Posts by Jim 59

Back in '84ish, CDs came out. Albums that had cost £7.99 on vinyl suddenly cost £15 on CD. The public was shocked. For the next 15 years, the music industry happily gouged us on CD sales, explaining the price hike (between sniggers) by saying CDs were more expensive to produce.

Around '99, somebody pointed out that magazines costing £3 were able to give away "free" CDs on the cover. Cue ructions. The industry's argument was a smoking ruin, and investigations ensued. But the industry was to powerful. Prices dropped to £10 or so and stayed there.

Then 2005, it all came crashing down: imesh, audiogalaxy, allofm3.com, etc. etc. etc. Digital Armageddon.

So, they gouged us for 15 years, then we gouged them for 15 years. Is it now time to kiss and make up ? I think it is.

ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits – bespoke chips designed for very particular workloads, as opposed to general-purpose processors...

It's been a while since I worked in the semiconductor industry, but I think the term used for bespoke ICs, designed from scratch, is "full custom", whereas ASICs are off the shelf designs, customised to a particular usage, and cheaper than full custom. Any IC bods in here?

My cx61 is i7 Haswell, eight core, and to be honest the needle hardly shifts off zero Nice to have the grunt anyway. Laptops that come with Windows, once you put Linux on them, tend to be over specified.

IT Recruiters are mostly looking for that greatest of all skills - the ability to work for much less money.

If they are chasing after sociologists, guess why.

Not sure why people are down on disk drives. They still offer capacities larger than SSD at a fraction of the price. 2 TB for 50 quid. How long will it take SSD to match that? If you want more reliability, RAID.

In the enterprise, of about 180 HP drives here (HP 2.5"), only one has failed in 2 years, and that was only degraded. The failure rate of older 3" units has been a lot higher.

All your PoS belong to us.

...his beloved collection of overpriced blahware

Lol. P G Wodehouse could not have put it better.

Pay rise for Mr Martin.

Google pulls plug on... again

They should never have been allowed to buy YouTube.

Good Grief

is my only comment on this story.

Google now supposedly favouring https sites too, but I don't see much sign of it.

According to popular rumour, people in F1 are almost exclusively arrogant berks, while people in motorbike racing are cool, friendly and approachable.

Don't shoot the messenger! I know nothing of either sport, no idea how true this is and I am just repeating the rumour.

The other thing gaming laptops are good for - apart from gaming - is just to be a desktop PC replacement. Smaller laptops, "notebooks" and the like, apart from lacking power, don't have the hardware and ports needed for general computing life. Eg DVD, USB, ethernet, VGA (for multiple monitors or overhead projectors), SD reader and so on.

Yes, you might argue DVD or whatever isn't needed, but life is simpler if you have it.

Dear Reg

Give me an official Logowatch article or it didn't happen. And two of those words better be "josticks" and "whalesong".

Good grief. One of the worlds most powerful unelected officials is actually accusing Google of being unfairly dominant.

Companies "pushing their own products" is good, and is in everyone's interest, until it gets to a certain point of overarching dominance. After that, the company uses its own position to remove competition from the market, and is no longer in everyone's interest.

Cf What MS did to Netscape - result - no browser progress in 10 years.

Cf What Google does to Yahoo - no search engine progress in 10 years?

Great to see that the Beeb has not strayed from its formula:

- all programmes to be forced through a PC mesh so fine that what comes out of the other side is just mush.

- Presenter to be pretty, with no relevant qualifications, experience and probably no interest in the subject matter.

- Anything outside the arts to be treated non-seriously, usually with a contentious/polemic argument to make it palatable to the ballet fans (here, it was the Java/C howler). BBC thinks the black jumpers will switch off unless they hear the word "punk!".

- Men and boys to be ignored, or if that cannot be, made to look stupid. Men and boys' confidence to be lowered, and boys made to feel useless and surplus to requirements. This despite the soaring male suicide rate and poor school performance.

...if it had been like this in the 50s, Attenborough and Moore would never have looked into a TV camera.

"Thoughts of exposed customers give Bill Murray sleepless nights"

Lol. Any customers in particular?

We'd guess it's because DXi deduping backup box and StorNext scale-out file management product revenues have grown strongly and outpaced the continued decline in tape product revenues.

Did anybody phone up Quantum to ask ?

Time to order a role of black insulation tape.

Remember: an Engineer is somebody who wares a hard hat for work. That's appears to be the message from the Register, and from WES too (see their website).

Big, economical and easy to live with

A bit like The Register.

I guess the market for new phones is people buying their first smartphone, or converts from the other side (Apple, Android). People who already have an S3 or S4, say, aren't going to foam at the mouth to acquire an almost identical black cuboid with a better camera but few other benefits and storage/battery drawbacks.

Sounds like something out of Red Dwarf.

Before gTLD revolution: "Yeah let's go to the Register web page. Bound to be theregister.co.uk..."

After gTLD revolution: "Yeah let's go to the Register web page. Find the telephone directory so we can look up their telephone number and ask them what their URL is".

According to one report the plan was to hover outside a cell window while the inmate reched out to grab the booty. A seemingly hairbrained scheme likely to end with a crash or lost fingers, as well as immediate detection by the prison guards.

Simply catapulting stuff over the wall seems like a better idea.