Posts by James 100 685 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2009
All they're really doing is selling AdWords on credit - at a pretty poor rate for store credit too.
<-- better thing to use money for
My company used some 'free' AdWords credit a while ago as an experiment. Google, of course, depend heavily on AdWords for their income, but we never saw much point: much better places to put resources.
I've been there a couple of times now - my godmother used to live further north, lives in Bristol now but insists on a visit any time she's in the area.
When I first saw the price list, I couldn't understand how the bacon roll cost so much more than the egg or sausage options - then saw how much bacon was crammed in there. I also noted the 'all day breakfast', something like twice the price. Last time I was there, someone ordered it - at least, I assumed that's what was spread across the three plates in front of him. I think I could actually hear the arteries clogging...
Glad to hear some action being taken - I just wish the telcos would be more proactive about terminating these nuisance callers. Not just overseas, though; I've had several silent calls from a *local* company in recent weeks, peddling some renewable energy nonsense. Apparently TPS registration isn't enough to stop the "energy" phone-spammers, and Ofcom don't care enough to unplug the silent callers however persistent.
Even on the "50Mb" service, streaming video usually got me buffering - I may have had a 50Mb cap on the traffic from the headend to me, but actually getting that from a lot of places was another matter.
I've switched to an Entanet FTTC now - slightly faster in tests (66 M down, 16 up), much better peering I suspect, and the connection certainly "feels" faster in use. Unlike VM, video really does start up quickly and play without buffering.
If they were banned for being rude, per some comments here, fair enough: I often find myself wishing places were more pro-active about evicting problem guests.
If it's about the amount of food, though, it's wrong. If your business can't genuinely deliver "all you can eat" for £12, put the price up a bit or change the offer (£5 per plate, maybe). "Not paying the optional service charge" just means the manager doesn't understand the word 'optional', and if he relies on ripping people off on the drinks prices to subsidise the food, maybe he should re-think that: knock £1 off the soft drink price and add £1 to the food or whatever.
I hate "unlimited (with lots of limits we lie about)" in broadband, I expect an 'unlimited' buffet to comply to its own terms or be honest about it.
That's RIM's problem, really: there simply cannot be an "iPhone outage", nor an "Android outage", because those are standalone devices rather than reliant on RIM servers keeping on ticking.
Even if Apple and Google somehow folded tomorrow and had all their servers wheeled away by repo men, my handset would carry on for now - yes, I'd be stuck for security updates, support etc, but my email and web access would be totally unaffected. If RIM's servers go dark, though, so do the handsets.
From an infosec perspective, I find people's enthusiasm for getting their mail via an encrypted link to a third-party server that makes an encrypted connection to their mail server, rather than having a direct encrypted link to the mail, depressing. Neat hack to achieve push with low power consumption, sure, but what happens when that extra point of failure fails?
Exactly what Three and Orange-T-Mobile did with MBNL (Mobile Broadband Network Limited).
I suppose Vodafone and O2 might feel they have an advantage over the others in more extensive infrastructure, and joining such a pool would forfeit that lead - but yes, if competition authorities allowed, pooling all the masts, backhaul etc into one would make a lot of sense.
Or, for that matter, reciprocal roaming. If I'm in a gap in O2's network but can still get a Vodafone signal, why can't I roam onto Vodafone to fill that gap, in exchange for O2 filling similar gaps in Vodafone's coverage? Too sensible, I suppose.
It's riddled with problems of course. Would The Reg qualify for a cut? What about the NY Times and CNN, which have UK readers? Is it based on "readers" - impossible to measure accurately at the best of times, as well as trivial to cheat? Who will log viewers, and how, given the incentives to cheat - government monitoring of all web traffic, or trying to use, trust and audit each individual publisher's web server logs? (So much for privacy!) What about public wifi, universities, shared Internet connections...? Does one person with two ADSL links bonded pay twice, while two households sharing one with WiFi only pay one fee? What about my £7.50/month mobile broadband - slap an extra £2 on that too? My pay-as-you-go phone, which has data facilities but no monthly fee now?
How about turning the tables: slap VAT on newspapers like his, use the extra revenue to boost broadband rollouts. Anyone like to try getting his comments on that idea?
Why are Vermin trying to produce their own firmware in the first place? NAT, WiFi, EuroDOCSIS 3.0 - precisely NOTHING they do is specific to them, unless they jump through extra hoops to make it so!
