I think Banks have learned alittle since then I'm currently a University Student with HSBC and I'm treated like royalty, the only time the bank has fasely taken money from my account (took bank fees for no reasons I could discover) within a hour of entering the bank I had the fees back and £50 in my pocket (based on two days of a standard bank fee, it took me two days to notice.)
I'm not advocating that banks are good by any means but they are far better these days (yes including Natwest whom many of my mates are with) to students. Today the building society is the truely evil customer hating entity go into an alliance and leciester at any time of day and you will have one angry customer asking why they can't access money from the account they just put money in, why Alliance and Leceister delayed the payment of their wage and then charged them because no money was in the account at midday then suddenly their wage will appear at 12:30 or 1pm. I've had reason to pop into an alliance and leciester many a time and the stories are facinating. Halifax are awfull as well I have a 'savings account' which gives less interest on it than my current account, when I question this and ask for anouther I'm told tough.
Banking fees need to be kurbed, far tougher measures need to be imposed on them, already we can see the rise of incredibly arrogant *cough* First Direct *cough*. If the internet means I can make this happen go internet!
Get 1gb of Ram, try ebay, watch as the system suddenly speeds up. I'm running on 2gb of ram and find Vista runs extremly well. I wouldn't bother running XP on 64mb of ram, nor would I bother running Vista of 512mb of ram.
Have you tried Vista? Or did you just read other peoples post and decided your Mac/*nix was obviously superioir and Vista was useless. I've run Vista RC1/Beta 2 on my Medion laptop (Model MIM2220 Notebook PC), the cheapest laptop I could buy last August, Sure I added 1gb of ram for £40 to it but its the same £399 laptop I bought last year. I could find two cheaper laptops at the time which were the same spec but lacked wireless. SO in short one of the cheapest laptops, most low end you could buy can run vista quite happily (minus Aero). My sister bought the laptop which replaced mine ( http://www.woolworths.co.uk/ww_p2/product/index.jh tml?pid=50822571 )in December she got her copy of Home basic and it runs fine.
Yes my laptop did run explorer slow and setting it up on the uni vpn was a pain (now rectified Uni has made an installer and guide.) But everything else ran just as fast, my sister's runs fine without any slow downs. Oh and yes I did upgrade my laptops ram from 256mb to 1gb so it wasn't exactly one of the cheapest off the shelves but then again it didn't even run XP MCE 2005 properly with 256mb of ram.
I'm sick and tired of this FUD Vista does not require the ultimate specs to run, a £49.95 (Abit NF 95 Maplins Electronics) motherboard with an onboard graphics card can run Aero. Vista is a resource hog compared to XP and the Nvidia drivers and ATi drivers are still not that well written so there are preformance drops. It wants more, deal with it either the features make the extra resource requirements worth it, or they don't.
I know I'm not taught to care about CPU speed or memory, sure I'm doing a Computer Engineering BEng where software programing is second to hardware but I spent two years programing in assembly for the 8031 (8052 varient) as well as learning c/c++. This year I am continually argueing with my software lecturer about methods of doing things, I automatically want to do the least memory intensive design and am continually told that worrying about a 'few bytes' doesn't matter in an age of gigabytes. It's not an attitude limited to this lecturer either most of the technology department have it. My course and a lot of other technology and engineering courses are certified by the UK in britain perhaps they should put greater emphasis on memory management and efficenty of algorithms. It wouldn't necessaryirly take a lot either during my second year we (Electrical Engineering based students) all had to design and manufacture an addon and program it for a slightly altered version of a 'open hardware' 8031 design ( http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/board4/index.html ) pretty much everyone in the class learnt the lessons of having pretty much zero memory. Perhaps similar development boards used through more technology/programming courses would help improve matters as they do make the point about how important clock cycles and memory are.
Sorry I'm just waiting for the actual news, the cameras in question have been deployed in my area for 6 months, with less advanced ones being in operation for atleast 4 years (required police officer to operate.) Do I mind that several goverment departments (or bodies as the articles describe) are actually talking to each other? So one camera can check a database to see if the vehicle is in tax, is owned by a nonbanned driver, isn't stolen and isn't speeding. I don't even think they have that much information, enforcing road laws is generally a good idea. I'm against total control there was a proposal a few years back about a GPS monitoring system suggested by a think tank, but spot checks in highly active roads in my mind is a good thing.
If you RTFA you'll see the majority of requests were various departments requesting contact information, no offense but thats sign of a efficent government working for my interests (creating less hassle.) Americans talking about privacy do make me laugh, this was legal requests made to a authority whos activities are reported by Sir Swinton every year, its a report which makes the six o clock news, ok this included requests to 'intercept' communications but this is done above board unlike a certain country which recently had a minor scandal involving was it millions of peoples calls being tapped illegally? In the UK heads would have rolled there would have been court cases for such actions. Before you start talking about civil liberties and privacy try reading the article the slashdot summary was designed to make Americans go "OMG PRIVACY INVASION! 1984!"
The only thing that was actually news was Sir Swintons calls that MP's be subject to the same buggin laws as us, you know so government bodies can investigate to see if their commiting crimes and *cough* terror plots last time I checked increasing the accountability of your government was a good thing
OK lets break this down 795 which are empowered to get access to communications data made 450,000 requests over 15 months, lets have a think shall we 795 bodies, not just MI6 and GCHQ. These requests include requests for email addresses and phone numbers. Hrmm what groups could be doing this perhaps the TV licensing people? Perhaps the tax man wants some details? Not made any Student Loan payments (SLC)?oh wait one of the listed bodies was the serious fraud office and Financial Services Authority. SO lets get this right 795 bodies made requests for contact information (sometimes they wanted more than that) for what's probably completely legitimate reasons (for example last time I had contacted the Pensions office was two houses ago, so the nice informing letter about the state of my state pension would have required a request for contact information because I've given them none.) They've also been used for crime fighting from serious fraud (personally I'm against fraud) and finally the media grabbing fight against terror.
