Oh dear, no Tetris = discredited article

Yah-boo!

Seriously does anyone even use Yahoo! anymore? You'd think with them racking up massive losses finding new ways to nark users would be low on thier list of stuff to do.

No surprises, except if you're Microsoft

The slow adoption of users and in particular businesses to Windows 8 should be no surprise to anyone. I find it strange that Microsoft continue to be (at least in public) flummoxed by the obvious.

To be fair Microsoft are caught in somewhat of a trap. They need to keep updating thier products & maintain revenue, but there are few new real ideas out there which really add to business productivity and there havn't been since WinXP.

Large businesses depend on thier workstations being reliable and thier staff using them effectively. Whenever Microsoft decide to piss about significantly with the interface, they create massive training impacts for large companies. That's why so many people reacted badly to the Ribbon.

Microsoft fail to comprehend that software is so central to a business operation that a company is taking a significant risk by updating it. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!!". Upgrading to Windows introduces incompatability, both with other software and with peripherals. In house applications which integrate with Windows may suddenly stop working. We should also not ignore the impact of a OS change on a company's IT pros to fully support it.

I work for an international bank and we're not even on Windows 7 yet. The list of incompatible software which requires re-write was in the hundreds and is still a significant issue. Many of our internal browser delivered apps are on IE8 and yet Windows 8 foists a new and potentially incompatible browser without the option to retain the old one. Fucking great that is.

The business community don't want an OS that looks like a big keyless iPad. The business community don't want to have to shell out for an entire generation of new PCs, or the costs of training, or the costs of redeveloping thier software landscape and testing it, they are nowhere as interested in public clouds or publishing stuff on the web from a toolbar (Sharepoint is fucking bad enough!), and they certainly aren't enticed by Microsoft's veiled threats to remove support from Windows XP or thier unrealistic volume licence pricing schedules.

The only thing that keeps Microsoft in business is that Apple and the other open source alternatives are even worse in many of these regards.

The Daily Mail

No shortage of irony that Ranzten published her opinion piece in the Daily Mail, who's online edition is at least 50% tits and arse stories these days...

Yeah... right....

Despite what Ballmer says I can't see most corporates agreeing to put thier data in some poxy ananymous, potentially insecure and uncontrolled "cloud".

Instead of focussing on pointless crap like that, perhaps Microsoft would add some more charts to Excel, or (God forbid) put styles back in the proper way instead of ruining the feature like they did.

Get the facts guys

Sorry to sound like a party pooper but before you link the poor fix time for this problem to the redundancies in 2010, have you established whether any of the job losses were in the division which runs the retail banking systems?

Suck

So that's an Olympic Gold for suck then.

It's nice to know we still dominate the world in certain fields.

Micro$oft

They really are a bunch of cheap schmucks. I really can see the day when corporates finally cry enough and go open source.

They think we muppets

I just love the way these people want to install this technology with all these amazing capabilities and then say "trust us, we've put in safeguards to stop ourselves using it fully"

I mean, seriously... do you really think I'm that stupid?

The only "safeguard" which is truly effective is not to put the tech in in the first place. That said, where can I get the software crack that allows you to rig your own readings?

As a bit of great value priced media it's great, but as a exhibit of blue-ray quality it is a long way from where it needs to be in my opinion.

The comment about the early films being grainy may be true, but what is unacceptable is that these movies have clearly been stuffed through some processing to sharpen and brighten the contrast (no doubt so on first viewing you coo "isn't that bright & bluray") but it also introduces a lot of noticeable picture noise. It's especially bad on Aliens and Alien Resurrection.

£12 is great value, but frankly that's about all the product is worth for what is supposed to be premium quality media.

Hmm, I'm calling "bollocks" on this one.

If Office 2007 is anything to go by, productivity will DROP dramatically because Microsoft messed with a well established GUI and refused to offer a way for those that wanted to switch back to the older version - you know, the productive non "ribbon" version where you knew where everything was, the hotkeys worked and the whole thing made sense.

And don't even get me started on the complete clusterf**k that Microsoft has turned MS Word styles into. It used to be a genuine productivity tool, and now it's a useless mess, clearly screwed up by endless feedback clinics with morons who never understood how styles worked in the first place.

