* Posts by Barry Lane

4 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2009

BT bumps up broadband speeds

Barry Lane
IT Angle

Woot!

Used to be with BT, who managed to get 1.7 meg to me along their ancient copper wire, at phenomenal cost to me. Damned thing used to drop out a couple of times a day, and if I wanted to watch iPlayer clips or anything else even slightly demanding, it would throw a sulk and I'd have to restart the modem.

Moved to O2 several months ago and I now get 4 - 5 meg - a little less speedy at weekends when the locals start their big pron-viewing marathons, or whatever it is they get up to - and it costs me around seven quid a month.

BT is a marketing company of dubious merit that just happens to have a small interest in telephony and something they call the Internets. The sooner these jokers are put out of business, the sooner we can join the rest of the world in having half-decent web access.

The IT? icon cos there isn't one that says 'BT?'

ISPs eye role in Jacqui's mass surveillance system

Barry Lane
Coat

Blame Blair and Brown

Had Tony not been up George W's butt over bowling into Iraq, none of this bollix would have been 'needed' by this hopeless government anyway. Thanks to our fab and far-sighted politicians - the ones who lied and lied to us about WMDs - and the same ones who couldn't tell you the difference between IT and TGI Friday, we now have to peek through the curtains to see which religious nutter is going to be next to blow us all up in our beds.

It's clear that Jacqui and her colleagues haven't the knowledge or the IQ to understand the games they play. The Tories will get in at the next election and probably add extra bells and whistles to the entire process, so we won't even be able to tell our Facebook chums what a shitty day we had without a rozzer being present in the room.

Mine's the coat with the ticket to Mars in the pocket.

UK.gov to spend £2bn on ISP tracking

Barry Lane
Paris Hilton

Government and IT. Oh, good grief!

This benighted government has an abysmal record with IT. WTF do they think they're going to get from this that they could possibly use? After all, if they're running surveillance on any individual or group, they can do it without waking up the UK's fab band of ISPs to do anything other than put an ever tighter lid on our usage levels.

Perhaps we should introduce a law that says any numbnut potential candidate for Parliament must have at least a working knowledge of computing or - oh, I don't know - be put to death, say.

Just a thought. After all, if these dicks want to investigate every aspect our feckn lives they should at least know what they're talking about. Perhaps we should show them absolutely everything we do; send Jacqui our stool samples, for example.

How stupid are these damned people?

Paris, cos I'd rather be in Paris in the Spring.

Slash your way inside Apple's Mac Mini

Barry Lane
Black Helicopters

Well, if I can do it...

Upgraded my Core 2 doodah Mini a few weeks back and it was easy-peasy. And the antenna reconnect turned out to be simpler than it looked, thanks to a pair of tweezers and my new varifocals. As for buying a PC, those things seem to run something called Windows and we wouldn't want that kind of dross on any serious computer. Nasty old business!

External power supplies are no problem. My Mini runs a 24-inch HP monitor very successfully, and while it's true that I'd prefer it to have better graphics - onboard stuff is a cop-out, I'll grant you - the Mini works superbly well and looks a treat. I'm aware that culturally challenged people who run enormous PCs with blue lights, water-cooling and more storage space than ASDA so they can play WoW and download pron to their little hearts' content, don't understand anything about aesthetics, or indeed operating systems, but (and I speak as a reformed PC user here) Apple continually raises the bar that all you drones and your squalid peecees scramble to keep up with every year.

I don't buy computers so I can take them apart, like I don't service my own car - if we were meant to do that, God wouldn't have given us mechanics - but even I discovered that breaking open the Mac Mini is a doddle. So there!

The bug, cos I ain't never 'ad one.