Posts by david gomm

Trekkies to flip lids over Star Trek bottle opener

old news

I've had one of these for a good few yrs, bought it at the Star Trek exhibition that was @ Hyde Park.

Works great

Delayed SQL Server 2008 hits release phase

SQL Svr 2008 improvements

There are a number of improvements to the reporting services elements, these might be useful if your organisation is pursuing an MS based BI strategy.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/reporting.aspx

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

false advertising

Virgin are very fond of describing their service as 'unlimited broadband' and ven now their website describes all their packages of having 'no download limits'.

I personally fail to see how they can actively pursue a bandwidth throttling policy and still advertise 'unlimited' service.

btw I did report this to the ASA who claimed it was outside of their jurisdiction.

Computacenter coughs to gloomy first quarter

@AC

thats quite a set of generalisations which are without exception inaccurate and very negative, get out of bed on the wrong side this morning did we ?

Dixons admits 'it's even worse than you thought'

it might be worse than you thought...

...but it's no worse than they deserve.

The last thing I saw that smelt as bad as Dixons/PC World/Currys Digital was sitting in my cats litter tray.

HP in talks to buy EDS

Apparently there is a question begind the logic of this deal

There is the assumption that this is a services play by HP and a number of analysts are critical as EDS Services is a low growth business.

There is another possible dimension to this, the HP Software business is much exapnded these days (following the HP and Peregrine acquisitions) and from what I recall the majority of the HP software line-up is targeted at the enterprise, these products typically delivered with extensive consulting support.

If HP were to use EDS as a services and sales vehicle for HP software then they'd likely see a much healthier growth curve.

PC World, Currys staff to be dumped in DSGi rescue plan?

They stayed in business this long because

of their mass marketing advertiseing strategy which inferred quality and a competitive price, this at a time when the mass market adoption of PC technology by a (largely) techncially illiterate consumer base was at a high point.

They attracted a lot of customers, once !

second generation PC customers generally have a much greater understanding of the market they are shopping in, much of the time they know what they want and how much it should cost, often if they don't understand this themselves then they have a trusted family member (or close friend) who will advise them to stay away from PCW.

My experience of Maplins is that they are generally high priced but they know what they are doing and they are very convenient, its worth shopping there if you need something quickly/conveniently, need just one or two components or if you want someone else to have to go there and get it. Maplins also sometimes have some quite cool stuff so its fun for a browse.

My experience of PCW is more akin to that of dealing with a second hand salesman, the last time they had a deal which I felt was worth recommending to someone (who due to the advertising was convinced they had to buy their PC there), I printed the deal out and sent them to the store with instructions to buy this and nothing else. PCW initially tried to deny the deal existed and sell a premium PC bundle (which was half the power at nearly twice the price), they then tried to say their other deal was better (at which point I got a phoen call), finally (and without an opportunity for me to defat it via another phone call), they scaremongered my friend into buying a premium AV product and warranty, even though I send my friend in with a bit of paper saying neither was necesary.

Also, PCW never sell anything that makes it worthwhile me browsing there and their sale bins are full of really dodgy stuff that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole.

I buy paper from Rymans, Ink from Tesco, components from Scan or Maplins and PCs direct from Dell. Software tends to come from Amazon or Play. Why do I (or any other sane person) need PCW.

QXL.co.uk shuts up shop

likely competitor to ebay

Amazon marketplace vs E-bay shops

it's not much of a battleground at the moment but it has the potential to become one.

I'm surprised it lasted this long

QXL hasn't been a busy auction site for years.

MS misses restart button on desktop auto-updates

All Uk Financial Services comapnies run fully patched/updated servers.

in your dreams...

Nintendo Wii 'like a virus', games boss sniffs

great exclusives

Wii Sports

Super Mario Galaxy

Mario Kart Wii

Wii Fit

Links Crossbow Training

(Smash Bros Brawl & The Force Unleashed on Preorder)

Warioware

are all must have titles from a gaming or social aspect

thats without even considering titles you can get for other platforms

which of the other consoles has such compelling 'must have' exclusive titles.

Windows Vista update 'kills' USB devices

the positve aspect to knocing out USB peripherals

is that they won't get many emails complaining !

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

I'm generally a fan of the BBC but...

Highfield is being a total arse over this.

BBC to launch iPlayer for Wii

cost of Opera

The cost of the Opera browser (which gives you overall internet capability and not just iPlayer) at 500 points is £3.50, at roughly 1/8 of the cost of a game or 1/4 of the cost of a nunchuk it's already excellent value.

