Posts by Geoff Campbell

Apple girds loins for 'obscene iPad sales surge'

@AC

Hardly any?

OK, this is purely anecdotal, but I threw a big party last weekend, as we do every August Bank Holiday. Just about everyone who comes along is connected to the IT inductry at first or second remove, and there's a lot of gadget freaks, because those are the circles I move in.

I didn't do a formal count, but I know for a fact there were three EeePad owners, one HP Touchpad owner (full price), two HP Touchpad owners (fire-sale, and probably thus not relevant), one Galaxy Tab owner, and one owner of multiple cheap chinese knock-offs. And about 7 iPad owners.

From that extremely small sample, I would have to draw the conclusion that Apple aren't having it all their own way.

GJC

HTC outs 'Mango' WinPho 7 smartphones

I have one.

I've got an HTC HD7. I like Windows Phone 7, although by choice I use an Android phone day to day. Overall I'd give it a cautious thumbs-up, it has a very nice UI and all the major features seem to be there - Mango should be even better, given the time it's been in development.

GJC

Ford unwraps Evos cloud-connected concept car

Uh-huh

Actually, modern Fords are some of the best value for money cars on the roads today. But do keep spreading the bollocks, won't you? It keeps the prices nice and low for those of us who appreciate a bargain.

GJC

UBS tells IT contractors: Take a 10% pay cut ... or 100%

Absolutely

As a contractor of several decades standing, my response to any attempt to reduce rates is "Bye-bye", especially if it's done mid-contract. At renewal, well, fine, it's just part of negotiations, but there is a contract in place for a reason, and attempting to reduce the rates paid is a breach of contract.

GJC

appToyz appWheel

Most kind.

But I wish I hadn't put a typo right in the middle of a criticism of someone else's cock-up. One day I shall learn to proof-read.

GJC

Frisby

It's just occurred to me that this device should make it possible to throw an iPhone *really* far away. Result!

GJC

And for a tenner....

....I expect someone who could tell the different between a percentage rating and a price.

Just saying, like.

GJC

VW Scirocco BlueMotion Technology TDI 140

The review says Band C for road tax

So definitely not 100% deductible.

GJC

Ultra-cheap HP TouchPads to hit UK at 6pm

Yes, they are genuine

Predictably, of course, the web sites for all retailers crashed. I got one into my cart on PCWorld, to find they don't deliver, and then Dixons, which got dumped when the system went down. Finally bagged one from Carphone Warehouse, shortly before they sold out.

GJC

Googlola's closed source Android temptation

@Nonesuch

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find this is under way already. Makes obvious business sense for Google, to my mind.

GJC

UCAS website collapses - on results day

@AC

You might want to look at Compuware's selection of APM products before announcing that you don't know jack shit about the market, perhaps?

GJC

Apple changed shape of Galaxy Tab in court filing

@AC

The Palm Pilot had rounded corners and a grid of icons years before the poxy bloody iPad. Apple don't innovate, they steal and stifle. Worse than Microsoft, and perhaps this will be the case they get properly slapped down for. We can live in hope.

GJC

Icebergs measured in Manhattans: Official

Depends....

....on the size of the Gins & Tonics in question.

GJC

Seagate's flash-disk hybrid crosses the chasm

It Just Works

The cache is built into the drive controller, so it appears as a single SATA HDD to the machine.

GJC

That's pretty much what it does, AIUI.

The caching is quite intelligent, I'm not sure of the exact details.

GJC

Works really well.

I've got a 320GB unit in my laptop, cuts boot and program load times right down.

GJC

One per cent of world's web browsing happens on iPad

Oh, I'm not worried at all.

Just curious, really. Pointing out that web traffic is just a subset of overall internet traffic is a statement of fact, why would someone downvote it? Just seems odd to me.

GJC

See what I mean?

What *possible* reason could there be for down-voting a statement of the bleedin' obvious like that? Some people here need to get a life....

GJC

That's pretty dumb.

The figure isn't "about right". It's exactly right, what with having been measured by traffic volumes an' all. If we were talking about opinions or interpretations, of course there would be room for debate.

The debate now is what 1% actually means. My call? Diddly squat.

Ah, more down-votes. How comforting :-)

GJC

1% of web traffic, not 1% of internet traffic.

The difference is quite significant.

GJC

Staggeringly huge?

