Speechless (it's safer)

Somewhere the ghosts of Beria and Eichmann are laughing and laughing and laughing...

The Shard

Anyone else think that the Shard should really have the Eye of Sauron held in its spiky bits?

No surprise

It's not really much of a shock, how many people need a fully functioning PC as opposed to a portable media consumption and communication device? Add a bunch of useful apps and browser-based interaction and I reckon that's about most peoples needs satisfied.

Crash free zone

I'm running three Windows machines and one MacBook Pro and can't remember when I last had a crash on any of them. The occasional self-recovering video driver glitch and the odd long hang when editing big videos, but otherwise no problem with either OS. However, as has already been pointed out, with top of the range machines with plenty of ram and decent internal parts/drivers, you'd expect a decent amount of stability. Oh, and no BSOD since replacing Vista with W7 a few years back.

Not for the likes of us

No matter what we (I'm including most of y'all by proxy) think of the idea, we are hardly the target market. Just by reading the Reg and posting here we are almost automatically disassociated from the majority of mobile/Facebook, whatever, users. If by re-skinning an interface you make it simpler for a large number of people to get what they want more easily, you may be on to something - ask Gates or the shade of Jobs. Assuming there are a few million dedicated Facebook on mobile users and the interface works well enough, there is no reason to think that it won't have some degree of success, whether we here like it or not.

He'll be missed

A great writer - possibly even more so when he uses the M. Apart from the fiction his non-fiction book, Raw Spirit, a trip round all the Scottish malt whisky distilleries, is great fun. Think I'll just go and read Excession for the nth time.

Untermenschen

It's a simple policy really. If the potential claimant (for whatever service) can't get online, they don't exist. They effectively become an unperson. As such, they can't add to the statistics or claim any money. From a government point of view it's a win-win situation.

Smelling a rat

Something similar happened at a place I was working. Our control panels were housed in a shipping container. One day we lost all power and a thin stinking smoke started coming out of the top of the door. naturally we didn't panic (much) and carefully opened the door....

Took us ages to find the fault. A rat had crawled up the main cable through the hole in the floor, put one of its tiny feet on a 440 volt bus bar and exploded. One foot print on the copper and singed body parts everywhere else behind the panels.

I can't comment...

... for once, I just can't, well, not without releasing a string of profanities that would shock a Navy Clearance Diver on a bender. There's just something about this bunch of clueless twits trying to sound technologically "down with the geeks" that just makes my skin crawl. (Although admittedly it's a good laugh - sort of like watching a drunken uncle trying to chat up bridesmaids at a family wedding).

"We need to tackle the digital divide, and this is a very good way of doing it."

Sure is, we'll make it impossible to claim benefits unless you have a computer and broadband of your own. (Don't try and use one in your local library, poor people don't need books so we've closed them all). What do you mean you can't afford a computer thingy? In that case you don't exist, therefor there is no digital divide, problem solved.

Cunning plan

My agents speak Cantonese instead of Mandarin....

Nicely summed up here.

http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/d/donovan/the_intergalactic_laxative.html

Cheap!

I used to work in Mayfair and there was a shop next to our offices that sold stuff that you could never imagine needing to people with more money than sense or taste. My favourite items were mobile phone covers (this is in 2000, so we're talking Nokia, Motorola, etc). How about one covered in black diamonds for £36,000? The best thing was that each was made for a specific model of phone, so when you wanted to change your phone, you just chucked the case and presumably purchased a new one.

"the core idea" of "real debate in depth". Yep, in 180 characters a time, that'll be really in depth then.

Already here

If you think about it, we already have "wearable computers". OK, they're in the form of smartphones and could be thought of as "pocketable", but for the sake of argument... The problem comes in the interface area. Do we want screens right in front of our eye(s) in the form of augmented reality glasses? How are we going to control them? Voice control has been the next big thing for as long as Virtual Reality. Mind control isn't yet sophisticated enough and may not be practical for fine control, e.g. text entry (the same applies to eye movement, gestures, etc).

I'd suggest that we're going to be stuck with two tier computing for a while yet, one for (mostly) consumption, which could be wearable and one with more "traditional" input methods for creation.

