Posts by RonWheeler
219 posts • joined Saturday 3rd March 2012 11:45 GMT
In this day and age
Taxing businesses on earnings is idiotic. You either penalise the smaller companies or drive away the multinationals for whom moving elsewhere is easy. And this destroys investment in our economy and jobs.
Best to have simple income tax and VAT on people. Politicians like taxing business and stealth taxes as the proles don't understand corporation tax and the likes.
For example
. "For example, Samsung could request first or exclusive updates of new software from Android before rival hardware vendors."
They could.
Or they could do an Amazon and fork it.
Or more realistically, Google are rich/powerful enough at the moment to tell them where to shove it.
Re: My two cents
Retro scifi movie sets. good for that too.
Re: Put your money where your mouth is
Another straw man argument. Never heard of contraceptives? I don't have kids (by choice) despite having being married for 15 years..And who proposed killing anybody?
Hmmm....
We tried loading an everyday humdrum Excel 6000 row, 250 column spreadsheet into Google Apps and clients (using Chrome on a fast connection) - didn't exactly give positive feedback - on the response times to repeated filtering.
.
Re: @RonWheeler - Or...
'you appear to be offering the solution of eliminating the breeders by some form or other'
No I wasn't. Go build another straw man.
Re: Population growing exponentially ?
Evidence for this speculation?
Re: Or...
Get ye to the pulpit sirrah with thy fine invective!
Re: Or...
Quite right. The overpopulation problem doesn't exist and people ignoring facts aren't stupid and selfish after all. My mistake.
Or...
..start treating breeders like the ignorant selfish people that they are rather than congratulating them on another nail in the planet's coffin.
MCSEs
Bringing in computerized exams will very quickly lead down the path of least resistance.towards multiple-choice. Our education system is bad enough without academic success and understanding of the subject being measured in the same ridiculous manner as MCSEs.
One day..
they'll turn up at the right site at the right time with the right equipment. One day...
140 laptops onboard
Seriously, how the hell did a stupid stupid stupid (did i mention stupid) computing decision like having ONE HUDRED AND FORTY laptops onboard make it past, well, anything sane really. Did someone senior have a relative work down the local Walmart computing department and was a bit behind monthly sales targets?
Very very cool
First Pi project I've seen that makes me tempted to dig deeper (depending on cast of radio, which could sink this immediately). Roll your own femtocell....
Re: Backup Exec - DPM
It can freeze the entire system, so for small appliances it is workable. Anything running a database is likely to suffer though.For MS shops, DPM is fantastic and on charity / edu agreements, very very hard to beat on price.
Re: At the end of the day..
No, but a lot of places are Cisco-only, and to hell with the cost to the company. And there is a huge level of job protectionism in there for 'the network guy' by requiring extensive IOS-speciific knowledge to get anything done..
Hotdesking
Great when you can hotdesk and log on off the phone with your unique ID. Not so great when the CTI / presence software behind it is an antiquated pig and still has your username associated with yoru old phone's MAC address and needs a manual reset, despite the promises.
Re: They stubbed toes, I broke my leg with Backup Exec.
Agreed. Truly flaky cantankerous unreliable product. It is just about usable for some specific small jobs, like databases. Trying to backup / recover whole systems with it is sheer error-plagued soul-destroying folly.
.
Posted in Deep, deep dive: Hyper-V
Re: Why would I want Hyper-V,
If you're a Microsoft shop, it is great. Especially if you get charity/gvt/edu pricing. Can only directly compare to VMware, so
Management tools a joy to use compared to VMware's
Manage (backup/copy) your .vhd files using Windows explorer rather than needing VMFS tools
Inject changes directly into virtual machine targets from Server 2012
VSS integration is strong
It is reliable and stable
In real world usage I've seen CPU usage from 16 core host to socket capped virtual servers such as MS SQL Std,scale much better than in equivalent VMware. Won't pretend to understand how it distributes load so well from one to many, but anecdotally from me it does. On the downside it fares less well with virtual machines running many hundreds of small services/applications running concurrently (like terminal server)
It is a LOT cheaper than VMware for in most SMB scenarions, possibly for the big boys too depending on density..
Still fugly though
It is still ugly and blocky with garish nasty colours. The Lumias quite appeal as GPS is important to me and I find low end Androids a sluggish mess, but the pure uglyness of the Windows offering puts me off every time I consider a (say) 620.
.
Time
Pah! Call that facial hair growth...
2 days = heavy stubble
5 days = beard
10 days = sky fairy fanatic
you mean a regular SMTP server...
With SMTP it is fundamentally easy to forge the source. Not Microsoft's fault.
PocketPC 2003
Given I was managing a fleet of these things 10 years ago and only Palm were the competition, I'm not surprised MS has a large stack of patents. At least they made stuff unlike most of these trolls.
Re: Neanderthal DNA
The skin or the bit inside?
Re: Office 365's licensing model
Some people aren't home users.
Peak hysteria
Peak hysteria for these things was around the iphone 3 / ipad 2 mark. Now everybody has seen the things and owning one no longer makes your an artistic progressive intellectual forward-thinking liberal.
That plus for normal people that actually use the devices rather than just show off, there isn't much in the way of killer apps that won't run on last year's hardware..
Re: Famine?
Beat that strawman, yeah!
Important style question
Can I now use linux if I don't have a ponytail?
Famine?
