Posts by Robert E A Harvey
2413 posts • joined Sunday 8th October 2006 16:17 GMT
Page:
Furious
I am absolutely furious with HP for making me wait so long for such a meagre offering, and then daring to set the price to match the iPud. Just who do they think they are? Just how gullible do they think I am?
I wanted this partly out of affection for the days of my palm pilot, and partly because I was expecting good things from the OS. But I am being asked to buy a pig in a poke, and having been promised jam tomorrow if I wait for the tablet, I will still have to wait for the jam because they have not drummed up a significant developer base.
I was really really looking forward to this, and feel badly let down. I even wanted a pre3 phone to do the touch-and-couple business and use as a modem link. But I will have to wait even longer for that.
It won't do, HP, it won't do. I am furious with you.
Oh, and the 32G version is USD600 in the states, which is UKP372 today. What is the extra £107 for?
Posted in Gartner slashes UK PC shipments for 2011
where do I sign?
Futurologist admits futurology is bollocks, but still gets paid.
How do I get a job where I don't even need to be any good at, and still earn megabucks?
Let me..
.. take a more informed view. I know what it is, and why they want to foist it on us, and I want none of it.
There.
Begone, spawn of satan
Posted in World braces for domain name EXPLOSION
Bzzt - tautology
but psurely /everything/ is all google's fault?
Odd
I am puzzled by this idea that the OS is designed for a particular size/resolution of screen. It does suggest some very odd assumptions in the early design stage. I wonder what other corners have been cut?
IWGTST
That annoyed me, too. If the reg. is going to patronise its techie readers, it might try to do so accurately.
Posted in Yuri Gagarin lands at Royal Albert Hall
Technicalities, Technicalities
I understand the arguement, but you are right. Brave Guy.
He was my childhood hero, and I can't see a picture of him now without smiling.
See, that's what I don;t understand
Anyone dumb enough to (1) watch and (2) believe CSIwhotsit is never going to be bright enough to be in a position to specify development software.
Posted in Help! My Exchange server just rebooted
Googling in the bath
?Googling? /GOOGLING/ ?
Nah...
Posted in Help! My Exchange server just rebooted
Astonished
I've avoided all contact with Exchange Server for some years, but I find myself astonished that a major pieced of (allegedly) corporate-critical system can't look after itself under all imaginable circumstances.
"I know, we'll ask that bloke juggling chainsaws on a unicycle over the shark pit to remember all our important ideas for us"
Posted in Help! My Exchange server just rebooted
Oh
First I've heard that there was an single instance store. They kept that quiet, then.
return to form
My word yes.
err.. I have a list of $MEGACORP management who need to be taken away. Do you do requests?
Posted in Apple iMac 27in
Well, quite
I have a couple I use all the time.
Useful for some video cameras too.
Posted in NHS trust issues nurse jub flash alert
umm
if leggings are cool, you must be wearing them wrong, shirley?
Posted in NHS trust issues nurse jub flash alert
Splendidly done
I just wanted to say that this bit of writing cheered me up at the end of a long, hard day.
A bit off-colour, yes. Slightly iffy, indeed. Near the knuckle, perhaps.
But it made me laugh. Keep up the good work.
Chesticles, indeed!
<- We all know someone without enough of them.
Posted in A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe
Ah, but that's theft.
In the 1970s the firm I worked for built "robot" garages - just a forecourt and pole sign, no buildings. Each pump had a "note acceptor" next to it. I designed and commissioned the note acceptors.
We built one on the A45, just after it stopped being the M45. I got a call one day that the site had gone. "Gone wrong? gone heywire?" I asked. "No. Gone."
I drove up there. The whole lot had gone. Pumps, note acceptors, pole sign. The only bit left was the tank underground, and they had emptied that.
Posted in Asus Eee Pad Transformer Android tablet
Been waiting for this review
And it is very interesting. But I don't trust the scores at all now, and I would like to be able to.
perhaps reg central could add a voting system? Buy/don't choices from commmentards?
Abso bloody lutely
I can't see that any crime is committed. Teenagers have a perfectly healthy propensity to display their bits to each other, and this is just the tech version.
OK, if someone gets hold of the picture and uses it for blackmail etc, that's a problem, but the problem is the blackmail not the picture.
The idea that the state should even care if a teenager's friends have seen his dick, or her minge, is entirely inappropriate. What next? shagging licences? a groping tax? health warning tattoos?
Posted in A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe
Datapoint
Datapoint had a magic OS (Dos.h? dos.K?) which was agnostic about drive IDs. You defined a removable device in the form <volume label>filename.ext. During a payroll run, for example, you could knock two drives offline, spin them down, physically swap <employee details> and <timesheets>, spin up, online, and it would carry on processing from where it left off. Brilliant.
At the end of each end-of-month run we would copy the result table to a backup device so we had two copies.
or at least we thought we did. I had tested both backing up and restoring and listing the two copies, etc. without noticing that I had defined them as <wages>EOM.dat and <wages>EOM_month.dat. <wages1> remained surprisingly empty when I needed it....
Posted in Yorks PC maker goes titsup owing £1m+
normal
Same as my Dad's Grocery shop being unable to compete with Tescos 'cos they soaked up the 90% of the market who only want tinned beans and sliced bread.
Posted in A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe
doing things on the cheap
Large engineering company developing its own control system.
Decided not to spend money on hardware, gave old PDP11 to software team.
Only storage was two 10" removable hard drives. Compiler and target development done on one, backed up to the other. Software man took backup platter home each day, swapped for another one the next day. Very professional.
Team on holiday during works shutdown. Compulsory that.
During works shutdown man from Dec came to do contract maintainence. Discovered lots of things wrong with both 10" drive stacks, carefully re-aligned heads (remember eyeball diagrams?) and adjusted read/write amplifiers. Got jobcards signed.
