My Toshiba NB550D (about £215 when I bought it) is a real trooper. I upgraded it to 4GB of RAM, give it a 64GB SSD drive upgraded to Win7x64 and it is now an excellent field laptop. I take it to all the dusty LAN rooms where there is no room to move and this fits the bill. The Battery lasts over 10 hours. The only major downside is the screen vertical pixels of 600, however It does do HDMI@1080p and is a very convenient tool.

It's a shame

they don't update their website. Whatever I look for seems to be nested about 3 levels down under an ambiguous sounding title. Is it just me or is their entire website painfully non-intuitive?

In my experience WiFi Hotspots just don't work.

I work in Central Birmingham and all of your general cloud providers like 'The Cloud' and 'BT Openzone' are there but you will be lucky if you get a connection. I get free Openzone access because I have BT at home.

1) You can be 'connected' to the hotspot but subsequently get no IP address leaving you with a 169.X unroutable dud.

2) You connect and get an IP address but the re-direction to the HTTP landing page doesn't kick in.

3) If you're lucky to get this far you might actually get online. Usually you're required to click through at least two more pages, one of them being a EULA and you might have to sign up if you're a new user.

4) Now you're online! On the BT Openzone hotspot I used today my connection dropped out completely roughly once every 30 minutes (with a 4/5 bar connection) and I had to disconnect and go through the whole process again. If I moved 10m away the connection went down to 1 bar and was unusable.

The most reliable connections tend to be dedicated ones in Coffee Shops.

I've just bought a brand new £1k laptop, the most I've ever spent on a laptop. It's got 16GB RAM (perfect for Virtualisation), Core i7, 1.5TB, Dedicated Nvidia 670M, Matte Screen with 1080p and a bluray optical drive. It has 5 USB ports, 3 at USB3. Its also a beast at 17". If I were to buy a similar spec Alienware from Dell I'd be paying £1.5k and more. Which brand laptop did I buy? Medion, made famous by Aldi. It came with Windows 7 (Home Premium).

The only problem is lugging the thing around, it's not exactly small and the charger literally defines the word brick.

Some specialised Apps are worth it

An App I have found fantastic and worth every penny is called Pleco which is free as a basic app. It's for learning Mandarin Chinese. For the dictionaries and addons you can pay a fair bit. I've paid £50 for all the dictionaries, OCR, flashcards, audio etc as it's very useful but also very niche.

Chinese is one of those languages where if you don't know a character it is incredibly difficult for a westerner like myself to understand it's meaning. Now I have OCR on my phone and it's success rate is fantastic.

This is the most I've ever spent on an App in my life, the next App down would probably be less than a £1 for Tunein Radio Pro or the Bus Checker App.

Snowball and a Desert

So in the past the earth has been to the two extremes of a Snowball and a Desert.

It begs the question, is MMGW just speeding up the natural process?

I can imagine an alternative reality where the earth is cooling down and there are tax breaks on producing as much CO2 as possible to keep the planet warm.

Kindle DX

I bought a Kindle DX which is only available in the States. I can see why Amazon never bothered to market it here in the UK. I predominantly use it for sideloading PDFs which Amazon get no commission for. It's a shame because it's an excellent e-reader with a hefty 9" screen.

Don't forget the traditional type

For example 中國 is what the Chinese from Hong Kong and Macau would use. So that's two domain names you need to register.

I can't see this catching on. The Latin Alphabet/Arab Numerals are ubiquitous so known by everone. As claimed above it is easier for a Chinese user to type .cn than .中国, Most of these will probably just be re-directs to their globally accessible .cn ages.

The day when I have to code in Chinese or log onto a router and type '显示日志 / show log' is the day English has officially lost it's grip on the world.

How long until Computer Science is a lesson taught in every school? I think as a nation we've arrived at this foregone conclusion much later than we should have.

In the next few decades I imagine Computer Science will play a far larger role in our economy than current stalwarts. Granted it's a difficult subject, but so are the big three Sciences and learning a foreign language. How much do those subjects contribute to our competitiveness?

We should be giving these away for next to nothing to encourage future generations. With the funds massively wasted with Government IT systems; we could have given one RaspPi to every person in blighty.

