I weep for the future of IT and America

Subject: Now that's a good one

SAP hacks Oracle servers and downloads a bunch of stuff, but never looked at any intellectual property-related code. Yeah, sure. If I'm not mistaken, were someone to hack THEIR servers and download stuff, SAP would be screaming bloody IP murder and shooting lawsuits from the hip with a machine gun.

Really credible, guys. And having the same mistakes Oracle patched afterwards really makes your point. Ah, wouldn't it be wonderful if only responsible adults were in charge of major corporations ?

Pascal.

Subject: Everywhere Girl Spotted

It seems the Everywhere Girl is addicted to College education.

http://www.hotcourses.com/courses-northeast-england/

Render

Subject: Al Gore

Oh no...don't make fun of our precious Al Gore. I'll tell you what...give us your war, your pestilence and your debt, just take the wacky tree hugging liberals from our country. We'll sort it out from there.

Outofhousepsychotic

Subject: Bloke launches one-man campaign to kill the INQ

If you want the guy's identity, why not just ring up the Yahoo folks, and with your best Chinese accent tell them this dude has been committing crimes against the People's Republic of China and you need to know who he is.

Jim

Subject: Apple Iphone costs $265 to build

Personally, I think iSupply got a few things wrong and the EE Times articles on the same subject are more accurate:

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=200001811
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=200002024
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=200001864

Cheers,
Sandor

Subject: Bush's Hamburger eaters attacking Estonia

I bet that burger eating trouble maker Bush is up to his old tricks again.

Doubtless at this stage he has loads of young burger eating script kiddies in his paws, using their bot-nets of Russian Microsoft nongenuine advantage insecure PC's to attack another country & blame it on someone else.

He is again temporarily starting the "blame game", trying to raise the "homeland security" threat level, and trying to scare the shite out of as many people as possible.

Someone tell Bush, "you got us with Iraq the last time, ....Fool me once,eh/?... fool me,eh/?...wazzit???

A potato paddy

Subject: INQ paid shills

I heard the same thing. It is why Terry Stemple was forced to resign.

TheDukeOfURL

Subject: Apple Ifawn $2000

Mike, er Ed,

"...includes unlimited internet over Edge..."

Wow!!! Unlimited? If Rogers in Canada offered unlimited Internet over their ($0.05 per KILO-not-Mega-byte) EDGE network, well that might be worth as much as Cdn$73-Quadrillion per month!

Not a bad deal at all.

Jeffy

Subject: Apple Iphone costs $265 to build

"Samsung gets the lion share of component manufacturers by supplying an ARM RISC core, NAND flash and DRAM, amounting to a whopping cost of $76.25, or 30.5 per cent of the BOM."

The cost of the ARM processor, DRAM, and flash is grossly inflated IMO. I'd like to know where those price #s came from, as anyone who has ever dealt w/ a semiconductor supplier knows, the advertised prices are far higher than a negotiated, volume discounted price.

And what about their estimate for building the thing? Is this based on paying a union worker's wage in the USA or a 3rd world worker 30-cents per hour to watch a monitor?

Me thinks Apple's margins are a whole helluva lot more than 55% at the current selling price.

Jim

Subject: Gates no longer worlds richest man

After looking into this myself I'm sadly forced to admit to you.. However once the Mexican goverment gets its act together and opens the market up slims fortune will hopefully tumble to the point whereby he sits behind Gates and Buffet.

We can't trust anyone to give money away like Gates and Buffet so on that note they don't deserve to be the worlds richest person!

Luke

Subject: Bloke launches one-man campaign to kill the INQ

You know what they say, "Lies, Damn Lies and Wikipedia".

Kevin

Subject: crimewatch, write or wrong

Hello

I tried writing to Crimewatch, but they still insist on showing videos of me "at work".

Luckily, I only go out at night time, but it still a terrible intrusion.

Cheers
Snedger

Subject: High cost of Indian jobs prompts shift in outsourcing trend

you just keep dreaming!!!

