Posts by Andy Worth

AT&T squeezes wannabe iPhone upgraders

Tough Titty

I AM an iphone user and I AM tied into an 18 month contract (with o2) at the moment. However, I wouldn't expect them to do me any favours when it comes to upgrading. I got the phone for "free" so obviously they have to recoup the cost (and make a profit) by me paying a monthly fee for the duration of the contract - as with EVERY PHONE I'VE OWNED! Anyone who expects either of these companies to give them special treatment is a misguided fool.

To be honest, OS 3.0 brings the features I wanted anyway so I wouldn't bother upgrading to an "S" if any exchange of cash was involved. My girlfriends contract runs out next month and she was after an iphone - although it's essentially £99 extra for video recording (why bother? we have a proper camera for that), voice control (she just tells me to do it for her instead) and internet tethering, which we have no use for at all.

While I can see that some people might view those features as more useful than I do, and may choose the "S" on a new contract, I can't see any reason why anybody but a real fanboy would bother upgrading from the 3G to the "S".

Japanese lunar orbiter to go out with a bang

I hope they don't hit a clanger!

Or the soup dragon....

'Breathalyser for the hands' fights hospital superbugs

@Christopher Ahrens

Try living with restless legs syndrome and then call it a non-issue. It feel somewhat like something is crawling around inside your leg(s) and the only way you can stop it is by moving your leg. This reoccurs after just a few seconds of being motionless again.

When you lose a couple of hours sleep every night for weeks on end, it's anything but a non-issue.....

Facebook value plummets $5bn

So....

....when will it reach its true value of $12.07?

From what I can tell, Farcebook is haemorrhaging money for pretty much no return and despite the protestations of its "chair-prat" has very little hope for turning a profit anytime soon - short of either directly scamming its users or introducing fees - which would drive 99% of its customers away.

Court upholds 'hacking' charge against smut-surfing worker

Re:hacking???

"So if you use a computer when someone says not to it's a criminal offence and you get 2 years in jail?"

From my understanding he didn't even use a computer when told not to - he used a computer which he was allowed to use, but for something the company considered to be an inappropriate use of company time/property. Instead of just firing the idiot, they decided to have him charged.

Re:Exceeding scope of authorisation

"Neither does it make any difference that the defendant didn't have to break some clever security to achieve his ends. If I leave my front door open, it is still theft if you walk in and nick my telly."

You claim that the lawyer makes no sense with his distinction between hacking and exceeding authorisation and then back it up with a ridiculous comparison such as that? Do you see the irony there at all?

If anything, what you said indicates that the "Theft of Service" charge should have stood rather than the charge of hacking. The guy might have been wasting his office time posting pictures of himself but at what point did he have to "hack" anything?

Personally, I think the guy should sue the I.T. department of the company for their obvious negligence in blocking sites such as adult friend finder. Even if the company had a clear policy in place regarding internet usage, this is a case that should be hand;ed under employment law and is sod all to do with "hacking".

It sets a dangerous precedent for any company who don't like what an employee does with their internet access to be able to have you charged with criminal activities. There is nothing criminal about posting pictures of yourself on a website such as the one involved (unless they depict some criminal activity of course) - the fact that the company were too incompetent to block the site is their own stupid fault.

Evidently the judge involved is as technically competent as the company themselves.

Carphone Warehouse buys Tiscali UK

Ahem....

"It's good news for our customers who will increasingly benefit from a group that has consistently championed best value and award-winning customer service."

Mary, awards you've won by bribes don't count. At least I assume that someone must have been paid off seen as Tiscali have (had?) pretty much the worst customer service I have ever experienced.....and this seems to be a view held by the majority.

I used to be on LineOne.net before Tiscali bought them and ruined it. Then I moved to Nildram which had great service, until Tiscali bought them and ruined it.

I'd like to say that they can't get worse, but then TalkTalk haven't exactly got the best record in customer service either so I wouldn't count on it.....

Microsoft: Don't rush to download Windows 7 RC

Re:1Gb and 1Ghz?

For once, MS might actually be telling the truth. I haven't gone quite as low as a 1GHz processor, but it certainly runs (and surprisingly well) on my Dell laptop with 1.4Ghz Celeron CPU and 1GB of RAM. I'd say that it is comparable with a fresh XP SP3 install on the same machine which is quite impressive really.

They must have been quite clever in the way it scales itself according to your PC's performance. I haven't determined yet exactly what features it disables (aside from the Aero theme) but somehow they've made it run quite nicely on "slower" machines.

