Posts by Peter 26

Refunding Bots?

But it appeared that most of the reviewers of his app were fake, which you can't do without buying it. So did Google just refund all his fake reviewers with £5?

He was out of money, now he's in the money! All he needs to do is make another slightly less obviously fake app and use all his fake google accounts to purchase it with their £5 credit, thanks Google.

ZoneEdit

I haven't used the free DNS for a while as I got bored having to activate it every month via email to say it's still alive.

The solution I have used, although not totally free is as cheap as it gets is to buy your own domain name, and use a free acount on ZoneEdit.com to control the DNS. The first domain name is free.

ZoneEdit.com supports Dynamic DNS the same way DynDNS did, so you can set it up via your router, install a program, whatever you like to change your IP address.

http://www.zoneedit.com/faq.html

I did some research about a year ago and there is quite a few of the DNS hosting companies who allow Dynamic DNS now. I don't remember off the top of my head who they are. But I stuck with ZoneEdit.com as it was free and working.

Virgin Media have lost the plot

Warning, random rant about Virgin Media follows.

I don't understand Virgin Media's business plan. Surely you make the most of the advantages you have over other competitors. Virgin Media have the only cable network in the country with massive potential bandwidth. Why then have they been dragged into offering faster speeds through the last decade just so they can compete with other ISPs speed offerings?

Even now for the fastest speed you are best going with BT. Technically Virgin Media can go faster, but with the amount they throttle it's useless.

Their advantage is their own cable network, they should be boasting faster speeds than any other ISP... I just don't get it...

My Google Drive went down from 1pm to 3pm GMT. I couldn't access my google apps spreadsheets which I really needed. Email was fine for me though.

I can't see what else I could have done as backup. I have google drive on my PC synced, but the spreadsheets on my disk are just shortcuts to the google drive web page.

Are the Apple doors supplied to their retail chains by Apple Ireland operating in Cayman Islands? If so that would explain the high costs.

Data Cost

I read this on Googles blog yesterday but it didn't occur to me the better solution maybe to just show your mobile screen, so thanks for the insight. I think you are correct.

The problem I have is that this will require another sim, another mobile contract to get data. Is it not time that the network operators changed their model and give you multiple sims you can use? I'm paying them a monthly contract to provide me with data, why do I need a separate contract for every device I own, phone, tablet and now car?

I refuse to go this route and just enable tethering on my mobile to use my tablet, but I wish they wouldn't make life that hard.

This has been covered before, if Google stopped paying them then Bing would happily pay them for their search traffic.

Mozilla make Google money via them using google search page as default. This isn't some sort of charity handout from Google, it's business.

Seems it's not the first time he's been done for hacking.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3966045.stm

Rumour was we'd have it here in the UK before the Olympics. Looks like that really was only a rumour. :(

What have we learnt?

The problem is we (and probably Google) assumed when Android was released that being open source everyone would get updates ASAP due to the openess. Nobody really got into the details of exactly how, but hey it's open source! Well it has taken a few years, but we have now seen that's this is not the case.

I'm fine with that now I know. If you want software updates go for the latest Nexus. If you don't care about the updates then you get more choice over handset.

I have noticed more and more people coming round to this way of thinking. I fully expect in a years time for it to be an Internet sin to complain about not receiving an Android update. The immediate response will be, well you should have bought a Nexus then.

Spirit of the law not being followed

Since the reason for quashing this conviction was that it was against European Competition Laws, shouldn't the laws now be changed so that broadcasters cannot use logos etc. to get around these competition laws.

It seems to me the spirit of the law is not being followed, therefore the laws needs to be tweaked to provide greater competition.

Personally I refuse to pay over half a grand for a mobile phone. I am sure I'm not the only one.

Pirating Windows

I have noticed in all these posts regaring the locked BIOS that nobody has mentioned another huge benefit to MS, and probably the reason they started looking at protecting the BIOS.

The standard way to pirate Windows 7 is to update your BIOS with a SLIC which makes it look like your computer was an OEM PC with Windows 7 preinstalled. There is very little MS can do to stop this. You can sell on PCs like this with Windows 7 installed without paying MS a thing and it passes all the genuine checks etc.

The solution for MS to this is to sign the BIOS to stop people doing this.

Please don't give these idiots press...

Good it was terrible

I wrote an app in AppInventor and it was painful to the extreme. 20 lines of code in java for snake turned into a week of work and something looking like a crazy A1 poster size spaghetti map. It also was incredibly slow despite doing things not that complicated.

I suppose it sets you on the path of coding android and lets you actually produce something straight away which you can run on your phone, making you eager for more. But it is useless for developing any app you would be proud to go public with.

TL;DR AppInventor is a bit of fun, nobody should be using it for making real apps.

BT came out on top?

How did BT come out on top? They throttle anything that isn't port 80, even SSL!

Sad Patent

I just read the patent. It makes me extremely sad to know that you can patent something so obvious. I mean how else would you do it.

http://www.taletyano.com/MftM/TivoTimeWarp.htm

What's the point...

I have no problems with the IC not fining Google, what's the point if they are limited to £500,000. To a company the size of Google that's meaningless.

There is the argument the fine could be a headline grabber, but I'd rather the IC actually did something useful about our privacy. Especially when it comes to the one company who probably holds more data about us that anyone else on the planet. Making sure they follow the rules is vital.

I'd far rather have Google change their ways voluntary via an undertaking than fining them a meaningless amount and then the matter is closed.