* Posts by Eddie

16 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2008

Microsoft conjures imaginary 'Apple Tax'

Eddie
Boffin

My 2p

R. Kay sounds like the sort of bloke you want to punch in the face, 5 minutes after meeting him.

After nigh on 20 years of PC/Microsoft and 2 years of Mac/OSX my analogy would be Windows is like buying a pair of cheap shoes, a size too small you see in a sale - initially nice, followed by years of pain. Mac/OSX is like paying for a pair of handmade Brogues, a little pain in the wallet maybe, but years of walking on air.

MS hardly need to pay Kay for drivel like this, 97% of computer buyers are clueless (the other 1% need DirectX 10 and build their own). The first thing most PC buyers will tell you is how cheap their PC was, followed by some specs - 320gb of memory, dual channel processors, 4meg DVD player, or whatever the PC World salesman told them.

Best 3 thing about my Macs, 1. Silence when on, 2. Hibernate properly, instant on. 3. TimeMachine.

What I hate about my remaining Windows boxes, 1. The fucking racket coming from the fans. 2. Waiting for them to boot. 3. XP throws a wobbly, just as I'm pondering doing a backup.

Bottom line is this: As a professional Web Developer, using Macs/OSX are worth at least £10k a year to me in productivity, MS would have to pay me £20k a year to use their shite, so Kay can put that in his spreadsheet next time and see how the numbers balance.

Life's too short to wear shitty shoes, drink cheap wine or use a crap OS.

eBay revenues defy worldwide army of bitter users

Eddie

No surprises here

Ebay's the top choice for people selling off all the baubles and trinkets they've bought on credit cards over past few years to now pay the mortgage/fuel bill/taxes. Expect profits next year to slide as the supply of nearly new tat dries up.

IPS ditches e-passport system

Eddie
Coat

Only £10.8m

to develop a website to fill in a form and take a payment, damn those low-budget developers - I'd want at least £25m for such a complicated project. Maybe I can interest the local council in a one-page static html for £100k?

Apple sued over Mighty Mouse

Eddie
Stop

Tick tock

Why has it taken M&M so long to get round to sueing Apple?

Apple's MM has been around a while, surely someone at M&M noticed this. If you're going to defend a trademark surely some sort of promt action is required, not sit around for a few years waiting for your "competitor" to build market share then demand your pound of flesh.

Dixons admits 'it's even worse than you thought'

Eddie

Success!

I boycotted Pricey C*nts World/Dixons/Currys back in 1991 after the manager of the local Currys refused to do anything remotely connected to the Sale Of Goods Act after a £17 kettle exploded not 2 weeks from purchase. Even though it had black scorch marks he would have to send to the manufacturer to have it tested and repaired. (Said he wasn't qualified to take it out back and boil a cup of tea with it - doesn't surprise me). Told him I wanted a new kettle or £17 - something fit for the purpose of boiling water, couldn't do that.

Life is too short to argue, so bought a replacement at ASDA and so far have managed to spend £0.00 at DSG in the last 17 years.

I just hear horror stories from others now (the ones who ignored my advice not to shop there), like the Packard Bell piece of shit that was so badly designed it ran at 50% speed due to thermal overload just looking at the BIOS.

If you must buy gear at DSG:

1. It is a Sunday and you need it immediately.

2. Know the Sale of Goods Act verbatim - you will need it.

The invisible pile of steaming crap icon.

Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler?

Eddie
Pirate

1st NASA graph

Why has nobody noticed the first NASA graph has a wonky scale - below 0 degrees it's in 1 degree steps, then above 0 it's only tenths of a degree - no wonder it shoots up so dramatically. Classic!

Not being a climate scientist I can't help notice the supposed increase/decrease are less than 1 degree from average WORLD temperature, yet in the places we actually measure the annual temperature ranges from -40C in the chilly bits to +40C in the odd desert, so how can anyone say what the actual annual temperate is? Some of the august climate change bodies say around 13C, some say 16C, so +/-1 degree seems irrelevant.

Furthermore I presume the latest satellite measuring equipment is more accurate than some bloke looking at a thermometer in the 1920's.

