Chawlk

1. Drawar
2. Fenxy
3. Decaflon
4. Two Credits
5. Wriging
6. Loose Suits
7. Chixe
8. Dud3s
9. Wing Colors

 

Don't forget that the ipod isn't subsidised by a $1200 contract.

Mike they never used to be. The iPhone launched and it's now frankly ridiculous trying to get any high-end phone on anything less than a 18 month contract. Even then, your monthly payout goes up and you get less in the way of bundled minutes, etc...

I'd be really wary of it, personally. Sure I see the immediate benefit: you get a new phone with a ton of features that should have been on the original. It doesn't cost you much at all right now but you end up with at least a 36month contract.

What bothers me here is that I've never been able to remain happy with a phone for longer than about 14 months, however cool it is, because there's always hotter hardware flying out every year. I'm going to struggle to make it to 18months on my N95.

Are you not just a little bit tempted to hold out until the end of your contract when the 3g coverage is all but guaranteed to be better, improvements in battery tech, slimmer, twice the storage and probably at the same $200?

What do you reckon the ebay resale price would be on your 1st-gen? Edit: to answer that, it looks around $400-500 for a new one. Wonder where that figure'll be in a month's time.

I guess it has to come down to stock control issues... If they're going to be offering this version at a much lower price that the current one, they're going to want to shift every last unit.

I'll be interested to see how the contract works though if the new one is (more) heavily subsidised. Are they going to let current 24month 1st-gen users upgrade and effectively wipe 12 months? Or if you upgrade, would you be taking on an additional 24months?

From a business aspect, I can't see the first one being true as they'd be taking an hit in the region of 12-23 months of service fees. That's an enormous amount of money and they'd be expected to repeat it when the 3rd-gen came out, etc.

If it is the second, more plausible version, how many upgrades until you're locked into AT&T for the rest of your life? This is why 24month contracts suck big balls.

MS really does have a tight grasp on the UK chat scene. I'm another MSNM/WLM user and just as you've experienced most people I know are on it, including work contacts.

It's true lock-in. I can't move service without:
a) not being to talk to anybody
b) converting every person on my list (and all their friends)

Facebook are apparently going to be exposing their chat under XMPP - perhaps that'll be enough to start an exodus away from MSN.

I think the first real point raised in the article is the branding. Apple is still designer. It's like buying Nike carpet for the office: equivalents might not look as nice but they get the same job done with a lower price-tag. Small businesses need to cut every corner they can and while Apple refuses to provide cheaper "beige-box" hardware, they're hard to justify as an expense.

Something he doesn't seem to mention (which is going to conflict with a later statement I'll make) is support. I know of at least fifty small-business MS specialists in a 20 mile radius from here, offering same-day on-site support, who are trained and can swap out hardware in an instant. There's choice and competition. That sort of Apple service just doesn't exist here yet; there isn't enough demand and of what there is, there's absolutely no competition.

What I really don't understand is the final line of the article:

Windows Vista, properly installed and used in tandem with Web-based productivity tools, is a powerful, powerful alternative.

Why Vista? If we're here scrutinising why the Mac is unnecessary expense, how the hell has Vista been allowed to slip under the radar? Upgrading XP PCs to Vista slows your system and can introduce headaches. And then you've got to fight Vista itself on a day-to-day level.

If you're really serious about saving money, ask yourself why you suddenly need to leave XP. Everything supports it (except DX10 games and who gives a flying shit about those in small businesses?!) and it's installed, ready and costs you nothing more today.

If you're trying to progress, or you've got to expand your office/server system, take a look at Linux. Yeah, anyone reading this who knows me probably knew I was going to hop on my soapbox but seriously: if your tasks are limited to Office and the web, Linux will work as fast, if not faster than XP, with guaranteed free updates for life, with free improvements to all its included software, again for the life of the product.

Professional support is an issue for Linux too, though in the enterprise world, generations of Linux server usage has given most techs at least a taster course. Finding a desktop vendor who can offer you same-day support is a little harder, albeit improving.

===

All in all, I don't think the article is too far from the truth. Support availability and price have to near-first when it comes to this sort of IT decision. We're talking small business, so it's not really something that can be done in-house.

Give it a few years though, and I think we'll see massive diversification in supported operating systems from average out-source techies...