(Presumably they are just rebranding Netgear's firmware, so it's actually Netgear scrambling to patch bugs rather than VM actually trying to produce their own, but still irritating to see them trying to pretend it's a Virgin product - nothing wrong with just issuing standard routers with standard firmware.)
Ah well - I'm off to Vivaciti FTTC on Tuesday: IPv6 and static IP addresses again, plus four times the upload!
I dislike the very attempt to draw a line of where speech is "offensive enough" to be illegal. The crime should require causing substantial harm or fear - not calling somebody rude names, even if they are really really rude. Saying that the Prime Minister is a waste of oxygen, or that his predecessor doesn't have the management skills to run a bath, should be fine - as should saying I'd like to break the legs of either or both: it isn't an actual threat.
Now, if I sent either of them a message saying I was going to maim them, that's cause for the police to get involved - but calling somebody names, however nasty, should not be.
Exactly what Google Voice does in the US already, pretty much what you can set up for yourself with Skype - and exactly what the 07xx 'personal number' range was assigned for in the UK.
Andrews & Arnold seem to offer something comparable as part of their VoIP service too, you can rent a number from them and have it terminate on a VoIP trunk, a landline, a SIM of theirs (on Three) or another mobile number. Appealing flexibility, certainly.
The only snag is that personal numbers were ludicrous premium rate ripoffs, and forwarding from landlines to mobiles in the UK is still ridiculously expensive, though that is slowly changing now.
It doesn't help that the BlackBerry - alone of the handsets mentioned - is not smart enough to talk straight to a standard mail server: you have to pay and do extra to funnel everything through an extra step in the middle, either BIS or BES. Yahoo - like Google - have a huge distributed email server farm - is supporting BES easy, cheap or sensible for them, when switching to any other handset eliminates that dependency and the extra cost as well?
I wonder - supposing they said 'OK, we'll give you an S3/iPhone/whatever on AT&T/Verizon/Sprint and pay the basic cost, OR you can have a BlackBerry handset and pay the extra $5/month for BES yourself', how many do you think would take that option? I remember at my university, even when BlackBerries were the only handset the university would pay for there were staff who provided their own handsets at their own expense instead; once there was a choice, there was a mass exodus.
The trouble is, that whole "OK, it's not actually copying us, but it's piggybacking on all our hard work and our ecosystem" sounds a lot like Oracle's argument against Google ... I'm sure Google remember how that one ended, does Alibaba or Acer?
Nuke, because threatening your own best customers/partners really doesn't make for best friends in future.
I saw this coming back when TPB was blocked and the loony for Devizes embarked on her web-burka crusade, but even I wasn't pessimistic enough to expect it this soon!
They put filters in place to block child pornography (CleanFeed) - fair enough, it's illegal, nobody should look anyway - it restricts Wikipedia for a while - well, mistakes will happen, etc ... then they want to block "adult" content, "pirate" content, "unsuitable" content ...
Unless we make a stand now, sooner or later we might as well not have Net access. I've contacted my MP about it, how many other Reg readers have?
No, the way to address this is to require and enforce consequences for false claims - which, looking at the "under penalty of perjury" stuff, seems to be exactly the original intent.
If I stick an ISO of Windows 8 on my website, Microsoft's enforcement bots should go "aha, that's Windows 8, it's ours, it's coming down". If they can't positively identify a file as theirs, they should leave it alone.
At the very least, there should be a manual check of each outgoing enforcement attempt - and compensation should be due to anyone falsely denied service because of such a mistake. In this case, claiming ownership of a piece of malware would seem either malicious or incredibly incompetent - or indeed defamatory, since they are claiming their client is a creator of malware!
In my area, the new Infinity cabinet is almost identical to the old analogue one 20 feet away that it connects to, apart from having fresher paint (obviously) and pointy rather than rounded corners (Apple patent?), plus the little vent grilles. (I think the locking mechanism's different too, but I've seen both styles on the analogue patch cabinets too.)
For goodness' sake, BT has been installing virtually identical cabinets across the UK for decades now for analogue service, Virgin installed bigger but very similar ones at the end of my street years ago for cable. In fact, by definition these FTTC cabinets are being installed near to and connected to existing green street cabinets - do these councils want those removed too, depriving their subjects of phone service?!
