Re: Windows 8 task manager?

Well, everyone wants a pretty task manager, don't they? Personally, I always want to be visually dazzled and inspired while forcing my unresponsive applications to shut down. I hope it comes in that special shade of purple - you know, the colour of someone's vomit after drinking red wine - that we are seeing in all the pictures.

Re: expect the howls of dismay from users trying Windows 8 for the first time to quieten eventually

They won't have to wait 5 years. Within nine months, that fuck-ugly abortion of an interface will look about a 'hip' and 'groovy' as one of Jimmy Saville's old shirts, and Microsoft will be struggling to rush a new de-Metroised Windows 9 out to market.

Re: So you tell all your suppliers to take a pay cut or fuck off

I wouldn't cry too much for them. Many of the 'suppliers' concerned have names like 'Microsoft', 'Oracle', 'IBM', 'HP', 'VMWare' - basically a shooting gallery full of all the bastards you'd like to do this to, yourself.

In part, it has been prompted by a 'supplier' approaching Northgate and demanding license fees for software sold to the company in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and allegedly still in use. It's basically up to NIS to prove that the software isn't in use, and it is therefore not liable. (This supplier approaches NIS, and several other ex-customers, every few years, with this jolly little scam.)

No naming names, of course, because that would be naughty - and those affected will already know who I'm on about.

Re: IT Giant?

Northgate has some business in the Public Sector, (notably every UK police force) but while these are large portfolios they lack the profits of the real money, which comes from private companies - many of them multinationals. That means Airlines, Insurance, Phamaceuticals, Motor Industry, the European arms of an Internet Search company whose name eludes me...

You may not realise this, because its offerings are often repackaged as those of its own clients (i.e. banks, mostly - think of business accounts that come with services bolted on). The outcome, however, is that Northgate is now directly responsible for managing the pay of 1 in 3 of the UK population (that definitely means some of you, reading this). So, it's a fairly big fish.

@Obviously! and Maxson

Indeed, they don't just rebrand Foxconn kit* since, in this case, we're talking about a laptop - which means it was probably made by Quantacom, in Taiwan, rather than Foxconn.

So, sometimes they rebrand Quantacom kit.

*Nor are they the only ones, since Amazon Kindles are also 'Foxconn kit', and Xbox 360s and Nintendo Wiis are 'Foxconn kit' - in the sense of actually having been made at Zhengzhou Technology Park, in Henan. Strictly speaking, large portions of my Samsung Galaxy S2 are 'Foxconn kit', but since it was assembled at a different plant, in a different country, that particular droid probably isn't the Foxconn you're looking for.

And if you're reading this on a high-end laptop there's about a one in three chance it's actually Quantacom kit.

Re: Energy / Power isn't complicated

To be sung to the tune of 'Ilkley Moor':

Power is the rate of doing work(doing work)

And energy, the ability to do work

Work is the distance, times the load

Work is the distance, times the load

And power is measured in watts

And Energy's measured in joules

And watts are joules per second

Once learned, never forgotten.

Re: As posters have pointed out...

Actually, I think it's the fact that Ferrari are largely owned by Fiat, is what pays the RnD bill.

Beware car analogies.

That point was made in the article

The point, implied, was that selling to Jeff Bezos isn't like selling to Tim's Hardware store. Bezos will sign five year exclusive bulk order deals, that give a 0.01% profit margin.

The message is: get in the queue to pitch to Jeff, or start work on your CV.

Buy what you want

The UN reckons that 80% of the world's cargo shipping is carried on ships that would be declared unfit for service if inspected, and are manned by crews that may not have seen land, or, in some cases, even daylight, in several years. Every month ships are lost whose crew manifestos were probably false. The only thing the families ever know, is that the money stops coming back.

Buy what you want: if you're alive, today, and you've bought something handled by a slave. We forget that it is only a few decades, since companies in the developed world were compelled to pay women (and by extension, everyone else) the same wage for the same task. These liberties are easier lost than they are won.

