Posts by Rupert Roker 7 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007
Personally I'd recommend exactly what I'd have recommended before this news - if you're in the market for a premium laptop for anything other than gaming buy a Thinkpad (and even if you're wanting to play games, if you can live with the performance of Haswell, still buy a Thinkpad).
I got Windows 7 on Friday night and after some confusion had it working by Saturday afternoon (and no I didn't work straight through the night). The instructions on My Digital Live (http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/10/23/how-to-create-and-make-bootable-windows-7-iso-from-exe-plus-setup1-box-and-setup2-box-files/) worked for me. I made one small change in that I didn't put a -1 before Win_en_DVD (as it didn't work if I did).
I'm writing this from my laptop in Windows 7 after reformatting and doing a clean install. Interestingly despite it being an upgrade license it didn't try and verify my previous license.
Despite the fact that I've found my first bug (screen brightness slider vanishes occasionally) I think this was £30 very well spent. A much better user experience than XP.
I can see some really good uses for a camera that can shoot at these speeds. It would be a great tool in school physics labs and would probably be quite fun for other things as well.
Maybe they could sidestep the problems of speed and capacity of memory cards by either having an unspeakable amount of cache or designing it to simultaneously accept several cards and write to the in sequence, i.e. say 5 cards put the first image on the first card the second image on the second card and so on then back to the first card for the sixth image. I could see this being prohibitively expensive for consumer use though.
I love the idea of legally pirating American IP (particularly TV and film) but all of this talk of how great a world would be without IP and how Britain should scrap it is just silly.
Who would develop new medicines? spend millions developing software? fund films? or indeed spend money researching or making anything? The fairies?
American companies, like everyone else currently charge too much for their IP, £20 for a DVD is a rip off and films on itunes aren't much better but the solution isn't to abolish IP protection completely.
Yes it would be great if we could all have all of the IP we want for nothing, but who is going to pay for it? Have the little leprechauns given you guys a pot of gold that you haven’t told the rest of us about?
If the essay companies believe their claim that their material is not used by students to cheat then why not simply give access to this custom written material to the companies that write plagiarism detection software? This way anyone who has a genuine need to buy an essay can continue to do so and cheats will find it more difficult to prosper.
If there is anyone out there who is actually in genuine need of essays though? If there is then this is surely a very poor comment on the quality of university education. It would seem reasonable to believe that they should be provided with adequate teaching resources and support by their college/faculty?
Or of course if the companies don't believe their own claim they can continue to protest about their treatment by Google.
Annoying as it is that Vista is so expensive ultimately there is nothing that the executive can do about without enacting primary legislation. We have a free market, the result is that we occasionally get screwed. Moaning about the fact that the executive is unwilling to pretend that it could do something is a waste of time. If you want price regulation you want primary legislation so talk to the legislature (i.e. your MP).
Something I’ve wondered though is why people buy the retail license, you can get an OEM one for a fraction of the cost and unless the rules have changed since XP/2K (i.e. when I stopped being an IT tech and started training as a lawyer) then you just have to buy a ‘significant’ item of hardware to get the OEM license. Result, buy the largest hard drive you can find and Vista Ultimate OEM (which is going to eat a lot of space anyway) and you’re still paying less than the retail.
Also, Linux/Mac just isn’t a viable alternative for a lot of users.
Things I have used over the years which don’t work (natively) on Linux/Mac
Photoshop (yes to mac no to Linux)
Quark (not on Linux)
Word/Excel/Access/SQL Server 2000 (yes there are alternatives but unless things have changed since Lotus 9.7 the ability of third party software to preserve formatting when saving in a Microsoft file format (i.e. what the rest of the world uses) leaves a lot to be desired).
GAMES! (not that I have time to play many these days) but the point still stands that if you want to play games you have to run Windows. (and don’t tell me about Mac gaming, Quake 3 + Sim City is not a broad selection, I want Arma and some other stuff).
Also, my desktop uses generic components, if I want to upgrade my MB I just pull it out and put a new one in with the chip of my choice and whatever else I feel like wasting my money on, not an option with Mac and drivers are a bitch with Linux.
Good luck to the company trying to claim any substantive damages. They are almost certainly not going to be able to recover. Following the decision of the Court of Appeal in Spartan Steel it seems unlikely that this claim will succeed.
BT are likely to have excluded their liability for pure economic loss in their contract with this company which would leave the company for a claim in tort which will almost certainly fail.
In an earlier case where loss was caused by the disruption (again by bad engineering work) to an electricity supply rather than to an internet connection it was held that economic losses (i.e. disruption to business etc.) were not recoverable. I can see no reason for distinguishing this case on the fact so it seems unlikely that the company concerned would be able to recover their losses.
This is probably no bad thing as if it was possible to claim for this sort of loss then there would be huge increases in the price of broadband to pay for settling this sort of claim.
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