Posts by Danny

Not my experience

Happily running Vista Business x64 for 12 months with no problems at all. At first the hard disk kept going nuts when idle, but when I configured the indexing to only do my documents folder instead of the whole drive this stopped. It runs just as well as XP ever did on this machine. Still waiting to see 'The Horrors Of Vista!'

Athlon X2 5000

1 Gb DDR2 with an extra 512 on a memory stick using ready boost (didn't need it, I was just curious to see if it worked)

SATAII HDD

Nvidia Geforce 7300GS

Only get a 3.0 rating but it's the graphics card that brings it down. Still no problems though

Robert

As was posted above 'Linux is fantastic once it has been set up to do specific tasks'

So you saying

'I use GNU/Linux in schools. Kids and teachers use it all the time with no problems.' does not make the issue about making it mainstream and getting into peoples homes valid.

I assume that at school, somebody who knows what they are doing set it up and maintains it so that end-users CAN just get on with things. At home, you don't have that technical support on tap so the above points ARE valid.

And enough with the anti-competitive crap about MS. It isn't just MS who engage in anti-competitive practices. It's every corporation on the planet. The idea is to stay a step ahead of your rivals by any means necessary, not shake them by the hand and pretend to be please they are doing well. That's business. You can just as easily say the exact same thing about Apple, Sony, Intel, Wal-Mart (list goes on and on)

@They sold every box

Just the fact that they sold every box does not mean the mass market wants it. No figures are released to say how many sold, it could easily just have been 5 that were shipped to every store and no market research was done to see WHO was buying them. I would bet that nearly if not all of them went to people who are confident with computers and had no intention of using it as their desktop. More likely they were bought to configure as a router/firewall/media server or for some other task that doesn't require masses of computing power. What would be interesting is to see if any were returned and what reason was given for doing so.

Priorites all wrong?

So we can bail out the failing Northern Rock with shedloads of our money, but we can't find funding for something that IS actually important like protecting the food supply

Happy with my 7"

because it does what I need it to do for less than £200. Given my experience with it, I would definitely buy the 8.6" model, but not at over £300. As has been pointed out, to spend that kind of money you are heading towards low-end laptop prices which was not the market the original was aimed at. Keep it below £250 and they have another sale.

Seems to me

That a lot of the FOSS crowd are quite happy to rip into MS at every opportunity but fail to apply the same criteria when something similar happens with their beloved OS of choice. Linux has problems, OSX has problems, patches are released that cause problems because of inadequate testing so please stop touting your preferred OS as the saviour to all.

MS have done the right thing here. They have discovered a problem and postponed the release to get it fixed and yet they are still getting slated for it. If they had gone ahead with the release knowing about the problem you lot would still have been slating them and with reason, but having done the right thing you lot still aren't happy.

Even those it may come as a surprise to some of you some of us actually do LIKE MS products. They have problems, but no software company is perfect. I much prefer supporting XP to linux as I find diagnosing and fixing problems far easier and quicker.

And for those wondering, Every day at work I use and support OSX (Tiger + Leopard), Ubuntu, Madriva, Mandriva Server, XP, Vista Business x64 (which my main desktop at work runs and I too am a happy Vista user with no problems whatsoever), Windows Server 2000 + 2003 so I have a lot of exposure to OSX and Linux and am posting this from my eeePC running Xandros but yes I still prefer the MS options. it isn't a crime, and it doesn't make us idiots. It's a matter of preference and unlike a very vocal part of the OSX and Linux community, I don't try to pretend it is all things to all people.

Spot the p****d off early adopter

'The market should be allowed to decide, not film studios who kill off a standard by publicising that they would not release their films on it'

The market DID decide. Look at the numbers of disks sold. Toshiba couldn't even get people to take up HD-DVD even when they gave away the players and despite having Universal and Paramount exclusives and having the Warner content until recently. If people wanted this inferior format, they would have been snapped up at the stupidly low prices Toshiba were selling them at and the other studios would have been forced to produce HD-DVD. Even including the films they were giving away, total blu-ray discs still wiped the floor with them by at least 3:1. Who do you think was buying these discs? The studios to push the numbers up? Don't be silly, it doesn't matter to them what format it sells on, as long as it sells. It was a consumer decision first, followed by a studio decision not to produce a format that wasn't selling.

Now please all the HD-DVD fanboys, go away, put your thumb in your mouth and sulk in the corner. It's over, you lost despite all the rabid posts about how much 'better' and more 'consumer friendly' over the past year.

Pot-kettle?

Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't the tories the majority backers of a bill that would have allowed MPs expenses and family employees to be exempt from the FOI act?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/may/18/freedomofinformation.uk1

All the current parties are as bad as each other. Politicians no longer have any interest in what is good for the country, only what is good for them. The whole system needs to be brought down and rebuilt from scratch.

Anybody want to join the revolution?

The sick vulture as a good representaion of our political system

But does it come

'onna stick?

No problems with Lovefilm here

DVDs arrive quickly, always in good condition, bargain price, rare items stocked, crappy name for a company!

@over inflated opinion

'Shell have to keep the pressure on costs to make sure they are profitable if oil prices fall by any margin'

did you not read the article. £13.9 BILLION in profit. That is pure profit, not revenue so all salaries, expenditure, taxes, EVERYTHING has been taken into account. That's more than the national product of some small countries. What are they going to do with all that money that makes saving £250mill worthwhile? Are they going to sink it all into developing clean technologies? NO, they will invest some but a long way away from all. It will go to the rich shareholders or sit in the bank earning interest everyday, making them yet more money that will not end up doing anything useful. How far do you think the company would have to sink before it became unprofitable?

That isn't the issue, what is a stake is thousands of peoples livelihoods being threatened to make a few savings, and when you compare £14bil to £250mil, it is only a small saving.

As for your comment of 'If the IT staff at Shell are as skilled as they claim they are, then they should have no problem finding alternative jobs' what utter bollocks. Have you any idea how things work. Fewer jobs means more skilled people apply for them. So many in fact that a lot of CVs get overlooked as there are too many to process. More people willing to do the job means companies have greater leverage in terms of dictating salary, so the amount you can earn goes down. Why would a company like shell who are obviously only interested in profits, not the people who allow them to make such obscene amounts of money, want to pay someone highly trained with 10 years in the business what they are worth if they can point to a new graduate and see instant savings of £10-20k in what they pay as a salary?

I have no doubt that you would change your tune once all this outsourcing starts to affect you directly and you are faced with submitting application after application only to never receive an interview because you are viewed as 'too expensive'

I too come from a working class background, and I can see the benefits the unions have brought. Before the unions, employers could dictate everything to you, working hours (70+ per week), no sick pay even if you are off because of something that happened at work, no overtime, no complaints procedure because if you do you get fired, no increases based on extra training or adding responsibilities to your workload, It goes on and on.

You sanctimonious prick

@paul fox

If tpb were really making $200k a day, don't you think they would have been able to go on with their plan to buy sealand?

Whatever happened to logical thinking?

@Desi Banda

'Where do you think the profits reaped from outsourcing go? They not only line the pockets of CEOs and other such big d!cks but also the average shareholder who expects more and more out of his investment'

Most people who hold enough shares to reap any benefits are not exactly on the breadline, are they? Plus, more and more large companies are heading into private ownership. Also, as has been reported elsewhere on El Reg companies who give dividends these days are considered stupid on the financial markets - all that matters is growth and pushing the share price up.

With regards to my spelling, it was a slight typo - so what. If you read the rest of my comments you would have noticed that I did spell globalisation correctly the first time. You are also confusing WRITING with SPEAKING. Being dyslexic and have difficulty spelling, does not mean you have a small vocabulary and do not have the means to communicate very effectively when speaking.

'fail to understand why some people jump up and down about outsourcing. Outsourcing is only applicable to lowskill jobs like support (reading out from a freaking manual is not rocket science)'

So support consists solely of reading from a manual does it? Thats where I have been going wrong then. No need to know the product thoroughly through personal use, no need to know of any issues NOT in the manual, no need to be able to listen to the customers problem and what they have done to try and resolve it - instead just read from the script even when the script is asking the same things that they have just told you they have done.

And I beg to differ, but it is not only low-skilled jobs (and even if it were, my point still stands about the millions lost in taxes). A friend of mine worked for a reasonably sized company (about 200 employees) in a department of about 20. The department managed everything from setting up hardware, network configuration, user policies, bespoke programming and support. The company was bought by a larger one. The CEO and senior managers got big bonuses and nice pay rises. This department of highly skilled people was deemed unnecessary because they kept everything running well. As is the case with most I.T. departments, people only notice you when things go wrong. Everything the department did was outsourced to India as it was cheaper. Software query, well support is just reading the manual. Server or network error, that's ok it can be managed remotely unless it is an actual hardware fault in which case it's cheap enough to pay a contractor for a one-off job. Some programming needs doing - much cheaper to have it done in India. All but one of those 20 employees was made redundant, given a pitiful redundancy package and told to go. The remaining person was a traitorous git who was given a marginal pay rise and a relocation package to go to India and train the new staff in procedures.