BTW I personally might do something when Al Gore stops spending $30k a month on electric & gas for his mansion - he doesn't seem too bothered about CO2 emissions - I will follow his lead.

MPs get £2k home cinema on taxpayers

Eddie
Paris Hilton

Who voted for this greedfest?

I'm pretty sure it wasn't the majority of UK voters.

Paris, because she also has the skills for wafting through life at other people's expense with no obvious talent.

Porsche to challenge London CO2 penalty in court

Eddie
Joke

My solution

Is keep your French Porsche in London and your English Porsche at your house in France. Save on parking fines, speeding tickets, road tax too. LOL.

How believable are government claims on ID cards?

Eddie
Stop

And the cost

Did the survey mention the ID card fiasco would cost £20bn+ to the taxpayer and the Government would probably lose all the ID data at some point before asking the questions?

We might need that money to bail out some more banks before too long.

Or the UK could have single handedly build 2 full scale prototype fusion reactors with the ID card money - it's taken 10 years and most of the world's economies to stump up the £10bn to build one in France.

ISPs demand record biz pays up if cut-off P2P users sue

Eddie
Coat

1908 all over again

When the British Red Flag Manufacturers Institute tried to get a law passed that all car manufacturers should confiscate their customers cars because they were exceeding 4mph and depriving their members of flag selling revenue, and 100's of flag carriers would be out of work.

It's thanks mainly to the "downloaders" and their quest for more speed we have anything above 1mb connections now. The knock on effect to the UK economy from higher speeds far exceeds the piffling £1bn the BPI claim they're losing.

If a law was passed and could actually be made to work, most people would be renewing their connections at far less speed & cost. Filesharers will be the driving force for fibre to the home and even more speed - the bloody useless Government isn't doing anything about keeping the UK in the 21st century.

A second point the Government need to ponder if such law was passed is suddenly half the population becoming wise to encryption and using proxies - not just for nabbing a few torrents but all Internet use - they'd have to spend a £1trillion upgrading GCHQ to keep reading our emails, etc.

I'll get my coat now and I think I'll do 80mph down the motorway after just paying the plumber cash in hand for fixing the boiler. I'm a bad boy :-)

Automated crack for Windows Live captcha goes wild

Eddie
Alert

Cretins

It's fascinating that in 2008 there are sufficient imbeciles still opening email from folk they don't know with stupid email addresses and subject headers, reading the usually idiotic message, then following any links to dodgy websites, then getting their credit cards out to buy penis enlargement pills, viagra or other drugs or stocks/shares in unheard of companies.

Brits split on ID cards

Eddie

Another Survey

1. £18bn+ for a ropey database with all your details on it & ID card to carry round.

2. £15bn to BT to replace all the copper phone lines with fibre and move the country into the 21st Century.

MPs squeeze science back onto select committee list

Eddie
Coat

Phil Willis!!

Why is a pensioner MP with no science qualifications in charge of a science committee, and I'd presume out of the 14 he was the best suited or the youngest?

Probably all sit around discussing the warm sounds they get from their radiograms and should they recommend building a thermonic valve factory in Dudley while trousering £30k+ a year in "expenses" for this extra workload.

I'll get my coat.

HP plunks 16GB SSD drive into slim business PCs

Eddie
Paris Hilton

Call that slim?

It should be hieght of the silver bit on the bottom or just make a laptop without a screen and keyboard.

What software does a receptionist run that requires a Core 2 Duo?

Paris could have done it better! :-)

100Mbit/s sewer broadband rollout coming your way

Eddie
Alert

Only £15bn!

£50bn to prop up an incompetent, greedy bank

£20bn+ for some half-arsed ID scheme

or £15bn for BT to cover the country in fibre?

I know what I'd like the lazy, incompetent bunglers at Westminster to piss my taxes away on.

It was the MacBook Air sub-notebook

Eddie

4200rpm HD!

What is the slowest, cheapest hard drive doing in a premium product? A 4200rpm drive kills any laptop performance - upgrade any laptop to a 7200rpm and watch the overall performance double.

The problem with any laptop is all the other clutter you have to carry round with you - power supply brick, proper mouse to do something useful, cables and adaptors, etc.