Posts by Will

US firm says handheld puke ray is ready to go

Hmmm

If it truely is a laser based product then polaroid glasses would sort this out as the beam will be polarised to a vertical or horizontal plane.

Satellite to offer 10Mbit broadband to entire UK

Cap

I bet the data cap is fairly brutal. I was with Eutelsat (on eBird) for some time and the download limits where about 300MB a month before speed restrictions cut in.

Cost of a cuppa set to rocket

I Tea

Everyone knows computers are run by brownian motion devices at their core, such as a nice cup of tea. CPU prices will soar.

Satellites crash over Siberia: Iridium bird destroyed

Insurance job?

With the Iridium company having a bit of a cheqeured financial history and with spare Iridium satellites up there to replace the destroyed craft my spider sense suggests this could be an insurance job. The Iridium satellites are moveable and very expensive so you would think that the company would monitor anything in it's path, after all the satellite positions are known and predictable (www.heavens-above.com has most of them on file). Quick easy way to make millions if you ask me.

Mobile broadband or WiFi? You betcha

3G saved my sanity

I live in deepest darkest Cornwall and can't get ADSL due to Aluminium cables and distance from the exchange. I was stuck with one way satellite which really does suck. Not only do they have crippling caps and costs but you need to use dial up for your uplink and quite often I found the ACK signal for the incoming data was exceeding the dial up capability so you never acheived the full download speed potential! Then 3G came along and I've not looked back, I'm with "three" for £25 a month 7GB transfer a month. Admittedly the modem doesn't move and I guess the tower in a rural area doesn't get huge amounts of use but I find the speeds are pretty damn good, quite often downloading at over 100k/s.

Time to move on from Chinook to the real MoD cock-ups

Merlin roles

I would say 'lifting' is simply a bonus with Merlins. Their main function is surveillance, recon and tracking. The kit they come with iterates this fact. Lets not forget the speed difference between a Chinook and a Merlin either. It's a bit like comparing a lear jet and a 747!

Still I agree with the lack of shopping around the government seems to do with any large purchase!

O2 says 128Kb/s is all its 3G customers need

3G broadband

I'm down in darkest Cornwall and can't get ADSL at all, too far away from the exchange. I use a 3G modem from "Three" and I get really superb speeds all the time. The modem is set up on a headless PC in the loft (only place I get 3G signal!) to provide 24/7 access for my network and I rarely get dropped connections. I've been quite impressed so far, it's certainly an essential for me and I'd be back to crap satellite wihout it.

Doctors back more tax on booze

Simple solution

Well, looks like I'll be making more of the ol' homebrew! No tax on the ingridients and you get 40 pints of pretty damn good beer as well for about £10!

Want faster broadband soon? Move to Kent, says BT

Faster?!

Never mind about faster, down here in Cornwall we could do with anything other than dial up! ADSL isn't available to a good portion of us rural folk mainly due to Aluminium cables, DAC's units and bodged cable runs!

I'm now on the 3G network and I think it may well be the easiest route to faster speeds.