What's the article actually about? The amount of communications data requested and intercepted has not increased, Tony Blair has actually taken note of the ID card E petition and given people who cared a response even if he disagrees with them(28,000 is a small number when compared to 60 million), Sir Swinton the guy who stated last year that the UK was a surveillance society doesn't like the fact that surveillance hasn't decreased (but supports the current system to stop terrorism) and is calling for the policy of no bugging for MP's be lifted to promote transparency and fairness, oh and a knee jerk sensationalist call from a Tory shadow secretary.
Yes Britain has moved into being a surveillance society, but shall I tell you what I don't care. I can't find CCTV camera unless I really look for them and they have come in handy for me personally in the past, the automatic number-plate recognition cameras are a good idea, you know its handy being able to catch people who are driving without road tax or insurance as well as people who speed. But then again maybe I'm the only one who thinks banned drivers should be caught and kept off the roads? Yes I know speed cameras are bad, but watch how a particular road is handled when those cameras are turned off for a week, there are times when their actually a good idea (radical I know, I still admit many are stupid) When measures which are truly invasive are proposed I'll care and be out there marching for it. I don't support things for terrorism but I do like to see government working together to catch the benefit fraud and serious criminal.
In short sensational article designed to make predominantly American site start ranting about privacy caused people to rant about privacy.
This guy hasn't really thought about what he's doing at all. Holidaying in a country is completly and utterly different from living in said country. I haven't done it myself but know several people who have. One of those differences is income, when you take a holiday (say from Britain to Spain) the £ is substantially stronger than the Euro the result is that everything is dirt cheap. When living there you get a job and a wage thats more in line with the country the end result is financially your probably not that much better off (good example would be UK/USA i may pay less tax and get a higher wage but once you've paid for medical insurrance, etc... it does work out about the same in wage terms.)
Assuming they've created a dev house which is paying devs the same amount as they would in America, great your only business savings are going to be in taxes when you balance that with the socail costs (quality of local talent, living in a china, dealing with different cultures/language barriers) its not going to be that much cheaper.
The only reason I can see for making a developer house in China is to take advantage of Chinese talent, to be honest thats a very risky venture since you don't really here about major CS breakthroughs coming from China (apart from the Great Firewall.) If they were fussed about working times why not actually look around the world places like the UK and Europe have a maximum 40 hour working week (the Uk has a opt out ability.) Just because America lacks such regulations doesn't mean other western countries do.
Basing major decisions on less than three weeks expearence of a place is just being stupid, they should have gone there and actually lived there for some time before doing this then make a choice. I'll wait for the backslash detailing how the companies gone under.
Somethings wrong with your PC, I haven't had a single BSOD on a 'good' PC since before SP1, I have had them when faulty motherboards, sound cards, video cards, crap ram and in one case an underclocked CPU. Before doing the usual idiot thing of 'blaming windows' for all your woes why not try and track down the problem. To use a awfull car annalogy you have a hole in your exhuast which is causing the car to lose torque and acceleration, rather than blame the crappy exhuast your blaming Ford because they made the car your solution is to buy a new car made by anouther company.
Yes I have this highly annoying Vista installation problem which results in BSODS but i've figured out the problem and made a workaround. I hope nvidia get around to making a driver which doesn't cause it. Vista and Xp are very very stable, sure once you load up Xp with spyware and rubbish it will start working crap, but then thats not really the computers fault its yours.
Sometimes the problem is OSX/Windows/Linux itself most of the time it is something else its usually not hard to figure out what.
Installing things in Linux is confusing and hard to a new user (be they computer iliterate or not) Windows has an incredibly easy installation system that even complete novice's can understand, OS X has a simple way of installing that people can understand.
Linux has 5, none of them simple. Give me something simple that doesn't involve typing sudo something, something and I'll take to it. Why should I have to deal with the source code at all? I get open source products in windows I get an installer than installs the application and puts the source files into a folder for me. I like that.
you guys may love the various install methods but give me and average joe a simple way to install and get used to the OS first.
I have a windows Mobile 5 device, I don't work full time (I'm a student) I have it because if I'm in a lab which I'm going to type up the results its easier to put them into excel in the first place, its good to keep pitch and putt scores in, when wondering where your lectures been moved I can quickly log into the uni's intranet and find out on the fly, it syncs with outlook meaning I have everyones phone number, address and email which has proved invaliable, finally it can be fun to play with. A WM5 device is a tool, I use it when I need it, to save me running to a computer room to find something out and to remind me that I have a one off lecture. These things exist to help you get on with stuff, unless your wife/GF/etc.. is emailing you why bother answering it? If I started doing that I'd start charging the company for overtime.
Its a role playing game that is unlike any other I have played. There is no levelling, the bad guys are archaeologists and there's a fantastic community behind it. The premise of the game is simple, you felt called to a underground cavern where a group of archaeologists are working to restore a ancient civilisation they've discovered, you take the time to explore really quite beautiful ages, you get rewards for completing ages (but can choose to ignore them if you wish), there are puzzles aplenty (which if you get stuck on come and ask someone in the community) and we can actually effect the storyline. I like it, everyone starts out the same (Uru stands for You Are You) the only difference is if you have completed one age or anouther and what side you have allied yourself with. Its not a grinding style of game, I've completed all the ages and gained all the current Relto pages but I only have 7 on because they are the seven which make my starting point look best to me. If your tired of leveling then give it a go it launched today and the first month is only 99 cents.
I only mention it because there are alternative to level grinding RPG and this is one of them
Until last week I couldn't order a PS3 anywhere in my city centre, it wasn't until last thursday that the game shops put up signs letting you know you could pre-order a PS3. That means just over a month of possible pre-orders, a comparision would be my PSP that was available for pre-order for 4 months before its release where I lived.
That pre-order time makes all the difference when I pre-ordered my PSP I started putting money away each month so come release day I had all of the cash, I have a month to save up for a PS3 (yes I know its been scheduled for March for a while but without a specific date I was very skeptical that it would make it.)
