Newspaper taxis will take you away, eh

Online Advertising

I was actually think about something along this line about news papers and magazines just today after reading that the New York Times takes 75,000 trees to produce one run of their Sunday newspaper. I'm not a “tree hugger” by any means, but I started thinking that the internet should replace all this waste.

Think of all those trees. Think of all the gas for those delivery trucks and cars. Think of all that paper in land fills. Think of all that waste. How much does it cost to make the paper? It cost much more than they sell it for and make their money off the advertisements. They would save a boatload of cash and the environment if they would just get out of the Dark Ages and look to the future (or even present). I even took it a step farther and figured the US could dump their entire mail system. Nothing sent through it really needs to be.

It is all wasted print. Every letter, note, bill, advertisement… can easily be handled electronically. The few packages that must be hand delivered could be handled through UPS or FedEX. Man look at all that gas, money, pollution, ozone, trees… would be saved. It is staggering. The US government subsidizes billions of dollars to keep the postal service running… to again keep to the Dark Ages. Not only that, but the reduction in gas and wood usage, would cut down imports tremendously, which would make the US more self sufficient, decrease inflation, decrease wood and gas prices, increase the value of the dollar, and save the government and tax payers billions of dollar.

Of course it would put a lot of postal workers and delivery people out of jobs, but hey, someone has to suffer for the rest to get ahead.

Todd E Abbott

Malaysian Muftis ban SMS games

Dear Editor,

Just one to inform you regarding the story regarding Malaysian Muftis ban SMS games. Actually, it refer to band the biding for phone using SMS. The SMS company playing cheat like this: to play this game, you send ONE sms to the biding center.

For every other people bid for the phone/good, they will send you a SMS to told the bid increase in bid of RM1, and ask you if you want to continue to bid. They charge for the SMS they send to you. If you don't reply, they will keep sending SMS to you, and charge RM1.20 per SMS they send you.

Let said you don't reply to cancel the bid, and got 2000 people bid for the phone/good, you are charged for RM1.20 x 2000. A lot of teenage being trapped in this type of scam. Now, hope you know the reason behind this.

Plz dont expose my name and email.

Thx.

PS: I love to watch ur news update. Just wanna inform you the thing behind.

Gigglebytes of Emal Space

Microsoft claims to now offer 2GB of space, but they don't, they LIE!!! I have a Hotmail Plus account that I paid my $20 for, but I just got a message telling me that my inbox was almost full. According to the gauge in the corner of the screen I've only used 1% of 2000MB... How can that be FULL!!! The email states I've reached my "25MB limit", so I guess they only made it look like I had 2GB with a fancy gauge, but I shouldn't try and actually use it! The email also claims that the mailbox is approaching full and they will send another message when it is full, another lie! I tried to send mail to the hotmail account and guess what, It bounced! Well of course it did, because Microsoft LIES!

This is a serious bug folks, Gmail has MSN flustered and they just can't seem to do anything right. First they give everyone 2GB because of a glitch, now they give nobody 2GB because of a glitch. Has anyone at MSN ever heard of quaility control???

Name supplied

Billy Gruff Gates and the WinXP slip

Microsoft has a schedule slip? I'm gobsmacked! Billy Gates Gruff's minions are now very late on XP SP2, Longhorn, and XP64 -- I guess Microsoft's 3 actual programmers are assigned one each to those efforts, while the real cause for delay is the in-house battle is over which of the 15,000 supervisors (in 14 layers) are to supervise each programmer. [Then there are the 30,000 who supervise the 3 Microsoft coders.]

Advice to BGG - Tell the programmer to take it slow on Win64, Billy. [As if you need to tell him that!] Every day of delay is a good day for Linux64, which - as you may not have heard - is already out! Once your customers have gone to Linux, they ain't never coming back. Have a nice day.

John

Microsoft Conspiracy Theories

"Anyone buying into rumors of some sort of conspiracy is either blind, stupid, or a combination of the two."

MS is late with an OS.
This is not news.
AMD looked like it would have a serious advantage, but it seems to be eroding.
This is not news. MS loves money, and will take money from those who offer it.
This is not news.

However, why would Intel pay Microsoft to hold back XP 64?
MS will do that on it's own, and Intel knows it.

If MS was holding back XP 64 for Intel, that would mean they were already close to finishing. If they were close to finishing, they'd be showing it off more, there'd be leaks of near complete versions, and it would get a more tangible release date. MS would not simply slow down development on XP 64, because as every wage worker knows, time is money.

The sad fact is that MS is having lots of trouble with SP2, and since it will most likeley be integrated into the final build of XP 64, they really need to get that finished before final testing and tweaking can be done on XP 64. Remember, MS is now juggling SP2, XP 64, Longhorn, and of course, they are still trying to lockdown IE. (I know MS is a big company, but do they really need so many backdooors?)