It was a useful service - just as well there's still jotti.org. How long before Google break it by welding it to Google- to get another user, or just deletes it to free up the developers for bolting pointless shininess to something I'll never want?
I thought the "invent neat new program/service, get popular, get bought by megacorp" was bad, until Google extended it with "then kill the product off and dump the users". Are they really that bad at attracting good staff that they have to buy whole companies just to extract the staff?!
I could understand a hard-line Democrat activist taking and releasing the data: just give it to CBS, the DNC, whatever, it gets out, it (presumably) hurts the object of their hate, job done.
It might be a hot news scoop, if there's something important in there - any reputable media outlet would protect their source's identity (remember Deep Throat?) and I'm sure a few would pay for a good exclusive. Again, story gets out, source gets some money, job done.
Offering it to the Republicans too, presumably to bury if there is anything secret, is much riskier for little reward: probably crossing the line into extortion - indeed, from the story they've already involved the police. Just leaking the data, even if caught, you might get away with it (Richard Armitage was never charged for naming Plame as the committee member who sent her husband to Niger, despite the big investigation that sparked) - but blackmailing? There's a cell for that.
Bitcoin would protect the recipient, but whoever pays up would be known. If the Republicans paid up $1m to bury the "tax returns", wouldn't that be a huge incriminating story in itself? If they had the real ones, no doubt they could quote something that would confirm the authenticity: a serial number, the exact value of some specific deduction claimed, something like that. PwC's denial (assuming they don't actually mean "missing"; I'd imagine their IT people checked and there hadn't been any access to those files) seems to imply there's nothing at all to verify yet.
The worst thing with the people stealing power lines is sometimes they take the *earth* wire. I remember hearing one substation (in England I think) where that happened ... causing power disturbances which wrecked lots of electronics.
Now, if we could just get these people to shim up a National Grid 400kV transmission line and grab that with just their rubber gloves, the world would be a better place!
The problem is, ducks are very reluctant to board boats.
Seriously: they got there first - and never moved with the times. Where's DEC now? From the PDP/11 and Vax, they end up getting eaten by a PC cloner which got eaten by a printer ink vendor. IBM started the whole PC market - and ended up offloading that to a Chinese clone-builder.
Being first in a market certainly doesn't guarantee success, particularly in tech; I suspect in some cases it might even be better to come in a bit later. RIM and Apple both had a hard time getting carrier buy-in at first; I remember back when the original iPhone was new, I had a hard time getting data support on my Vodafone account at all! ("Data? On a phone? Why'd you want that? How about a nice PCMCIA datacard instead?"). Now they know there's money in it, the carriers are all falling over themselves to push fancy handsets.
Whatever the ultimate outcome, how can it taking SEVEN YEARS (and counting) possibly be considered adequate? Yes, you go to court (Westminster Magistrates' Court, for extradition matters) ... maybe an appeal and even appeal the appeal, but playing musical court-rooms for the better part of a decade is just taking the mickey. Even now, we don't have an actual decision - just something to come from the Home Secretary, then back to the High Court again, then probably on to some other court after that ...
That requirement seems particularly daft: developing the new system and supporting the existing one are very different projects, with very different requirements. The current system is apparently a mix of Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Usoft, with Solaris and SCO UnixWare behind the scenes, from Unisys.
So: support the most legacy of legacy lashups in VB and Usoft, AND develop a replacement system in something from this century too. What next, tendering for the MoD's combined catering and nuclear warhead maintenance project? I could understand wanting bidders to be familiar with the existing system, but taking over supporting a UnixWare-NT-VB setup from somebody else? Presumably Unisys will be bidding for this contract too, so have a vested interest in making life harder for anyone else...
I can understand this guy wanting the 1000lb corporate gorilla to enter politics, assuming it'll be on his side in this particular issue, but even if they are right now, it's a dangerous line to cross.
Like others here, I really don't see anything wrong with the policy itself, just the way the government enforces it: indeed, I'd be delighted if more governments adopted tax incentives etc to that end, rather than promoting breeding on an already-crowded planet!
Why on earth is the Education department involved in this nonsense in the first place? Telecomms regulation is supposed to be the remit of Ofcom and DCMS. Cynically, I suspect the answer is that Ofcom isn't quite clueless enough to push this stupidity or swallow Claire Perry's lies.