But by then, the cheaper hardware requirement and free OS of Linux will dominate all. You'll see. *evil-laugh*

*throws smoke bomb*

*disappears*

Jimmy Carter stumping for Obama just sealed the deal for me. Anyone who is A-OK by Carter doesn't get my vote.

Hitler was a painter and a vegetarian. By your measure, people that fall into that category are all mass-murdering bastards.

Ev did say something useful and that was that "fixing" Twitter isn't a money issue, it's not a scalability issue, it's essentially an HR issue. They have to find the best architects -- right now -- and get them hired and up to speed yesterday.

I disagree. This is completely a scalability issue with MySQL.

They've been going this master/slave "push" route for some time now because that's what they thought would provide the best performance. And they were wrong. They need to take it back to paper and figure out what's going to serve as the best possible.

In theory, all they need is one guy (who might already be on the books) with the right idea. By the sounds of it, they're testing a filesystem-only approach and I've got to say that I reckon this is probably going to fix things for them. There are plenty of freely available filesystems that can scale to infinity and maintain a decent level of performance.

So hiring people might speed the implementation of the next step, but it's not going to solve things immediately and unfortunately the problem is very immediate.

And hiring a ton of people would also be a colossal waste in the long term. Once this issue is fixed, they're going to be standing around twiddling their thumbs.

Well I'm so sodding glad somebody else noticed this. Harri (m' lover) will attest that I started spitting in indignation at the stupidity of this episode.

Plus, how much money are MS paying these guys? They're using their tech all over the lab (Photosyth, VB just two in that ep)... Pity that none of the computer appear to be running Windows.

That's because people in Britain don't use money. They use pounds.

... Says a Dollar user.

Kami says "they aren't Rottweilers" but they are, and more. In the US, Pit Bulls were responsible for almost twice as many human deaths as Rottweilers.

Pit Bulls can be loving pets but they take a lot of training to forget a lot of their innate aggression. They are a dangerous breed and their owners need to acknowledge and respect that.

You really aught to ask them to keep it muzzled when in public. No, muzzles aren't the nicest things in the world for dogs but its owners need to respect that their dog has a history of biting and it could do a lot more damage next time.

===

I think I would have been pretty pissed off but I would also know that this is somebody's pet. If somebody told me my cat had to be destroyed (the nice terminology they use in the news here to say 'put down' for dogs), I'd fall apart.

Unfortunately, reporting it in any sort of way (doctors or police) here would result in the animal's death. Another breed might get a second chance.

I'd probably get some serious antiseptic on the wound (TCP or some other iodine-based a/s) and keep applying it for a couple of days. I'd expect a little bit of swelling and a lot of bruising. If it's swill really tightly swollen after a day, it might be a good idea to visit the docs for some antibiotics.

But for the dog, I would just want its owners to make sure that nothing like that could happen in the future to somebody that was less able to defend themselves. Muzzles, intensive training, fences. And needless to say, they've got to cover any medical expenses.

I don't think you need an entire policy to say "Be relevant and polite". You could write that on your comment form but you shouldn't need to.

If you keep having problems with this problematic poster, just wang them an email explaining that you're not happy with the quality of their responses and ask them to qualify their criticism or bugger off.

That might cause some initial friction but they get the message, in which case you either have to ban them and delete their furious sploodge of retaliatory postage, or you regain a useful audience member.

An infinite array would be thoroughly unnecessary as numerical nomenclature does adhere to programmable rules.

Googling "convert number to word php" will show you the way. Knock off the php for some JS methods of doing it.

Performance. Out-the-box, WordPress is a complete hog. Even with caching, page generation (when there isn't a cached version) takes about fifteen times longer and a hundred times too many database transactions than one should reasonably need to display a page.

The admin side of things isn't bad. The feature set is pretty good. The plugin scope is pretty good too, even if they do keep moving the goal-posts for developers.

It's actually called Vexille (note the double-l). Took me a while of finding nothing on torrent sites *ahem* I mean IMDB before I spotted a comment in another forum.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing it myself.

I love my 24"ers =)

I would definitely recommend anybody who needs a lot of screen two of them. They big but not too big. I think dual-27+ would cause too much head movement.

Not sure what's next on my list. Probably some form of Eee PC but I'm tempted to hold out for the Atom-powered models.

And the screens (yes, I know this is going to break the layout a little but I figure that we're so far down the page that it doesn't matter too much)

They are extremely awesome.