We're blaming the wrong thing for the problem. The real issue is overpopulation. We've got 7 billion people now and can barely feed them. We're so past the point of being able to sustain the human race ina sustainable way it isn't funny.
Less people would make all osrts of renewables work as a viable proposition, but apparently the right to spew your offspring over the planet is beyond question...
Re: About what I expected
I'm quite looking forward to the HTC First as it will probably be quite cheap (as in subsidized) and the FB app can be uninstalled easily to revert to vanilla Android.
Average 13 inch laptops
Average 13 inch laptops these days re much thinner and lighter than they used to be too. I suspect that portability has cannibalised a lot of the potential netbook market share too. The difference of a couple of mm between a poser toy ultrabook and most mainstream laptops is often minimal now.
Having said that, my old netbook is still going strong and goes on holiday with me every time.
Re: A lack of federal judges too
Cos the Dems have never tried that sort of tactic, have they?
Re: Multiple desktops on windows...
Thanks - just tiried it on my screenspace-deficient netbook and works a treat.
Face it, vinyl sucks
Dust, scratches, pain in the ass to use. The only context in which it was good was as compared to Ferrous cassette tapes played through cheap Dolby decks. If people nowadays get off on the nostalgia experience, good for them, but let us not kid ourselves that it is in any rational way a good medium.
Re: Profiteering
Paper costs very little. Typesetting, printing, distribution and warehousing plus overheads cost a mint.
I'd pay a small fee
...similar to the way they do with now DVDs and CDs, just to get ebooks. Perhaps that could somehow reimburse the publishers on a better per loan rate? Frankly if they closed the local library and had ALL the material available as ebooks instead, I wouldn't care. Better choice, no transport cost (if online), better format (useful for poor sighted). As long as it were in a platform neutral format. Save money and give a better service.
Meh
I'm not going to run out and bin my XP netbook just because official support has ended. Decent router plus no java plus AV plus Chrome equals minimal risk for personal use.
Re: telcos dont really need to worry
Disagree - they still pay. They're just stupid and doh't realise they're being royally shafted on poor value loans.
Buzzword bingo anyone?
Surprised no webdev hack has created some sort of buzzword bingo site based on the Reg
....or more usefully, a buzzmeter plugin so I can compare ratio of BS words (cloud / Gartner / xaaS / tablet) against norm. Done well I could filter all the sales hype from tech site affiliates automatically.
Re: Bioshock Infinite & Steam!
Worked OK on steam for me on my midrange hardware.
The rather pretentious posturing backstory can be very annoying at times.- I found the tannoys constantly taking the mick out of dumb right wing gibberish simply annoying. On the plus-side the Elizabeth sidekick is the highpoint of the game. Gameplay mechanics are very, very old school with virtually no interaction with the pretty environments. You can look, you can't change much or interact, or even sneak - just shoot.
Dishonored is a far far better game IMO.
Re: Good
I get the point, but...... PCs are the best tool for playing videos. My mini-itx behind the telly is a superb device precisely because I can put all sorts of codecs, TV tuners and whatever the heck I like on it. And more importantly remove the crud I don't like.
To me the death of the home PC is great cos it means I don't get as many freebie callouts by relatives. Most people are too inept to be allowed out of the walled garden.
Dogfight
Usually it ends up being a dogfight with s/he who shouts loudest and has the biggest stick gets what they want, even if it is the wrong thing. And everyone else takes the blame for the shortcomings. Talk all you like about good working practices, the people who get what they want are those who don't follow them.
Tinfoil hats
Seem to be a must-have fashion item round here.
In a world where unencrypted email is the day to day reality, the abilty of 'security professionals' to make balanced views of risk seems a litte off.
Re: Cisco is the problem, Skype is good enough
Media gateways that cost megabucks are a requirement in almost all deployments of Cisco + other vendor. More hidden costs. Yeah, you can get Cisco TP to work, but only if your company really likes throwing money away so you can be a 'Cisco house'.
Cisco is the problem, Skype is good enough
Cisco costs silly money and they don't play nice with anyone else. But they always get first shot at the quote cos that is what the infrastructure 'experts' recommend so they get to play with their serial cables. Have put Skype into several offices and actual users are happy because thy can communicate with 'normal' third parties on their home laptop; It is 'good enough' for inter-office - just create a skype account for each endpoint. The upper end of home user webcams are good enough these days, and voice lag issues are best overcome simply by using a regular conference phone for audio.
Here is why
With RSS I can get text only information without all the flash/adverts etc html crap. Also most sites have specific areas / subsites that could be read without going via the main landing page. In short, I tend to use RSS like a constantly updating index.
Precis
Give everyone an iPhone! They're soooooooo cool.
First iGoogle, now this
So last year I spent an age transferring all my RSS stuff over from iGoogle to Reader. Shouldn't have bothered - they're killing this too. Won't be trusting Google any more with any hosted services. Tempted to close our work Postini account too so we can implement a graceful exit strategy before they pull the rug out from under us there.
Re: Whoa - massive unsubstatiated assumption here
Most users feel sitting on Facebook, What app and Twitter all day is highly productive use of their time.
4%?
I call shenanigans.
The only way the 4 percent make sense is if you count ovens and tumbledryers as IT because they have chips somewhere in them. I suspect the figures are based on the same sort of BS as aircon engineers who come round measuring each workstation as being 400 watts for quotation purposes.
