I'm really disappointed by their demise as a few years ago just after they had done the deal with Live Nation for the venues I really thought they were going to invent something innovative that could differentiate them from Amazon et al.

i imagined exclusive access to blocks of tickets via the high street outlets with aligned merchandising promotions instore in a way that could create an almost festival like atmosphere.

Make it special for people to go, make them need to go, capture them for something related when they are there and if you make it special enough, they will go back and want to pay for the bnefit of it.

they had the right venues, the right stores and the right expertise in the staff but unfortunately they never pulled any of it together so they just failed because they failed to evolve.

it's sad as I thought there was real vision and potential there but ultimately if they didn't do anything with it, death was inevitable.

the future ?

a bit of bluesky thinking but perhaps it will go this way -

mobile devices increase in computing power and become connectable to TVs wirelessly, for still/video playback, gaming etc, accessories connect to the mobile device via bluetooth or some related successor, turning the mobile devices into a home computer, console etc, storage is predominantly in the cloud with some local storage held centrally in the home for performance reasons. your preferences are held in the cloud and sync'd to whatever device you happen to be using at the time.

games, videos and apps are purchased predominantly online and sent to your home NAS as well as entitlement being sent to your cloud store, thats not much different to how the 360 handles content today.

I'd like to have all my stuff in a resilient environment in the cloud with stuff like pictures also held locally, I'd like my purchased content to follow me around during my life and through the different devices I use.

What'll be interesting I think will be the conflict between companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Tesco of this world when it comes to owning the platform - I've included Google due to Android, Amazon have the existing media sales channel and Kindle, Microsoft have experience of putting a multichannel footprint in the home and Tesco have a strong established multichannel model as well as a direct business and the advantage of their stores/food business.

And personally I don't think it is the mobile devices that is killing consoles, I think its more the cheap apps sold to tens of millions of people which are killing the traditional software pricing model.

Played original Elite on 5.25" floppy on the BBC Model B, worked my way up to Deadly after chasing a Fer De Lance for ages (and across universes IIRC).

Never again found the same experience in terms of richness and approachability despite trying all the various sequels as well as Privateer, X3 etc.

would love to see this done really well and don't really understand why no-one wants to back it !

@Justin 9

OC to 1.9Ghz sounds rather high, standard clock speed is 1.2 with OC to 1.5 or even 1.7 being v.common (mine is at 1.5 and with WebOS 3.04 is very fast/stable)

Are you sure you are running at 1.9 ?

They're not a bad bunch

I've known Steve and his team at ecrm for about 10 yrs and can vouch for this being anomalous behaviour

The ecrm senior consultants know their stuff (especially in ITAM and ITSM), they're well connected with leading companies and they've placed quite a few of my old friends/colleagues in good positions.

I'm also on their mailing list, I get emails semi-regularly which are well aligned to my skillset and are only addressed to me, if there is anything that's a really good fit then they always pick up the phone for a chat.

This could've happened to anyone, its a shame it happened to one of the good agencies and not one of the others who call me each week without having a clue of what they're talking about (names withheld but you all know a few like that).

@Georgees

Your suggestion with the teacher faking ID in front of a class is already a lesson performed at some London secondary schools.

and @all of those who think parents can just 'educate' their kids to be safe

teenage kids will listen to what suits them and then go off and do what they want to, they know everything and they know best and they'll often push whichever bioundaries they are provided with just for the hell of it.

I'm not by any means perfect but unmonitored use of a computer and a lecture about internet safety is not going to stop kids from exposing themselves to situations you'd rather they avoided.

Inadequate controls

I am a parent and I implement strict controls on my kids use of technology, I monitor everything and have a complete ban on social networking, my 9 yea old is not allowed independant access to email, I monitor my 14 yrs olds mail box and her use of IM type applicatons, as a general rule she is told not to put anything on the computer unless she is happy for me to see it.

I get a lot of pushback against this parenting policy as it is far stricter than that implemented for any of their friends, why is this ?

- We have an uneducated general public, being pushed technology through the newspapers, the supermarkets etc. whilst being told by their governments that 'everyone gets online'.

