Re: Hmm!

>And after 3 months of signing on, the Jobcentre should pay at least a fair chunk of the mortgage interest.

Need to be careful here, as it may be more beneficial (both in terms of time and money) to claim tax credits. Basically, your best advisor is someone from the local 'sink' estate who knows their way around the system, they will also recommend you contacting the council to try and get your council tax reduced...

Re: @David

The real challenge with starting up a business once you're out of your 20's is that you generally have commitments which mean that every month a significant amount of money has to be found to pay the bills, plus having the family around isn't necessary conducive to focused working...

Obviously if you can get the business started and earning some money whilst you are employed by someone else, life is a little easier...

Re: Hmm!

>Savings are now dwindling fast. I reckon that I have three, maybe four months before the house will go on the market.

Given the current UK housing market I would be tempted to get the house on the market now, rather than in the autumn when the market normally slows down. Obviously if you get a job, you can always take it off the market.

Re: Like it or not the industry is changing

>we urgently need 22 year-old programmers fresh from uni and with zero life experience. Folks who don't know how to properly shave.

That was us back in the 80's!

Certainly the company I joined just after Uni. had much in common with Data General as described by Tracey Kidder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine ) and like the programmers at Data General, we matured into seasoned engineers and went on to do other things...

Re: Aged 41 I am worried reading this

Re: No hope for the over 40's seems to be what I am reading?

Yes and no! I suspect that the IT industry is probably still ahead of the crowd on this.

I would suggest that what is important is expectation setting and hence planning accordingly.

Given the level of redundancy at circa 50, I would advise planning for it. Which given that the government is expecting us to work until we're 70 isn't a stupid idea, because effectively what you are planning for is an enforced career break (potentially spanning several years) and potentially a need to retrain so that you can do something else until you formally retire.

Obviously, for some, circumstances will enable them to leave the plans on the shelf and have a more comfortable retirement...

Re: I really hope...

>By my mid 40s I want to be running a company

A bit late perhaps - all the focus and support is for young 'entrepreneurs' ie. people in their 20's ...

Good luck, the world and economics of IT start ups is significantly different now to what it was in the 80's.

Re: Lucky old Ireland

>Ireland must be making a mint from this - they still charge 12.5% corporation tax!

Eh? have you not been following the Apple disclosures - I suspect that Google are doing very similar and only pay 12.5% corporation tax on sales physically made in Ireland - the UK sales probably don't satisfy this criteria...

Re: Want to know why it is where it is now? @IHateWearingATie

A big disincentive to small operators is the differing taxation schemes that are applied to smaller operators but not to larger operators such as BT and Virgin Media and naturally favour the larger operators.

Another is that BDUK (and OFCOM) places no requirement on BT et al to use the services of the local broadband provider, which has a negative impact on the long-term viability of any local service provider.

Re: 2 Megabits per second?

"I can't begin to imagine just how much more expensive it would be to provide 10Mbps 'everywhere' in the UK."

I suggest going back to the work done prior to the start up of the BDUK project as it is all there in black and white.

A major discussion point was around setting the expectations around what could be achieved within a political timescale (ie. by 2015) without the government effectively funding the update of BT's network to (glass) fibre, to the detriment of all other players and potential players...

From memory the reason for choosing 2mbps was that this could be achieved over ~98% of existing last mile telephone circuits - the replacement of which is the most costly and time consuming and hence added several billion on to the costs. It also permitted BT to continue with it's self-funded FTTC deployment plans.

Obviously, we hope that by 2015 we will have FTTC across most of the country, which should permit a secondary update of the last mile...

Re: At Least VMS was GOOD @Eadon

>its b*st*rd offspring - WNT and it's ugly daughters

Says something about David Cutler - perhaps whilst he had the big idea's it needed the talents of others at DEC to shape them into something GOOD.

Re: Won't or actually can't, port?

"unless a white knight comes riding in from IBM, Oracle, or maybe even Dell"

Perhaps a black knight might persuade HP to hand VMS over - whilst it may still mean VMS is toast, it would mean that the black knight would now own the IPR that NT is drawn from...

Re: Open sourced?

Yes if HP really want to upset things then releasing VMS under open source would be a very interesting game play.

Without on-going source code and application development, VMS can only wither.

Re: ? @Tim Worstal 09:06

>But at some point those loans need to be repaid. Either out of US made profits, which will pay the US corporate income tax, or out of those foreign made profits, which will have to be brought into the US and will thus pay the US corporate income tax.

Unless the US system is vastly different to the UK system, there will be no US corporation tax to pay: servicing the loans is an allowable business expense, sufficient monies from oversea's can be brought into the US to service these loans - after allowing for expenses incurred in the US there is no US trading profit...

I expect to see more companies following Apple's lead, particularly given the substantial difference between corporation tax rates and the cost of borrowing money.

Re: Thankfully

It looks as if this framework agreement just applies to the 'Information Technology' category family in the Network Rail catalogue (http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/1542.aspx ), hence it will exclude signalling. I expect that also omitted from this agreement are the the major OEM hardware and software vendors that Network Rail uses.

Re: Valuables in your parked car? @AC parking car in dodgy areas

I found it useful to save people the effort of rummaging and used to dump the contents of the glove compartment on the passenger seat when I parked ie. make it look like the car had already received a visit...

Only once did this fail, because I had forgotten about the shopping bag on the back seat which contained my wet swimming gear...

