* Posts by Tim of the Win

61 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2011

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Violin Memory falls through basement in first day of trading

Tim of the Win

Re: Wow, what a spectacular failure...

I agree with what you're saying but it's also bad PR if your share price drops immediately after IPO. A rising share price also creates a positive buzz around the company. The human brain tends to operate in the opposite way to stock markets. People's instincts are to buy into a company when the share price is going up and sell when it's going down, but buying high and selling low doesn't make much money.

Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant

Tim of the Win
FAIL

I think this guy is having a mental breakdown. All he does is say "this is f***ing stupid" or "moronic" he doesn't actually explain any of the reasons why.

Cameron: We'll turn NHS patients into real-time drugs lab rats

Tim of the Win
Thumb Up

Re: parasites

And I completely agree with you. I'm surprised this data isn't available wholesale already. We're always hearing stories about X or Y drug might cause Z. If the boffins have access to the data for all the patients taking that drug we should be able to spot/dismiss these things sooner.

Ice island snaps off Greenland: Just a fifth the size of 1962 whopper

Tim of the Win
Happy

Yeah, might not be warming that causes ice to melt. Could be someone with a huge gritter, or a russian nuclear powered ice breaker nefariously creating huge icebergs to disrupt western shipping.

Online bookie can't scoop £50k losses made by 5-year-old

Tim of the Win

I also wonder whether he would have tried to back out of the trades if they had been profit making?

UK man to spend year in the clink for Facebook account hack

Tim of the Win

Re: lol @ todays "hackers"

I think you mean over 9000

Olympic champ ad blitz dents Virgin Media despite £1bn sales

Tim of the Win

I think the agreement also gives them rights to use branson's image and get him to do a couple TV appearences every year.

Tim of the Win

What I don't get is why they didn't wait until AFTER they had upgraded everyone's speed. Checking the timetable it will be another year until I get upgraded. Or at least confine their advertising to the areas already upgraded. If I wasn't a VM customer and saw one of their speed upgrade ads I might be tempted to check out their website. If it then told me I would only get the new speed after a year I would jog on.

10x power boost for Freeview as London analogue signal cut

Tim of the Win

About time they finished this off. We switched over 4 years ago. Seems like a decade.

Nature ISN'T fragile nor a bossy mother-in-law - top eco boffin

Tim of the Win

Nature isn't fragile, but human beings are. The world will survive after we've wiped ourselves out, however we chose to do it. The long term needs of humanity are best served by making sure the planet stays in a relatively stable state that suits humans. Short term benefits to humans/economies are often directly opposed to the long term good of a human suitable eco-system.

Game chain sold

Tim of the Win

Maybe I'm an old fuddy duddy but I still prefer to purchase physical media games. There's a lot more satisfaction in having something to hold or sit on your shelf. It's going to be there until I decide to sell it or throw it away. If you spend your money on steam you are very vulnerable. If steam closed how would you play your games? I generally only buy things on steam when they are on super special offer, eg 75% off.

Things like BT Infinity and VM's upgrades are all well and good, but they aren't cheap. I'll stick to my cheap cable connection rather than pay for 50/100mbps

Freeview TV shoved aside for iPad-compatible 4G

Tim of the Win

Would existing Freeview equipment work in 600mhz?

Spain donates Enigma gear that kick-started Brit code-breaking

Tim of the Win
FAIL

A historian. Not "AN historian", A historian.

Everything Everywhere's 4G party bus could run Three off a cliff

Tim of the Win

If you had only short licenses then the network operators wouldn't be able to invest the money to setup the networks in the first place, since they don't have the guarantee of being able to operate it for a long time.

To be honest I think allocations should be made on the basis of public benefit rather than purely who is offering to pay the most. 3g was ridiculously expensive for a long time because the networks were forced into paying so much for it.

We could always separate out the people who own and run the towers from the people who sell the mobile phone services. In a way like BT Openreach works every tower / frequency would be available for every mobile operator if they buy the coverage from the tower operator. Rural areas would stand a better chance of getting service on all networks and competition in the city areas would keep prices low.

High Court asked to keep 'cheap DVD' VAT loophole open

Tim of the Win

It's about time this loophole was closed, not surprised the channel island tax dodgers are moaning.

Play.com might be setting themselves to avoid this. Their invoices have recently started listing 'service charges' built into the price of the goods.