@Henry Wertz

Just on your point 1), I know exactly what you mean. Kit that becomes too slow to run XP can quite happily be used with a Linux install. In fact, using Linux as a base and some server-based virtualisation for app streaming (for apps that "require" XP) makes quite a nice replacement for a Windows XP desktop imho.

BlackBerries outselling Apple iPhones

@Andrew Matthews

Absolutely agree. So it just boils down to what you need. Personally I've done my duty in the past going for the most highly functional phones - now I just need something easy to use, so the iPhone does me fine and the app store means I can keep it interesting. For other people, particularly high-use customers, the Blackberry will be the far more suitable device.

It might be that some people are beginning to wait to see what Apple decides to release this year before they buy as well.

Yes! It's the invisible¹ shed²!

One upside.....

At least you'd have somewhere to hide from a passing "Predator". Arnie would have had a much easier time if instead of having to cake himself in mud he could have just jumped in the shed that is invisible to predators (assuming they don't change their spectrum view.....)

Windows 7 gets built in XP mode

@Richard Drysdall

With a large enough application set there will always be some legacy apps which don't run under the new OS. Given how massively used Win XP has been (and for many years) I would expect there to be MANY apps which need to make use of the "XP mode".

Bear in mind that (excluding Vista) the last major upgrade most companies did would have been from NT/2000 to XP, around 7 years ago. I happen to know that some companies STILL to this day have Citrix or some similar back-end to run legacy NT applications.

There is a massive difference between how PC's were viewed 7-10 years ago and how they are looked at now. Whereas back then, in a lot of cases they were treated more like an accessory to help people work, I think it is safe to say that now most companies rely almost exclusively on desktops of some variety rather than on paper communication.

Add to that the change in sheer numbers of PC's involved and now an OS upgrade becomes a massive undertaking. All MS are doing is removing one more potential reason why people might not upgrade to Win 7.

Self-replicating machine replicates

Stargate....

What were those things called? Replicators? They basically consumed other materials to build more of themselves.

Scary.....

</Tongueincheek>

Blu-ray to boom despite downturn

Re:Demand but no suply...

Not going to get involved in a discussion about the pro's and cons of Blu-Ray but I was just going to point out that the supermarkets tend to have a particularly poor selection of Blu-Ray's. Try HMV or even the console game shops as places like Game/Gamestation in my area also have a choice of Blu-Ray's.

Zavvi were the best around here until they closed down.

Failing any of that, Play.com and Amazon.co.uk both have a wide selection of Blu-Ray films, and they tend to be a couple of quid cheaper than in the shops.

Can the iPhone save NFC?

Pointless Bollocks

I refer RFID to the post title....

UK's visa fingerprint system fails

I love the wording.....

"a small issue with our on-line visa application process".........

as in it wasn't working

"but this was quickly fixed"

4 days for a critical system is not a "quick" fix. Or if it is then I want to work there!

Microsoft extends Red-Ring-of-Death cover to fresh Xbox fault

Staying out of the console word wars.....

....but, "Hopefully, Microsoft learns its lesson here and will spend a little more on parts in the future to save millions of dollars in repairs".....

You mean, like they spend a bit more on developing a stable, secure application/OS in order to save millions of dollars paying for people to fix/patch them over the coming years?

Businesses will postpone Windows 7 rollouts

Re:Interesting times are ahead

Well I'm definitely not a MS fanboi but I did have a play with Windows 7 and it does indeed seem more accepting of "lesser" hardware than Vista ever was. At least, it runs on my Celeron 1.4 lappy with useable speed whereas I would expect that Vista would take about an hour just to boot.

Then again, with MS' reputation for screwing up the OS between beta and final release I wouldn't be surprised to see that change.

I agree with a lot of what you said though, and I think in this climate they will find it hard to persuade companies to adopt Windows 7. As a home user I almost certainly will use it, but on a professional basis I'm pretty sure we'll be waiting at least a year after release (probably until after the first inevitable service pack!) before we think about extending it past the testing phase.

Microsoft: have it your way on IE 8

Re:Interesting pitch

"This is a nice gesture, but I'd really like a public apology for IE6."

And IE7.......

In fact, for people already using IE7 I don't believe the "upgrade" will cause many issues. The included "compatibility mode" does seem to impersonate IE7 very well and certainly some of the things that IE7 broke look broken in exactly the same way with compatibility mode turned on!

Interestingly, because it is standards compliant, I have found that several web apps which would not run correctly on IE7 (but did on IE6) actually run well on IE8.

My personal opinion? I like it, especially as Firefox has become dog slow as of late.

