Why you should pay for the INQ

SUBJECT: HP/Voodoo & the Inq

Maybe it was the best kept secret at HP because everyone was afraid of having their phones tapped.

Doormat

Subject: What you love and hate about The INQ

I hate the ads too. Solution? I pay (an extremely small amount of) money for my Inq. Thank you for running a system which enables me to do so. (Here, Ed.)

Fanciful jargon? Just following in MIT's footsteps. Read the Jargon File. Thank you for running such a journal.

Tiled home page? I never see the home page. I choose the page that suits me as my L'Inq home page. That's page 4 by the way. Thank you for running a system which enables me to do so.

Good English? When UK or US writers get it wrong I scream with anger. Mike has been an excellent gatherer of writers with other home languages. Your (the latter group's) fluency embarrasses me and I love the often strange idioms. Thank you for running such a journal.

rwt

Subject: Vista upgrade will cost you $5,000 per person

It is a constant source of amazement to me the way our trans-atlantic collegues manage to pluck these figures from the sky. Do they work in the same industry as the rest of us?!?

Sure, I can see where they are getting the $5000, dividing the costs of servers, office etc over all the users within a company, but how on Earth do they plan to spend up to $2000 (around £1060 in real money) on a PC?!?

The specs listed in this article are hardly anything terribly special, and I am sure Dell would LOVE to knock you one together for a figure more like £400-£600 - HALF what was suggested!!!

Bah - maybe I'm just in a bad mood!

Steve

Subject: Dead journalists

It saddens me that journalists have to die simply for doing their jobs, especially if it due to their love for "extra risk fees" in real time war zone scoops. Truly disturbing that some people would harm this gentle breed of professions. Cruelty knows no bounds and I'm sure I type for everyone when I type "those poor poor souls"... But perhaps more news worthy, as far as the IT world goes, would be something more relevant? Dont get me wrong, its always a crowd pleaser...err...I mean, it always brings ratings when people read about death...but in this case the majority of the readers are techies that, dare I say, have little concern for such tidbits when they load up an IT news site. If statistics regarding death was their thing, perhaps they would try a different site? After all, no one wants to find out that they just missed an entire minute of playing GTA just because La Inq. wrote something obscurly absent in coherant meaning to the technocrats.

Now run along and do some professional work like finding out more PS3 hidden blunders, or even what is the official Intel explanation to the disaster they affectionatly dubbed tITANIcUM.

Kind regards,

A humantarian and devote reader.

Subject: Vista upgrade will cost you $5,000 per person

Well NOT for this company!

I wouldn't allow that POS Vista within a hundred miles of our front door. MICROSUCKS can stick their defective O/Ss where the Sun don't shine. Only a complete moron would touch Vista with a ten foot pole.

Oliver Wendel Homes

Subject: Microsoft and the EU

In reply to the question by a reader regarding Microsoft and the EU: >Why dont they just let the consumers decide >what they want . (?)

To avoid the security software business goes the same way as Netscape et al. I think in this particular sector it is important to look at the operating system from several angles - ie. not just Microsoft's.

And then there is Microsoft's security track record - imagine a monopoly on security software with them in charge.

Nikolas S. Andersen

Subject: Vista upgrade will cost you..." article

This really is a trite piece of self-marketing. The business does not have to adopt Aero, therefore it does not necessitate a replacement of all workstations. And for the love of the gods, why is the purchase of Office, and all back-end system upgrades, there? That's not Vista, so shouldn't be included in a 'Vista upgrade' whingefest. I'm no fan of MS, but come on, this is the most appallingly bad piece of hackism I've ever read.

Babydinosaur

Subject: Flame against Daniel Fitzgerald

Daniel Fitzgerald, you are a moron. Wait, let me rephrase that: You are the moron, the only moron in the world. You can't use ebay for price comparisons idiot. On ebay, people will try to jack up prices because they want to make money. And oh dear, you own four boxes. That should be big enough for a house for your fat arse. Stop programming your useless life and just kill yourself. Stop wasting my air. You don't deserve any service from AMD or Intel. AMD has been through worse scenarios than this. One day Intel will win and one day AMD will win, but neither company will go bankrupt and I doubt the government will let either one go bankrupt; so much depends on their cpus.

jzperadin

Subject: Daniel Fitzgerald... and why I love you letters section.

