Problem with the Walkman brand

The problem with the Walkman brand was that it had ceased to be recognised as such. A Walkman had long ago become a generic name for a personal portable cassette player with headphones. People aren't bothered about owning a phone with a built in Walkman; a phone with a built in iPod, now that's a different matter.

Are you sure you've upgraded to Mango? Some of this stuff you've listed is solved.

Web browser... slightly complicated javascript. - The web browser in Mango is IE9 it supports the same websites as IE9 on a desktop PC. The old browser had problems with javascript the new one; I've not noticed any.

- screen lock activates on every screen timeout meaning you have to type a code every few minutes... In Mango you can choose separate times for screen timeout and phone lock

- signal indicator is pretty much absent for no reason... tap the top of the screen and the indicator appears

- no receipts for texts or other messages to confirm delivery... delivery reports are in Mango, I haven't tried them because the stupid O2 network doesn't support them but the options are there

- the pointless search button... Again, in Mango the search button has changed, it now links you in with the new bing functionality. Including the text translation stuff, QR code reader and the local scout which I actually used at the weekend to find a nice restaurant near my hotel in Brighton.

- multitasking... the most disappointing fail in Mango. If you want true battery draining multitasking, get an Android phone. If you want to be able to listen to music whilst you browse the web and pick up where you left off in an application, the Mango implementation is fine.

You're missing the distinction. When Google first started one of the things I liked about it was that all the search terms were included by default. Then about a year ago Google decided that they knew what they were searching for better than you did. First it was fairly useful stuff like searching for plural and non plural search terms, searching for UK and US English spellings of words. Then they started including roots of words, you search for playing, you get results for play, and synonyms.

Now Google just drops words from your query if they make the results too limited. When I use + in my searches I'm not trying to find an exact phrase. I just want to see all the pages that contain every one of those words.

Tethering

Tethering is in Mango but for some inexplicable reason it's only on the new phones, so my Mozart doesn't have it and neither does your Omnia but the two new HTC phones do and the Nokia phones will as well.

My Mozart is the first phone I've had for 10 years that doesn't support tethering. I haven't used it often but it's nice to know it's there if you need it.

You can't be tagged in a photo if you don't have a Facebook account...

Are you sure, it certainly used to be possible. You tagged the person and put their email address in and facebook sent them a please join up message.

That was my impression, there's no problem with capacity they just don't have enough capacity.

"VDI is essentially a solution to the problem "how can we sell more servers?""

I was thinking the same thing about VDI. I currently manage a network which is a mixture of desktop PCs and thin/zero clients connected to Citrix XenApp (what was metaframe) servers. When I first started with Citrix your limit was about 20-30 users per server, less if your users were doing anything clever.

Now I can get 100 users on a server without it really breaking sweat and the servers cost me less money than they used to.

Virtualising servers is condensing traditional server loads onto less hardware.

The first time I saw VDI was in HP's product bulletin, they were advertising a system where you had a low power PC on your desktop driven by a workstation blade in the server room. So instead of a desktop PC you buy a cheap desktop PC and a server blade which means you also need a slot in a blade chassis. If that's not simply a way to sell more servers I don't know what is.

This is the thing, ask any body about a brand of drive and you will always get a group of people saying the won't touch them and they're the worst drives going.

I've had drives fail on me from all manufactures. Seagate, WD, IBM/Hitachi, Maxtor (In their day) and Samsung all make decent drives, some of which fail. Failing drives is the nature of having a lump of metal spinning at 7500 RPM. I think the only drives I've never had fail are Toshiba ones but I've dealt with far fewer of those over the years so I don't think they're any less likely to suffer an issue.

Once you start dealing with drives in hundreds rather than 2 or 3 you'll see that they are all very similar.

I own two SSDs one of them failed inside the first 3 months, the other one bought around the same time and the replacement for the first are fine.

Doesn't matter how big your drive is, if you want to keep your data you need to have it backed up. If you can't afford to be without your data whilst a broken drive is replaced/repaired you also need to be running RAID.

100 square miles is only an area 10x10 miles, it's basically as far as the eye can see but not far enough to have differing weather from one end to the other.

I didn't know the dock connector had digital outputs, in that case, what the hell is all the money for?

This is exactly what I was thinking. New Macs don't come with firewire ports and we're told thunderbolt is the future.

Companies with 50000 users don't use chrome as a web browser. I'd also wager they are unlikely to be using forefront security.

the early problems with pixel sub-addressing seem fixed. To me it looks loads better, I have it turned on in both IE9 (when I use it) and Firefox.

Totally

16:9 is a stupid ratio on a small screen unless you're only using it to watch films. And if all you're doing is watching films then you can buy a portable DVD player for much less money.