Is that actually true? We live in an era of very, very rapid churn of devices. Laptops, phones, PCs all get replaced on a 2-3 year cycle, so I would expect take-up of new form factors to be pretty rapid.

GJC

Man battles police siege with Facebook

Downvotes-a-go-go

I'm noticing lots of light-hearted or plain factual comments attract down-votes currently. Methinks some visitors are taking the whole thing rather too personally.

GJC

Stupid police.

Surely the first thing to do in a siege is to cut off outside communication? Phone lines can be cut, and 3G/2G data channels can be jammed or disabled locally.

But no, they didn't think about this, because they have guns. People with guns don't think, have you noticed?

GJC

Dealers' outrage at Microsoft Office 365 cloud-sales plans

I'm sure Office 365 is wonderful....

....but until it supports 64 bit installations, I'm unlikely to find out.

C'mon, Microsoft, WTF are you thinking?

GJC

The real reason most source is closed? Open is hard

Hang on just a second there, hoss....

Corporations develop internal software to gain a business advantage over other corporations. They often spend very large sums of money to do this, having first reasoned that this expenditure will save them significantly more than they spend.

Why in the name of all that is holy would they then give away this commercial advantage to other corporations, a good number of whom will be competing either directly or indirectly for the same business? Makes no sense at all, and is, I suspect, a mere pipe dream of open source evangelists.

GJC

Apple, Google, Microsoft seek gargantuan tax break

"Ever" complain?

Here in the UK, they complain continually, whilst pulling similar aerobatic moves to avoid paying taxes. Taxes, it seems, are things that other companies pay.

GJC

Formula 1

Twonk

It is just possible, I suppose, that the iPhone app is an exact facsimile of the Android app. Had this not occurred to you?

GJC

Captain Cyborg: Computers are alive, like bats or cows

I would

If, and only if, there was any point to it. And there was no point to it, he didn't push the boundaries of medical or cybernetic knowledge any further forward, it was all completely average ho-hum, seen-it-before, no-advance-here stuff that was known to be perfectly safe. All it achieved, and all he wanted to achieve, was a load of publicity from a press that didn't understand what he was doing.

GJC

What a twonk that man is.

I have no point to make, I just wanted to air my opinion of him again.

GJC

Can Big Blue survive another century?

One of the quickest Godwins I've ever seen....

....and I've seen a few.

Happy birthday, Big Blue. Somehow, it wouldn't have been the same without you.

GJC

When tuning the server, don't forget the network

Absolutely!

I've been doing application profiling for more years than I care to admit to (actually decades rather than years, now), and always when we get called in the message is "we know the network is slow, come and prove it". In all those many years, network bandwidth has been the culprit twice.

Other times, quite often, latency is the issue, due to badly designed client/server software. Mostly, it's just crap software.

GJC

O2 won't touch BlackBerry fondleslab for now

Ah, yes....

....probably because their data network can't take any extra strain, collapsing on its arse as it currently is.

GJC

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Android tablet

3G

Coming Real Soon Now, I hear. But I decided to stop stressing about it, and tether everything to my phone via the excellent and simple WiFi tethering in Android, keeping all the data bills together.

GJC

I agree

Owning one, I was very puzzled by the 80% rating, and more so after reading the almost exclusively positive review.

GJC

GPS

Yes, GPS and compass are built in.

GJC

Absolutely agree

I love the way it looks, and the build quality is also absolutely superb - odd that this only ever gets a mention in Apple reviews, not those of other manufacturers' kit.

One little trick that wasn't mentioned in the review, which is worth the entire purchase price on its own. Use the tablet until the battery goes flat, then plug it into the keyboard unit and leave it for a few hours, and the table recharges fully and is ready for another 8 hours of use. Very nice indeed.

Another thing not mentioned in the review, is that the SD card slot in the keyboard unit is SDXC, and so supports cards up to 2TB, although only 64GB and 128GB cards are currently available.

I've started using this as a replacement for my laptop when travelling, and it fills the role very well indeed. Not so good for heavyweight document creation, of course, but I rarely do more than take notes and do minor edits to existing documents when I'm on the road, which this does perfectly well.

Overall, 10/10, I'm very impressed.

