Posts by alpine

Revenues from in-app purchases swelled 32% to almost $30bn for Q3 2020 – and Apple snaffled most of it

Confirmation that Apple customers are thickos.

'Year-long' delay to UK 5G if we spike Huawei deals, say telcos

Bless you.

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

There's clearly only one solution. I shall have to get the soldering iron out and build my own network, and none of this fancy microcoded stuff.

Re: 9 Months delay?

Still waiting for reliable 3G in my leafy suburb. And I have tried all the providers...

Gartner to wearables biz: Through failure comes success!

Nice piece of pink twisted pair from your breast pocket up to the hearable, to make the battery last more than half an hour. Yes, a vast market there...

One UI to end gropes: Samsung facelift crowns your thumb the king

It's Android, not IoS, just install another shell and forget Touchwiz.

TV Licensing admits: We directed 25,000 people to send their bank details in the clear

Capita

Just another daily cockup by the kings of cockups. Tv licences should be abolished and the contract to Capita terminated immediately. It's the 21st century: the tax is an anachronism from the 1930s.

No one wants new phones – it's chips that keep Samsung chugging

Re: The problem is:

Indeed, I was astonished by the sneaky icloud chargeable storage stuff. How do they get away with it? Basically millions of idiots buying it of course...

Re: What else IS there?

I did have a phone that did this, unfortunately it was a let down in other ways. A single slot, accommodated 2 sim cards, one on each side with one sideways, and a microsd. Unfortunately the Elephone S2 idea has never been replicated. But the clever slot was let down by the abysmal battery life...

You know what your problem is, Apple? Complacency

Re: Just more BS

I've been using an iPhone recently. After Android, it's like going back into the 20th century. All the fiddles and loops one has to jump through to actually do things with apps because of the rigidity of the elderly iOS. It's quite an eyeopener how they've managed to get away with it for so long.

There will be blood: BT to axe 13,000 employees

Re: No people skills whatsovever

Being a football fan is also a prerequisite if you have customer's and shareholder's cash to dispose of.

Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

It's April 16th and all of a sudden Google Earth Pro is reporting an invalid security certificate to my Win 10 machine. This is totally ridiculous.

Probe: How IBM ousts older staff, replaces them with young blood

Ethics

Reminds me of the old IBM salesman's manual giving all the 'ethical' rules that were to be used during sales projects. Of course, the rule book could be interpreted and then used in exactly the opposite way to the claimed 'ethical' intention. No wonder we relatively gentlemanly chaps in UK firms lost out all the time...

Do they still use that manual I wonder?

Mazda and Toyota join forces on Linux-based connected car platform

Re: 3 years of supported apps?

I've always thought that steering tillers should never have replaced those nasty wheel things you have to tuck into your lap.

Amazon granted patent to put parachutes inside shipping labels

UK mail have a very good one hour window tracking system, and you can change the window the day before delivery if required. And watch the progress of the driver and the package count he's up to.

Microsoft's in-store Android looks desperate but can Google stop it?

Wierdly odd

Despite Microsoft's constraints, HP did manage to provide some very odd WIndows machines. Nothing was ever quite the same as a normal windows installation. Very annoying to support.

Crack in black: Matte iPhones losing paint at alarming rate, gripe fans

Re: Looks like the sky at night...

Well, the 20th century user interface is a look back into the past.

God save the Queen... from Donald Trump. So say 1 million Britons

"More than a million Britons"? FAKE NEWS

There is no check on age, nationality, residency in the current farcical government petition system, so this article is fake news.

UK ISPs may be handed cock-blocking powers

"You forgot trump"

And Corbyn.

Amazon's first live drone delivery flew last week in Cambridge, UK

Re: No, it's still bloody stupid

Yup. It's aimed at keeping their delivery contractors payment demands down, nothing more.

WileyFox Swift 2: A new champ of the 'for around £150' market

Xiaomi Redmi 3S

Android 6 ( its Miui fork), 3GB, 32GB, dual sim, lte, 13Mpixels rear camera, Snapdragon octacore 430. £159. Brilliant phone and probably made in the same place as the Swift.

Google may just have silently snuffed the tablet computer

Re: @RIBrsiq "I remember a time when tablets were supposed to kill the PC"

My Nexus 7 2013 is 2+ years old now. Works well, I see no reason to change. And replacements with the same video spec seem to cost silly money.

Plusnet outage leaves customers unable to stream Netflix. Horrors!

BT Owned

'Nuff said...

Inside our three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party

Applespeak

Is this all Applespeak or do all Californians talk like this now? Absolutely DIRE.

"Thanks for reaching out"

"my colleague Michaela, copied here, is our point person,"

Etc...

UK's EE scores network reliability clean sweep, rival dwarves fume

Re: Nothing Squared

Here, a leafy suburb with standard 1920s detached houses, I have to go upstairs or out of doors to make even a 2G call. EE is abysmal.

Re: One thing is for sure

Here, with EE, I have to go upstairs to get even a 2G signal. Standard 1920s detached house, nothing odd. Their coverage is appalling.