The key would be to replace some of their workload: the routine box-ticking. Last week, I needed a prescription (anti-inflammatories for my shoulder, as it happens). With that particular drug, like many, there's a set of instructions and a checklist of contra-indications: any history of stomach ulcers, etc. With a bit of coding, the computer in the waiting room that handles checkins could have checked those too, freeing the GP up to deal with the next patient sooner.
There was a bit of manual prodding and twisting to make sure the shoulder hurt, or words to that effect. That's the bit the doctor's needed for, or at least someone with relevant training - but that's less than half the time the current process took.
The taxi drivers I've seen here lately seem to be moving in that direction, certainly - and with mobiles having either GPS or at least basic location services, it's easier for the dispatcher to see "ah, Dave's a mile from this fare and not doing anything, I'll send him".
At least one mobile company has managed to offer a working push-to-talk setup anyway, though; I'm sure if they saw a market for it here, handsets would do it pretty soon.
@Tom Wood: Yes, handheld radios work fine in power cuts - but so do mobile phones: the base stations have serious battery capacity to keep them going if the mains goes off for a while. There's also the security angle: radios are easy to monitor/jam/interfere with, mobiles have reasonable protection against that.
I'd say a large part must be that Google isn't really AIMED at "enterprise" customers (yet) - it's busy eating up the lower end of the market, consumers and small businesses.
Look back into the 80s - how many of these guys' predecessors would have said much the same about that silly little MS-DOS upstart? Those guys in Redmond would never manage to compete with those nice enterprisey Vaxes and mainframes!
Right now, it's a valid point: if I ran IT for a big company (except Google themselves, who are #73 in the Fortune 500 and presumably use their own stuff quite happily) I'd probably play it safe: Microsoft Office on Dell PCs and a great big Active Directory setup in the middle - but that's just this decade's "nobody got fired for buying IBM". When it's good enough for individual users and 10-man companies now, expect to see it in 100-man companies in a few years.
Whatever happens though, it's giving Microsoft some competition again. How many big companies and government departments have knocked big chunks out of an MS renewal price by waving GOOG adware around during negotiations, even if they did stay with MS in the end?
That really is taking the mickey for mislabeled "unlimited" offerings. Does it allow tethering, or is that another limit they keep quiet about?
Still, earlier today a retention salesdrone tried to tell me their broadband was better because "it's got more fibre". In salesdrone-land, apparently their fibre ends at the end of my driveway, while the BT fibre (FTTC) "only" comes as far as the green cabinet at the end of my street. Funny, the green cabinet at the other end of the street seems very full of Virgin fibre-coax converters to me ... Once she tried to tell me the fibre had to stop in the street not in houses "because of Elf n Safe-T" I'd have switched away from Virgin just on principle!
For my own mobile usage, Orange's £15.50/month (£5 off if you sign for a year, plus £50.50 cashback = £6.29/month!) seems pretty good. Not a huge data allowance, but you can tether in emergencies (£1/day extra) and can use a lot of non-free WiFI hotpots too (TheCloud?). I've never liked the idea of having usage limits - but I prefer them to "unlimited (with a limit we lie about)".
The underlying idea seems a good one: invent a new idea, get a monopoly on it for a while. The problem now is that "new idea" isn't being very well enforced, and "a while" is currently far too long for high-tech fields.
Having someone more competent review applications might help - just run them past someone with a relevant degree, for starters. Shorten the time limit: 7 years might be more appropriate, still an eternity in computing terms but much better than 20. Perhaps different time limits for different fields: engines might not change so much, so a decade or longer for a new spark plug or crankshaft might still be reasonable, but silly for computing or biotech.
The best for competition, though, might be mandatory licensing, as we have for design rights in the UK in some cases. Instead of "Samsung's handset uses this patented widget of Apple's, so it's banned", "Samsung are using this widget Apple patented, so must pay Apple $1 per handset using it" - as is already the case for 'standard essential' patents like those involved in GSM, 3g etc. The patent-holder still gets money from their invention, fulfilling the actual aim (granting them a monopoly on the invention was a way of getting them an income from it, not the only way to do so) without stifling competition on other areas.
Yep. A barrel, a tonne, even a dozen or so tonnes on a truck would be a theft - but thousands of tonnes of the stuff is a different setup entirely. Someone delivering trucks of mixed full and empty barrels over the course of months, or similar.
I take it someone has checked those barrels were genuinely supposed to be full, it wasn't just an accounting error recording inventory being higher than it should be?