The Wii is sadly still suffering stock problems and isn't making it onto the floor due to a back log of people asking for them, however I would like to make a point. Secondary sales (more Wii games, Wii joystick thing etc....) aren't selling in the store where I work. People buy a Wii and have Wii Sports but don't seem to be buying anything else which is odd I think. Thats purely ancedotal but I'd be curious if others see the same pattern.
Will I be pre-ordering a PS3? I'm still not sure £464.97 for a PS3 and One game is alot of money.
I think he was referring to the above slashdot article, basically in the last couple of months more blue-ray films have been released compared to HD-DVD, meaning there are now more Blue-ray films, which surprisingly means that more people bought Blue_ray disks over a month. To be honest I do think Blue_ray is going to win the format war since HD-DVD has had such a head start but doesn't seem to have much if any lead on Blue Ray.
Yes, in britain this is illegal. I'll give two examples here the place I work occasionally has glitches with the pricing system, one database (where we get our price tickets from) can be old, if I have a sign out saying such and such is £24.99 when its actually £49.99 the store is legally obligated to sell the item at the advertised price. Is it moral to take advantage of the system, perhaps not but it is the law. I have had a catalogue try to do this to me in britain and as soon as I started talking about advertised price being such and such they shut up. Arguements like yours aren't necessarily very good ones, there are times when an offer may go unadvertised for a particular product, should the consumer question this? Umm well no
Morally these people are in the wrong but at least in britain and with my expearence with companies Amazon is breaking the law in charging them again for this product.
1and1, just never use them. Let me tell you a little story
Five years ago now myself and two school mates registered a domain with 1and1 hosting, we went with 1and1 because they offered a bandwidth cap, were the cheapest and we found a domain that was very cool. After about a year we lost interest in the website but kept the account because it was usefull to have webspace, apart form the occasional reminder to pay to continue the service (came yearly) there was no other notification of change in status. I've actually been through the previous emails to confirm this and the original signed terms and conditions included the bandwidth cap in them.
Several years went by and I started with a group of online friends a website, we used my existing account because 1and1 offered a free service. A few months go by and the podcast becomes popular but I notice that their billing me extra each month. So I phone them (and have the woman on record (I love PPC's)) telling me that the bandwidth cap must be broken and I wouldn't be charged. Then assuming things were ok I carried on and recieved a bill for £650. After dozens of phone calls I put measures in place to stop any more downloading and they agreed they had screwed up, this time a man (on a saved MP3) said they were wrong and he would look into it.
So I guess you would be surprised when a £700 bill landed on my door mat with threats of calling in people to take my stuff three weeks later. At the time I was in contact with a solicitor for other reasons and related this story to here complete with the agreed terms and conditions, the difference in service without notification and all the recorded phone calls. Her response was legally I was completly correct however the cost of fighting the bill would be pretty much the cost of the bill plus alot of time off university I couldn't afford. After some time with her I sent a letter to the head of the accounting department starting the process of a legal challenge(the idea was to get them to drop the bill) he agreed that after a certain date that things had gone wrong at their end and knocked the bill down to £400. I'm a poor student the people I ran the podcast with had coffed up £350 and my legal advice was that challenging the bill would cost more than £400. I was already going without sleep to keep up with university so I swallowed my principles.
In short they changed my service without notification (against their Terms and Conditions) they deactivated features after I'd activated them without notice (in this case a bandwidth warning notifier, due to 'site maintanence' the guy on the phone told me) they lied to me on the phone over technical matters, they lied about the service plan so many times I've lost count, they used the fact that the legal costs would be greater than the bill to force their customer to pay, even though they repeatedly agreed they were wrong.
I hate 1and1, I want them to die. I'd actually put them as worse than the RIAA in their tactics, their fine if all you want to use your site is to transfer the occasional large file, so you don't use email.
Ribbons are great, I was an intermediate user of Office 2003 but even tho I still only consider myself an intermediate user on office 2007. The difference is I feel more powerful and things to me seem much quicker, one thing I began to use heavily in the Office 2007 beta was the comments tool (very valuable for uni work) for the moment I've downgraded to Office 2003 and the fact I have to keep clicking a menu has put me off using it, pretty much every function has become like that since discovering Ribbons. Their horrible at first but after a week something clicked for me.
Oh and not to sound like a Microsoft Loving shill I've started using OpenOffice on my laptop, its actually working out great for that purpose, my laptop needs to open powerpoint slides and allow me to make word documents which include tables, pictures and a few easy to see formating options. OpenOffice does that well, its just when I get home I find the evil Office that much better in actually combining all the notes from the day into a usable, indexable and helpfull to revise from format. Stealing ribbons would be a very good idea for OpenOffice I think, although I'm sure a ton of people would argue that I'm wrong
Abit NF95 AMD64 3700+ BFG 7600 GS OC 25mb Creative Audigy SE 7.1 2gb Cosair Value DDR ram
I tried everything but Vista would hang on the install almost every time and the few times it installed I had the exact same errors you've listed. as far as I can make out it was the ram/chipset driver, unplugging one of my ram sticks (leaving 1gb) allowed Vista to install properly. Using anouther motherboard and all the other same components on a Asus A8n-SLi Deluxe motherboard (Nforce 4 chipset)and it installed fine. Trying the same components on anouther nforce 410/430 chipset board (a DFI Lan Party) caused the exact same error.
The really weird thing is now Vista is installed I can put the second 1gb stick in my Abit Nf95 and don't suffer the issues you mention. Since its only happened on one chipset and two boards which support a maximum of 2gb DDR ram I'm assuming the installer is seeing somethign different and going wrong when it configures Vista.
In short if you have 2gb of ram and a Nforce 410/430 chipset try removing a 1gb stick and installing again, then once its installed replace the 1gb stick.
