Posts by Anthony Hegedus

Actually having brain failure is not limited to "users". I spent nearly three minutes yesterday cursing at a tablet which refused to get email after I set it up correctly. Then I realised I'd forgotten to connect it to the wireless network. Well, at least it wasn't 90 minutes...

I was in California in July and in a couple of shops, the terminal asked me to type my UK Debit card number PIN in. The person at the till wasn't in the slightest bit fazed by this. On one occasion, I was quite surprised that the payment device asked me if I wanted to pay in GBP or USD and told me their own exchange rate.

Ipad are great but content editing within a cloud filing system is lousy

There's one thing that sucks a bit on iOS, and that is the ability to do the following:

1. Find a file on your cloud-based file server

2. Edit it

3. Save it back again where it came from

Unless your word processor/spreadsheet of choice works with the cloud system you use, you can't do it. It works (sort of) with Microsoft Word and an office 365 account. It works with Google docs and a google drive/apps account. It works with Pages and iCloud.

But want to use Word with Livedrive, dropbox, etc? Forget it. You can open documents easily enough, however it's a hassle to save them back again in the right place.

This is the one thing iOS does badly. Android could do it with 4.3 without a problem. But iOS restricts the ability of one app to access data from another. This is a serious problem, as it really tries to tie you in to a particular service.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an iOS basher. I have an iPhone and an android tablet and phone, and I can see the relative strengths of each OS, but they both have weaknesses.

If that problem could be fixed, I'd rather have a maxi-pad than a microsoft surface any day. Actually I'd rather have one now despite the problems

Green my arse

Given that these cars probably took thousands of hours to build, the "carbon footprint" of building them far exceeds whatever is saved by having one of these electric cards. Unless this really does have a useful trickle-down effect, these are just playthings for people with too much money.

Sony computers are and always have been shit. The hardware over engineered and yet poorly executed. Like really complex hinges on laptops that are a cool design and yet aren't strong enough for a 17" screen. Everything about the computers stinks, especially the software. 50-odd sony POS bloatware apps graced the average machine. And they'd build a machine for maybe a month, with its own set of drivers, then a different model with different drivers. Try to get help for a nonfunctioning driver on google? you'd have to hope that someone with some technical knowledge posted something somewhere on the web about that particular model, which is unlikely because a) they didn't make that many of each model and b) people with technical knowledge would presumably have give Sony a wide berth anyway.

The quality of the drivers and software was always poor. Prone to crashing and freezing. Trying to repair a Sony tower was a nightmare. Non standard parts with different screwholes to anything else.

Having said all that, the Sony tablets are amazing. Not so much bloatware, well made and the bits that are made by sony do actually work and are designed reasonably well. And they keep up to date. My z3 phone already has android 5.1.1.

So glad they've exited the PC market though

Anyone who uses the email address supplied by their ISP ...

... is an idiot!

Email is always an extra service that ISPs add, usually to keep the customer with them (even though you can usually keep your address if you leave). But people don't realise the ISPs don't have an obligation to provide the service. ISPs have an annoying habit of changing the company they buy the service from and cocking it up. BT in particular.

Why not use a gmail, yahoo or even outlook.com / hotmail.com address? At least with something like gmail, even though it's free, google have some sort of reputation to uphold. The most visible thing after search is their email facility. They tend to want to keep it going.

Or better still, register a domain for yourself.

I have one of these and it's really rather good. The keyboard actually makes it more than usable for content creation, it's light enough to hold in one hand (without the keyboard) for general web browsing.

The speakers are louder than the Z2, and the waterproofing doesn't require you to mess around with port covers (for the micro usb).

I have two slight issues:

1. The bezel is slightly smaller than the Z2, which makes it slightly easier to accidentally touch something at the edge of the screen. Not a major problem, just an observation really

2. I'm not sure if the battery life is all that good. It seems to vary, and eat up the battery faster than the older z2. It seems to use up battery on standby, but lasts a good while when in use. I used the device with wifi and the bluetooth keyboard almost all the way to London on a flight from LAX recently. It does seem to get a bit hot at times, even when running apps that don't appear to be CPU or GPU intensive, but that could just be a badly written app.

