The week in your words: Wireless home, phone bill fears and IBM's addiction

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Posted on 4 Jan 2008 at 16:30

In a week that saw PC Pro play at being Mystic Meg, a Vodafone customer wish he'd checked the small print, IBM patent everything in sight and DSG lose £50 million down the back of the sofa, we take a look at what our readers have made of it all.

The wireless home

First up then our prediction that one day we'll all be able to forego the bane of cables in favour of wireless televisions powered by technological voodoo. Not everyone is convinced.

"I wonder when we'll realise that living inside a microwave oven isn't a good idea," asks j9chapman, peeking out from underneath his lead helmet.

"Apparently when we are all over-done," answers mrstevenrogers. "Up until then, some say, there is no proof. I would wait 'till a few are crispy."

That's the way, can't bake a house without breaking a few brains and all that.

£27,000 phone bill trauma

Speaking of broken brains, this week we heard the tale of a man who racked up a £27,000 Vodafone bill, after using his phone as a modem. You were not impressed... by either party.

"What a muppet," sympathises SmokeyMcPotHead cheerily.

Not so, argues philsayer.

"Surely the issue here is why Vodafone charges such a swingeing rate for excess usage. £18 per minute? How on earth can that be justified?"

Swingeing? That's right, here's a man so angry he's forgotten what century he lives in and slipped into medieval lingo. It means punishment by the way. This linguistic endeavour, didn't impress bobbdobbs though.

"Nope. The issue here is a customer who didn't check what he had signed up for and then Vodafone for not stopping the account when it reached stratospheric proportions."

IBM's patent addiction

And speaking of stratospheric proportions, we also learned this week that in 2006 IBM managed to file roughly ten patents every day. Now, obviously, there's a myriad of issues here concerning patent violation, IP infringement, trolling and legal reformation of the US patent system... but none of those made us laugh, and the following from pcernie did.

"Things to do in 2008: Patent something. Anything. Design my own office suite. And patent it in some way. Set up my own blog. Make it so weird that I can patent it."

DSG's profit woes

Good plan. Which is something DSG, the retailer behind Dixons and PC World, clearly didn't have last year because it's bracing itself to miss its profit forecast by an impressive £50 million. Believe it or not, a few of you had opinions on the cause of this mishap.

"I popped into PC World yesterday it seems that many of the laptops are rather cheap these days, [below] £500," begins nickholway earnestly. "Perhaps the deflation in prices is hitting them hard."

Mmm, maybe. Anybody else... yes, c6ten?

"I popped into PC World yesterday, it seems that many of their sub-£500 laptops are rubbish. I don't believe this is evidence of slowing consumer demand I think PC World are just peddling cheap junk and consumers are voting with their feet."