The consumer loses

SUBJECT: Inquirer is da best!

I like your site a lot, I am reading it every day, including
weekends. I have my doubts about the freedom of media anywhere in the world, but I still think your articles are funny and as close to the truth as I could expect.

You seem to support competition and reject
monopoly, particularly when it comes to the eternal battle between AMD/Intel or Linux/Windows. Your articles have opened my eyes to a new world, and it is sometimes painful to see the bad an the ugly in the IT today.

I really hope the world is becoming a better place
every day, and you help that a lot.

I wish I didn't see Microsoft advertising against Linux on your site,
but I guess it's about money and making a living, so I understand. It hurts to see the nasty Redmond giant picking on the little
inoffensive Tux which I love so much. The fact that they are spending money on advertising against Linux shows they see a real threat in it, and it also proves once again, that they did not create anything good of which they could be proud, so that they could advertise that instead.

Thank you for all the good work and keep clean.

Danut

Subject: Scotland

you say that bbc journalesm has desended two the level of a local newspaper.

do you realize how stupid this makes you look? your style of artical

righting is not worthy of the daily sport!

Syd

Subject: Re: iMetal Imac fReezes uP

Maybe I'm just cynical, but perhaps Apple thought that if perhaps their O/S

performance was closer that of its convicted monopolist rival, it would gain

some customers.

Jim Bormann

Subject: Everywhere Girl helps you sleep

http://www.csmngt.com/gaba.htm

Craig Bartell

Subject: Lack of sleep threat to health of Everywhere Girl

It appears everywhere girl is risking heart disease with lack of sleep;
http://www.eontarionow.com/health/2007/09/25/lack-of-sleep-raises-heart-disease-risk/

Jon Monkcom

Subject: Disturbing Trend

I really enjoy reading The Inquirer. Your humorous, irreverent spin on news keeps me coming back. However, recently I have noticed a series of articles by Egan Orion which I would characterize at best as mean spirited. Egan seems to have not understood the bit about putting an amusing twist on the news and his anti-vole bias is glaringly evident. In fact, after re-reading a few of Egan's articles from today, they seem devoid of any humor.. and in it's place a triple helping of venom.

I hope Eagan's contributions are not indicative of the direction The Inquirer is headed as you will most likely loose me as a reader.. The best part of your site is its ingrained whimsy, a fragile sort of thing, easily destroyed by acid such as this.

Bradford

Subject: Flora

I wasn't clear in the message (I thought it would link you to the article I was emailing you about, automatically):

You used forii here

I believe it should be "fora".

Allen

Subject: Too cute

Howdy. I just started reading and really like your columns. However, I wanted to suggest that you cut down on your use of cute phrases and subject headings trying to sound clever. These things often come across as juvenile and can call into question the credibility of the article. I often find I have to concentrate to know what the hell you are talking about in articles because you use all these cutesie phrases and words that are meaningless; "Vole"? "disties" ?, "How to tame a Leopard"? Oh please *rolls eyes*

John Doe

Subject: Acer's Whines

Like it or not, Intel, MS, they deserve the margins over the PC makers. PC makers forget, I can put a PC together in my living room within the span of a few days thanks to UPS and Newegg. On the other hand, I will never, ever, in a thousand years fabricate a processor in my living room even if I was twice as smart as Einstien. Though I think that in a thousand years I could probably code Vista, or maybe in a thousand days or less with my eyes closed and a brigade of monkeys hammering away on typewriters. I'm sure some kind of algorithm could be applied to the monkey's combined output that would render something more useful than Vista. Consider vaccums attached to their asses with the output written directly to disk...

-roger that shit orwell.

Octamember

Subject: Hitachi's DRAM'd SSD drives

According to the article, if I were to use one of Hitachi's DRAM'd SSD drives, some of my data would be written to DRAM, and when I shut down my computer, it'll be written to the SSD.

Being a computer programmer that loves to play computer games, the benefit I see of a SSD is speed, reliability, and, if the manufacturers' R&D finds a way to rewrite SSD memory as many times as I want, longevity. There's no argum ent that DRAM on my SSD would make saving (some) stuff a lot faster than it is, and it's possible that having DRAM in a SSD the way Hitachi is talking about will increase the life of the drive, but this idea has the strong potential to create reliability problems.

