Posts by jwenting

what caused BluRay to win out was NOT superior technology, it was superior funding in the marketing department.
A few billion spent on "convincing" movie studios and others to release their products exclusively on BluRay meant there are simply not enough HDDVD disks being produced to make buying a player an option.

P.S the same goes for (most?) other brands, except maybe ones like Leica that have release cycles measured in years.

Canon has a "new" range of cameras available twice a year, each time with a new marketing hype attached in the form of some new acronym to add to the specsheet.

In reality none of those cameras are much of an improvement in real terms over their predecessors, certainly not worth replacing your old camera unless it's 3-5 years old at least.

Hardly surprising. Their customer base isn't made up of the few tenths of a percent (at most) of techies who "hate Microsoft" and are willing to put up with the troubles Linux gives (like not being able to run Windows software, for most users especially MS Office and games).

Given the massive cost difference between wireless hotspots and mobile broadband (not to mention the difference in bandwidth, up to 54MBit for 802.11 vs. 1.8MBit for wireless broadband) it's unlikely.

Wireless broadband through my ISP would cost me €80 per month with a bandwidth limit of 2GB.
802.11 access through the hundreds of hotspots they provide nationwide (mostly in public buildings and public transportation nexi) is free and has no bandwidth limits.

Just about the only advantage of UMTS/GPRS is the availability. Instead of having to stay near that hotspot you can use it anywhere you're within reach of a cellphone tower and move around almost anywhere instead of loosing the network if you're outside the area of the WLAN.
For that reason my employer has supplied each employee with a UMTS card and account for emergencies. If we're somewhere with no internet access and we need to access the company intranet (say to fill out timecards or check email) we can use that, but due to the high cost we've been given a strict datalimit of 500MB per month (which is I think cumulative, rather than being lost when not used, but that's details).

At the same time we have a company wide WLAN set up for everyday use at considerable cost (multiple high capacity hotspots on each floor to cover for the maybe 500-1000 people who connect to it every day).

So no, WLAN is going nowhere for the time being. UMTS …

Oh wow, a beta that's not stable and not fully functional. I'm shocked, shocked I say, that Davey didn't go to greater lengths to state how EVIL Microsoft is because of that.

I've no sympathy at all for idiots like that who don't bother to read their contracts before using services abroad where they're more expensive than at home.
Or idiots (like this one it seems) who don't bother to read things like manuals.

Maybe having worked for a mobile network and seeing this kind of idiocy first hand, and seeing that it's not a rarity but commonplace helps.
Being someone who does check up and make sure he doesn't do such stupid things of course also helps give me perspective :)

Worst of all, the idiots more often than not complain that the network should pay instead of them, presenting cost conscious customers with higher bills as the network has to get their income somewhere and thus has to increase prices for everyone to accommodate idiots.

it's a group of computer criminals...
They're releasing it as a piece of advertising, trying to draw in buyers for their services.
If they're releasing what they've been using themselves before that only means they've got something more powerful already and/or have mined it dry themselves already so it's got no economic value left for them.

And it's in reality no problem at all as they're all using private connections to central computers and are not as the alarmist report wants you to think connected to the internet without any firewalls or virusscanners.

In reality even people without those who run Windows are at minimal risk unless they actively engage in insecure activities like visiting shady websites or using p2p clients to download pirated content.

In 10 years online the ONLY times my virus scanners and firewalls have ever detected a serious intrusion attempt were when visiting websites, the only attempts that could have done damage that came in unsolicited (so were not the result of code embedded in some html page) were assaults on my web and mail servers.
For an embedded device that should pose no threat. They're not visiting websites, and aren't running web and mailservers.
Combine that with not being on an open network at all and there's no problem (unless that private network were compromised, in which case the criminals would have access to the central banking computers already and not need to look at incoming traffic from ATMs).

The only winner is the Sony marketing department.
For the consumer a normal DVD is quite good enough, he doesn't need or (in most cases) want to spend €500+ for a BluRay player when he can get a DVD player for under €100 that has similar functionality, or to pay €60+ for a BluRay disc when he can get a DVD for €10-20 (depending on the content).
With no more competition to remove from the market, BluRay can now raise prices through the roof, and with the movie distribution companies on board we'll soon find that DVD releases are going to be either delayed past the BluRay release, get far more expensive, or get scrapped altogether.
The extra profit margin on BluRay discs and players is far too lucrative to pass up...