It could be a good news for eastern europian countries/vietnam, not definetely US.

I hope you've visited and seen what's bangalore. Bangalore will be ahead of the outsourcing race.

Kannan

Subject: Carlos Slim

You may also know Carlos Slim as the guy who owns CompUSA. Look into the wrist slap he got for some very dirty dealing he did to buy CompUSA.

Mogbert

Subject: Everywhere girl....

OK, didn't find the everywhere girl on the page you linked to, but ended up on this site which promptly sang to me...

http://www.cajacanarias.org/

and that's good enough. :)

keep up the good work!

Ian

Subject: understated iphone margin

I read your piece about iphone build costs and it sounds about right but it's forgetting one crucial thing. ATT is paying some sort of kickback to apple to get exclusive rights to the phone and to acquire a 2 year contract.

When a person buys a phone, they typically sign a 2 year contract and doing so allows the person to buy a phone at the same time for a steeply reduced price. Typically, the discount on the phone is about ~$150. Of course, you're really paying for the phone through the monthly payments on your cell service but the cost is hidden. If a person chooses not to get a contract, then the phone is full price.

So Apple must be getting *at least* another $150 on top of the list price of the iPhone. Since Apple has agreed to be exclusive with ATT, it must be getting a handsome sum on top of this to make it worthwhile to fore-go all the other carriers. Assuming apple is getting an extra $100 over what phone companies typically get, that would make the iphone margin a whopping 69%.

Zwong

Subject: Everywhere Girl & Erasmus

Vocatus atque que non vocatus, Everywhere Girl aderit

Dan

Subject: SOITEC

As with all our financial analysts, it never hurts to check the source and draw your own conclusion. SOITEC look like they are saying customers had overstocked (Wasn't there a rumor of Intel buying lots of SOI for some reason - monopolistic, perhaps?)

This is the first/latest items I read there.

http://www.soitec.com/en/finance/f_press72.htm
http://www.soitec.com/en/finance/f_info_full07.htm

Now I see the release:

http://www.soitec.com/en/finance/f_press73.htm

Toby

Subject: Slack12

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the plug on Slack12. This particular distribution has been a very quiet, but very heavy horse in the Linux world for many years. It's not glamorous (or controversial) enough to the press coverage in deserves. Maybe that's because it works well and doesn't get all tangled up in its trousers with each new revision.

It's especially noteworthy that this is a distribution which supports different platforms: desktop, server, laptop, etc. In addition, it works well with older hardware reducing landfill load: With Slackware, our 13 year old Gateway 486 is quite happy providing primary DNS and outgoing mail service.

Thanks,
ScottJ

Subject: INQ smear campaign

There is no doubt The Inkwell writes bogus stories and in particular hypes Intel and bashes AMD. This has been going on for years even when Intel had nothing to sell and AMD kept taking market share.

Denial doesn't change the facts. The Inkwell has lost just about all credibility in the past couple years as a result of shilling and mis-information.

Randy

Subject: Microsoft needs an enema...

For a while now I've kept my peace, and now after reading about all of Microsoft's latest antics I've had enough and I want to voice some personal observations and thoughts.

For years, Microsoft's anti-compeditive practices has hurt us, as Charlie has tried to beat it into our heads since Vista came into the radar. And after wasting $399 on a full retail copy of Vista Ultimate, I'm about ready to blow. On my Athlon 64 4000+ system with 1GB of DDR-400, and GeForce 6800GT 256MB PCIe, XP runs happily and responsively. And I can pretty much run any game out there, within reason, as long as I don't crank the newer stuff up with AA+AF and max the details. On Vista, it's a totally different picture. My gaming performance nearly dropped in half. And one would think such a machine would be able to run Halo 2 (a four year old game I might add) just fine? Wrong. It was a slideshow. Doom 3 performance at 1152x864 with 4x AA and 16x AF went from 83fps down to just 46. Appauling. And before I get flamed, I've tried it on a X2 4200 Windsor AM2 with 2GB of DDR2-800 and two 7800GTX cards in SLI and the situation don't improve much considering the performance I get in XP or 2000.

