Seriously, though, Ofcom and the operators are busy arguing and threatening one another about what is fair for them compared to what is fair for their competitors, and as a consequence nothing is happening. Consumers are getting short shrift because there are no LTE networks. Ofcom's job is to make sure consumers get a fair deal, is it not? It isn't happening now.
The strongest argument in favour of allowing EE to do this is that consumers will actually get 4G services to buy as quickly as possible. That's a strong argument.
Re: "that HSPA+ is almost as good as LTE so it's not important"
There is lots of 1800MHz LTE hardware being made available by manufacturers though: *they* think it is going to be an important band, as do I. 900MHz was used for the first group of GSM operators, and then 1800MHz for the second group. 900MHz has been widely refarmed for 3G, and 1800MHz is now getting lots of spare capacity as 2G is starting to wind down. There are vast numbers of countries outside the EU where this is so, and in a lot of them the operators don't face quite as excessive regulation of what they do with their spectrum as inside the EU.
Thank you. I thought I was the only one thinking that. I have to say she's wearing a rather nondescript frock, too, given that she is marrying someone worth tens of billions of dollars.
My internet banking with Barclays private client business is not allowing me to log in and is generating an error. I need to transfer money to a different bank by this evening, so this is not good.
Even if "tooling costs" did matter, there is no obvious reason why Apple would not just retain the existing chassis, put newer electronics inside it, and otherwise keep the design the same. Apple can neglect the line and not spend much money updating it, but people who really want a 17 inch Macbook Pro can keep buying it and won't be pissed off. That's much better than discontinuing it.
Retaining it just isn't very hard, either. Take the existing model. Design a motherboard for the new Ivy Bridge CPUs and some new more state of the art discrete graphics. Sell it. That's about it. The professional designers who like it can keep buying it, even if Apple is neglecting the model a bit.
I am not sure this is it, though. Last time Apple redesigned the chassis of the Macbook Pro, they actually updated the 15 inch model first, and did not update the 17 inch model until a few months later. This was presumably because it was simply easier to get the engineers and manufacturers to update one model at a time. If the same thing is happening now, then maybe a new 15 inch Macbook Pro but not a new 17 inch Macbook Pro is in production now, someone has noticed and told this analyst, and he has concluded that "The 17 inch Macbook Pro is being discontinued", when the story is actually only that the new model is a little late.
The 13 inch Macbook Pro is far and away Apple's bestselling laptop, so they won't get rid of it. It's a very nice machine, but I am not quite sure why it is their bestselling laptop, given that the 13 inch Air has the same graphics, an only somewhat slower CPU (1.7GHz rather than 2.4GHz, but substituting an SSD for a Hard drive makes up for a lot of this), a higher resolution screen, is much lighter and more portable, and costs only slightly more for the base configuration. (If you order the 13 inch Pro with a 128Gb SSD like the Air does, it actually costs more).
Although, given how many times I hear people in Apple stores ask "Why does that one only have a 128Gb Hard Drive, when that one has 500Gb?" perhaps I do. Non-technical customers seem to have "How big as the hard drive?" as one of their key questions, along with "How many megahertz does it have?", so perhaps that is why they buy the Pro over the Air. They seem to have no interest at all in screen resolution, though, which I find a bit baffling. (I have the 13 inch Air, myself).
There actually is going to be a bigger technical difference between the next Air and the next 13 inch Pro, however. Unlike the 15 and 17 inch Macbook Pros, the present 13 inch only has a dual core CPU, due to the power and heat envelope for the present enclosure requiring a CPU with a thermal design point of no more than 35W. Quad core CPUS with a 35W TDP don't exist for Sandy Bridge, but they do for Ivy Bridge, so the next 13 inch Macbook Pro will be Quad Core (at least in some configurations), whereas the next 13 inch Air will still be dual core.
The next 13 inch Macbook Pro may well lack an Optical Drive and may well be thinner than the present model, but it will still be a separate model from the Macbook Air.
What we want is EE being allowed to use its 1800MHz spectrum for LTE. In return for this, they must be required to sell that 30MHz they are required to sell *right now*, and the sale process must be something transparent so that the other operators are not prevented from buying it if they want. Joint ventures between the other operators allowing them to buy it and build a shared network (so that everyone can offer 4G to their customers as soon as possible) once again should be explicitly allowed and indeed encouraged. (Such a shared network might run out of capacity fairly quickly, but hopefully by the time it does the individual operators will also have LTE running at 2600MHz and it won't be a problem). Somewhere in all this, we get rid of all restrictions that exist on what operators may use their spectrum for. (Once you own it, you may use it for anything you want).
Why has this not happened? It seems blindingly obvious.
To be fair, any machine with a Windows XP Professional licence bought in 2010 had a licence that had been sold by Microsoft no later than mid 2008 if the machine came from a major manufacturer and no later than mid 2009 if it came from a small system builder. If the manufacturer of the PC then took a year or two to sell a machine with it to you, then I think it is hard to think that Microsoft has much obligation to you because of that. (The PC manufacturer might).
More likely, a machine with Windows XP Pro bought in 2010 had a Windows Vista Business licence and XP had been installed using downgrade rights. In this case, the licence comes with support from Microsoft until the end of life date for Windows Vista (April 2017). Of couse, after April 2014 you will have to actually install Vista to take advantage of that support, which might not be recommended.
Originally, Microsoft's support lifetime policy was that Windows XP Home was to be supported for five years from release (mainstream support), and XP Pro was to be supported for five years belong that (extended support). That would have meant XP Home went end of life in late 2006. As Vista was delayed and delayed, that would have meant that support for XP Home ended before Vista was released in 2007, so Microsoft then changed the policy to two years after the release of the replacement product for the Home Version and five years beyond that for the Pro version. That would have made XP Home support end in April 2009, but there were still problems, as people kept buying the OEM versions of XP Home in large numbers until early 2008 and the system builder version until early 2009. (Plus, of course, they kept buying XP Pro via these routes and via "downgrade rights" even longer). Then, the Netbook came along and as netbooks wouldn't run Vista, they kept XP Home alive for that, and kept selling it until one year after Windows 7 was released, i.e. until late 2010. Some of these machines were for sale new into 2011. Due to this and the huge installed base, Microsoft had earlier extended the life of XP Home to the same end of life date as XP Pro, i.e. the April 2014 date mentioned in the article.
What is lovely, in my opinion is that XP managed to remain on sale beyond its supposed end of life date not once but twice, and the actual end of life date had to be extended a total of eight years. Microsoft really did manage to lose their way between Windows XP and Windows 7.
This sort of laptop isn't my cup of tea, but I have been giving advice to people who want to buy something like this lately. We are talking the sorts of people who use a computer quite a bit for light office and web tasks but aren't really quite technical. What I have found is that such people really want 15 inch screens - a big screen appeals. Also, they don't seem interested in the number of pixels on the screen., at all.
I have tried to suggest that either (a) if they are going with that screen resolution, they might want to consider a 13 inch or even a 14 inch rather than 15, as that will give them a much more portable machine for the money or (b) paying a bit more for a higher screen resolution at 15 inch. However, one then discovers quickly that most manufacturers don't do any other screen resolutions in their budget laptops and a laptop with a higher resolution screen will actually cost hundreds of pounds more. Such a laptop will actually be better in a lot of other ways too and will likely be a sound purchase, but you are by that point way out of the price range of your buyer. Further investigation indicates that the buyer doesn't care *at all* about the screen resolution anyway, meaning that they would not have paid even an extra 50 quid for a higher resolution. So I end up recommending something like the reviewed laptop. (Samsung are good value. Better build quality than some of the others at that price point).
And you know what? These buyers seem to usually end up happy anyway. Often they like to watch DVDs on the laptop as well as the other uses, and the extra screen real estate certainly does help for that. Of course, they would get much better picture quality by, well, buying a TV, but once again they don't seem to mind. And this is fine. You are actually getting a lot for your money in a laptop at that price range.
In return for allowing EE to use this band for LTE right now, Ofcom should also bring forward the requirement that EE sell of the 20MHz (or possibly the full 30MHz) it is obliged to sell as a consequence of the merger *at once*. That way, if it turns out that there is value in building an LTE network at 1800MHz right now, one of EE's competitors can buy this spectrum, build an LTE network at 1800MHz too, and there will be no monopoly. If there is no value then this might not happen, but allowing for the possibility is a good idea.
As to the frequencies, the story in the GSM world is approximately this:
GSM 2G spectrum was initially allocated at 900MHz, and then more was allocated at 1800MHz shortly afterwards to allow additional networks. (In the UK, O2 and Vodafone got the 900MHz and T-Mobile and Orange the 1800MHz. Even before merging, they had unusually large allocations, as in most other countries the 900MHz operators have been given more 1800MHz as well, and/or the 1800MHz spectrum is split between more than three operators).
UMTS 3G spectrum was allocated at 2100MHz, and virtually every GSM operator in the world got an allocation at 2100MHz and built a 3G network there. At the same time, 2600MHz was designated as a "3G relief band", to be used for more 3G services when 2100MHz ran out.
