Another vote for Linode.

They're the only VPS provider I've used so I'm not sure how they compare, but I'm using their basic package for $20 / month and I haven't had any problems and there seems to be a great community based around them so support isn't really an issue.

The two services I wish I could live my online life without.... COMBINED!

I share your frustration, RIM have been making the odd statement it certainly doesn't feel like they're doing enough when you're on the front line and you have people who expect their BB to be replaced with an iPhone free of charge because of this outage.

I'm sure there must be some dialogue between the operators and RIM, but all that's filtering down to my level is pretty much "Yeah, it's up" (when it's not) or "Nah, it's down" so I'm pretty much relying on twitter and the BBC site for information although I'm not blaming RIM for that.

For consumers I certainly feel that they're on their last legs, their QA sucks as I'm dealing with faulty Blackberries on a daily basis, the Torch was buggy as hell and the BB 9900 is a joke (so many are DoA), I'd never recommend a Blackberry to anybody!

No clue what the stock will be like to be honest, I'm just glad that I'm mainly in a 2nd line role as I'll be working on Friday which wont be much fun! Assuming there's stock they'll have no issue buying your contract out, taking out a new contract, buying one outright or going for a fast track upgrade (if you're tariff's over £40 you can buy out what's left minus the 20% and minus VAT, if not you can change your tariff and have it come into effect next day if it'll work out cheaper that way).
Unless you already have an iPhone or have a lot of purchases on iTunes I'd save some money and go for the Samsung Galaxy SII which is pretty similar spec.

Yeah, pretty much although it wont be hard to get around (just find somebody with an unregistered PAYG SIM that's been used at least a month ago). Until stock settles down it'll be for existing customers only, existing customers are called as anybody who has had an O2 phone, dongle or home broadband for at least month before the 4th of October.

I currently work in a call centre for a mobile operator that has around 45% of the UKs iPhone customers (should be easy enough to work out who!), I've been speaking to people on a daily basis for months who have enquired about pre-ordering whatever the next iPhone turned out to be. The stats are a big anti-climax, but since the announcement I've been speaking to plenty of people who are upset that we're not taking pre-orders and are threatening to go to the competition.

Sure the majority of tech savvy people are disappointed with the 4S announcement and were expecting something more, but the majority of iPhone users I've spoken to about it (taking at least 30 calls a day) want one and are returning orders or putting off upgrading in the hopes of getting one, my colleagues have been experiencing the same.

The average slashdot user wont see what the big deal about the 4S is, most of our friends and colleagues wont either, but your average consumer who's been waiting for the latest iGadget is still going to lap it up, it's new, it's shiny, it's expensive and it's Apple so it MUST be the best!

I think this really depends on the company, the place I used to work for was a small family run company, there was a few insanely loyal employees who had been there for longer than I've been out of high school (and in one case longer than I've been alive), unfortunately for them when redundancies were announced my job was safer than theirs and somebody who had been with the company for about 30 years, would work on his holidays if requested, never had a sick day and knew the directors since they were kids, he was one of the first people to be made redundant, another who had been working for the company had been there for about 15 years was also up for redundancy.
It was a small family company, we all got on well, it was a close knit group and we'd all quite happily go to the pub together, but at the end of the day it's a business, they'll put the company first if it comes to it so you need to make sure you put yourself first.

It might just be me, but I find this rather disturbing, an incorrect OS on a device is a pretty obvious mistake to spot, if HP can accidentally ship TouchPads running an OS they never intended to release then surely there's a real risk of them shipping PCs, servers or switches preloaded with rootkits/backdoors that are designed to be well hidden?

Maybe I've just been wearing my tinfoil hat for too long though!

I find it rather disturbing that a company like HP can "accidentally" ship a product running an OS that was never intended for release, if they can ship TouchPads running Android rather than WebOS who's to say they can't accidentally ship PCs or servers with undetected rootkits? If something as obvious as a completely different operating system can slip through the cracks then surely a small rootkit wont have any trouble?

Like many I've certainly never been a member of his fan club and I'm not a fan of Apple, but you've got to admit, the guy was good at what he did and it's a real loss. My thoughts are with his friends and family.

Use a VPN.
I already use one as I don't like my ISPs proxy and I don't like getting redirected to their search page whenever I enter a URL that doesn't resolve. I've setup my own VPN on a VPS so I know exactly what's getting logged (nothing), but at the same time I don't feel it gives me any extra privacy as the IP address can quite easily be linked to me (as I host my personal site on the same server), but if I was being paranoid and was up to something illegal it would be relatively easy to setup a VPS that couldn't easily be linked to me.

The only thing I really miss about overplay.net is they have a DD-WRT extension so I could allow my home router to handle all the tunnelling for me, but I'm sure if I invested a bit of time I could setup my linode OpenVPN with DD-WRT, but at the moment I'm just not bothered enough to look into it.

Full control of what's logged and what's going on, if you use less than 200GB you can get away with paying less than $20/month for their entry level VPS, you'll get your own IP address so it's very unlikely to get blacklisted (as that seems common with a lot of the more popular proxy/VPN providers). You'll need to setup everything yourself, but you get a lot more control, you essentially have your own server to play about with and it's not much more expensive than move VPN providers.

Before I setup my linode I was using overplay.net who were okay, but they were often quite slow and I did have issues with blacklisting on certain sites and every so often the server I was using would go down.

I'm hoping this bad publicity puts Comantra out of business, but they'll most likely just disappear and pop up under a different name.

My family members have had calls from a few of these companies and my 84 year old grandpa was recently scammed out of around £85 and had his computer filled with their malware which really pissed me off, he'd just bought a license key for MS Office then a few days later got a call from "Microsoft Windows help desk" or similar saying they've detected a virus on his computer, blah, blah, blah, install our software, pay us money and you'll be fine.

We really need somebody to go after the people who actually process the payments, if the scammers could only accept payment through western union or bit coins it would trigger a lot more alarm bells in their victims heads. Given the right circumstances even intelligent people who are just a little naive can be taken in by these scammers.