(Pint - another sweet, tasty golden substance they like there!)
I've found TA quite interesting, and make a point of reviewing places on it (almost always positive ones, usually with some nice photographs). Ultimately, though, it's my own experience: any website which publishes it is being entirely truthful: it is honestly reporting what I said about the place. If it's negative, or harmful to them, the proprietor should take it up with me, not the middleman. (In this particular case, "87% of our reviewers said this hotel was dirty" is presumably entirely factual; whether those 87% were being honest or fair is another matter, but not TA's responsibility.)
Astro-turfing can be a real problem, though. A few years ago, I had a lousy family meal out in Dundee, after which my mother emailed the proprietors and posted a critical review online somewhere. The review received a comment from a "satisfied customer" who said he couldn't understand her criticism, it was great value and he loved it, great value, wonderful food... Her email of complaint received a reply, *from the same person* - but this time signing himself 'customer service manager'. Funny, that: I suppose the staff discount would make it better value...
A shame we didn't know about false-flag reviews being a crime at that point: my mother's retired now, but used to be a lawyer - for Trading Standards. That could have ended quite badly for them if she'd known! (As a lawyer, presumably she would if it had been in force at the time. Glad to know it's actually illegal now though.)
The 2.5 years does seem silly - a fine or community service would seem more appropriate.
4.5 years for the kidnapping might make sense in a way, though: remember, you need to leave plenty of headroom for harsher sentences. For example, if the kid had actually died in the process? Whoever pulled the trigger should get 20+ years. Accomplices should then get less - 10-15? Less if the kid had been harmed but not killed - maybe 7-9? Now you knock another chunk off because, IIRC, the kid was physically OK and for the accused pleading guilty, you end up in that ballpark.
That's the dilemma with sentencing. Give rapists life in prison for the rape, if you don't have the death penalty then why would a rapist refrain from murdering the victim afterwards? Same sentence either way, but less chance of getting caught without a live victim to identify him. Likewise, you need to reduce the sentence for guilty pleas, or they have nothing to lose by spinning the case out as long as possible. (I'm in favour of stiffer sentences in general, but you need to be careful how and where you apply them.)
I hope so, they are turning loose, i.e. unleashing, a weapon. Nothing wrong with that as a headline.
Bad news for the public, though: perhaps O2 could try thinking about how to deliver a better service, rather than 'competing' in court? Maybe pool resources with EE to give all their customers a better network, or get on with preparations for delivering their own LTE service once the spectrum is freed up (beefing up the backhaul, having the power and tower capacity for the new equipment...) - rather than lawyering up to make sure "if we can't serve customers yet, we'll make sure nobody else can either".
If not washing your hands after using the bathroom can spread diseases, why don't bioterrorists do that and wipe us all out? There's a huge difference between 'not safe enough to approve' and 'effective way of killing people' - when did an assassin last tamper with somebody's seatbelt, rather than their brakes?
Having said that, it's a valid point; I recall a presentation about 10 years ago by an expert in the field. He had a simple bar graph - showing the maximum radio power output of a mobile handset, next to the minimum power level aircraft are required and tested to be unaffected by. Apart from anything else, they have to withstand both electrical storms and fairly close proximity to radar systems (often including their own); a single watt of power, on a frequency the aircraft's systems don't even use (because it's set aside for mobile phone use) is trivial by comparison. Hence some countries already allowing it, without their aircraft falling out of the sky because of it!
A bit of both, I'm sure. It's easy enough to use a mobile phone like I did in the 80s, with a shoulder strap to support the weight of the hefty lead-acid battery, and imagine one day cramming it into a tiny fraction of the size - even though it took another decade to achieve.
Sci-fi authors, essentially, ask 'what would be useful, regardless of technical feasibility?' The designers are asking the same question, but with the extra constraint. Self-driving cars, cloned transplant organs on demand, robot surgeons; sci-fi has had them for decades, because they would be useful if they existed; researchers try to create them, because they will be useful when they really do exist.
I'm impressed Microsoft turned the SSLv2 support off within hours of it being pointed out - though of course it would be better if they'd turned it off unprompted in the first place.
Code-signing can be a lot cheaper than that; I've used Startcom in the past, who charge a handling fee of something like $30 or $40 for the validation involved, and even Verisign were a lot cheaper than $895 - more like $99 for the year. (There's a hefty discount if you sign up via Microsoft's promotional link rather than directly.)
