Hire some people that what speak proper English

The neo-geek boobs you have are so bad it is hard to take your site seriously.

I am being honest, it sounds like a bunch of nerds just sounding off, spewing opinion and never more than just shooting out lines out of a text editor. If that is what you are aiming at, fine. But if you want to be taken as a credible source of news and information, you should really look at hiring some people that know how to form a sentence. Then, maybe work on article structure, but at least find some folks that can get a thought out in a coherent manner without hyperbole, subjective rants and slams, opinion...

Again, this may come across as a flame, but I seriously don't forward articles from your site 'cause it just reads like a bunch of barely-post-teen nerds. In fact, I don't even go there anymore, I just ran across an article sited from your site, clicked over and in a few seconds TOTALLY remembered the site based on the poor presentation.

Thanks for your time,

"Jester"

[Thanks! Which geeks do you have in mind? Fudo is from Bosnia, so his English is excruciatingly Bosnian. Fernando is from Argentina so he's from a Third World country. Rick Reroy is from someplace in central Europe. Paul Hales is from Luton, so his English is English. I'm Scottish, so my English is Scottish English. We've a few Murrikans working for us too. Don't forget that Shakespeare is the man who destroyed the English language. And what's this "sited from your site" stuff mean? :) Ed.]

Fix found for IBM Deathstar hard drives

My Friends

While it's true that the Devil does make work for idle heads, I could have sworn the entire output of those so corrupted ended up in the US Congress, the Texas State Legislature and the MCI boardroom. Best check your figures.

Jack Imsdahl

Game over for the Nintendo Gamecube?

"Nintendo only sold 80,000 units of the Gamecube in the financial quarter ending in June 2003."

This was announced at the 8/7 press conference:

http://www.cube-europe.com/news.php?nid=5126

It seems to be the number of consoles sold to retailers/distributors, a lot more than that was sold to consumers during the same period.

You can see here: http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm

376,771 gamecube were sold in japan b/w 1/1/2003 and 8/10/2003

I regularly have a look at sales and i can assure you that more than 80000 gamecube were sold to consumers during this particular quarter in Japan alone.

From that you can conclude that retailers/distributors have too much stock and the gamecube didn't sell as well as expected.

And nintendo also seems to suffer from overstock as they stopped production.

Yes things are not very good for the gamecube, but the game isn't over either.

And allow my to express doubts concerning the online gaming being a big factor of success for consoles. how much xbox owners are also xbox live subscribers ? 5 % ?

A "niche" segment of players of a "niche" console!

Despite being very much hyped, xbox live is definitively a "niche" thing that seems to matter much more to microsoft PR and analysts than to gamers.

regards

Luc Dumaine

Documentation

GentleFolk

My 'umble contributions to the techno-follies:

* From a Denon Turntable Owners guide circa 1978: "Is to be a precision instrument, not to be torturing Please."

* Marked on the printhead shipping holder of Mannesmann-Talley 'Spirit' printer: "A Row Dis A Weigh" Many late-night hours went into the final decryption of this message as: "Throw this Away" Demonstrating some crucial linguistic disconnects between Helmut and Dong Jhon Lee

* However, pride of place remains firmly rooted in Old Albion with this from a 1957 Jaguar XK150M shop manual: "Whilst dexterously holding the Gudgeon assemblage betwixt the fingers, offer it up to the Crankshaft." To which one can only respond: " O Manny makes the Jaguar hum ..."

Cheers

Jim Mitchell

InActiveX

Rick (or whoever gets this {g}

You said in your activeX article

"What Eolas and InterTrust have in common is that their main business is in "intellectual property", the sale of permission to use ideas. As such they don't have any significant end-user products of their own, but rely on collecting royalties from companies that do"

This is not entirely true. InterTrust did have, at one stage, an actual DRM product, I know because I worked with it. They licensed it to ComputaCenter in the UK in an attempt to sell music online 5 years ago. It appeared as a system tray icon and acted as a wallet and license holder, with music encrypted in a very intertrust specific format. Creative's playcenter was a 3rd party player. From that they went on to attempt to provide document rights as well, getting adobe to support their 3rd party rights plugin (no longer there in v6) and producing a plugin for outlook, so you could auto-expire or revoke emails. They even tried a CD replacement system (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-271170.html?legacy=cnet) and had partnerships with Iomega to allow saving of DRM protected data onto jazz drives (remember them?).

None of these solutions worked well, the music system used to crash developer machines on a regular basis. Then, about 6-9 months later, Microsoft came out with their first version of DRM for Windows Media.

Of course it appears all their ideas failed, hence they "lets use our patents to make money" option. Bunch of muppets.

Regards

Barry

Phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric

Dear editor,

I read with great interest, your articles.

I also read with particular interest the readers' views, and your reactions to them, about your being an anti-microsoft. i would just like to make the following points.

Let me humbly submit, that the "freedom of speech" game is being played very irresponsibly these days, especially by large, capitalistic, press-manipulating democracies, and UK is no exception, especially with their "native" cynical and humourous tone. i know very well that this is a very argumentative observation, and would appreciate that you support your disagreements if any with facts and justifications before "flaming" me abruptly.

Microsoft is a business, with "profit motives", that behaves in a "customer friendly" manner. with microsoft, there is someone to take (on all the) dirty comments about its "voleware", to take on responsibility, and to do something in the interest of protecting its business and customers. top hardware manufacturers "recommend and design their computers for microsoft windows". can you deny all this?

On the other hand, "open sourced" linux is everywhere, and is "open", with no ownership. linux is not (yet) meant for end-users, atleast not for another decade. can you deny all this?

there is something about microsoft that the inq does not see, or doesnot wish to see?!

MSS