Posts by RICHTO 853 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2012
I got my 64GB Playbook for £119 from Currys. However, it's a 7 Inch tablet with a pretty crappy OS. Does great duty for the kids to watch films, but its not quite in the same ballpark as the Surface.
Personally i think that if Microsoft cut the price by £100 they would probably double sales. As it stands, it seems expensive for what it is. Which makes the new iPad a real rip off...
They already did cut the price to some channels. They are going for £430 new on eBay instead of £560 (64GB + keyboard). Certainly that route will likely provide better customer service than the Microsoft Store - which is truely awful.
And you cant really compare this to the iPad which is a very limited toy. The Surface RT has a whole load more functionality. For instance you can have an app onpen on the tablet, and a different app open on an external monitor. It has a proper version of Office. It has proper USB support, etc, etc. Not to mention a higher contrast, brighter screen, and high quality case materials.
What utter FUD.
When gases are ranked by their direct contribution to the greenhouse effect, the most important are: Water vapor: 36 – 72%, Carbon dioxide: 9 – 26%, Methane: 4 – 9%, Ozone: 3 – 7% - So 640 times is utter codswallop.
Anthropogenic CO2 comes from fossil fuel combustion, changes in land use (e.g., forest clearing), and cement manufacture. Houghton and Hackler have estimated land-use changes from 1850-2000, so it is convenient to use 1850 as our starting point for the following discussion. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations had not changed appreciably over the preceding 850 years (IPCC; The Scientific Basis) so it may be safely assumed that they would not have changed appreciably in the 150 years from 1850 to 2000 in the absence of human intervention.
In the following calculations, we will express atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in units of parts per million by volume (ppmv). Each ppmv represents 2.13 X1015 grams, or 2.13 petagrams of carbon (PgC) in the atmosphere. According to Houghton and Hackler, land-use changes from 1850-2000 resulted in a net transfer of 154 PgC to the atmosphere. During that same period, 282 PgC were released by combustion of fossil fuels, and 5.5 additional PgC were released to the atmosphere from cement manufacture. This adds up to 154 + 282 + 5.5 = 441.5 PgC, of which 282/444.1 = 64% is due to fossil-fuel combustion.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations rose from 288 ppmv in 1850 to 369.5 ppmv in 2000, for an increase of 81.5 ppmv, or 174 PgC. In other words, about 40% (174/441.5) of the additional carbon has remained in the atmosphere, while the remaining 60% has been transferred to the oceans and terrestrial biosphere.
The ~ 369.5 ppmv of carbon in the atmosphere, in the form of CO2, translates into 787 PgC, of which 174 PgC has been added since 1850. From the second paragraph above, we see that 64% of that 174 PgC, or 111 PgC, can be attributed to fossil-fuel combustion. This represents about 14% (111/787) of the carbon in the atmosphere in the form of CO2.
i.e. what might seem as relatively small changes caused by man do make a significant difference in the long term.
Green algae and cyanobacteria in marine environments provide about 70% of the free oxygen produced on Earth and the rest is produced by terrestrial plants including trees....
You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a actually a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. As it is written in The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Praise be to his Noodlyness, Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster and the real father of Jesus ($1 million on offer if you can prove that he isn't! http://boingboing.net/2005/08/19/boing-boings-250000.html)
The recording industry employs paid bloggers to support their cause. This is no secret.
That is why you will often find a couple of far out cartel supporting comments early on in such threads - they are paid to sit all day watching out for such news and spouting copyright cartel gospel to make it seem as if the public actually support them....
Surface wipes the floor with all of them in the Sun Spider benchmark though: http://media.bestofmicro.com/B/V/359419/original/sunspider.png
And it has a much better contrast screen than any other tablet: http://media.bestofmicro.com/6/K/359228/original/maxcontrast.png
Except that buying it from a shop isn't an option for the Surface tab - and when it does arrive broken it should be their problem, not mine....
Had they had an even barely useable customer service operation i woudl likely have bought a Surface Pro too, but now im going to get something else instead. Maybe the new HP Envy or the Dell with the detachable screen....