However, operators preferred to use lower frequencies for additional 3G services, as base-stations have longer range at lower frequencies, and these lower frequencies work better in rural areas. Therefore, operators either refarmed some of the 900MHz 2G spectrum for 3G, or in countries where the 850MHz band was still allocated from analogue services or was being used for CDMA, they built additional 3G networks here. It was helpful that this was one of the primary bands used for 3G in the US, as it meant that lots of hardware was already available. (850MHz only is allocated in the US, 900MHz only is allocated in Europe, and *both bands* are allocated in much of the rest of the world).
The 1800MHz band was neglected for 3G, however, as it was not as useful as 850MHz or 900MHz. And the 2600MHz band was not generally allocated for additional 3G services, although that was the original plan. However, as of 2012, demand for 2G GSM services is winding down as it is old technology. 850MHz (non-Europe), 900MHz, and 2100MHz is very busy, so 1800MHz and 2600MHz are obvious places to put LTE. (Other bands being allocated due to switching off analogue TV is rather wishy washy, inconsistent in different places, and is going to take time). As a commenter above said, there is already 1800MHz LTE in Australia, and I personally think this is going to end up being one of the most common places where we are going to find it. EE need to get a move on here, as they can gain a competitive advantage by doing this.
I have returned phones that I have found to other people, and other people have returned phones that I have lost to me. In both cases the information that allowed the owner to be identified and to get the phone back would not have been accessible if the phone was password protected. So there is something to be said for less security rather than more.
Apple has a huge cash pile, and a lot of this cash is trapped outside the US, in the sense that the would have to pay tax on it if they move it back into the US, either to spend in some way (eg on wages) or return it to investors. One way to not pay taxes on some of it is to move jobs outside the US and pay the workers there from the cash pile. So Apple has a tax incentive to outsource jobs to India and other countries.
Well, 3G was supposed to be a mixture of FDD and TDD, and the European UMTS 3G standard contained a TDD mode called TD-CDMA, which was supposed to run alongside W-CDMA. European (and other) 3G auctions included some spectrum for this mode. I don't know of any operators who actually used it - China Mobile eventually rolled out a network based on a different but possibly in some ways related TDD 3G standard called TD-SCDMA. However, it is easy to forget that a decade ago the focus of 3G was actually on providing more bandwidth and higher quality for voice calls, along with being able to provide video calling. These sorts of uses suit FDD - similar amounts of data on the upload and download, and a desire for very little latency.
Now that we are all using (very likely) asymmetric data services most of the time, TDD does come into its own a little more, as it can allocate different amounts of bandwidth to the upload compared to the download, and the amount allocated to each can be varied on the fly. I think therefore that TDD is going to be a big deal in most places for 4G, particularly given that the Chinese are willing to cooperate more with everyone else in terms of using the same standards this time. Given that the Chinese are definitely using TD-LTE from the start, and Apple desperately wants to launch an iPhone on China Mobile, we are going to get multi-mode handset support from day one, too, so my guess is that using the FDD and TDD modes of LTE side by side is going to become standard practice almost immediately.
The mall in Sanlitun that contains the Apple store actually consists of two unconnected bits. Between them is a little street filled with bars, stalls in which guys sell you barbecued meat on skewers, and little stores selling all kinds of stuff, as is typical in China. I would be astonished if eggs cannot be sourced there.
"I am unable to access my online account and I need to access my bills. There may be a problem with my login details".
"We are very sorry, but the online billing website is down at the moment"
"Has it been down for the last six weeks?"
"Er, yes.."
When I stated that I did in fact need to look at my bill, they immediately offered to send me a paper bill and waive the usual charge.
However, they have moved most of their customers over to online only billing, and there is normally a charge for customers who receive paper bills. They certainly have a legal obligation to provide their customers with bills, and having a situation where most customers have been moved to an online billing platform that does not work for months at a time is at best astoundingly crappy and at worst a serious breach of their legal obligations
That they have the audacity to raise prices for customers locked into long term contracts at the same time (a practice that regardless of legality, has not generally been practiced in this industry in this country until now) when they are simultaneously unable to demonstrate even basic competence is rather impressive, however.
Like the first commenter, I know exactly when is the end date of my contract.
Buy a PC from any OEM you like. Register the copy of Windows with Microsoft. Replace the motherboard. If Windows demands reactivation - it doesn't always - go through Microsoft's activation procedure, which might involve calling them. They will generally reactivate it fine. Although an OEM licence for Windows is theoretically tied to one PC, they don't really care how much hardware you change, as long as the licence is only used for one PC at a time.
Oh I don't know. Consider the following conversation.
"My PC doesn't work? Can you fix it?"
"Yes. However, your Windows installation is damaged / filled with crap / your hard drive has failed. Could you give me the box of CDs that came with your PC when you bought it?"
"What box of CDs?"
This conversation is no less common in cases where I know that the PC came with recovery discs as in cases where I know it didn't. (What I then do is scrounge for compatible disc images from somewhere else, download drivers from somewhere or other, and do a reinstall. Is that wrong? No).
So possibly recovery discs have been left out because people who know how to use them don't actually need them, and people who don't never use them.
There doesn't seem to be any suggestion here that anyone has installed any software without valid licences for that software. Without that happening, I find it hard to say that it is software piracy. On occasions when I have needed to restore Windows on a PC, I have been known to download the correct Windows image on Bit Torrent, burn a disc, and then do a reinstall on a machine *with a valid licence*. Does that make me a pirate? I vote for no.
It may be that Comet is in breach of their licence with Microsoft in other ways, or has charged customers for things it was not supposed to charge them for, and it may be that a company in financial trouble did some slightly dubious things to make payroll or some such. If so, they should be punished for it. (It is also good practice for the new owners to do a proper audit and make sure everything is above board and that anything bad that was done in the past is properly accounted for and not repeated, and this may be what is actually happening here). However, copyright industries have a habit of shouting "piracy" when opposing almost anything they don't like, and they should not be able to get away with this.
Er, no. Apple did. It was a very rare example of an Apple product announced a significant time before it was actually released. Steve Jobs got up on stage (at the annual iPod announcement, I think) talked about it, and said that it was called iTV for now, but that might change. When the product was released six or so months later, it had been changed to Apple TV, probably because ITV was such a well established trademark in the UK.
The problem is financial markets and European related
In happier days, Deutsche Telecom bought all these foreign mobile carriers in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Now they have discovered that mobile isn't a growth business any more, and they have a lot of debt, and a major shareholder (the German government still owns around 35% of the company either directly or via a stretched bank) that has all kinds of other problems and which definitely wants out, but even more definitely is not going to give them any more capital. Within a couple of years, T-Mobile US is going to need to build a 4G network, and it simply does not have the money. They either have to find a network sharing arrangement with somebody else, or find the money somewhere, probably by being bought by someone with deep pockets. If not their long term prognosis is fairly poor.
I doubt that anyone at Apple would consider that to be a huge pile of cash.
Credit to Facebook. It's a real company that has lots of customers and is genuinely quite profitable. Still, though, most of its valuation is based on optimistic estimates of the future. These may or may not happen. The tech industry has companies that generate a lot of cash now - Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle. Facebook isn't really one of those yet.
I have a parcel I wish to send to my sister in Australia. Yesterday, I attempted to print the postage using the Royal Mail website. After an hour of timeouts and errors, it eventually announced that the system was down and I should come back later. This was after it took my money and failed to issue me any postage.
I went to the Post Office, and stood in a long queue. If I had succeeded in preprinted my postage online, I could have bypassed the queue and just placed the item in a chute for prepaid items. However, this had failed. After about ten minutes, I realised that the queue was barely moving. I gave up and went home, and send an e-mail complaint to the Royal Mail.
This morning, I received a reply apologising for the online problems, and stating that my money had been refunded. I logged in again, and exactly the same thing happened. I was charged for my postage but the system went down before the process was finished.
This is a debacle.
(Incidentally, if I look at the "history" section of my interactions, I am told that my online prepayment balance was transferred from an old system to a new system on 20th November. So clearly they migrated to a new platform that doesn't work five weeks before Christmas. Cretins.
I don't know how big this migration was. Enormous, I fear. Things are failing all over the place. I don't buy the "unrelated".
Although I have been inconvenienced quite a bit by these outages, I did not think that I had been double charged or overcharged for anything. However, this article caused me to worry, so I went to the Royal Mail website to check, and got this.
Error: Problem encountered - Display process failure
If I were running a business that is vastly busier at Christmas than any time of year, I wouldn't have thought that six weeks before Christmas was the ideal time for migrating your systems to a new platform, personally.
The "Gilmli Glider" incident in Canada in 1983 is also worth mentioning. A Boeing 767 ran out of fuel mid-flight (an imperial/metric mixup combined with a faulty fuel gauge) and the pilots managed to successfully land the plane with only minor damage. The minor damage was due to the nose wheel not being fully down due to the power loss and due the the brakes having to bit hit very hard due to coming down a bit too late, rather than the plane doing anything brick-like. Everyone on board the plane was completely okay and the aircraft was back in service soon afterwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
There are not many incidents like this, because multiple engine failures are incredibly rare. You have to run out of fuel, have simultaneous bird strikes, fly through a cloud of volcanic ash, or something like that. Independent mechanic failures due to faulty engines simply do not happen, as modern engines are incredibly reliable.