Since then, at least 2 people from that department are still unemployed. Highly trained and skilled or not it is becoming harder and harder to find well paid work as we lose more jobs. Fewer jobs = more people applying for them. Why pay someone with a proven track record and 10 years experience when you can employ somebody who has recently graduated for 10-15k less?

1 person lost their home and their family as they couldn't pay the mortgage and the stress of it all destroyed his marriage. Don't know what happened to him after that. 1 more person was 'lucky' enough to be able to pay his mortgage but the stress and longer working hours destroyed his marriage too.

3 people tried to set up their own company which failed in under 2 years as they couldn't compete on price (quality of service doesn't mean much these days) taking their savings along with it.

As for the traitor. After his 2 years, his contract was not renewed and there was no relocation package to get him settled back in England. Since then the company has lost customers and is losing money as more people are unhappy with the level of support, the code they ask for is buggy as hell and takes far longer to sort out as it gets passed back and forth, has more downtime when things like the webserver go titsup and the remaining employees really don't enjoy their job any more.

For those of you claiming comments like this are racist - you are way off the mark. As Marty said, it isn't about racism it's about being unhappy with the way things are going.

@Ashwin

If you think my comments are aimed at the people involved - they aren't. They are just doing the job they are paid for, just like the rest of us. It's the companies who should be ashamed of themselves and our governments should step in to do something. It destroys lives and hurts our economy in the long run.

'BTW Bad at the Queen's English != uneducated'

Not at all, but just one example from personal experience. I rang Dell to report a piece of faulty memory. I knew exactly what was at fault as I had tested it. The guy in India asked me to remove the memory and switch the machine on and -his words- See if it booted! Even somebody with no training but that has taught themselves to build a PC from components knows that if you switch a PC on without memory, it gives a beep code telling you there is no memory or it is faulty. Even when I pointed this out to him, and that there is no way this machine would boot without memory all it would do is beep at me, he kept insisting it would. Eventually I gave in and put the phone to the machine as it was beeping, then asked him was he happy now that I had been proven correct that I actually know what i am talking about. Not knowing something as basic as that means badly educated to fulfil that role.It seems sometimes that the only qualifications need to work in an Indian call centre is the ability to read from a script and speak english to a certain level (in some cases not even a high level). You don't need to knwo anything because like Desi said, support is just reading from a manual.

Am I the only person

Who is yet to see any of these problems with Vista?

I was given the job of evaluating it for work, and while I can't justify the cost for us to upgrade just yet I still have it as my primary desktop 8 months later.

No slowdown, No network copy issues, No driver issues, using Aero and all my software runs. It was a bit heavy on disk access at first, but trim down the indexing feature so it doesn't scan as much and it runs better than my copy of XP did on the same machine. So far not a single system crash!

It may have something to do with the fact I did a clean install and it hasn't been burdened with all the unnessary bloatware OEMS seem to feel is essential. Just a guess, but I am happy with it so far it was just a bit of a learning curve as it's different.

Athlon X2 5000, 1GB DDR2, 150GB Sata 300 disk and Nvidia 256mb Geforce 7300GS running Vista Business x64 in case anyone was wondering

Piracy is on the rise

Because people don't want to keep paying for the same re-hashed shite they watched 20 years ago

@Dana

I have to disagree with you that El Reg is biased. Over the last couple of weeks I have informed them of a story about Steve Jobs snubbing one of the faithful at the Mac Expo, showing his true colours, i.e. a tosser who thinks the little people are beneath him

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/01/18/jobsness-snubs-fangirl

A story that Apple are being sued once again for patent infringement over the iPhone

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/01/23/apple_faces_new_lawsuit_over_iphone_concept.html

A story that MS software has been found to have fewer vulnerabilities than open source, but MS take a while longer to fix problems

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=11154

None of these stories has made it onto El Reg, yet we have stories about 'the stunning MacBook Air laptop' despite it being a severely lacking over priced pile of crap.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/01/18/review_video_macbook_air/

How exactly are they being biased? Or is it just that you have one of the permanent 'Protect Apple Fields' than fanboys seem to come equipped with?

@Christopher D'Souza

They have done tests and found that all the panic about wireless signals is in the mind. Volunteers have been told wifi and bluetooth have been on when they haven't and reported the same symptoms. All the experiments have shown is if you think it is affecting you, you show symptoms. If you don't know it is on, nobody reports any ill effects. The Panorama you mentioned is highly biased and based on very dubious 'science' as a lot of panorama shows have been recently. Scaremongering makes for a more interesting TV show, telling everyone things are OK doesn't get viewers. It was even reported on the register about how bad this show was.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/03/panorama_wifi_fear_wristslap/

My uncle has severe MS, he is confined to a wheelchair and his wireless and bluetooth don't affect him at all. This is more than likely due to the fact he uses his common sense and doesn't believe all the scaremongering. You get more radiation from the sun, or from TV signals but I'm betting they don't affect you.