If 16:9 is good because it's better for films then maybe we should be using 1:2.35 screens on our laptops.

A 3:2 aspect screen would probably be a good ratio. The most important thing is that it's possible to buy screens with a sensible number of vertical pixels. Modern software can make use of high resolution screens. Windows has DPI settings so that the gui appears the correct size. Websites can be zoomed to make them readable but everything is nice and sharp.

My phone has a 3.7" screen with 800x480 resolution, I want that kind of DPI level on my laptop.

nope

gas industry in this country measures in m³

if you have an old gas meter it will measure in cubic feet. If you look at your bill you will see this is converted to m³ before it is converted to kWh

I'd imagine it's only folks from the USA still using cubic feet.

Really?

Your scenario concerning abusive fiancées makes no sense. First off the fiancée has to find out the mac address, how are they going to do that? If they no it already then they already know where the person is because the only place they're going to find that information is from the AP.

Also it's trivial to change the mac address/SSID etc. of the router. Chances are if this person is trying to hide they've also changed their phone number, ISP, router etc.

I just can't see a problem with it, Microsoft and Apple are doing exactly the same thing.

It's not about getting BT to let you use their cable. The point is that they should be letting other companies use their ducting and poles. One of the major costs of installing any kind of cable system is digging up the roads. BT don't need to do this because they were gifted a network by the government.

Patch Tuesday is once a month to allow people to plan updates correctly. Once you're managing patches for more than 20 or so computers you can't afford to be testing and releasing updates every week.

Couple that with the fact that even most home users don't want to be continually bombarded with patches and please reboot messages.

If you're insane you can still download all the individual patches and install them manually, but if you're a normal individual you just use the windows update process. If you're a business then you use WSUS.

Microsoft update all software that they supply via the update mechanism. Linux distros update all the software they supply, no difference. Maybe Microsoft will launch an Apple style app store for windows. If they do this you'll start seeing updates for other 3rd party software.

that's not the point

The point is not that the Samsung tab looks like an ipad, yes it does, quite a lot. The point is that the design is obvious and Apple shouldn't have the right to stop other companies making similar designs.

If I was going to design a tablet I'd come up with something very similar. If I'd designed it 7 or 8 years ago it probably would have looked the same but with a brushed chrome finish rather than the shiny black because that would have looked modern. The design of the device is obvious, it's a screen with a bezel.

You can already plug a kindle into your Windows/Linux/Mac device and upload your files directly on to it. The only thing you can't do is buy books with DRM from a supplier other than Amazon.

Already happens

"As for not charging people national rates when they dial the full national number - forgive my cynicism but HAH! That will work without anyone getting overcharged (I don't think!)"

This system is already in place and works, I live in Manchester dial code is 0161. I can dial 01204 (Bolton), 01457 (Glossop), 01565 (Kutsford) and a few others and they are counted as local calls.

If you dial same area without using the dialling code, the billing software assumes the dialling code. In the same way that from your mobile you can dial your numbers starting with +44 but you don't get charged for an international call.

Very odd

surely the solution is to move a digit from the code to the local number.

Bournemouth is currently 01202, just remove the last 2, prefix all numbers in Bournemouth with a 2 and suddenly you have an extra 8000000 or so numbers. Forcing the dialling of the area code only seems to create 100000 extra numbers.

Not so sure

The MEMS screens I've seen don't look as nice as e-ink and anybody who's ever used an e-ink based screen on a sunny beach will understand how much better the technology is than an LCD screen for this kind of application.

Not that targeted

"1. These are highly targetted emails, not your usual phishing spam. Somehow they are getting the email addresses for the students. As we're a student service provider we're also seeing them."

I've got a few of these emails and they're not to any address that has been near student finance. They go to an address I used with an online retailer once that now receives a lot of spam.

I use a new email address for each company I deal with so I can see where the spam comes from.

Ground source heat pump

A heat pump doesn't generate electricity, it consumes electricity.

Agreed

This has been my problem with a lot of apps since the very start. You don't need an app, you need a website that targets small screen devices.

XP Home has no RDP

XP Home has a terminal services service which is used when you share your desktop with a "helper" who is fixing your computer. However this isn't vulnerable to the attack here.

For the attack here to work you have to have enabled remote connections in system properties and you have to be using one of the stupid passwords in the list for your administrator account. You also have to either already have the work on your network or you have to have the RDP port open to the Internet.

should be there

Have a look for event ID 1149 also check the security log for event 4624

If you have network level authentication enabled then I don't think you are vulnerable to this worm. Also I doubt that a standard install of Vista or 7 is vulnerable because you can't log in as Administrator on those computers.

Space remaining is already there

Set your Computer view to details, tiles or content and space free and total space are displayed for each drive, at least they are on mine.