Destructive takeovers

The other form of takeover is the destructive one. If I (Megacorp plc registered Lichtenstein) feel threatened by a new upstart I can take them over, skim off any valuable IP, "redeploy" their human assets and sell off anything else worth selling. I win and the shareholders may well win because the competition has been neutered. Unrestricted capitalism naturally favours monopolies.

An advanced variation can be found if you look at what happened in Russia after the end of Communism. With a total lack of effective regulation you had a period of anarcho-Capitalism. Here the takeovers were carried out with extreme prejudice, eventually leading to huge monopoly companies which in turn became arms of the state.

Creating stuff

That's fine - everyone can buy their shiny new tablets while we sit in comfort producing the content for them on our nice ergonomic keyboards, facing our multiple screens, coding, drawing, editing movies, making games and writing away merrily and making all the money :-)

Post growth?

For some strange reason, the seasonal intake of excess booze has led our household to discuss growth and consumerism (we know how to party). We came to two conclusions:

1) There hasn't been anything new on the market for a while that has made us go "ooh, must have the precious". Sure, plenty of incrementally improved stuff, but nothing worth coveting.

2) We've got enough stuff and don't see why we should go into debt to fuel a consumer led boom that may put some growth back into the economy. Sorry, I know we're being selfish, but whatever.

If more people start thinking the same way, we start to break our present model of consumer led capitalism which is dependent on constant growth - at least in the West.

Far from just the internet, I've come across factual errors in paper-based books, sheer weirdness on some e-books owing to bad transcription (not entirely sure the transcriber's first language was English) and really bad errors in TV documentaries. I remember working as an advisor on a history one but was told by the directors assistant that he wasn't going to use a particular, absolutely critical source, because "that wasn't the story he wanted to tell". The end result was therefore complete bollocks and misrepresented the facts, but is now the "popularly" accepted version (if you get your history from TV that is ;-)

A Sad Loss

Orbit in peace

On the other hand...

Fanbois will never die out entirely. The whole thing would seem to me to be an extension of the human desire to belong to something. You might view it as a logical extension of youth cults (bikers, punks, hippies, mods, etc). Adults get to play too, religious sects, political parties, exclusive city clubs, etc. Of course, any group that you belong to is of course superior to any other group, you want to be one of the chosen, the holders of the secret knowledge, part of the exclusive bretheren.

In order to prove your loyalty and bolster your belief you may try to attack or convert the unbelievers, the stupid Windows users, the Capitalist lackeys or the heretical Protestants for example. It's just part of human nature and will probably always be so.

Tech tool box

Couldn't agree more - it's all about what you need to do, not what you do it on. For instance, this is being written on a Windows lap top, and a very fast and powerful one. It's used for most of my corporate applications. I'll soon transfer to a Mac to produce some video, because Final Cut Pro gives us the easiest method of doing so and it runs on Macs. The video will be uploaded to a bunch of Linux servers via a Flash inteface but in a format that can be viewed on any screen, tablet or smart phone. I have a Blackberry for the corporate push email and an old iPhone for personal use because it runs a couple of apps that aren't available for anything else.

The software our company produces is written on Windows machines but will run on Windows, Linux, Unix, Sun servers, etc.

It's all about picking the right tools.

Parkinson's Law

Apart from his most famous law, Parkinson also postulated that you could tell how well a company was going to do by its HQ building. He reckoned that a growing company was too busy doing money making stuff to worry that much about the building but moving into a palatial new one was the sign of impending stagnation and decline... No axe to grind, just saying....

Lots of stuff

ESA has a whole bunch of satellites up there, with a goodly number of planned misions on the way, so a radar makes sense. With those capabilities it might also make a good ballistic missile warning radar...

Did I miss something?

Somebody better tell the company I work for that software is dead - we sell nearly half a billion dollars worth a year. Selling software to consumers might be a little poorly, but that's only a fraction of the software market.

Inspired by GCHQ? Closed, secretive, techie.....

Post, Post Industrial

Perhaps the European population in general is the first society (barring certain demographics) to just go "meh" to new stuff. Perhaps they're cynical enough to run a cost benefit analysis on items like tablets. Obviously being broke really helps this process, but even among a lot of prosperous people I've started noticing a distinct reluctance to buy stuff just because it's "new". There's a lot of folk out there who won't replace a perfectly good CRT TV until it finally dies, who's iPhones are out of contract and who's cars are many years old. Of course, if we all did that the Capitalist system would collapse, but hey, whatever...