GJC

Groupon hug from small businesses? Not so much

Standard industry practice

I used to run a 4x4 driver training school, we had a few voucher companies selling vouchers for our services. We got about 50% of the face value of the voucher, and they paid 30-60 days after the courses had been given (if you were lucky - twice I had companies fold owing me for a large number of courses).

I gave it up in the end, just wasn't profitable, especially not when compared to fettling computer systems for fun and profit.

GJC

Acer slashes tablet forecast, banks on notebooks

@Michael

I absolutely agree. Apple are ignoring the 7" size because Jobs backed them into a corner on stage, and a lot of the others are following Apple. Fortunately, there are some exceptions, and the Galaxy Tab is still one of my favourite portable devices, precisely because it will fit in a pocket when wandering around airports and the like.

GJC

Apple pulls app after dev publishes users' PINs

Nah

"Amitay reasoned that punters will generally use the same code for his app as they will for their iPhone's main PIN lock"

Amitay reasoned wrongly. I can only speak from a sample of one, but when some two-bit phone app asks me for a PIN, I will almost certainly use something trivially memorable like 1234 precisely to avoid given my main security PIN away to a third party.

Security levels of passwords and PINs isprecisely related to the importance of the application, and I think most people probably think the same.

GJC

World's biggest ad agency keelhauls 2000 'pirate' sites

So, let me see if I've got this right?

"We are serious about combating piracy and protecting our clients' intellectual property as forcefully as we possibly can," GroupM Interaction Global CEO Rob Norman said

Um, were I one of his clients, I'd be asking Mr. Norman just exactly what the hell he thought he had been doing advertising on these sites up until now.

However, no doubt this question will no be raised, what with the advertising industry being full of unethical, amoral tossers.

GJC

A cloud hangs over the sysadmin

Marketing gimmick

Absolutely. Yes, it's a new-ish way of hosting managed service. No, it doesn't change a thing - any half-way competent IT Manager or Director will still be concerned about the service delivery, which is downstream of the actual systems hosting the service, and thus unaffected by the Emporer's new clothes.

Of course, the business is stuffed full of IT Managers and Director who are not entirely competent, but that's another article, by quite a long margin.

GJC

Win8: A beginner's guide to FondleWindows

Don't be silly.

Apple only invented them yesterday.

GJC

Apple iCloud: Steve Jobs' own private internet

Careful....

....you don't want to be giving Jobs ideas like that.

GJC

iTunes Match is iPiracy, claims loopy Oz industry troll

One question that no-one appears to be asking:

Who gets the twenty five bucks annually? Apple are collecting it, are they passing it on to the music industry, in whole or in part, or are they keeping it all themselves?

GJC

NHS Direct

Medicine and IT support have so much in common:

I get friends come to me all the time with computer problems, and the discussion *always* goes thus:

Them: "I am but a poor, weak, worthless being who knows nothing about these computer thingies, will you take a look at this?"

Me: "Of course" <Fiddles> "Ah, OK, it's just such-and-such, I'll sort it now"

Them, suddenly gaining twenty years of IT experience and a hitherto unknown confidence in their capabilities: "Don't be bloody silly, you're wrong, how can you know that, my mate down the pub says it's *definitely* the Humpty Dumpy Virus, how can you be so stupid as to not agree with us?"

Me: "Piss off and never darken my doorstep again, you worthless idiot".

I'm rapidly running out of friends....

GJC

Mac OS X Lion debuts in July as $29.99 upgrade

To be fair to Apple....

It was a marketing event (whatever the title implies to the contrary). Marketing events don't set out to answer all the questions.

GJC

Two fat atoms get the nod

Err, actually....

There is every reason to believe that these didn't exist after the big bang, as pretty much the only substance to come out of the initial cooling phase was hydrogen, followed by a brief period when a few light elements up to berylium were created. All other elements got created much later in stars as a result of fusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis#Heavy_elements

GJC

Aussie vendor pledges to ship 'first' Chrome laptop this week

Well....

The download file from Google is called:

Chrome_OS_Linux.i686-1.3.767.oem.tar.gz

GJC

This may or may not be pertinent:

http://www.kogan.co.uk/shop/agora-pro-12-ultra-portable-laptop-computer/

GJC

Antimatter hangs around at CERN

Oh for goodness' sake.

It was a joke, OK? You don't need to down-vote anything that doesn't fit your nice, safe, comfortable world view. Now run along and let the grown-ups talk.

GJC