Apple will update its existing Macbook Airs when it can source the Ivy Bridge ULV CPUs in adequate numbers to satisfy demand. Because Apple makes so few individual models of laptop and therefore tends to move its whole production to a new generation of hardware at the same time, Apple is seldom the first manufacturer to offer a new generation of CPUs in its hardware, so I doubt this is likely before about May.
As for the 15 inch ultrathin laptop (which may or may not be called an Air, but probably will), Apple will release it when they are happy with it. They clearly weren't happy with it at the time they last updated the 11 and 13 inch Airs in July, but the rumours suggest they are close to being happy with it now. t am sure that Apple has a Sandy Bridge prototype of this, but they are unlikely to turn this into an actual product if Ivy Bridge is only a couple of months away. So likely May for this too. If the timing of the other Ivy Bridge models was to slip much later than may, you could get a Sandy Bridge 15 inch model in the interim, I suppose.
I don't think so, actually. The unibody models have upgradeable hard drives and user upgradeable RAM. I have never heard of a case in which Apple has refused to honor the warranty due to such an upgrade, and I know of many cases in which they have honored it. The earlier non-unibody Macbook Pros did not theoretically have user upgradeable hard drives, but even then Apple would generally still honor the warranty if you had clearly done the upgrade carefully and had not damaged anything when doing it. (Amazingly, Apple replaced a faulty motherboard for free on my non-unibody Macbook Pro despite my having previously replaced the hard drive myself, and despite the computer being out of warranty. I am still awed by this).
You theoretically do void your warranty if you replace the SSD on a Macbook Air yourself, but that is a price of the extremely thin form factor. It is still possible to do, assuming you can find a suitable SSD using that non-standard modules that go in the Air.
Looking at the low end models, the Macbook Air has a slower CPU (1.6GHz against 2.4GHz), but the same graphics, a better screen, an SSD rather than a HDD, and is much thinner and lighter. The Pro has an optical drive, and a tad more expandability - ie you can upgrade the RAM and the hard drive. That SSD is going to actually make the Air a better performer for a lot of tasks. Unless you need the optical drive or more storage when you are on the move, I can't really see the point of getting the Pro. If you are going to do complex graphical or computational "Pro" tasks, the 13 inch Pro just isn't going to cut it: you are going to need one of the 15 or 17 inch models with better CPUs and graphics. You can buy the 13 inch Pro with an SSD rather than an HDD, but that makes it more expensive than the Air.
Apple needs to turn the 13 inch Macbook Pro into a genuine Pro machine. That means quad core CPUs, a screen at least the equal of the one in the Air, and decent discrete graphics. If the power, heat, and space constraints of the current enclosure do not allow this, it needs a redesign. One option might be to cut out the optical drive to make space. For those rare occasions when you actually need one, an external USB drive does the job fine.
This is a response to Caffe Nero's recent decision to offer free WiFi, I suspect. Starbucks are usually more generous at offering power outlets for customers, so this is a good move. It will certainly mean I use Starbucks more often, even despite their somewhat inferior coffee.
Both Pret a Manger and Wetherspoons offer free Wifi at their regular outlets and not at their airport outlets, too. I suspect it is because the owners of the airports have sold "exclusive" rights to offer WiFi within the airport to someone else, and therefore prevent regular retail tenants from offering it directly to their customers. It's certainly an annoying state of affairs.
All the Apple rumour sites got it totally right. On the morning of the announcement (and a few days before) they stated exactly what was going to be announced, and the presentation yesterday was thus very dull because it completely lacked surprises.
Leading up to the announcement, there were some rumours that the iPhone 5 was the new model, and the 4S was going to be a cheaper, slightly lower spec verso of the 4 for the mass market. At this point the 5 was supposed to have a faster CPU, better camera, better graphics etc. As the announcement came closer it became clear that the 4S had all these things and there was not going to be any new lower end iPhone. (Apple have simply not discontinued the 4 and the 3GS and have cut their prices). There was no 5 announced yesterday, but the 4S had all the things it had been earlier rumoured to have. Anyone taken by surprise by this really hadn't been paying attention.
Where Apple do perhaps deserve a little criticism is being a little slow with this update. The higher end Android phones (Galaxy SII etc) have been clearly superior to the iPhone 4 in hardware terms for a few months now. My understanding is that the iPhone 4 continued to sell well (most people don't care that much), but Apple have been a bit slow in catching up. I think the iPhone 4S is pretty much on a part with the top Android phones for the moment - it may be behind again in six months - but the truth is Apple's hardware usually lags a little. Apple's users are after the whole experience, and most people buy a new phone when their contract runs out. For most people, being a few months behind Samsung doesn't really matter.
With the iPhone 4, I thought Apple had finally got the model numbering to (for the tech industry) an unusually sensible situation with respect to model numbers - i.e. the fourth model of iPhone was in fact called the iPhone 4. Now, however, they seem to have messed it up again, with the fifth model being called the iPhone 4S.
Assuming the next model does in fact have LTE/4G, does that mean that the next model will be the iPhone 4G, the iPhone LTE, the iPhone 5, or the iPhone 6?
All this doesn't really matter compared to the question of whether the new phone is actually any good, but they seem to have missed a wonderful opportunity to keep the name simple.
Dropping back to China Mobile's 2G network, actually. China Telecom is a CDMA operator.
Another issue here is that there is no number portability in China, and most customers use China Mobile's 2G network. This is as much a hack to allow customers on China Mobile to use an iPhone without changing their number as it is about coverage. And as such it is quite clever.
You get a fixed phone with BT, they tell you it is a one year contract, which is annoying in itself. They tell you it includes free weekend calls. They then tell you that they can offer you free evening calls on top of that, for no extra charge, and "this is also a 12 month contract".
13 months later, when attempting to change to a different provider, you discover that the free evening calls was automatically renewable (although the basic line rental was not) and you can't get out of it for another 11 months, and are therefore stuck with the line rental as well. A dishonest trick, and I am glad it is being banned.
On the "December 2012" thing, I remember a few years back the Spanish terrorist organisation ETA one afternoon announcing that it was declaring a ceasefire "effective from midday tomorrow". This did make me wonder how many people they were planning on blowing up before midday tomorrow.
If the item had been opened by your neighbours., then you did not receive it new and either the courier company or the retailer is liable for this and must send you a new one. They have not got your signature confirming delivery, and they don't have a leg to stand on.
e2save (and all of Carphone's websites) are very annoying with the direct debits for insurance and "gadget helplines" and stuff. It's easy enough to fix though. Just go to your bank's website and cancel them. You haven't actually committed to anything. The positive is that independents such as Carphone are more likely to give you an unbranded and unlocked handset than the operators are directly, which is good. And they do have some good deals.
There is a lot to be said for simply getting the cheapest line rental you can find that satisfies your needs with respects to minutes, texts, and data, and simply buying a SIM free handset whenever you need/want a new one. To get the cheapest line rental, either look for SIM only deals, or explain to the customers retentions department that you want the cheapest possible line rental but don't need a new handset. (I'm getting 600 minutes and 1000 texts for £7.50 a month). Either buy the phone SIM free at retail, get it PAYG on the same network and throw away the PAYG SIM, or buy it from someone with an "unwanted upgrade" on ebay. I usually do the last - it's the cheapest way but there can be a certain amount of hassle and risk.
Getting rid of the optical drive does allow a second hard drive or flash drive to be added. Apple is offering build to order options with one hard drive and one flash drive, which makes for a nice quick startup machine I would think. It is apparently not hard to buy an option with one drive and add a second yourself, too.
This is potentially of more use to me than an optical drive that I only use occasionally. A third party external USB DVD burner can be purchased for about £20 if you really need one.
Another thing that is quite interesting is that Apple is selling a non-server configuration with the AMD discrete GPU but only with dual core processors (up to a 2.7GHz dual core Core i7) and is selling a server configuration with a quad core Core i7 but only with the Intel graphics. You can't buy the machine with both, which is a shame because that would be quite a nice machine.
I guess this is probably about heat, but one gets the sense that Apple is trying the shove as much as possible into a case that is really too small for it. A slightly larger box might be able to fit the two drives, the discrete GPU, and the quad core CPU. If it did, I would find it a tempting machine.
I do have a Mac mini, as it is the only headless desktop machine that Apple makes. It is very pretty , but underpowered.
Apple uses a non-standard module for the flash drive, and although it is theoretically not user-serviceable, there are third party upgrades available. Therefore, you should be able to upgrade to a bigger flash drive in 3 years time. You are stuck with the 4Gb of RAM though, which may be a drag.
My present 2007 Macbook Pro came with 2Gb and 120Gb when new and I have upgraded it to 4Gb/640Gb, and it still works just fine with pretty much any current software, so I know exactly what you mean. However, the truth is that most laptop owners do not upgrade the RAM and only upgrade the disk when one fails, which is going to happen much less frequently with a flash drive anyway. If you want a machine you can upgrade in future, there is the Macbook Pro.
