I've got drawers full of returned windows mobiles and early smartphones. Blackberries and iPhones were of course very different, but early smart phone sales definitely were returned or misused a lot. I can see wearable being exactly the same way!

Jason

And then spend the next 10 years accurately classifying the rest of the internet.

Jason.

I never saw a desktop computer offered without Windows prior to the anti-trust legislation. It's still rare now.

Although I actually think the IE thing was positive. Purchasing Netscape or using an AOL disk with custom browser was hurting the widespread use of the internet.

Jason.

You are confusing remote wipe with deactivating a phone.

Remote Wipe (if successful) means that a lost or stolen phone if successful you can be as close to sure that no data on the device is still there. The thief is welcome to to the phone.

Deactivating the phone means that the smartphone cannot be used again. Apple have something close to this now with find my iPhone. A wiped iPhone cannot be reactivated without the original username and password, if it is still linked to your iCloud account. It is questionable as to whether this can be easily defeated. There are very few opportunities to jailbreak a device that is pending activation.

Jason

This article reminded me of that one. Nice to see that one again.

Jason.

How many?

This is probably an issue with every Windows operating system using the update services, it's only visible with XP as it's the oldest supported operating system, so it has many, many more patches.

Jason

Yep and in fact despite what I said earlier, this could be worse. If google pre-fetch every image for instance, then this could have some horrid consequences. Such as confirming e-mail addresses.

Jason

Yes and the point the summary misses, is that the images are used to verify that you have received and viewed the e-mail. This is far more important than browser types / locations etc.

It also prevents some evil things, such as first time you hit the page you get a drive by, the second time (with cookie set) you get the actual image and all seems fine.

Jason.

My gran lasted 15 days with no food or water after a stroke. The care home who saw her through this inevitable stage said that even wetting her lips with a sponge would keep her alive for a lot longer. Bear in mind that if you are in this shut down state your body doesn't need much of anything;

Jason.

The trouble with Dell is that the support service isn't permitted to do a full replacement. You have to go part by part until you have a working system. The trouble is to go through all the parts on a typical server or PC can take weeks. This isn't quite what you expect when you have a 4 hour on site contract, you sort of expect to be back up and running in at the most a day or two.

Of course they don't really commit anything till you've gone through full diagnostics. Which can seem a bit of an irritation when you are struggling to recover a down service and you have a call centre insisting on dset, bios updates etc.

On the whole though I've been happy with Dell. If you are aware of these quirks then you can work with them.

Jason.

Forget endurance failures, think more about firmware blowouts. The latter are far more likely and will take all your data with it, while leaving the drive for warranty purposes and statistics functional. Premature SMART errors are on thing on traditional hard drives due to bad firmware, but this trend with SSDs of firmware issues hosing all data is the real concern.

Jason.

I think this device is all about getting corporates to go with the 5C rather than the 4S. For a small increment on the 4S you get the 4G connectivity and twice the storage. Corporates won't be pre-ordering.

This is a very neat way to increase revenues. Realistically for the consumer though, there is such a small difference that I'm sure that anyway going for the 5C is going to say screw it and go with the 5S full phone.

Jason.

Yes, but. Bad firmware that can be fixed by flashing wouldn't generate a warranty return. Yet the customer has still lost all their data.

We have a lot (around 20 out of 100 drives in just over a year) of SSD firmware issues (resulting in lost data), but only one for destruction (we don't return drives).

That said, I have 288 drives in a traditional array (between 2->5 years per shelf), we replace under warranty 3-4 a year. This is still a very small sample.

Jason