Mobile Data Rates

Those little letters next to your signal bars? They tell you what the connection type is. What possible use the manufacturers think they are, I have no idea. I’m an engineer, and I have no idea what the relative speeds of the various data modes are on my mobile. For example, is “H” better than… Read More »

Bitcoin Rising (I)

Another in my tracking of bitcoin acceptance increases articles. This is a product unassociated with bitcoin; and yet look down there at the bottom of the page. We now take BITCOIN! Small steps. Small steps.

Raspberry Point

There are times that I despair of the world. Reading this review of the Raspberry Pi was one of those times. We fired up Debian (the most beginner friendly of the official options) and the media center and came away slightly bemused. Each suffered from its own strange limitations and collection of glitches that leads… Read More »

TomTom Whinge

Awww, didums. In one particular instance, a leading open source map was compared against a professional TomTom map, and shown to have a third less residential road coverage and 16% less basic map attributes such as street names. Worse still, it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included ‘a high number of fields and… Read More »

Microsoft Blows

Microsoft Delivers a Blow to Open Source with Visual Studio 11 When I read this headline, I thought, “oh, oh, Microsoft are going to try and compete with the open source compiler by giving away Visual Studio 11”. After all, they’ve got the money for it, and charging developers to write software for your operating… Read More »

Hacking Shouldn’t Matter To Customers

WHMCS, a client management company has been hacked. 1.7GB of data was stolen. The data leak comprises 500,000 usernames, passwords, IP addresses and in some instances credit card details. As I keep saying: the only financial information that would be stored in the company database when you pay via bitcoin is a magic number that… Read More »

Bitcoin versus American Express

At the Future of Money and Technology conference yesterday, the VP of American Express got an uncomfortable question (for him). His response caused amusement and tweetnoise. For the benefit of the search enginges.. Richard Nevins Q: What does Amex think about bitcoin? A: Next question. [cue laughter] Christian Lanng Q: What do American Express think… Read More »

Chicken Prisoners

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a well-known example from game theory. The basic idea is: Two men are arrested as being involved in the same crime. The police offer both the same deal: testify against your partner and you will go free and your partner goes down for twelve years. If you both remain silent, you… Read More »

FFS O2

Do you have an Internet-enabled phone? Are you with O2 (or one of the companies that piggyback their network, like Tesco, Giffgaff, etc)? Then they’ve been giving out your phone number to every web site you visit while using mobile data. O2 customer Lewis Peckover recently discovered that when you’re browsing over 3G on O2,… Read More »