Brian Stewart

Print doomed? Advertising Online
Hi,

I don't know about them being doomed but we haven't advertised in a paper magazine for over two years. When we first decided to stop advertising the mags went to great lengths to convince us how indispensible print advertising was. We had several predictions of our demise. Stopping all ads dead was considered foolish, naive, even stupid. Since then we have seen big advertisers like Dan and Tiny fall by the wayside but we've been going from strength to strength :)

I believe we are the only PC manufacturer to have not advertised for over two years and still grown in both turnover and profitability. (The profitablity part perhaps from retaining the big cheques we were paying the mags). The downside though is that there are one or two "Pro" mags who conduct what they call "unbiased" group tests of PCs who won't accept your products for review unless you advertise with them - so much for being "unbiased". But we're doing very well without them.

It's possible to run a profitable PC business without advertising in magazines.

Best regards,

Clinton Lee
Director, Best Price Computers Ltd

It's time for the industry to say go away Hollywood

Hi Mike,

Could you please put the following comment on your letters page:

Isn't it time the computer business just jumped off the multi-media bandwagon, stuck two fingers up at Hollywood and went with its own formats? If DVD and CD are such an issue, let's just throw them away and use some other format to store our data.

The tech industry is just being really wimpy over this whole DRM/copying issue. If we don't watch out, our computers will become even more useless than they already are. Just imagine a future where every bit of data you have is so locked down you can't backup your accounts to tape, or even move files between hard drives (forget upgrading to a bigger disk etc.)

Bah!

Cheers
Ben

All Hail Mozilla

Hi Mike,

I just wanted to comment on the letter Jim Blaich sent you.

He claimed that IE could be embedded into programs by 3rd party developers while Mozilla didn't offer a similar option. I suggest he visits http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/faq.html or there is an ActiveX control available (the same way IE is embedded) at http://www.iol.ie/%7Elocka/mozilla/mozilla.htm

He also mentioned he found it hard to install software in Linux. I don't know what distribution he's using but I suggest he gives Gentoo a go. Portage is the best system I've ever seen. I've tried Redhat, Mandrake, Debian and Suse, nothing comes close to the power and ease of use that the "emerge" command offers in Gentoo when installing software.

He also complained that driver support in Linux is poor and he felt that it was a cop out to say that it was the hardware manufactures fault. His argument was that he paid a subscription to some linux distros and that the cost is greater than using Windows XP but he doesn't get the same quality drivers as he would if he used XP. Microsoft doesn't produce the drivers for his hardware, the hardware manufactures do so I don't see why the linux distros should be responsible for producing linux drivers. They're not the ones who designed and built the hardware so the fact that people can reverse-engineer drivers for linux is a great feat and one they should be commended for.

I could be wrong but it was my understanding that the subscriptions fees charged by linux distros are for optional services/features that don't have to be used. Good on Jim for paying those fees (if he does) because the people behind those distros work damn hard and deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. Again I urge Jim to try Gentoo because there are no fees.

That's just my two cents. And just for the record I don't use Mozilla or Linux on my primary desktop machine. I use the Opera browser on Windows 2000 so I'm my arguments above aren't biased.

Kind Regards,
Matt Courtney

Ninety Nano Lead Balloon

It's been interesting to see the wall that most chip fab companies are hitting with the 90 nm process. It puts a lot more speculative interest for me on how AMD will make this transition. With Apple moaning about the inability of the G5 to ramp to where they hoped it would go (3 GHz), the 2.5 GHz G5 being liquid cooled and Prescott's under-whelming performance and over-whelming power consumption, it doesn't seem likely that AMD can beat this problem? But maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, as Dothan has moved from 130 to 90 nm without a significant power output increase. I'm not a tech head but the Athlon 64 seems to be closer to the Pentium-M in being a high IPC part, so maybe the die shrink won't be so negative for it either?

The recent Anandtech Dothan article surprised me in just how well the Dothan performs against Prescott & Athlon 64, except in media encoding & gaming. For general usage though, it has to be the most balanced x86 design out there, period. An excellent IPC, very low power, versatile dynamic clock/voltage switching. I see a problem though. If you're not a gamer or hard core media encoder, you don't really need any faster than today's lowest spec CPUs. So who are the next generation CPUs being marketed at. Sorry, I mean designed for :)

Well if they're being designed to match people's needs, then they should be aimed at people who need more power, so we're back with gamers and encoders. But the P-M isn't so good at these tasks! Hmm. Either way it seems as if dual-cores are the way forward. With media encoding, dual cores shouldn't pose a problem, as it's relatively easy to get close to maximum theoretical benefits using parallelism. But what about for gaming performance? Isn't the ball suddenly going to be passed to games developers to optimize their games for dual cores? I imagine that's going to be a hell of a lot of extra work for no extra revenue. But aren't next generation games consoles moving towards multiple cores anyway? I think I'm correct on this, which means that all this extra development work is going to be done anyway, at least by software houses that are targeting multiple platforms.

It points to the games platform designers being more prescient than the likes of Intel, who seem to have been caught short recently. In the future, making comparisons between different platforms might very well get a lot more complicated. Certain platforms might well shine in certain areas but be very weak in others, much more so than today. So a dual core Prescott running at a high clock rate, marketed at gamers, might be released, but built into a fridge! At least now I can start to see the logic behind selling fridges with a built in web browser. You'll be able to view your virtual electric meter whizzing around via your utility companies website, whilst fragging at insane frame rates simultaneously. If the thought of your next electric bill gets too much, just open the fridge door and pull out a cold one :)

Regards
Smiling Crow