Back to topic, this is yet another reason for me to only turn bluetooth on when I need it and leave it off for the rest of the time. We get bombarded with enough ads as it is.

Did Diana Ross have the casting vote?

How long have the Supremes been involved in corporate law?

In the words of Bill and Ted

Excellent!

@greg

'if I have to spend 1.5 billion dollars in R&D, like is the average currently, to create a new drug, I NEED to have a protection against generics companies'

Bad analogy to use. Most new drugs, particularly for high profile diseases have had the research paid for by the general public through charitable donations. Just one example, how many readers have contributed to the Cancer Research charity? If they manage to find a cure for one or all cancers, do you really think they will give it to all the pharmaceutical companies for free, so they can make it as cheap as possible? Not a chance, it will be patented and only those who own the patent or have paid to be licensed to do so will be allowed to produce it and charge whatever they feel like. Most charities do not own their own labs, so chances are they are allowed to use labs belonging to a big company in return for either the patent on anything discovered, or the exclusive rights to produce it.

Not for me

It will be a cold day in hell that I trust all my documents etc to a remote server that I have no control over

Some people never learn

The Steve Jobs Devil is purely because I don't like the guy, not anything about hating Apple as a company. He does nothing but put on a show, pretend to innovate and be the consumers champion when in reality he does what most companies do, steal other peoples ideas and tries to milk as much money out of you as he can. These days thanks to him, Apple products are more about hype and being a fashion statement than actual performance or features. When you take away the hype from Apple products and compare them against equivalent products, they look second rate and sorely lacking.

RE Regarding the camera

As I said, most people want these devices to replace a few. If you just want your phone to be a phone and nothing else, then what is the point of buying anything more than a basic one that just does voice and sms?

Trying to compare a professional video camera with a phone is just a silly comparison. The pro cameras would beat any standard home use dedicated video camera never mind a phone but the N95 is capable of SDTV resolution at 30fps meaning it can be played back on a standard CRT TV with no loss of quality or it looking jumpy because of a poor framerate. It doesn't even need to be transferred thanks to the handy TV-out making it extremely portable. It may not be good enough for studios, but many artists have been making use of the camera and the video.

My original point still stands and so far you haven't been able to come up with a decent counter argument. If you are being charged for top of the range - shouldn't you expect top of the range? How can Apple justify over £700 for their product when it is so limited? It may be a good, high quality product but the fact it it so limited in function means it really isn't worth more than £200-£250

@Graham Lockley

Love it! Thanks for the heads up. I will def be getting one of those T-shirts!

So

The HD DVD lot are scared they are losing the format war so they try giving them away free to generate interest. It might work if they were to offer some decent titles, but these? I wouldn't even buy those on DVD with the exception of Serenity

Noooooooooooooooooooo

Sobs quietly into his last pint of reasonably priced beer

No coat/No door, I am making this one last awhile!

Somebody need to go to Springfield

Give Fat Tony the contract to supply the milk.

Hypocritical cow, sitting in a gas guzzler while asking me to give up meat. Pass the bacon sarnies

That's the munchkins stuffed then

The Wizard of Oz doesn't quite work with

Ha Ha Ha, lady of negotiable affection,lady of negotiable affection,lady of negotiable affection and a couple of tra la la's

Coat, door as per rule 8

@will

http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2007/08/nokias-2q-numbe.html

1.5million in 3 months

And that's without hyping it up and making it out to be the greatest thing ever. No big billboard ads, nowhere near as much free media coverage, no TV ads, no huge launch parties. Plus the iphone figures are skewed as hundreds of people seem to have only bought them to flog straight away on ebay

I am pleased to report

That my local O2 and Carphone Warehouse which are only a couple of doors away from each other didn't have a single person waiting at 6pm. Good to know that far fewer people fall for hype in the north :)

Is This

How amanfrommars translates his posts before submitting them?

@Bruce

No I am not claiming Windows is any better, just that when MS cocks up windows users tend to be quite happy to badmouth MS, while when Apple do it they don't have to apologize as mac users do it for them.

@anonymous coward

'But in fact the strength of your derision actually acts against you, because you're simply exposed as a person who can't control their emotions and so has to resort to unhinged generic insults without looking at the issues rationally and from a balanced perspective.