Message to Microsoft : a GUI which is primarily directed at tablets isn't going to get all those companies still running WinXP to upgrade. In fact with so much kit due for replacement you may just be pushing them towards other alternatives.

Poor exploitation

The least Sony could have done would be to have dug up a few crappy extra tracks that never made it first time around and added them to the CD.

I mean that's what they did with Amy Winehouse and everyone wowed about that....

The Police investgate!

So Police are carrying out a thorough investigation to find the perpetrators eh?

So presumably that means everyone in Strathclyde nick is now looking at online porn all day eh?

Anonymous

How grateful and justified I now feel in not completing most of the census form. I wasn't the only person concerned about the processing of this data by Lockheed Martin and how it might be used.

The Government bleated on batting aside all the concerns as if they were irrelevant. Who's right now? Bunch of incompetent tossers. Hacked by a bloody 19 year old....

Only minor hipocisy

I find Schmidt's comments a bit funny really. So it's "bad" to roll out CCTV with facial recognition software, but at the same time it's ok to photograph people's properties without thier consent and post it on the internet, and it's ok to obtain and post high quality satellite pictures of people's houses and gardens on the internet without thier consent too?

Is that right? Hmm.

Making an epic out of a trilogy

At this rate it will be quicker to read the novels than to endure the (seemingly) never ending movies.

Mess with thier heads

Reading the form, I'm of the view that the information being requested isn't actually far off the level of intrusiveness we saw when Labour were trying to press the ID Card into our unwilling palms a few years ago. In fact if you added the requirement for biometric it would be very close. The point quoted in the article that all the information requested about workplace and your employers being used to help businesses plan is such an indefensible crock of crap - but I bet the HMRC will find it useful.

It's hard to to come to the view that a lot of this information is nothing to do with what a census actually needs, and is a wider data trawl. In this decade, more than in 2001, the people have the opportunity to network virally and register a protest.

In 2001, thousands of people all declared themselves to be Jedi in objection to the religious questioning. Perhaps for 2011 we should all hand in the postcode of a single pub in rural Somerset and declare (in our millions) that we were all in the same pub.

Shillness

I doubt if a more glowing article about the reasons for dumping XP for Windows 7 could have been written if Steve Balmer had done it himself.

More monkey misses the point

I suspect the funny thing about this is that your average terrorist is (I would think) very unlikely to be stupid enough to carry storage devices through US Customs. They would be wary of being a terget for searches anyway, and (if I were them) would be accessing email/content from kit borrowed/purchased in the country once inside.

What we have is pure showboating. The only people inconvenienced are the general public. It would be interesting to know how many of the thousands of devices seized actually contained terrorist related content that led to a conviction? Probably not many, if any I suspect.

Who's kidding

Let's face it, if a DFT commissioned survey, with a tilted question to include the carrot of cost neutrality, produces responses of 38% for and 34% against, that's hardly a resounding endorsement is it? And despite the spin that's not "half of all motorists" either.

The government may have changed, but the civil service at the DfT and all those government funded lobby groups (Brake, Campaign for better Transport, Transport for London) are still out to fork the motorist any way they can.

Put it on the net and then try to licence it

God forbid that perhaps all the BBC should do is put iPlayer on subscription? Maybe they should just scrap it - it's not like we don't all still have Sky+, DVDRs and even VCRs is it?

Who made BBC god of the Internet? I say scrap the whole poxy service before the politicians decide they can add it to the

Glaister is missing the point

For all his cleverness Prof Glaister is missing the point. I recall that a lot of the public outrage that led to the famously supported Downing Street petition was not because of road pricing per se, it was anger at the suggestion that the Government (or any other Agency) wanted to install spying devices in people's cars that would track thier every movement.

And it doesn't actually matter whether those were to be owned and operated by the Government, MI5, the RAC or Bobo the Clown - there was *huge* resistance to the concept of being tracked everywhere.

Now many would argue (correctly) that in ANPR we have such a system anyway by the back door, but there is a threshold of personal space which I still believe motorists are not willing to accept and these GPS tracking devices are where the line is. It's like putting CCTV in people's homes.