Back on Monday Morning, and neither the system nor any of the backups could be read. 2 years of development down the tubes. Large amounts of cash wasted trying to recover data. Project cancelled. Half a million quid wasted saving the price of a new vax.
Hoo Fucking Ray
I can't abide hot weather.
yes
Jim O'Reilly is right - in a world migrating to web based services this is madness.
But
Nonesuch is right too. Woot!
I'm going with Woot. Imagine, being able to crack MSoffice in a few seconds. And, perhaps, being able to run MSoffice and have it display letters as quickly as I can type them!
Posted in HP WebOS tablet to ship early July
Sorry. HP
I've waited over a year for what turns out to be a damp squib.
Just why do you suppose I'd want to buy this?
Not in my house
Not even got a DVD player on the telly, only on my 'buntu box. When that can play Blu-rip I might consider it, but while they try to control my other purchasing decisions they can do the other thing.
Posted in Most gamers are middle-aged adults: FACT
Pink Pixels
I reckon risqué games would be as unattractive as porn. Tacky, interest lost in about 15 seconds, ultimately unsatisfying. Pink pixels are still just pixels.
But, yes. surveys are very unreliable. I know, I answer one a week for Yougov...
Title overdone
I saw the words "scoop" and "eyes" in close proximity and could not bring myself to read the story just in case...
Posted in NHS Direct
Hmm
Given the variable quality of the advice I have been given, It has already lived too long.
Half a mind
Half of my mind wants to welcome this cloudy storage idea, because I grew up in the days of dumb terminals and central mainframes and it all makes sense.
But it doesn't.
The other half of my mind says "Do you mind? that's my data. I'll be having the holding of that."
The biggest missing part of this is the internet connection. If I want to listen to Beethoven's 9th, as recorded by Leonard Bernstein after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that's around 830MB. Sat at home on my hard disk, it costs me nothing to stream 830MB. The original CD cost me £6.
Now, if I am fool enough to put it on the cloud, I will have to pay for 830MB of download every time I want to listen to it. That will be £1.08 on BT's broadband package, or £4.96 on 3's payg cellular data service. Every time I want to listen to it.
This cloudy thing might be convenient for people who don't care about data privacy, but it makes no sense until the internet is completely free.
tempting
Not sure about the hyperbole, "High Powered Mobile Computing" = Intel Celeron M, and the risk of paying £1.64 extra by not being 'quick'.
but ignoring that, yes it looks good value and nice to see someone offering a machine with no gates tax.
Tempted.
Dual?
Never mind two cores.
Never mind two cameras.
What about two sim cards?
whot?
3000 new apis? whot?
I can almost swallow 3000 new & updated system calls, but psurely an API is whole bundle of system calls giving access to a something?
3000 new system calls would be a pointless encumberance. 3000 complete APIs would be be programmer overload.
Sounds like bollox to me.
"Political Tool"
Is that another name for Michael Gove?
Ah, right
So M$ want us to buy an M$ tablet instead of a robot or fruit based one, because then we get our familiar M$ environment in which all our software runs.
Then when we get it we discover it won't run all our old software, 'cos it wants everything to be in html and magic fairy stuff.
Marketing win? or marketing drop? you decide.
quite clever
Obviously old stock they were stuck with. Bung summat lightweight and fashionable on it, sell even some of them and get some good publicity.
Good business decision, regardless of the performance you end up on them. Good for them.
HMSO
I recall HMSO supplying notepads, typewriters, desks, briefcases all alike to employment exchanges, Customs clerks in Ports, telephone exchanges and the NHS. Worked remarkably well, and remarkably efficiently. OK, a lot of things were brown, and the paper was a bit hairy, but the economies of scale were vast and simple to understand.
Bring back HMSO I say
Now, then..
What was it intel said about ending price cutting?
See?
this is what happens when you sell what people want, instead of what you've decided they can have.
Posted in Asus revamp adds tablet-phone dock
Padfone
I really fancy that. Pity about the spelling, but hey.
I'm sitting here going "ooh shiney thing", and have yet to come up with a rational reason to have one. But I reckon "ooh shiney thing" is quite a convincing arguement, really.
FFS
Here we are 20 years into the internut, and someone has got to skunk a simple voting system? Ye glods.
I propose a petition system involving crowds of villagers, flaming brands, pitchforks, and a one-rope-per-lamppost technique.
That'd get their attention, and would not need any fancy web technology.
Posted in 4G interference will knock out Freeview
Oh?
"£10 filter, which focuses the frequency received more accurately"
Look, we are techies here. We know what bandpass and bandstop filters do. Not only don't you have to spoon feed us, I'd rather you didn't spoon feed us meaningless pap.
"focuses the frequency" indeed. Been writing Dr Who scripts have we?
Posted in Qualcomm confirms Windows 8 on ARM
yes, but
How long will this take, and will anyone buy one?
you have got to read this one
http://www.barnsley.towntalk.co.uk/news/d/19732/skyline-rescue-as-barnsley-town-centre-is-shut-down/
Aye
If there's going to be a fire sale, let us have the details please, El Reg
Posted in Micron streaks away with PCIe flash
"very little processing is offloaded to the host server's processor"
? why is any offloaded to the host?
seems odd to me.
waiting for the other shoe
""The whole RISC and UNIX market remains in the doldrums with customers continuing to adopt a wait and see attitude [as they assess recent tech advances on x86, at chip and systems level, designed to boost reliability, availability and security]," [Nathaniel Martinez] told El Reg.
Nothing to do with Sun's customers having the jitters that Oracle might ditch Solaris next? honestly?
Well, quite
I don't really believe a word of it. Sounds like friday afternoon down the pub at DHSS HQ
