Posts by RonWheeler 567 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Mar 2012
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.
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?
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..
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..
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...
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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