He's got a great point, and I'm stuck in his situation. I've just recently started seeing the 1xx Opterons start to go down in price. Yet I could get a Core 2 Duo for the same price as a Opteron 165/175 and the 6300 will mop the floor with either of them.

It's a funky divot AMD tripped on. For my home PC I'm probably going to break down and buy a 939 Opteron 170 for ~$190 US, and keep my 2 yr old(literally) mobo, keep my 2yr old(literally) RAM, it's a simple dump-n-go procedure. If I was going to assemble a new system for myself though... I see no reason to buy AMD's AM2 platform. On the other hand it looks to me like system builders like Dell and HP are taking into consideration the performance gap between AMD and Intel, and they're charging more for Intel kit than they would for AMD kit. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of mark-up, AMD offering highly favorable pricing to these companies, or that the Intel kit really costs on average ~$100 more to put out the door. It's an interesting time in the computer industry right now. AMD's fortunes are genuinely looking up, perhaps not with the newegg crowd but because they have finally cracked the system integrator's door, and wedged their foot in it. Yeah it kind of sucks that I can't get an AMD part for my 2 year old motherboard that will be competitive with a C2D, and AM2's debut wasn't stellar. Despite the performance disadvantage AMD the company is doing better than ever.

We're buying some new PCs for the office right now. Looking at Dells web page I can get a Dual Core A64 for $569 US, or a Dual Core Intel for $699 US that's about a 20% difference. That difference means Dell is running a buy 4 get 1 free deal on AMD systems compared to Intel. We're using them for word processing, spreadsheets, and email. Guess which system we're going with?

What if you have a tight IT budget, and your corporation needed 1,000, 10,000? which system would you choose? Performance for AMD kit isn't stellar but it's way more than adequate for a large portion of the PC buying public, so expect to be seeing a lot more of them.

-manno

Subject: Wasn't sure where to send this so I thought you'd be the best!

I was looking through some of the javascript config files for FireFox whilst building a new laptop at work (as you do!) I found this strange piece of code in there...

It looks like a gaff, someone's made a comment and hasn't removed it. AND it wasn't a beta release! :-D

Anyone know who Blake is?

FireFox v1.5.0.7
C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxdefaultspreffirefox.js

// 0 = blank, 1 = home (browser.startup.homepage), 2 = last // XXXBlake Remove this stupid pref
pref("browser.startup.page", 1);
pref("browser.startup.homepage",
"resource:/browserconfig.properties");

Daniel

Subject: Response: EU and MS

"If the EU strips Vista down I'll just buy a US copy instead ." -Matt B

And me and many others would run the EU version of the software if we had a choice!

To respond to another one of your points, the fuss is about MS locking out security companies. You wouldn't be able to run your own firewall cause no one will be making one. That sounds rediculous, because it is...M$ can't and won't get security right..and third parties will be let in. Just wait for the smoke to clear.

-Glen

Subject: Dumb consumers

In your latest "letters" column, you printed a letter by a "Matt B", that pretty much summarises the point of view of many consumers, who simply don't understand how competition works, and why anti-monopoly legislation exists.

Mr. B writes:

"Vista is Microsofts [sic] Operating system so they should be able to include whatever they want in it.

Personally I think Media Player sucks so I'll just download something else [...] I dont particularly like Microsofts firewall so again I'll download something else. [...]

If the EU strips Vista down I'll just buy a US copy instead ."

It's not just sad that he doesn't understand why monopolies harm consumers, but it's also ironic that he contradicts himself in the process.

He says he thinks Windows Media Player and Windows Firewall "suck", and yet, he says that "if the EU strips down Vista" (ex., forcing Microsoft to release a cheaper version without a Media Player or a Firewall), then he will "buy a US copy instead".

