Posts by gratou
81 posts • joined Monday 19th January 2009 00:02 GMT
whose
Not: who's
It is not difficult, really.
Sony
Who buys Sony these days? Don't you guys learn?
Sony proved over and over they will always screw their customers when given a chance.
English is such an imprecise language
No wonder French was the language of diplomacy.
"good practice aimed at enhancing transparency and consumer control".
as in
"good practice aimed at enhancing transparency and control of the consumer ".
or
"good practice aimed at enhancing transparency and control by the consumer " ?
@ D wilson
Yeah, but you still trade good cash for nothing.
The online model means you no longer own anything, just a right of use really, but your money has been exchanged for nothing you can reuse, as raised just below by grumpy.
ownership is the (one?) real issue
I buy stuff from itunes or wherever. What do I have?
Nothing: the stuff I bought has no economic value, as has been mentionned here before.
Supposing I am lucky to still have access to it in 20 years (ie. it is still playable, some DRM hasn't crapped out, my rights haven't been changed, I didn't lose my account or my licence, etc) - and that's a major assumption-, in the meantime it is still a pain to use on a variety of supports (in the car, the tube, etc), and I can't do anything with it but use it.
I can't give anything to my friends or kids, I can't sell; I have nothing.
So we have content that: is hard to freely use, is worth nothing, and has a fair chance of being lost. On top of being quite pricey.
Mmmm, I wonder why this online thing doesn't take off faster...
drives are exciting again.
About time too, CPUs are Meh since they went multi-core instead of Hi-GHz, HDDs stopped evolving 15 years ago.
At least some exciting and fast-paced improvements to look fwd to in IT.
Obvious flaws
5. USB ports
6. SD slot
Sheesh!
no choice
Tried buying a gigaset dect phone in NZ? Good luck.
Oz retailers might have a few but don't ship here.
UK retailers have lots to choose from, run specials and are cheaper than anything this side of the world to start with (US retailers are out, as their shipping prices are usually stupid, and their 110V power supplies suck).
Sad!
less cocky
OK, Iran and Venezuela will be less cocky. Good.
Now, what would it take for superpowers to be less cocky?
Cocky icon obviously...
HR
Same old: the myth that investing in fancy tech will replace investing in good, trained staff.
Posted in Oracle revs VirtualBox, mushrooms memory
so no RDP to the guest from V4?
Do I understand correctly? Time *not* to upgrade then.
education
Go read the definition of the words you use please. And grab a history book too while you are at it. Sigh...
fuel is fuel
What fills up the tanks wasn't exactly carbonprint-free, regardless of what chemical compound it is.
average income = meaningless
The median income is a lot more useful to estimate what a population earns, or who really is "average".
The average is too skewed by high earners.
Average *is* interesting however when used together with the median: the gap between the 2 shows the inequality (The gini coefficient is a slightly better measure).
Median annual houselhold income is $50k in the US, average is $70k, which is a rather large gap (+40%).
A few ginis:
Slovakia 25
OZ 35
USA 45
Brazil 57
2 sets of laws, once again?
Kids get heavily punished, who cares? A politician might be too. Woh, pass a law, fast!
Or did I miss stg?
control
Controlling the hardware is one way to increase stability. Not nearly enough though. The underlying architecture must also be sound, which windows definitely isn't, being the broken spaghetti mess that is. And mostly the attitude must be right. Apple aims at small high-margin volume, but wants perfect experience, and is anally retentive about it. MS goes for volume rather than quality and doesn't give a s**t as the xbox (100% controlled by MS, never fixed) reliability fiasco shows.
Only govts can create monopolies?
You look like the clueless one now, Tom.
For example, last time I looked, the power lines and the phone lines here belong to a private monopoly that will never be challenged because the cash outlay to do so is too great.
Same for my city's airport, etc. You can't have two sets of wires running down a street, the return on the 2nd set will never cover the huge cost.
As for private companies doing a better job just because "the market knows best" look at the british railways and weep.
"make sure we get paid for the features"
or not.
I only buy AMD CPUs as they provide ECC memory support in their chips for a fraction of the Xeon prices.
Paris coz it s no-brainer.
Posted in Kiwi virtual world creators get $2.5m
crock of shite
Trade Me is has many flaws for sure (like crap search), but is head and shoulder above ebay. Better GUI, better fees (no listing fee for general items for a start), better customer service (yeah I know, that doesn't say much, but nonetheless it is). I dread the day ebay buys them.
And Fairfax's ROI is almost 7% and steadily growing. I doubt they kick themselves.
Sheesh.
