Posts by Simon Langley 65 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2008
I bought a Vaio a couple of years ago and in two years I had to replace the CD drive twice and the motherboard once. I also bought a PS2 and had to replace it because the disk drive died. My experience with Sony products does not suggest that they are worth any premium at all.
I would far rather have a new MacBook Pro and would not cost two grand.
As one of my friends would say "Two grand? They're 'aving a larff".
@Ted Treen
I think you missed the point. Kebabster was sarcastically reflecting the use of the word "fuck" in the comment by Joe K.
@The Reg
The review system is already flawed. There are plenty of apps on there with absurdly positive reviews clearly put there by the author of the software or a sock puppet. There are also plenty of reviews giving one star because of crashes, although why Joe K thinks it is unreasonable to complain about this in a review rather passed me by.
I like my iPhone, but I am not happy about the excessive restrictions on the sale and purchase of apps (ie itunes or nothing). While they remain in place, any review system is going to be seriously flawed. Consequently, I am not prepared to pay for anything unless one of my friends has bought it first and I can play with it or I have read proper review elsewhere on the net.
There is a lot of good free stuff though, so ignore the reviews and just get stuff for free. If it's rubbish, you have only lost 5 minutes of time and no money.
I own an iPhone and an Acer Aspire One and there is no way that the iPhone will replace my laptot. Firstly, text input is painful at best. It is OK for a short message but nothing else. Secondly, the screen is just too small to be able to stand in for a laptot.
The fact is that my Aspire One is very portable and does most of what I want a laptop to do most of the time. It simply isn't true that all it's suited to is web browsing and email. Any device is a compromise, but the iPhone and laptots are different compromises and I could not do half the things I use my Aspire One for on an iPhone. I spent a few hours last night programming in Python for example, try that on an iPhone.
Try showing a presentation, writing a letter, programming and so on with a phone. Even just using Skype is beyond it.
Quite why the author is so negative about laptots is not obvious, but that this is no more than a propaganda piece is made clear by the silly use of the word "weaktop". What an inaccurate and linguistically foolish use of English.
I think that Asus, having kick-started the whole sector, are shooting themselves in the foot.
10" is too big, particularly with a 1024x600 screen. HDDs are fragile (and soon will be out-performed even by cheap SSDs). XP, well, do I really need to say any more.
All they are doing is moving out of the laptot sector and proposing to sell what are essentially not very good laptops. You can buy an Acer Aspire One (which is a better laptot than any of Asus' anyway) for £170 now. There is no way Asus will be selling theirs for this price (look at their current range for confirmation of this) so they are just shooting themselves in the foot.
Goodbye Asus, thanks for starting it all anyway.
My employer (one of Deloitte's rivals) uses full disk encryption on all company clients whether desktops or laptops. This being the case, the data is pretty safe unless the laptop is turned on or the baddies are capable of breaking AES256. We are instructed not to carry our machines around in standby mode.
While I imagine we do lose laptops like any large organisation, there is no material prospect that anyone is going to be able to extract any useful data from the machine and I hope that our line would be "the hard disk was fully encrypted using a strong algorithm and so there is no material risk of disclosure of anything on the lost machine."
My view on this is either you use strong full disk encryption, in which case there really is no real risk or you don't in which case you are stuffed. No other controls really count for anything. The danger of referring to eg passwords, is that you are implying that the encryption may not be strong enough on its own and if that is the case you are pwned.
Until last July, my wife had been using Windows for a decade, most recently Vista.
However, she was in the market for a new machine so I bought her a MacBook. She had never used a Mac before but after two days of helping her get used to it, I now spend literally a tenth of the time helping her compared to when she was running Vista. She has almost no problems (particularly with wireless which plagued Vista on her and my son's laptops) and the bundled software is so easy to use that she just gets on with it.
Macs are more expensive, but my wife loves her new machine. It looks great, it's reliable and most importantly, easy to use. From my perspective, the time saving for me was worth the price of the laptop several times over.
I made the plunge after pondering for quite some time and opted for the Acer Aspire One. I love it but the article correctly identified the main problems with it which are battery life (not much more than two hours) and the somewhat quirky Linux installation.
I decided against the Dell mainly due to the stupid keyboard layout. The fact that it runs Ubuntu though is very appealing.
The 901 is just too expensive. I know £280 is not a lot of money, but my One cost £199. When I show it off and can say "it was less than 200 quid" I always get the same positive reaction. Saying "less than 280 quid" just doesn't sound as impressive.
Despite what the AC said above, while I do always travel first and business class, my employer pays those fares, I paid for my One so I still care about its price.
What is interesting about this whole sector is how usable a machine can be while remaining truly portable.
My shiny MacBook Pro is on my desk 1 metre away from me but I can't be bothered to go all that way and open the lid; my One just happens to be right here. That's the beauty of laptots (what mine always gets called in our house BTW) they are so small and light that you can have them there with you almost all the time.
@AC Your legal skillz suck.
The Theft Act S.1(1) defines theft thusly:
"A person shall be guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it."
Therefore, copyright infringement is NOT theft as the original rights holder is not deprived of the copyrighted material.
...and keep your noses out of issues that are of absolutely no concern to you.
Doctors should focus on the standard of their medical care. There are many excellent aspects of health care in this country but there are also many areas in which doctors' performance could improve and I respectfully suggest that they stick to their knitting and leave environmental issues to someone better qualified to opine on the subject.
Martin Fowler is spot on.
As a customer of O2 for some time I was very unhappy with the mess they made of the roll out of the iPhone. However, Orange is so bad (particularly customer service) that I wouldn't go to them if they paid me £100 up front and £30 a month, let alone the other way round.
So your terrible fuzzy distorted image will waste even more pixels.
Phones will never make even half-way decent cameras as long as they remain usably small. I make phone calls (and browse the web etc) on my phone. I have a DSLR for photographs.
Just the front piece of glass on my usual camera lens is bigger and heavier than my whole phone, never mind the rest of the lens. How could a phone ever compete?
Phones are for crappy snaps and they always will be.
I am in the same boat and it appears that this is my reward for being a loyal O2 customer for years.
I had to wait 2 hours in the shop waiting for O2's system to confirm I was eligible for an upgrade while new customers waltzed out with their fully functional iPhones.
Now three days, four phone calls (using my old phone) and two visits in person I still have an iBrick.
Every person I have spoken to has given me a different version of events and the whole episode has left me decidedly unimpressed - what a dog's breakfast.
I got my shiny new 3G iPhone this morning and I managed to d/l the latest iTunes and activate it without any problem on my MacBook Pro.
Everyone I've shown it to has been coming out with comments like "wow", "fantastic", "that's soooo cool" etc. Suck on that webster phreaky (no doubt another Vista-using saddo who is fed up of Apple out-doing M$ at every turn recently).
@Anonymous Coward
So the internet wouldn't work without Windows! The internet was based around Unix and Unix remains the core of the internet.
Without Windows the only difference is that there would be more standards compliant web sites and fewer idiots.
I liked it better when you had to be clever to be able to connect to the internet. Those were the days (eyes mist over nostalgically).
Oh, and if Vista is so great, why does Steve Ballmer keep apologising for Vista and saying they'll get it right next time?
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