Posts by Shaun Sheppard8 posts • joined Thursday 15th November 2007 18:11 GMT
Our tv only has one hdmi input, so we have to switch it when we want to switch from sky, to playing a DVD, or to switching a device that can stream from our media server.
It would be great if all this could be done in one device, with one remote and one interface.
Imagine an average consumer, who works and has two kids, want's a server at home to stream stuff around the house, and setup logins for each person in the household. They could go out, buy a cheap PC or netbook type device, download a Linux distro, install it, and then configure it with a static IP address, spend hours setting up samba and getting the user logins/shares to work.
Not everyone has the time or want's to mess about spending hours of their precious time configuring and managing a server. The average consumer just wants something they can plug it, quickly setup and job done.
Sky + is important to many people these days, but you don't see people asking for dual raid storage just incase one of the drives fail.
Apple know fine well who their market it, and so far, they're doing a great job at catering for them.
The patents talk about add on websites, and adds using flash. Seeing as iAd's doesn't do any of the above, then they're not infringing on the patents?
Been with them for roughly 8 month, download speeds are constant no matter what time of day, and the service has been 100% reliable so far.
It's much better than my previous BT Business Broadband account, and at half the price.
If someone was to buy Tiscali, they'd be buying it for their customers rather than the technology or network.
To the bog standard computer user Linux is too difficult...simple as, and until this changes there will never be a massive uptake.
All my PC's run windows, can't say they ever crash and nor have I ever got a virus, and I never get spyware either.....I look after my PC.
I've tried Linux, but as a web developer I missed photoshop and dreamweaver, and then visual studio and the .net framework....yeh there's wine, but it's such a pain to setup.
Windows seems to be a common platform, if someone gives me a file or application, it's likely it'll come from a windows machine, simply because there are more windows machines around than Linux machines, and if I wanted to get half the stuff I was given to work on linux it would involve re-compliling the kernel and looking for dependencies or something like that.....which is a really time consuming task.
I'm not bashing linux, there's a lot of effort going into building each distro, but the facts are plain to see, it's not as easy to use as windows, and getting stuff to work can be too difficult or time consuming for people with busy lives.
www.msofficeaccounting.co.uk
It supports UK VAT, and it can automatically calculate PAYE and NI, that is free at the moment, but from april 2008 that feature will cost almost £10 a month.
I've downloaded it and had a quick look, and for £150 it seems like a good peice of kit for the professional version, also having the advantage that it works like most other MS products, which will probably suite most small businesses.