Yes, let's see a balanced perspective. Here is a typical Apple fanboy response to some common articles:

MS patch causes crash - crappy MS,buy a mac

MS delay release - Apple release on time, buy a mac

MS announce new product - Call that innovative, they stole it from ..., buy a mac

MS announce new OS - It will still be crap, buy a mac

New virus alert - Wouldn't happen on OSX, buy a mac

Linux kernel unstable - buy a mac

New linux desktop - looks just like windows it's crap/looks like OSX, shows how good OSX is if it's being copied

MS announce service pack - Fixing all the problems they left in on release, wouldn't have needed it with OSX, buy a mac

Apple patch causes problems - Can't be Apples fault, must be something 3rd party

Apple announce service pack - sorry new OS - Great lets go and blow another £85

Apple announce new model - Hooray another opportunity to get blatently ripped off for rubbish foxconn hardware and a sense of smugness

Apple release new ipod - Oh wow, I can go and give Apple another £150 for an inferior mp3 player and get tied into the itunes shop at the same time, bargain.

Apple announce Iphone - It must be so cool cos it's Apple, we don't need all the features that come as standard on a real phone and we will happily pay through the nose for the smugness factor.

Apple upgrade causes problem - it's not Apples fault it must be 3rd party, buy a mac

Apple hardware found to have major design flaw - it's not Apples fault, scream loudly about how it can't be Apples fault, find some way to turn it into a MS bashing issue and sulk when everybody else takes the opportunity to laugh at the smug bastards

So yes Mr coward, a balanced perspective would be nice. However those deemed as fanboys usually follow the above example almost to the letter and as such are incapable of forming any opinion that would throw Apple into any doubt.

3 words guaranteed to get a fanboy rant:

Apple Are Crap

Apple problem= MS bashing

I am still waiting to see all these problems that people keep mentioning. I have been running Vista business x64 for over 6months evaluating it to see if it is worth migrating from XP. As of yet I can't say it has any distinct advantage for us to do so, but I am more than happy with it's performance on my machine with a measly 1Gb memory. I have had no stability issues, all my hardware is recognized, no slowdown even when running multiple programs and this is on a custom built box, not an OEM one that would have had any issues dealt with by the manufacturer. So far it has never crashed once. The only annoyance is that they still not brought out a completely working adminpak so I can manage network settings from my PC, but it's easy enough to rdp to the server and that doesn't count as a problem with the OS.

@Paul Talbot

'The problem is that most users don't even look for alternatives unless something goes seriously wrong with the bundled app'

By the same logic the courts should force Apple to ship OSX without all the extra apps that come along with it:

Ichat - not fair on alternative messenger clients

Garageband - not fair on other music creation software

Imovie - not fair on other video editing packages

IDVD - not fair on the DVD authoring apps

Iphoto - What about alternative photo organising and editing tools

Iweb - A different web design package anyone? Not until the bundled app stops working.

And that is all without mentioning mail or safari!

If you look on Apples website, most of the above are listed as applications, but since imacs come with it all pre-installed, it's good enough to argue it ships as part of the OS. Most consumers wouldn't know the difference.

Oh, one more thing - are any of these open source to allow better interoperability as this seems to be the topic of the moment. NO. Apple can keep as much of their code proprietory as they like, while whinging all the time that MS won't allow them access to the MS source code.

Just like Dennis Price

I too am still waitng to see all these problems that people keep mentioning. I have been running Vista business x64 for over 6months evaluating it to see if it is worth migrating from XP. As of yet I can't say it has any distinct advantage for us to do so, but I am more than happy with it's performance on my machine with a measly 1Gb memory. I have had no stability issues, all my hardware is recognized, no slowdown even when running multiple programs and this is on a custom built box, not an OEM one that would have had any issues dealt with by the manufacturer. So far it has never crashed once. The only annoyance is that they still not brought out a completely working adminpak so I can manage network settings from my PC, but it's easy enough to rdp to the server.

re:economics

Idiot?

Lets see

£32 + 17.5% = £37.60

Shipping and excise are generally higher to the US since all the security got tightened. I know this for a fact as my father in law is in the shipping business. Add on the necessary costs for bringing goods into this country and duty to be paid on top of the VAT and I am reliably informed that this should make the product cost between £45-£50 MAX. So the £65 price is ridiculous and another example of how we get ripped off.

As for guestimated price, the article does not claim this to be a guess, but that it will be around £65. This usually means the manufacturer has given a rrp and it is then up to the vendors to compete with each other on final selling price which will be within a few pounds of each other.

As for £65 not being bad for the camera and a game as games are around £40 anyway, if you noticed in the article the camera will be sold alone for £25 making the charge for the game £40. How is this a good bundle deal?