Posts by Alexis Vallance

DVLA: A licence to bill

Never pay private parking companies

It's criminal. Basically, any private parking company can buy your details from the DVLA for £2.50 and then bombard the registered keeper with threatening letters, full of lies and intimidation.

This is despite any alleged contract being with the driver at the time, not necessarily the keeper, and the fact that these 'fines' are merely unenforceable invoices with no legal basis.

The DVLA will send you their standard template letter if you complain, in the same way these private companies send you a template 'appeal rejected' letter if you're silly enough to contact them.

Apple ups the ante in Psystar battle

How?

How can you monopolise a sector of the market you created? Does this mean averything that has a patent is monopolising the market as well?

Psystar are screwed, and rightly so.

US boffins: Laptops will be as hot as the Sun by 2030

Too hot

Cue even more "I'm really scared because my laptop is really hot when I touch it" posts on internet forums.

Developers to get Windows 7 pre beta next month

Need to rethink

Windows 7 is going to be like Windows Vista, which was like XP, which was like 98, which was like 95.

They need to simplify and come up with something new. There's just far too much clutter and a scattergun approach to Windows. Looking at the blog, they seem to think it's fantastic to use because their 'research' tell them 95% of users do x, 3% of users do y and 2% of users do z. Maybe 100% of users want to try it a better way, if MS thought of something new.

Take the image they posted on their blog: [url]https://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/e7/WindowsLiveWriter/UserInterfaceStartingLaunchingandSwitchi_1321B/clip_image002_2.jpg[/url]

Everything is crammed together at the bottom of the screen, just as it's always been. The blogger thinks it's the bees knees. No - it's so cluttered and poorly designed. I hate the start menu with a passion, mainly because you spend more time keeping it tidy than using the thing.

NEW IDEAS NEEDED.

Blockbuster: DVD to Blu-ray shift slower than VHS to DVD

HD TV

With VHS>DVD you could keep the same TV.

With Blu Ray you need a new TV to gain advantage.

Some of us are still happily using 21" CRTs in their front room!

eBay: don't come on our US site without protection

Ebay gone down the pan

"e-Bay is history. It just doesn't know it yet. It'll be bought be Google or Microsoft within two years."

I hope you're right. I'd love Google to march in and sort everything out.

Dell offers XP option for £44k

Bargain!

It would be a bargain at twice the price!

EU slaughterhouses may get animal welfare officers

Sick

Halal should be illegal.

We can't even sort out underaged forced marriage, so what hope have we got of banning barbaric medieval practices like Halal though?

PC gone mad.

Mozilla security chief: Apple should open up

@ Kevin

Not the old market share argument again.

Millions of Macs are sold every quarter, but the market share is always going to be fairly niche. At what point are we going to be seeing apocalyptic virus attacks? When market share is 8% or when it's 9%??

People have been saying it for years but OS X as unaffected by problems in 2008 as it was when OS X arrived in 2001. If your market share argument held any weight, we'd be seeing at least something by now.

Ranting like Webster doesn't change the fact I'm sitting here, happy as larry, with no anti virus, stumbling around the internet with nothing bad happening to me. And I'll be doing the same tomorrow, and the same in 5 years time.

It's great!

Climate change blows out eco-boss's record bid

What an idiot

So 'unseasonal rains' are automatically attributed to climate change?

Newsflash - weather conditions aren't static year in year out. No doubt the lake bed has been flooded numerous times in the past before anyone thought of 'climate change'.

Perhaps when it was a lake?

Dixons stores offer own-brand HSDPA mini-laptop

1 gig a month

There was some small print on the advert saying you're limited to 1Gb a month, whereas Carphone Warehouse gives you 3.

It also proclaimed it comes with 'Genuine Windows XP Home' as if that was an advantage over the Linux their rival gives you.

UK launches major road signage review

Clutter

The graphic simplicity of the signage is sorted, so the only things left to do are to reduce the number of signs and clutter. The road where I work has THREE give ways signs at the end, all in front of each other for no apparent reason!

