Posts by Danny Thompson

Google snubs St George - again

We will all have arrived at Hell .......

....... in our handcart when we all start celebrating St Google day. Remember, you read it here first!

Vodafone explains N95 crippling

Plink! Another Customer Lost

My contract with Vodafone comes up for renewal later this year and the N95 is definitely the one I want at the moment. But there is no way that I will entertain the notion of an N95 from Vodafone that has had the VoIP client crippled from using the inbuilt WiFi.

Vodafone have some clear choices - leave the darned handset alone and put up with the vastly relative few who will use VoIP as well as Vodafone's minutes. Or take the risk that these same "few" will walk away and therefore lose not only the potential VoIP minutes but the entire contract.

Still, others will buy a Vodafone N95 and get it un-crippled by having the handset unbranded back to Nokia original firmware.

What a ridiculous state to put themselves in. So, come June I'm off to a network who have not crippled the N95 and Vodafone will have lost the business for what?

Mobile phone threat to honeybees

Facts and Rumours

Oh why let a little ole Fact get in the way of a bunch of juicy ripe Rumours?

I think that CCD just goes to show that the scientists and their fanboys are not as smart as they would have us believe. They simply do not know everything, they're nowhere near it. And so, we should treat everything they say with great suspicion and doubt.

There will be, in time, a perfectly simple and natural explanation for CCD.

Users fawn over Ubuntu's feisty Linux release

Oh, OK, I'll give it a go!

I have been coming back to sample Ubuntu since it wasn't Debian anymore :) But it just has not been able to stick. It has been a long and hard quest away from Windows - and I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever get away from it completely.

The rocky road has taken me, finally, to Mac OS X and I'm not really looking back. But the appeal of Ubuntu has never truly left. I know that it can be a great Desktop but for Laptops it has always left me a bit short - particularly with WiFi. Yes, yes, I know it can be done, but it is so hard to get working right that one tends to give up and walk away (often right back to Windows). Ubuntu's target for mass-scale take up has got to be Plug 'N Play as much as Windows and OS X is. Then it is ready for Prime Time mass take-up.

Ubuntu does rather seem to be nearly there - and so I'll be running up 7.04 on the trusty Laptop as soon as I can get it downloaded.

PS3 UK sales rocket... then plummet

No need to apologise for Sony

I have to chuckle at the inevitable Sony apologists that appear when such articles as this are made public. Why is there any need to make excuses for a huge international conglomerate? Especially when they are abusing the good nature of the British with their [Sony's] disdainful treatment of our market!

There is no escaping it - the Sony PS3 is over-priced and under-specified in comparison to its home and American market. Why exactly is that? Sony cannot offer any reasonable explanation, and it has already been pointed out that the cost of getting a PS3 into a shop does not in any way justify the huge cost difference (100% more than the Hong Kong buyer!). No, this is pure corporate greed in an attempt to soak what is percieved to be one of the richest economies in the world - the UK.

But Sony are due to catch a bit of a cold on the PS3 this time. The buying British public seem to have offered an entirely justified snub to the PS3 for all of the reasons that are written about. We care not about Blue Ray, we care not that Sony want it to be a "Home Entertainment System" - in the PS3 we simply want a next generation games console. When it is marketed as something else, and at a huge premium, we vote with out feet and wallets. Sony can refuse to listen at its peril.

Of course, Sony is absolutely right, I can afford a PS3, additional controller, HDMI cable and all of the other stuff that is not in the box. But, and this is the crux of the matter, I don't want to afford it. Not when I know my Hong Kong, American and Japanese cousins are getting way more for way less capital outlay. Get that Sony? I don't want to!

Apple's second-generation iPod Nano

Over-priced, Over-hyped

The Armani or Dolce & Garbana of MP3 players - Apple have done a great job of selling the Emperor's New Clothes, and now updates that are slightly incompatible with some [many?] existing accessories. One has to congratulate them on not only their ingenuety at [their own] wheel reinvention but also their marketing skills - very Japanese-must-have-the-latest-and-greatest-update.

I'm steered to almost any MP3 player but Apple by this latest update.