At home, if I'm playing Half-Life 2 and I quicksave once every few minutes, I get a BSOD or lose power for some reason or another (angry wife anyone?) I don't want to come back to my game and find out that my quicksaves didn't really save!

In the corporate world, if I'm writing a Software Design Description for a program, and I get finished with it, I save the document, I exit the program in which I wrote the document, and then my computer crashes for some reason or I lose power (Anyone ever kick the power strip?) I don't want to come back to a computer that doesn't have the document I saved!

In Joe User's world, imagine the amazement, anger, etc. (s)he would experience if the computer crashed during start-up, shut-down or any other time and (s)he ended up with corrupt files because of this go-between DRAM that lost the OS's critical data and then (s)he couldn't get the computer to come up again. Joe User (Grandma/Grandpa) paid too much for the hard drive in the first place, and now (s)he's going to pay the same price to the Geek Squad to get his computer working again. I fix computers, too, and this is the last thing I want to see happen to someone who knows nothing about his (or her) computer! Checking your e-mail shouldn?t be a dangerous task!

The only place you'd use a SSD on a server is to install the OS and critical programs to get the server to reboot much faster in case of a problem, but in the same way as with Joe User's computer, the potential for critical data corruption is here, and data integrity is crucial on a server.

Even if Hitachi accounts for computer crashes (if[BSOD] {write stuff to SDD}) they still can't make up for sudden power loss (which is even more of a concern on a laptop.) In the end, I'd get a potentially less reliable product with more parts that have the potential to break and the added potential of data loss and/or corruption, that only addresses the problem of SSD overwrite longevity, and what's more, they'd expect me to pay more money for it!

I want reliable, soundly manufactured parts in my PC, and until they find a material that I can write to as many times as I want, they just aren't going to be there. I just wouldn't take that kind of chance with my data.

Note to hard drive manufacturers: I want a little cord running out of my motherboard that transfers data to/from the storage medium (a really fast little cord,) and I want the little chip(s) that control and/or translate the data (fast little chips,) and I want the storage medium (again, fast.) That's all. And I want them to outlast the mechanical drives. If you have to throw a little power cord in there too, then okay, I can live with that. Let's stick with the basics here.

I'm a server maintainer, workstation user, system administrator, computer repair man, and gaming enthusiast. Not one of those niches has a place for potentially unreliable data storage. Sorry guys, but I'd say you ought to focus on better SSD technology.

Kasey D.

Subject: Stick to Computers

Your little blurb on sputnik awakening America's "imperial" ambitions is absurd. You really should go back and read about the reconstruction of Germany, that was well underway before Sputnik was launched. As far as imperial ambition, well I guess that's how Europeans in a marginalized countries (failures at real imperialism, don't forget your own history) view the current US policy. I agree that the current US administration is a bunch of criminals and imperialists, however to insinuate that this has been the US policy since Sputnik is just ignorant. Go take a lorry to whatever you call a library and do some real book learnin', I'm going to eat apple pie, cop a feel off Mom, and buy some guns.

Cheers.

Geov

Subject: Freeze

This kind of freeze is well known to me and other linux users who experiment with beryl/compiz. When the window manager crashes then no window related actions can be taken (move/resize windows, switch between windows, or use the keyboard to input text), yet the contents of the active window and shortcut keys still work. Never had a mac so I can't verify if this is the exact bug but sounds pretty much the same. Oh and the crashes on my linux box were mostly because ati drivers too.

Deimios

Subject: Bad caps

My old iMac G5 does that all the time. It's bad capacitors. There, how you like that quick and easy diagnosis? Someone should pay me big bucks for that.

Marcus

Subject: Acer margins

No PC maker can realistically expect to make typical margins on PC sales, for one very obvious reason...it takes no special skill to build a PC.

No one in the world other than an electronics manufactuer can build a TV. No private individual can make their own automobile tires. I can't fab my own CPU.

However, any idiot in the world with enough dexterity to operate a philips screwdriver can build their own PC from basic components...this is all that a PC vendor does. There is no inherent value added to that process...there is nothing unique about that service...it requires no special skill, and hardly any kn owledge, to bung together a servicable PC. Any clod can go to Newegg.com, purchase all the components they want, and screw them together. The value proposed by a PC vendor is essentially that they are going to assemble the kit for you - which is a very low-value proposition.