Eric Schmidt to cash in $1.45bn Google shares

Tim of the Win
FAIL

I gathered that from the rest of the article, it was the single paragraph that was ambiguous. As I said, I was being pedantic.

Tim of the Win
Mushroom

I hate to be pedantic (ok I LOVE being pedantic) but to say he is cutting his ownership by "about 0.7 per cent" is ambiguous. It could mean he is selling 0.7% of his shares whereas you meant 0.7% of the whole company. You should have said cutting his share of ownership by 0.7 percentage points (or 70 basis points).

Avast false alarm hits Steam's weekend gamers

Tim of the Win
Facepalm

At that stage it wasn't obvious that it was a false positive. If you just restore anything your AV detects as a virus, what is the point in having anti-virus protection?

Tim of the Win
Thumb Down

Had to uninstall steam but then couldn't get it reinstalled. Hours of faffing about and now I have to redownload all my games :(

The same update also tanked some of the adobe runtime software but reinstalling that was easy

Zuckerberg's 2012 personal income tax bill: $1.5 billion

Tim of the Win

Mitt Romney isn't using particularly creative accounting. He just owns shed loads of investments and lives off the income from those investments, which is taxed at 15%. He donates a few million to charity (church) and so his effective tax rate is a bit less than that.

Blame the US law makers for setting the tax rate at 15%.

America abandoning DSL in favour of faster cable

Tim of the Win

It's fibre to the cabinet, the same as BT Infinity. The only difference is the connection between the cabinet and your house. Theoretically it's shared but the bandwidth available is very large and only shared between a relatively small number of properties, it's not like the old days when everyone in a city would be on the same loop. In practice the congestion does not occur at this point but is more likely at the head end.

Virgin Media takes itself in hand after punter-package tickle whoopsie

Tim of the Win

The margins on the lowest tier products are pretty thin, so cost rises will always get passed on. The top packages have a large profit margin so there's quite a lot of room to cut prices in order to appeal to more customers.

Virgin Media to push out nimble new broadband speeds

Tim of the Win

They only throttle you if you exceed the peak times limit. They are doubling the limits. Even if you're throttled, general web usage isn't affected. Just schedule your large downloads outside of peak times, it's not unreasonable. As long as you avoid the throttling your achievable speed is actually very, very close to the maximum speed of the connection you are paying for.

Tim of the Win
Thumb Up

I love my Virgin Media broadband primarily because I don't have to fork out £15/month for a useless landline. I have the 10mb service and find that for general internet usage it is great. You only have to worry about the STM when you're downloading huge files, like the latest linux distro. Even then it's not too much of a hassle, they clearly publish the limits and rules and so I always schedule them for the right time. It would be nice if they had a good boy exception to the STM rule that would let you break the limits without being throttled as a one off, but I guess you can't have everything. At least they said they are doubling the limit where STM kicks in so maybe now it won't even be a problem.

Phone maker punts AA-powered blower

Tim of the Win

I think the clue is in the name "SpareOne". It would be a good idea to have one in your car, along with a torch and a blanket etc.

I also know some old people who might like it. They just don't get how to use a mobile phone and if you had one that worked like a plain old touch tone they might like being able to take their phone with them.

China pumps CCTV into Freeview HD boxes

Tim of the Win
Thumb Up

In UK you watch Freeview, in communist China Freeview watches you

Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge

Tim of the Win
Alert

More complicated systems = more complicated problems

Ailing HMV sees tech sales' bright spot among dire music biz

Tim of the Win

I'm sure they do, but it's the stores that are in trouble.

Tim of the Win

Hang in there baby

In April VAT will be applied to all small purchases from the Channel Islands. This should remove one of the blocks that stop HMV from competing with online retailers for DVDs and CDs etc.

Download.com sorry for bundling Nmap with crapware

Tim of the Win
FAIL

I don't see why "open source" software is a special case. I don't mind them offering to install added crap I didn't want, but it should always be opt-in and it should always be clear that it is not required.

Man fights felony hacking charge for accessing wife's email

Tim of the Win

Probably used the 'forgotten password' feature.

ASA upholds customer complaint against eBuyer

Tim of the Win
WTF?

Wait a second here, are we talking about the information just displayed on the website or did they produce some kind of promo material here?