Electronic signs are a nice idea, but since Manchester is inundated by a network of illuminated car park space signs that haven't worked for 5 or 6 years, the last thing we need are more of these.

Road markings have gone mad over the last decade. Junctions are plastered with red and green coatings which last about a year before they disintegrate and become a confused mess.

It's all well and good new technology and signage being implemented, but it's local councils that are the weak link since they have no funding.

Forget a road sign review, how about spending some money on road resurfacing. Manchester's roads are crater filled.

Web designer sues Brat City for assaulting hyperlink

$85k?

She's in the right, but isn't owed any more than £100 for inconvenience suffered.

$85k is taking the piss and she doesn't deserve it at all.

Apple revamps iPod line-up

@ Webster Phreaky

Er, who said you should throw away your 6 month old player? It seems you expect Apple to never bring new stuff out, but when they do, people are idiots for buying them.

You must be a real blast at Christmas. Do you limit yourself to a new pair of socks and no more than a sip of sherry?

ID scheme plans 50,000 cards by April

Personal cost

I'm not too bothered - unless they are going to still make us pay for it.

They can't seriously still be expecting us all to fork out £35 for a bit of plastic?

World goes mad as Bill and Jerry eat churros

Utter pants

WTF??

The most nonsensical piece of unfunny crap I think I've ever seen.

I have no idea what just happened.

And why put Gates in it??? Surely putting the living, breathing stereotype of everything that's wrong with computing is the last thing they should be doing.

MS are running around in circles without a clue how to get out the mire they've got themselves in. Pants ads like this aren't gonna help.

Mythbusters busted over RFID gagging

Names

From the YouTube video, I understand it was Tori and the producer, not Grant.

Either way, Savage is only reporting on what he heard second hand from them.

Microsoft slashes US Xbox 360 to sub-Wii price

'We'

You say 'we' switched off the XBox.

I agree the Wii is more fun, but I find only really when there are a group of you over. It's a great party machine, but it's lacking when it comes to the 'traditional' single player games market.

It's not as much fun playing on the Wii on your own, unless you're doing something wacky like 'Wii Fit'.

Dixons Group still suffering

Things have moved on

The chain belongs to a different era. Customers are more discerning now than they were 10 years ago. You can get everything online now - their stores need to create a new incentive for you to step through the door.

Tacky warehouses and cheesy advertising are no good anymore (not that I'm sure they ever were).

There's a reason why Apple stores are packed to the rafters with people and PC World is an empty space.

I hope their refits are substantial and forward thinking. Curry's new adverts aren't tacky anymore, but unfortunately they are dull as ditchwater.

They need to move with the times. And fast.

Google releases open source browser

Can only be good

The more competition IE gets, the better.

Samsung unwraps MacBook Air beater

@anonymous coward

"The air isn't the smallest, it isn't the best, and it's frankly just another dire piece of Apple hardware for the Jobs bridage - under quality, over priced."

If you don't like Apple hardware, at least convey it with some meaningful words.

I don't think you get the point of the Air, or a lot of Apple's products by the sound of it.

Not again

Why is every thin laptop deemed a 'MacBook Air' beater?

It's just a thin laptop. The Air is in a different league.

MS beefs up WinXP Pro's anti-piracy nagware

It makes no sense

How exactly would MS lose out if they scrapped the whole stupid system?

XP is easy to pirate. Anybody can torrent it and a crack to go with it.

Vista is easy to pirate. Anybody can torrent it and a crack to go with it.

Nobody out there thinks, oh I'll have to buy a copy because I can't get past the activation protection.

You either buy it or you pirate it. What pathetic hurdles MS try to put in your way are merely pushed aside.

MS always like to bring up the fairly unbelievable scenario of some innocent buying a machine and somehow having a dodgy version of the OS on it. Then they're shocked to discover this and MS takes them by the hand and kindly educates them how they're missing out by not having a Genuine (registered trade mark) version.

Hackintosh maker bites back at Apple

Not quite

"After all its all the same hardware underneath the case. INTEL cpu's NVidia/Radeon GFX, etc etc. SAME STUFF as any PC."

