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Comment Re:Data plan cost the same (Score 1) 334

Hi,

I (my company) forked out 650 dollars for my iPhone here in Australia.

Why would I do this instead of paying 300 dollars? My plan was cheaper because I wasn't paying off my phone, I upgraded out of my 2 year contract sooner, I got a better phone. I can travel overseas and save hundreds of dollars on roaming phone charges. I like this game, can you think of any other reasons? Oh heres one! I can use the "personal hotspot" feature without paying extra. Ooh I have been able to use the old-style tethering for the last 3 years without paying extra too! (thats 120 dollars per year value right there!)

One day; one of your carriers will go: "heey... we could get more people if we didn't *force* them to buy a phone and charged them less!!!" (just like it is everywhere else where you can buy unlocked phones, or more importantly have consumer protection laws that REQUIRE your phone providers to unlock phones when you are out of contract)

Just because you can't see beyond your current market doesn't mean there isn't a slightly better model just around the corner. When telecoms are forced to treat you like a customer, you might see actual benefits. Phone unlocking should be mandatory after contracts (or for a fee) in the US. I really don't understand why it isn't.

Comment Re:...and develop iOS on their iPads? (Score 1) 577

17% of hits to the website I developed/work on for work (lawyer focus) is Mac users.

Without office these mac users wouldn't be able to work with other lawyers. (they are barristers, they are sole entities that work with other lawyers).

Without MS these barristers would not own macs, and THEY are the ones with more money than sense and they are the ones buying 2 macs (work macbook air for laptop, work desktop), an iPhone every 12 months an iPad every 12 months and deprecating their old hardware to the rest of the family every 12 months. Without them, you have less people handing down hardware, and less people getting in on the MacOS ecosystem. Dangerous to get rid of them.

Comment Re:Well that didn't take long. (Score 1) 135

With an iPhone, your only option is to reinstall. Because when stuff breaks, you haven't got enough control to figure out what is wrong.

My wifes iPhone stopped taking calls properly. reinstall iOS fixed it. But ofourse now its a 3g with 4.0 iOS, and guess what. It runs like arse. yay.

Comment Re:Praise Xena (Score 1) 353

it renders them, but most of these "apps" are ActiveX controls that do something in addition to the rendering engine of ie6.

I work in the legal sector in a state of Australia, and our justice system was running on ie6 (last I heard; 24 months ago) and their public website for Barristers (fancy lawyers) to access a system they had invented for easy access to state criminal law, relied exclusively on an Active X control that only ran in ie6.

Thankfully, they have since updated the ActiveX control to work properly in ie7. It wasn't the rendering engine (which I believe that "compatibility button" switches to) that was the issue.

My biggest problem was once a year they would come and make a presentation to our barristers, as I was the IT guy, I'd have to re-install windows XP on a laptop somewhere for use as the presentation machine. I tried a Virtual machine one year, but unfortunately the hardware in the presentation laptop at the time completely choked. In the end, I started saying if they want to present it they need to supply their own laptop.

Sadly, they were presenting it so people being presented to could learn about it for their own criminal trial work. Ironically, one year they basically had to say: "but .. it won't work for you because no computer you have access to will have ie6 on it. And chances are if you own your own computer it won't have ie6 either."

*shrug*.

Comment Re:So what you're saying is.... (Score 1) 200

My backyard is literally full of redbacks, even found a mouse spider in my hammock stand the other day!

And I am in suburban Melbourne.
Honestly though, first time I ever saw them was this house when I bought it 2 years ago.

Went spraying with the bug killer last year and must have killed at least 10 females, and countless males. (females are the "red back" part of redbacks)

Comment Re:I thought the exact same thing (Score 1) 488

200 dollars an hour?

You do realise how much experienced network technicians cost from a large firm don't you?

If you *have* to break into (sake of the argument) Cisco network yesterday because your admin buggered off with the passwords, you would get Cisco in.
Cisco doesn't send you a complete moron, they send you one of their well paid engineers that spend 90% of their time doing nothing. And Cisco doesn't charge you the cost of his time (maybe he's paid $40 an hour?) they charge you 10 times the cost of his time.

$400 per hour per expert is not unreasonable.

After my dad retired, he did part time work for one of the very large accounting firms here (possibly international accounting firm, never checked). He was paid $70 an hour as an IT security consultant. He was charged out at $700 an hour for the hours he worked on the firms clients.

My work had a single specialist in to look at our equipment during a failure. $250 dollars an hour. And this guy wasn't even very good. I shudder to think what they would charge if we wanted an actually useful specialist.

Comment Re:Put it on your student loan (Score 1) 361

The australian government wont give me a loan for that.

Oh wait, you are assuming everyone lives in the retarded american system where you have to get an actual loan rather than government assistance (with a promise that you'll pay it back if you earn enough, and if you don't you get a free education - basically).

America is so broken, don't assume everywhere else is too.

Comment Re:stealing (Score 1) 361

Expansion on this then for games just to help you.

If you write a [game] and you get 100 paying customers and 1000 warez kiddies, you have 1100 total people that know of your work from the past that might buy from you next time.

Pirated copies = potential future customers. Unless what you give them is crap.

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