Posts by Andrew Maddison 1

DVLA off-road system seriously off-message

@Intractable Potsherd (re: Proof of Posting)

Recorded Signed For and First or Second Class Post (as long as you have a proof of posting - ie a completed Certificate of Posting) are all insured to the value of 100 x the price of a first class stamp (currently 41p, so the insurance is £41).

Forms such as the V5 do have a value as the cost of a replacement where the original has been lost is £25, and similar charges apply to replacement of lost Driving Licences.

Proof documents such as passports are worth more, and are therefore worth the expense of sending via Special Delivery.

As far as someone being sent back someone else's biometric passport, I don't know why they sent it to the DVLA in the first place - you can insert the passport number in the relevant section of the license application and the DVLA can electronically check the Passport database, all without the need to risk it in the postal system.

Dunstone vows to bash Tories on filesharing laws

I thought...

that TalkTalk were now the biggest ISP, not the 2nd biggest, what with being TalkTalk *and* AOL *and* Tiscali (and all of the ones those companies had hoovered up before)?

Blu-ray capacity to increase by a third

@Anonymous Coward re: Successful Sony formats

SDDS wasn't much of a success - certainly not in the UK cinema industry. It might be offered in "flagship" screens, but that will generally be in addition to the other 2 digital sound formats for film.

And to illustrate the failure, Sony closed its UK SDDS office several years ago, and have since stopped manufacturing SDDS hardware (see http://www.sdds.com/PDFS/04SDDSDiscontinuationLetter.pdf). Considering both Dolby and DTS continue to manufacture and market Dolby Digital and DTS respectively, it looks a bit like betamax all over again.

The only real reason films are still released in SDDS is because of the (comparatively) greater penetration in the US market (and that as the vast majority of SDDS releases use the 'inferior' 6-channel configuration, rather than Sony's 'preferred' 8-channel the cost of adding SDDS to a release print is minimal).

Yes, the Googlephone works in Blighty

@ Patrick 14

All phones supplied on contract by Vodafone are network unlocked - this has been their policy since a few months after I got my N95 about 2.5 years ago. Any handset that is being used on a Vodafone contract can be unlocked by them for free as well, if it was supplied before the policy came into effect.

Vodafone gives away internet over Christmas

Pretty hopeless but...

sorted their act out when I threatened to leave and take them to court for being so completely useless.

I was on their "old" billing system with unlimited texts and picture messages, but their old system couldn't cope with the "unlimited" mobile internet bundle (unlimited in this case meaning 500MB). So every month for 10 months I was being charged the off-plan rate for internet use, and then having to get my bill adjusted (and getting them to waive the non-DD payment fee since I had no faith in their billing). When they realised this was the case they said I still had to pay for the usage - even though I'd used it in good faith.

After the threatening letter, I was moved to the "new" billing system (and therefore a different tariff) - but the new system can't cope with bundled MMS messages.

In some ways they're a total bunch of clowns, in others they're much better than other networks (unless hell freezes over I'm never touching Orange again!).

Anyway, the WAP gateway is hopeless - didn't work for A-GPS on my N95 so swapped to the Internet gateway, and have got my Xperia X1 on the Internet gateway from day 2 of having it since the WAP gateway was still so very, very slow and rubbish!

Kingston SSD Now V 40GB boot drive

@Steven Jones

My Acer 17" laptop came with two 2.5" drive bays *and* a DVD ReWriter drive, so you don't need to lose the optical drive if you don't want to (obviously it's bulkier than a 15" but then I like having the bigger screen!). It's not even high up the model series.

TomTom navigates way onto iPhone

So where's the support for people who've given TomTom money for years?

Why has TomTom now completely abandoned a pretty big user base by refusing to write or release a new version of TomTom Navigator to run on Windows Mobile / CE or on Symbian? The latest 'official' release I believe is Navigator 6 on Symbian (and it's so old it fails to work with the N95's internal GPS) and Navigator 6 on WinMo (apart from devices that had TomTom 7 preinstalled). Even TomTom's customer service people don't know why Navigator 8 hasn't been released (or Navigator 7 made available separately) - they'll rake in the money from people upgrading to new maps if they sorted it out!