Gun-jumping French pols demand rapid end to English in EU

Re: Lingua Franca

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to buy a nice Italian T-shirt to bring back to the UK as a souvenir for a 7 year old. There were some fun toddler's ones, with sayings that looked exciting, even though I didn't understand them. But this boy takes T shirts for 9/10 year olds and by the time they get to that age, Italian kids want slogans in AngloAmerican, not their own language.

Users fear yet another hack as TalkTalk services go down

"What kind of moron puts critical infrastructure on a floodplain?"

Most businesses in London. The Thames barrier won't last much longer and the Jubilee river cannot provide enough future protection.

Re: BT Here but.....

"Because he said something positive about a company that some people don't like?"

The BT pensioners always come out in force to attack TT.

In fact the problem, a flooded data centre, appears to have been resolved. My web stuff there is up and running again this morning.

Official: Microsoft's 'Get Windows 10' nagware to vanish from PCs in July

"Without those fixes, you'll be better off unplugging your machine for good."

Not really. By far the vast majority of 'security' fixes relate to things that have never been seen in the wild but result from investigations by supposed security firms who are of course on to a nice little earner.

Microsoft half-bricks Asus Windows 7 PCs with UEFI boot glitch

Not an asus issue, but I dual boot my Dell XPS13 with Win 7 and Win 10 for various reasons. I reformatted the drive to get rid of all the 'secure' boot stuff. It all works, but Microsoft or Intel are certainly still up to sillies because when I choose Win 7, the machine loses the sound drivers on the Win 10 installation and I have to reinstall them each time...

MoD contractor hacked, 831 members of defence community exposed

An MoD network forum. On the INTERNET? Were they mad?

How exactly do you rein in a wildly powerful AI before it enslaves us all?

2040-50?

Or will it be like the pension age where they keep having to increment it earlier than expected? 2020 anyone?!

BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans

Re: Missed the boat...

"So, why oh why oh why, didn't someone at the BBC do the "proper" thing and ensure that all set top boxes could take a subscriber card..."

They knew it very well, and went out of their way to ensure conditional access facilities were optional only. This was to preserve the guaranteed income that the licence in its existing form gives them.

iPhones clock-blocked and crocked by setting date to Jan 1, 1970

WoW!

"your timezone could pull you into negative time"

Apple lead the way again, the first phones to time warp. And the space time continuum has curved corners. No one has ever surpassed their innovative minds. Their 'Joney' deserves another knighthood for his second piece of brilliance.

Bye-bye, BT: Finance director jumps ship

He's probably just latched on to how much they've paid for their football deals and that it will never match their subscriber revenues.

BT broadband is down: Former state monopoly goes TITSUP UK-wide

Talktalk's been fine.

As it usually has been for me for 6 years now.

Ofcom's head is dead against Three and O2's merger

Re: Easy fix

" people say "you can't put a mast there"

BT of course don't have that problem because all those nice telegraph poles, which they own, are already everywhere. Ideal for cellphone or wifi repeaters. That's why it is very dangerous to encourage their monopoly to extend itself into the mobile arena.

Rooting your Android phone? Google’s rumbled you again

They would say that wouldn't they, they're looking for customers!. Personally, I'd never use contactless payments either and it's not enabled by default on my cards.

Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules

India

Probably shortly JLR's parent company will open a new plant to build them in their home country, free of EU interference.

Happy 30th birthday, IETF: The engineers who made the 'net happen

RFC

The clue that explains why it was all so successful is in the initials on all the fundamental standards. They're still called RFCs, or were when I last looked, which I admit was some time ago.. 'Requests for comment'... Cooperation was the key.

Capita in line for tasty £139m deal across five councils

Anti-localism

And all in the name of 'localism', as Big Brother strides further over our lives. Localism? The truth is the exact opposite, encouraged by weak councils who have been conned into believing renaming their main committee as 'the cabinet' gives them some importance, as well as more fees.

It's very sad to see.

EU governments reach agreement on passenger name data

Landbased?

And what about land based travel. You know trains n' boats n' cars?

Part of the world's IT brought down by Azure Active Directory issue

Rubbish

Active Directory has always been rubbish under the covers, since its first incarnation limped out of the starting blocks. Nothing's changed.

Microsoft Office 365, Azure portals offline for many users in Europe

Re: Hosted Exchange

Don't be silly. It's the CLOUD, dontcha know, the unversal answer, alongside 42, to everything.

Please conform.

DS5: Vive la différence ... oh, and throw away the Citroën badge

SM

They should reintroduce that most beautiful car, the Citroen SM. I wonder whether SM would be a good brand? In some circles, possibly...

They could merge with the old Bond brand, for even more excitement. The SM Bond.

BT reveals vanishingly small detail about its fibre broadband network

Former?

'Former' state monopoly? As long as BT is allowed to hang on to Openreach, it still is a state monopoly except in those highly restricted areas covered by cable.

Apple's OS X App Store downloads knackered by expired security cert

I'm sure Steve Jobs put an entry in his diary.

Amazon's chomping at the Brits: UK to get AWS data center region

Re: GCHQ/NSA is a red herring

Speeds are reasonable, but it's always bugged me (!) that their search engine is awful compared to Ebay. Why don't they do something about that first.