Posts by DarkHorseDre

Unions demands better conditions for temps

@ Permie whinge-bags

*I think someone just got pwned ;)

I'm a PERMIE and always have been, yes, so stfu before you start lol!

I prefer being a permie at the minute, due to my circumstances and the old economy issue, however I don't think contractors deserve the bashing they get - its all jealousy!

Why?

. If a contractor is crap and still paid "all that money" - then the boss failed and is wasting the companies money.

(And when they do fire the contractor, its cheaper than firing a Permie - see below)

. "all that money" may seem alot, but the company doesnt pay sick pay, redundancy, holiday pay, training costs (in the traditional sense) and other costs. It actually works out cheaper most of the time, especially when the contractor is on a 3/6 month contract and stays less than a year.

If they want to save costs, they can sack one with like a weeks notice - the contractor gets nothing.

Permies, as you know, are the opposite. A company spends alot of money to hire, keep and fire a permie, so deal with it.

Paris, cos she knows all about earning her keep

IT's recession could be bottoming out

@ AC #6

You give an example of motherboards that I dont know much about, but lets take something common: laptops. They are at their cheapest for years. Netbooks are cheap as chips too.

1

Now lets look at business: the lowest average network speed in a business is 10/100 ethernet.

People dont need to buy network switches much as 10/100 is pretty decent. of recent typical companies have been upgrading the core of their network and thats not that expensive.

Network cards were the bread and butter of 3com a few years ago, and now they dont sell them!

10/100 switches are reliable and so they dont need to be changed often. Same goes for pc's (my dual core bought in 2006 runs everything I need today, even vista if I was a sadist)

Point is the hardware lifecycle is at its end - more units = lower cost to produce, more competition and cheaper retail. its life. We dont need as much new shit these days!!

Software, however, enables the hardware to work.

Services turn software + hardware = solutions. (Reggy, why didnt you report on the impact of the service sector? I can see professional services outstripping software)

Verizon to cut 8,000 (more) jobs

Re-assignment?

Could they not have re-asigned at least some of those landline jobs to their wireless division??

BT does that in their 'transition centre' - its better for all and cheaper to the biz to move staff around rather than fire the landline peeps and hire new ones for the wireless division!

How the hell does your headcount rise when you're firing 8k peeps?!?!?

Time Warner swallows Google's AOL stake

Holy mackerel!

$160BN? down to $282M? Those proportions astound me!

I remember the dot-com crash... overvalued companies gettin a reality check, resulting in my not being able to buy my employers options in 6 years!!

What I will never understand is, despite the fact that everyone was doing it, why would anyone buy a part of a company that is allegedly worth $160BN? Didnt they want proof???

I mean, AOL sucked for as long as I can remember lol!

*anyone remember AOL on win 95 and the browser it used? damn!

Barclays online banking borked

Wow!

I'm not sure what year Barclay's started their internet banking, but I'm thinking it was after Natwest - am i right?

I've been using Natwest banking since day-1 and I cant say I've ever seen a failure! (Ok it could have failed on a day I didn't sign in, but.....) Natwest FTW!

That said I had a Northern rock savings account (yes I did experience heightened heart-rate a year ago) a Santander credit card, cahoot and maybe 1 more I cant remember, and never experienced any real failure (aside from cahoot having regular maintenance, and Northen rock using Java which is sloth-like!)

If the competition can do it better and for longer, Barclays are clearly kak and their customers who rely on internet banking should just move on!

(after all, whats the incentive to stay with a high-street bank when they all pay similar amounts of interest and offer similar products - its all about service isnt it?)

Paris, cos she can do it better and for longer since the first video. I know these things.

Memory-hogging bug offers universal browser crash exploit

Bare-in-mind..

.. that the code does NOT loop to cause this failure!

Pretty poor after 9 years and as a standard 'feature' of ...DOM..

Top marks to M$ for "just saying no" - But Bill, I just downloaded IE8!??!

*I downloaded it as there are times when we are forced to use IE....

Nokia's next-gen tablet OS uncovered?

"Everione" - I get jokes!

.. do I get a prize?

Google News stumbles again

.. nothing new

If anyone here has read the gmail/google "help" (loose-term alert) pages/forum, they would know there are frequent outages and bugs.. even my trash folder thats supposed to be emptied every xx days had items over a year old in there - when I posted about it, got dismissed, then proved it, it was suddenly fixed!

Point is Ive read and experienced many google app failures and they just dont seem to have a good resilience and continuity in-place...

Google are great app builders, but only ok infrastructure designers = don't depend on them (I have my personal mail split between 2 yahoo and 1 gmail accounts)

Paris - 'cos she knows how to keep going when the going gets tough

The Sun points bazookas at MoD killjoys

Wow

What does it say about me when Ive forgotten the point of the article but I can still see the topless?

I think the pope was right in that other article...

Paris, 'cos she belongs in that sun pic (but at the back to hide her no-boobs)

Western Digital debuts 2TB power sipping drive

Eh?

Is it me or were there 3 speeds: Green barracuda, greenpower and the AV-GP, with the AV-GP using more power than the barracuda?