I doubt the temperature of outflow would make that much of a difference - power stations put most of the heat into the air through cooling towers anyway, and compared to the volume of water involved, the thermal energy would be minute.
The volume and flow rate could be a factor, though: apparently much better upstream drainage increases the peak flow substantially on our bigger rivers (one reason for floods being more common now: previously, a major downpour would saturate fields then drain into the river over the course of days). In very cold weather, you often get little clumps of ice forming around bridge supports and along the edges; with slower water, it's easier for the ice to expand rather than getting washed downstream.
"More to the point, it would have been even better if those concerns were raised with Tesco privately first and only then made public after improvements had been made, rather than have every script kiddie and his pals now eagerly probing Tesco's servers."
Tesco were directly approached first, and denied that this was a problem: all this attention, and the ICO involvement, came after Tesco categorically denied that unhashed passwords were a problem. They haven't yet replied to enquiries about the SQL injection vulnerability...
I'd love to see the universities etc booted off the /8 and /16 subnets they hog - encourage them to speed up IPv6 as well as freeing up address space for other users to ease the shortage overall. It's galling to see them say so complacently "oh, we'll be fine, we've got 10 IP addresses per student" - particularly when they have whole slabs of that address space firewalled off to be outbound-only anyway, so RFC1918 space would be perfectly adequate!
The ISPs are starting to wake up to it though: enough geeks shouting about it on customer support forums to get it on the radar. The kit's supported it for a decade now, they just need to get round to configuring it!
"even though there's abundant research showing that many technologies are nearly as inexpensive as fossil fuels."
So where are they, and why does the technology actually in use here need such massive subsidies for tiny intermittent output? If you can deliver renewable power so much more cheaply than the current renewables, please do so, so we can scrap all the windfarms and solar panel handouts.
At first, I thought this was a slower, low-cost variant of S3: same concept, but bigger, cheaper SATA disks and more use of RAID than straight duplication. The multi-hour retrieval times quoted would be consistent with tape, but they denied in interviews that it's tape based - some kind of disk library, perhaps, where the disk is stored powered down in a vault somewhere, then spun up when you request your data back? That could explain a few hours - spin up and mount a RAID set, then copy the data off to a staging S3 bucket for you to read from. Throw in some smart placement (keep all your stuff together, destaging it from S3 in big batches) and they should avoid the worst case scenarios (lots of little requests for different archived objects, spread out in time.
A dozen 4Tb or two dozen 2Tb drives in a pod, with double or triple parity protection, would fit with their 40 Tb maximum object size plus a bit of overhead - and they've set up infrastructure for hooking up big external drives to S3 already for the Import/Export stuff.
I like the price compared to S3 - but it's $120/yr for a terabyte. Probably about what you'd expect to pay to rent a pair of 1 Tb SATA drives for the year, sitting in quiet corners of two different Amazon sheds, plus a small share of a couple of shared drives for parity protection?
Constantly expanding for no visible reason, without actually improving? Clearly, the universe itself is Windows!
At some point in the future, a far-off version of Windows will consume all available resources in the universe, crashing the cosmos itself and looping back to the start where it can continue expanding without limit. Scary stuff.
So QNX is a huge departure from the current BB OS - if they'd made that jump a decade ago, it would have been a surefire winner. The trouble is, it's a long way down the line: the target market already owns rival smartphones, the developers they need are all busy developing for iOS and Android - and now they're burning cash as their market share swirls round the drain.
Professionally: if I wanted to develop a new mobile app, I'd hit Android and iOS. Then maybe give Windows a shot. BB? Doubt it, we'd get a better return improving the product on more popular platforms instead.
Personally: I've supported users with BlackBerries in the past. Horrible, horrible pointy little buttons that hurt my fingers in trivial use (WTF are you supposed to do, jab them with a stylus?!), clunky menu system freshly dragged from the carcass of the MS DOS Shell, weird bugs (mail disappearing because the clock was wrong!) - painful to use, painful to support, so we started switching users to iPhones which work at least as well without needing to babysit a BES as well.
It would be nice if RIM can bring something totally different to market before they run out of cash, then somehow get apps running on it too (Android compatibility layer?) - but it seems unlikely right now.
