Demonic car takes out TelecityRedbus

Letters What? Keep the lights on? Forget global warming, it's all about budget allocation?

Hello: That kind of reminds me of this one place I worked at where there were three guys working on a shift. One quit, leaving things seriously shorthanded.

However, the administration refused to hire another person saying it "wasn't in the budget." We kept arguing with them it wasn't a NEW position, it was REPLACING an old one that was already budgeted.

It went round and round and they commissioned a study to "determine" if we needed to hire another person, which they finally (and grudgingly) did, after a great deal of arguing. Another had a new software package and server ready to go.

In comes the new boss, who takes the entire project and hands it to someone else without a clue. They wonder why we couldn't use an open source alternative, to which we replied we'd looked at all opportunities, and more importantly we'd already bought the software and hardware. Next we had two people do another study to determine we'd save-a-little-money with the software we wanted to use, but not as much as it cost two full time people to do the study.

Then we had an endless merry go round of one person after another taking over the project, getting up to speed, and then being pulled off for something else. In the end this "cost saving" took up almost a year where we could have been up and running. All I can say is they say "let's do a study," hit the panic button. Sincerely, Scott

TelecityRedbus turned its lights out this week...but not in a cost saving way. What happened to the power?

The Telecity Redbus power failure affected Sovereign House at about 1pm.

It's not even been a year since the last power failure at the same location in June 2006 when they caused the failure because of work being carried out on the UPS's/generators...

No reason for the failure, just a pathetic email "apologising for the inconvenience". I wouldn't trust Telecity Redbus to tie their own shoelaces!

Nice to see some more negative news about redbus; their data centre is a joke.

We are a small hosting company with a couple of racks with them; its a bitter pill to swallow that these power/system failures cause us untold embarassment to our customers - yet we seemingly have no means of recourse with telecityredbus. Their last power failure was only 38 weeks ago...

Only a month or two ago their rack prices went up AGAIN; even whilst utility prices are dropping their prices funnily enough are still right up to 42U in height :(( Please make them hurt!

Inflicting pain brings us nicely to Microsoft and its nasty WGA, which, like ET, phones home whether you want it to or not.

"By way of justifying Microsoft's approach, alexkoc writes that the EULA, likewise presented by the WGA installer, also covered the relaying of such information." (from the Heise article)

Quite a spin! So the EULA which I just read says we will do what we want anyway regardless whether you accept the EULA or not :P Yeah as if an installer needs soooo much more improvement. All of those WinUpdate installers usually only have Next / Cancel anyway. There is never any option (except which update you want to install).

The only thing I can imagine is: - you get a good statistic that the majority of people cancelling the WGA installation happens at step n - you add a lenghty stupid dialog box that pops up when you hit cancel at step n telling Joe Average that "some components may not work properly or not at all bla bla bla <insert usual MS Spin>" so that he is trickled into having some FUD and then just go ahead and install the Genuine Disadvantage Anything not like it uses to be from Redmond?

Now that's rich : We collect Globally Unique Identifiers, but honest, we don't try and identify individual users. Noooooo, of course not.

MS is not identifying individual _users_ - they'd need a DNA sample for that (coming up : WGA with rectum scanning - for security purposes, obviously). No, MS is identifying unique MACHINES - to better call in the SWAT teams later.

Anyone want to bet that the "false positives" have something to do with cancelled WGA checks ? Man how it annoys me when lawyerspeak is used to pull the wool over the eyes like that. Hey Steve ! You think we're brain-dead, or what ? Mind you, he may just be right. There hasn't been any public burning of Vista CDs yet, as far as I know.

Pascal.

If I decline the EULA, and MS collects the data anyway, aren't they breaking data collection laws since I decined to accept their rules?

Re: WGA update

Another thing I've noticed is that ever since this was foisted on me, my server will no longer stay asleep.

I have a music server which is set to wake on LAN so when I turn on my AudioTron music player it wakes up and then goes back to sleep a while after I've turned off.

Ever since the last WGA update it just keeps waking up for no apparent reason and then staying on for hours. I don't know if it is related but it is certainly deeply suspicious.

Would you care to investigate? If true MS can be accused of environmental destruction amongst their other crimes.

Regards,

Stephen.

"We use the information collected to generate aggregate statistics that help us improve the WGA user experience and quality of service."

If you want to improve the "WGA user experience," then all you have to do is obliterate WGA from the universe. The *user* gains no benefits whatsoever from WGA, while Microsoft does - and the user is forced to pay in drive space, in CPU cycles, in memory usage, and in bandwidth usage.

Which is why my personal PC and the several servers I own and operate run Linux. I haven't found an application yet that can't be either run in native Linux mode, or in a Windows emulator.

Just say "no!" to WGA.

No! Now what?

Just a second while I warm up my harp... Now for the harping.

"Guilty until proven innocent." That's the 'legal principle' of WGA. Next thing you know, they'll be trying to repeal habeas corpus. Oh. Wait.

I suggest that you try to change the terms of the debate. It's okay to refer to it as WGA for purposes of official identification, but for the sake of reality you should call it "Microsoft's Advantage Program", since the only advantage of this program (both as software and as a policy) is to help Microsoft squeeze the last few drops of blood out of some poor turnips somewhere in Africa or South America.

