Posts by Tim Williams 2

US broadband speeds 15 years behind South Korea

State by State

I'd be intrigued to see all figures on a state by state basis. I can appreciate why the figure for Alaska would be low, but how about New Jersey or California, which would probably be a fairer comparison with S. Korea or most European countries.

UK.gov won't drop 50p high speed broadband tax plans - yet

Why ?

They managed to build all the previous generations of broadband without this tax. What has changed that makes it necessary now ?

Microsoft warns of 'irreparable harm' on court's Word injunction

I Hope MS Win

Just a thought but is the application of this patent specific to the way that Word and OOXML work, or could it be applied to other Word processing software which operates in a similar way using XML based file formats ? As a OpenOffice/Linux user I would be concerned if MS lost this case.

Orange declares mobile broadband price war

Cheapest by 11p

I'm getting 3GB for £5 a month from T-Mobile as an addon to my pay monthly phone plan and have had this a few months now. I suppose £4.89 is technically cheaper in monetary terms, but it's a lot more expensive per MB.

I wonder if Orange will now extend these prices to their French network where prices for 3G are still criminally expensive. Many of the tariffs are still time based and an unlimited package (with 3-5GB per month fair usage), will set you back about 40E a month. PAYG works out at about 8-10E a day. Ouch....

Eurostar tunnels through UK border ring of steel

Ireland

Correct me if i'm wrong, but you don't need a passport (though you do need photo ID for the ferry/plane) to go to the Irish republic and their are no land border controls between the republic and N. Ireland. Presumably the ferrys and planes going to/from Ireland are included in this scheme, but as a would be dodger I could fly to Dublin and the cross 'uncounted' into N. Ireland. Seems to me that either we need to give N. Ireland to the Republic and the re-impose full border controls or forget all of this nonsense and join the Schengen zone.

Masked passwords must go

Wrong target

He should be addressing his comments to the browser makers not website designers. The password form type exists for a reason, browsers don't automatically remember it's content without asking you. If I change my password fields to text and then use a website on somebody elses computer, my password is going to get flashed up to every subsequent user who manges to type in the first letter of my password. Not good.... If he really wants the option to turn off masking, it should be a browser config option to change the behaviour of the password field type. But then I might be showing my banking login details which are critical.......

Opera applauds scepticism on MS browser pledge

Makes no difference

So i've just installed my shiny new copy of Windows 7, stated it up, opened my web browser. Ah but I can't. Ooops. So how do I download and install this essential piece of software ? Given that most web browsers need to be downloaded using, wait for it, a web browser you're now stuck. However, helpful Microsoft will presumably provide an nice big 'download and install IE NOW' button on the desktop to help solve this conundrum. How many people will bother to download an alternative browser on another computer and transfer it across ? Probably not very many.

Rather than forcing MS to produce feature incomplete versions of windows, the EU commission should force MS to licence windows core technology to 3rd parties at a fair price. These 3rd parties can then create their own windows distributions with alternative software for all the main apps, different configuration and branding, (just like the linux distros do) while still being compatible with windows as a whole.