Does this make any sense to anyone?

What some people don't understand is that applications like Windows Media Player, Windows Firewall, MSIE, Outlook Express, and so on, are NOT FREE. Their cost is included in the total cost of the operating system.

So, even though many consumers do not want those products, they are forced to pay for their development and marketing. Not only are we forced to buy a product that we don't want and never intend to use, but the money we pay for it will actually be used by Microsoft to compete against (or buy out and terminate) the alternative products that we do like.

When a small company tries to force its customers to buy "bundles", most of those customers will simply refuse to pay for the whole package when all they want is the main product. And capitalism does its job (either the company delivers what consumers want, or it goes under).

But when a company like Microsoft (that has a "de facto" monopoly) does it, consumers are forced to buy the whole package because they cannot live (or cannot keep their job, etc.), without the main product. This kind of behaviour hurts consumers, hurts the competition, and makes the economy stagnate.

And that is why there is anti-monopoly legislation in most civilised parts of the world (even if a lot of consumers are clueless, and even if some of the people responsible for enforcing that legislation get amnesia from "campagin donations").

Microsoft is free to have 90% or even 100% of the operating system market. But what they cannot do is use people's dependency on their core operating system to force-feed them other types of products, competing unfairly with the makers of those types of products. If Microsoft thinks its media player, firewall, etc., can compete fairly with the alternatives, all they need to do is sell them separately, and subtract their cost from the price of the operating system.

How can any sane consumer be against this?

Tretas

Subject: Vista upgrade will cost you $5,000 per person

Hi!

This young men has forgotten that a good Office Workstation with a medium AMD AM2 3200+ CPU on a good mainboard with a normal PCI-E graphiccard, 512MB memory and a 80GB ATA drive will cost around 300 Euro! (And it's not a DELL)

SUSE Linux and StarOffice 8 cost around 120 Euro and a good new 19" TFT monitor will cost today 300 Euro!

That cost's only 720 Euro!

For 5.000 Euro you can by a very fast MAC Pro Quad Core with XP as a CAD workstation and for 680 Euro a fast MAC mini with AppleWorks and ...... XP if you need for StarOffice, COREL and other good software! ;)

*** Company's can think!!! ***

When W98 on a "small" workstation is enough for to work with the fastest 3D Construction Software like IronCAD 6 or 7, a fast W2K (or XP) workstation enough for to work with bigger tools like ProEngineer Wildfire, CADENCE, MENTOR, EWB an others, then ...... is VISTA for the BIRD's!! ;)

I hope BillyBoy can think! :)

Best regards

Frank-J. Bebber, germany

Subject: Inane

I'm running server 2003 with a gig of ram. Everything bought straight up, not pirated, cost me $2100 (PC AND OS). The same PC, running vista on a partition runs a 4.5 on the "performance" gauge on vista (so it's not too shabby.)

Also, the businesses that plan on running onboard graphics with office, aren't going to be running "Aero" (if they're even stupid enough to run Vista within the first year, in which case Peripherals will be cheaper).

You can buy an ATI x850xt for $100 bucks or less now. That in itself nullifies the Video card issue for those willing to upgrade.

His whole article is basically saying, "If I want to drive on vacation, it's going to cost me $30,000 because I have to buy a reliable car and drive a cadillac if I want to get there... plus $900 in case I have a gas leak.... and $2000 because I'll be staying at the Hilton each night."

Anyone can make or buy a PC for less than $600 that will run vista just fine, if they feel like buying a new PC. Anyone that feels it's absolutely neccessary to run Vista RIGHT NOW, will probably already have the equipment or will upgrade accordingly. Others will just get it with their next PC purchase like they did with EVERY previous version. I still know people that are running 98 and ME... this change is no different than any other OS.

Why isn't he complaining about MAC OS instead? Really. Think about how cheap they are to upgrade. This is an old problem.

mataro

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