Posts by ParaHandy

Console yourself – research finds gaming may actually boost mental health

Re: Or is it more to do with winning the lottery?

Less than ten percent of the participants of the study were involved in the lottery. 8800 ish out of 97000 ish. Still enough to skew the results.

India ditches its 'Google Tax' after US waved a big stick

Sales tax is a tax on revenue. VAT in the UK. It only affects profit if it changes how much you can sell.

Tech support scams subside somewhat, but Millennials and Gen Z think they're bulletproof and suffer

Wasting time.

Mostly I just hang up. I still get the microsoft support calls fairly often. One time I let the guy talk me through the process until the hit enter to visit dodgy website. I then told him I wasn't going to hit enter because I knew it was a scam but I wanted to know how it worked so I could tell my customers about it. I thanked him kindly for his help. The stream of vitriol he emitted was quite gratifying. He eventually shouted "You think you're so mart!". I replied, "obviously smarter than you" and then hung up. I had to ignore the answering machine for a while after that, which was even more satisfying.

More recently I've started asking them "Does your mum know what you do for a living?" That usually gets another gratifying tirade of abuse. I hang up chuckling.

Brit voucher biz's signup page blabbed families' details via URL tweak

Re: Shouty shout

This is 2017. You take a picture and post it on twitter and facebook. Someone they know will tell them eventually.

AWS's S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn't get into its own dashboard to warn the world

Re: Am I Getting Old?

So you've turned your lightbulb off remotely via the internet. The switch on the wall in on. Internet goes down. How do you turn your lightbulb back on? In this scenario is basic operation not compromised? Genuine question.

Did you know? The FBI investigated Gamergate. Now you can read the agents' thrilling dossier

Re: Humanity fail.

I came across a man fighting with a woman once. He was beating her. When I attempted to intervene the woman rounded on me and told me it was none of my business and I should "fuck off". She was much more aggressive towards me than the man. I'll never understand people. You're all weird.

'Bring back xHamster', North Carolina smut watchers grumble

Re: REALLY NOW

That is astonishingly ignorant bigotry. Gender is what is between your ears, not what is between your legs. That is why this law is wrong. It seeks to create a climate of fear, not prevent one.

It's the white heat of the tech revolution, again!

Re: Government’s role is @Esme

A woman made of whisky? I gotta' see that!

Ericsson to Apple: Cough up for licences or stop selling iPhones, iPads and Watches

Re: Does Apple make any of the parts?

Thanks. That explains what is probably going on, but it shouldn't be allowed.

Does Apple make any of the parts?

The real problem here is Apple being hounded for IP that is in parts they have bought from someone else. Surely the maker of a chip or module is responsible for the patents used in their product. A manufacturer assembling product from bought-in components shouldn't have to worry about this nonsense. It should be included in the component price.

Or is the IP in question in one of the components that Apple have fabricated especially for themselves?

Seems to me this is the main problem with current patent issues, the patent holders seem to want paid by every member of the supply chain. Only a matter of time before we see cases suing end users. Like SCO did.

M0n0wall comes tumbling down as dev throws in the trowel

Re: "m0n0wall should be celebrated, not ridiculed"

"...throws in the trowel"

I think it is a pun on fireWALL. i.e. made of bricks and assembled with a trowel, no?

RIP Windows RT: Microsoft murders ARM Surface, Nokia tablets

Re: A workable solution

Linx 10 has 2GB RAM.

Linx 7 and 8 are both 1GB though.

Behold: The touchy-feely future of Office on Windows 10 fondleslabs

Re: Flat look and feel

Completely agree. Have got somewhat used to Windows 8 with classic shell but it is just so ugly. Windows kindergarden edition. Skeumorphism was used for many years for a reason. You could turn aero on or off in Windows 7. It should still be an option for those who want it. Like us. Thankfully KDE4 is just lovely to look at and I can't see Windows ugliness when I'm playing games full screen.

Red-spattered Android figures sinkhole Sony's healthy financials

Re: Marketing Marketing and Some thinking out of the Box

"The company that brought mobile music to the masses!"

I assume you mean Sony here? The Sony walkman was the device that brought mobile music to the masses. Surely?

Just sayin'

Who's come to fix your broadband? It may be a Fed in disguise. Without a search warrant

Up-vote for "unless proven guilty". The common mis-quote of "until proven guilty" implies, incorrectly, that proof of guilt is inevitable.

ZX81 BEATEN at last as dev claims smallest Chess code crown

My dad bought a kit for £50. It was £70 built. You could put a 2KB RAM chip in it as this was socketed. No idea what that cost extra.

He bought me one a few weeks later and that was my first experience with a soldering iron. It didn't work first time but several hours with a mutlimeter (old type using a galvanometer - lovely thing made of bakelite) comparing mine to his I eventually found a splash of solder under a capacitor. Cleaned that off and I had my first computer (they were micro back then until IBM made them personal a few years later). Happy days, learning to program from the excellent manual. 2K from the start and eventually getting a 16K upgrade, a sort of decent addon keyboard and even a sound add-on. Type too hard and all the dodgy connections caused it to reset but it was star trek technology to a 15 year old in 1981.

The manual had more information in it, and taught me more about how a computer actually works than kids get in secondary school now. They are taught a lot about what a computer can do but almost nothing about how they work. A raspberry pi could do this but it needs a manual as good as the XZ81 and later that of the spectrum.

Clive did some really good stuff up until the C5. But that's another discussion.