Posts by boe

Microsoft takes a pruning axe to Skype's forest of features

Does the register get paid directly by Peter Skillman!?! If you go to the skype forum HOSTED BY MS you'll see that virtually NO ONE LIKES THE NEW SKYPE. Please, I IMPLORE YOU read the forums and even his own twitter account before regurgitating what Peter tells you to say. The new skype 8 is an abomination and all the features no one users are posted over an over and over again to return - including the ability to just make skype call without it dropping sound or dropping completely. Skype 8 is a turd from top to bottom and I'm not just one person - thousands of people are complaining about the new skype on many forums including MS' own web page - how did you miss this. You've posted a number of articles and my guess is you've never used skype or you'd know what rubbish the product is.

The general consensus is to roll back to 7, skip 8 and fire Skillman.

Seagate's shingle bathers stalked by HGST's helium HAMR-head sharks

Platter obsolete

So what I've learned from this -

1. Seagate is about 4 years behind on HAMR tech as they announced many years ago it was just around the corner.

2. Seagate is having a hard time getting costs down, performance up and a viable consumer market production drive.

3. Even with the new tech Seagate is going to have a hard time getting storage capacity higher any time soon.

4. I better PRAY that SSD storage capacities quadruple in the near future while cost per GB drops significantly.

5. Seagate better have a transition plan to go completely SSD or they'll be out of business within 7 years.

Marry Microsoft, analyst tells Nokia

Exclusivity is a recipe for disaster

Nokia doesn't think outside their eurobox. Their opinion is you can have any car you want as long as it is black (Ford). Nokia thinks what works for Europe is what should work for the rest of the world. Nokia's phones have some nice designs but that is based on some really weak processors - probably not good for WP7.

Nokia doesn't seem to understand why CDMA phones in the US should be important since they use GSM over there and the CDMA market is "too small" to chase after.

I honestly wish Nokia would consider changing their OS, changing their attitude towards foreign markets, up their platform specs but that is about as likely as MS asking end users what features they want in Windows 8.

Intel to intro next-gen netbook Atom on 10 January?

Not fast enough

What about SPEED? I just set up a Vaio X laptop for a client and it was very sleek but too slow at 2GHz. Any news on faster atom procesors or 64bit Atom processors? As far as I heard the new processor is 1.6 GHz only and a 1.8 GHz processor will be released later.

Bill Buxton to change Microsoft from within, hug Steve Ballmer

Hugs from Steve Ballmer are always from behind

Anyone else here notice when Steve Ballmer gives you a hug it is always from behind? I think he learned his hugging technique in the prison showers.

I'm pretty sure when everyone told Ballmer Vista sucked he blatantly ignored us and told us it was "the most popular" version of Windows. Pretty sure when 200,000 people signed a petition to keep XP we weren't getting the hug we wanted. Pretty sure when we told Balmer that the new "powershell commands" AKA DOS commands in Exchange 2007 were indeed nifty we wanted the GUI interface back so we wouldn't need dedicated exchange engineers to know arcane spells to work on the exchange server Steve wasn't giving us a good hug in return.

I don't know about you but I think in grammar school they told us if a Uncle hugged us the way Steve likes to hug us we should tell the authorities. I'm pretty sure if a child psychologist asked us where Steve was "hugging" us we would have to point to an add spot on the doll.

IBM's eight-core Power7 chip to clock in at 4.0GHz

Vista comments boring

As boring as Vista comments may be - I'm glad so many people are dinging Vista for bad performance everywhere they can. While anyone who is even a junior level IT person knows Vista sucks donkey balls, a lot of people who don't know much about computers are still stunned when they find out vista is crap. They say things like - isn't Vista newer than XP - assuming it will perform better. Then their are MS Fanboys who have replaced their 10 year old PC that was running XP and hasn't been reformatted in 5 years with a new Core 2 system with a couple of gigs of memory running Vista and they think it is the Vista that is making it run OK - not knowing that that new machine with XP would run faster.

Why do I want people to ding Vista - not because I hate MS - on the contrary I've been supporting MS products for over 20 years now. What I hate is Ballmer ignoring the complaints of IT professionals, IT journalists, the public in general and just saying Vista runs fine - it is all in your imagination - look how many vista licenses I've sold (ignoring the fact they originally forced vendors to sell PCs with Vista only until the hardware manufacturers rebelled, ignoring the fact people are buying Vista licenses but using them to upgrade to XP, ignoring the fact they have their first class action against a bad OS, ignoring the fact they had a petition from over 200,000 people saying they preferred XP over Vista etc etc.)

Still seems sluggish while running Vista

Better luck next time

Intel lands Cray

Supercomputer - finally a computer that runs Vista well

I think they are planning for people who are forced to use Vista so they are trying to come up with a platform that can handle the rediculous demands of Vista.

Windows Server 2008 is better than Vista, but why?

I second the question about 2k3 vs 2k8

I would like to see some benchmarks comparing 2003 R2 to 2008.

I here a rumor not sure if there is any truth that 2008 does not have DRM built in so it is faster- not sure who asked for it to be built into Vista - hopefully they'll skip in in Windows 7 or leak a patch on how to remove it from Vista if that is the cause for the incredibly bad performance with Vista.

Windows Vista update 'kills' USB devices

Keep XP alive

Fortunately you can still sign the petition to keep XP alive until a better OS from MS comes out

http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/

All that is necessary for the triumph of Vista is that good IT men do nothing

Windows better off closed, says Microsoft

Ballmer is a afraid someone will fix Vista

I think Ballmer is afraid some overseas 17 year old kid will figure out why Vista is so slow, come out with a patch and make MS look bad because their whole team of developers couldn't make Vista a viable alternative to XP. Frankly, if he wants those bogus sales numbers for copies of Vista sold Ballmer keeps using (even though they were on PC's that MS strongarmed retailers to put on their PCs even though end users wanted XP and Ballmer never calculated all the people who upgraded from Vistat to XP since they were forced to give the XP license for free to dissatisfied Vista users), Ballmer should let someone fix the turd that is Vista.