In effect we're going to see the same thing that happened when audio CDs became standardised, or VHS tapes (Betamax in the US).
The availabillity of the "old" media will evaporate rapidly while the new media will be marketed as being "temporarilly" more expensive to recover development cost, a "temporary" that will last 10-20 years (when CDs were introduced the "promise" was that they'd cost the same as vinyl records within 5 years, it's now 20 years later and they still cost over twice (for new releases) what new vinyl releases cost).

"The Russian company, Gleg, is in the business of selling information on such exploits and security flaws. "

I guess they got an offer from some criminals that was higher than the offer (probably an offer of nothing at all) they got from RealNetworks...

Economics, Soviet style. Don't care about social responsibility, only about stuffing your own pockets, compared with economics, softy style, appeal to peoples' social responsibility in an attempt to get them to part with their goods for free.

The problem with politicians telling us there won't be a recession is that noone believes them anymore after they've lied to us for decades about pretty much everything (and especially economics).

That's the real problem, the very fact that a politician tells you something makes you suspicious about the truth behind the statement, UNLESS he's telling you that you're going to be worse off because of new tax hikes (and even then you are suspicious about the amount he tells you you're going to loose, mentally doubling it).

Will there be a recession? Possibly, even probably.
Is there a macroeconomic reason for there to be one? Probably not.

So both the consumer who fears a recession and the economist telling you that there is no reason for a recession are correct.
But that recession won't happen because of macroeconomic reasons, it will happen because consumers perceive there to be a recession and therefore stop buying things, thus bringing about that recession all by themselves.

The tax increases in some countries which are leading to actual loss of consumer buying power in a strengthening economy only make things worse, especially when those consumers see their politicians wasting that money on projects that don't do them any good (especially pay increases for those politicians themselves, reducing the opinion people have of those politicians even further).

And there's the problem. While the economy is strong and getting stronger (for the moment), consumers have less money to …

So an industry group consisting of a few companies selling malware detection software is claiming that most such software (read, software produced by their competitors) doesn't work properly?

Sounds like advertising to me, launch a new "quality logo" or "certification" to show what programs are "guaranteed good" and apply it to your own products only.
A lot of potential customers (and given some money magazine and website editors too) will happily fall for it, either not knowing better or in the case of those editors looking the other way after being paid to do so.

Nothing new there, been going on in many areas for a LONG time. Just don't trust "independent quality certification" on face value.

Never think I'm in favour of virusses, but when they hit the pirate 2 pirate networks there's some sort of poetic judgement in what happens next :)

Their first arrest, and it has to be someone who's trying to go after pirates...

Guess they've never heard of hardware failure.
Data centers are already pretty much unmanned, except for people monitoring the equipment and reacting when things (threaten to) go wrong.

I've yet to meet the dog who can swap out a failing core switch or harddisk, or reconfigure a panel of patch cables.

Another major factor in pulling countries into a recession is politicians stating that things are going well with the economy while people are getting hit in their income and see their spending power reduced by skyhigh inflation.

This is not so much the case in the US maybe, but in several European countries the economy is growing still while consumers are getting less and less spending power due to tax hikes.
As a result they are rapidly loosing what trust they have in the economy, spending is slowing down, and the economy is cooling.
The only thing preventing economic collapse at the moment is the price increases in necessities like food and clothing. People are having to spend a lot more money on those, forcing them to spend every cent they have rather than putting it into savings accounts or safety deposit boxes for the future.

If at the same time they see politicians get ever more lavish salaries (as is the case here, where the cabinet decided to give themselves a 30% raise while at the same time urging companies and labour unions to not increase salaries by more than 2-3% to prevent the economy from getting too hot) things only get worse.

I've often thought that Microsoft's patent policy is defensive rather than offensive.
Come up with an idea you don't want worked out into a product, develop it just enough to have a viable patent, then file for that patent so a competitor can't do it and possibly harm you.

Spell checkers are useful tools for sure, but ever more people (and especially kids) are relying on them in lieu of learning to spell themselves.
I don't blame anyone for using a dictionary (yes, I have a series and use them for several languages) or spell checker (I use those too, though rarely do they catch me and most of the times they do they turn out to be wrong) for complex or unfamiliar words, but ever more people have to rely on a spellchecker (not even knowing how to read a dictionary) even for everyday words, especially words longer than 2 syllables.
That's a very worrying trend, and it starts with schoolkids.