HP stuffs XenServer into ProLiants

a bit of smokle/mirros here methinks

If they are being vague about the Insight bit then my guess is that its less functionality and more marketing smoke/mirrors

ie - fuinctionality may be limited to the externt that if the VMs are running SNMP agents then they'll be seen by Insight

Call me an old cynic but I think its unlikely they'll have written VM specific ILO functionality for a hype (rather than function) led initiative like this one.

AMD 780G integrated DirectX10.1 chipset

so if I'm a gamer then...

its still the 8800GT all the way ?

AOL buys a friend for $850m

a good time to sell

Nice work by the owners of Bebo for selling almost at the top of the social networking market

Bad luck AOL it's all downhill from here

Iomega says no to EMC

jazz drives were great

unfortunately the high cartridge price meant many people went for the lower end zip drives, which had a pretty high failiure rate.

Why you should care that Jimmy Wales ignores reality

it is perhaps revealing that...

the Wikipedia entry for El-Reg makes no mention of it's views on Wikipedia, with the editors making in clear on the talk page that they don't consider this information 'noteworthy' or 'relevant'.

BBC mulls dropping Flash as iPlayer meets iPhone

streams to downloads ratio expected to change - why ?

If I stream somthing then I can watch it immediately, if I download then I hammer my ISPs traffic management quota and have to wait several hours, why do they think people will want to move from streaming to downlaods ?

Restored Vulcan hits financial turbulence

@Daniel

and therein lies part of the problem - TVOC have never been that great at communications.

PS3 won't beat Wii until 2011, forecasts analyst

hmm, something fishy here

this graph assumes that :

Wii will get to a point where no-one buys it as its obsolete

Sony will continue to capitalise on their blu-ray advantage and will provide the longevity of their platform.

MS will fail to shift from HD DVD to blu-ray, allowing Sony to continue to be the sole console with capabilities based upon the winner of the DVD standards war.

Personally i don't believe things will turn out this way and thats why this graph is screwed up, a couple of observations to back that up :

- Nintendo have already announced and will soon be shipping the Wii Fit, showing that they will continue to use their console to push at the horizontal boundaries of the coneol marketplace, I reckon they'll continue to do this and will win big on sales as a result.

- MS have already publicy scaled back their commitment to HD DVD and I beleive they'll have a blu-ray option within 6-12 months.

I beleive Sony will aggressively push the PS3 and it will, for a time enjoy a 'blu-ray advantage over the 360, enhancing it's sales curve. I do also beleive that hardcore gamers will find the Wii doesn't offer the performance to play the type of titles many of them need but these will represent blips on the sales curve rather than make a material and long lived effect on it.

Star Wars animation heads for the silver screen

@AC

Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper ?

Yahoo! to! reject! Microsoft! offer!

this deal was overpriced to begin with

the reaction of the Yahoo! board serves to indicate just how out of touch they are with reality, an offer of $44bn represents a huge premium for a company which has no prospects of ever getting near that valuation by itself.

Paris, because she knows when to climb onboard and enjoy the ride

Sony Ericsson goes Windows Mobile with Xperia X1 'arc slider'

hmm

Is this move to Windows in response to the increased control that Nokia seem to be having over Symbian or to the Apple OS entry to the phone market ?

(would be interesting to know which of the two was responsible for the shift in direction)

Also, 3.2mp is fine for a cameraphone if the optics are good.

With regard to the memory cards, does this support the SDHC capacity or just standard SD ?

Microsoft! bids! $44.6bn! for! Yahoo!

overpriced

this is 8x larger than their largest previous acquisition and will probably be 100x more of a mess and at this price M$ believe Yahoo has the same value as Sony Corp

I bet the Google guys are laughing their socks off

Reg readers bring down HMRC website

it's not like this hasn't happened before

Having experienced this problem in previous years, this time I did my return on the 26th, it was a little slow even then but it worked.

Come on guys, as experienced IT contractors I'd expect most of you to be a little more cynical of a system proven to have capacity problems.

I'd suggest as a workaround that next year HMRC operate a staged deadline based upon where the first letter of surname falls in the alphabet.

'Facebook fatigue' kicks in as people tire of social networks

I think we'll still see a rise in usage of business networking sites...

such as Linkedin.com as they are a valuable tool for business networking and knowledge sharing but without all the baggage/trivia that accompanies membership of the social networking communities.

Phone with foldable e-paper display to get summer roll-out

this is a massive step forward

In my laymans opinion, since we now have large capacity flash ram, fast mobile CPUs, bluetooth for peripherals (or maybe wireless USB ?) and a reasonable SFF (Small Form Factor) keyboard design, the largest remaining obstacle to device convergance has been the display.