I'm not so sure of that, vista adoption has been faster than Windows 2000 adoption in american business ( http://news.com.com/Report+Vistas+business+sales+s tronger+than+expected/2100-1016_3-6149468.html ) to be honest thats going to drive sales. Most people I know like things to be the same, My pa uses outlook 2002 in work and refuses to upgrade to 2003, I can name several other family/friends who use a set OS/Office apps in work and so use the exact same ones at home (sometimes newer if the UI isn't much different.)
Vista's adoption rate has surprised me, only two other tech savy people I know have got it and yet the store in which I work is filled with new upgraders, a online group I'm part of has formed a vista discussion group and even a few of my university mates have also made the plunge. To be honest its worrying, I upgraded because I found one or two features useful and got too used to ribbons (from running the beta of Office) many people have upgraded because the people on the news have been going on about how wonderfuull Vista is.
I was doubtful that Microsoft would get 100 million copies of Vista out the door by the end of the year, but am not so sure now. BTW does anyone have and idea of the number of activations of Vista so far?
Apple have a monopoly position on music sales throughout the world (well anywhere with a ITMS), do you seriously think that Apple wouldn't have the clout to kill off DRM? Steve Job's 'open letters' are very nice but you just can't help but feel that their a publictiy stunt and nothing more. The fact that Apple won't allow any music to be sold without DRM says alot to me, they're either really behind DRM or they have sold out almostly as badly to the media companies as Microsoft.
Their lack of interoperability is worse than Microsoft, people moan and complain about Office and its propritry.doc format, yet people don't mind it when Apple build proprietry software.
I hate to bring this news to you, but the iPod is not the best MP3 player, it was the best all round package a few years back but it works these days because it is the mainstream and Joe Consumer doesn't have time to learn what different types, they have just heard of the iPod and know it plays MP3's. Personnally I think my PPC with WMP10 syncing with WMP11 is better than the iPod Nano/iTunes combo my little sister has. My other little sister has a MP3 playing USB stick and uses WMP11 and she finds that easy to use and suits her down to the ground. Don't assume that just because something is the most expensive, best marketed or most popular that it is the best, everyone has different needs. Buying one product because everyone else buys it is being a sheep.
Apples been getting worse for years, I have no misconceptions that Microsoft are acting in their best interests, why do people always think that Apple are some benevolent company who only locks things up for your benifit?
Reading the comments and the article I'd like to argue that its math, that is the issue. Most the comments here talk about people dropping out because Computer Science was so Math orientated. In my first year of University we had a basic refresher math course in the first term we started with a electrical/communications/robotics/computer engineering group of 70 and by january the group was doing to 35, some because they never attended, a few realised it wasn't what they wanted to do and a surprising number (That I talked to) quit because they had failed so much of the maths module the previous term. The second year a group of 39 went down to 12, surprisingly many people found statistics to hard and started failing it because they saw it as stupid and pointless. I'm in the final year and theres no maths module this year we have started with 20 and there are still 20 people in the electrical/communications/robotics/computer engineering group.
Perhaps its not that Computer Science is boring but how maths is taught in schools, I've had some incredibly interesting labs over the years which even socialogy students think are cool, but if you don't know math well and have been taught to see it as a geeky pointless subject your not going to stay on a course which involves lots of it.
The article link appears to be broken, I really don't get why people find managing software projects so difficult, Programming is much more an art than engineering.
For example in electrical engineering, I've built a design board I knew what signals I wanted generated, what I wanted doing to them it was something easy to quantify, am I looking for a microcontroller or FPGA? Which is cheaper, which specs are capable of doing what I want. I have definitive specs (which rarely change) and lotsa fixed parts.
Software Programing is filled is many intangable parts, many people find programing languages like C and Java wierd and very difficult. As a result me and a friend could finish working programs in class, go through a few class mates code, help them understand the difficult bits and get them to see where their going wrong before bunking off to play pool. I'm not a great programer by any means, so its easy to see that like artists, great artists can do fantastic stuff in seconds which a poor artist could never do. I've had to do this 'Software Project managing' module in university and so far every solution has been an attempt to bring engineering style of management over to whats really a artisic discipline. Why does no one want to run a software house like a fashion house, or a comic house? Yes engineering principles need to go into the design, but Electrical/Mechanical/Civil is mostly dealing with materials, Software is mostly dealing with people, like art.
I'm not trying to devalue software engineering, its a field I'm very interested in but I'm amazed no ones realised that you can't manage the project like an engineering project, you can design it like an engineering project (and you should) but people are this annoying highly unpredicatble thing, often prone to moody tempers while they look down on others because they don't get how their disicpline is so important as they labour into the night talking about their genius, wait I am talking about artists here arent I?
Thats a lovely speech there but my expearence is people buy Mac's because their 'shiny'. Sure pople in industry buy them to aid in business, thats called using the right tool for the job. But most the public I've met are shiny motivated I've been browsing in PC stores and heard people buy them because they were 'cool and looked pwetty', Mac's are currently riding the Ipod cool wave. Your really over estimating the rational behavoir of the general public, if Joe consumer is looking for laptops, look and reputation are key. Apple has been building a reputation of being for fun (I disagree here there aren't many Mac games) and something simple that never breaks. If you compare a Mac PC style with a standard windows PC case then a Mac looks much better. Try working in a shop for a while its scary, you and me might go out and look at what we need and choose the best, but what do those technical specifications mean to the average user?
Its actually why Aero is going to make Vista a sucess in the home market, look at it from your normal users point of view, two machines look equally pretty on screen but one means you have to change a ton of stuff (acording to that nice sales guy) so what do you do?
How can we puechase something which will be free? I'm guessing this will be like channel 4's airing of IT. You'll watch the videos in a fixed web viewer assuming your IP is from the UK.
See the thing to do would be to download it lotsa times and cost BBC money and argue that the drm forces you to keep downloaded. But then again that supports DRM and may put the Beeb off doing it. Gah how will i get my free *legal* fix of red dwarf now! I can justify spending £25 for six episodes.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Banks have learned alittle since then I'm currently a University Student with HSBC and I'm treated like royalty, the only time the bank has fasely taken money from my account (took bank fees for no reasons I could discover) within a hour of entering the bank I had the fees back and £50 in my pocket (based on two days of a standard bank fee, it took me two days to notice.)