Learn them to spell correctly and they'll have a skill that never dulls. They'll also have far less difficulty picking up and remembering the correct spelling of new words they encounter in the future.
When I was in highschool our teachers used to dictate exam assignments to us, and grade not just the answers but the writing on the questions as well for correct spelling.
You could get every answer correct but still fail the exam if you made too many spelling errors in taking down the questions.
Maybe a bit harsh, but it did teach 2 things:
1) rapid writing ;)
2) correct spelling.
Everyone came out of those courses with a vastly improved vocabulary.

And indeed, she probably doesn't blame those two services in particular. …

She should take it further, and require all papers to be hand written without major spelling or grammatical errors.

Kids no longer don't learn to think for themselves, but also no longer learn to write properly or correctly without the help of spellcheckers and grammar checkers (and often not even using those...).

So the Gates Foundation is doing the work, not Microsoft themselves.

Can't you ever let your Microsoft hatred prevent clouding your intelligence?

Cell phone "features" are NOT driven by consumer demand but by network capacity.

As networks get wider, capable of carrying more and wider signals to users, phone manufacturers and network engineers have to think up new ways to use that bandwidth in such a way that it generates income for the networks.
Network marketeers come in on the act in order to create the demand for the things the engineers think up.

The consumer doesn't enter the equation except as a target for advertising and a source of income.

The fact that he thinks he actually wanted that new capability before it was offered to him when he goes in to purchase something that didn't even exist a few months before is testament to the success of network (and cellphone manufacturer) marketing techniques rather than the foresight of engineers and marketeers to consider correctly what customers are going to want to have in the future.

They create the demand after all, not the customer. Without the marketeers the demand would not exist. Without the engineers the marketeers would have no demand to create.

Opera is loosing money scru, and they know full well that the EU is out to get Microsoft (and indeed any American company that competes with a French or German one) whereever they can.
They saw an opening to make money by forcing EU computer makers to ship Opera with computers instead of IE (because that's what'll end up being decided by her Majesty of "anti-competitive regulation" Madam Kroes) and jumped in.
The EU, being what they are, are almost certain to go ahead and launch another war against the Evil Microsoft.

idiots.
Can't stand to loose so they start another smearcampaign.

Sounds like Al Gore after the 2000 US presidential elections, or Kerry after the 2004 elections.

Customers have all the choice they need. As a service they get IE preinstalled (which is anyway an integral part of the operating system as it's also the help engine and file browser) and they can install whichever other browsers they like.

Of course the EU, being anti-American to the core, is likely to cave in to this, the latest idea to hurt Microsoft...

Maybe we should launch a complaint against Symbian for bundling Opera with their operating system...

The very thing (well, the most important thing) that stops people from using GPL'd software/libraries for commercial purpose IS the requirement to release anything created using that software under GPL yourself.

The GPL zealots of course have never understood that, not being professionals (most of them), or at least not professional software developers and being religiously rather than economically motivated in their decisions.

hmm, sounds like a rehash of the results of 2006, 2005, 2004, etc. etc. etc. with the added paragraph about virtualisation.

IOW the market is going nowhere.

hardly surprising that they'd want to get people scared up this time of year.
Many subscriptions to AV and firewall software are given as gifts around Christmas time, or bought to fit PCs received as gifts with Christmas.

It's a big market in December and January, and getting people good and scared in advance will make them all the more eager to buy, buy, buy.

I wonder what indices you're looking at. The NASDAQ had quite a rally yesterday.
And it's not just tech stocks that have been going down. There's been a general downturn in the market which only yesterday (or maybe monday in some regions) started to revert.

For those who'd missed it: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20071108

i like orange

So do I, as a colour, in moderation. As a service provider, no thank you.
Maybe they'll improve now that T-Mobile has bought them (at least the local operations here), but why try when I'm already using T-Mobile?

I want my phone to be a phone, darn the phone manufacturers, not a radio-camera-mp3player-pda-internetdevice-messagecenter.

reason #6: it's not offered on the network I want to use. Apple delivers solely through Vodaphone (I think it's going to be here), while I'm a happy T-Mobile user with an old aversion to Vodaphone.