Prof Glaister seems to have spent all his research looking at spreadsheets and doing calculations. He can't possibly have spoken to any road users before proposing this flawed piece of drivel. In addition did anyone at the RAC actually check the document? They boast about about looking for completely new and different solutions to congestion, and then just trot out the same old (rejected) tax proposals.

Cobblers

I've read some corporate bullshit in my time but "We're sorry, we decided to equip our camera cars with aerials, detection and recording equipment but we didn't mean to accidentally capture people's router SSIDs" has got to be one of the lamest, most duplicitous lies I've ever seen.

Aside from thanking the German authorities for highlighting this (something which the Home Office seemed to have missed) what do our Governments intend to do about it? What *can* they do about it? Is someone going to sanction Google? Force them to destroy all the data? Fine them some huge about for all this snooping?

Of course not... move along people, nothing to see here. Google are immune to your complaints and will continue to do what they bloody well like. No matter that Sergei Brin is a Russian.

Absolutely no excuses

There is just no excuse at all for this. It's not even a human error, except if you count what must have been a deliberate policy decision not to implement encrypted media at the technical level.

Everyone involved in this is culpable and should be considering thier positions; The Chief Exec, the IT Director, the senior IT security managers, Internal Auditors, Risk Managers not to mention the operational management who allowed the unencrypted stick to be used (and lost)

Every single one of those people is responsible. No excuses - clear your desks and go tomorrow.

Me? Unsurprisingly I submitted my opt out request for the the NHS Central Records spine last week. Anyone who is still willing to trust that thier personal medical records will be professionally managed after reading the above is simply an idiot.

Some level of support

I'm sure Microsoft won't be too bothered with the opinions of a mere Customer but this is pretty dreadful really isn't it.

I bought a laptop with Vista (don't forget the "wow") a little over two years ago and already the support plug is being pulled. If I buy a copy of Windows 7 how soon will it be until support is withdrawn from that as well?

I'm sure Microsoft would deny this, but it feels quite contemptuous and arrogant from this customer's perspective. If I go into my VW dealer I can still purchase replacement parts for my 18 year old Volkswagen... why should Microsoft stop supporting thier products as little as a year after sale?

Shame on them.

Here we go again

If the utility companies really will have the capability to limit or cut off energy using these meters, I'm willing to bet one thing : That the David Beckham & John Prescotts of this world won't be the ones being 'managed'. It'll be us - the bloody serfs first. You can bet your house on it.

Educationalists

The reason for the questionnaire is to allow the school to identify the kids who are not fucked up so that they can target extra time and attention to turning them into ill-educated text messaging morons like all the chavvy kids.

Easy innit.

Doomed to fail

"The more you tighten your grip Governer Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers..."

Bad decision

I read all the broadsheet UK newspapers online every day at lunchtime. I can't see how introducing charging is going to help News Intl. Aside from anything else the website layout for The Times is poor compared to the other onlines, and that's before you bring up the subject of the quality of the journalism which (I think) is noticeably inferior to Telegraph/Guardian/Indie.

If Murdoch does introduce charges it just won't affect me. I predict many current Times readers will just migrate to the other free titles. In a global internet marketplace even News International doesn't hold a monopoly on news, and the "pay-per-view" value of a mainstream title like The Times is zero.

If News International is going to charge, it will really have to seriously upgrade the quality of it's output, and create some unique selling points behind the paywall. Personally I don't see it happening but that's what I think they'll have to do.

Oops

I'm sorry I just can't stop laughing.

Labour spinning this already

[Article] 'Jacqui Smith trailed the forthcoming Commmunications Data Bill in a speech this morning to the Institute for Public Policy Research'

Spinning already. That sounds like Jackie Smith was giving an announcement to an independant audience doesn't it? No mention that the IPPR is in fact a think tank who work for and are funded directly by the Labour Party.

Smith is clearly needing a sympathetic and sycopphantic audience in order to get a hearing - even at this early stage.

Please... let it die... please

If there was ever a story which illustrated the how 'Smashy & Nicey' Q magazine is, or the sheer desparation of a record industry to keep recycling tired old products then this is it. And there was me thinking that the last Stone's tour set the benchmark.

