Posts by jahill

Many years ago, I remember replacing a gaggle of Microsloth email servers with a single Mac Pro (which happily dealt with email an order of magnitude faster).

While, from my perspective, this is a sad demise, it was perhaps an inevitable one given the price of a machine running Linux (which can also be had with redundant power supplies).

I can't help but feel that anyone who bought the device in the UK going back over the last three to five years would indeed have a valid claim under what was the Sale of Goods Act (I believe this is now the Consumer Rights Act).

I also wonder whether deliberately bricking a device (as opposed to merely dropping cloud support) would fall under either the Computer Misuse Act or Criminal Damage (and I'm sure there are similar laws elsewhere in the world). Wasn't there a USB->serial port chip manufacturer who did this to cloned devices and realised pretty quickly they had to stop?

I'm pretty sure that this has been going on for a while and became much worse once free roaming started being offered. I've tried using Three and Vodafone abroad with connection speeds often as low as a few 100kB's.

The first few of web pages usually work fine, beyond which it's like swimming through treacle. Switch to another device and all is fine, until you hit the throttling again. It's not consistently bad, but when it's bad, it's very, very bad.

Back when this outfit was called Dixons, I made the mistake of allowing these guys to 'fix' a brand-new Walkman.

Every time it went away, it was gone for four weeks and came back (still) broken. Eventually (after seven months without the unit), I decided I'd had enough and asked for my money back - to which the store had the cheek of offering me half its new value on the basis 'it was now second-hand and more than half a year old''!!!

After a discussion with the store manager, I did eventually get all my money back. I think they have improved since then, although this article suggests this is not always the case.

WiFi calling works on some Vodafone tariffs too, the catch is you can't send or receive text messages while outside of their cellular signal, which can be a bit of an issue.

I can imagine the conversation went something along the lines of: 'I know. We'll tell them that their citizens can sue us through our courts, with our rules to protect the data that they won't even know we've stolen. That'll do. I bet those European idiots will buy this.'

I can't help but feel suspicious that the 'powers that be' are on the side of the Americans and simply want to find a way around the 'inconvenient' decision that the previous arrangement was illegal.