Adamson Rust gets his

Dear Mr. Rust,

I spilt my coffee reading your article about AMD pricing. It was so funny that I had to change into my gym pants for the rest of the day.

Please keep up the great work.

Atreya

(A reader who now drinks coffee with the lid on)

Ten good reasons not to buy Intel chips

Adamson,

The extra performance RDRAM provided would have allowed the use of slower processors to get the same benefit. The lower costs of processors would have more than offset the higher cost of DRAM, and the consumer could have had the same performance at less cost. By RDRAM not becoming the standard, the customer was cheated, but that is probably of little interest to you, I guess.

Further, as has become clear in the FTC case against Rambus, the memory manufactures conspired to limit production of RDRAM, thus keeping the price higher than it would have been. This constituted antitrust activity. Intel was forced to backpedal and support DDR because of this. RDRAM was the better solution and in fact DDR contains Rambus IP as will become clear once the litigation resumes in the Virginia court.

Not quite sure why you condemn Rambus. Seems a better target would be Micron Technology, Infineon and Hynix. It is they who have stolen IP, and conspired to kill a better solution for the customer.

Sincerely,

Jim

Inkjet manufacturers' shameless tactics exposed

Hi

Just read your article in the inquirer, it's all very good but i feel you missed out one major point: Lexmark cartridges have no expiry date or nasty stuff like that, but you failed to mention the fact that the lexmark cartridges are around half the size of canon ones yet over 3 times the price!

For that one reason alone i ditched my lexmark because it was bankrupting me in ink costs and brought a lovely canon i550 instead. The canon has so far lasted twice as long as the lexmark did on one set of cartridges :)

Hey,

You don't even remember what you write, Mike.

Sometime ago you wrote about Lexmark printers, when a new printer costs LESS then new black+color cartridges (and it's obvious that new printer has both).. at this point it's probably even worse (I saw lexmark printers for 200zl while last time I checked one cartridge was for 150zl...) And you tell me they are the good guys?!?

I have an old and broken EPSON printer, it was a good buy, epson color 400 if I remember right, lasted few good years.. I was looking for a new printer few months ago (no more LEXMARKS, begone evil creature) and I went for EPSON again.. reasons?

They have two nice and cheap models - C42 and C62. The difference is that C42 has got a bit lower printing quality and speed.. and it only prints 250pages on one cartridge while C62 prints 500pages. It's also nicely shown in cartridge prices - original C42 cartridge goes for 80zl while C62 for 150zl... that's fair.

One more thing is that I have found full non-original cartridge replacements for EPSONs.. they cost me as little as 44zl... So I can print 500 pages with my C62 for 44zl... beat that.. and print quality of this printer is awesome, even with non-original cartridge. No refilling problems or paying a fortune for a cartridge... :)

I hate hate hate LEXMARK and I will NEVER again buy one... Epson is the way to go for inkjet printers.

With best regards,

Mirek Czerwinski

What is it with Mr Vole's Internet Exploder insistence?

Dear Mike,

I really hope this letter gets an audience. Foremost, I bumped into the Register accidentally when searching for technology news. This was a couple of years ago. I finally settled for the Inquirer a view months later. Little did I know that I migrated just about the same time you left the Register till a view months down the road when I read about your move from The R to The I.

Anyway, I need a favour, if you can help. With your journalistic power, I'll like to know why Microsoft requires Internet explorer and only Internet explorer for windows updates (http://v4.windowsupdate.Microsoft.com/en/default.asp). Isn't that being unfair to those that prefer using other browsers (Opera, Mozilla, etc...). Didn't the antitrust against it spawn an agreement to allow the freedom to chose any browser? If so then why is it still forcing users to walk the narrow path to windows update?

I hope through your site, an MS PR person will be forced to enlighten us on their IE only prerequisite to updates and about the freedom to chose in a windows environment. Perhaps they have a good reason, otherwise, a dumb one at that.

Your site is fun and very informative. For instance, I got to know of my lay off at Agere Systems through your site before I was officially told. That really helped me prepare, psychologically, for the 'surprise'. Thank you. Keep up the good work.

Regards,

Worlali Afoh

Rename the Itanic the VMSCore

Hi Mike,

How do you estimate the chances of Itanium being renamed to VMSCore in the coming 5 years?

Think about it... Only one vendor actually sells products based on it, and VMS is the only operating system you could conceivably want one for (apart from some very temporary speed advantage where you'd be willing to recompile for the fastest machine you could buy--every time). It's the only thing that has some level of continuity to it, and one of HP's best prospects when it comes to actually making money.

Come on Carly, you know it makes sense!

Jeroen

PS - a hymn I once SMS'ed to xxxx for when Carly gets the boot:

Don't cry for us Fiorina,
the truth is we never liked you.
Through the dot-com days,
our mad existence,
we bought IBM kit;
HP good riddance.

That was a few years ago but I guess it'll still apply if needed.

Adamson gets his again

Hey Mike,

From the article:

"If our mole's whisperings are as correct as we believe them to be, this means that it's going to be ever so much cheaper to get yourself a Pentium 4 3.20GHz microprocessor mit motherboard upgradeable to Mr Prescott than it is an Athlon FX mit mobo, we'd suggest."

I'd just like to point out that the above is somewhat misleading. While true that it will be cheaper it is a false savings because the P4 doesn't scale to 64 bit OS'es and apps as they become available. You would have to buy another complete system to accomplish that. When you look at A P4 system plus another Itanium system for 64 bit to achieve still less functionality because of having to work on two separate computers to accomplish the same thing, the AMD Athlon 64 begins to look very good indeed.

Pat

Dumping the wrinklies causing massive hi tech problem

Now THIS makes a lot of sense! Been there, done that.

I used to work for a company that built tow targets and drone augmentation systems for air to air gunnery and missile practice. This was a division of a parent company. The parent company almost went belly-up through a variety of ill informed ventures.

They put our division on the market and it was bought by our biggest competitor.

They were only after the blueprints to our line of products and closed it down within a year.

I will bet that to this day they have not and will not ever build any of those designs.

There was a whole body of knowledge that was required to build, test and make work those targets and systems. It wasn't written down in any manual and someone with no background to the company would have had to spend the time to get to know the "lingo" merely to START learning how to make and build those targets.

Did they get their money's worth when they threw away all that IM, as you call it?

I don't think so, but they WILL get the business. Because now they will be sole source on a lot of contracts- no matter how much that will cost the government. At least until some OTHER company takes the gamble to get started in the field.

So not only does the U.S. government suffer because now there is less competition in a very specialized field, all the former employees suffer because now they have to go to work for a company doing different work for less pay as inexperienced workers, whille all that IM just quietly vanishes away. Or they just retire. Like I did.

My opinions about "higher" management are generally unprintable- and my 20+ years of experience with the company make me unemployable at anything like what I was making anyway.

But I have the last laugh every time I think about those dim bulbs trying to build a working target out of just those blueprints! They will doubtless succeed eventually, but not without spending a lot of time and money they would otherwise not have needed to spend.

Cheers,

Frank