I'm not advocating that banks are good by any means but they are far better these days (yes including Natwest whom many of my mates are with) to students. Today the building society is the truely evil customer hating entity go into an alliance and leciester at any time of day and you will have one angry customer asking why they can't access money from the account they just put money in, why Alliance and Leceister delayed the payment of their wage and then charged them because no money was in the account at midday then suddenly their wage will appear at 12:30 or 1pm. I've had reason to pop into an alliance and leciester many a time and the stories are facinating. Halifax are awfull as well I have a 'savings account' which gives less interest on it than my current account, when I question this and ask for anouther I'm told tough.
Banking fees need to be kurbed, far tougher measures need to be imposed on them, already we can see the rise of incredibly arrogant *cough* First Direct *cough*. If the internet means I can make this happen go internet!
I dunno I just have to hope when I flip the coin it explodes and kills me
Get 1gb of Ram, try ebay, watch as the system suddenly speeds up. I'm running on 2gb of ram and find Vista runs extremly well. I wouldn't bother running XP on 64mb of ram, nor would I bother running Vista of 512mb of ram.
Have you tried Vista? Or did you just read other peoples post and decided your Mac/*nix was obviously superioir and Vista was useless. I've run Vista RC1/Beta 2 on my Medion laptop (Model MIM2220 Notebook PC), the cheapest laptop I could buy last August, Sure I added 1gb of ram for £40 to it but its the same £399 laptop I bought last year. I could find two cheaper laptops at the time which were the same spec but lacked wireless. SO in short one of the cheapest laptops, most low end you could buy can run vista quite happily (minus Aero). My sister bought the laptop which replaced mine ( http://www.woolworths.co.uk/ww_p2/product/index.jh tml?pid=50822571 )in December she got her copy of Home basic and it runs fine.
Yes my laptop did run explorer slow and setting it up on the uni vpn was a pain (now rectified Uni has made an installer and guide.) But everything else ran just as fast, my sister's runs fine without any slow downs. Oh and yes I did upgrade my laptops ram from 256mb to 1gb so it wasn't exactly one of the cheapest off the shelves but then again it didn't even run XP MCE 2005 properly with 256mb of ram.
I'm sick and tired of this FUD Vista does not require the ultimate specs to run, a £49.95 (Abit NF 95 Maplins Electronics) motherboard with an onboard graphics card can run Aero. Vista is a resource hog compared to XP and the Nvidia drivers and ATi drivers are still not that well written so there are preformance drops. It wants more, deal with it either the features make the extra resource requirements worth it, or they don't.
I know I'm not taught to care about CPU speed or memory, sure I'm doing a Computer Engineering BEng where software programing is second to hardware but I spent two years programing in assembly for the 8031 (8052 varient) as well as learning c/c++. This year I am continually argueing with my software lecturer about methods of doing things, I automatically want to do the least memory intensive design and am continually told that worrying about a 'few bytes' doesn't matter in an age of gigabytes. It's not an attitude limited to this lecturer either most of the technology department have it. My course and a lot of other technology and engineering courses are certified by the UK in britain perhaps they should put greater emphasis on memory management and efficenty of algorithms. It wouldn't necessaryirly take a lot either during my second year we (Electrical Engineering based students) all had to design and manufacture an addon and program it for a slightly altered version of a 'open hardware' 8031 design ( http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/board4/index.html ) pretty much everyone in the class learnt the lessons of having pretty much zero memory. Perhaps similar development boards used through more technology/programming courses would help improve matters as they do make the point about how important clock cycles and memory are.
Sorry I'm just waiting for the actual news, the cameras in question have been deployed in my area for 6 months, with less advanced ones being in operation for atleast 4 years (required police officer to operate.) Do I mind that several goverment departments (or bodies as the articles describe) are actually talking to each other? So one camera can check a database to see if the vehicle is in tax, is owned by a nonbanned driver, isn't stolen and isn't speeding. I don't even think they have that much information, enforcing road laws is generally a good idea. I'm against total control there was a proposal a few years back about a GPS monitoring system suggested by a think tank, but spot checks in highly active roads in my mind is a good thing.
If you RTFA you'll see the majority of requests were various departments requesting contact information, no offense but thats sign of a efficent government working for my interests (creating less hassle.) Americans talking about privacy do make me laugh, this was legal requests made to a authority whos activities are reported by Sir Swinton every year, its a report which makes the six o clock news, ok this included requests to 'intercept' communications but this is done above board unlike a certain country which recently had a minor scandal involving was it millions of peoples calls being tapped illegally? In the UK heads would have rolled there would have been court cases for such actions. Before you start talking about civil liberties and privacy try reading the article the slashdot summary was designed to make Americans go "OMG PRIVACY INVASION! 1984!"
The only thing that was actually news was Sir Swintons calls that MP's be subject to the same buggin laws as us, you know so government bodies can investigate to see if their commiting crimes and *cough* terror plots last time I checked increasing the accountability of your government was a good thing
OK lets break this down 795 which are empowered to get access to communications data made 450,000 requests over 15 months, lets have a think shall we 795 bodies, not just MI6 and GCHQ. These requests include requests for email addresses and phone numbers. Hrmm what groups could be doing this perhaps the TV licensing people? Perhaps the tax man wants some details? Not made any Student Loan payments (SLC)?oh wait one of the listed bodies was the serious fraud office and Financial Services Authority. SO lets get this right 795 bodies made requests for contact information (sometimes they wanted more than that) for what's probably completely legitimate reasons (for example last time I had contacted the Pensions office was two houses ago, so the nice informing letter about the state of my state pension would have required a request for contact information because I've given them none.) They've also been used for crime fighting from serious fraud (personally I'm against fraud) and finally the media grabbing fight against terror.
