Decaflon

That's a lot of assumption, and no fact.

Given that we're talking about a story slathered in words like "allegedly", "claims" and "rumors". There's very little fact around the story or its backing stories.

But no, I don't sit in on a lot of Apple-Rogers meetings these days -- it's hard to find the time -- but I'm really not venturing too far from common sense, am I?

There are only a couple of points there. I'll attempt to call bullshit on myself:

• Renegotiations: almost guaranteed because Apple changed the pricing scales. There's no way in hell that Rogers wouldn't want to take advantage of cheaper hardware.
• Apple knowing Rogers' rates: Slightly tougher but how on earth are Apple supposed to pick providers to handle their brand unless they've receive fairly detailed business planning?

I could be wrong - but I doubt I am. This "news" seems just a little too close to the rest of the internet's outrage on the subject to not be a PR back-covering exercise by Apple.

On a purely economic level, talking basic supply-and-demand theory, by cutting the supply like they're rumoured to have done, Apple have increased demand. You might see it as a sanction but it could also be something to motivate the people who were thinking about putting a purchase off into queuing. Moving on..

I'm assuming that Apple and all their providers around the world went back to the negotiating table for the 3G iPhone.

If that's the case, Apple have known about Rogers' evil plans since day one. Under their deal, I bet you a ton of that cash goes in Apple's direction.

Now it's the eleventh hour and Apple have only just discovered how much Rogers are charging? Bullshit. Apple have just found out how pissed off the internet is. Who said petitions didn't work?

I would have thought going through all the SMS folders and scrubbing everything (like you did in the inbox) would do the trick. There might also be a delete-all function hidden somewhere. I'm not sure because I'm not familiar with Ericssons

A common problem on old phones is that they stored all the SMS messages on the SIM, giving you a stupidly low message limit. Your inbox might be empty but you could well have a ton of outbox messages and status reports clogging up the tubes.

I'm actually really surprised that AT&T would let people do this.

And I'm surprised you're surprised. Seriously: I don't get it.

I've seen this thread buzzing away in RSS and I haven't paid it any attention, just marking it read and moving on but now I've read it and I don't understand why you're surprised.

What was the alternative? AT&T forcing people to keep their units tethered to an AT&T account?

Or are you shocked that the iPhone can run SIM-free? Even so, surely the US has pay-as-you-go SIMs that only cost £1 or thereabouts?

News would be: AT&T allow you to convert your old iPhone to wlan VOIP handset. Or is that already a viable feature?

But if you're on the inside, making sites for companies that do have this problem, you might have more luck by actually talking to them and explaining how having you hack your way around IE6 could cause serious maintenance issues further down the line.

Reading through somebody else's (or even your own, months down the line) hack or workaround -filled CSS is a horrible prospect. I'm sure you know how much extra time it adds to getting something relatively simple done.

I recently had to bring an in-development site up to production standards for its release, fixing several cross-browser hacktastrophes. The code was horrible and massively convoluted because it used a combination of workarounds and plain hacks. It was impossible to tell what parts certain browsers were using and what it they were ignoring and by the time I was done, I reckon it would have been equally easy to dump the original and start again... But it's hard to tell when you start off with just a short list of required fixes.

Conversely, fixing things on a standard-embracing site that doesn't care too much about IE6 is a dream. You can target the issue with Firebug, change the one part in CSS and you're done.

If they're just paranoid, the prospect of wasting that much time and money on maintenance issues should heavily outweigh any doubts for an upgrade.

And if you can explain that to somebody who has ultimate control over the IT jockeys, perhaps you can make a change.

There's no reason for people to be using IE6 any more. You should feel no guilt in kicking them off (or at least giving them a strongly worded recommendation).

Well... There's almost no reason. Some people are locked into it because their poorly-built internal apps only work on IE6 (so it's an IT constraint). They're in the cant-help-it camp but they could pester their IT guy(s) for an upgrade.

Then there are the people who installed (or had installed) XP SP0 when automatic updates weren't on by default; paired with those that turned auto updates off when MS started breaking illegal copies of Windows. I wish I could remotely reformat all of these computers, killing IE6, spam bots and all sorts of other mucky crap too.

I don't see why fixed term contracts are the biggest evil here. They manage to give you your handset for a lot less than its retail markup in exchange for you paying them the moolah over a long contract.

Apple (and others) selling exclusive contracts so you can only receive a certain handset on a certain provider and sometimes only on certain tariffs is what causes stagnation - especially when the handset is as fashionable as the iPhone.

But it's ultimately your fault. If the contract isn't good, don't end up on it. Switch provider (if you can), let them know you're considering switching away. I've had luck beating O2 into giving me a better-than-standard renewal by saying I need my number unlock code.

You could argue that (as I pointed out last time) the deals are improving for the 3g model in some places without inter-operator competition, but I think, in the UK, O2 and Apple have been feeling serious heat from other smart phones with a lower-price, on better tariffs and so they have to compete.

But that's here. The US mobile market is poor and has always been poor. People are locked to one carrier because there is a difference in actual service (not sure if this is still true).

Scrivs try the Europe server: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en

Edit: it's going pretty slow but at least it's going.

I see. Yeah I just read something wrong along the way.

On pricing, I just found out that the US prices I've been citing are excluding taxes. The UK ones are inclusive. How much would the final price be where you are guys?

And it's shitty, fake, "assisted" GPS. Uses cell-triangulation instead of satelites so it's no use for navigation without an external, proper GPS receiver.

And there's still no MMS >_<

And they've crippled it so you can't use it as a modem.

3 years? I'm surprised they sold any!

It's certainly cheaper here in the UK... But that's not hard. It was £270 + tarrif (£35 upwards) * 24 = Total Cost of Ownership: £1110 (~$2220) = Fuck!

It's now:
£free + (£45 * 24) for the 8gig or
£free + (£75 * 24) for the 16 gig.

You need to look at the tariffs quite closely to see exactly what you're getting but you can still get it on cheaper tariffs (though, of course, you get a many fewer bundles minutes/texts) and it works out even cheaper:
£100 + (£30 * 24) = £410 cheaper than the £45/pm

But the TCO is still massive compared to other similar devices. I realise this incantation is a damned sight more "complete" than the first gen iPhone but I'm still not sure if it's justifiable at £820 (~$1640) over two years... But it's getting much closer.

My n95's TCO was £540 over 18 months (£30pm + free handset).

Tangent: If I'm looking at the right figures, I think the iPhone is cheaper here than the US. $1640 vs $1975 and the UK one comes with more minutes, data and texts. Surely that's a first.

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

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*

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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 =\

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.

What do you use Automatix for? I know you've said codecs and the like, but since Feisty, 90% of that was done by enabling restricted and letting Totem do the rest.

Java and the more complicated stuff has only really been an apt-get away.

Thanks for that Paul. I had no idea but having read that post, I'm still not sure what they're doing other than adding more "sources" to dilute down their toolbar results.

Popularity statistics are always flawed in some respect as everybody wants to outwardly seem successful and some are more than happy to abuse the data collection methods to appear more popular.

So while I can see the increase of data being an improvement, it also introduces more points of weakness and once people figure out where they're collecting this data from, it increases the scope for being able to game it.

I don't see regex being too difficult here. You want to match something like: \$([\d]+(?:\.[\d]{2}))

That should match: $123123 and $123.23

Get that as a list of matched values, then just string replace the captured values (match group 0) with the converted rate. Don't forget you need to convert from string to float before you start getting hardcore with the numbers.

Ideally you'd cache the output to temporary file too as all this jazz is expensive CPU wise.

So 3G is just another tech to download stuff?

I'm not sure what the latest EDGE speeds are at, but HDSPA caps out at ~15mbps with scope (with network upgrades) for something closer to 50mbps. Absolute insane speed.

If it's any consolation, I'm certain there's going to be a market for cheap second-hand, contract-free, first-gen iPhones on Ebay. Can't say how much money you'll be looking at though.

New, unlocked ones still seem to be going at the ~$500 mark so if you could get something near that, it's a lot better than a kick in the teeth. I dare say this price will start to plummet nearer summer though.

I'm not sue if this means people have to purchase new phones to get 3G or if this is something that can be one as a software upgrade.

I strongly doubt that Apple included the 3G kit into the first-gen phone. It would have been too expensive to license and not use (considering they have been taking a lot of criticism over the lack of 3g)

Don't do it. I used to be a volunteer expert there. I was ranked #1 in Webdev in their 2007 awards. I'm just saying that to give you an idea of how committed I was to EE.

EE only cares about one thing: money. At the end of 2006, they brought in new management or something and they decided it would be an ace time for a redesign. I can't fault them on that point because the old design was a little bleurgh, but they replaced it with 500k of images.

They provide a slimmer template without all the nasty pop-up adverts on every page at a cost. You either need to be a VIP Expert (as I was) or be a paying member.

I found out about their redesign a couple of months before it was released and posted a thread in their general chat about it, offering lots of feedback. Many other VIPs offered their feedback too - genuinely constructive stuff. EE rewarded me by blocking my account for 4 days.

I tried to ask why I had been blocked in their site support section and my thread was deleted. I asked again. Deleted. I started asking other members and moderators directly and they all had one thing to say: management is fucking EE up. Many of them knew member that had offered some constructive criticism, just to find themselves being screamed at by one of the hired moderators - so left.

After the design nonsense, I left, my membership lapsed and I never visit EE any more. And about the same time, they dropped completely out of the search engines (at least a lot lower than they used to be) so they're a complete non-entity to me.

Bytes (formerlly TheScripts), though I've never used it, looks like a much better model. They don't fuck you over when you're looking for answers and they seem to reward membership better. Many EE members I knew went over to TheScripts.

IRC (freenode) is also a good bet for the simpler issues.

I've had my account some time, just not using it at all... But today all this changes! I''ve got a new client for Linux, dusting it off and going to try and put it to good use.

If anybody wants to follow me: /oliw