Re: Realistic in one sense

For a time I knew Harry Lange, through his wife Daisy (while she studied archaeology as a mature student at my University). He didn't talk too much about his time working with Kubrick, as he was generally a rather modest man, but he did say, in general, that he and the other NASA artists, hired for 2001, took their inspiration for how the outside of the spaceships should look, from their years of drawing and painting concept art for countless proposed NASA rovers, landers and deep space probes. ("A good picture could make congress open it's wallet" he once said.) He commented that "we may have over done it", since - at the time we were talking - hardly anyone had dared to present a movie spaceship, which did not feature that same, dull, slightly grubby-looking, matt grey exterior, with ports, panels, grills, handles and ladders all over it.

I've seen some claim that Lange 'designed' the Millennium falcon (it's a claim he did not make in my presence) but I do recall, he did say it was he, who convinced Lucas to stick a comms dish on it - as a homage to the comms dish on the Discovery, from 2001. Lucas had complained that people with faster than light travel would not bother communicating using radio, but Harry had replied, is his usual pragmatic manner: "George, who says its a radio dish? A parabola is the best way of focusing any kind of radiation into a beam, isn't it?"

Harry's love of wearing tweed flat caps, on set (although, by the time I knew him, he'd moved onto trilbies) is often said to have been an inspiration for the space suit designs of 2001 - a claim Harry certainly repeated, to me on one occasion, when he showed me a Set Crew's commemorative book, that was presented to all the people who had worked on the film, after it's success - pointing out the photo of himself, wearing such a cap on set.

However, a personal favourite - in cutting costs, to produce props - was the muffin trays, from Dark Star. "If only we'd thought of that!"

The map appears to be a form of "3D Buzzword Bingo".

What are the people under the separate entries for "VB.NET" and "C#" doing, that the people doing ".NET" aren't, for instance - and why does it merit 3 different salary ranges? Perl.NET, presumably.

In my area, apparently, the VB.NET people are the most expensively-rewarded of the three, but all three groups would be better off if they were doing thing called "Cisco" instead, while the plain ".NET" people wouldn't take much of a hit if they just jacked it in and specialised in "HTML".

English Electric Canberra

Probably a Mk 20. My dad flew these things. They were used to tow targets for training Bofors gunners, but my dad mostly recalls the gunner's preference for simply shooting at the plane.

This is probably an Australian air force one.

It's a rotating distance-monitoring antenna

Part of the Pirs docking unit on the Zvezda module that TMAs and ATMs use to dock with ISS. Because the Kurs docking system is made in the Ukraine, by what is now a commercial competitor to RKA, the entire docking mechanism is under review. Pirs, itself, is set for replacement under this ongoing scheme, and will thus become the first section of the ISS to undergo decommissioning since the station was built.

The readout for the KURS (which is mentioned repeatedly in the commentary) can be seen in the bottom right under the Cyrillic letters 'KYPC'.

He works for the City of London

You know? That powerhouse of intellectual talent and cocaine-testing that put this country in "Glad we're not Greece" bucket. You only have to look at how well all the people he's hired, so far, have shaped up, to see what a keen eye he has for weeding out life's failures.

Worth bearing in mind that they _sell_ them for £125. It probably _costs_ them substantially more, to make, than this. As with the Kindle, they'll be betting on selling content, to make up the difference. In fact, I'm guessing that Jeff Bezos is probably hoping Fire users DON'T just sit around surfing the Web, watching free videos on YouTube and playing games that Amazon didn't sell them.

This isn't just going to be a walled garden. It's going to be one where you have to pay, to sniff the flowers.

Even better than that

The firewall will also prevent all your servers from connecting to the vendor, and receiving any software updates. So when your network get compromised, all the wonks who run the firewall can blame it on the vendor, for having shonky server software, and thus keep their jobs!

Dumbledore and Dumbleder

It shows how times have moved on, however. If you'd told the Northern Ireland police, twenty years ago, that you'd accidentally started a fire while trying to make something using fertiliser, you might have risked a good deal more than jail time!

@stoneshop

Yeah, I did correct the altitude snafu: I typed without thinking.

However, your assertion about getting 5kms from the ground with a 'decent' rocket... Well, it's true, you can do it, but you're actually talking about something like an Aerotech M1550 Redline, or similar - which is a VERY decent rocket.

