Posts by Steven Pemberton

Don't forget the pricing

When Win8 came out I watched prices of machines going up; luckily I bought my new machine before that. I'm sure the manufacturers thought "New OS + Ultrabook = we can charge Apple prices!" not realising that a lot of people don't buy Apple for exactly the inflated price reason. I'm waiting for the PC industry to come to their senses before buying again. Recently I built my own computer instead, and was shocked, shocked I say, at what a good machine I could create for so little money...

Other uses of Google Translate

By the way, you can also use Google Translate to get round ISP blocks. In the Netherlands, some ISPs have been required to block The Pirate Bay; however, if you go to it via Google translate there's no block.

Units

"it will be generating a bracing 960,000,000GB of data a day"

So that'll be 960 petabytes a day then, or did you think we wouldn't know anything above giga?

Did anyone notice prices going up?

When Win8 came out I watched prices of machines going up; luckily I bought my new machine before that. I'm sure the manufacturers thought "New OS + Ultrabook = we can charge Apple prices!" not realising that a lot of people don't buy Apple for exactly the inflated price reason. I'm waiting for the PC industry to come to their senses before buying again. Last week I built my own computer instead, and was shocked, shocked I say, at what a good machine I could create for so little money...

I agree with megapixel

Then it is consistent with how digital cameras are sold

Boblbee

and no other.

Reaching parity with HDs

"There may never be parity between SSDs and the good old mechanical disk drive but the solid state option is steadily heading in the right direction regarding cost and capacity."

Sure they'll reach parity. SSDs follow Moore's Law, HDs don't.

Game changer

This is one of the most cynical articles I've read on El Reg, and that's saying something...

Anyway, Alexander Graham Bell is reported to have believed that the invention of the telephone would help the deaf in some way or another, and I think people are making the same thought mistake here. I don't think the Pi will turn out to be of particular use for education, but for loads of other things we haven't even considered yet. The key thing about the Pi is that it is an order of magnitude cheaper than other commercial computers. Like the PDP 10 was in its day, or the personal computer. When the price drops by an order of magnitude, people start using computers in completely different ways. Handled right, we will be able to look back at the Pi as the first generation of the £10 computer, that changed the way we thought about and used computers.

6000 TB = 1 PB

Can I just point out that since you are writing for professional computer wonks, that it's quite all right to say 6 petabytes rather than 6000 terabytes. We will know what you mean. (And if we don't, we know where to look it up.)

Don't like Unity? Install Gnome!

I don't understand the fuss about Unity. If you don't like it, go to the Software Centre, type "Gnome" and install it. Done. Then at the log-in screen you can choose which you want to use. You don't need to install another distribution just to change the interface!

As it happens I prefer Unity, but there you go.

I like Unity, but it's easy to replace

I don't understand the fuss. I run several versions of Ubuntu on different machines, as well as Fedora, but having given it a chance, I now prefer Unity over Gnome. But I also don't understand all the hissy fits from people who don't like it. You just install Gnome from the software centre, and you're back to how it used to be. No need to go looking for other distributions. Choice, it's what free software is about.

Aargh!

They've removed the indicator of whether a mail comes from someone on your contacts list or not. This was the thing I most liked with Opera mail! I could scan through the hundreds of emails I get per day, and in one go see the important ones (from people I regularly correspond with). Ugh ugh ugh.

What a lot of fuss about so little

If you don't like Unity, install Gnome from the Software Centre, and then select Gnome (classic) when you log in. All fixed.

A waste

To create 360 they bought up zyb.com, which was a good service, which I happily used. And then they wrecked it, above all by not supporting calendars. Basically they were clueless.

And only yesterday Acer said exactly the opposite

Acer slashes tablet forecast, banks on notebooks

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/15/acer_cuts_tablet_forecasts/

(Hey! Where's the badgers icon gone???)

Don't confuse the W3C with the person who designed the logo

The article seems to confuse two very different things: the organisation that commissioned the logo, and the guy working for the company that designed it. Just because a graphic designer says the logo represents CSS as well, doesn't mean that W3C agree with him or asked him to say it.

Thanks EU!