Of course not using a proxy or TOR when hacking is the real WTF.

Essentially a professional hacker with the right tools should never get caught.

Isn't this simply a case of eliminating the middle men and flattening out the supply chain? It has seemed inevitable for a while.

Thanks I found this to be a well written and informative article. Surprised to see ISL being mentioned, it doesn't sound right. I thought Cisco had killed that off years ago?

There are ways to load balance spanning-tree if you so wish. You can run multiple instances of spanning tree that span over different links. However if your traffic levels hit 50% and above you risk overloading your network in the event of a failover.

I think the phrase 'the report of my death has been greatly exaggerated' sums it up. The high street won't die, but it will evolve into something quite different. People have become more savvy and now realise that the rip off prices that high street retailers have relied upon for so long are no longer acceptable.

After reading the reports it seems that the sales at some of the retailers went up, but their profit margins went down. Why is that bad for the shopper? It means the retailer wasn't able to rip you off as much as they usually do.

Let us hope this is a sign of consistently lower profit margins for all the big retailers.

What's wrong with an Auction? You pay what you want to, if someone else wants to pay more, then you lose out. Isn't that a prime example of the free market?

What's wrong with good old CAT5e/CAT6 ethernet? You can buy decent quality reels from ebay, proper wall connectors, a crimper if required and RJ45 8PC heads for a few pence each. A few hours work and you'll have a 1Gbit/sec network throughout your house which is rock solid. Most home routers come with four ports by default, you can add more with a cheap switch. Powerline has its place in certain situations, but good old ethernet is ubiquitous, reliable and still unbeatable for it's speed.

I bought two 2TB drives last summer for £48 brand new. I've been able to sell my used 1yr old 1TB drives on ebay for £60+. It's very rare for IT kit to go up in value.

So now I really can poke the receptionist

I seriously dislike Apple, but every time I walk past their stores in Newcastle or Manchester they're both packed.

I know the media like to push the word hacking wherever possible, but this is also the fault of the retailers or whoever supplied them with the POS equipment. They should never have had the ability to remotely log on to them, and the passwords should have been very strong.

I wonder if the US has a similar system to the PCI compliance we have here which is supposed to stop things like this happening.

Has anyone else used NavFree? I downloaded it for Android a few months back and it's impressive. You have to download a large map and postcode database initially, but after that you don't require any data connection and can route anywhere solely with a GPS signal. It is based upon the data taken from OpenStreetMap and is free.

In car speed information

You should have an indicator in car that tells you the current speed limit of the road. You could have future cars respect this limit and lock the car down (would be good for reducing insurance premiums). The amount of time you spend looking at the speed indicator and trying to avoid cunningly placed speed cameras adds to the risk factor more than the occasional red light jumper.

I can't view videos at work. It would have been nice if you could have posted the results with the article.

Sony have lost the trust and respect of most consumers through their rootkits and security exposures. I don't think they could cut it anymore.

I have used a tablet but felt so lazy using it. It doesn't encourage me to do anything productive with my time and when I looked at the price I was put off even more.

It doesn't take a genius to see that Silverlight has no future. I'd recommend you start re-training if you're a Silverlight developer.

It's nice to see this story instead of the usual doom and gloom. I'm proud to see enterprising IT businesses in the UK. IMO the IT cartel is too heavily dominated by US firms.

When I think of big UK IT companies, the only ones that really come to mind for me are ARM, Sophos, Computacenter and (shudder) SCC. I'd never heard of Autonomy until HP bought them. Surely I'm missing some that deserve recognition?

I honestly cannot see how Groupon is worth that much money. Unless the uptake of Garra rufa fish grows exponentially I would make an educated guess that this is the beginning of the next dotcom bust.

I thought the Japanese had found 'rare' earths in abundance at the bottom of the sea? I find it hard to believe that the rest of the world could be so naive in allowing one country (with a questionable reputation) to control 98% of the supply chain.

Well done John Lewis

It makes me happy to see a company who pride themselves on customer service coming in first place, and the other companies who provide a service that can only be described as 'customer service' coming in last.