What's the article actually about? The amount of communications data requested and intercepted has not increased, Tony Blair has actually taken note of the ID card E petition and given people who cared a response even if he disagrees with them(28,000 is a small number when compared to 60 million), Sir Swinton the guy who stated last year that the UK was a surveillance society doesn't like the fact that surveillance hasn't decreased (but supports the current system to stop terrorism) and is calling for the policy of no bugging for MP's be lifted to promote transparency and fairness, oh and a knee jerk sensationalist call from a Tory shadow secretary.
Yes Britain has moved into being a surveillance society, but shall I tell you what I don't care. I can't find CCTV camera unless I really look for them and they have come in handy for me personally in the past, the automatic number-plate recognition cameras are a good idea, you know its handy being able to catch people who are driving without road tax or insurance as well as people who speed. But then again maybe I'm the only one who thinks banned drivers should be caught and kept off the roads? Yes I know speed cameras are bad, but watch how a particular road is handled when those cameras are turned off for a week, there are times when their actually a good idea (radical I know, I still admit many are stupid) When measures which are truly invasive are proposed I'll care and be out there marching for it. I don't support things for terrorism but I do like to see government working together to catch the benefit fraud and serious criminal.
In short sensational article designed to make predominantly American site start ranting about privacy caused people to rant about privacy.
This guy hasn't really thought about what he's doing at all. Holidaying in a country is completly and utterly different from living in said country. I haven't done it myself but know several people who have. One of those differences is income, when you take a holiday (say from Britain to Spain) the £ is substantially stronger than the Euro the result is that everything is dirt cheap. When living there you get a job and a wage thats more in line with the country the end result is financially your probably not that much better off (good example would be UK/USA i may pay less tax and get a higher wage but once you've paid for medical insurrance, etc... it does work out about the same in wage terms.)
Assuming they've created a dev house which is paying devs the same amount as they would in America, great your only business savings are going to be in taxes when you balance that with the socail costs (quality of local talent, living in a china, dealing with different cultures/language barriers) its not going to be that much cheaper.
The only reason I can see for making a developer house in China is to take advantage of Chinese talent, to be honest thats a very risky venture since you don't really here about major CS breakthroughs coming from China (apart from the Great Firewall.) If they were fussed about working times why not actually look around the world places like the UK and Europe have a maximum 40 hour working week (the Uk has a opt out ability.) Just because America lacks such regulations doesn't mean other western countries do.
Basing major decisions on less than three weeks expearence of a place is just being stupid, they should have gone there and actually lived there for some time before doing this then make a choice. I'll wait for the backslash detailing how the companies gone under.
Somethings wrong with your PC, I haven't had a single BSOD on a 'good' PC since before SP1, I have had them when faulty motherboards, sound cards, video cards, crap ram and in one case an underclocked CPU. Before doing the usual idiot thing of 'blaming windows' for all your woes why not try and track down the problem. To use a awfull car annalogy you have a hole in your exhuast which is causing the car to lose torque and acceleration, rather than blame the crappy exhuast your blaming Ford because they made the car your solution is to buy a new car made by anouther company.
Yes I have this highly annoying Vista installation problem which results in BSODS but i've figured out the problem and made a workaround. I hope nvidia get around to making a driver which doesn't cause it. Vista and Xp are very very stable, sure once you load up Xp with spyware and rubbish it will start working crap, but then thats not really the computers fault its yours.
Sometimes the problem is OSX/Windows/Linux itself most of the time it is something else its usually not hard to figure out what.
sigh if only the zombie networks could be used for good
Installing things in Linux is confusing and hard to a new user (be they computer iliterate or not) Windows has an incredibly easy installation system that even complete novice's can understand, OS X has a simple way of installing that people can understand.
Linux has 5, none of them simple. Give me something simple that doesn't involve typing sudo something, something and I'll take to it. Why should I have to deal with the source code at all? I get open source products in windows I get an installer than installs the application and puts the source files into a folder for me. I like that.
you guys may love the various install methods but give me and average joe a simple way to install and get used to the OS first.
I have a windows Mobile 5 device, I don't work full time (I'm a student) I have it because if I'm in a lab which I'm going to type up the results its easier to put them into excel in the first place, its good to keep pitch and putt scores in, when wondering where your lectures been moved I can quickly log into the uni's intranet and find out on the fly, it syncs with outlook meaning I have everyones phone number, address and email which has proved invaliable, finally it can be fun to play with. A WM5 device is a tool, I use it when I need it, to save me running to a computer room to find something out and to remind me that I have a one off lecture. These things exist to help you get on with stuff, unless your wife/GF/etc.. is emailing you why bother answering it? If I started doing that I'd start charging the company for overtime.
Myst Online : Uru Live
Its a role playing game that is unlike any other I have played. There is no levelling, the bad guys are archaeologists and there's a fantastic community behind it. The premise of the game is simple, you felt called to a underground cavern where a group of archaeologists are working to restore a ancient civilisation they've discovered, you take the time to explore really quite beautiful ages, you get rewards for completing ages (but can choose to ignore them if you wish), there are puzzles aplenty (which if you get stuck on come and ask someone in the community) and we can actually effect the storyline. I like it, everyone starts out the same (Uru stands for You Are You) the only difference is if you have completed one age or anouther and what side you have allied yourself with. Its not a grinding style of game, I've completed all the ages and gained all the current Relto pages but I only have 7 on because they are the seven which make my starting point look best to me. If your tired of leveling then give it a go it launched today and the first month is only 99 cents.
I only mention it because there are alternative to level grinding RPG and this is one of them
Until last week I couldn't order a PS3 anywhere in my city centre, it wasn't until last thursday that the game shops put up signs letting you know you could pre-order a PS3. That means just over a month of possible pre-orders, a comparision would be my PSP that was available for pre-order for 4 months before its release where I lived.
That pre-order time makes all the difference when I pre-ordered my PSP I started putting money away each month so come release day I had all of the cash, I have a month to save up for a PS3 (yes I know its been scheduled for March for a while but without a specific date I was very skeptical that it would make it.)