I just want to thank the EU for enforcing this. They get so much flak from a lot of people, that it's good to recognise them for their valuable things (while I'm here, I'd also like to thank them for the 750ml wine bottles, in the days that the wine industry was steadily reducing the amount per bottle, to 690ml and less).

Eh? Where's the rub?

So after listing several positive aspects of Percolator, it says:

"The rub is that Caffeine uses roughly twice the resources to keep up with the same crawl rate."

So what's the rub here? It sounds like yet another advantage. Am I missing something?

Swindlers

I recently got a message from T-Mobile telling me that they had slashed rates on roaming,

And indeed, the per minute rate is halved. But now they charge per minute rather than per second, and add a per-call fee. So what used to cost at minimum 23 cents, now costs 104 cents. The break even point is at 3 minutes 30 seconds. I checked my most recent calls from abroad, and almost all calls are under 1 minute.

Why no HTML?

What I don't understand is why if the readers support ePub format (which is just a packaged version of HTML) they don't also support HTML. It would be so easy, and so useful...

He should do his homework

For twenty years there was exactly one laptop in our house - mine. But after netbooks were introduced there were suddenly 5; everyone had one except for the 6 year old, and I can only put off his complaining by telling him that he can't have one until he can read. No one has complained after 36 hours that they are unusable. Nor after 3600 hours. They are all happy, because they know what they bought.

I miss it

I enjoyed the original Joost, and miss it, even though I didn't watch it often. I loved the Aardman cartoon channel (and so did my kids), but a lot of the other content was stupid stuff meant I suppose to appeal to geeks, like the Swimsuit channel or whatever.

I never had any trouble with the streaming (though latency was sometimes long), and the underlying idea was brilliant: distribute the bandwidth needs of broadcasting over the whole network, so that broadcasters only needed a thin pipe to get the stuff out (like Bittorrent). But that plan depended on getting critical mass, which they never got, alas.

Maybe they shouldn't have started off with a closed system, and just let anyone broadcast.

Some points of information

Everyone "puts a postit note" on their copyrighted works. The Register too. It is called the copyright notice, and if it's not there, then if someone copies it, you can't complain. All this use of RDFa does it makes the copyright machine readable too. Nothing wrong with that, right?

RDFa is just microformats generalised. It allows you to add machine readable information about the content. It's early days yet, but if a page for a conference for instance were marked up with RDFa, the browser would know it was an event, and could offer to add it to your calendar, show you it on a map, look for hotels, or flights. You can only do this if the information on the page is machine readable.

There really is an official W3C version of HTML with RDFa: it's called XHTML+RDFa. It's section 8 of http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/

There is already some adoption of RDFa apart from CC. For instance, it will be in the next version of Drupal (http://groups.drupal.org/node/16597), and check out the London Gazette (http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/) whose articles are chocka with RDFa.

2TB of memory should be enough for anybody (ha ha)

Frankly, I can't help thinking that they'll kick themselves very soon for restricting it to only 2TB. Current consumer hard disks max out at 2TB, but that's only 6 iterations (doublings) away from the current max of 32GB for SDHC. 2TB sounds a lot now, but it won't soon. The first generation of SD cards (introduced in 2000) maxed out at 1GB. They tweaked that later to 4GB, and then had to define SDHC to get up to 32G, and now SDXC to get to 2TB. Three redefinitions in less than a decade doesn't sound very visionary to me.

Hardy Pardy more like

So I went along to their website wearing a newby user's hat to see how easy peasy it would be for the the average netbook user to install this stuff.

The home page has a link to download, but no instructions on installing. You get an ISO file, that most people won't know what to do with.

The home page also has a link to documentation, which *also* has no instructions on installing.

So it's just another Linux distro for those in the know. How do they expect Linux to catch on if they don't make it easy for newcomers?

Europe has been doing good

Good grief! What is everyone getting worked up about? Reding didn't say anyone *should* charge for incoming calls, just that she wouldn't stop anyone who did. Whether a telco does do it is up to them, not to her.

Europe has been doing good stuff stopping the telcos from fleecing us when roaming in Europe (pity it doesn't have the power to stop them when roaming in other countries), so cut her some slack!