Kids meanwhile are being encouraged by their schools to perform research online.

Major vendors push open operating systems with no controls to stop kids getting into socia;l networking etc.

This is worse than letting them watch 18 DVDs etc as we are allowing them access to an unmoderated, unrestricted environment, with absolutely no adequate control.

I think the IT industry is creating an impossible job for uneducated parents to deal with by not giving them tools which are safe for their kids to use, we cannot as an industry then blame the parents for not dealing with the problems that we have created through our own inadequacies.

Trending ?

The big enabler for high flexibility is making the workloads very portable, that's accomplished by virtualisation (which these days is relatively easy).

That statement isn't meant to trivialise the scale of the supporting infrastructure as in order to do this properly I guess you need to have lots of very stanfardised, very responsive, very high capacity and very integrated technology, this is also quite obvious and although not easy, it's not 'magic'

Perhaps the magic ingredient is trending and predictive as oppose to reactive balancing of the workloads, this isn't my specialist area but isn't that the way the electricity companies work ?

PCW, gone but never forgotten

The first computer mag I ever had was a second hand down PCW from my aunt who I think at the time had an RM-380z and was a regular subscriber, I lived for my visits to her flat in Teddington and the armful of issues she'd saved since my last visit.

We went to a PCW show together at the Barbican, I'm not sure what year it was but I guess it was probably sometime around 80/81 as they were still selling the Atari 400/800 range, it's something I remember almost as vividly as the first time I saw Star Wars.

Over time I became a hardcore gamer, starting with Flight sim and 3D monster maze for my 16k ZX81, PCW became the only mag able to reliably support the ram pack during particularly heavy gaming sessions.

At some point thereafter I discovered issue one of a new gaming mag (C&VG) which caught my eye because of some very cool aliens on the cover, I think they particularly attracted me because my mum had stopped me reading 2000AD due to cool aliens when I was 8 (a few years earlier).

I think I read adverts for the Acorn Atom in PCW before the proton was developed and became the BBC Micro, I upgraded to the BBC from the ZX81 and never looked back especially after getting my 40/80 track switchable double 5.25" disk drive and a copy of Elite !

I'll always be grateful to PCW for introducing me to the world of computers, it always had some articles which were specialist but many were written in the way that a techno-savvy kid and his aunt (as well as already clued-up industry professionals) could learn a lot from.

Perhaps we haven't heard all of it

What if their principle was really "Don't be evil............yet !"

They don't actually have to do anything

I might be well off the track here but perhaps the most interesting strategy for Oracle would be to actually do nothing, instead they could just make lots of noise about how much they intend to do to support and extend MY SQL (and promote FUD via unofficial channels) - what better way to confuse and distract the open source community and their business clients, keeping it from being credible in the enterprise but at the same time using it to stifle any real open source opposition.

an obvious and sensible fix from Nintendo

32GB should be enough for anyone !

why not just drop the medical restrictions

there will be a lot of people out there with the capability to do this but who would not have passed the USAF entry medical, why not reset the medical bar to remove the bits that are now irrelevant and allow them to train as drone pilots ?

Surely that is better than trying to get the gung-ho athletic types to spend their lives behind a VDU ?

Second life is great because...

It has done more than any other environment to advertise the potential of virtual world technlogy : recruitment fairs, small meetings, large scale conferences, scientific prototyping are just a few of the uses that it has been put to.

Imagine what people could do with more sophisticated design tools, a better security model and some integration with enterprise collaboration tools such as Sametime or Livemeeting or from a social perspective imagine if it was integrated into something like Facebook ?

@Stuart

they probably couldn't make a deal with Scrabulous as they'd already sold video game rights to EA

@Adam

It's all very well to spend money keeping people happy but surely the time to spend to this degree is after you have something that works and is making money (ie after the people have proved they are worth it).

It seems irresponsible and just plain bad business sense to use speculative investment designed to help the company develop it's product line to pay for personal trainers & luxury treats across the workforce.

Just try pitching the suggestion on Dragon's Den and see what sort of response you get.

Headphones

I can't stand in-ear headphones and I bought the predecessor to this Sennheiser set, they are brilliant !