Oh and another plus point, it uses quick-charge technology which allows the charger to boost the voltage up to 12V at 1.8A (I think) so it charges a lot quicker than the Z2 did.

maybe they should make products that work

It used to be that their search results included so many scam companies, more than google did. I just tried it now, I typed "yahoo technical support" into the yahoo.co.uk search field. It yields NO natural search results and one ad - an ad for changing your home page to yahoo.

Seriously though, I know only one person who uses yahoo (they pay for a yahoo email service which goes wrong fairly regularly). When you think of search, who the hell thinks of yahoo? What's it even for?

Just open your documents in MS Word, remembering to tell the computer how important the files are. Usually they'll corrupt themselves beyond any hope of recovery, just because Microsoft.

Sure that panel isn't from a yacht?

64Gbit?

"The controller looks after the Kingston branded NAND which, in actual fact, is Toshiba’s A19 64Gbit MLC Toggle chips. The 240GB drive I’m reviewing uses 16 NAND packages, eight per side of the PCB, and there’s also a 256MB DDR3L 1600 cache chip (Nanya) for good measure."

Surely they'd be 128Gbit to achieve 240GB total, if there are 16 packages?

Isn't vectone one of those "not proper" mobile companies which simply sells cheap SIM cards with bundled minutes to countries only people in the areas in which they advertise would ever need to ring?

It's cheaper than spotify for multiple users

I like the fact that at £15 a month for 6 users, it's cheaper than spotify (£10 per month + £5 per additional user). That, and the fact that spotify haven't finished developing the user interface for increasing the number of users. Once you've gone to 2 users, if you want to change to 3, you need to cancel the service and resubscribe!

Apart from the pricing the service seems good. Quick at changing tracks when you're on 3G/4G, Music selection good (for classical anyway). Seems easier to find music I want than google play music and spotify.

The beats station is useless to me, as so far I've only heard some sort of rap "music" on it that isn't exactly to my taste. I'd like to understand though, is the station set for UK time zone if you listen in the UK, seeing as they have a london base?

So overall, I like the service. A lot easier to set up than the others, and pretty easy to use as well.

Why not just throw them in the microwave and nuke them? You don't need a box, and it gives you an excuse to buy a new microwave because the smell of burnt arachnoid & banana pie won't shift

How about .doesntsuck and .dontsuck, and then next year's .areprobablyok and .annoysme and the list goes on and on, until it'll become impossible to work out what the hell domain name to go to, what with .comm and .con and .co and the old-fashioned .com.

It's going to be a gangster's paradise

A PC isnt like a car or anything else we own. People use the car analogy a lot though, presumably because it too is a complex and expensive machine that can be used for so many things. A car can be used for going to work, going to the cinema, going on holiday, moving furniture, picking up a friend from the station etc. A computer can also be used for many diverse things.

But a computer is also flexible, and can be treated (and mistreated) in so many ways. What is really sad is that nobody has come up with a foolproof way of restoring your computer back to factory settings without losing something.

In microsoft's latest incarnation of its windows "OS", there's a facility to restore back to factory settings and "keep all your apps" but what it means by apps is the ones that nobody ever downloads off the "store". Other computers have complex restore options that people don't understand.

I once had a customer who managed to wipe everything off her HP computer because every time it booted, it had "press F12 for restore options" (or similar), and so she decided that it must want her to press F12. So she did. And when it said it'll restore your PC and wipe all the programs and data, she thought it meant something else. When people are that fucking stupid they really aren't going to prevent a cryptolocker infection, are they?

We have had customers infected with one of these crypto-style viruses, and every single one of them was a reasonably intelligent and careful person. They just had a momentary lapse, and that's all it takes.

There is a way to get more energy...

Another commenter wrote here that radio signals don't account for 30% of the total energy output, but I know what does - the screen. Now if you could have a really efficient solar cell blocking the screen out, you'd be able to recoup even more energy.

That's tongue-in-cheek of course, but it's saying much the same thing as recouping "lost" radio energy i.e. it's complete bollocks

The kids might have access to fast broadband at home, tethering on the go and a decent battery life on these devices. And Microsoft's hyper-reliable "onedrive" cloud service never goes wrong does it?

I'm so excited

I love Apple and all their products. I want to buy all their watches and I have four iphones and a macbook air and a macbook pro. I want to give them all my money because I love them so much.