In fact, it's the most powerful type of rocket licensed for civilian use in some countries; and you launch from solid ground (i.e. not a balloon) to get over a mile of altitude, using a proper rocket shell (i.e. something capable of sustaining 8-12Gs of acceleration all the way). Take a look at the videos of Steve Jurvetson (of venture capitalism fame), to see what a real 'mile high' rocket looks like. You cannot launch one of them from any kind of balloon.

The Register will certainly need to be something like an ACPC-fueled burner, to even ignite, in a near vacuum - and Aerotech are a likely candidate, to provide such a charge - but the actual rocket or rockets are going to be nothing like on the scale of a Redline. It would tear both the plane and the balloon to shreds.

Don't worry

In desperate last minute bargaining, congress have agreed a new ceiling to the "United Stated dead Puppy Mountain".

Crisis averted. Keep Googling.

Then why launch upwards, at all?

Your last balloon reached 89km. Solid fuel rockets would give, what, in comparison to that? Another couple of hundred meters?

Launch the thing sideways for maximum cross-range velocity and best glide, when the inner atmosphere is met with.

Make that 30km, but still...

Still begs the question

Yes, you do have to wonder

How far would MS DOS have got, in this sort of climate?

Long may it last

You think the Windows machines are bad, you should see how opaque the mainframe business is in this regard. Big Data users used to like to point to how they could get the maximum workload out of their gear by running at top speed all of the time, but with virtualisation, it is becoming possible for everyone to do that, to some extent, without paying out hand-over-fist for it.

(Of course the mianframe business is canny, and what will happen, is that IBM will take all of your cheap commodity servers and stick them in one big, chest-freezer-sized box, spray paint it mat black and sell it as a "Z1000", for a smidgen under a million dollars, with a label on the front saying "also runs Linux".)

So you fix the search

Poor search is a computing problem, not a economic one. Saying that the search is bad, and thus efforts based on search are inherently bad, is a bit like saying you should ditch your database and go with lots of little flat text files because you can't work out how to optimise your queries.

Apple's app store is a train wreck, but not because of it's one-stop approach. It shoots itself in the foot through not actually being a proper free market. That doesn't mean the model is wrong. It just means that deliberately limiting the range of goods you sell, for a variety of commercial, ideological, or, occasionally, down-right geeky reasons, is bad business.

Google's is a disaster because they don't actually want to do any organising in the first place.

The "small shops" approach simply offloads the job of sorting and categorising everything, to other people - all these supposed enthusiastic little shops. However, shopping on the high street, is something everyone seems to think everyone else should be doing: elderly spinsters in thick grey stockings, perhaps, keeping the village store alive by cycling in, once a week, to buy butter in weighed quantities.

But even when it is done, you know what actually happens: they go to the specialist store; seek advice from the knowledgeable and enthusiastic sales assistant; work out which product will be best for them; then go home and buy it on Amazon. Intel's "small shops" approach is an attempt to split what profits do exist, two ways, in hopes that this can still undercut the one-stop shop. Every app vendor will still know, however, that they'd better make sure their product was available on the one-stop place, because that's where most of the punters will actually buy from.

Why even have your own store, when referrals are often simpler and less hassle, anyway? The referrals business is growing and will probably become the model to be followed, by anyone wanting to make money from a specialist recommendations system.

We also need a definition of "foreseeable future"

Since this is something that was actually happening 12 billion years ago, its forseeable future, is our seeable past. Either way, we can presumably presume that its forseeable future is less than 12 billion years, or else this sort of freaky stuff would still be going on in our own near-vicinity, today.

Not really

The point is, that, these days, you can sign up to some perfectly useful and obvious service, like a monthly video hire service (for instance, naming no names) - money exchanged for a tangible product, and all that - only to discover that your service provider has chosen to share the data - which you originally gave them for a fairly reasonable purpose (send me the videos I've paid you for) - with some "social networking site" that you have been actively avoiding for the last few years.

