Copacetic

Today I sent an email to hostireland.com to get pricing info on its dedicated server offerings. For some bandy reason (probably the fact that they are rackspace partner) they don’t post this invaluable information on their website. I got this autoreply to a message directed to sales@hostireland.com.

This is an automated reply.

I am currently out of the office until mid-February. Please re-send your
email as follows:

Sales - richard.tarr@hostireland.com
Project Management - ciaran@hostireland.com
Technical Support - ryan@hostireland.com
Accounts - jean@hostireland.com

____________________________________________
David Moran
Managing Director
Host Ireland
18-19 College Green
Dublin 2
Tel: +353 1 8219350
Fax: +353 1 6708220
Email: david@hostireland.com

www.hostireland.com

Fix your bleedin’ mail system guys!

If anybody is looking for a pretty good hosting service these guys look good on paper. I will publish a complete review of the local ones once I’ve collated all the info.

Turns out hostireland is just a shill for rackspace. They just pass you directly over to a rackspace rep. Then that guy quotes me in sterling, what a jip!

If you read the Sunday Business Post you will be aware that it regularily ships with with a glossy insert called Computers in Business. The regularily run Buyers Guide articles where they review a range of vendor products, last Sunday it was Business PCs. I hope the editors won’t mind if I give them some pointers on how to improve the quality of this kind of article going for.

• label the pictures so the reader will know which system is being displayed
• Indicate the source of the pricing information (vendor website, distributor etc.)
• Provide a comparison table (see below) so that the reader can rapidly assess the key comparison criteria (in this case processor, memory and disk space).
• Clearly indicate whether VAT is included in the quoted figures
• Define your criteria for high end vs. entry level, many of the picks look to all the world like random jabs into the vendor websites.
• Wake up to the 21st century and start including your images in the the web versions of the print articles (sheesh! can you say flickr )
• There is no such model as the HP Scenic and HP Celsius in the Fujitsu Siemens catalog (did you mean Celsius W and Scenic X ?).

This information was obviously obtained by the author or researcher of the report. It just never made it into the final copy. For those who found the article as frustrating as I did I have included some of the missing information below.

Finally a few tips for the vendors, in this day and age, if I can’t easily find your prices on your website, or the prices are only quoted in pounds sterling I’m not buying.

Acer, Fujitsu Siemens, HP and IQon take note.

The full comparison table is here.

Google have announced Google Pack a fantastic list of free software include commercial and Open Source programs. It includes an updater and is smart enough to ignore stuff if you already have it installed.

Top gear!

The software includes,

• Google Toolbar for IE
• Google Pack Screen Saver
• Google Talk
• Google Desktop
• Ad-Aware SE Personal
• Picasa
• Mozilla Firefox
• Gallery Player HD Images (??)
• Google Earth
• RealPlayer
• Adobe Reader
• Norton AntiVirus 2005 (6 month free subscription)

DELLLAPTOP.JPG

Originally uploaded by Joe Drumgoole.

I know what, lets put a sticker on all our laptops that won’t come off without dynamite.

hah, it was actually stuck to a plastic sheet that was relatively easy to remove, doh!

With this kind of hard disk in a phone you better pray you don’t lose it….

This is a blog post from www.writely.com. Finally an online editor with save and other good stuff. You can’t set categories yet but according to the writely forum this is coming.