The Wii is sadly still suffering stock problems and isn't making it onto the floor due to a back log of people asking for them, however I would like to make a point. Secondary sales (more Wii games, Wii joystick thing etc....) aren't selling in the store where I work. People buy a Wii and have Wii Sports but don't seem to be buying anything else which is odd I think. Thats purely ancedotal but I'd be curious if others see the same pattern.
Will I be pre-ordering a PS3? I'm still not sure £464.97 for a PS3 and One game is alot of money.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/12/ 2016222&threshold=1
I think he was referring to the above slashdot article, basically in the last couple of months more blue-ray films have been released compared to HD-DVD, meaning there are now more Blue-ray films, which surprisingly means that more people bought Blue_ray disks over a month. To be honest I do think Blue_ray is going to win the format war since HD-DVD has had such a head start but doesn't seem to have much if any lead on Blue Ray.
Still hedging my bets tho
Yes, in britain this is illegal. I'll give two examples here the place I work occasionally has glitches with the pricing system, one database (where we get our price tickets from) can be old, if I have a sign out saying such and such is £24.99 when its actually £49.99 the store is legally obligated to sell the item at the advertised price. Is it moral to take advantage of the system, perhaps not but it is the law. I have had a catalogue try to do this to me in britain and as soon as I started talking about advertised price being such and such they shut up. Arguements like yours aren't necessarily very good ones, there are times when an offer may go unadvertised for a particular product, should the consumer question this? Umm well no
Morally these people are in the wrong but at least in britain and with my expearence with companies Amazon is breaking the law in charging them again for this product.
1and1, just never use them. Let me tell you a little story
Five years ago now myself and two school mates registered a domain with 1and1 hosting, we went with 1and1 because they offered a bandwidth cap, were the cheapest and we found a domain that was very cool. After about a year we lost interest in the website but kept the account because it was usefull to have webspace, apart form the occasional reminder to pay to continue the service (came yearly) there was no other notification of change in status. I've actually been through the previous emails to confirm this and the original signed terms and conditions included the bandwidth cap in them.
Several years went by and I started with a group of online friends a website, we used my existing account because 1and1 offered a free service. A few months go by and the podcast becomes popular but I notice that their billing me extra each month. So I phone them (and have the woman on record (I love PPC's)) telling me that the bandwidth cap must be broken and I wouldn't be charged. Then assuming things were ok I carried on and recieved a bill for £650. After dozens of phone calls I put measures in place to stop any more downloading and they agreed they had screwed up, this time a man (on a saved MP3) said they were wrong and he would look into it.
So I guess you would be surprised when a £700 bill landed on my door mat with threats of calling in people to take my stuff three weeks later. At the time I was in contact with a solicitor for other reasons and related this story to here complete with the agreed terms and conditions, the difference in service without notification and all the recorded phone calls. Her response was legally I was completly correct however the cost of fighting the bill would be pretty much the cost of the bill plus alot of time off university I couldn't afford. After some time with her I sent a letter to the head of the accounting department starting the process of a legal challenge(the idea was to get them to drop the bill) he agreed that after a certain date that things had gone wrong at their end and knocked the bill down to £400. I'm a poor student the people I ran the podcast with had coffed up £350 and my legal advice was that challenging the bill would cost more than £400. I was already going without sleep to keep up with university so I swallowed my principles.
In short they changed my service without notification (against their Terms and Conditions) they deactivated features after I'd activated them without notice (in this case a bandwidth warning notifier, due to 'site maintanence' the guy on the phone told me) they lied to me on the phone over technical matters, they lied about the service plan so many times I've lost count, they used the fact that the legal costs would be greater than the bill to force their customer to pay, even though they repeatedly agreed they were wrong.
I hate 1and1, I want them to die. I'd actually put them as worse than the RIAA in their tactics, their fine if all you want to use your site is to transfer the occasional large file, so you don't use email.
Ribbons are great, I was an intermediate user of Office 2003 but even tho I still only consider myself an intermediate user on office 2007. The difference is I feel more powerful and things to me seem much quicker, one thing I began to use heavily in the Office 2007 beta was the comments tool (very valuable for uni work) for the moment I've downgraded to Office 2003 and the fact I have to keep clicking a menu has put me off using it, pretty much every function has become like that since discovering Ribbons. Their horrible at first but after a week something clicked for me.
Oh and not to sound like a Microsoft Loving shill I've started using OpenOffice on my laptop, its actually working out great for that purpose, my laptop needs to open powerpoint slides and allow me to make word documents which include tables, pictures and a few easy to see formating options. OpenOffice does that well, its just when I get home I find the evil Office that much better in actually combining all the notes from the day into a usable, indexable and helpfull to revise from format. Stealing ribbons would be a very good idea for OpenOffice I think, although I'm sure a ton of people would argue that I'm wrong
I had this exact same problem on a
Abit NF95
AMD64 3700+
BFG 7600 GS OC 25mb
Creative Audigy SE 7.1
2gb Cosair Value DDR ram
I tried everything but Vista would hang on the install almost every time and the few times it installed I had the exact same errors you've listed. as far as I can make out it was the ram/chipset driver, unplugging one of my ram sticks (leaving 1gb) allowed Vista to install properly. Using anouther motherboard and all the other same components on a Asus A8n-SLi Deluxe motherboard (Nforce 4 chipset)and it installed fine. Trying the same components on anouther nforce 410/430 chipset board (a DFI Lan Party) caused the exact same error.
The really weird thing is now Vista is installed I can put the second 1gb stick in my Abit Nf95 and don't suffer the issues you mention. Since its only happened on one chipset and two boards which support a maximum of 2gb DDR ram I'm assuming the installer is seeing somethign different and going wrong when it configures Vista.
In short if you have 2gb of ram and a Nforce 410/430 chipset try removing a 1gb stick and installing again, then once its installed replace the 1gb stick.