So this is an appeal to the great man of Rock himself : Meat - please refuse to accept this award. Try creating some new music, or just retire gracefully so we can enjoy the memories. Please stop flogging a horse you killed on your third tour in 1980.

Please - make it stop.

Google joins the lazy, greedy corporates

I laughed when I read this article, as I had a similar reaction when I read the huge Chrome EULA last night. How does a "free" open source browser (plagarised as it is from it's competitors' code) come with so much legal baggage attached? My antennae were immediately twitching as I re-read some of the terms.

But then I finally tried it quickly. What a (slow) piece of crap.

Hail Firefox3. All my base belong to me. Hopefully.

A bit daft really

The irony of all of this of course is that because most of the major banks (both retail & merchant) are all currently busy setting up offshore operations (again) there are far too many jobs chasing too few qualified/experienced people in Mumbai & Chennai.

As a result it's not actually that cheap to hire our there any more. You've just got to love capitalism havn't you! I wonder if info on current offshore salary trends has reached the Barclays' board yet?

Ironic

Isn't it somewhat ironic that over 10,000 Americans are killed every year in the USA - by other Americans using guns.

Who are they trying to protect themselves from?

I mean.. seriously...

Don't incidents like this seriously make you wonder about the quality of staff being recruited to carry out security duties at our airports? How on earth did this particular security guy get a job?

Is "security" one of those jobs that the Government is using to get unemployable fucktards off the UB40 stats?

This stupid prick has made our whole country a laughing stock to international travellers - not that BAA has been working hard on that for the past couple of years.

Numpties

There is no reason at all why the tender cannot state an explicit requirement that all data must be physically stored and maintained within the UK, and cannot be accessed from abroad.

I mean how hard is this stuff?

Articles like this reall depress me. This is a simple competance matter which exposes spineless, supine ministers and a pathetic civil service procurement process. Our country is being run by retards, and all our personal data is at stake once again.

Absolutely pathetic...

Danger ahead

Cases like this should make the arguments for the protection of civil liberties stronger.

During the past 10 years the Government has brought in a sequence of new laws which have chipped away at various aspects of personal privacy, liberty or protection from zealous government interferance.

For years New Labour has defended the introduction of these measures by offering sop-assurances to the effect that the laws are only intended for reasons such as child protection or anti-terrorism and that we should not worry to much about the actual wordings - we should trust the Government to use the powers responsibly.

Personally I've always been dubious of making law in such a manner. Those making these changes over the years have deliberately used poor legislative drafting to cast the net widely from a legal perspective for only one reason - so that the law can be 're interpreted' at a later date to encompass wider use without actually having to change the laws again.

This case shows the shallowness and falsehood of those assurances. This episode demonstrates clearly how Government or local Gov't can utilise these laws for what were probably unintended purposes but with the full support of the legislation nonetheless. In this case powers intended to allow the Government to investigate suspected activities of terrorist and serious criminals have been cast so broadly and handed to so many branches of Government that Poole Council has used them to snoop on the parents of the 3yr old child for what is by any measure a petty cause.

So what are we to believe? When Jackie Smith stands up in future and assures everyone that thier data is safe with the Government what are we to believe? Are we to trust that the powers and data now held on us by the Government will only be used for thier intended and stated purposes, or should we assume that all these assurances are just a mechanism to persuade us to hand it all over before then using it all freely for any future purpose without opposition?

This should be a blow for all those simpletons who see the ID Card & NIR as a panacea for all our criminal, terrorist and identity problems. We only have Government's promise that the scope of use of the identity card & NIR will not creep, we are supposed to trust all these Government employees to access and use thier powers responsibly, and not snoop, use the data for personal purposes, or sell it on to marketing companies.

Cases like this prove that the Governments assurances aren't worth the paper thier printed on. More to the point the law is drafted so badly there is neither legal protection or redress available to us. We cannot accept further extension of Government powers or the introduction of the NIR in these circumstances - it would be like posting all your personal details to a 419 scammer.

Unbelieveably stoopid

I can see it now :-

"You must show me your tits in the interests of National Security. The procedure says you must comply"

Only in America eh... they'll be pulling people's fillings out next...