So you only buy caged-hen eggs Matt?
Not everyone does.
Thankfully people look beyond pure price/service ratio and ethics play a growing role in decisions.
Egg-head icon.
own medecine
>They also come with “just the software you need,” which is code for saying the machines don't contain crapware such as promotional versions of antivirus software that can drastically hamper performance.
No trial version of MS office then?
Posted in Prepping the great Windows 7 migration
@AC: ancient, etc.
The same non-sense was uttered by Vista proponents.
W7 is hardly better than XP, and struggles to justify the expense of buying the licence, deploying it, upgrading HW, training users, etc.
MS will still sell it because most IT depts are afraid to leave MS and can' t use an unsupported OS, but XP would still do fine without the politics.
Indeed
Human rights come *after* corporate rights don't you know?
Even worse in the US in some respect [not the one mentionned in the article] where corporations, despite not being natural persons, are recognised by law to have rights and responsibilities like natural persons ("people"), and can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state.
Sick world indeed.
@stim
Usual tactics of those either malicious, dim-witted, or losing an argument: attack the messenger rather than discuss the point.
Elop: The worm is in the apple
I'd be so sad if I were Finnish.
One of Europe crown jewels is gone. If Elop's gamble succeeds, MS (and Elop) will benefit and Nokia will be an also-ran. If it doesn't, Elop doesn't give a damn and Nokia will disappear.
Who's surprised?
There's a lot more money to be made if these keywords are accepted, so if the possibility exists, it is a no brainer really.
are you sure?
> we have an accent which is generally human comprehensible
as in " the trine's lite mite" ?
Also a dash is missing in this composite adjective.
Posted in No new strings for Guitar Hero
GH hardware was crap.
We didn't play much at home (like a few hours a week), but I had to resolder the wire under some drums, take the guitar apart to tweak its sensors and switches, and still the guitar would miss or add notes/clicks.
It was fun to start with, but frustrating when we got better. We never pretended to play the guitar (I was on the drums anyways, and sucked :), just to have a bit of good time ... till we stopped bothering because of the frustration.
how does this work?
"we are always going to say what we think is right for this country. We believe in free ideas"
So which one is it?
Posted in Canada? The computer vendor says no
Up to you
I moved from Europe 10 years ago with my IT skills.
Yes NZ has got some good sides (hence why I moved, even though english is not my native language, and despite the crippling distance to family & friends).
Note that it is a lot easier to ski and scuba dive on the same day in Vancouver (which I love, but it's probably a good thing we didn't go there seeing BC's economy atm) than in NZ. It would be just as feasible in Nice or Ljubljana.
These good NZ sides are no reason not to be aware of the shortcomings, like very limited tech choice, ridiculously slow and capped and expensive so-called broadband, or totally crappy housing building quality.
Trevor, if one manages to find a US retailer willing to ship to NZ (good luck), one wiIl probably get charged USD30 or USD50 to ship something like a teeny weeny CPU. That's the kind of rorts we have to live with here. Again, no hard feelings, we made the choice, but grass is always greener etc.
You are right of course; ideally, the whole world would have the incredible choice and low prices the USians enjoy. But hey, better living here than living in the states imho. You lose some, you win some as they say. We made a choice, and alleviate the down sides as we can.
Posted in Canada? The computer vendor says no
backcountry
Sheesh, stop complaining, Canada still has easy access to all the US gadgets. Over here in forgotten New Zealand, if you want a 45W AMD CPU, you can choose a 235e or nothing. No other dual-core, no triple-core, not quad core. How's that for choice? And they'll cost an arm and a leg too. Sigh...
Posted in Microsoft sends Windows 7 SP1 to OEMs
patches for free?
Really, w7 is a sp for vista. What worthwhile features does w7 have that vista doesn't? (well, I am shooting my own rethorical question in the foot, but he same could be asked for w7 vs XP, depending on what worthwhile is deemed to mean).
I'd hate to be a vista customer having paid for sh!t and having to pay again to get it fixed with w7.
monolythic thinking, that's why.
NZ has made software not patentable though so there's some (tiny) hoping.
Posted in Diary of a server failure
ZFS
Why ZFS is not mentionned when there is a discussion about raid is beyond me.
ZFS and RAIDZ beat any raid config for data safety, ease of maintenance, ease of moving the array to a different box.
RAIDx is dead afaiac.
bad driver?
Why no criticism? Since when an OS doing its most basic job should BSOD because of a driver? I suspect most windows fanbois have never used a proper corporate OS like Solaris or HP-UX or AIX or old VMS (let alone a mainframe).