Microsoft's present policy is that mainstream support goes until the second Tuesday two years after the end of the quarter following the quarter in which the replacement product is released, and extended support (the one that matters) ends on the second Tuesday of the month five years after that. This means that support for Vista ends on April 11, 2017.
That Microsoft will support its products for at least that long is clearly part of their contract when you buy a copy, and to end support before that would get them a pile of lawsuits that they would lose.
Microsoft could extend support longer than this, but I doubt they will. Not many people are using Vista, and I have personally been encouraging anyone who is to upgrade to Windows 7 because Vista is so crap. If Vista was less crap, I would not be encouraging an upgrade. (I never did for XP). Microsoft is clearly getting money for upgrades to 7 that it would not be getting if Vista had been better, which has probably marginally improved its short term financial results. Oh boy, has it pissed customers off, however.
Microsoft did extend support for XP several times, though. Under the policy they had in place when XP was released, support for XP Home would have ended in December 2006. (For XP Pro it was originally supposed to be December 2011). As they did not ultimately stop selling it until late 2010 - it was available for netbooks until a year after the release of Windows 7 - they clearly had to. This is not the first time something like this had happened, as Windows 98 support was extended once or twice too.
There are still going to be a fair few Windows XP machines around when XP support ends in April 2014. It wouldn't even surprise me that much if Microsoft finds it has to add another six months or a year so on in the end there.
I can't imagine much of a problem with Vista in 2017 though.
In the mid 1990s, there were two 2G GSM mobile networks set up in China, one by the incumbent operator China Telecom, and one by a new company China Unicom. (We say "new company", but all these things were and generally still are state owned).
In 1999, the mobile assets of China Telecom were split off to found China Mobile. The advantages of being part of the incumbent fixed line operator up to that point were such that China Mobile was by far the market leader by then, a position it retains to this day. (China Mobile is by far the biggest mobile operator in the world). At the same time, more assets of China Telecom were spun off as China Netcom to build high speed internet infrastructure in China - i.e. to be a large ISP.
On order to supposedly compete with fixed line services, China Unicom was also given a Wireless Local Loop (WLL) licence. For this, it used the IS-95 CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm in the US, which was being sold as a WLL solution at that time as well as being a fully featured cellular system (as used by Verizon and Sprint in the US). China Unicom were highly aware of this, and thus used the WLL licence to build a second mobile network.
Meanwhile, the Chinese had decided that they did not want to pay huge levels of royalties to western companies to operate 3G mobile phone services, and decided that they would develop an "indigenous" 3G standard called TS-SCDMA to be used in China. (In actual fact, this was originally developed by Siemens to be possibly used as the European 3G standard, but this lost out to W-CDMA). While this was being further developed and made ready for use in China, no 3G licences were issued for use in China.
Thus, approaching the 2008 Olympics, there were no 3G services in China, and the Chinese were concerned that China Mobile was too dominant, and they were concerned that their "indigenous" 3G solution had not been launched yet, and they were embarrassed by the prospect of foreigners coming to the games and discovering that there was no 3G service, and they retrospectively decided that what was better was to have a number of telcos competing on both wireless and fixed line services rather than separating by function.
Thus the industry was reorganised.
China Mobile was awarded a TD-SCDMA licence, and ordered to roll it out at once.
China Unicom was given a W-CDMA licence compatible with the rest of the world, and was forced to buy China Netcom so as to offer fixed line and wired ISP services. China Unicom was forced to sell its IS-95/CDMA network to China Telecom.
China Telecom was instructed to buy China Unicom's said IS-95/CDMA network, and upgrade it to 3G speeds. (China Unicom had already done this to some extent).
Thus we have three mobile networks, the biggest of which has 2G GSM and a strange, 3G network using a standard used nowhere else that few people use and which doesn't work very well, but which has most of the customers. (There is no number portability in China, so customers don't often switch network). The second largest, China Unicom, has the combination of GSM and UMTS/W-CDMA that most iPhones are designed for, and that is why they have been the only network offering the iPhone until now. (Apparently several million people use unlocked iPhones on China Mobile's 2G GSM network in EDGE mode only).
And you have a third mobile network, which uses CDMA/IS-95 as used by Verizon in the US. Apple's introduction of a phone for Verizon earlier this year didn't quite solve the problem, though, as the use of a SIM is optional on CDMA, and China Mobile uses a SIM and Verizon doesn't, and the CDMA iPhone 4 does not accept one. Hence we have had to wait a little while for that problem to be ironed out. My assumption is that the new iPhone(s) that we will see later this year will solve that problem.
China Mobile is going to use 3GPP LTE for 4G phones, as apparently are everyone else in China. At that point all three carriers in China will probably carry the iPhone, but we won't see that until late next year at the earliest.
10.5 (Leopard) is the last PowerPC version, not 10.4. Apple gave PowerPC users one last upgrade after moving the hardware to Intel. Snow-Leopard was the first to support Intel only. Lion is the first to support 64-bit Intel only.
No machine that can run Panther has been sold in years, either.
Also, Panther runs only on PowerPC Macs. Lion runs only on 64 bit Intel Macs. There are no machines that are capable of being upgraded from one to the other (even with intermediate steps).
In a sense, copies of OS-X are upgrade versions, as it is only legal to install them on PCs that came with an earlier version of the Mac OS included when you bought the PC. I think the licenses supposedly require that you upgrade from the previous version of OS-X, so theoretically you couldn't go directly from 10.4 to 10.6. On the other hand, if you just simply bought the disc and did it, it worked fine, and Apple did not support an official upgrade path for this once they had released 10.6 and discontinued sales of 10.5, one doesn't get the impression that they cared, especially.
Things are perhaps different with Lion as you can only buy it from the App store. On the other hand, it remains to be seen if there is anything stopping you from simply downloading the image from the App store, copying it to a DVD or a memory stick, and then just using it to install on another machine, that may or may not be running 10.6. Apple has not traditionally used any copy protection or registration keys or such for its OS: it remains to be seen if they will do so now. It may well be that the App store is the only way to buy it, but it may not be the only way to get it.
The Gold Master of 10.7 is already available to developers. I'm running it on the machine I am using to type this. It installed fine without using the App store. I will be intrigued to see whether the App store notices that I haven't yet paid for it and asks me to pay when 10.7 is officially released. (I will do so even if it doesn't - Apple have earned the money).
Of course, even if there is a mechanism to check whether I have paid and ask me to if I haven't, this still probably isn't going to check whether I was running 10.6 prior to upgrading to the GM, and it certainly isn't going to be able to check if I paid for that.
In practice, I think we are still at "Apple doesn't care much what you upgrade from".
There are plenty of netbooks that come with 1Gb and have an empty slot into which you can stick another 1Gb. This is a good reason for avoiding this Samsung, frankly.
You do probably pay a premium of £50 or so for a dual core CPU (N550 rather than N450 or N455) in a netbook. Even despite that, Samsung are too expensive. This should be a £249 machine, not a £329 machine.
One reason why earlier netbooks only had 1Gb of RAM was that Microsoft insisted that they come with no more than this if they were going to sell the manufacturers Windows XP to put on them, after it had otherwise been discontinued. It has been rumoured that there are similar restrictions on the sale of Windows 7 Starter, so this may be Microsoft's fault.
If you don't mind buying a "refurbished" machine from Argos or some other retailer, you can buy as-new netbooks - current spec although single core - for well under £150 quid with full warranty and support. (In practice, "refurbished" just means someone bought it and then decided they didn't want it and bought it back. Argos are particularly good for this sort of thing as they have a 30 day no questions asked return policy). I have bought three this way for myself and other members of my family, and they have been great, for the right product niche. The netbook is not my only computer or even my only laptop, but it is great to travel with, as it weighs practically nothing, provides me with the full functions of a PC - you can do work on it if you have to, which you can't with an iPad - and is so cheap that if it is broken or stolen I just buy another one without getting stressed.
>Solution: give users the choice to upgrade to Android 2.3 at the cost of Sense.
To be fair, we have this option already. I am running the Cyanogenmod version of Android 2.3 on my Desire now. It isn't officially supported, but it is perfectly legal, and it works just fine.
Register
111 posts • joined Thursday 14th August 2008 15:42 GMT
Page:
Regulatory capture.
Seriously, though, Ofcom and the operators are busy arguing and threatening one another about what is fair for them compared to what is fair for their competitors, and as a consequence nothing is happening. Consumers are getting short shrift because there are no LTE networks. Ofcom's job is to make sure consumers get a fair deal, is it not? It isn't happening now.
The strongest argument in favour of allowing EE to do this is that consumers will actually get 4G services to buy as quickly as possible. That's a strong argument.
Re: "that HSPA+ is almost as good as LTE so it's not important"
There is lots of 1800MHz LTE hardware being made available by manufacturers though: *they* think it is going to be an important band, as do I. 900MHz was used for the first group of GSM operators, and then 1800MHz for the second group. 900MHz has been widely refarmed for 3G, and 1800MHz is now getting lots of spare capacity as 2G is starting to wind down. There are vast numbers of countries outside the EU where this is so, and in a lot of them the operators don't face quite as excessive regulation of what they do with their spectrum as inside the EU.
Incompetent idiots.