If Im right then the only benefit is the quietness? But then it has already been said that the current drives are pretty quiet anyway...

As for NAS - there are many 'home-use' 2 and 4 bay NAS boxes on the market for under £150/$2xx.. I have had the Dlink DNS 323 for a few years now... the main point is that a NAS box is for disk redundancy and not a standalone backup solution! You STILL need a backup of the NAS data (if you want to survive data curruption/unit failure/physical damage etc.)

DHD

Microsoft consumes Chicago data center

@Andrew Fraser

Andrew, It isn't clear [to me] if the article is saying the sub-station had links to the grid, or if the facility had the separate links?

of-course if the substation has the links and then dies, then yes, single point of failure, and we just need to sit and wait here for that story where an entire cloud is, er, vaporised!

DHD

Ford crushes half-price hybrid hoax

The Oscar debate!

I think we've missed out a few obvious points here:

Americans love big engines thus why they have V6 and V8's in alot more of their cars, but they are inefficient. The bbc and ABC's world-news this week showed a manufacturer "making V6 engines that have V8 power". Wow! Here, we have 4 cylinder engines that are more efficient and sometimes more powerful than their V6's. I remember renting a 2 litre mustang - what a joke that was! The last two 2 litre cars ive owned pee'd all over the speed and economy of that piece of crap.

Cue Top gear where Clarkson raced a dodge viper (maybe another American 'super' car?) plus others like porche 911 turbo and the smaller engined, naturally aspirated TVR won in a drag race... its all about engineering.

Plus, theres no incentive (until now) to produce efficient cars, as there is here in Europe.

We have STRICT European driven standards on emissions, and great engineers.

Americans have CHEAP fuel with low or zero duty, Bush never signed up to Kyoto, so why make an efficient engine?

Im not even sure they have 'compulsory' catalytic converters nationwide, which we have for what, almost 20 years?

Obama is finally putting that right. parts of it at least.

But not being as strict as we are, and aiming for low targets as they currently have, will only give them partial success and reward.

Paris, as she gets 100 miles to he gallon from me, always

DHD

Motorola's handheld self abuse continues

Moto-who?

Motorola phones build quality? who cares?! Did that win them market share?

There was a time when they had HUGE market share, and they've lost out. Repeatedly. There was a time when their main competitors were Nokia and Ericson. Now look at it!

If they are so great at building quality products, then it just proves that the market aren't interested in that and they buy for *other* reasons - I'll let others fill in that gap...

The guy pointed out the obvious, and got fired... if Motorola cant find a legally justified reason for firing him, and show that they acted in accordance with the relevant employment law, they are screwed.

"he was on his way out from before"? no sh1t Einstein: no doubt the good-doctor shared his plans on what would turn the company around last year and he was told the bleeding obvious! So the relationship went down hill from the start of the stupid ideas from the "good doctor"!

See for yourselves - the companys handset division wasn't saved!!

Bill - as he knows all about maintaining market share, and not getting fired.

Vodafone writes off £5.9bn

Currency kills!

Every company has experienced loss where they rely/trade in specific currencies which are currently mostly weak.. that figure will move along the stated scale as currency values shift - likely to be in vodafones favour sometime soon so I know they're not bothered!

@ PaulK - yeah voda are a multi-national for a reason - they are raking it in! (My Orange cant offer me anything when I travel!)

Interestingly though, voda reckon they are scrapping roaming charges this year (to certain destinations!) - if they include enough euro countries, it will be *interesting*!

ps - didnt voda charge a minimum 75p for each call under an hour on passport? I called my mate simon and hung up 5 times within 30 seconds = ££££ lol!

Paris Hilton doesnt understand the losses at Voda either

Startup sees iPhone through biz-colored glasses

Is Mark Daniels ok?

Mark, Im hearing you, but I sense the heart-rate was high when writing that?

Rant FTW lol!

I rarely go into coffee shops, and when I do its the same: I listen to them speak, and then I say "medium" lol!

But that app word is out there now my friend, before apple pushed it to its current state: it wont go awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

DHD

Paris, cos she never gets heated, unless its on amateur video

Gut instinct no protection against net scams

Jeez

clairvoyants - yeah, well said, they're all frauds! Where were they at pearl harbour/German invasion/911/lottery night... ah Im a fool for venting this!!

So the conclusion is that the research isnt worth as much as it should be, as they failed to show that people who fall for scams ARE gullible (as fonejacker cleverly shows) and that being good in business is relative at best...

@ Francis Boyle (its so cool to be speaking to a nobel peace prize winner!) - AIG - LOL!

Bill - cos he knows nothing about scams, or bad business

Chip cooler launches liquid nitro at CPUs

So in summary..

.. Liquid nitrogen offers questionable benefits over other methods, is aimed at over-clockers and not the majority of pc owners, is only dangerous if used by non-experts (majority of the worlds population) - hmm...

I'm guessing its not the best idea ever!

Paris, cos she's the hottest icon available (the penguin is a close second)

DHD