Posts by NIILL

It will be funny in a few years

I am sure that in a few years we'll all look back on this "humans changed the climate" fallacy in the same way we do about the Earth being flat, Moon made from cheese, and super-natural creator of Heavens and Earth. DOH, we still have some way to go to overcome that one too!!!

Predicting climate changes based on very short historical evidence is naive at best and dangerous at worst. A recent Ice Core sample from Greenland showed that there was insects and vegetation in that region between 150,000 and 400,000 years ago. This is a region now covered by over 1 Km of ice. I am sure that the last few millions of years have seen the planet warm and cool for all sorts of reasons, and the Eco-nutters who are more worried about scare-mongering and fund raising than scientific evidence should put their 20 years of research into a planet life-cycle context.

Al Gore.... = Al Bore

The Dell Vista version is cheaper

Been on the Dell web site and I just did a basic spec Inspiron 530 (DC1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD) and it came to £322.61 with Ubuntu; the same Vista Basic Home spec (with a free 250GB HDD upgrade) came to £300.24. Both prices included VAT & Shipping. I therefore fail to see the advantage of taking the Ubuntu option, as the whole idea of having a free OS is that the system price is cheaper... clearly not the case if Dell & MS are price supporting the Vista system. I use both Vista (Business Premium) and Ubuntu (7.04) and prefer Vista (with or without Aero), so personally a no-brainer.

So when did Microsoft start selling PC's?

The decision to add these stickers to the PC are taken by the PC manufacturers; they are well aware of what the hardware is capable of, and if they were happy with the OS performance the user would experience, then surely they are the guilty parties?? And all the MS-haters need to realise that there is more to an OS than a flashy 3D GUI; Vista provides users with many other features that XP doesn't have, and most (not all) but most HOME users will not use most the the features anyway, so a Home version is better suited. I would like to know who the PC Vendors were and what they say about this!

Carousel fraud irony

How ironic… organised crime gangs make billions of pounds a year exploiting loop-holes in tax laws to claim VAT on (mostly) mobile phones that they claim they are shipping around Europe and claim the VAT on each transaction (known as Carousel fraud), when the Telco providers themselves get stiffed for not being clever enough or understanding tax laws!!

Of course you can laugh all you want, but the Telco’s will have the last laugh; charging higher prices on the services that you DO use to cover the cost of the ones you DON’T. OFCOM are a joke at overseeing consumer protection, and I am sure the Government will turn a blind eye to allow the Telco’s to recoup their losses; otherwise they won’t buy the licences for the next “BIG” technology franchise!!

Who decides?

As far as I am concerned, the consumer has the right to choose what they want, and if more consumers wanted AMD and not Intel, then the shops would be selling AMD - basic rules of supply and demand. Ruiz needs to look at the PC market a bit closer - no change in 10-15 years!! Get real; 15 years ago I paid £1250 for a 486 DX4/100 Compaq desktop that could just about run basic DOS games; my latest Dual Core Intel system that I built myself costing no more than £600 (thanks to Ebuyer.com's great prices) and it has enough power to play games; encode media and fold for World Community Grid all at the same time. AMD need a competitive product that people want, they almost did it with the Athlon64 but you can't argue with Intel R&D as the Core Duo is ace.

What happened to QXL.com?

I remember seeing QXL.com a long time before eBay; and QXL was backed by Hollywood Super-Cop Bruce Willis!! Maybe Google should team up with QXL, and stick it to eBay/PayPal (PayPal btw have not upheld both the claims I made for against sellers sending rip-off gear described as new, so I don't use PayPal anymore, even though I have a 147 eBay rating). QXL, QXL; yippie kiyaa eBay!

Collaboration with Aliens

Collaborating with Aliens for space travel technology (including artificial gravity drives) will be our fastest route to inter-stellar travel; the probability of Aliens may be in the hundreds of billions to one odds, which given the number of Stars in this Universe means there are likely to be billions of planets orbiting stars in their relative "Goldie-locks" orbits and sustaining life. If a very, very small percentage of those planets were lucky enough to have escaped a life ending meteor strike, then those civilisations could well be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. The one thing that maths teaches us is that the odds are we are not alone!!!

Vista 64 IS stable

My Vista 64 installation ha been working away without a restart and no crashes for a couple of weeks; and this includes adding a Canon scanner and numerous storage devices.

So not only have I got an OS that looks much better than my XP machine in the office, but one that is more stable too.

Having worked in software sales for years, I can say without doubt that the only software that doesn't need patches/updates is from vendors who have ceased trading. Stand still and die!

HD is Not All Bad

I have been a Sky HD customer since launch, and agree that there does need to be more content, and there will be in time and as demand increases - but I have to say that once you have watched Premiership Footie in HD, there really is no going back to "nornal" telly. This is worth every penny of the £10 per month to have HD. Also, the HD box looks cool, is fast and can store an unbelieveable amount of recorded content on the 160GB space they give you. So unless you have actually lived with HD for a while, you won't know what you're missing.