MySpace rant was not private, rules US Court of Appeal

Re:Copyright - yeah right

Again, I am also guessing but by posting something on MySpace I don't believe you automatically transfer all copyright rights to them. It is more likely that you grant them rights to reproduce what you publish as they see fit but retain the intellectual rights to what you post.

I don't know much about copyright in the U.S. but if it's similar to the U.K. then you can reproduce something like that as long as it is not for financial gain. Now as this paper is a business, I am guessing that they will have made some financial gain by publishing the story, so they might just have a case based on intellectual property law.

While I think she's an idiot for publishing this story on the web, the actions of her principal were out of order. Mind you, the threats that her and her family received kind of prove her point about the place - I mean, I live in Milton Keynes and people always say it's shit but I don't feel the need to go to their house and shoot at them....

Honda creates thought-controlled android

/me remembers....

.....Firefox.....not the browser but the film with Clint Eastwood and a fighter jet that could only be effectively flown by somebody capable of thinking in Russian.

All of a sudden it seems less stupid.....

Action games 'improve eyesight'

It's very simple.....

Like anything, the eyes can be trained and exercised. It's no great surprise really that people who spend lots of time trying to spot enemy "soldiers" in an action game have trained their eyes to become better at picking objects out from a cluttered background.

Out of interest, people who spend a lot of time looking at screens tend to lose some of their ability to refocus at different distances. So when you look from a close object to a far one (or the other way round) it takes a fraction of a second longer for you to focus.

BMW driver follows satnav to edge of cliff

Re:@codge, paper maps

"I challenge anyone to prove that using paper maps is safer."

On a blanket level? Perhaps difficult if not impossible. I'd say it's true though ASSUMING that the driver stops to read the map rather than tries to navigate with the map blocking half of his window, and also that the driver has an ounce of common sense.

In fact, people use a sat nav to replace a sense of direction, knowledge of their route and common sense so there are times when it does heighten the risk - i.e. when people rely on it completely blindly without using their own brain (as in with this particular story).

"There is no doubt that satnav is easier and it is safer to use."

I challenge you to prove the second part of that statement. You challenged everyone to try and prove something which is almost impossible to prove just after making the opposite claim without a shred of proof.

Personally, I don't blame the sat nav for supposedly directing him over the edge, GPS is only accurate to a number of metres anyway. Most peoples "uh-oh" alarm bells would have started going off before they got as far as this guy did, and they would have stopped to check the visual display on their chosen sat nav device.

Microsoft 24 hours late with IE8 pwn protection

@danny_0x98

"....I'm just not smart enough to figure out...."

At least that part of your post is true. I shall refrain from explaining why as at least half a dozen people have already done so.

So, this "news" is that some script kiddy exploited a vulnerability in a beta which MS were already aware of and had already coded the fix for (we can assume that as the full release the following day already had the fix - too soon for it to be a reaction to the hack)? I mean, I'm not a great fan of Microsoft but it does seem somewhat like a fuss about nothing.

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

Typical alarmist crap....

If I caught my neighbour going through my bins I'd probably pop outside and give him a swift kick in the balls, because I'd assume that he was trying to find something to be able to steal my identity. It's not that I particularly distrust my neighbour, but I find somebody going through my bins as being a bit suspicious.

So which do the police want us to do? Report people seen rifling through our bins as potential identity thieves or rifle through our neighbours bins to see if they are a terrorist?

London stab murder rate entirely normal, says top stats prof

Some would say.....

.....that the press play into the governments hands in order to support further restrictions on public liberty. By making people believe that it is all "for their own safety".

Of course, I would never be that cynical.....

Inside the world's greatest TV remote

70 seconds??

So I have to stand there like a tool, waving this thing at a TV for anything up to 70 seconds before it does anything - IF it happens to have the right off code? I don't see how this is really much in the way of innovation, despite the fact the bloke looks like some sort of crazy Doc Brown.

I've got a device that took me 18 seconds to design and build. It's a brick on a big bit of string and works with almost 100% of TV sets.

NHS study produces ejector-seat ambulance design

Flying paramedics?

"Speed is of the essence in the ambulance service. The Autocare Concept aims to get the pre-hospital clinician on-scene and ready to treat the patient as soon as possible. "

Yes, but if they are "projected" out and manage to injure themselves in the process then it might cause delays. Surely this is progress for progress' sake? Really, how much of a delay is caused by the usual method of "getting out of the ambulance"?

Besides, this will probably make them much more expensive, so for every 3 of these (plus paramedics) you'd be able to afford 4 standard ambulances.

