another way to fix the contactless card?

I bet that 5 seconds in the microwave oven would take care of the contactless portion of the card (and would be less damaging to the physical card, only frying the electronics inside.

wish it was that easy

I agree with your assessment and I feel your pain - "charge an additional fee for something which makes their product work properly". But the competitive situation is that generally purchasers drive the price down, and cause upsell opportunities. Also - in some cases (not sure about EMC) these products might be 3rd party tools that were picked up along the way and used to be separate software sales. Or they are services that in theory you could do yourself, or you could pay a specialist to take care of in less time (at a cost.)

I'm not trying to defend the vendors, but from being on a vendor's side customers will drag out that tired old saw for every single thing the vendor might have. And within the vendor's business some things have offsets (self-installing hardware = less need for professional services.) Also, if you make the equipment run by itself, then you'll need fewer people to operate it (and then your customer's people will get nervous as they smell possible layoffs coming.)

Maybe the way to grasp what the customers are saying is that their overall solution cost is high, so maybe there is another creative way to reduce their total overall cost?

min wage is where it will be

Lately it seems that these ideas turn the shop into a showroom where you then have to order what you really want. The workers in there are only there to keep you from swiping the display models. No more, no less. They're incapable of doing anything else.

thought sams/walmart attempted to do this

I thought WalMart and Sam's club attempted to start their own credit card, or maybe their own credit card processing company a few years back. Trying to crush the fees from visa or mc I thought. They bailed on the idea though, it was probably enough to scare the hell out of them, and got them to lower their fees to WalMart.

Imagine what the network would cost if they charged for it

You have to admit, the estimated costs to install ($115k) and operate ($45k) the network are pretty low. Sure not as cheap as 3 DSL lines and 3 SOHO routers, but nowhere near what companies were quoting back in the years of muni-WiFi.

Can you imagine what kinds of operational overheads and costs would come with having to create billing, authentication, support center (including a way to give credit to users who pay but can't get connected), and roaming agreements and transfer payment schemes and revenue sharing, and on and on...

what about traffic data

So here is an item that I've yet to see compared between iOS and Android and Windows Phone - the amount and quality of the traffic data that is displayed.

I got a windows phone (for work, they foisted it on me, not my choice) and I noticed that very few roads have traffic information. I assume that since nobody else has the phones, that Bing Maps isn't getting much data fed to it. Likewise iOS maps would have a similar issue. The lack of data comes down to a lack of handsets reporting their locations. Were there any complaints about Apple maps and their traffic data?

When I first got the phone I was sitting parked, stopped in traffic on what is usually a very busy street. Whip open WinPhone Maps and there was no data on the road... except to show a red line behind me. Does that mean to tell me that I am the only person on that road with a windows phone? A sample size of one??

they should have noticed that something was wrong

I say - they should have known that something was wrong when they noticed that there were people in the store. Not employees mind you, but people that might be mistaken for customers.

Maybe Disney is waking up?

We subscribe to Netflix, and if Disney won't play, that's fine with me. I'll just watch something else. So Disney wins in the immediate term, but loses in the long run. Maybe they are starting to realize that a buyer's market is emerging here for content?

good analysis, but something doesn't add up

I read somewhere that the deal was for the spectrum and subscribers, but not for the equipment (or real estate.)

I wonder what US Cellular could possibly do with all of that equipment. Maybe deploy to their remaining markets.

It seems that Sprint will pay them to keep the network running for a while, until Sprint can get the subscribers moved into their spectrum (as they're all CDMA/EVDO mobiles.) But then Sprint would go deploy new CDMA (in the case of capacity needs) or LTE equipment in existing Sprint site locations?

had my turn with that a few years back

We had opened a small branch/field office and had a copier. It would do D-sized paper (11x17) but there was no paper tray other than a tray hanging off the side. We had a lot of those bigger things to copy so we loaded up the external tray. It proceeded to tear the machine apart inside.

So we call the printer repair guy out, he crawls into the machine up to his waist to replace a twisted piece of metal bar. Then he proceeds to yell at us something along the lines of "YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUT PAPER INTO THIS MACHINE!?!?!?!". My colleague and I were speechless, after all a printer is meant to consume paper, isn't it? We told him it seemed like a bad design if putting paper INTO A COPIER ruined said copier.

We nearly threw him down the stairs, but then figured it would be much more fun to keep feeding paper into it, and seeing him every week to come back around to fix it.

Live by the sword...

...die by the sword.

These guys shouldn't be able to only take one half of the risk/reward balance. Because if they do, then they'll program the system to hand them the reward, and all of the rest of us will get caught holding a big bag of risk. If they want to risk their whole company to chance a big fat reward then that is their decision and they better understand what they're risking (and what their odds may be.)

Or maybe the truth hurts

Most people only use their login/password once per year, in order to pay their annual dues. And for that they picked a completely throwaway password. Sorry IEEE but your webpage is not as important to your users as you may think.

Apple is usually good at extracting their premium prices

Apple is pretty good at pocketing nearly all of the margin in the handset industry. I'm surprised that they don't set their prices a hundred pounds higher for the first month or so, to bank the extra idiot margin on the people that think they absolutely have to have it and will buy it NO MATTER THE PRICE. In fact, to these people, paying extra for it would seem to be something they'd be more than willing to do in order to demonstrate their position of high privilege. Maybe Apple could laser etch the price into it so they'd have that to flash around.

I guess there is one potential downside to this: if half the lemmings wait to buy after the first week, they might find out that the next iThing isn't as earthshaking as they had imagined it to be, or they may have realized that they could in fact live without the next new thing. Or there could be some bugs with the new thing that give everyone pause.

