Posts by Paul Randle

Guinness to hit three quid a pint

@ Andy Pullin

When you buy drinks in a pub, you are not just paying for the drink. You are paying for the cost of the premises, the staff, all the legal hoo-haa that goes with licenced premises, heating. lighting, security, insurance etc etc. The cost of a drink is typically about a third of the price you pay.

Health Benefits?

The idea that increasing the price of alcohol would have health benefits is absurd. People who wish to become intoxicated cheaply will simply turn to their friendly local drug dealer, who will be happy to serve them untaxed, unregulated highs at any time of the day or night.

Desktops are seen as unimportant until...

Money, Money, Money.

The best way to get the attention of non-it management to to talk to them in terms of money. They think they understand that.

If large proportion of the staff are unable to work because of computer down-time, they will be bitching to customers, suppliers, rivals and anyone else who will listen, and getting paid for it! This is a scenario that will get the attention of any sentient manager.

Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble - and why it's flawed

Upgrade?

If I buy a new PC today, I can upgrade to Ubuntu ulitmate for $0.00. This will give me better security, better multi-tasking, better memory management, and access to thousands of free-as-in-beer applications. And get a free upgrade to the next version in October. Or choose from many other free Linux distros.

Or I could just get a mac and forget about hardware, operating systems and all that religious nonsense and just get on with using it.

Cops to step up use of phone and net records

Clueless

This is a blatant attempt to justify surveillance of our every move, thought and fart, and the humungous, uncapped costs that this will entail, to store, retrieve, analyse, adminster and "protect" this data. Anyone who thinks this will increase police efficiency is away with the fairies. Our best hope is that, having wasted so much of our money on failed banks, train and car companies, there will be no cash left in the coffers to pay IBM, M$ etc, to do their dirty work.

Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM recorder

FLAC Flack

The amount of CPU power required to do real-time FLAC processing would flatten the batteries unfeasibly quickly.

AMD releases 'world's fastest' graphics card

Ram it in

Well I certainly set that cat among the penguins there!

Thanks to the guys who backed me up with facts & figures.

Ram it in or boot it out?

Since 32-bit Windows can only address 4Gb of RAM, if you put 2 of these beasts in a box, there's no RAM available for the OS. So your box won't boot.

1,076 developers, 15 years, one open-source Wine

64-bit Wine

If it only takes them 15 years to get 64-bit apps working, they'll probably get ther before M$.

MS + Yahoo! = Microhoo! - Official!

Microhoo Cares

Depending on the efficacy of the resulting entity, surely it should be either "Microhoo Scares", or "Hoo Cares".

My vote's on the latter.

Ballmer! explains! hostile! Yahoo! bid!

The most expensive suicide note in history

Perhaps I can be the first to dub this "the most expensive suicide note in history".

What M$ needs is not Yahoo!, it's users, developers, technology, staff etc.

What M$ needs is a clue. Long-time observers will know that it never has had one, and It clearly cannot generate one from its own resources

Equally clearly, whatever clue Yahoo once may have had is long absent.

This is great news for Google.