What after this?

Google Monacle, as approved by Chris Eubank?

Should have sent in ED209

He doesn't piss about, just fires a gazillion rounds of lead into the would be perp, asks questions later. Just don't ask him to "do" stairs.

"Someone call a Goddamn paramedic!"

Careful!

The dude moderating this is called Phil Mitchell, so if you are having trouble distinguishing real life from soap operas, you might get two sweaty, balding cockney types coming around your house to give you a good old fashioned knuckle dusting. That being said, didn't one of them call the police in real life when his ex-wife beat him up? Hmm..quaking in my boots now? Not so much.

Oh, and +1 for Google Currents, great suggestion for whoever said it.

So I take it...

..Apple Maps is still shafted then?

Oh well. Mwah ha haaaaaa....

There you go again..

..with your use of the pejorative "bumpkin" term, you bunch of 1970's, bullying, burning cross tossing bigots.

Ah, on the other hand, who cares? Those bothered, go outside and breathe in the air. Hurry back in though, the infamous "Max as Jimmy Savile" episode of the Tweenies is about to start!

Careful now..

If you go round calling folks "Bumpkins", you'll get someone on with a stick up their arse calling you a racist. Believe me, I've seen it happen!

Is there anyone left..

..who gives a shit about new versions of Office? Won't be long now before the shrink wrapped product is largely dead. I use Google Docs for all my stuff now (except highly confidential stuff, obviously. Only a Hmong would put that in the cloud) and I find that all the buttons I ever use (bold, underline, bullet, justify) work just fine and do not require me to remove wads of cash from my trousers for the benefit of Billy G.

Hardly even news. I work for a 50,000+ employee company, and we're not even fully off XP+Office 2003 yet!

"They're Just Opinions"

I wouldn't worry too much about what Moody's say, it could be argued that they colluded with other financial institutions to cause the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008. Watch "Inside Job" with Matt Damon and see what I mean. People are trading stocks on what Moody's say, and the bottom line is, it's all collusion and bullshit. Moody's staff stated in official hearing that credit ratings are "just opinions", which is handy when your pension fund goes down the shitter.

Firing 100 staff to save £100m?

Wow, not surprised they're cutting back if they're paying their IT wonks £1m a year!

Not necessarily...

I'd have to say there's no silver bullet to this problem. I worked in the NHS many moons ago, and it seemed to me from afar that GP systems were poor value for money for the taxpayer. That being said, what is the alternative? All major vendors have canned products at the drop of a hat when sales are struggling or they just don't think it sexy anymore, regardless of how wedded you are to it and where it leaves you when the lights go out.

The only thing to do is find some kind of middle ground, meaning if you do get shafted either by a vendor or the in house systems get canned because of internal NHS politics, make sure your data is in a format in which it can be easily transported from A to B.

Not defending private enterprise in the slightest, but if you offer criticism you also need to offer constructive suggestions.

"We can't boil an ocean?"

Surely a new one from the business lexicon of bullshit? Why can't management speak plain English anymore?

Apples vs Oranges?

I'm not sure there's too much to be learned from this report, after all, how we do biz in the UK is markedly different than how we do it than the Germans say (and I'm not getting political on your ass here) and certainly the BRIC countries. Maybe we don't virtualise as much, but of all the customers I see with "legacy" systems, they work, they're cost effective and they're reliable. In this economy, you'll need a better reason to "innovate" when systems are already good enough.

As regards Mexicans downloading all sorts, might this be because they take a slightly more ahem..."relaxed" view on licencing? Never been to or worked in Mexico, but I doubt with all their internal strife (kidnappings, gangs and drug culture) that much of the national budget is spent on software licencing compliance, a la FAST.

Move on, nothing to see here...

2012?

Don't you mean 2022 in Qatar?

CDS's

Good article Tim, some interesting thoughts there. I would however disagree with your comment that Credit Default Swaps were "that system worked for a decade". That it "worked" is a stretch, I'd probably argue that the only reason they went on so long is because there was a bit more liquidity in the system, hence it sort of hid the problem until the liquidity ran out. Fundamentally though, it's a flawed concept that got swept along in the euphoria.

For those interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend "Inside Job". It's only 90 minutes long, and it will make your f**king bloody boil.

I would have thought this would have been more appropriate..

...for a carrier such as Aer Cunni-lingus?

No?

Coat please, goodnight! ;-)

Shame Alec Guinness Still Isn't Around..

..we could have hired him to wear a robe and wave his hand at the screen saying "this isn't the electrical retailer you're looking for"..

It's Bono's fault anyway

He clicked his fingers again and God picked Steve. Probably.

Count Eccleston Out

By his insistence on using his Salford accent for all roles (not that there's anything wrong with that mind). Can you imagine him at the Apple keynote saying "To get your tunes, you have to use t'clickwheel"?

Time for the obvious response

Kapoor's Tower is a vertical pile of shit that just doesn't fit architecturally. Just sayin'.

My 8 year old could have designed something 10 times as good for a fraction of the price. With his hands tied behind his back. And a blindfold on. And drugged. Holding a crayon with his toes.

"giant fuck-off web proxy"

+1

The joys of the English language!

And in other news...

Bear shits in woods, Dolly Parton sleeps on back, Bobby Charlton tips hairdresser. Did it need a survey to reveal the country's apathy to 3D? HD is only just becoming mainstream because the content is there, who wants to sit in front of a telly looking like Ray Charles?