If I could, I would charge them a £20 fee everytime any online anything from them fails. But I can't
Re: Good luck to him.
Thank you. I thought I was the only one thinking that. I have to say she's wearing a rather nondescript frock, too, given that she is marrying someone worth tens of billions of dollars.
Still, I wish them both happiness.
Delusions.
>after China’s 3G TD-SCDMA technology failed to gain traction outside the country.
Or, indeed, inside the country.
Not just Barclaycard
My internet banking with Barclays private client business is not allowing me to log in and is generating an error. I need to transfer money to a different bank by this evening, so this is not good.
Re: Wouldn't surprise me - Tooling
Even if "tooling costs" did matter, there is no obvious reason why Apple would not just retain the existing chassis, put newer electronics inside it, and otherwise keep the design the same. Apple can neglect the line and not spend much money updating it, but people who really want a 17 inch Macbook Pro can keep buying it and won't be pissed off. That's much better than discontinuing it.
Re: Yes
Retaining it just isn't very hard, either. Take the existing model. Design a motherboard for the new Ivy Bridge CPUs and some new more state of the art discrete graphics. Sell it. That's about it. The professional designers who like it can keep buying it, even if Apple is neglecting the model a bit.
I am not sure this is it, though. Last time Apple redesigned the chassis of the Macbook Pro, they actually updated the 15 inch model first, and did not update the 17 inch model until a few months later. This was presumably because it was simply easier to get the engineers and manufacturers to update one model at a time. If the same thing is happening now, then maybe a new 15 inch Macbook Pro but not a new 17 inch Macbook Pro is in production now, someone has noticed and told this analyst, and he has concluded that "The 17 inch Macbook Pro is being discontinued", when the story is actually only that the new model is a little late.
You don't dump your bestselling product.
The 13 inch Macbook Pro is far and away Apple's bestselling laptop, so they won't get rid of it. It's a very nice machine, but I am not quite sure why it is their bestselling laptop, given that the 13 inch Air has the same graphics, an only somewhat slower CPU (1.7GHz rather than 2.4GHz, but substituting an SSD for a Hard drive makes up for a lot of this), a higher resolution screen, is much lighter and more portable, and costs only slightly more for the base configuration. (If you order the 13 inch Pro with a 128Gb SSD like the Air does, it actually costs more).
Although, given how many times I hear people in Apple stores ask "Why does that one only have a 128Gb Hard Drive, when that one has 500Gb?" perhaps I do. Non-technical customers seem to have "How big as the hard drive?" as one of their key questions, along with "How many megahertz does it have?", so perhaps that is why they buy the Pro over the Air. They seem to have no interest at all in screen resolution, though, which I find a bit baffling. (I have the 13 inch Air, myself).
There actually is going to be a bigger technical difference between the next Air and the next 13 inch Pro, however. Unlike the 15 and 17 inch Macbook Pros, the present 13 inch only has a dual core CPU, due to the power and heat envelope for the present enclosure requiring a CPU with a thermal design point of no more than 35W. Quad core CPUS with a 35W TDP don't exist for Sandy Bridge, but they do for Ivy Bridge, so the next 13 inch Macbook Pro will be Quad Core (at least in some configurations), whereas the next 13 inch Air will still be dual core.
The next 13 inch Macbook Pro may well lack an Optical Drive and may well be thinner than the present model, but it will still be a separate model from the Macbook Air.
Fairly obvious, I would have thought.
What we want is EE being allowed to use its 1800MHz spectrum for LTE. In return for this, they must be required to sell that 30MHz they are required to sell *right now*, and the sale process must be something transparent so that the other operators are not prevented from buying it if they want. Joint ventures between the other operators allowing them to buy it and build a shared network (so that everyone can offer 4G to their customers as soon as possible) once again should be explicitly allowed and indeed encouraged. (Such a shared network might run out of capacity fairly quickly, but hopefully by the time it does the individual operators will also have LTE running at 2600MHz and it won't be a problem). Somewhere in all this, we get rid of all restrictions that exist on what operators may use their spectrum for. (Once you own it, you may use it for anything you want).
Why has this not happened? It seems blindingly obvious.
Re: Original support lifetime.
To be fair, any machine with a Windows XP Professional licence bought in 2010 had a licence that had been sold by Microsoft no later than mid 2008 if the machine came from a major manufacturer and no later than mid 2009 if it came from a small system builder. If the manufacturer of the PC then took a year or two to sell a machine with it to you, then I think it is hard to think that Microsoft has much obligation to you because of that. (The PC manufacturer might).
More likely, a machine with Windows XP Pro bought in 2010 had a Windows Vista Business licence and XP had been installed using downgrade rights. In this case, the licence comes with support from Microsoft until the end of life date for Windows Vista (April 2017). Of couse, after April 2014 you will have to actually install Vista to take advantage of that support, which might not be recommended.
Original support lifetime.
Originally, Microsoft's support lifetime policy was that Windows XP Home was to be supported for five years from release (mainstream support), and XP Pro was to be supported for five years belong that (extended support). That would have meant XP Home went end of life in late 2006. As Vista was delayed and delayed, that would have meant that support for XP Home ended before Vista was released in 2007, so Microsoft then changed the policy to two years after the release of the replacement product for the Home Version and five years beyond that for the Pro version. That would have made XP Home support end in April 2009, but there were still problems, as people kept buying the OEM versions of XP Home in large numbers until early 2008 and the system builder version until early 2009. (Plus, of course, they kept buying XP Pro via these routes and via "downgrade rights" even longer). Then, the Netbook came along and as netbooks wouldn't run Vista, they kept XP Home alive for that, and kept selling it until one year after Windows 7 was released, i.e. until late 2010. Some of these machines were for sale new into 2011. Due to this and the huge installed base, Microsoft had earlier extended the life of XP Home to the same end of life date as XP Pro, i.e. the April 2014 date mentioned in the article.
What is lovely, in my opinion is that XP managed to remain on sale beyond its supposed end of life date not once but twice, and the actual end of life date had to be extended a total of eight years. Microsoft really did manage to lose their way between Windows XP and Windows 7.
Re: I don't like it much
Those levels are free on a Samsung device, however.
Manufacturers give customers what they want.
This sort of laptop isn't my cup of tea, but I have been giving advice to people who want to buy something like this lately. We are talking the sorts of people who use a computer quite a bit for light office and web tasks but aren't really quite technical. What I have found is that such people really want 15 inch screens - a big screen appeals. Also, they don't seem interested in the number of pixels on the screen., at all.
I have tried to suggest that either (a) if they are going with that screen resolution, they might want to consider a 13 inch or even a 14 inch rather than 15, as that will give them a much more portable machine for the money or (b) paying a bit more for a higher screen resolution at 15 inch. However, one then discovers quickly that most manufacturers don't do any other screen resolutions in their budget laptops and a laptop with a higher resolution screen will actually cost hundreds of pounds more. Such a laptop will actually be better in a lot of other ways too and will likely be a sound purchase, but you are by that point way out of the price range of your buyer. Further investigation indicates that the buyer doesn't care *at all* about the screen resolution anyway, meaning that they would not have paid even an extra 50 quid for a higher resolution. So I end up recommending something like the reviewed laptop. (Samsung are good value. Better build quality than some of the others at that price point).
And you know what? These buyers seem to usually end up happy anyway. Often they like to watch DVDs on the laptop as well as the other uses, and the extra screen real estate certainly does help for that. Of course, they would get much better picture quality by, well, buying a TV, but once again they don't seem to mind. And this is fine. You are actually getting a lot for your money in a laptop at that price range.
Ofcom should do one other thing
In return for allowing EE to use this band for LTE right now, Ofcom should also bring forward the requirement that EE sell of the 20MHz (or possibly the full 30MHz) it is obliged to sell as a consequence of the merger *at once*. That way, if it turns out that there is value in building an LTE network at 1800MHz right now, one of EE's competitors can buy this spectrum, build an LTE network at 1800MHz too, and there will be no monopoly. If there is no value then this might not happen, but allowing for the possibility is a good idea.
As to the frequencies, the story in the GSM world is approximately this:
GSM 2G spectrum was initially allocated at 900MHz, and then more was allocated at 1800MHz shortly afterwards to allow additional networks. (In the UK, O2 and Vodafone got the 900MHz and T-Mobile and Orange the 1800MHz. Even before merging, they had unusually large allocations, as in most other countries the 900MHz operators have been given more 1800MHz as well, and/or the 1800MHz spectrum is split between more than three operators).
UMTS 3G spectrum was allocated at 2100MHz, and virtually every GSM operator in the world got an allocation at 2100MHz and built a 3G network there. At the same time, 2600MHz was designated as a "3G relief band", to be used for more 3G services when 2100MHz ran out.
However, operators preferred to use lower frequencies for additional 3G services, as base-stations have longer range at lower frequencies, and these lower frequencies work better in rural areas. Therefore, operators either refarmed some of the 900MHz 2G spectrum for 3G, or in countries where the 850MHz band was still allocated from analogue services or was being used for CDMA, they built additional 3G networks here. It was helpful that this was one of the primary bands used for 3G in the US, as it meant that lots of hardware was already available. (850MHz only is allocated in the US, 900MHz only is allocated in Europe, and *both bands* are allocated in much of the rest of the world).