There is no reason for such terrible performance losses save for one. Windows 2000 in comparison to XP was only a few per cent slower. Only at first because of drivers. From XP to Vista it's a much steeper dropoff. Why? Inefficient coding and bending to the will of the MPAA and RIAA for inserting DRM throughout, adding things that phone home, and overall breaking the efficiency of the Windows NT kernel. And none (or nowhere near as much anyways) of this would have happened if Microsoft had a actual compeditor. Why do you think Core processors from Intel are so much better than NetBust and even faster than Athlon 64 chips? Because AMD lit a massive fire under their collective ass with K8, a compeditive product. See? Competition is good. Someone needs to do the same with Microsoft.

Who would be in the best position to do this? Apple. MacOS is much more user friendly than Linux, it's cheaper by far, and it's 64-Bit off the go, so that developers could tap those unused ponies in current "64-Bit" CPUs. Steve Jobs really needs to get off his high horse, swallow his pride and open up the MacOS platform to everyone else. I'd bet after MS' latest polished turd leaves a sour taste in their mouths people would flock to MacOS if it was available for the PC, as long as they didn't screw it up. Just look at id Software, they're now using it as their primary development platform instead of Windows.

But unfortunately at present us gamers are pretty much locked in as there aren't hardly any games for Linux or MacOS. Why? No significant installed user base which equals no profitibilty on a product

And franky, I think Microsoft actually has a role-model. The Republican party. For years on end they have been taking kickbacks and all the campaign fund "donations" so that big buisness and special interests can get their "spokesman" into office that will bend to their will so they can fatten their margins that extra .2 per cent. At the same time they play the "pro-life" card to appeal to the churchs so that they will tell their congregations to vote Republican, or promise tax cuts to the rich. Who does this hurt? Everyone else. Pretty much parallel in a way as to what Microsoft is doing to IT and the average consumer, huh?

By the time we see it, the damage has already been done, and is pretty much too late. And some people wonder why other nations see us as a joke or want to destroy us. Look to capitol hill and their policies and you will see why.

Same as to why Linux and Mac people are so adamant about their platform of choice. They see the bigger picture. Why can't the rest of us?

I weep for the future of IT, and America.

Sincerely,
G. Jaunese

Subject: ifawn cost

Hi guys,

Don't forget the sales taxes on top of that. I'm not sure what the different state rates are though. I can tell you though that 60 US doesn't sound so bad compared to rates in Canada, plus here in Ontario we have to pay 6% Federal sales tax and 8% Provincial sales tax, so we pay a total of 14% tax. So anyways it's probably going to be over $2100US the cost of an iFawn and it's service.

Daniel

Subject: Who's fooling who?

I'm sure it's easy to say people should ask for refunds on Xbox 360s if they keep failing, if you're looking at the little picture. Do you think they're going to refund your games too? The console isn't the expensive part once you've got a dozen titles or so.

It's not like these things are toasters and you can go "Oh well refund my Brand X model and I'll go buy the Brand Y one." You can't just grab a PS3 and keep on playing where you left off, it doesn't work that way. This isn't like dumping your IBM for a Dell. It's more like dumping your PC for a Mac. If you want to play the games you've invested in, there's only one manufacturer to buy the product from, so people are stuck either continually replacing it or throwing away several times that value in software for it. Most people are going to put up with a lot of replacements before putting their game library in a garage sale.

I'm just glad my original 360's had no issues these last 17 months. Maybe because it's kept in a cool, dry, smoke/dust-free environment with regulated (UPS) power? The 6 chain smokers who live next door have been through several.

Gldm

Subject: Thai vs youTube

Tuesday 13:15 here in the Land of Smiles. Not redirected but with the big green evil eye still looking at anybody wanting to access the youKnowWho.

Leonsk