I'm delighted to see nails being hammered into that particular coffin - a web without Flash would be a much better place. The real problem isn't so much Flash itself, but the "programmers" who excrete most of the .swf malware* out there (* - seriously, how can wasting resources and slowing the whole machine like that not be considered malware?!) need to be fired, then sent back to remedial finger-painting classes to start their whole education again from scratch.
The sad irony? There are a handful of Flash files out there which actually do genuinely useful things you can't sensibly achieve in plain HTML/Javascript yet: multiple file uploads, for example. That niche is rapidly shrinking now though: we used to have to resort to Flash for graphing that Canvas can now handle, which is a very welcome development.
Fizzy alcoholic beverage needed - because Flash is second only to IE6 on the list of "things that make the web a worse place".
BBM gave a way to text your friends for free regardless of the network they were on - which was a great asset for cash-strapped teens who had to pay for (cross-network) texts. That didn't happen in the US, and doesn't seem to be the case here any more (plenty of unlimited text plans available cheaply) - end of USP.
As for "security" - an SMS is encrypted when transferred over-the-air, locked to a specific device (the SIM card and whatever handset it's mounted in at the time) - anyone who actually needs more security than that won't be allowed to use any retail handset for it anyway: they'll get something with actual security, like the Sectera Edge they're thought to have issued Obama with for SIPRnet access. If you aren't using SIPRnet or equivalent, iPhones and Androids are just fine.
So, what does BBM really offer that an unlimited SMS plan doesn't? Not "security" in any sane sense, not price when it's a few pounds a month for unlimited texts, not ubiquity (anyone BBM can reach, a text can). That's why it's so polarised: some communities - individual schools and groups within a school - ALL have BBs, so they can use BBM - everywhere else, you have to use something else anyway. If even one member of your group can't/won't get a BB device, you have to choose between using BBM for the rest of the group and excluding that one, or using something that works for everyone. Except for teenage girls, that's an easy choice.
There's still the group functionality - much more convenient for organising riots that way - and SMSs do seem quite limited for that (yes, I can send an SMS to 10 people - but it'll take a second or two for each). Enough to keep RIM afloat? I very much doubt it.
The reality of course is that as a SYNC service, Dropbox uses 'cloud storage' (i.e. a whole bunch of expensive colocated hard drives in a datacentre somewhere) AS WELL AS your local storage - instead of each byte of your data taking 1 byte of domestic hard drive, it's now taking more like 3-4 (1 local, plus effectively 2-3 copies colocated, depending what mix of RAID and replication they're using).
What I do have is a bigger hard drive at home, backed up to the cloud. Fast local access at home, reliable remote access/storage when I'm away or if anything happens to it (I just pick up another cheap 2-3Tb drive, fire up the sync in reverse - might take a few weeks to have the whole lot back, but I can get the urgent stuff much faster and leave the rest to it).
Shame I used a Drobo for the first implementation of this plan - the four green LEDs don't quite match up with the random I/O errors and hangs it's been throwing - but I'll be moving everything to Zen or btrfs RAID soon.
My university switched to Microsoft's rival last year, presumably using LDAPS ... all fine until a few weeks ago when the SSL certificates expired, without the new ones being accepted. Result: a nice peaceful day and a bit without receiving a single email - though that's probably not quite how most of the users saw it. With that setup, if the link to your authentication server breaks, the whole thing becomes a paperweight until it's all fixed; at least if the sync agent goes down, it's just *changes* that get delayed, rather than disabling the whole service!
Weirder still, my MSDN account will only let me get the Checked builds of Win8, not the regular ones - but says I don't have access to license keys for the checked builds either.
Presumably a glitch, since I had access to Win7 all along and there's very little point allowing a multi-Gb download but refusing to hand over the code to install it!
Particularly with limited-data packages, limitations like no tethering/tablet use irritate me. If I've paid you for 1Gb of data, what does it matter whether that gigabyte is going into a handset, a dongle or a laptop? Unlimited ones at least have the excuse that unlimited laptop/tablet use will tend to be much heavier than regular handset use - but paying by the gigabyte and still restricting it? That's just double-charging.
I'm with Giffgaff at the moment; the fact tethering doesn't work at all on the iPhone (even after paying for a 'gigabag' data package which does allow tethering!) is one factor in my planned jump to Orange later this year. For £6.90 though 3's bottom package (1 year contract) is very tempting: more data, minutes and texts than I'd use - and talk of an add-on that allows tethering too.
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