The Borings renew Street View fight

Re:Hmm

But the whole point the judge made is that if they were really interested in their privacy rather than just being a pair of money-grabbers then they could have just reported to Google and asked them to remove/not to publish the images.

Instead, in an effort to "protect their right to privacy", they have launched a law suit which has projected them directly into the public eye. Nobody would have given a toss about them or their street pictures otherwise.

The only way they would have a case is if either the G-Car had to "break in" to gain access to their property or if Google refused to remove the image when requested.

Hollywood to totally recall Total Recall

Benny....

"We'll stump five bucks to see that character at the wrong end of a tunnel-drilling machine"

If Eddie Murphy is playing him, I'll stump up another ten if they do it with a real drilling machine and no added visual effects......

Microsoft temps get shorter hours

Not really a surprise

I think a number of companies are doing similar things and trimming contractors first - after all it means they don't have to pay out redundancy payments and it saves them the cost of re-hiring again when(?) the market picks up.

Teen sacked for 'boring' job Facebook comment

Re:Privacy

"isn't this invasion of privacy?"

No, Facebook is a public website, so unless they broke into her Facebook account to get this information then she's just an idiot. I'm also assuming that she must have had one or more of her colleagues on her friends list, which makes posting this even more stupid.

A lot of companies now have social networking policies specifically aimed at issues like this (to cover their own backs). If the company don't have one then you could possibly argue they are on dodgy ground, but I don't think the girl would win a case against them.

Debt collection can be harassment, rules court

I think most of us have been there.....

From what I read and what I hear from friends most people have been pursued by some corporation or other incorrectly at some time. Although this does seem like an extraordinary case of the company being incapable of dealing with a dispute.

I have a friend who is constantly pursued by finance companies because he shares the surname, first initial and date of birth with somebody who seems to love to rack up bad debt. He's even had "debt collection agents" turn up at his house AFTER informing the companies on numerous occasions that he is a completely different person. Also he has received phone calls claiming to be holding a parcel for him and found people snooping around his property.

I hope this case sets a precedent for being able to punish companies who pursue either the wrong people or unnecessarily hound customers over the companies own mistake. I will certainly be advising my friend to consider citing this case as an example and taking somebody to court over the matter he is suffering.

Blu-ray Disc sales to hit 100m by Xmas

Re:wow such hatred of larger 'bandwidth'

I own a BD player but I'm with Anonymously Deflowered on this one. I buy BD's very occasionally and still buy DVD's much more regularly. Sure, it might not be £10 more, but even £5 more isn't worth it unless the visual effects are going to be "worth the difference". This is where romcoms differ from effect-filled action blockbusters, because who really cares if you can see every hair on *insert male romcom stars name here* nose?

Whereas in contrast, watching a good action or sci-fi type film in HD can provide a different experience to the SD version.

Ten of the best... noise-isolating earphones

Fail and this list.....

I won't claim to be an expert on all types of headphones and won't profess to know what else has been missed from this list. However, there is a great injustice to having the Apple phones at number 3 on the basis that they have the remote/mic for iPhone. They have relatively poor sound quality compared to the Sennheiser or Denon equivalents and don't really cost any less.

The Sennheiser mm50ip phones have some nice in-ear buds - not sure if they are officially noise cancelling but I can't hear a thing when I have them on (even without music playing). They also come with the mic/remote for the iPhone and better sound quality than the Apple ones. Not only that, but most online retailers were selling them for around £35 last time I checked.

I also saw some Denon phones (with mic/remote) which were about £60 online and I suspect offered (like most Denon products) an even better sound quality. I just couldn't justify spending £60 on a pair of earphones!

Wanted: £160k-a-year Twittercrat

Jeezus.....

I read that associated piece about Tom Watson and he sounds like he watched Pimp My Ride UK and saw Westwood as the coolest guy around. If there's one thing I've learned over the years is there's no easier way to make teens think you are a twat than to try and use teen language towards them. You ALWAYS end up sounding like a dick, to both teens and adults.

Paris Hilton celebrates 28

Where's the Paris angle??

Oh.....there it is :)

By the way, we expect pics!!

Boffin: Earthlike worlds within 30 lightyears of here

This is news how?

Just wondering, as Erich Von Daniken made the same conclusions years ago in his books. If you consider that there are billions upon billions of stars then even with a relatively low probabilty of any given star having an orbiting planet which can support life, there are still likely to be millions of inhabited worlds.

