Posts by gsf333

Project Lightning, you say? Virgin Media's fibre rollout is pretty glacial

Re: (If you can get domestic fibre) then Virgin business is the way to go ...

It's £22 + VAT for the "essential" 50/5 service if you are out of contract

What's wrong with coax cable?

Guess who's still most moaned about UK ISP... Rhymes with BorkBork

Re: Huh?

Here in South Yorkshire 'talk' is said like the word 'torque' / 't-OR-c, thus does rhyme (sort of) with 'bork'

Re: Talk rhymes with Bork?

Its not 'borough'. The 'burgh' element is pronounced in the same way as 'brough' is.

This seems to be a common issue around where I live as there are plenty of towns that end in both 'brough' and 'borough'. Although they all come from the same word meaning, the pronunciation is different.

Taiwanese cops give malware-laden USB sticks as prizes for security quiz

No problem, Just take it for a 'thrash down the River Don' and race the River Boat & Party Boats

Take notebooks: About those new Thinkpads...

On my T series laptop (T460P) the entire back cover has to be unscrewed and pulled off to gain access to anything. If the battery is not soldered in place and just on a small fly lead and clipped in then then in my opinion this is good enough as how often does the vast majority change their batteries?

If the company I work for is any indication, no-one has a spare battery, and very few people change their batteries apart from when they are left with <30mins life left. In fact, most stay plugged in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Anyone know if this is how they have designed these newer laptops internally, is the battery easily replaceable just not on demand user removable ?

WD My Cloud NAS devices have hard-wired backdoor

Anyone know if this effects the WD My Book Live? I know the article makes no mention to this, however is this because it's no longer a currently supported device.

As a side, if the device is set to not accept remote connections, would this mean only a local user could gain entry?

Yes, Britain has an urban-rural 4G schism. This is what it looks like

Do you mean Femtocell? A Picocell isn't something anyone would usually have in their home.

Ofcom proposes ways to stop BT undercutting broadband rivals

Re: How about opening up Virginmedia's network

Virgin Media don't do ADSL.They sold their ADSL customers to Talk Talk well over 2 years ago.

Thousand-dollar iPhone X's Face ID wrecked by '$150 3D-printed mask'

Re: From experience though.....

So I take it you don't use a computer monitor, nor did you use any mobile comms equipment before 3-4 years ago, and lastly have no idea what the text on your TV screen says when you put the menu up or change channel?

Firefox 57: Good news? It's nippy. Bad news? It'll also trash your add-ons

Re: LastPass

I think you've already advertised it as you are not logged in as AC.

Re: NoScript ?

If by faster they mean it will load up quicker, then this is certainly a very welcome improvement.

Firefox up until a couple of years ago used to load up almost instantly, now even on fast computers it is still like trying to load Windows on a 386.

If it's something else, then yeah, never noticed it slowing me down when browsing.

Apple's iPhone X won't experience the joy of 6...

Re: Android? Phweeewt

Apple direct refurbs are always re-cased and have their battery replaced. Regardless of whether they need it or not. Smart way to buy an iPhone if you ask me.

However, refurbs from CPW, o2 or similar, could well be customer returns, if they look fine they go back in the a box and classed as 'refurbed'

Re: Gorilla(s) in the room

You have made the usual mistake of thinking you are reflective of the 45+ million adults in this country.

If you have a sim only contract, why would they try selling you a handset? They try to sell people handsets when you come to 'upgrade' or try to leave for another supplier - at this point they will then try to deflect attention to the phones they make most money on by trying to 'understand what you need in a phone'.

Re: Gorilla(s) in the room

Not sure where you are based, but in the UK this is certainly not the case.

Although most phones are sold by the networks it doesn't mean they are jumping for joy to be selling the iPhone over any other manufacturers. Customer behaviour does mean the network operators as a whole sell the most phones - simply because it's the simplest method for the customer phone up, new phone comes = no effort and it's effectively on credit without doing a thing.

The networks push new iPhones because they know that if they don't other networks will be happy to poach their customers, many have seen this happen multiple times in the early years.

The network operators would much rather sell you a non Apple phone that they have a much higher markup on. In fact most of the operators pay higher commission (or increase the banding - thus price to customer) . So yes, the iphone might get you to call the networks retention's department, however they will try and sell you something they make more money on once you have opened the door.

iPhone has a very slim markup for the operators. Tesco once let slip that the cost price wasn't even 10% below sale price, it's likely the main operators get a better deal - however Apple squeeze, so it won't be a massive amount more.

Want to keep in contact with friends and family without having to sell your personal data?

Have the team that designed the O2 Joggler come back for a version 2? This sounds like it's destined to have the same demise with crate loads of brand new ones dumped in a skip never to see the light of day ever again.

Chief digital officer and sales director leave O2 amid ongoing shake-up

It does seem an odd metric to measure how big a network is. I thought O2 were the second biggest network in the UK by conventional measures.

