Posts by OneArmJack

Google cursed its own phones with wacked Wi-Fi, say Nexus users

Re: A slightly different problem

There's a setting for the wifi thing: go to Settings - Wi-Fi - Advanced and tick 'Avoid poor connections'. I haven't tried it so can't vouch for its effectiveness.

Google lifts skirts, reveals Play All Access to UK market

Re: UK vs Euro pricing

Point taken; '...asked...' instead of '...made...' would have been a better wording. At today's exchange rate it's about £16/year difference between £ and € prices, so they are effectively getting 6 weeks for free.

Google's pricing is:

£9.99

€9.99

$9.99

I'd be very surprised if differences in costs led to such convenient pricing.

UK vs Euro pricing

Google should be made to explain why the service costs £9.99 in the UK and only €9.99 in the Euro countries. I can accept differences in UK vs US pricing - tax, consumer law etc - but the only excuse for this is if they are being charged more for UK rights.

Sky asks Ofcom to unlock BT cabinets

Why do Sky need access to the cabinets?

For the benefit of those of us not up on the intricacies of FTTC, why can't Sky route via their own backhaul from the exchange? Why do they need access to the cabinet?

Google to double encryption key lengths for SSL certs by year's end

What do they know?

Google buys a D-Wave quantum computer and then 1 week later announces that it is doubling its encryption key length.

*Takes off tin foil hat*

Google builds crowdsourcing into new Maps code stack

Re: Their biggest crowd-driven maps app

I started to use mapmaker when it was released over here last month but then thought, "what the hell am I doing giving my time, knowledge and effort to a commercial company for free?" Sure, our changes are shared to all users, and you could argue that is our 'payment', but Google are still profiting massively from it.

Virgin Mobile doffs its cap: Web speed limit axed after outrage

Still no data here

I've noticed no difference today - I still get no data at all despite my phone showing that I have 5 bars and HSDPA. Every so often the mast will give up a few bytes and I'll receive the backlog of email notifications, then it's back to nothing for a few hours.

Ex-Exel president found guilty of hacking former employers

Re: HR and Sysadmin

It's not totally their fault. From another site:

"In an Oct. 14, 2005, e-mail that was turned over by the defendants, TTS founder Mike Musacchio asks Exel employee Joseph Roy Brown "... how are we going to get into email after you leave?" Mr. Brown, who left Exel to join TTS only days later as its Vice President - Information Technology, sent the reply "I have the back door password that only I know and no one else can change."

It doesn't sound like it was as simple as their accounts not being deactivated when they left.

Virgin Mobile coughs to choking its customers

If 2Mb/s is all anyone needs then the networks have just wasted an awful lot of money on LTE

Re: If this is true...

If it was a steady 2Mb/s I would agree with you but my connection at home and work has gone from a steady 8Mb/s to one that varies constantly between 300Kb/s and 2Mb/s. That's very noticeable even when browsing.

The Register Android App

Re: This

You can do those things with css in a browser, it doesn't need an app.

When your squash partner 'endorses' your coding skills on LinkedIn...

Facebook: for friends outside of work

LinkedIn: for people I've worked with

And never the twain shall meet.

CSC axes doctor support software in the UK

Re: Open Country

HL7 is the closest there is to a standard for medical records but it isn't open in the free as in speech sense.

RIM slashes BlackBerry PlayBook tablet prices

I bought one before Christmas at this price. The hardware and OS are superb; if you're a power user who needs hundreds of apps it's probably not for you, but as a tablet for casual browsing, a few games and watching the odd program on iPlayer they're great. Come next month they'll even have a native email client!

RIM readies 7in, 10in BlackBerry tablets for 2012

I picked up a Playbook before Christmas when they were £170. The hardware and OS are superb, what's lacking is decent apps. Netflix, Skype and Kindle are all missing, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't use at least one of them on other devices. RIM should be paying these companies to the write apps for the Playbook. Also, the BB app store policy of $1=£1 needs looking at as apps are expensive compared to Android an iOS because of it.

Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?

Google legal vs Reg hack

I suspect that the Google legal bods probably considered all this for longer than the 5 hours between the takeover announcement and this article.

O2 and Be Broadband speeds dip

Dodgy Analysis

I'm also on Be LLU and still get the full 2.2MB/s download on a 24Mb/s connection and haven't noticed any problems. Measuring an average speed for all customers and then reporting that speeds are dropping is pretty useless, the comparison needs to be done like for like. It's like measuring the average speed on all roads then saying motorways are getting slower.

Spam volumes increase to pre-McColo takedown levels

Gmail Spam Still Down

Oddly, my Google Apps spam folder, which keeps spam for 30 days, is still down to around 500 messages, from a peak of 3000 just before the McColo shenanigans. Google have always been pretty good at filtering spam, but that doesn't explain why they're not even receiving it.

Fancy a shattering ORG45M for £150k?

Regtransfers

I thought for a second that you'd branched out.

Finnish blogger amputates Google from Google

@jimbobmcgee

item -ebay does the trick

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

Sales

For €5 a month you can tunnel your traffic via a VPN to Switzerland, with download limits in the 10s of GB and speeds of at least 8Mbps. So for less than the price of an album from iTunes you can download without the BPI knowing who your ISP is and without your ISP knowing what you're downloading.

Moody's to fix sub-prime computer error

A bug? My arse

They've been caught mis-rating CDOs and so are blaming it on a bug; how convenient. And who will they be disciplining, the coders or the QA team?

How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew

Any Firefox Extension coders out there?

I'm keen to help out AVG out by using a simple Firefox extension that, every 10 page requests or so, goes away and silently checks that the AVG website is still up.

When the music costs nothing, why do freetards prefer to leech?

You're using the same misleading argument as the *IAA

Just because someone downloads something for free, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would have bought it.

Sky broadband customers blindsided by SMTP switch-off

@Nick McGowan-Lowe

Google's SMTP servers seem to be very strict on what they allow; for example, if you set the from address to something different to the registered address it shows in the recipients client as from '[e-mail] on behalf of [e-mail]' (or the other way round, I can't remember). You might want to check, if that's what you're doing.

Seagate's US customers get refund

Thank goodness for that

Now perhaps computer forums won't be full of 'why is my hard drive size showing less than it's supposed to' posts, to which some idiot always replies, 'it's because you lose some when you format it.'

Asus prices up Eee PC sub-sub-notebook for US

Why the poor battery life?

How have Asus managed to get such poor battery life from a device this size with no hard drive and a small screen?

Beeb news website goes titsup

Don't panic, there's no need to do any work

You can still go to the news sections via the BBC homepage and navigate around from there, it's just the News Front Page that's not working.

UK police can now force you to reveal decryption keys

They haven't really thought this through, have they?

So if I want to get someone sent away for a couple of years, all I have to do now is plant a disk containing strong encrypted data? Maybe send it to them through the post then anonymously tip off the police that that person is involved with drug crime or a terrorist plot. They wouldn't be able to provide the police with the key and couldn't prove that the disk doesn't belong to them. Sounds like a great law. Until it happens to you...