How about one account per person?

;P

No running.
No heavy petting.
Don't write spoilers without a prominent notice.

Two 24"ers would mean I get a 75% desktop space improvement, and looks like it would cost £550. £1 gets me 8.3kp (vs the cheapest 30": 5.8kp/£)

Sold.

What I don't get is how some TVs call themselves "1080p ready". I've seen a lot and I've thought "holy shit - that's huge and cheap!" but when you look at the specs, their native res is much closer to 720p. What's that about?

Well I'm still not sure what I'm doing.

Dell have an offer on where it makes far more sense to buy a 27" ultrasharps over a 24" (the price difference is forgettable) - but I need two.

Still not sure I can justify spending £1000 on monitors because I know how much other cool shit that sort of money could buy (dual quad core CPUs, ALL the RAM, 2 EeePCs, 10,000 penny sweets)

I hate money >_<

I guess the other option is getting two middle-of-the-road 24" ones and spend half the money. There certainly is a premium for the Dell brand. It's nowhere near as silly as Apple's designer mark-up. Just how good are Ultrasharps vs "the rest"?

what I meant to say was that Studio 60 wasn't a very funny show

I do not know why people seem to "get" 30 Rock more than Studio 60.

Everybody I know whose seen both sees 30 Rock as a cheap and lesser imitation of Studio 60. It doesn't have anywhere near the same level of comedy or speedy dialogue.

I'm not saying they could replicate their better points onto a new season even if they wanted to... but I'd happily take one episode of Studio 60 over every episode of 30 Rock.

Perhaps it's an English thing.

Cheapest I've found is about £900 including delivery and that's a dodgy-looking "new" one from Ebay.

I've just found the Daewoo LCD30KAL Sensy 30"... It's weighing in at about £700 but I can't find any reviews =\

Red wine, like most alcohol, is an acquired taste.

Remember back all those years to when you had your first beer, If you were anywhere near as young as I was, you probably have some vague recollection of thinking it tasted like something between tar and shit.

Most white wine (and alcopops) are sweet and fruity - two flavours (or aspects) most kids grow up loving - and therefore there's no "learning curve". It's easy to understand why whites are so much more accessible than reds.

The food comment is particularly valid when you're talking dessert. Try drinking a traditional red while chowing down a sweet dessert and enjoying it. That's when dessert whites (have you tried one, Paul?) step in and redefine the phrase "sweet white wine".

I only started drinking red a few years ago when I started hanging out with my girlfriend's family. Haven't looked back. It's hard to beat a good Rioja or Burgundy for a sophisticated flavour.

Diet Coke tastes different from regular Coke. I see your point and understand there are people that drink it for its nutritional value (or lack thereof), but plenty of people prefer the taste of Diet Coke. My woman is one.

But as Ozone42 says, even if you are drinking it to be healthy, it is still marginally better for you than pumping in another batch of calories (if you assume it doesn't give you cancer, mucky AIDS, et al - as some have suggested).

Edit: Scrivs could you poke the RSS outputting so the links point at chawlk.com instead of 9rules.com? Or put a redirect in (instead of the "serious error")

I only have my desktop but it does everything I need at the moment. My girlfriends computer is an entire 5 meters from it, and that's hooked up to a 32" LCD screen for watching media. So you could argue that I use two computers.

Then there's my Nokia N95 that I use about five times a day to catch up on the news. That's something I could use my desktop for apart from I do it when I go for a smoke.

I'd love an Eee but I'm holding out for the next generation, where the processor should be an Intel Atom (miles better in terms of power consumption and performance than a Celeron M) and hopefully the screen will be another touch larger, slightly larger/better-value storage.

But my eventual plan is to have a plethora of computers around the house doing my evil for me. A storage server is probably highest on my to-buy list to try and get some of these noisy harddisks out of the bedroom, possibly with a media centre element to it, possibly having that on its own, or with a games system performing that task.

I guess the end stage is to have all the TVs in the house replaced with thin clients to a media centre. And have a mini to control it all.

Yeah I'm not sure what's going on... Are all the old 9rules Notes commenters just AFK? Or have we lost some people in the move to Chawlk?

Ollie and I are different creatures, roaming the same city with the same first name, but we spell our nickname different. Not trying to be rude - just pointing it out =)

But to go back to what you said, yeah I can see that you can learn the technical side of creativity and that's fine, but all that does is tell you how to apply your creativeness -- how to express what you're imagining.