Well, that's the very basics of it, but probabilty alone would dictate that it's pretty likely that other intelligent species exist elsewhere.

Feuding iPhone fart-makers raise legal stink

Who cut one??

You lot sat around here gasbagging while there are serious air-biscuit related cases under dispute!!

I was under the impression that to trademark a phrase you had to be able to claim ownership or invention of said phrase. "Pull my finger" is something I have heard used for probably 25 years, since the school playground.

Let's just hope that they don't manage to follow through with the prosecution eh?

Unix world braces for geekgasm

Re:@Matt Devney

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Call that job satisfaction?

Twitter attack exposes awesome power of clickjacking

Yet another....

....proof that something which says "Do not push the big red button" will result in people doing exactly that. So when the "Your computer is infected....download the xyz antispyware now!" fails, they just put a button that says "Don't click this" or something similar, and thousands of normally sensible people will abandon their common sense and click it!!

Mind you, I'd probably have clicked it too, if I'd ever been on Twitter.

DSA looks at 3D animated driving tests

3D test......like GTA?

So the new test will consist of car-jacking a young mother and shooting her in the head when she complains, driving at breakneck speeds while being chased by the cops and the passing mark can be obtained by handbrake turning into a spray shop so that they can knock out the dents and therefore make you unrecognisable to any passing police?

HD TV beats depression, claims HD TV company

Re:I think I'll stick to the obsessive masturbation

Damn, you beat me to it.........It's a damn sight cheaper than a HD-TV and has been proved over thousands of years to be a great aid to cheering up.

Teen accused of 'sinister' Facebook sex extortion plot

@dreadful scathe

"300 years in prison for lying to and threatening to embarassing classmates?"

Don't forget the bit about blackmailing them into performing sexual acts. Granted, 300 years does seem a little excessive but this guy deserves to go down.

Motorola handset profits still MIA

Unfortunate

It's not good for those who aer losing their jobs obviously, but then Motorola have long made shit phones backed up by some truly shit advertising. I don't know many people who would still even consider buying a Motorola phone, they've just lagged behind the rest of the market for years now.

Sony stands by 10m PS3 full-year sales forecast

Prepare yourselves!!!

Fanbois on both sides start screaming in 3.....2.....1......

EC will force users to pick a Windows browser, says Microsoft

Re:Money back?

IE is free anyway. I can't remember them ever charging for it, or for new versions of it. So I don't know what money you would like to reclaim on it. Do you ask for a part-refund on every car you buy, just because you don't take it to its top speed every day? (Not that I'm suggesting IE is equivalent to top speed, just equating the similarities in using all of the available features).

As for Apple, well this ruling means bugger all unless it applies to everyone and every OS. MS should retaliate by making the same complaint about Jobs' lot.

As Steve Roper says though, how are they going to regulate who and which browsers get included? What happens when some minority browser demands to be included? There will have to be some fairly strict methods in place to evaluate each candidate to decide which get in and which don't. I forsee many small legal battles resulting in a list of shitty browsers, pages long to choose from.

The funny thing is that most people will still choose IE, quite a few choosing Firefox or Chrome, and still hardly anyone will use Opera.

US cable giant to throttle P2P

Re:beat em at their own game

I'm torn here, because I used to be a heavy user whereas now I am not. Part of me says, "great, all you heavy downloaders downgrade your service and mine will work faster", but then I'm also torn by the fact that I agree that broadband providers in general mis-sell their services.

I think that any provider who puts ANY sort of throttling on their service should immediately be forced to remove the word "unlimited" from their adverts. Because if you're throttled down from 20MB to 512KB once you hit a certain limit, your connection is no longer any use, at least on the downloading side of things.

So I guess when it comes down to it, I side with the users. While I may get annoyed that some people persistently drain bandwidth I don't believe it is their fault for utilising what their provider told them they could, simply by means of calling it "unlimited broadband".

25 years of Mac - the good, the bad, and the cheese grater

Re:Shoorli shum mishtayk hoshifur?

You're missing the point. The current range might be technically superior but then everything has developed in that time so the models available now are nowhere near as "groundbreaking" as some of the older ones.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion and whether you prefer the old macs or the new ones is up to you.

Personally I think they're all shit, but that's just me :)

Good article though and I enjoyed reading it.

Sony warns of first operating loss in 14 years

Fanboy attack.....

.....in 3.......2........1......

Seagate promises second fault fix in 24 hours

Drive data

Well, the firmware fault might not render the drive unreadable, but I'm pretty sure the lump hammer smashing against the casing in anger when the brand-new drive stopped working probably did.