will let me put anything I like in the From: field. Most ISPs have something similar.

Re: sim locking

No this is a different thing. Even if you buy an unlocked Note, it will only accept a European SIM, so you can put a local French SIM in it, but not for example a local Japanese or American SIM. In a couple of years time, there won't be any reason to put a local SIM in when travelling around Europe. You will need an unlocked phone if you want to switch UK providers, but region locking will prevent you from putting in a local SIM outside of Europe.

Re: Cost effective .....

They will make a synthetic version of the active ingredient if it is useful as a medicine. That way there would be no risk of junkies stealing things to get their next fix.