Oh wait - how about "Jaundice"?

Or that green/yellow color that hard-boiled eggs get around the yolk when they're overcooked.

And the one next to it looks minty

Its - Watermelon, or Ruby?

Or Sandia...

probably preserved it better than the library would have

I'd posit that losing the book was the best way to preserve it.

I don't know about other libraries, but ours turns over a large portion of the collection every year. A book like this may not have been determined to be a classic for quite a while, at which time most of the copies would have been lost, sold off, or destroyed.

And many books that seem to turn up most valuable or rare may be because they were deemed crap at the time, and just generally thrown out. When the one or two stragglers that were forgotten about show up they're valuable.

it is also called arbitrage

Whenever there is a mismatch between prices you'll find someone willing to step in and make money on the difference. Given normal conditions there is nearly zero financial risk in doing it. Economists will say that it helps the market be more efficient. That Microsoft's UK team can undercut the French team is one example. The pricing is not at parity across currencies (probably never is). Is it illegal to play the arbitrage game in the EU? Probably not when you're on a massive scale, but I bet the average Joes are strictly barred from it...

Think Norton is slow? Just wait

I can only imagine what checking a "5 billion-long list" of apps will do to your PC in terms of app launch latency. Or disk space.

Either that, or every time you want to launch something it has to call home to check if it is OK?

Michael Bolton too

"PC LOAD LETTER? WTF is PC LOAD LETTER????"

That movie Office Space - it should have won "best documentary" the year it was released.

No big deal

They're not going to be selling many phones, no matter if they're in the market or not. Might as well cut their costs on advertising etc.

if a tree catches fire and nobody sees it

does it make a sound? Unless I'm missing something, a brush fire in an uninhabited part of the world doesn't put any people at risk, or property. Animals are a different story... but then these fires aren't anything new to the planet.

People still buy HP printers?

I was not aware that people still buy HP printers. I thought everyone abandonded them 5+ years ago as their drivers kept getting more bloated and useless.

I agree with the PC comments. I have one for work and its even more poky than the prior Dell. Their software/driver support is almost DIY.

must-have apps - find my mum!

Hope the GPS doesn't drain the battery too quickly, a real "find my android/mum" app could be priceless.

I'm only half joking here. About a year ago a friend's father with Alzheimer's took off one afternoon, they couldn't find him. He took the truck, drove to his boyhood home/farmstead, got stuck far back on the property, and died from exposure. They located him after a couple of days.

still need to change it into something useful

Now all these people have to do is change it back into real money like dollars or pounds or euros.

Since the whole market of bitcoins has shrunk it should not be hard to find someone looking to exchange a big pile of them for real money.

Either that or they would have to dribble out their exchanges over time and dollar-cost-average their exchange rate. If they decided to dump their coins on the market would it have an impact on the price?

THANKS El Reg

I definitely owe you at The Reg a big thanks. My poky HP Laserjet 6L tore through another batch of toner, and I was just about to reorder when this article came through. Turns out that Brother is having a huge set of deals right now in February, so was able to get the HL-2270 for $USD 80. I'm excited for the ethernet and duplexing, no plans to use WiFi just yet. Too bad the intro toner cart is only rated for something like 700 sheets, but it also looks like they are very easy to refill.

or use CUPS

Looks like base AirPrint support is built into CUPS. If you're a medium to large business you probably already have a CUPS server type appliance (headless Linux box) sitting somewhere behind the scenes accepting your print jobs. Add this configuration and you've saved a small chunk of money and another box to configure.

specifics of "Femto" cells

While "femto" seems to indicate the smaller size and smaller radio coverage, to me the main difference of Femtocells is that they use a public data network as the transport back to the wireless operator. Plug them in to your ISP connection at home, and the femtocell will tunnel through the internet back to your provider.

At this point the cost of backhaul is prohibitively large for an operator to provide for femtos. At the same time it means the end user is subsidizing the transport cost (thus the rub as mentioned above.)

Picocells are physically small devices, but use the operator's private backhaul/transport network to get the voice and data packets back to the switching center. In that sense they are like the macro-network but may be physically smaller, offering lower total transmit power and capacity so as to make them mountable on a pole or side of a building, or in a mall, or subway/underground situation.

it certainly did save her life

without those monstrous funbags she'd be doomed for life to be a "nobody".

Maybe she's bipolar and/or depressed because to her the whole world looks like a bunch of drooling idiots.

rainbow tables

if you're only talking 10,000 possible combinations (of 0000 through 9999) then it is even easier to pre-compute a rainbow table once, and then simply do the matching of the captured hash to the table. The table itself would only have 10k rows and therefore has to be relatively portable.

Rainbow tables are an amazing idea. The only way around them is to have some crazy hash space where the space required to compute and store a rainbow table is prohibitive. Even then Amazon's compute cloud takes care of much of that as well.

This seems like a good thing

The regulator simply appears to be making companies come clean on their rate plans. It is either unlimited, or 2GB, but pretty hard to be both at the same time. So... which is it?

I guess an operator could claim unlimited, and then bracket it down with a bunch of restrictions, no VoIP, or no IM, or no video streaming, but then that's what the fine print is for already, no?

What a dose of sanity.

well said on the Toshiba split product lines

We bought a "cheap" Toshiba back a few years when a 37-incher cost $800 and the Samsung ones started at a minimum of $1,200. I guess it was one of their bargain-bin filler models, but I really couldn't see paying any more for TV when the content to fill it is so lame.

So the Toshiba - it sucks. Picture quality is acceptable but the black levels and/or contrast ratios are pitiful. I will never consider them for my next TV, as I don't want to chance getting one of their lower-rung models when I'm expecting to get something better.