The 1800MHz band was neglected for 3G, however, as it was not as useful as 850MHz or 900MHz. And the 2600MHz band was not generally allocated for additional 3G services, although that was the original plan. However, as of 2012, demand for 2G GSM services is winding down as it is old technology. 850MHz (non-Europe), 900MHz, and 2100MHz is very busy, so 1800MHz and 2600MHz are obvious places to put LTE. (Other bands being allocated due to switching off analogue TV is rather wishy washy, inconsistent in different places, and is going to take time). As a commenter above said, there is already 1800MHz LTE in Australia, and I personally think this is going to end up being one of the most common places where we are going to find it. EE need to get a move on here, as they can gain a competitive advantage by doing this.
Password protect it and you don't get it back.
I have returned phones that I have found to other people, and other people have returned phones that I have lost to me. In both cases the information that allowed the owner to be identified and to get the phone back would not have been accessible if the phone was password protected. So there is something to be said for less security rather than more.
Tax issues
Apple has a huge cash pile, and a lot of this cash is trapped outside the US, in the sense that the would have to pay tax on it if they move it back into the US, either to spend in some way (eg on wages) or return it to investors. One way to not pay taxes on some of it is to move jobs outside the US and pay the workers there from the cash pile. So Apple has a tax incentive to outsource jobs to India and other countries.
A bit of deja vu
Well, 3G was supposed to be a mixture of FDD and TDD, and the European UMTS 3G standard contained a TDD mode called TD-CDMA, which was supposed to run alongside W-CDMA. European (and other) 3G auctions included some spectrum for this mode. I don't know of any operators who actually used it - China Mobile eventually rolled out a network based on a different but possibly in some ways related TDD 3G standard called TD-SCDMA. However, it is easy to forget that a decade ago the focus of 3G was actually on providing more bandwidth and higher quality for voice calls, along with being able to provide video calling. These sorts of uses suit FDD - similar amounts of data on the upload and download, and a desire for very little latency.
Now that we are all using (very likely) asymmetric data services most of the time, TDD does come into its own a little more, as it can allocate different amounts of bandwidth to the upload compared to the download, and the amount allocated to each can be varied on the fly. I think therefore that TDD is going to be a big deal in most places for 4G, particularly given that the Chinese are willing to cooperate more with everyone else in terms of using the same standards this time. Given that the Chinese are definitely using TD-LTE from the start, and Apple desperately wants to launch an iPhone on China Mobile, we are going to get multi-mode handset support from day one, too, so my guess is that using the FDD and TDD modes of LTE side by side is going to become standard practice almost immediately.
It's China
The mall in Sanlitun that contains the Apple store actually consists of two unconnected bits. Between them is a little street filled with bars, stalls in which guys sell you barbecued meat on skewers, and little stores selling all kinds of stuff, as is typical in China. I would be astonished if eggs cannot be sourced there.
Recent conversation with Orange customer service:
"I am unable to access my online account and I need to access my bills. There may be a problem with my login details".
"We are very sorry, but the online billing website is down at the moment"
"Has it been down for the last six weeks?"
"Er, yes.."
When I stated that I did in fact need to look at my bill, they immediately offered to send me a paper bill and waive the usual charge.
However, they have moved most of their customers over to online only billing, and there is normally a charge for customers who receive paper bills. They certainly have a legal obligation to provide their customers with bills, and having a situation where most customers have been moved to an online billing platform that does not work for months at a time is at best astoundingly crappy and at worst a serious breach of their legal obligations
That they have the audacity to raise prices for customers locked into long term contracts at the same time (a practice that regardless of legality, has not generally been practiced in this industry in this country until now) when they are simultaneously unable to demonstrate even basic competence is rather impressive, however.
Like the first commenter, I know exactly when is the end date of my contract.
Microsoft doesn't enforce this very hard though.
Buy a PC from any OEM you like. Register the copy of Windows with Microsoft. Replace the motherboard. If Windows demands reactivation - it doesn't always - go through Microsoft's activation procedure, which might involve calling them. They will generally reactivate it fine. Although an OEM licence for Windows is theoretically tied to one PC, they don't really care how much hardware you change, as long as the licence is only used for one PC at a time.
The conversation
Oh I don't know. Consider the following conversation.
"My PC doesn't work? Can you fix it?"
"Yes. However, your Windows installation is damaged / filled with crap / your hard drive has failed. Could you give me the box of CDs that came with your PC when you bought it?"
"What box of CDs?"
This conversation is no less common in cases where I know that the PC came with recovery discs as in cases where I know it didn't. (What I then do is scrounge for compatible disc images from somewhere else, download drivers from somewhere or other, and do a reinstall. Is that wrong? No).
So possibly recovery discs have been left out because people who know how to use them don't actually need them, and people who don't never use them.
I am not sure.
There doesn't seem to be any suggestion here that anyone has installed any software without valid licences for that software. Without that happening, I find it hard to say that it is software piracy. On occasions when I have needed to restore Windows on a PC, I have been known to download the correct Windows image on Bit Torrent, burn a disc, and then do a reinstall on a machine *with a valid licence*. Does that make me a pirate? I vote for no.
It may be that Comet is in breach of their licence with Microsoft in other ways, or has charged customers for things it was not supposed to charge them for, and it may be that a company in financial trouble did some slightly dubious things to make payroll or some such. If so, they should be punished for it. (It is also good practice for the new owners to do a proper audit and make sure everything is above board and that anything bad that was done in the past is properly accounted for and not repeated, and this may be what is actually happening here). However, copyright industries have a habit of shouting "piracy" when opposing almost anything they don't like, and they should not be able to get away with this.
Steve Jobs himself
Er, no. Apple did. It was a very rare example of an Apple product announced a significant time before it was actually released. Steve Jobs got up on stage (at the annual iPod announcement, I think) talked about it, and said that it was called iTV for now, but that might change. When the product was released six or so months later, it had been changed to Apple TV, probably because ITV was such a well established trademark in the UK.
The problem is financial markets and European related
In happier days, Deutsche Telecom bought all these foreign mobile carriers in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Now they have discovered that mobile isn't a growth business any more, and they have a lot of debt, and a major shareholder (the German government still owns around 35% of the company either directly or via a stretched bank) that has all kinds of other problems and which definitely wants out, but even more definitely is not going to give them any more capital. Within a couple of years, T-Mobile US is going to need to build a 4G network, and it simply does not have the money. They either have to find a network sharing arrangement with somebody else, or find the money somewhere, probably by being bought by someone with deep pockets. If not their long term prognosis is fairly poor.
Perspective.
I doubt that anyone at Apple would consider that to be a huge pile of cash.
Credit to Facebook. It's a real company that has lots of customers and is genuinely quite profitable. Still, though, most of its valuation is based on optimistic estimates of the future. These may or may not happen. The tech industry has companies that generate a lot of cash now - Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle. Facebook isn't really one of those yet.
This is a debacle, and "last week" is a joke.
I have a parcel I wish to send to my sister in Australia. Yesterday, I attempted to print the postage using the Royal Mail website. After an hour of timeouts and errors, it eventually announced that the system was down and I should come back later. This was after it took my money and failed to issue me any postage.
I went to the Post Office, and stood in a long queue. If I had succeeded in preprinted my postage online, I could have bypassed the queue and just placed the item in a chute for prepaid items. However, this had failed. After about ten minutes, I realised that the queue was barely moving. I gave up and went home, and send an e-mail complaint to the Royal Mail.
This morning, I received a reply apologising for the online problems, and stating that my money had been refunded. I logged in again, and exactly the same thing happened. I was charged for my postage but the system went down before the process was finished.
This is a debacle.
(Incidentally, if I look at the "history" section of my interactions, I am told that my online prepayment balance was transferred from an old system to a new system on 20th November. So clearly they migrated to a new platform that doesn't work five weeks before Christmas. Cretins.
I don't know how big this migration was. Enormous, I fear. Things are failing all over the place. I don't buy the "unrelated".
Oh great
Although I have been inconvenienced quite a bit by these outages, I did not think that I had been double charged or overcharged for anything. However, this article caused me to worry, so I went to the Royal Mail website to check, and got this.
Error: Problem encountered - Display process failure
Excellent.
They really are idiots.
If I were running a business that is vastly busier at Christmas than any time of year, I wouldn't have thought that six weeks before Christmas was the ideal time for migrating your systems to a new platform, personally.
Gimli Glider
The "Gilmli Glider" incident in Canada in 1983 is also worth mentioning. A Boeing 767 ran out of fuel mid-flight (an imperial/metric mixup combined with a faulty fuel gauge) and the pilots managed to successfully land the plane with only minor damage. The minor damage was due to the nose wheel not being fully down due to the power loss and due the the brakes having to bit hit very hard due to coming down a bit too late, rather than the plane doing anything brick-like. Everyone on board the plane was completely okay and the aircraft was back in service soon afterwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
There are not many incidents like this, because multiple engine failures are incredibly rare. You have to run out of fuel, have simultaneous bird strikes, fly through a cloud of volcanic ash, or something like that. Independent mechanic failures due to faulty engines simply do not happen, as modern engines are incredibly reliable.
