Posts by Jaymeister 13 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Rather than sending the user cash or the new model, why not simply send them a replacement that's the same model as the one they just trashed?
That way they don't get anything out of it, except of course the inconvenience of having trashed their phone and having to wait for a new one.
Finally, an e-reader that I'd actually consider buying appears to be approaching.
Honestly, I'd love something like this if I could get my daily newspaper delivered to it over the air, as well as open some other document formats, and it didn't cost the earth.
I don't have pockets big enough for a regular e-reader, especially not one big enough for comfortably reading a newspaper on. One that can be rolled however, is a totally different story!
Unfortunately, I'd be very surprised if this thing is released with a reasonable price tag. Shame really.
All yesterday and this morning I've had no/intermittent data access, and yesterday evening I couldn't even make calls. When trying to call someone for a lift home in heavy rain and all you're getting is a "network busy" message, you really start to wonder why you're still with your current provider.
Needless to say, with their network being as awful as it has been the last few months, as soon as my contract is up I'm jumping ship!
I've managed to dodge the bullet on the last two outages, but this time even I was wrenched from my beloved internet connection.
Seriously, with the way O2 has been going for reliability of their network, as soon as my (now looking unfortunately overly long) contract is up, I'm going elsewhere...
Seconded. Though I generally dislike apple products and buy better, cheaper alternatives... and foxconn have generally made me believe nothing more than that their hardware is ****.
It is a sad situation to have encountered though. Losing poor quality hardware should not be something someone has to die over.
>Under your scheme, they would have the money to either expand the network or pay the directors a big bonus, which do you think they'll do?
Ah yes, appologies, I was momentarily blinded by an unexpected burst of faith in humanity. You are in fact right, they would just pay the directors bigger bonuses for being useless.
>A per byte charging scheme would actually result in less traffic because there would be an incentive to customers not to use it.
This is true, however every story I've heard of such schemes, the ISP's charge insane prices for it. Australia is a good example. They're paying silly money for their bandwidth (and now getting censored too! I'd hate to be them.)
>There is a tendency in Britain at the moment to regulate to make businesses do what they would do if there was a proper market. Fundamentally unnecessary regulation is a bad choice.
Of course, a proper market would be nice, but I don't forsee any method of actually getting that except by maybe doing something utterly crazy such as allocating some spectrum for a longer range cross-country wifi mesh network, completely sidestepping the need for wired infrastructure and allowing new, smaller ISP's to appear and offer a gateway from the mesh to the rest of the world that we subscribe to. This is of course, not without some serious technological challenges, and I am unsure if it is even something that could be sustained. Especially given the reduced bandwidth over such long range, building-penetrating links.
>>If that is the case, then surely the problem is the fact that (for the most part) iPlayer requires streaming or P2P. Personally, when I get home, I watch the shows that I have already downloaded during the day with get_iplayer (as I can login remotely and initiate the download from work if I choose to). Or perhaps I will download programs late at night, when it only takes about 5 or 10 minutes.
Indeed, that's a nice idea, but unfortunately I'm on virgin so while I'm at work I'd have my bandwidth throttled into oblivion if I did that. To add to the problem, I also tend to watch more content on other legal streaming sources (Youtube, Funimation, etc...) which do not provide the option to download in advance.
Everyone keeps harping on about how the problem is the "unlimited" packages. This isn't quite the case, as if everyone was limited, we'd still have the same problems. Why? Because everyone gets home from work in the same few hours of the day and goes online. It's not the quantity of data transferred overall, but the quantity within a certain few hours of the day. This is why ISP's, an example being virgin media, throttle connections during parts of the day and especially in the evening.
The result even if we do pay for quantity rather than speed, is that we all still suffer, because we all want the allocated bandwidth at the same time and the ISP's just can't provide what they've advertised.
What needs to be done, rather than ISP's whining about this crap, is for them to start charging more. Yes, this sucks for the customer, but if they're charging more, they can then afford to expand their network capacity, and we'll all start actually getting that service we're paying for. Maybe, just maybe, we'll even be able to beat them about the head enough to stop with their rediculous capping policies.
The first step, if you ask me, would be having the regulations changed so that when advertising broadband they have to say "At least xMb/s" rather than "Up to xMb/s", and specify the slowest possible speed the customer is going to get, INCLUDING the capped rates! That would at least give the customer a fairer insight into how fast their connection is going to be when they actually want to use it (which would be at the same time as almost everyone else). Wouldn't it?
I do believe this farce with the aussie firewall has worn out my surprised face long ago.
No-one should be surprised by this. Any efforts to censor the internet in the interests of protecting the people are really just a thinly veiled excuse to set up censorship so you can screw the people over. Always have been, always will be.
My only advice is for those poor sods down under to take heed of my chosen icon for this post. Interpret it any way you will.
Shouldn't it be that rights holders have to complain to the police who then perform a full investigation to prove that they're not talking a load of crap, THEN it gets passed to ISP's who can send out the nastygrams or otherwise make the users internet connection not worth having?
As it stands, it's a case of the rights holders being able to cause trouble for anyone they want as and when they want just by having a whinge at their ISP. way to go to give the music/film/whatever industry an easy way to harrass the general public rather than insisting they fix their broken distribution mechanisms and learn how to interact with modern society.
Seriously, of the ways to reduce piracy, here's a few:
a) Make content easily affordable and readily available WITHOUT any retarded restrictions on use or requirements for specialist software/hardware.
b) Simultaneous global releases. I dare say few people in another market area are going to wait the extra month for it to reach them, they'll just pirate it. This is especially true given most distribution technologies include regioning so you can't even play it back in another market area. Technologies that the pirated copies do not include.
c) Stop treating the customer as a criminal until proven otherwise, it only creates resentment that results in people thinking along the lines of "I'm not paying those scumbags! They don't deserve it!".
Also, when will the government and rights agencies learn that internet connections are NOT representative of a single user, they represent a whole household. This means that applying restrictions to a connection is not punishing the intended target alone, but also those who are innocent (until proven otherwise) who they live with. How is this acceptable? You don't send an entire family to prison because one of them stole something, so why send them all back to the dark ages before the internet became useful?
[/rant]
For the record, I don't support piracy. I buy stuff, perhaps stupidly since the pirates get better quality and less restrictions for free.
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