I once amused myself in my office by feeding these survey scammers false information to see what they did with it. I'd frequently get phone calls after that asking for "Gary Hitler" or "Adolf Eichmann" or various other names I'd made up. In 2011 the trend was to use cheap indian call centres to make the outgoing "sales" calls - offering injury compensation, doing more "surveys" etc. (can't remember if PPI was a thing back then). If the call looked like an "outcome" was promising, they'd escalate it to a slightly less impossible-to-understand indian. If it looked like a "definite", they'd transfer you to a UK call centre staffed with people with vaguely understandable voices and official sounding job titles. The whole thing was probably very well organised and was probably linked to the nascent "your computer is sending out viruses, please pay as to repair it" industry,

Anyway, I recorded one of these scam incoming calls, where they had already been fed rubbish data, and fed them some more. I still can't believe the sheer determination of the call centre staff, tempered only by their ignorance and stupidity. Here's the recording (with subtitles that I added): https://youtu.be/UakaSdXk8ZI

I really don't get it. I don't get expensive watches either, but I do know they hold their value, because of the craftsmanship, the name, the expensive jewels etc. and of course the fact that they will always do their job as well as the day you bought it.

Apple's "watch" on the other hand will not always do its job as well as the day it was bought. By job, I mean "being a smartwatch". Yes, it'll connect to a 2015-model iphone, but in ten years time, what exactly will it be able to connect to? Are apple going to ensure that a 2035 model of the iphone will still work with that lovely looking apple watch you bought for $10000 20 years previously? I think not. And even if it did, the software won't be upgradeable to whatever apple watches will be using then, for sure.

Unless they've designed it so that the electronics and the display can be easily replaced, leaving a fancy case and strap, the whole thing is fucking daft. No other tech has been made that incorporates precious metals and fancy design in the same way (and I don't count those nokia vertu phones as they're targetted at a different market)

Oh good, so they'll block Java, because it insists on loading Ask.com, which is basically malware. And Avast.com because avast tries to load Chrome or dropbox, and adobe because it tries to load mcafee "scan plus" (another virus). And Microsoft.com because it tries to load harmful software such as microsoft updates, Windows 8, etc.

progress...

And pity the poor helpdesk minions. They are armed only with a 10-line set of instructions and no other knowledge of anything in the world.

Reminds me of a helpdesk in the bad old days of AOL actually being an ISP - a customer of mine told me that they rang AOL when their broadband wasn't working, and after half an hour on the phone confirming that their browser was indeed internet exploder, the helpdesk zombie asked the customer to follow the *yellow* lead from the modem to the phone socket. The customer said that that was a grey lead. The AOL operative replied "I'm sorry, we can't help you, as you're not using the equipment that was sent out to you. Please find the yellow lead and call us back"

I often end up having to set up remote access to home security systems so that the owner can ogle his security cameras from afar and I'm shocked by the total lack of security on these systems. There's usually a separate user and admin account, but all too often only the admin account is set up. Then the actual security is usually just a 4-digit pin. And amazingly, it's usually set to "0000" or "1234".

The security companies who put this kit in are not IT security consultants. They understand about fitting cameras to walls, best places to put IR sensors and certainly talk the security talk. But they get lost with IT - completely lost! That's why they often call us to set up the remote access bit.

I've even seen some instances where they completely open up all the remote management ports on a home router that's still got its factory default password set.

And in 50 years, where are we going to find a device that'll be able to read that disc?

Speaking as the owner of an iphone 6 plus, who upgraded 11 months before the contract is due, I'm delighted. I sold my "old" iphone 5s for more than the buy-out cost of my existing contract, got the latest phone on a zero-interest scheme from my network (o2), and now have the phone I wanted. Yes, it does the same basically as the old phone, but I can see the screen better (being nearly twice the size), I can type more accurately, I can take better photos, I can store more music and videos, the battery lasts longer - much longer, as a satnav it's more functional because it's bigger, and the speakerphone seems louder.

The improvements are incremental, but I'm not interested in fashion, I don't care about a new car, I don't even have a TV (another thing that suckers you in to frequent upgrades - 47" is the new 32" I believe).

It's what floats your boat I suppose. Phones float my boat. I spend less on my phone than other people do on Sky subscriptions, clothes, cars etc.

And the thing about zero percent interest is significant - I could buy an iphone, but it would not cost me less than getting it on a contract (at least with o2) even if I had the money, which I don't.