* Posts by Sam

6 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Apr 2008

Germans give peeking Google one in the eye

Sam
Pirate

Simon Davies?

That'd be the same Simon Davies who thinks Phorm is a good idea, presumably?

Inquirer celebrates spammer murder-suicide

Sam

Link bait

How horrific. I can't help thinking, though, that the Inquirer is just indulging in completely crass link baiting - it's exactly the sort of thing that gets picked up by other media - like El Reg - and social news sites; I wouldn't be surprised if this is making its way up the ladder of Digg and Reddit as soon as America wakes up properly. Which makes the Inquirer not just crass, but something else beginning with C, too.

O2 buckles under 3G iPhone demand

Sam
Dead Vulture

Success, sort of...

I went down to Camden at about quarter past eight, grabbed a coffee and paper and joined the queue outside the O2 store, where they were handing out tickets to mark your place in the queue - all slightly pointless, though, because the manager came back out a little while later and told us all that if we left the queue, we couldn't get our places back, ticket or no ticket.

After another half hour or so, he came back out and said that the "system had crashed" and that this had happened across all the stores, including Carphone Warehouse. At about half nine, I bailed and went to the Carphone Warehouse next door - with much shorter queues, but no one knew if they had stock - where I was dealt with in about half an hour. As I left with my phone, people who had been ahead of me in the O2 queue were still waiting outside the shop.

O2 has mismanaged this from beginning to end - first load issues with the online store, and now load issues with their in-house system. What's the betting O2 will be recruiting a load of replacement engineers after their current ones have been given their marching orders?

iPhone apps hit the racks at the iTunes store

Sam
Thumb Down

Meh

I was quite excited about Apps being released. Now I've looked at them, I'm wondering if I can even be bothered getting out of bed first thing to go and queue for an upgrade.

O2 starts 3G iPhone stampede - and runs away

Sam
Dead Vulture

Gah!

I tried a few times this morning, then the site fell over and was just going to a "maintenance" page ("Hi there, we've broken our site because we are stupid and didn't realise that thousands of people would log in at once. We'll be back later. Hopefully"). It claims to be sort of back up now, but I'm not getting anywhere further than the first page where you enter your number to get the upgrade code texted to you.

Apple punts 'Penryn' iMacs

Sam
Boffin

@ Anonymous Coward - "Overpriced"

"Apples are overpriced piles of rubbish who's real value is around the £400 mark, its only idiots who would pay 3 times the worth of an object."

See, I can understand how, when people look at just the spec of a machine, they think that. I don't know whether you've spent mcuh time using macs (for lots of people there's no real reason to, their PCs suit them fine) but I switched from a PC to a mac a few years ago, because I realised I was spending a really quite significant amount of time each month keeping my PC working. For me, the value in a mac is that I turn it on, I get on with what I need to do, and then I switch it off. There's none of the frustration I experienced with XP, wondering why things weren't working, or why the computer was doing strange things, or whether I was going to lose what I'd been working on for the past couple of hours.

In the 6 years I've owned macs I reckon I've spent about 3 hours tops on fixing technical problems. In the time I used PCs, I reckon I easily spent 3 hours a month minimum trying to get the damn thing to work properly; thinking back, it seems like it was more like 30 minutes a day, but that might just be psychological scarring. The last PC I had, I had to re-install windows three times in the space of about 6 weeks. A mac lets me get the job done, in the shortest possible time, with the least worry; it's the path of least resistance - I work largely by myself in a very small company, and time not working (yup, like time spent posting things like this...) costs me money.

So, yeah, the new iMac and Macbook Air I've just ordered might be "overpriced" but they fit my needs perfectly - sure, I might be able to get equivalent kit for £500 less, each, (though I'm not sure I can find anything equivalent to the Air). These machines will probably last me a couple of years though, so really £1000 combined "overspend" now on those two machines equates to about £9.60 a week. Call it insurance, call it a stupid tax, call it whatever you want - I'm happy to pay that upfront now, for a couple of years of stress-free computing.

Some people wouldn't be happy with that, though, because their priorities are different. Which seems to be the point a lot of people miss when they weigh in on the OMGMACS arguments.