Will you hit the Orange iPhone “unlimited” cap?

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Orange’s big unveiling of its iPhone tariffs has caused a bit of a kerfuffle, not least because its prices are almost identical to those of O2. A lot of people are up in arms about the promise of “unlimited browsing”, which in fact comes with a fair-use limit of 750MB.

But, ignoring the terrible decision to put an “unlimited” label on a very clearly capped tariff, is that amount of monthly data actually “fair-use”?

As discussed in this week’s podcast, there’s a very easy way for existing iPhone owners to find out if that data cap would prove troublesome. Just go to Settings -> General -> Usage, and take a look at your Cellular Network Data. I did just that, believing this cap would be encroaching at least a little on my roaming lifestyle, but I was in for a surprise. (more…)

Windows 7: the licensing mess continues

Monday, October 19th, 2009

There’s a fabulous new document on Microsoft TechNet entitled “The 10 Things to Do First for Windows 7″, which is an excellent checklist on what you need to think about doing in your organisation before you move to Windows 7.

I was particularly thrilled to read “Section 3: Plow through licensing”.

Now maybe I am just being a stick-in-the-mud, and I accept it is a Monday morning and I have a headache, but my headache is made worse by reading this:

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Mollom: What’s in a Name?

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Regular readers will know that I am a major fan of Belgian developer Dries Buytaert,  the man behind Drupal. Drupal is the most powerful open source content management system and IMHO deserves to replace Dreamweaver as the web designer’s tool of choice. In fact, as far I am concerned, the major factor holding it back from world domination, apart from its precipitous learning curve, is its name. Let’s face it “Drupal” (pronounced “droople”) sounds old, ugly, gloomy and deflating. It’s almost perversely uninspiring. “Dreamweaver” it ain’t.

Now I’ve come across a brand name that’s possibly even worse… (more…)

Why ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to NDAs

Monday, October 12th, 2009

I have acquired a rather unfair reputation in the PC Pro office for being a bit of a moaner. However, I’ll happily (or should that be grumpily?) confess that one thing is guaranteed to get my dander up: non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

These horrendous documents are becoming increasingly common in the technology trade. For those of you who are unfamiliar with their evil ways, they work as follows:

Company A decides to launch a new product, but it doesn’t want Company B or (more importantly) its customers knowing about it, just in case Company B decides to copy it or its customers decide to stop buying its current products and wait for the launch of the Shiny New Loveliness. So Company A invites a bunch of journalists along to see the new product, but before said hacks can get a sniff of the goods, they have to sign a five-page document promising not to mention said product before such and such a date.

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The shame of Microsoft’s Media Center EULA

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

For reasons too boring to relate, I just had to fire up a Windows Media Center installation on an HP touchscreen device – the one that comes with every bell and whistle, and is actually quite a nice box.

In going through the TV setup for a DVB-T TV tuner which is built into the device, you get to this glorious licence screen. There are a half-dozen lines of text in that box, and then sixty-nine, yes SIXTY-NINE pages to scroll through. It’s 67 pages if you maximise the window to full screen on this large, high-res display. (more…)

The mystery of Vodafone’s mobile broadband filtering

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Whatever your views on porn, I’m sure you will agree with me when I say that content filtering just seems like such a good idea. How nice to be able to decide what you see, especially when it seems that makers of adult materials go through occasional phases of trying their utmost to stick something in front of you when you’re looking for something else.

When that happens, I’d like my content filtering services not so much as a way of protecting my innocence, but more so I can just do my stuff without interruption. So I am having serious trouble understanding exactly what is driving the content filter on Vodafone’s 3G dongle service.

Some days, whole swathes of the net are invisible – not because they are known to be rude, but because Vodafone claims it can’t even decide whether they are rude, or not. Vodafone’s content filter is offline, so to be on the safe side it just bars all accesses to marked sites.

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Google and Firewalls, round one

Monday, October 5th, 2009

My mailbox has been filling up with pleas for an end to confusion. Not globally, just in the tiny bit of the sum total of human achievement which concerns Google and their applications.

For ages, I have been telling everyone within reach to get themselves a hardware firewall. I hate the fact that “Firewall” has come to mean a whole lot of different things to different people – some say it’s software, others believe it’s a thing a router just does as if by magic; others still say “firewall” and mean “endpoint”… but that’s a digression.

It seems as though Google’s calendar web application wants to actually sniff around in your machine, to pick up re-publishable events in whatever local calendar program you’re using – and it does it from afar. This means, it doesn’t work unless your PC is naked to the web on the particular traffic port it wants to use – and opinions vary over what port that is. There’s a slew of sync utilities, many forum threads, and ominous mentions of Port Forwarding configurations for various chunks of hardware. (more…)

Does anyone actually use dynamic contrast?

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Playing around with Samsung’s XL2370 TFT this week, I hit a bit of a wall. In fact, not so much hit it, more slammed my head straight through it in sheer, irate frustration. You see, it uses an LED backlight, which Samsung’s press bunf confidently told me would produce a level of contrast the old CCFL kind simply can’t match.

And it does. Not just any old contrast, but MEGA contrast! Yes, MEGA, in capitals. In non-marketing speak that converts into a figure of 5,000,000:1, or 5,000 times higher than the standard contrast ratio on most of today’s TFTs.

Except the XL2370 doesn’t manage that at all. (more…)

Could people learn to love Microsoft once more?

Monday, September 14th, 2009

It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft was generally considered a dirty word. Dare defend the company and the outpouring of scorn was enough to leave you wondering whose puppy you’d just shot.

To be fair, the software giant hadn’t done itself many favours. Its response to antitrust investigations stopped marginally short of certifiable paranoia, while Vista turned out to have all the charm of a broken bottle being waved at a bar fight. Office 2007 was brilliant, but conspicuously so among a product list that had come to represent the best cure for insomnia.

Microsoft seemed adrift, bereft of ideas or inspiration as its empire was systematically hacked to bits by Google, Apple and Mozilla. And yet, two years later and the company is once again the toast of the tech press. Windows 7 is good, but one product’s not enough to rescue an enormous company’s reputation. What on earth has happened? Is it really okay to like Microsoft again? (more…)

Is Firefox turning into the ultimate nagware?

Monday, September 7th, 2009

Firefox, it must be said, is beginning to get on my Bristols. Like a death by a thousand cuts, the accumulation of minor irritations is pushing me desperately close to permanently decamping to Google Chrome.

From the irritating freeze that seems to temporarily paralyse the address bar about 30 seconds after it has first booted, to the mystery disappearance of the close button when you’ve got nine or more tabs open, to the clumsy implementation of the new Private Browsing mode, to the way the browser refuses to reboot for about 30 seconds after it (increasingly frequently) crashes… Firefox is heading for a fall.

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