Cellphone manufacturers are ever more forgetting one very large category of users: those who just want to use the darn thing as a phone (so no cameras, PDAs, internet access, radios, mp3 players, you name it) and don't want something so tiny you need a pencil and magnifying glass to press the buttons.

And also check the fees.
Some dealers have extremely high trading and transaction fees, which can run up to a third or more of the amount you're trading.
That's a percentage you're unlikely to get back out again (remember you pay the same percentage again when you sell...).
If you're investing $100 and have to pay 25%, you end up with $75 in stock. Now to get that $100 back that $75 has to becomes about $130, or something like an 80% increase in stock price. Unless you are lucky and choose a very successful stock you can keep a long time you're not going to make that.

Linux is loosing marketshare because Windows (and true Unix) servers are outselling Linux servers, not because people are switching their existing servers away from Linux.

This is clearly shown in the company I work for. We used to buy about 50/50 Linux and Solaris servers (with the occasional Windows machine for special purposes) but over the last 6 months (and expected to continue) it's been almost exclusively Solaris.

We're having excellent experience with it, low downtime, good support, etc. etc.. Overall better value for money (for a high availabillity environment) than the Linux machines we used to buy (which have more downtime, which means we require more redundancy using them, which increases purchase cost as well as hosting cost (rackspace) and support/maintenance cost).

hmm, my Hotmail account stores an average of 5 messages (not counting spam and other disposables).
My main account at home is under 300MB.
I wonder why anyone would need that much storage space (unless it is to store all the movies and mp3s they get sent by friends).

what's to like about Blackberries?
Too small to be comfortable as a replacement for a laptop, too large to be a decent replacement for a mobile phone.

well, as it is out of warranty they have no contractual (and quite likely no legal) obligation to replace it...
It does of course make for good damage control given the negative press they're sure to get over the incident (which isn't in any case shown to have been caused by a design flaw or other malfunction in the device itself that Apple could have prevented).
If the guy had it in his pocket, and turned on for hours at a time (his entire shift), probably in some sort of protective cover as well, it's entirely possible for electronics (and especially batteries) to get rather hot.
Do that for 18 months, every day (or almost) and you're creating an accident waiting to happen.

A far bigger problem than email getting lost is important email getting swamped in a deluge of useless messages.

Example, a typical day at the office:
issue tracker: 20 messages
colleages, work related: 10 messages
colleages, non-work related: 5 messages
automated systems mailing to distribution lists someone put me on for some reason that I don't have any interest in: 300 messages.

Davey, if you "don't hate Microsoft" you may want to change the tone and topics of your blog entries a bit. They're almost universally twisted in such a way as to be negative about the company. Never is there anything positive about them, hardly ever anything that's even neutral or doesn't try to place them in a bad light in some way.

it's a marketing campaign, what else would you expect but boisterous comments about its success?

maybe that's true in the US, but in Europe (and probably even more so in Asia) almost everyone walks around with a smartphone.
They've become status symbols, and from that are now becoming commoditised.
With prices for new model phones always having been in the €300-€500 region here that's hardly surprising.
When I bought an N70 last year, it cost me the same as did the 6110 I bought in 1999. Both phones were also supplied at a steep discount by the network operator, in exchange for buying a 2 year plan instead of a 1 year plan that would have come with a lower spec phone.

So the price of phones supplied with regular plans here hasn't changed much (though a lower priced segment has opened up, mainly to fuel the large numbers of prepaid phones being sold to schoolchildren).

Most people buying such phones don't necessarilly buy them to use all that functionality though. Almost everyone in the office (and I work in a hightech firm, supplying among other things a Blackberry application) uses much of that functionality.
The exception are those having Blackberries supplied by the company, which are used to track and respond to emergency messages sent by our monitoring systems when things go wrong with our platform.
But the web browsers, Java capabilities, music and video players, etc. are hardly used at all (to the chagrin of the telcos, who'd love it if those things were used, as …

well, in other countries the political leaders are doing their best to create a recession.
The Netherlands will get massive tax increases next year, the announcement of which has already sent consumer confidence plummeting by 16 index points, the largest single monthly drop ever recorded.

With customers demanding to get cutthroat prices, leaving businesses with paperthin margins, something has to give.
That something is customer service, the one area of the business that most customers never have contact with and those that do are in large part considered lost to the business already.