Me? 90% of my home computing is on Ubuntu Linux now, and about 20% of my work computing. The work-side is gradually increasing, and my current dream is to avoid Vista as completely as possible.

Avoiding Vista is one thing, but avoiding a petrol station while under the control of a demonic hybrid car is quite another. Sympathy for one man's lost battle against the machines? Ah, no...

'Robinson recounted: "I could not stop the car. Because of its design I couldn't shift into neutral. It happened so fast I didn't have time to be scared then. I'm scared now."' And poor Mr. Robinson was apparently too stupid to switch off the ignition. Had the car successfully done away with him, I'd have called it Darwinism in action.

Regarding the rampaging Prius, this man is too F'N stupid to drive a car, PERIOD. No way to shift into reverse?

Then WHAT DOES HE THINK THE BIG "N" ON THE SHIFT JOYSTICK **FOR**!?? NINTENDO MODE!???!?

http://www.phillycarshare.org/html/fleet_PriusInstructions.htm

As long as America keeps waiving the requirement to HAVE A BRAIN in order to drive, unbelievable morons will keep driving. And that's a hazard NONE of us needs!

It's only fair to stick with anatomy, so moving southwards from the brain, we arrive at the vagina...monologues, that is, and three high school students who were suspended for uttering said word:

I think it's entirely appropriate to suspend students for attempting to foist that tedious monologue on the school body. Not to mention that they should get poor marks for using the word "vagina": if you've ever had the misfortune to sit through that sad production you probably also immediately realised that the entire thing is about the _vulva_. Yours in anatomy, D

Communication is a wonderful thing, and the launch of SkyNet 5 spells good news for the UK military command centres, who can now speak to each other. Pity still for those front line blokes, though.

Wonderful that the UK is getting this shiny new communication setup that allows HQs to talk to each other with FIVE TIMES(Woah!) the bandwidth...now all we need is a working radio system to allow them to talk to the grunts at the business end of the army.

Order 10,000 Nokia 6230i's and send them to Iraq?

Other hardware that don't impress you much is the PS3, and Tech Digest's 10 reasons to buy Sony's new console became 10 reasons why you shouldn't:

1. Home and LittleBigPlanet Nice, but looks like these will become very expensive very fast to actually do anything with. But more importantly games should be the number one reason to buy a games machine not the frippery.

2. It'll probably be easier to get hold of a PS3 than a Wii come 23 March If you're right it's because the pre-orders didn't sell out which is a real bad indication.

3. It's another reason to buy an HD TV Xbox360 and PS3 both look the same on HD TV. The only difference in visuals that have shown up on titles available on both platforms is the texture mapping. Neither are higher res, but some producers have managed to make the textures look better on one machine, other games look better on the opposite platform. (Plenty of comparision websites are out there)

4. MotorStorm really does look rather good. What's it playability like?

5. Affordable games You're comparing the PS3 price structure to the most expensive xbox360 games. I am very happy with my Gears of War metal boxset and art book at £50 compared to the cheaper Resistance Fall of Man. Looks good, plays far, far better, presentation case makes a nice collectors piece.

6. It's a good-value Blu-ray player I'd rather have it as an optional extra and get the console cheaper.

7. SingStar and online content Yay, that will sell PS3s as an overpriced karoke unit. The fact you actually included this in your list shows you're cribbing from a Sony PR release.

8. The PS3 controller might get its rumble back Or how Sony lied to us yet again. It's a technical issue that we can't resolve, errr, we can now resolve it the day the courtcase finished.

9. Your old PS2 games will work on it - almost I purchased my PS3 in Asia back in November. Cost £100 less than the launch price for the UK, so my machine can play a hell of a lot more of the Japanese games the PS2 became famous for and the UK machines will play less.

10. Resistance: Fall of Man Reality check: compare Resistance to EA's Black and you see that this title should have been a lot, lot better. Comparing it to Gears of War shows that the next gen games isn't just about HD graphics, it's about a more immersive enviroment.

As I pointed out in #9, I have had a PS3 for nearly five months and I am not impressed at all. There is still a lack of games. The online side of the console is gimmicky. The shiny black plastic suffers scratches very easily.

And there's more:

Some reasons against

1) Should we feel privileged to pay £425 for a console that is available for £250 in Hong Kong, or £260 in Japan (where I saw it discounted a further 20% by shops because they could not sell them)?

2) It does not upscale DVDs

3) BlueRay is region locked - and Europe is lumped in with Africa for some strange reason. And if anyone suggests 'EMEA', then why is the Middle East not in the same region? And Japan is no longer in our region, so say goodbye to high-def Anime. Mind you, the people in Hong Kong are particularly screwed - they got lumped in with US/Japan, and cannot use DVDs or PS2/PS1 games because the units do not support Pal!!!!

And also, Hong Kong is not in the same region as the rest of the Chinese speaking people in China (ok... there is the Mandarin/Cantonese divide... but come on!!!).

Sony, your tactics make the mind boggle!!!!

That's all for now. More boggling on Friday. ®