Normal measurement would be either subscribers and/or profit & turnover.

Seems like measuring the size of a cars fuel tank to ascertain how big the car actually is.

Mobe reception grief turns LTE Apple Watch 3 into – er, a dull watch

Re: I don't know about you...

I notice that iOS 11 now has an option in for each individual Wi-Fi hotspot that says 'Auto-Join'. Select it and you have to click on the WiFi hotspot to connect (but no need to add your login details - it still remembers these).

This should stop the pain in the backside that is O2 Wifi, BT Cloud, Tesco WiFi and alike that you only connected to once in the past that now like to rear their ugly heads at the most inappropriate times.

Google rushes to curb Oreo's massive appetite for your 4G mobile data

I certainly wouldn't buy an Android TV again that is for sure. Sony have shot themselves in the foot with it. Although Google seem to be wanting it to commit hari kari with the changes they make, and lets not even talk about the shambles of a joke the 'new' Youtube app is. Yep, no 4K videos, stuttering, crashing.

I wonder if Google would like to comment on why Android TV uploads so much data even when all the syncing options are turned off. Looks like a family trait.

I want to be able to have the option to switch to Android if I so chose (for phone), however both my Sony Android TV and Motorola tablet seem to be uploading data for no apparent reason. This certainly puts me off, and makes me worried that data from my network is being syphoned off

UK not as keen on mobile wallets as mainland Europe and US

Re: Unreliable Mobile Nets in the UK

Have you been out of the country for a while? I am not saying coverage here is perfect. However even where I live in deepest Yorkshire we have 4G, and it's a small village where they couldn't be bothered make the 3G signal reach any useful landmass so was 2G for most of this century.

When I travel around there are very few areas with no coverage, however if you mean drop outs then that is a real problem. They really do need to sort out the issues faced on the East Coast mainline route.

When in the car I come across very few places on 2G anymore (and this is O2 - who don't like to spend their money).

It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild

Re: Great laptops!

I thought the T440's came out in mid 2013. The company I worked for was giving out T440p's in 2014.

SanDisk's little microSD card sucks up 400GB

Mid 1996 I remember fitting a 2x cd-rom drive. Later that year someone lent me a 'gold' CD that had lots of really useful programs on such as Office. Only problem, the 500mb hard drive didn't have enough space to store everything off the 640MB CD. I remember thinking at the time how can this little bit of gold plastic store more than the 5.25" hard drive.

That's a massive hard drive. My first PC (an Escom computer from Christmas 1995 only had a 500mb hard drive, 4mb of ram and a speedy (lol) DX2 66mhz Cyrix cpu.

Western Digital has cloudified the NAS and shoved it in a trendy box

I've had a My Book Live now for many years and it still works as it should. However, there are lots of reports of people only getting 2MB/sec or lower so either there are a lot of lemons out there or something conflicts on their PC's. By way of example on large files and via a network cable I get between 75-78MB/sec read and around 35-40MB write speed. Over wireless this drops to about 20MB/sec read, not sure write as rarely do that over wireless.

Re: the average US household has 4l.5TB of data spread across 14 digital devices

I think they have simply added up all the storage of every device, including Tivo, Xbox, PS4, Tablets, Computers, Phones etc. There is no other explanation to get such a high number.

Nokia's comeback is on: The flagship 8 emerges

Why does a phone need to be thrown away? Just because its a sealed phone does not mean the battery is unreplaceable. To change a sealed battery for example on an iPhone is relatively straight forward procedure which could be done by any half competent person.

As a side point batteries seem to be higher quality now. I have had my iphone 6s plus for almost two years and have seen little degredation. Battery app shows 89% of original capacity and its been charged most days as i wear it down from 100% to mid 30% most days.

Skype for Business is not Skype – realising that is half the battle

Oddly the business I work for allows external Skype (personal) contacts to be added and communicated with but does not allow external Skype for Business to be communicated with, even though they can be added.

Apparently if I want to communicate with our clients who also use Office 365 & Skype for Business (even though they are visible in the contact list) we have to go through a process of 'federation' with the client.

Makes no sense to me why we can communicate with world+dog, however our clients who also use Office 365 are a no-no.

Microsoft won't patch SMB flaw that only an idiot would expose

Do any of you technical guys know if people are 'safe' (to a decent enough level) when using WD My Book Live & My Clouds with remote access enabled?

I appreciate this might have nothing to do with this article however always makes me think if I am opening up a can of worms when I select these options.

The Windows Phone story: From hope to dusty abandonware

Re: Windows Phone FAIL

You certainly don't speak for everyone! I really liked Windows phone. Bought myself a Lumia 930 when it was new (after having every generation of the iphone). I still think the setup is far better than iOS and 100 times better than Android. I am annoyed that the Lumia 950 appeared to be a plastic fantastic phone and that the Edge browser still crashes too much. I'm back on a iPhone 6S plus, however really wish it had Windows 8.1/10 or that Apple would make iOS just like Windows phone.