I'm not so sure of that, vista adoption has been faster than Windows 2000 adoption in american business ( http://news.com.com/Report+Vistas+business+sales+s tronger+than+expected/2100-1016_3-6149468.html ) to be honest thats going to drive sales. Most people I know like things to be the same, My pa uses outlook 2002 in work and refuses to upgrade to 2003, I can name several other family/friends who use a set OS/Office apps in work and so use the exact same ones at home (sometimes newer if the UI isn't much different.)
Vista's adoption rate has surprised me, only two other tech savy people I know have got it and yet the store in which I work is filled with new upgraders, a online group I'm part of has formed a vista discussion group and even a few of my university mates have also made the plunge. To be honest its worrying, I upgraded because I found one or two features useful and got too used to ribbons (from running the beta of Office) many people have upgraded because the people on the news have been going on about how wonderfuull Vista is.
I was doubtful that Microsoft would get 100 million copies of Vista out the door by the end of the year, but am not so sure now. BTW does anyone have and idea of the number of activations of Vista so far?
Wow, the blinkered view people can have.
.doc format, yet people don't mind it when Apple build proprietry software.
Apple have a monopoly position on music sales throughout the world (well anywhere with a ITMS), do you seriously think that Apple wouldn't have the clout to kill off DRM? Steve Job's 'open letters' are very nice but you just can't help but feel that their a publictiy stunt and nothing more. The fact that Apple won't allow any music to be sold without DRM says alot to me, they're either really behind DRM or they have sold out almostly as badly to the media companies as Microsoft.
Their lack of interoperability is worse than Microsoft, people moan and complain about Office and its propritry
I hate to bring this news to you, but the iPod is not the best MP3 player, it was the best all round package a few years back but it works these days because it is the mainstream and Joe Consumer doesn't have time to learn what different types, they have just heard of the iPod and know it plays MP3's. Personnally I think my PPC with WMP10 syncing with WMP11 is better than the iPod Nano/iTunes combo my little sister has. My other little sister has a MP3 playing USB stick and uses WMP11 and she finds that easy to use and suits her down to the ground. Don't assume that just because something is the most expensive, best marketed or most popular that it is the best, everyone has different needs. Buying one product because everyone else buys it is being a sheep.
Apples been getting worse for years, I have no misconceptions that Microsoft are acting in their best interests, why do people always think that Apple are some benevolent company who only locks things up for your benifit?
Reading the comments and the article I'd like to argue that its math, that is the issue. Most the comments here talk about people dropping out because Computer Science was so Math orientated. In my first year of University we had a basic refresher math course in the first term we started with a electrical/communications/robotics/computer engineering group of 70 and by january the group was doing to 35, some because they never attended, a few realised it wasn't what they wanted to do and a surprising number (That I talked to) quit because they had failed so much of the maths module the previous term. The second year a group of 39 went down to 12, surprisingly many people found statistics to hard and started failing it because they saw it as stupid and pointless. I'm in the final year and theres no maths module this year we have started with 20 and there are still 20 people in the electrical/communications/robotics/computer engineering group.
Perhaps its not that Computer Science is boring but how maths is taught in schools, I've had some incredibly interesting labs over the years which even socialogy students think are cool, but if you don't know math well and have been taught to see it as a geeky pointless subject your not going to stay on a course which involves lots of it.
The article link appears to be broken, I really don't get why people find managing software projects so difficult, Programming is much more an art than engineering.
For example in electrical engineering, I've built a design board I knew what signals I wanted generated, what I wanted doing to them it was something easy to quantify, am I looking for a microcontroller or FPGA? Which is cheaper, which specs are capable of doing what I want. I have definitive specs (which rarely change) and lotsa fixed parts.
Software Programing is filled is many intangable parts, many people find programing languages like C and Java wierd and very difficult. As a result me and a friend could finish working programs in class, go through a few class mates code, help them understand the difficult bits and get them to see where their going wrong before bunking off to play pool. I'm not a great programer by any means, so its easy to see that like artists, great artists can do fantastic stuff in seconds which a poor artist could never do. I've had to do this 'Software Project managing' module in university and so far every solution has been an attempt to bring engineering style of management over to whats really a artisic discipline. Why does no one want to run a software house like a fashion house, or a comic house? Yes engineering principles need to go into the design, but Electrical/Mechanical/Civil is mostly dealing with materials, Software is mostly dealing with people, like art.
I'm not trying to devalue software engineering, its a field I'm very interested in but I'm amazed no ones realised that you can't manage the project like an engineering project, you can design it like an engineering project (and you should) but people are this annoying highly unpredicatble thing, often prone to moody tempers while they look down on others because they don't get how their disicpline is so important as they labour into the night talking about their genius, wait I am talking about artists here arent I?
Thats a lovely speech there but my expearence is people buy Mac's because their 'shiny'. Sure pople in industry buy them to aid in business, thats called using the right tool for the job. But most the public I've met are shiny motivated I've been browsing in PC stores and heard people buy them because they were 'cool and looked pwetty', Mac's are currently riding the Ipod cool wave. Your really over estimating the rational behavoir of the general public, if Joe consumer is looking for laptops, look and reputation are key. Apple has been building a reputation of being for fun (I disagree here there aren't many Mac games) and something simple that never breaks. If you compare a Mac PC style with a standard windows PC case then a Mac looks much better. Try working in a shop for a while its scary, you and me might go out and look at what we need and choose the best, but what do those technical specifications mean to the average user?
Its actually why Aero is going to make Vista a sucess in the home market, look at it from your normal users point of view, two machines look equally pretty on screen but one means you have to change a ton of stuff (acording to that nice sales guy) so what do you do?
How can we puechase something which will be free? I'm guessing this will be like channel 4's airing of IT. You'll watch the videos in a fixed web viewer assuming your IP is from the UK.
See the thing to do would be to download it lotsa times and cost BBC money and argue that the drm forces you to keep downloaded. But then again that supports DRM and may put the Beeb off doing it. Gah how will i get my free *legal* fix of red dwarf now! I can justify spending £25 for six episodes.