I think first quarter is a bit optimistic.
Apple will update its existing Macbook Airs when it can source the Ivy Bridge ULV CPUs in adequate numbers to satisfy demand. Because Apple makes so few individual models of laptop and therefore tends to move its whole production to a new generation of hardware at the same time, Apple is seldom the first manufacturer to offer a new generation of CPUs in its hardware, so I doubt this is likely before about May.
As for the 15 inch ultrathin laptop (which may or may not be called an Air, but probably will), Apple will release it when they are happy with it. They clearly weren't happy with it at the time they last updated the 11 and 13 inch Airs in July, but the rumours suggest they are close to being happy with it now. t am sure that Apple has a Sandy Bridge prototype of this, but they are unlikely to turn this into an actual product if Ivy Bridge is only a couple of months away. So likely May for this too. If the timing of the other Ivy Bridge models was to slip much later than may, you could get a Sandy Bridge 15 inch model in the interim, I suppose.
Warranty
>If i put in an SSD, i void the warranty!
I don't think so, actually. The unibody models have upgradeable hard drives and user upgradeable RAM. I have never heard of a case in which Apple has refused to honor the warranty due to such an upgrade, and I know of many cases in which they have honored it. The earlier non-unibody Macbook Pros did not theoretically have user upgradeable hard drives, but even then Apple would generally still honor the warranty if you had clearly done the upgrade carefully and had not damaged anything when doing it. (Amazingly, Apple replaced a faulty motherboard for free on my non-unibody Macbook Pro despite my having previously replaced the hard drive myself, and despite the computer being out of warranty. I am still awed by this).
You theoretically do void your warranty if you replace the SSD on a Macbook Air yourself, but that is a price of the extremely thin form factor. It is still possible to do, assuming you can find a suitable SSD using that non-standard modules that go in the Air.
The 13 inch Pro is lagging at this point.
Looking at the low end models, the Macbook Air has a slower CPU (1.6GHz against 2.4GHz), but the same graphics, a better screen, an SSD rather than a HDD, and is much thinner and lighter. The Pro has an optical drive, and a tad more expandability - ie you can upgrade the RAM and the hard drive. That SSD is going to actually make the Air a better performer for a lot of tasks. Unless you need the optical drive or more storage when you are on the move, I can't really see the point of getting the Pro. If you are going to do complex graphical or computational "Pro" tasks, the 13 inch Pro just isn't going to cut it: you are going to need one of the 15 or 17 inch models with better CPUs and graphics. You can buy the 13 inch Pro with an SSD rather than an HDD, but that makes it more expensive than the Air.
Apple needs to turn the 13 inch Macbook Pro into a genuine Pro machine. That means quad core CPUs, a screen at least the equal of the one in the Air, and decent discrete graphics. If the power, heat, and space constraints of the current enclosure do not allow this, it needs a redesign. One option might be to cut out the optical drive to make space. For those rare occasions when you actually need one, an external USB drive does the job fine.
It might be a lease condition at airports, too.
This is a response to Caffe Nero's recent decision to offer free WiFi, I suspect. Starbucks are usually more generous at offering power outlets for customers, so this is a good move. It will certainly mean I use Starbucks more often, even despite their somewhat inferior coffee.
Both Pret a Manger and Wetherspoons offer free Wifi at their regular outlets and not at their airport outlets, too. I suspect it is because the owners of the airports have sold "exclusive" rights to offer WiFi within the airport to someone else, and therefore prevent regular retail tenants from offering it directly to their customers. It's certainly an annoying state of affairs.
Looks solid to me.
All the Apple rumour sites got it totally right. On the morning of the announcement (and a few days before) they stated exactly what was going to be announced, and the presentation yesterday was thus very dull because it completely lacked surprises.
Leading up to the announcement, there were some rumours that the iPhone 5 was the new model, and the 4S was going to be a cheaper, slightly lower spec verso of the 4 for the mass market. At this point the 5 was supposed to have a faster CPU, better camera, better graphics etc. As the announcement came closer it became clear that the 4S had all these things and there was not going to be any new lower end iPhone. (Apple have simply not discontinued the 4 and the 3GS and have cut their prices). There was no 5 announced yesterday, but the 4S had all the things it had been earlier rumoured to have. Anyone taken by surprise by this really hadn't been paying attention.
Where Apple do perhaps deserve a little criticism is being a little slow with this update. The higher end Android phones (Galaxy SII etc) have been clearly superior to the iPhone 4 in hardware terms for a few months now. My understanding is that the iPhone 4 continued to sell well (most people don't care that much), but Apple have been a bit slow in catching up. I think the iPhone 4S is pretty much on a part with the top Android phones for the moment - it may be behind again in six months - but the truth is Apple's hardware usually lags a little. Apple's users are after the whole experience, and most people buy a new phone when their contract runs out. For most people, being a few months behind Samsung doesn't really matter.
Just when I thought things had been simplified
With the iPhone 4, I thought Apple had finally got the model numbering to (for the tech industry) an unusually sensible situation with respect to model numbers - i.e. the fourth model of iPhone was in fact called the iPhone 4. Now, however, they seem to have messed it up again, with the fifth model being called the iPhone 4S.
Assuming the next model does in fact have LTE/4G, does that mean that the next model will be the iPhone 4G, the iPhone LTE, the iPhone 5, or the iPhone 6?
All this doesn't really matter compared to the question of whether the new phone is actually any good, but they seem to have missed a wonderful opportunity to keep the name simple.
A couple of details.
>Fit the sticker, which comes in SIM and Micro SIM versions, and one's iPhone
>will attach to China Unicom's 3G network when it's available, dropping back to
>China Telecom (and 2G connectivity) everywhere else.
Dropping back to China Mobile's 2G network, actually. China Telecom is a CDMA operator.
Another issue here is that there is no number portability in China, and most customers use China Mobile's 2G network. This is as much a hack to allow customers on China Mobile to use an iPhone without changing their number as it is about coverage. And as such it is quite clever.
This was a nasty trick
You get a fixed phone with BT, they tell you it is a one year contract, which is annoying in itself. They tell you it includes free weekend calls. They then tell you that they can offer you free evening calls on top of that, for no extra charge, and "this is also a 12 month contract".
13 months later, when attempting to change to a different provider, you discover that the free evening calls was automatically renewable (although the basic line rental was not) and you can't get out of it for another 11 months, and are therefore stuck with the line rental as well. A dishonest trick, and I am glad it is being banned.
On the "December 2012" thing, I remember a few years back the Spanish terrorist organisation ETA one afternoon announcing that it was declaring a ceasefire "effective from midday tomorrow". This did make me wonder how many people they were planning on blowing up before midday tomorrow.
You should have sent it straight back
If the item had been opened by your neighbours., then you did not receive it new and either the courier company or the retailer is liable for this and must send you a new one. They have not got your signature confirming delivery, and they don't have a leg to stand on.
e2save (and all of Carphone's websites) are very annoying with the direct debits for insurance and "gadget helplines" and stuff. It's easy enough to fix though. Just go to your bank's website and cancel them. You haven't actually committed to anything. The positive is that independents such as Carphone are more likely to give you an unbranded and unlocked handset than the operators are directly, which is good. And they do have some good deals.
There is a lot to be said for simply getting the cheapest line rental you can find that satisfies your needs with respects to minutes, texts, and data, and simply buying a SIM free handset whenever you need/want a new one. To get the cheapest line rental, either look for SIM only deals, or explain to the customers retentions department that you want the cheapest possible line rental but don't need a new handset. (I'm getting 600 minutes and 1000 texts for £7.50 a month). Either buy the phone SIM free at retail, get it PAYG on the same network and throw away the PAYG SIM, or buy it from someone with an "unwanted upgrade" on ebay. I usually do the last - it's the cheapest way but there can be a certain amount of hassle and risk.
Apple does indeed offer it with an SSD, if that's what you want.
If you go to the online Apple Store and look at the build to order options, you can buy it with a hard drive, a SSD drive, or one of each.
There is also the flash drive option
Getting rid of the optical drive does allow a second hard drive or flash drive to be added. Apple is offering build to order options with one hard drive and one flash drive, which makes for a nice quick startup machine I would think. It is apparently not hard to buy an option with one drive and add a second yourself, too.
This is potentially of more use to me than an optical drive that I only use occasionally. A third party external USB DVD burner can be purchased for about £20 if you really need one.
Another thing that is quite interesting is that Apple is selling a non-server configuration with the AMD discrete GPU but only with dual core processors (up to a 2.7GHz dual core Core i7) and is selling a server configuration with a quad core Core i7 but only with the Intel graphics. You can't buy the machine with both, which is a shame because that would be quite a nice machine.
I guess this is probably about heat, but one gets the sense that Apple is trying the shove as much as possible into a case that is really too small for it. A slightly larger box might be able to fit the two drives, the discrete GPU, and the quad core CPU. If it did, I would find it a tempting machine.
I do have a Mac mini, as it is the only headless desktop machine that Apple makes. It is very pretty , but underpowered.