Now when Babestation 3D starts, I might change my mind ;-)

Oh the irony!

Politicians telling someone else they're not fit for purpose! In the words of the great Edmund Blackadder, I'm glad I'm wearing my corset, otherwise I'm sure my sides would have split with the laughter!

"Scots say domain will pay for itself"

Loosely translated as "let's get the stupid f**king English to pay for this too!"

Get a life, Al.

Fuck off, Al. Instead of patronising us with questionable climate change mumbo jumbo, why not do something infinitely more useful and more immediate like sorting out those reckless pricks on Wall Street?

Kids would do a better job

Dunno about anyone else, but I'm sick of these financial fuckwits spunking someone else's cash chasing stupid dreams. We could do worse than get a bunch of kids in to look at the world's finances using their in built brutally honest appraisals of everything in life.

"You want us to spend money we don't have? That's stupid!"

What's this guy's secret?

Hoovering up piles of cash and not apparently too effective at what he does, looking at past articles. I'm clearly in the wrong game!

Dave Limp?

Is that his porn star name? Haw haw!!!

Damn statistics?

Yeah, but how many hits do Google and Bing/Microshite get from default home pages of web browsers?

Everything in moderation, dear friends

Most things in small doses won't cause too much harm - drinking, exercising, smoking, masturbating etc. Still, attempting them all at the same time probably isn't a bright idea.

"Journey to the cloud"?

I'm sick of hearing such vacuous and pretentious bollocks. You need to have a word with yourself, mate.

Dixons?

And a senior staffer for Dixons is the best candidate to perform this task how?

Step forward The Stath

I would have thought Jason Statham will get in there somewhere, as he's contracted to Lionsgate for some stuff, and he's a bit cockney and well, has got typecast kicking people around as a bit of a geezer.

Like others, I doubt it'll see the light of day, and if it does, it'll most likely be shite. Still, one from my very young days, so a bit nostalgic none the less ;-)

Here's hoping...

Attachmate can get rid of the dead wood on the Novell board and start making waves again with their software stack. It's never been about the technology, but the fact that Novell are classed as "legacy". Let me tell you they're not, many of their solutions are as good as, and in many cases, better than the opposition in that field.

I have a little insider knowledge as a Novell partner, and I have a good feeling about the Attachmate deal. Still, couldn't be too much worse now, could it?

Cloudy Nonsense

Anyone else think this cloud thing is a load of old bollocks? No? Just me?.....

Oi, Sony and News International!

Sky Player on PS3, please. Tout suite, there's good chaps. Sick of my Xboxed son giving me gyp over it!

Looks like

a Velux window to me!

Well that's the first part over...

..as someone who works for a Novell Partner and so therefore coat-tails on the company's success (or lack of it), I'm glad this bit is over. I'm sick of all the conjecture over the months as to where Novell was headed, so now it's private again, that might actually work out better. Novell's problem has never been the products, they're all sound and as good as (and mostly better ) than MS's equivalents. The problem is and has always been their shitty management. I hope Attachmate is a bit better at pushing said portfolio along than Ron H and his useless bum chums..

As for the MS angle, I'm told it's to do with the convenants they signed a while back about suing each other's customers, rather than anything of any great note. I doubt that Novell will just hand over Unix/Linux to MS after all of the SCO shenanigans!

Another vote for Gauntlet here!

"Valkyrie is about to die!!" - cue zillions of 10p's in the slot to try and get more health. Somehow whacking the square button on a PSP to the same end isn't quite as much fun...

So many jokes!

Oooh oooh! Where to go where others have not already tread? It seems that all the jokes about extras, credit cards etc. have already been done, so there isn't much left, except maybe:-

- You need to put a pound/euro in the door slot when you go into the data centre (non refundable)

- When IT arrives in the morning, they play musical chairs and sit wherever they can on a first come, first served basis (unless they've paid for priority desking)

- ID swipe card not working, Paddy? That'll be 50 Euro please

I'm sure I also read somewhere a while back that O'Leary had wall sockets removed so that staff couldn't charge their personal mobiles on Ryanair's expense. I imagine this is true. He's a chancer, that guy....

Not forgetting...

The Wankdorf Stadium in Austria, though I notice HuwLewis kind of beat me to it. Still, he always did have "The News", eh?

Ubuntu 10.04 kicks openSUSE's ass!

I work for a Novell partner, and I don't like openSUSE or SLED. Having used Ubuntu 10.04, Novell/SUSE need to take a long hard look at what Canonical have done with limited resources and hang their head in shame.

Where openSUSE is buggy, bloated and suffers from a lack of project focus and terminal infighting (GNOME vs KDE crew), Ubuntu turns out a lean, clean and polished distro that takes ideas that work from other places and make them work in a Linux environment (Software Centre with App Store type functionality, online updates, free (and paid for) Ubuntu One for cloud based backups, Nice toolbar integration for Facebook, PlaywithLinux etc. All slick, quick and reliable. Oh, and free.

10.04 has really raised the bar for me.

Dickhead alert!

"This is not a non-serious issue" ?

Plain English please, you pretentious dickhead!

It should be the dog's bollocks...

...as the Dear Leader gets credit for inventing everything over there (apparently he's done 18 holes of golf in 57 or something stupid), he will have invented Linux and so therefore will be the best thing since...well that nasty concrete hotel they're just getting round to finishing in the capital!