I can image the conversation

Marketing bright spark 1: Let have a online competiton so we can collect a marketing database of perspective customer.

Marketing Bright spark 2: Yea, Great Idea, but won't we have to go through IT to get the website created.

Marketing bright spark 1: No, IT don't know nothing and it takes them too long to do anything, One of my friend on facebook is a web expert who can do it in 5 mins. He'll do it and we can host it at 1to1 hosting they only charge $25 a month.

Marketing bright spark 2: Brilliant. I'll tweet to say how great we are.

The everyday story

of when Jean Luc Picard deadliest enemy assimilate a Melbourne Suburb...

Come on everybody sing along..

Neighborgs, everybody needs good neighborgs,....

Can't knock customer service

Is this a change of managent style from Apple? To admit when things are less than perfect.

Under Jobs, customers would have been told they were holding it wrong, it was down to sun spots etc.

Don't get wrong Jobs was a very good visionary, but how can you say this.. a trifle arrogant.

Forget the hardware

From a Corporate security perspective BB blows away using iphones or Androids, but lets face it their phones are about as sexy as Anne Widdecombe in a thong.

They have the secure infrastructure in place, what they should do is create a Blackberry/RIM client for ios and android and concentrate on providing secure remote working environments which enduser can use on the device of their choosing.

Apple store's are Show rooms

It doesn't how much money an individual official Apple store makes or loses (I've never seen Apple release figure) , because they don't need to make money in themselves.

The Apple stores are just there to promote the brand. Apple don't care if you buy in an Apple store, at Tesco or Online.

How to bring back Industrial Excellence to Britain.

Reduce the number of "media studies" type degrees.

Change all the "new universities" back to polytechnics.

Change the perception of engineering back to a profession like medicine or teaching.

At it's peak, British engineering excellence wasn't created by academics or managers, but by engineers and technicians.

But will it have..

The bit about the additional memories of the alien encounter.

The real problem is:-

These sites are great if you want to share that picture of Great Aunt Winifred's pet pug, but the problem is that most users believe if somebody offers a service like this on the internet it is safe to use for business purposes.

I've seen people transferring sensitive and confident material over these types of sites, without realizing that if anybody that gets hold of the URL they can open the files.

Oh the days

I remember a incident where on for a a couple of months every Windows 95 computer in the building (approx) 1500 would blue screen simultaneously on a Friday morning. Pretty impressive to watch!

We investigated everything and couldn't find a thing, We even looked at hiring a forensics company but they wanted £300k just to start the investigation.

It got to a point where IT staff would arrange doctors appointments, boiler repairs, holiday, etc just to avoid the Friday morning tirade of angry users.

I finally tracked it down to some developers who were using Novell IPX drivers on DOS based machines, they had written some low level data transfer tools and decided that they would start using some "unused' data fields in the IPX header for their own error messages, and guess when they would run these, Yep Friday morning!

I asked them if they had never noticed that every time they ran these tools that all the workstations crashed, they said they had, but they didn't think is was anything that they were doing.

"Please come outside the IT management team want to introduce you to Mr Baseball bat"

Sorry but

How can any of them be as good as Micromen with Alexander Armstong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry, A brilliant Classic!!

I'm questioning this

"Another behaviour which people commonly consider to be energy-virtuous is the unplugging (or switching off at the wall) of appliances on standby or unused cell-phone chargers."

I'm no green eco-nazi, but I do like avoiding handing money over to the energy companies when I could be spending it on something useful such as beer.

I did a totally unscientific experiment some time back.

I have a old style 'spinning wheel' type electricity meter. I recorded the speed when all my appliances were on standby and chargers left plugged in. I then turned them all off or unplugged them and checked the speed again. After playing around with various household objects I concluded that the speed difference was the same as having a electric kettle boiling water.

I'm sure that I could have done the maths if had wanted to, but I concluded that having a kettle running 24*7 would use quite a bit of juice and hence eat into my beer money.

Is this a case of....

Trying to convince people that they want a more complex, feature rich system, when what people really want is simplicity.

Don't get me wrong, the technology in wave was fantastic, but in a world which has just had it's 20 billionth tweet it would appear that less is more.

I think that this can also be demonstrated by the sheer number of txts that are still sent, compared to the number of people who use video calls on their mobiles.

Ahem

Can I mention the attack on the USS Cole, An Arleigh Burke class guided missle destroyer with all the whistles and bells including Phalanx.

Perhaps Mr Page would like to explain how good all these systems are to families of the 17 people who died in the attack on the Cole.

All the tech in the world doesn't protect against fanatics.

Please let Novell die with Dignity

When I stated my IT career I started as a Novell Network Admin, so I have a soft spot for the old beast. When Netware 4.1 came out (best forget about 4.02), it had the best directory struture of any system, and even today would still give Active directory a good kicking.

The 3 worst sins committed by Novell Management were:-

The attempt to take on Microsoft office with Perfect office - You were a networking company what the hell were you thinking, stick to what you were good at.

The slow take up of TCP/IP relying to long on IPX/SPX. Somebody forgot to spot the Internet coming.

Not porting Netware run on other operating systems. NOS was OK but to a business having to run a dedicated server build just to run network was hard to swallow.

If Novell had developed Netware, we would never have the dog's dinner that is Active Directory.

Believe it when I see it!!!

It's Friday, I demand a Playmobile reconstruction of the momentous moment!

Excellent

It's Brilliant

I can browse the net,

Play movies,

Play music

Listen to the radio

run app and games

view pictures

I'm talking about my 7 year old TC1000 tablet of course

What will be his punishment?

Being made to watch all the films John Travolta made between Saturday night fever and Pulp Fiction, and Battlefield Earth.

El Reg .. Not up with the news

It's been announced this weekend that O2 is going to trial 4G in Slough.

Not so lucky for UK users as you have to live in Slough, which is without question a complete dump.

Re: Peter Garner

All mobile devices have an International Mobile equipment Identity number. My guess is that you had to register that and if you didn't then it got cut off. If the mobile operators networks are now set to block PAYG devices that haven't had the IMEI number registered then phones brought in wouldn't work.

I'm not sure how that would effect anybody with a UK PAYG phone travelling to spain. Not sure if you can roam with a PAYG phone as I've never used one.

Anton Ivanov, try phonehouse.es. They are the spanish equivalent of Carphone Warehouse in the UK and have hundreds of stores. According to their website they sell 59 different Samsung models on Orange and Vodafone.

I love the smell of Hadrons in the morning

Hand me my BFG, I'm going in.

Of course the real use of the LHC is to move all the molecules in the party hostess under-garments 2 feet to the left, in accrodance with the laws of indetermincey