A SFF display doesn't work for anything other than basic functions but people want to converge to a SFF pocket/handbag friendly device.

Does anyone know if there is potential for this technology to evolve to handle colour and FMV ?

If so then the potential is truly revolutionary.

IBM snubs OS/2 open source plea

to j clarke

I think you've hit the nail on the head with the MS reference

I worked for a firm during the mid 90's which developed software for the OS/2 platform, our biggest problem with IBM was always the MS code they couldn't release or talk to us about.

Computer system suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

system decision making 'by committee'

I'm not sure this was true with the 777, the AIMS system seems to be at the heart of everything, it seems like they put a lot of trust in the robustness of ADA as a language and as a consequence didn't isolate in the same way as they had done on previous aviation systems projects.

Perhaps this led to some common decision tree login somewhere ?

- I'm not a developer so may be barking up completely the wrong one, I have been workinbg in support for far too long and this looks fishily like a sw bug to me though.

Bloke finds missus working in brothel

chicken and egg

they both count as extras

Paramount puts down HD DVD dump rumour

Sony couldn't afford to lose this one...

I wonder how much the PS3 price cut had to to with comparative sales vs the Xbox 360 and how much it was driven by the need to get a bunch more blu-ray players out there...

Secret Crush widget spreads adware on Facebook

I think it's only a matter of time

before the open nature of Facebook becomes its own downfall

Amazon claims amazing Christmas

comments to comments

to Steve

Your comment regarding Amazon new delivery offer is interesting as I have noticed items ordered via their free super saver delivery now seem to take much longer to arrive than they used to.

In fact, I ended up paying for regular shipping for most of my deliveries and realised by the end of it that next year I could save money by taking advantage of the aforementioned offer.

Funny that...

To others whose items didn't arrive until after Christmas - I don't tend to rely on ordering anything online unless the items in question are in stock and the latest delivery date is at least a week before Christmas, I've not really had a problem with Amazon when these conditions are applied.

this surely isn't much of a surprise

This year I purchased about 50% of my Christmas shopping on Amazon, accounting for most purchases of books, CDs, DVDs, toys and consumer electronics.

The remainder was mostly a combination of online at The Body Shop, various smaller e-tailers and online reservations at Argos.

This method of shopping is convenient, cost competitive and normally allows me to order from reserved stock items which I know I want but otherwise would be difficult to obtain.

I still shop for three types of items on foot -

Those special somethings - I don't know what they are but I need some every year, major department stores, my local sci-fi/comics store and curiousity shops tend to sell them.

Greetings cards - cards for my nearest and dearest that are a 'good fit' are expensive and time consuming to locate, I'd like to be able to browse and buy great greeting cards online.

General Groceries - I can reserve my 'special' christmas items such as large joints and party food but not the general groceries, if I order these online then I have to take pot luck as to whether they are instock or not, consequently if I want to be sure of having cocktail cherries, cream or stuffing then I need to be in the store, a few days before Christmas, at opening time (generally queueing up 3 hrs later to pay with a good book).

I think it would be great if I could place an online order with a major supermarket for my groceries against 'reserved stock', saving me the 3 hrs of gridlock and the worry of whether or not ai'll be able to get hold of the right sort of cream, fresh spouts or mixed nuts.

Tesco to start flogging Dell computers

Personally I've never had a problem with Dell

Great PCs for the money with good components/build quality, certainly less hassle than building something myself their mid range desktops are generally built with upgrades in mind (space bays with associated nearby cables, plenty of cooling etc) while their mid range Inspiron or Latitude laptops have proved rugged enough toi survive daily transportation whilst packing a good punch for the money,

I have steered clear of their budget/value ranges though as these don't seem to be as well specified or built with cheaper chassis and lower grade components (many integrated).

PS3 demand booms in Japan

the Wii may appeal to chicks 'n' kids

thanks for the hardcore gamers view but there are an awful lot more chicks 'n' kids out there than hardcore gamers.

BBC's iPlayer launches Christmas Day

incompatible with Virgin Media

iPlayer downloads are approx 150mb for each half an hour of programming, this seems quite reasonable, taking 19.5 minutes at max speed on your average, domestic 2mb connection to download each hour of your favourite shows.

Unfortunately, Virgin Medias with their new and 'improved' traffic management policy are targeting people who overuse their internet connection for temporary bandwidth reductions, this includes people on their 2mb service who decide they really must download at least one hour of television using iPlayer anytime between the hours of 4pm and 9pm.

