Posts by jim

Windows 7 boss predicts 'modest' initial shipments

not gonna happen

Matt Ashworth: That won't happen, not at $100 for an upgrade. There might be significant interest at $25.

don't buy hype

Something I've learned in 25 years in the tech business (I hear the groans): never buy any product based on claims of compatibiility with something that isn't available yet. The promised compatibility never, evern materialize - you always end up with some lousy second-rate kludge.

Xandros - the Linux company that isn't

they blew it so royally...

... with the ASUS EEE, that I still shudder at the name "Xandros". I had to ebay my 701 (with Xandros) and buy a 900 with XP. Now I can do all sorts of wild and crazy things - like install new programs, or configure my desktop. I have a future! And Linux has a past.

Best Buy leaked memo spills Windows 7 upgrade details

$100 ? not me

Who would pay $100 for this upgrade? Try $25.

Oh wait it's a "new operating system". Cough.

Microsoft, Asus launch anti-Linuxbook campaign

Linux is nowheresville, baby

I gave Xandros a shot. No support whatsover from ASUS - you got questions, go to a forum and beg. I really tried to like Linux but it was just w-a-y too much of a hassle. Want to download a new application, install it, maybe put an icon on your desktop? Good luck with that. Nothing but fingers pointed in all directions.

I got XP and never looked back. What Linux needs is a responsible adult, somewhere, to put together a unified, completely supported OS out of all the fragments of distributions, toolkits, libraries and other open-source wet dreams out there now. And with a unified, discoverable GUI for configuration and maintainance instead of a Black Forest of configuration files.

Google Wave - interwebs idealism in real-time

bad UI

Google's UI designs are invariably burdened with too many borders, tabs and toolbars. They just don't play on netbooks.

Windows 7: MS plays a Jedi mind trick on netbook owners

they've gotta be kidding

Just when you thought maybe MS had been sufficiently chastised by the reaction to Vista, and that W7 might be a new direction - they come up with something like this 3-application version for Netbooks. Unbelievable. No one will buy this. Absolutely no one.

I'll just run XP on my ASUS 900 forever. Screw it.

Life hands Sun steaming sack of...

hold the profanity please

I find it somehow depressing to read tech news laced with gratuitous profanity. It makes the business seem dumb and ordinary. Sorry to see then Register heading down this path.

Congress mulls stringent data retention rules

insanity

And exactly how is the counter person in a coffee shop, or a librarian, supposed to accomplish this? I can picture router manufacturers and Best Buy (aka "Geek Squad" ) seeing the dollar signs and lobbying for this insanity, big-time.

Windows 7 'upgrade' doesn't mark XP spot

gotta be kidding

And they think the big corporate users who wouldn't buy Vista are now going to wipe every hard drive in the office and buy W7?

Microsoft SKUs Windows 7 clarity

merge with GM

Microsoft should move to Detroit. That's where dinosaurs go to die.

Intel shows Visual Studio multi-threaded way

if the price is right

If this product carries a typical $500 price tag, it will sink without a trace. If Intel wants to drive multi-core processor sales - and these plugins actually help - they should be free.

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

I tried. Really,.

I bought an ASUS EEE with Xandros Linux and made a serious effort to get into it. I hit the wall after about 2 days of posting forlorn messages on various forums, trying unsuccessfully to install FireFox 3 when it came out. Not long after that, I Ebayed it and bought one running Windows.

Linux will remain exactly where it is until some for-profit company offers a complete unified "distribution" where all the updates come from one source, with a GUI that lets me configure everything. An OS that lets me -out ot the box - browse to a web site, download a program, install it and get an icon on my desktop.

Until then, it stays where it is - in the back rooms of IT, out of site. Don't even try to argue with me, I spent many hours trying to learn to like this thing and it's not going to happen.

Clickfree Backup external hard drive

wrong word

The word you wanted is "regimen", not "regime".

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regimen

Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C905 eight-megapixel cameraphone

megapixel hype

I wish tech journalists and reviewers would learn a bit about digital cameras instead of mindlessly repeating the vendors' hype. 8 MP behind a cheap pea-sized lens is of no value; in fact it's a liability it's just sucking up storage because the resulting images are larger.

RIAA won't sue, but will throttle

how in God's name can this be happening...

.. that a private company thinks it can simply packet-sniff my internet traffic and compel another company to stop doing business with me? If I told the US Post Office that I'd peeked at my neighbors mail, decided he was doing mail fraud and demanded his mail service be cut off, how much luck would I have? And which one of us would be most likely to be prosecuted?

Google hints at the End of Net Neutrality

It may not be "wrong" but...

... deals like this make it even harder to compete with Google. And ultimately, "search" is a lot more important than YouTube. There's a public interest in having internet search be unbiased, which means un-commercialized.

I'd say this resembles, in some significant ways, the deals Microsoft made with PC OEMs to create the Windows monopoly. Pre-loading the OS on the PC is analogous to ISPs having direct pipes to Google.

Google is setting itself up to be the next abusive monopoly that needs to be taken down.

A380 too quiet, moan Emirates pilots

well boo hoo hoo

Previous poster said it all with "welcome to our world, pilots".

Merseyside plant to punch out Chevy Volt

2 years?