Is that why I can merely place in an OS X DVD into a PC and watch it happily install?

Everything's a 'PC' at the end of the day to a differing degree - XBox, Playstation. Do we classify the XBox as a PPC Mac due to it's PowerPC CPU?

This case is not that different from Sony banning PS2 PC emulators back in the day.

Differences

The software is available for sale and you can use it as long as you agree to terms x, y, z. One issue is whether you agreed to those terms by installing the software and the other issue is whether those terms are fair.

If you don't think the terms are fair, you challenge them. You do not challenge them by ignoring the terms and make a profit as a result.

Challenge first, then profit once you've won. You can't do it the other way around.

Council clamps down on 'man on the street'

Don't fuss

Nobody will ever read the 7 page guide anyway.

Although that makes me wonder what sort of format it could possibly be in, since literature has to consist of either 2, 4, 8, 12, 16 etc. pages.

World+Dog predicts new iPods, Macs imminent

Still waiting for an iPhone Nano

I'm not sure what else they can really do with the Touch, apart from drop the price. The original one is an iPhone really, despite what the article says.

Every iPod Touch sale is a potential iPhone lost sale, as they are basically the same.

I'd love an iPhone Nano for the simple reason I won't buy the phone as it is because I already own one in the form of the Touch.

That 'Elderly Persons' sign: Can you do better?

Old People

Here in Eccles there's an old sign from the 70's outside which says 'DANGER: OLD PEOPLE CROSSING"

About two weeks ago, someone scrubbed out the word 'crossing'.

Copyright lawyers accuse 25,000 UK videogame filesharers

Shared connection

In a house or flat with 2 or 3 people sharing one wireless connection, it would be difficult to prove who actually downloaded and shared the game I would have thought.

A friend of a friend received one of these notices last year about a Codemasters game and demand for £300. They just ignore it and nothing happened.

Downing Street rejects 'Clarkson for PM' petition

Fair play

LOL. Fair play to them.

Meanwhile, have a look at www.ministryoftype.co.uk for an overview of the typographical mess that is the 'beta' version of the new site.

A third of Vista PCs downgraded to XP

Fix it

They don't actually need new features. They just need to streamline and simplfy what they've already got.

You've just got to look at the control panel: 52 choices. OS X has 25.

Everything needs stripping back and made to work.

Ditch crap like 'Welcome Center'. Ditch marketing crap like 'Windows Defender'.

And ditch any piracy crap which disables legimate users' machines. Just sell it in two versions: home and business, for £50 and £75.

This isn't the world that MS thinks it is. Consumers are much more savvy nowadays and can see what is and what isn't a good deal. This sums it up: http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f234/PORSCHER/osx_vs_vista_upgrades.jpg

Apple tops customer satisfaction poll as rivals' ratings slide

Yay

You pay a bit more, but you do get a genuinely nice machine for your money. And I've never had any problems with Apple.

Pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap companies have a harder job keeping customers happy. Those low prices have to paid for somewhere along the line.

Vodafone jacks up UK prices

Vodafone: poor

Vodafone have always been expensive, but this takes the biscuit.

I'm on PAYG and I got a text the other day with all the new charges. Local 0845 calls and 'free' 0800 numbers have been pushed right up.

In only went with them because T Mobile had no decent phones at the time. I've noticed credit with Vodafone has been vanishing all too quickly over the last few months - I thought WAP had accidently become activated or something in my pocket, but it can't be done.

Looking forward to ditching Vodafone at Christmas and moving back to T-Mobile.

An iPhone Nano would affect any plans though :-)

Road Pricing 2.0 is two years away

Why are they doing this to themselves?

Are the government trying to turf themselves out of office?

It's unpopular decision after unpopular decision.

They'll be out in 2010, no question. I can't stand the tories and the lib dems have gone all green and have no idea what they're doing anymore.

There is nobody to vote for anymore. I'll just sit back and wait for Cameron to get in.

We're all doomed.

Apple preps patch for 'problematic 3G' iPhone?