Also are they alleging that eBuyer manipulated the 'most useful' feature or is the rating based entirely on what users have said they find 'most useful'. If it's the later then I don't see how the ASA can complain. If it's the users deciding which reviews are useful (regardless of whether they are positive or negative) then surely that's not misleading.

‘Blogger not a journalist’ says Oregon court

Tim of the Win
Facepalm

I'm not defending all the media, but some of them do actually fact check their articles. Plus they have the risk of being sued for libel which keeps them partially in line. Twitter contains 75% nonsense.

Tim of the Win
Thumb Down

May I suggest that what you believe to be 'news' is really just rumour and gossip?

British athlete puts self on eBay

Tim of the Win
Thumb Up

Fair play to him, he (or whoever it was) came up with a good publicity grabbing idea. Hope he does well. The auction is a little sparse on the details of what this kind of deal entitles you to though, will appear in your adverts etc?

Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH

Tim of the Win
Facepalm

More to the point, why bother?

Let sleeping Mammoths lie.

Antarctic ice formed at CO2 levels much higher than today's

Tim of the Win
WTF?

Of course the world hasn't changed at all in 34 million years.

Cnet slammed for wrapping Nmap downloads with cruddy toolbar

Tim of the Win
Stop

They've been doing this for more than a few days. I downloaded a program on 28/11/2011 and it included this annoying toolbar installer. It almost caught me out too, but I just spotted what it was a moment before clicking "Accept" and managed to click "Decline" instead. It's not very obvious that it's an optional extra, you could think it was required to install your chosen program. Naughty C|Net

Flash prices FALL

Tim of the Win
Thumb Up

Capacity per price differences are so high, you're right, they don't compete at the moment.

Replace a 1TB drive with a 64GB alternative or just take the price hit until supply resumes?

UK lays carbon plan before Earth Goddess

Tim of the Win
FAIL

The idea that we are all going to use less electricity and thus save money is pure fantasy. Many of us have already taken measures to monitor our electricity usage and turn things off when we are not using them. The only way I could use less electricity is by turning off my PC and reading books by candle light instead. No thanks.

As Mr Coward said above, they should just get on with building nuclear power stations and scrap all these stupid green subsidies that push the price of energy up but deliver very little. I'm all for saving the planet and the best way to do this is nuclear power and scrapping most of the coal and gas power stations.

DWP cuts spending with top IT supplier HP by 4%

Tim of the Win
Holmes

IT systems designed by managers with no IT experience, no doubt.

Fuel taxes don't hurt the world's poor - they don't have cars

Tim of the Win

Indeed. I know some very low wage people stuck in circumstances where they are spending £50 on petrol per week just to go to work. If you're in a city it's fine, there are other options. But many work places are simply not near public transport.

Gov's e-petition service cost £80k to develop

Tim of the Win

Why didn't they just use the e-petitions site developed under labour on the no 10 website? It seemed to work fine then.

UK space radar satellite project gets funding kickstart

Tim of the Win
Stop

Animal Health Laboratory? Is that another ironically named version of Huntingdon Life Sciences then?

Seagate embiggens hybrid drive, won't say how...

Tim of the Win
Thumb Up

Good for games

'Tis a great idea for games. I have a proper SSD for my boot drive but given the size of games these days they are all stored on magnetic drives. Having a hybrid drive for games should speed up the load screens considerably for games you play often without breaking the bank. Notice the prices have massively gone up recently though so won't be buying one for a while.

Punters even more dissatisfied by Virgin Media's package

Tim of the Win

Only if you have TV too. If you just want broadband it's cheaper to not have a landline. £21/month for just BB

Tim of the Win
Trollface

Who needs a TV service when you've got the Internet? I've been living off iPlayer, ITVPlayer, 4od and Demand5 for over a year with no problems. Best part: no TV Licence required since no live streaming.

Tim of the Win
Thumb Down

VM customer service is woeful but I stick with them simply because I refuse to pay for a landline I don't need.

If you write to VM customer services specifically asking for a written reply all you get is an acknowledgement letter and a lot of missed calls on your phone.

Ofcom: ISPs can cripple the web as much as they please

Tim of the Win
FAIL

Useless regulator is useless.

Not only can you put a limit on something and sell it as unlimited. Now you don't even have to provide access to the whioe Internet.

The top five spam subjects sullying inboxes

Tim of the Win
Thumb Up

On the subject of lotteries

I also love the one "you won the postcode lottery". I think they misunderstand what that phrase means.

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