2011? Might as well be 2111. They're simply advertising vehicles they don't have, in hopes we'll buy the ones they do have. I'm already tired of looking at computer-generated images of the Volt.

Visual Studio 2010 - reading the Redmond runes

gee thanks

Oh yeah "business alignment", thanks so much for that stuff. Hey I wonder if it tracks "lines of code written" or just lets me know which "feature" I'm supposed to be "coding" that day.

Reg readers in Firefox 3 lovefest

further

If you try these browsers on an ASUS EEE PC, with a slow CPU and a flash drive, you'll see how much faster than IE Opera really is.

The interesting thing to me is not that Microsoft has been passed up by Opera and Firefox. It's that the gap is increasing. Microsoft has many brilliant people but is today a huge multi-headed bureaucracy.

Hotmail holdouts grumble about 'pathetic' new interface

I've seen the future, and it's advertising

Ultimately, all "free" services like Hotmail are about pushing ads. The idea is that the longer you use the service, the harder it would be to leave, hence the more ads you'll put up with. The ad banners will continue to get bigger and more intrusive.

Asus to phase out sub-10in Eee PCs, says CEO

Xandros = boat anchor

The first one I bought was the 701 with Xandros. I'm a Windows guy but I thought I'd get to like Linux. Big mistake. No support, no updates, no communication, Changing or installing anything meant 2 days of Googling and begging for help on forums.

After a couple of months I Ebayed it and got an XP model. Sad, but now I have a useful, maintainable system.

I think ASUS just wanted to get MS to the bargaining table, by pretending to get behind Linux. They bought a one-time paste-up from Xandros and drop-shipped it to customers.

they all succumb to 'bloat'

I'm typing this on an ASUS 900 (8.9" screen, flash drive) that I carry around on my bicycle. Wouldn't dream of buying a 10" HD model.

Manufacturers simply can't resist the siren song telling them that every new model has to be bigger and "more powerful". Sorry to see ASUS is no exception. No one actually thinks this is a good idea, including most of the people at ASUS; it's just marketing hysteria that's impossible to beat back.

Other manufacturers will fill the gap, real fast.

Windows 7 early promise: Passes the Vista test

nail on head

IGnatius T Foobar, that's it in a nutshell. MS has never felt that they need to produce a WIndows product that end users actually "like" or "want". It's always push rather than pull, based on their confidence in their big corporate and OEM license agreements.

they'll never get it

So it's right on schedule to become the big bomb that everyone is predicting.

"Chunky icons".

UAC and those endless 'notifications' need to GO AWAY, not be 'configurable' i.e. even more complicated than it is now. People who can't cope with that cr@p today won't be figuring out how to "change their notification settings".

MS absolutely cannot grasp that the market wants less OS, not more.

Eee PC series to get Windows 7 but not Vista, says CEO

refl

I'm not sure why the writer says the returns are "no reflection on Linux". I bought one expecting to like Linux and Ebayed it a few months later after an unsuccessful 2-day struggle to update FireFox. In a nutshell, Linux was just one huge pain in the @ss.

Apparently a lot of people think Xandros is at fault, but hey. Not gonna hand-edit any more configuration files or hunt for any more "distros", thanks very much.

Google ends gambling ad self-denial

hear no evil?

It's entertaining to watch the slow, gradual, relentless corruption of Google.

Linux risks netbooks defeat to Microsoft

like being in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic

A few months ago I bought an ASUS EEE with Xandros Linux. I was pumped about finally cutting the cord to MS. What a letdown. Absolutely zero support from ASUS, or Xandros, nothing but finger-pointing in every direction. Trying to install something new, or configure the system differently, turned out to be an enormous pain, a lengthy 'scavenger hunt' of Googleing on forums, repositories, incompatible packages, semi-defunct open-source projects, conflicting information, trial-and error...

As soon as it's cheap and easy to do so, I'll be putting XP on this system and getting on with my life, and LInux will remain right where it's been for the last 15 years.

Putting a mule on a cloud: one man's battle with Amazon S3

non technical

Interesting that someone capable of using FTP and updating a web site is today called a "non-technical" person.

Microsoft pledges to fight Vista 'myths'

give us what we want

Oliver Jones (above) said it all. Linux is basically great for fiddling with Linux. I say this as the owner of an EEE PC who hoped to discover that Linux was the ticket. Um no, it's definitely not. Maybe someday...

Microsoft, pull out of this slump for God's sake. Give us something we WANT. Faster, smaller, lower power consumption. CUT THE BOOT TIME TO A FRACTION of what it is now. Drop UAC. Drop DRM. Put the 'up level' button back in Explorer. Quit patronizing me, quit telling me what to do, quit trying to rope me into someone else's money-making schemes.

Dell, HP, Acer, the rest of you OEMs - drop the shovelware crap, just install the OS and get outta my FACE, thank you..

Otherwise you guys are going to see Apple slowly eat the entire pie.

Microsoft says ‘hasta la vista XP’ - well, kinda

impact

We need an asteroid impact to kill off this dinosaur.

Microsoft seeds HP PCs with Live Search

one more reason not to buy

As if I needed another reason not to buy a cr@pware-loaded system from HP or Dell.

And paying OEMs to force your products on their customers is now called "marketing"?