These OSes wil never ever let a driver or an app get in the way of the OS. Ever. By design.
Windows falls over all the time, sometimes freezes for a sec or two when you insert a USB key or a CD, lets apps install crap in its system folders, etc. Wtf? Windows is not a good OS. At all. It is flawed. By design. As long as people accept mediocrity and say such things as "the box crashed because of the driver, not the OS", MS will get away with inferior OSes.
Less of a problem indeed
I'd much prefer a guy stole $1000 from my account (and many others') than he assaults or burglars me (or them), thank you very much. Violent crime is the most traumatic, and should be the most punished, there is not doubt.
@PDawe
I am missing something?
You want greater govt intervention, and at the same time condone survivalists, who would like as little govt intervention as possible?
Posted in WD intros latest network hard drive
The data is still unsafe then?
Where is the ZFS-type data integrity check?
Why bother? Everything worth doing etc.
Posted in Google open sources JPEG assassin
@Seiler
>I hope "40%" is just not enough. While h.264 got away with a "50% off MPEG-2" .....
If images can be further compressed by 40%, surely video can do a lot better than 50% seeing that it also benefits from compressing along the time line.
Posted in Seagate stuffs 3TB drives in NAS box
whatever
Vulgar language for no good reason makes you look ... vulgar. And dumb ... and immature.
Also, insulting other people demeans you.
Grow up and stand proud. :)
shingled slow-write very useful..
>will enterprises buy shingled HDDs if rewriting data takes seven or eight times longer than with today's drives? Of course they won't. SWR drives won't find a place in applications where fast write I/O is a requirement.
Bad generalisation. It is the re-write that is slow, not the write. Back-up and archive disks can benefit from this technology right now. I reckon we'll see more and more specialised disks: expensive and fast SSD for OLTP (fast access time), cheap and slower SSD for 24/7 low-load servers (no wear, no heat), shingled for one-off writes (huge capacity, fast first write), etc.
Marketers will love this.
SSD + shingled?
How about the buffer is SSD? The best of both worlds: fast SSD speed, large shingled capacity.
Posted in Intel eats crow on software RAID
RAID-Z is it
RAIDZ is the only solution addressing bit rot (bit flipping).
Use anything else if you don't care about your data.
Where is the evil Larry icon? Alien will do I suppose.
Posted in Microsoft to embrace and extend HTML 5?
time machine
> IE9 team want to fork the HTML5 spec by bolting on custom windows APi's ”
Phew you scared me for a sec, I thought I was sent 10 years back when I misread:
IE6 team want to fork the HTML3 spec by bolting on custom windows APi's ”
Morons!
Selective burning...
>Jones also plans to burn copies of the Talmud.
And the Torah?
And "the legend of Rudolph the red nose reindeer"?
What are the criteria? Safe provocation it seems (though a fatwa might make this not so safe...)
Posted in Save us from our users
propaganda master.
I love this!
No cohersion, you are free my fellow end-user, IT is your friend, do as you want.
Same effect as checking the change-required box, but on a volutary basis.
Is Joseph Goebbels your favourite reading by any chance?
Keep them coming Trevor, you must be the most read author by far. Reality journalism is here.
love patent trolls
> in a departure from previous actions, it is seeking $150,000 in damages.
2 articles @75k = $150k, no departure at all.
These trolls are the only hope the system will change. More of them please!
compulsory 3-year commitment?
Lets' see....... mmm ... oh yeah, Microsoft Software Assurance.
Did I get it right?
Also, about vendor and trust, who is shoving the puky office 2007/10 ribbon down our throats, at our training and time-wasted cost, without consultation, just because they decided it is good for us?
Sheesh, some cheek !
Serge Humpich ...
... will not be forgotten.
Posted in It's time to presume the web is guilty
Unworkable and dangerous
Ok, so the worldwide top 500 companies decide to fork out $1m each, and establish a list that they maintain and make available for all to use.
Maybe. Far stretched but why not.... The upside is that it is a private list and private list maintainers don't have to justify themselves to anyone.
That's the only way I could see this taking off.
Any public (aka government) or commercial (aka Norton & co) list would be open to errors, complaints, appeals, suits, etc, so that wouldn't work.
Even this hypothesis is open to abuse: why are www.bhopaltruths.org and www.thebigpetroleumcon.net not accessible? or: yes Mr Bush, we'll see that www.iraqtruths.org is taken care of.
The biggest threat however is of course goverment taking over the idea (for everyone's good obviously, ask the aussies) and censoring away. If something can go wrong, it will, and this is decuply likelier with any technology that has a big-brother potential.