The utter lack of skill involved also invites the PC market to be overly saturated with people providing that service...anyone from the 15-year-old down the street to IBM can provide the same basic service of assembling a PC from parts. Because of this, there is essentially no margin to be made because there is essentially no value to the service.

PC vendors need to realize this - they are not in an industry of unique value. PCs are not like plasma TVs, which only a few factories in the world can make. They are not even like a bargain-bin PS/2 keyboard...at least that requires plastic molding and basic PCB manufacturing to get produced, and therefore is not a product/service that the 15-year-old can provide. All a PC vendor is is an assembler of parts...at least for their "core& quot; PC business. Not too far removed, conceptually, from snapping together Legos for you. And an assembler of parts, which requires very little skill, is simply not a service worth paying much money for.

Kaleb

Subject: " Nobody wants to read your drivel"

Not yours, of course -- I'm just quoting you, where you said:

> If anyone wanted to read your opinions,

> you would be offered a job as a

> columnist [...]

> The fact that you aren't being offered this

> kind of money should be seen as a clear

> message from God that nobody wants to

> read your drivel.

Absolutely! And yet, for some unfathomable reason, you've added reader

comments to the bottom of your stories, and provided no way for us to turn

them off.

I've no interest in reading the useless drivel that random deranged people

attach to your articles; if I want to read their comments at all, I'll want

them filtered by your editor on the letters page.

So, please: give us a way to turn the annoying "reader comments" off!

Thanks,

Charles

Subject: The consumer loses

In the time it takes me to pen this missive the global company Nvidia will have made significant amounts of money from purchases made in good faith, from people who have worked hard to earn their Dollar and who in good faith decide to invest it in products that make their recreational time a bit more enjoyable.

In the same time more and more of those same people will have come to realise that the products they have paid for do not fulfill every promise that is made of them. Nvidia have boasted from day one that their products work well with Windows Vista. Seven months on and this is still not true. Do they not read the complaints and bug reports submitted on forums or through their own channels?

I for one do read these reports and have suffered, like so many, with products that are almost unuseable in their ineffectualness.

As an avid reader of many pc hardware websites and magazines i ask myself why issues that impact and plague the daily lives of so many people go almost unspoken? As a cynic i may be tempted to think that the reviewers on these sites are too scared of losing their free supply of hardware to demand of the manufacurers that they account for the quality and efficacy of their products.

Many of us would like to see the bull taken by the horns and have the spotlight thrown onto companies like Nvidia. This can only happen if respectable and popular media stand up for the people who have no voice and help us be heard. The Inquirer is a media outlet that has enough influence to shame a big manufacturer into responding to their consumer base and providing product support befitting any company of good standing.

It is my hope that one day soon we will see an article on your website that contains a full investigation into the shortcomings of Nvidia and the terrible state of it's Vista support.

Mike Stannard

Subject: re: Microsoft told to abandon Vista

Hello "Egan":

It seems to have been a wet dream of the entertainment industry almost since moving video appeared on computers to have us all huddle around our computers and not blink an eye about making payments every time we watch a movie.

With Vista Microsoft seems to have done it's best to accommodate Hollywood, with nary a thought for the rest of us.

All I want of an OS is three things:

-The ability to backup and restore whatever is on my hard drive, and recover from a major crash or rebuild with minimum fuss, something DRM and Product Activation has been doing it's damndest to foul up.

-Play games

-Give me a 64 bit platform to run the new and forever-coming 64 bit apps on. As it is we'll have 128 bit processors by the time we go 64 bit on everything.

I buy all my movies and TV stuff on DVD, forget trying to download DRM laden crap and working with it. Really, Microsoft is it's own worst enemy at this point, now if the application developers would say en masse "Screw it, we're leaving" then things may change.

Sincerely,

Scott Peterson

Subject: Tinfoil

A "tinfoil" wallet might make more sense ;)

Dhu

Subject: Microsoft has another stab at fixing its web search

I have XP boot-camped on my iMac and upgraded to the newest IE with the new

copy of Safari called IE and tried their search more than several times and

it sucked. Went back to Google.

Enough said.

Glenn