It's the same with airline travel. Passenger grumble about not getting free 3 course meals, cramped seats, and other customer service related issues. But if an airline increases prices by a €5 dollars on a €300 ticket to give that free meal and maybe a bit more legroom those same passengers stay away and book Easyjet or Ryanair.
They never even notice that they end up paying the same for even worse service because of all the extra surcharges the lowcost carriers charge of course.

children are cruel MP. I've experienced it myself, both as a recipient (constant bullying by classmates for years) and as a witness.
I've seen my classmates trying to destroy teachers mentally. From harmless (though expensive to the teacher) pranks like turning cars onto their roofs to what amounts to mental torture, any slightest weakness shown by a teacher is mercilessly exploited.
Locking a teacher who used to be a prisoner in a Japanese WW2 camp into a classroom was the worst I've seen (she got out through the crawlspace under the floor, a woman of around 60 years old, and surprised the kids by coming back up behind them with the principal and conscierge, the entire group ended up with several months of after hours lockdown).
I've heard of other classes doing worse though, leading to teachers leaving their careers behind in desperation and some ending up in psychiatric wards for years.

UK isn't it? Isn't the UK covered by EU consumer protection laws?
If it is threatening a lawsuit under those laws will set things moving, as under EU law warranty must cover things that can be reasonably expected to work for a reasonable period.
What that entails is described in the law, and I'm pretty sure a failure to cover hardware failure because of a customer's choise of software isn't legal and neither is denying warranty coverage for hinges.

well, after 2.9 there's always 2.10 and you can take that a LOOOOOONG way, especially with the Linux tendency to use ridiculously long strings of subversions.

2.100000999.432325.432321545.35beta143523alpha542323.5234323 anyone?

hmm, I've seen first hand the "transformation" of an IT company into a "service oriented organisation" and it was a bloodbath.
Instantly, within days of the board getting their brainwave that we were no longer a software company but a "service company" everyone outside the software development group had just about forgotten that our services revolved around the software created by that group.
All successes (including ours to deliver new functionality) were heaped upon the sales and training teams, all failure of them to do their jobs was blamed on us.
In the next end of year letter the CEO explicitly stated that the success of the company had been reached DESPITE the software group, without whom (he didn't of course state) the rest of the company would have had nothing to sell or craft services around.

If that's the future we're in for a rough ride, and a lot of highly frustrated and overworked IT staff queueing up for reeducation into other fields where our skills are still respected.

yes it is. It is certainly true that the majority of compromised systems in real numbers run Windows, but it's just as true that the majority of compromised systems as a percentage of installed base are running Linux (and to a lesser degree other Unix flavours).

What Davey of course wants you to believe is that Linux vendors are faster at fixing flaws than is Microsoft, something that's patently untrue, that every compromised Windows machine is due to something Microsoft failed to patch while every compromised Linux machine is due to negligence of the operator.
Neither is true, not to any degree whatsoever.

In fact the majority of flaws in Windows itself are not known before Microsoft themselves discover them and release a patch.
The same is to some extent true for Linux as well, though most Linux vendors don't bother looking for or fixing flaws, instead relying on the goodwill of their users to do it for them.

Personally I don't think anyone who doesn't pay for Skype (which is the vast majority of users, certainly private ones) has any reason to complain about anything.

But indeed for Skype to blame Microsoft for their own self-inflicted problems just makes them look silly.
They probably think something like "noone will notice the next paragraph as they'll all immediately go rant on /. when they read that Microsoft did it" and in good part they're likely correct as the jealousy and envy where it comes to Microsoft has led an entire generation of impressionable people to blame Microsoft for everything that's wrong in the world anyway...

The main things happening:
1) banks are getting less eager to hand out credit, both because they've been hit by the bad loans already and because they've got less money to lend because of the trouble with the mortgage companies they've invested in that are defaulting on their commitments.
2) hedgefunds are rapidly selling off their stock to cut their losses as well as because their own creditors (mainly large investment banks) are demanding they pay back the billions in loans they took out to fund the investment (most hedgefunds run in large part on loaned money).

This is also affecting venture capitalists, who often stow away money they don't need immediately in the financial market (and are thus also taking a beating).

When will it end?
Well, predictions range from just about now to sometime late next year.