From MacRumors

"We are working on some bugs which affect around 2% of the iPhones shipped, and hope to have a software update soon."

Steve

Microsoft starts stoking hype for Windows 7

Need something new

I think MS needs to do an Apple. v7 needs to be Vista, but fixed, in the same way Snow Leopard will be Leopard, but improved.

Go back to basics, throw out stuff that doesn't work and simplify.

Then strip it down to two versions - home and business - and sell it cheap.

Mashed up Met Police crime maps go online

What to do

Decisions decisions. Do you either burgle a recently robbed street who probably have shiny new gadgets from their insurers, or do you target an area that hasn't been done for a while, and rely on their complacency.

This is a mad idea!!

Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered

No surprise

The media are still loving the global warming / claimate change / carbon footprint rubbish.

I heard the latest government radio ad yesterday, with the infuriating line "How many time have you heard 'funny weather we're having lately' down at the pub?"

Aaarggh.

iPhone 3G isn't necessarily

So

The adverts in the US are based around it being 'twice as fast'.

Some different laws in the UK mean the line is replaced with 'really fast'.

I'm not sure how you define 'really fast', but I've yet to hear anyone complain over here.

Dell to launch 'Eee PC beater' today

Market?

It's seems odd there's a market for these when grown-up laptops are being sold for pennies and given away for free with some broadband deals.

iPhone apps selling like hot cakes

Why all the fuss

It seems pretty simple to me.

• Apple *could* remove an application. I gather this is just for emergencies and will be rarely used.

• If you lost an application you'd get a refund.

There are bigger things in life to worry about.

Yep

It's just a backup option apparently, but there's no reason to suggest you won't get a refund from a deleted app. They'd have to.

Tiffany demands reappraisal of eBay counterfeit decision

Ebay don't police their site properly

Ebay are very reluctant to remove items and users. I've reported plants that have obviously been poached from the wild on there and ebay do absolutely nothing.

No doubt Tiffanys have constantly been telling ebay what's on there and ebay's inaction has led to this case.

UK employers sharpen job axe

Get real

14 year olds don't care about job options when they pick what GCSEs to drop or take - it's all about doing what you want to do.

Double award science is fine. If you really like science, do all three.

There are not a shortage of scientists because not enough kids are choosing to do triple science at GCSE.

You certainly can't punish kids who do well at science SATs by forcing them to drop a subject they might like and replace it with a science course at GCSE.

Not to mention SATS are utterly utterly pointless, and they always have been. You just turn up on the day with no revision and get told you're a level 5, 6 or 7 a few weeks later. It's GCSEs that are important, not SATS!

Wind farm wound down on air traffic fears

Pointless

They're a waste of time - they produce a miserable amount of electricity, look crap, don't produce a steady stream of power, mess up the grid and need a proper power station to provide backup support.

Which is why Denmark scrapped their windfarm program a few years ago.

Notebook sales lead Lenovo in Q1

Surprised

I'm always surprised when I hear Lenovo do well. Their laptops could make lethal weapons, going by their chunky "my first laptop" proportions!

Orange sees broadband subscriber exodus

No problems here

I've been with them for 18 months and found them to be pretty good.

Livebox works fine.

Great download speeds (700k)

It's unlimited (or I haven't fallen foul of their fair use policy at least)

Always reliable.

Customer care seems good - I sent them a change of bill-payer letter and I got call back just to say they'd received the letter. Spot on!

I'm in the centre of Manchester admittedly, but I've got no complaints.

Rockstar confirms GTA IV PC edition

Yay

Well it is a little bit shocking. There was always a chance it wouldn't be ported, especially if it San Andreas hadn't made all that much money for example.

Please consider buying the game for once, instead of torrenting it. This is a game that is actually worth the £30.

Paris Hilton - the compromised candidate

Novel

I think this is the first internet video I've seen of her with her clothes on.

Supercomputer to improve UK weather

Good

Sounds good.

How will it improve the accuracy of the UKMO model compared with the currently best-verifying model output from the ECMWF in Reading though?