Time to change, Microsoft

What we are seeing here is simply madness.

Microsoft is a vast organisation, with some of the best budgets, people and talent in the business. They've been working on developing Vista for years (and longer if you count the underlying infrastructure), have access to some of the best testing facilities (not to mention a huge beta-testing user base) and active 'partnerships' with most of the biggest names in the business.

And yet... and yet even now they are unable to productionise an operating system which will operate with even common 'partner' hardware, appears to have been insufficiently tested to the point where an upgrade wipes existing configurations from the PC, and publishes a list of incompatible software and drivers which is thick enough to hold a door open with.

All of this points to a model which is simply too complex, with too much code and too many functions to be able to be tested and implemented successfully. This is, in my view, supported by the fact that from my perspective Vista doesn't fundamentally deliver any user substantial user functionality beyond that which was (is) available in Windows XP. That is also one of the key reasons why businesses are refusing to migrate.

Microsoft needs to do the following.

a) Simplify the operating model of Windows, and the code - fast. They just can't maintain it any longer.

b) Simply accept that the days of high growth & earnings are over now. Income is simply not going to be what it was during the previous 20 years. Microsoft must change, and it must reduce it's expectations, adapt and become a smaller company to meet the future.

c) Microsoft has to accept that the world is not only saturated with PCs, but more importantly it's userbase is now saturated with functions they don't use or understand, and no longer need (or want to pay) for even more "stuff". In the world of mainstream consumer electronics, people need simpler and easier to use OS which simply works and works well. Apple's Leopard OS is streets ahead in this respect. Vista is gimmick-laden and yet still carries too many bugs and incompatibilities to be accepted either in the home or business as an upgrade.

d) Microsoft's development effort should concentrate on the boring, unsexy task of making thier product work. They have to get Vista simplified, completely and thoroughly tested and work with third party developers to improve compatibility of apps & drivers. It's not glitzy or cutting edge work but it needs to happen as Vista is just a disaster for such a 'mature' product.

e) A simpler (but better) product might also ship more boxes. People and business aren't ready to go out & buy dual-core or better kit simply to allow Vista to work. Those days are also over now. Vista has damaged hardware sales, and that clearly won't be tolerated with the next software.

f) Microsoft need to spend a bit of time in the real world. Masses of people are not going to download a 484Mb service pack (even on free broadband) which is full of bugs, and risks thier data & systems through insufficient, compromised or lazy testing.

He's doomed and he knows it.

Looks like Ken's been advised he's going to lose this one in court, hence his need for threats.

I wonder if Porsche can get a court date before the London elections? That will spice the story up a bit.

Appalling

How ironic that our Government is prepared to pay the £10million cost of RIchard Branson's failed bid for Northern Rock, and yet at the same time is butchering science funding in this way.

A plague on New Labour's ignorant, uninspirational, second rate house.

All outta bubblegum...

"I came here... to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum..."

- Roddy Piper, They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

The price of progress...

Although the internet has grown exponetially since I first started using it in 1995 I read articles like this and wonder that the web really was a much better place to be ten years ago than it is now.

Sure there's more content, broadband video & radio streaming content abounds & stuff but it's arguable that the web has suffered in other ways not only as the corporates have moved in, but also as politicians now feel the need to exert more and more control over what people can do online.

One of the key attractions of internet use remains the freedom to browse independantly, freely, privately without anyone looking over your shoulder or trying to censor, analyse or channel. The recent reaction of MrSpace users to that company's attempt to tamper with that axiom and use personal information to generate marketing income should serve as a warning to ISPs in this case.

If people start to believe that the the Government, foreign governments, advertising agencies and uncle Tom-cobbly are all inspecting thier usage, then the future not only for the internet, but freedom of thought is going to be pretty bleak.

Waste, waste, waste

In what way is this any kind of improvement on giving a child his/her GCSE certificates to prove to an employer that they have qualifications?

I've seen some bloody frivalous uses of IT initiated by this Government but this one seems to me to have been authorised simply as a way to piss a load of our tax money up the wall.

New Labour would try and computerise the building of sandcastles if it could find a contractor willing to take it on.