And one more
>It's important to note that Apple isn't the first tech company to ascend
>to the top as the most valuable firm in the US.
So has Cisco, for a time.
You will be able to upgrade the flash drive.
Apple uses a non-standard module for the flash drive, and although it is theoretically not user-serviceable, there are third party upgrades available. Therefore, you should be able to upgrade to a bigger flash drive in 3 years time. You are stuck with the 4Gb of RAM though, which may be a drag.
My present 2007 Macbook Pro came with 2Gb and 120Gb when new and I have upgraded it to 4Gb/640Gb, and it still works just fine with pretty much any current software, so I know exactly what you mean. However, the truth is that most laptop owners do not upgrade the RAM and only upgrade the disk when one fails, which is going to happen much less frequently with a flash drive anyway. If you want a machine you can upgrade in future, there is the Macbook Pro.
We all have contracts with Microsoft.
Microsoft's present policy is that mainstream support goes until the second Tuesday two years after the end of the quarter following the quarter in which the replacement product is released, and extended support (the one that matters) ends on the second Tuesday of the month five years after that. This means that support for Vista ends on April 11, 2017.
That Microsoft will support its products for at least that long is clearly part of their contract when you buy a copy, and to end support before that would get them a pile of lawsuits that they would lose.
Microsoft could extend support longer than this, but I doubt they will. Not many people are using Vista, and I have personally been encouraging anyone who is to upgrade to Windows 7 because Vista is so crap. If Vista was less crap, I would not be encouraging an upgrade. (I never did for XP). Microsoft is clearly getting money for upgrades to 7 that it would not be getting if Vista had been better, which has probably marginally improved its short term financial results. Oh boy, has it pissed customers off, however.
Microsoft did extend support for XP several times, though. Under the policy they had in place when XP was released, support for XP Home would have ended in December 2006. (For XP Pro it was originally supposed to be December 2011). As they did not ultimately stop selling it until late 2010 - it was available for netbooks until a year after the release of Windows 7 - they clearly had to. This is not the first time something like this had happened, as Windows 98 support was extended once or twice too.
There are still going to be a fair few Windows XP machines around when XP support ends in April 2014. It wouldn't even surprise me that much if Microsoft finds it has to add another six months or a year so on in the end there.
I can't imagine much of a problem with Vista in 2017 though.
China is complicated
The story here is approximately this:
In the mid 1990s, there were two 2G GSM mobile networks set up in China, one by the incumbent operator China Telecom, and one by a new company China Unicom. (We say "new company", but all these things were and generally still are state owned).
In 1999, the mobile assets of China Telecom were split off to found China Mobile. The advantages of being part of the incumbent fixed line operator up to that point were such that China Mobile was by far the market leader by then, a position it retains to this day. (China Mobile is by far the biggest mobile operator in the world). At the same time, more assets of China Telecom were spun off as China Netcom to build high speed internet infrastructure in China - i.e. to be a large ISP.
On order to supposedly compete with fixed line services, China Unicom was also given a Wireless Local Loop (WLL) licence. For this, it used the IS-95 CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm in the US, which was being sold as a WLL solution at that time as well as being a fully featured cellular system (as used by Verizon and Sprint in the US). China Unicom were highly aware of this, and thus used the WLL licence to build a second mobile network.
Meanwhile, the Chinese had decided that they did not want to pay huge levels of royalties to western companies to operate 3G mobile phone services, and decided that they would develop an "indigenous" 3G standard called TS-SCDMA to be used in China. (In actual fact, this was originally developed by Siemens to be possibly used as the European 3G standard, but this lost out to W-CDMA). While this was being further developed and made ready for use in China, no 3G licences were issued for use in China.
Thus, approaching the 2008 Olympics, there were no 3G services in China, and the Chinese were concerned that China Mobile was too dominant, and they were concerned that their "indigenous" 3G solution had not been launched yet, and they were embarrassed by the prospect of foreigners coming to the games and discovering that there was no 3G service, and they retrospectively decided that what was better was to have a number of telcos competing on both wireless and fixed line services rather than separating by function.
Thus the industry was reorganised.
China Mobile was awarded a TD-SCDMA licence, and ordered to roll it out at once.
China Unicom was given a W-CDMA licence compatible with the rest of the world, and was forced to buy China Netcom so as to offer fixed line and wired ISP services. China Unicom was forced to sell its IS-95/CDMA network to China Telecom.
China Telecom was instructed to buy China Unicom's said IS-95/CDMA network, and upgrade it to 3G speeds. (China Unicom had already done this to some extent).
Thus we have three mobile networks, the biggest of which has 2G GSM and a strange, 3G network using a standard used nowhere else that few people use and which doesn't work very well, but which has most of the customers. (There is no number portability in China, so customers don't often switch network). The second largest, China Unicom, has the combination of GSM and UMTS/W-CDMA that most iPhones are designed for, and that is why they have been the only network offering the iPhone until now. (Apparently several million people use unlocked iPhones on China Mobile's 2G GSM network in EDGE mode only).
And you have a third mobile network, which uses CDMA/IS-95 as used by Verizon in the US. Apple's introduction of a phone for Verizon earlier this year didn't quite solve the problem, though, as the use of a SIM is optional on CDMA, and China Mobile uses a SIM and Verizon doesn't, and the CDMA iPhone 4 does not accept one. Hence we have had to wait a little while for that problem to be ironed out. My assumption is that the new iPhone(s) that we will see later this year will solve that problem.
China Mobile is going to use 3GPP LTE for 4G phones, as apparently are everyone else in China. At that point all three carriers in China will probably carry the iPhone, but we won't see that until late next year at the earliest.
Leopard.
10.5 (Leopard) is the last PowerPC version, not 10.4. Apple gave PowerPC users one last upgrade after moving the hardware to Intel. Snow-Leopard was the first to support Intel only. Lion is the first to support 64-bit Intel only.
No machine that can run Panther has been sold in years, either.
Also, Panther runs only on PowerPC Macs. Lion runs only on 64 bit Intel Macs. There are no machines that are capable of being upgraded from one to the other (even with intermediate steps).
In a sense, copies of OS-X are upgrade versions, as it is only legal to install them on PCs that came with an earlier version of the Mac OS included when you bought the PC. I think the licenses supposedly require that you upgrade from the previous version of OS-X, so theoretically you couldn't go directly from 10.4 to 10.6. On the other hand, if you just simply bought the disc and did it, it worked fine, and Apple did not support an official upgrade path for this once they had released 10.6 and discontinued sales of 10.5, one doesn't get the impression that they cared, especially.
Things are perhaps different with Lion as you can only buy it from the App store. On the other hand, it remains to be seen if there is anything stopping you from simply downloading the image from the App store, copying it to a DVD or a memory stick, and then just using it to install on another machine, that may or may not be running 10.6. Apple has not traditionally used any copy protection or registration keys or such for its OS: it remains to be seen if they will do so now. It may well be that the App store is the only way to buy it, but it may not be the only way to get it.
The Gold Master of 10.7 is already available to developers. I'm running it on the machine I am using to type this. It installed fine without using the App store. I will be intrigued to see whether the App store notices that I haven't yet paid for it and asks me to pay when 10.7 is officially released. (I will do so even if it doesn't - Apple have earned the money).
Of course, even if there is a mechanism to check whether I have paid and ask me to if I haven't, this still probably isn't going to check whether I was running 10.6 prior to upgrading to the GM, and it certainly isn't going to be able to check if I paid for that.
In practice, I think we are still at "Apple doesn't care much what you upgrade from".
This is a bit lame.
There are plenty of netbooks that come with 1Gb and have an empty slot into which you can stick another 1Gb. This is a good reason for avoiding this Samsung, frankly.
Go the "refurbished" route
You do probably pay a premium of £50 or so for a dual core CPU (N550 rather than N450 or N455) in a netbook. Even despite that, Samsung are too expensive. This should be a £249 machine, not a £329 machine.
One reason why earlier netbooks only had 1Gb of RAM was that Microsoft insisted that they come with no more than this if they were going to sell the manufacturers Windows XP to put on them, after it had otherwise been discontinued. It has been rumoured that there are similar restrictions on the sale of Windows 7 Starter, so this may be Microsoft's fault.
If you don't mind buying a "refurbished" machine from Argos or some other retailer, you can buy as-new netbooks - current spec although single core - for well under £150 quid with full warranty and support. (In practice, "refurbished" just means someone bought it and then decided they didn't want it and bought it back. Argos are particularly good for this sort of thing as they have a 30 day no questions asked return policy). I have bought three this way for myself and other members of my family, and they have been great, for the right product niche. The netbook is not my only computer or even my only laptop, but it is great to travel with, as it weighs practically nothing, provides me with the full functions of a PC - you can do work on it if you have to, which you can't with an iPad - and is so cheap that if it is broken or stolen I just buy another one without getting stressed.
It doesn't really matter
>Solution: give users the choice to upgrade to Android 2.3 at the cost of Sense.
To be fair, we have this option already. I am running the Cyanogenmod version of Android 2.3 on my Desire now. It isn't officially supported, but it is perfectly legal, and it works just fine.
Page: