[Nottingham] Consumer notes

[Matt Bunter]

> That 2GB (I'm sure you didn't mean 2 Giga *bits*) is physically not 
> too outlandish now. However, it does give frighteningly huge room for 
> horrendously badly designed and implemented software!
>
> Room enough for more bloat than a high altitude weather balloon!

But how many PC suppliers actually ship 2G of RAM systems that aren't 
servers? None that I know of. We are only now going through an XP 
roll-out and most machines are getting 512M. It will be at least three 
years before we even consider another desktop upgrade.

>
> Yes, I get very annoyed when there is patronising INTRUSIVE 'help' 
> features to force you to an 'experience' as dictated by the marketing 
> types. More so when there is the thinly veiled message that they know 
> better for your own good so that they can also grab more of your money 
> and your time. Oh, and it really is for your own good and best 
> experience, really (or more likely not).

My pet hate is the auto-formatting in Word. I've submitted several 
documents recently to so called Project Managers and they always insist 
on Word docs (for the links in the Table of Contents).

>
> Are there really so many suckers that such squeamish marketing works 
> well with? Are our schools really so pathetically bad?!

And more and more are becoming addicted to the M$ hype every day. I just 
spent the last week going through some of the presentations for SQL 
Server from TechEd that was held in Amsterdam at the beginning of June. 
The presentations themselves are quite good, but what really frightens 
me are the photos of the event. A football field size room with PCs for 
the visitors to use, buffets for hundreds, game rooms, activities etc. 
etc. The cost of just this event must be in the millions. The marketing 
arms of M$ probably has a budget in excess of $1 billion - that can 
convince a hell of a lot of people.

>
> Meanwhile, for my Saturday winges: 

Cheer up, at least there's the cricket - duh! At least its not raining - 
duh! Well at least Eric Raymond didn't accept the job offer from 
Microsoft !!

Rgs,

Matt