FYI, here is the returns email you get. It says that you must return the goods to get a refund, which is not what the law says - it requires a refund to be made within 30 days of the request to cancel - reqgardless of if the return has been completed yet. I have never received a label or an address to ship to despite chasing many times. They can apparently see on their system that a label was never sent too - but dont seem to be able to get their 'warehouse' to actually do anything:
Thank you for ordering from Microsoft. At your request, a return has been initiated. Your request to return items ordered will expire in 30 days. You must follow the instructions below before your request expires. We cannot issue a refund before these instructions are followed.
Each product must be received at its correct corresponding address in order for us to process your refund.
Please read carefully to ensure that each product is returned to the correct location. Once the product is received, your refund should appear within 5-7 business days.
Return Request Details:
Order ID: xxxxxxxxxx
Order Date: 16 October 2012
Return Reference Number: xxxxxxxxx
Reply Due By: 06 December 2012
Product(s) to Return: Product: Surface wWinRT-64GB Bndl SC EngBrit Hdwr Single
Quantity: 1
• All returns must be sent to the address on the pre-paid shipping label you will receive in a separate email.
They are based in Ireland so the small claims court becomes more effort. It is easier just to point the finger at my credit card company. I have wasted enough of my time already to be bothered to complain to everyone and his dog.
If you wish to though, feel free - the T&C are on the website and as far as I can see they don't come close to meeting UK law: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/DisplayTermsOfUseAndSalePage/ThemeID.30273200/
My Surface did not arrive as promised on launch day. I complained and was told i would get a voucher in compensation - I never heard any more.
When it finally did arrive, it was in a mangled box and had a shattered screen. I reported that straight away - and despite over 2 hours on the phone via repeated calls to the Microsoft Store no help desk trying to get a replacement i got nowhere. Every question required the agent to put me on hold to talk to someone else and they claimed that this was something 'the warehouse' had to resolve who were apparently not contactable by phone, email, or anything else that actually involved getting a response.
I asked to speak to a supervisor - and was told that they were busy talking to another customer. I said i was happy to wait - after which i was told that no supervisor would be available - now or ever - and that they didnt have a complaints or escalation proceedure! I then gave up and requested to cancel the contract under the Distance Selling Regulations. (I note that their website and their refunds process does not comply with UK or EU law.)
Depite multiple chasing calls - they still havnt provide the promised label to return the item - and as 21 days have now lapsed, i have no longer any obligation to return it. As of today (30 days later) I still have not received a refund as required by law so i contacted my credit card company to raise a chargeback...
Microsoft Store have zero customer service and no contact other than the no help desk - not even an email address!
Avoid at All costs....Buy an Asus, an HP Envy, or anything that doesnt involve the Microsoft Store....
That's not bias - the evidence for global warming is overwhelming and hasnt been in any doubt by climate scientists for at least a decade now. It's just like saying that they wont bother publishing articles that state that the world is flat, or that the moon is made of cheese.....
It is worse because the average temperature is higher than in 1953 due to global warming, so the atmosphere holds more water....meaning storms are likely to dump more rain on us...
nb - global warming hasnt ceased at all since 1998. Where did he get that crap from? See http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/graphs_tables/i8_GlobalTemp.PNG
Well it doesnt look like happening yet. Surface is in V1 much better than Android. I can properly use a external screen for instance - and run multiple apps at the same time. Plus it has the devices drivers for 400 million supported devices! Not like Android crap where you have to root it and recompile the kernel just to load a driver!
So nowhere near as much as the recent jump in Nokia shares then....
No one needs Blackberry anymore - you can connect directly to Exchange email systems from most modern handsets, and you can fully set device policy, etc. from within Exchange - you can remote wipe a device from your web mail - and if you need to manage mobile device applications, etc then SCCM can do that for you - and if you need high security then Windows Phone has a similar clean record to Blackberry...
My vote goes for Mac OS-X Civet. The cat best known for it's shit.
After all, OS-X is almost the worse OS for security on the planet - now with over 1800 known vulnerabilities: http://secunia.com/advisories/product/96/
To put that in perpsective, Windows XP has about 450. (About about the only thing worse than that for vulnerabilities is a Linux distribution!)
You cant do that without modifying the hardware of the Xbox - soldering a board inside it, or hardware flashing the firware of the DVD drive with special equipment for instance. And THEN patching the disk image too.
The statistics prove you are wrong - the Xbox has a MUCH higher attach rate (sold games per console) than the PS3.
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