So, if you download one hr of TV, Virgin will cut your adwidth in half for the next five hours, meaning every subsequent hour takes twice as long (40 mins at your maximum speed) to download.

This is as a 'Heavy' user in Virgin speak is defined on their 2mb service as downloading more than 300mb between 4pm and 9pm, they say this makes you one of their top 3% of users !

The fact that a 300mb download over 5 hrs is using only 6.67% of available bandwidth seems to be of little consequence to Virgin, they will merrily traffic manage you as a heavy user anyway.

As you will have probably worked out, I'm not super impressed by by ISP and would urge anyone considering their service to think seriously before committing about whether or not using iPlayer will be important to you.

The ability to download using iPlayer at your max connection speed is an assumption I've made for this comment, the iPlayer does use Kontiki peer to peer technology to icnrease the number of nodes available to supply serve content bandwidth so its perhaps not an unreasonable assumption.

Virgin also operate traffic management for uploads, I'll leave explaining the implications of that policy to the BBC iPlayer Kontiki client to someone else....

Microsoft kills Santa Claus

Santabot.com also seems to be imperfect...

He seems to think that he's single (is evasive when I ask questions about Mrs Christmas) and clearly believes that "Sex is more fun alone".

Perhaps it's his split frm his partner and long term sexual isolation that leads him to make occasionl references to finding the bored.com website interesting.

Could you kill Vista too ?

The other day I was using my friends copy of Vista, the whole computer seemed really slow and it stated putting error messages on the screen, several of my applications also failed to run properly.

This is clearly inappropriate behaviour for an operating system, being completely unsuitable for public consumption, could El Reg please make M$ aware and maybe they'll do a 'Santa' on it too ?

(that would certainly make my Christmas a merry one!)

IBM buys Cognos for $5bn

So, IBM aren't buying SAP then ?

There has been a fair amount of speculation recently that IBM might buy SAP, if there were going to do this then they would be inheriting BO so they wouldn't need to be spending money on Cognos......

Xbox 360 outsells PS3 in Japan

these numbers look wrong

According to Enterbrain the Xbox 360 sold 18,717 units in the whole of October so how the hell did they manage a 400% increase in sales for the first week in November ?

I think its more likely to be a typo that the Halo factor that's responsible for these numbers.

Ukrainian eBay scam turns Down Syndrome man into cash machine

ebay unsuitable for large value transactions

It would seem clear from this arcticle that the current ebay mechanisms for transaction handling are completely unsuitable for large value (>$1000) transactions.

It would seem there is a gap in the market for someone...

Xbox 360 wrests US sales lead from Wii

might yo-yo for a bit longer

This has happened at a really important time for Microsoft

In compeition to Microsoft, the launch of the 40GB Ps3 and the corresponding price drop means a much more competitive head-to-head offering from Sony, the Nintendo Wii also has a very heavy release schedule for the Winter season with the next few months promising a number of major titles designed to fully exploit the capabilities fo the Wiimote.

Both these events have major implications for the 360 and its sales curve over the coming months, especially as in recent generations the console market has seen 'wars' with one side eventually domiating the other, to the detriment of adopters of the 'losing console', leading to a certain degree of 'caution' from consumers that they are to pick the winning console.

I'd suggest that the healthy sales curve so far enjoyed by the XBox 360 will serve to further emphasise its leadership over the PS3 (currently more than 2:1 global sales leadership) and will by one of (but not the) later nails in the coffin of the PS3 as 'loser' of this generations war.

The Wii I believe will be unaffected by what happens to either PS3 or Xbox 360 as due to its wider and in many cases different userbase, the focus on compeition with the Xbox 360 will decrease over the current generations lifecycle.

Ballmer: All open source dev should happen on Windows

sounds more like he's talking up yahoo

..rather than talking down Facebook.

perhaps they'll buy yahoo instead and relaunch the Geocities brand as a social networking hub ?

Total world Wii sales close in on Xbox 360 tally

PSP Sales a bit High ?

I'd be surprised if there really have been 22m PSP units sold

BBC iPlayer launches, but with limited viewer reach

They wanted it to be more open

The beeb wanted to be able to publish a full (rather than time limted) archive but were told that they couldn't as it would 'harm the competition', this is why its locked down adn time limited.

The requirement for the lockdown (via DRM) is probably also behind the platform limitation.

US PS3 sales hold up as Wii, Xbox 360 numbers dip

2nd consoles

I think that many will be buying the PS2 as a second as opposed to a primary console, this probably makes it more likely that those people will be more likely to have a Wii or a 360 as their primary as opposed to another Playstation