Online retailers are in danger of colluding in trying to drive us into a form of interaction most of us have no interest in, and have actually avoided - and seem blind to the damage they may ultimately do, not only to their own business, but the entire idea of online retailing as a whole. If you can no longer buy a chair from Argos, say, without worrying that you'll end up with a Facebook account being set up for you, then, you may end up yearning for the high street.

In some ways, it is the fact that the betrayals of our data come from such banal sources, that is most offensive. I once bought a hand-cranked paper shredder, made by Draper (£5.99), from a tools store in Stockport, online.

(Yes: I bought from the lowest budder, just like the MOD. No: I've never been to Stockport, and have about as much interest in going there, as people from Stockport probably have, in visiting my village.)

What could be more run of the mill than that, you may wonder? Except I now get weekly invites to 'follow' them on Facebook. Yes: a DIY store in Stockport... they want me to "follow" them on Facebook!

I never opted into that. Where does it say Facebook has a right to know of my preferences for hand-cranked paper-shredding machines? Or, indeed, Mancunian suburban tool shops. Is the fact I even WANT to own a hand-cranked paper-shredding machine, perhaps, in some ways regarded as evidence of the fact I need to be encouraged to "share" more?

On the plus side, it is quite a good hand cranked paper shredder. I particularly like the icons, warning you of the dangers of trapping your hand in it, while you crank away at it (presumably using the other hand).

Get to the point: the 1% thing is a smoke screen.

It was Britain's biggest selling news paper. You really think that didn't matter to him? Your arguing business logic over a guy whose business is anything but logical.

It's contrarian revisionism

...And Andrew is nothing, if not, both a contrarian (often for its own sake) and a revisionist. The problem with revisionism is that it provides almost no context, as to why people at a given time, reacted as they did, based on what they knew, and is thus somewhat futile, from a historical point of view. In the 80s, Rupert could lean on you and obliterate you. End (or start) of story (depending on how they felt, and how many column inches it looked like you could be milked-for).

The fact that, today, we could beat the 1990s News International war machine with a few Google searches, both diminishes how powerful the fact-and-slander-gathering power of News International was, back then, and reflects how mighty us modern folk think we are, with all our self-empowering "Googling"(TM)[verb][citation needed].

If you weren't the one holding the sling, then you're not David: you were one of the ones paying Goliath protection money - which is part of what I think Andrew is getting at. A great many minnows from the churnalism fish tank are now feeding on a corpse that was actually felled by an adversary much more recognisable to Murdoch, than many now acknowledge: good old fashioned research-based journalism - the stuff that is so unfashionable, these days. The crowd all cheers - and all assume the solution must have been crowd-sourced.

But to deny (as Andrew is) that Goliath was ever Goliath, is just an excuse for not being the one holding the sling - and, sorry, that's inexcusable. Find something else to revise, Andrew. I'm sure there's a verse missing out of a song, somewhere, that deserves your attention.

He's notorious for micro management

Haven't you read up on his management style? The fact the News of the World made up less than 1% in financial terms, is itself pretty telling, given how much he used to obsess about it. It's not about income, with Rupert.

In fact, within twenty minutes of Rupert's statement during testimony, that he would phone the editor off the News of the World "maybe once a month", we had Piers Morgan (of all people) asserting that he would get phoned at least once a week, by Rupert, for upwards of twenty minutes, to discuss what news stories they were running with.

The 1% thing is a smoke screen: The Times loses Rupert money, but it's still a flagship product. The telling thing about the old man, is how much more the influence mattered to him, than the money. It doesn't matter where you think he got it, or whether you think he got it without merit: he still loved having it and trying to use it.

He has it all arsey-versey, as usual

He's identified that Murdoch is where he is, today, partly because he doesn't get how the media has changed in the last decade. However, he forgets to consider what it was like before that change happened.

Sure, Murdoch was doomed because the world would move on and he would eventually be too old to move with it, but hindsight is a great thing. It's like saying that, ultimately, we didn't need to worry about the KGB, because the Warsaw Pact was set to implode under its own weight.

Murdoch's empire is a stupid, ridiculous thing, from another age; but so were many things. The past is another country, but it was a real place, and we all lived there.