I suck hard when it comes to being creative. I can follow tutorials and use an existing design as "inspiration", but when it comes down to me getting creative (coming up with a new idea), the result is somewhere between poor and appalling 90% of the time.

Regarding logic, as I was saying, you don't need much with the latest waves of WYSIWYG editors and it won't be long before you can define everything without writing a line of code.

Nils I can certainly agree with that. (True) designers and true developers tend to do different things, but there are certainly tasks where the two overlap.

Interface design is one instance where the designer needs some development knowledge to know how people are going to end up using their work. They can't go all-out on the creative because people might not understand how to use it.

Similarly developers need some idea of the creative process so they can realistically mock things and help designers get the most from an interface.

But I think in a one vs t'other argument, designers definitely have the advantage. You can learn how to develop. You might not have the skills or patience to be a great programmer, but you can cover most of the important bases quite thoroughly.

Conversely, you can't learn to be creative. Your capacity for creativity is quite innate. Again, you can get some of the basic concepts, but developers need designers a lot more than designers need developers...

That's heightened by the bar-to-entry constantly being lowered for developing. WYSIWYG tools, simple, yet powerful scripting languages like those of Flash and even Silverlight are making it increasingly easy to take a design interactive.

Developers will always have their place, but I think as time goes on, we (developers) are going to get pushed further and further away from interface design, where the arty-types that can program will take our places.

Hear hear on the 'shrooms. They're fungus. They're decay. They're horrid.

Things that live in the water can also stay well away from my mouth.

Yeah that's pretty much where we settled for now.

We did a few little ones each but it's a metric buttload of hassle trying to convince the centre of an onion to come out without the outer layers:
a) tearing,
b) crushing, or
c) falling apart when you try and stuff it.

We bought a "large" Spanish onion (about the size of a baby's head) at a market a few weeks back and en "elephant" garlic, both seen below next to a 2litre bottle of Cola:

As much as I'd love the 2.6kg one, we might attempt it with one of those - two if we have company - and see how that fares.

Since we've already brought up the Geneva Conventions, Prisoners of War are defined as armed militia or armed forces who pledge allegiance to a government not recognized by the detaining force. That would be a member of an army under the flag of a specific country.

Last time I checked, Al Queda and the insurgent forces in Iraq were not firing on the US armed forces under pledge allegiance to any specific government

Emphasis mine. Under that wording, you could certainly argue that they're governed by Al Queda.

And even skating around the direct wording doesn't make it any less against the spirit of the agreement.

The argument saying this is just collateral damage, which I'll agree is expected in conflict, doesn't carry as much merit when the whole war is illegal, massively disproportionate and thoroughly unnecessary in the first place.

Right after 9/11 the world was with us and felt our pain. That's all gone now and I don't know if it will ever come back.

I don't think any amount of pulling out could repair the damage that has already been done.

I think you either have to stay there until you've killed/bagged everybody that opposes your presence and fix their infrastructure, economy and general quality of life; or you pull out and let chaos reign.

The first costs more than any of us can afford. The second is wildly dangerous and would probably result in a NY/Madrid/London mach II.

There's certainly no clear or clean solution.

Extra markup is much easier to debug because you're putting in there so every browser behaves the same. If that's not the case, you've done something wrong.

Mike: in answer to your PNG question: I wouldn't swap it for a JPG (primarily because if I'm using a PNG, that probably means there's alpha-trans going on). I'd use a JS hack. Quick, easy and it's not garbing up my mark-up or presentation code.

XHTML every time but invalid CSS causes just as many problems.

At work I've had to try and fix a complete CSS hacktastrophe and it's been a nightmare. There are few reasons to *need* to hack CSS. You can usually get around the problem by refactoring your XHTML.

I just wish I could meet the "developer" who originally coded some of this crap so I could poke them in the eye with a sharp stick.

We'll lets be pedantic:

My chair, desk, keyboard, mouse, computer.
A network switch, the router it's connected to, its ADSL modem and the CAT6 cabling connecting them all up.
The copper cabling leading to the exchange, the exchange itself, the fibre leading off to the ISP.
The servers at the ISP, all the nodes between my ISP and my host.
My host's network, including: routers, switches, firewalls, web and database servers and storage arrays.

But is a blog a blog if nobody reads it? There's the return route to users.