Re: Only a matter of time.

>You don't want foolproof security on your car

For your average car, you want good enough security, so that there is a good chance the car is still there when you get back to it, but also if it does go missing you want to know that it is unlikely to re-appear any time soon and so the insurance will pay out.

Re: Thankfully

I would hope that Network Rail won't let these five anywhere near these operationally critical IT systems. As you say it is a niche market best served by maintaining the long-standing direct relationships Network Rail's experts already have with the few specialist companies/divisions who have been supplying these systems for decades.

This might also be a contributing reason as to why certain companies lost out.

One aspect that you missed in your thumbnail, is that these systems also had very exacting service levels to achieve, I seem to remember the basic requirement for the signalling IT systems was a 20 year working life and no class A failures during that time (computer hardware/software failure either resulting or could of resulted in a train crash). It was with some personal satisfaction several years back to see the retirement of a system I had designed nearly 20 years previously with a clean record sheet.

Re: Cloud Latency...?

I think AC was referring to real enterprise applications eg. Olympic results systems, airline reservations, etc. where the user interface doesn't need to be particularly fast, the backend has a lot of processing and co-ordination to do. Be interested in seeing a 'real' telco backend being put into the public cloud ...

Re: Good company though @Mike Richards

>I switched over to Xilo and haven't had a problem.

Only word of warning is do check which wholesale/LLU service they are using for your connection.

I see that Xilo are upfront about the services they use, some other ISPs you have to do a little digging and be prepared to ask the question ...

Re: Come on 150GB a month

It would be interesting to know which exchanges and services and whether this applied to subscribers connected to the O2/BE LLU or those who had to connect via a third-party LLU such as BT Wholesale.

One of the things about the O2/BE offering was that it didn't really differentiate between business and residential usage. So whilst 150GB might be a lot for a typical family to get through a small business could quite easily use this.

@ChrisM - the issue of 'Trade Dress' yet to be resolved

This will also be interesting, as whilst some Samsung devices did get packaged in a style that was very close to that used by Apple, the question is who actually saw this dress BEFORE they purchased and hence were confused? I don't remember there being shelves loaded with boxed Apple and Samsung devices in PC World, Tesco's etc. just waiting for people to pick them up - in the same way as these stores made a big feature of the Kindle, Windows, Office etc..

Re: Been Off for Weeks

>Am near Northampton, we have had practically no voice, text or data service for over 4 weeks now.

This morning is the first time I've had the dongle unable to connect to the mast (APN 3internet). In the past (and a little too frequently for comfort these last few weeks) I have noticed the DNS service have been a little unreliable.

Can't talk about voice/text/phone data services (these use different APNs to the dongles) as these services don't normally work in my village although Orange for voice/text does...

Mind you this outage just confirms the validity of having dual broadband suppliers for the home office - particularly as a 56k dial modem connection is probably no longer a realistic fall back - even though there are still some places where it is the only option available...

Re: Usability @Keithpeter

"Download Ubuntu LTS, burn it to a DVD or copy it to a stick, and install it with default options. Then use Ubuntu Software Centre to add GIMP and the Ubuntu Restricted Extras package"

Re: What is wrong with the following advice for 'general' users...

All of it!

For the 'general' user, I would strongly advise purchasing a Linux magazine and running the included Live disk. If they are happy with which ever Ubuntu/Linux distribution they settle on, it is then worth taking matters further and considering doing a HDD install along with sourcing all the various necessary peripheral drivers.

Yes loading a Live disk does take time, but it is significantly less and less frustrating than starting down the install path and hitting problems that could of been discovered by running the Live disk...

Re: Legally wrong

I think we need to be circumspect about Microsoft's IPR and how it may or may not impinge on Linux distributions today and in the future. Whilst utility and design patents have a limited life, we shouldn't forget about copyright, which doesn't have such a limited life.

Re: What's with this "Apple invented" BS? @Liam Proven

"You don't know your history."

Whilst I get the graphical parentage, I suspect we need to look at the CRT parentage where two schools of thought were at work: Firstly forms, which tended to put stuff across the top of the screen and had drop downs and secondly the keyboard/function key mapping, which tended to put the soft-functions at the bottom of the screen.

So whilst I would tend to agree about Win95 being the source in terms of GUI, in terms of layout design things do go back much further.

Re: Trevor Pott I'm not sure Microsoft *has* won.

"and the market for real "power users" is how big compared to the masses of average desktop lusers and home users....?"

Whilst I know it has been trendy for many years now to focus on mass market share and/or total numbers of users, we shouldn't forget that companies such as MS still need to make money.

I suspect that whilst the OEM consumer market sales account for the biggest in number, I suspect that the enterprise market accounts for a significant proportion of revenue - remember enterprise licensing is an annual license and not a for life license. So if you want to run those old systems on XP and W2K VM's you still need to keep paying the annual fee...

The question is whether MS can make the right noises to pacify the enterprise market - remember they've got until 2020 (when Win7 extended support ends)...

Re: I'm not sure Microsoft *has* won.

"There is nothing much wrong with Windows 8"

Well having installed Classic Shell and ModernMix, plus done some additional configuration, I would tend to agree the Win8 desktop is very similar to Win7 albeit at times some weirdness does occur eg. I installed a Flip camera last night and Win7 didn't need a reboot whereas Win8 did...

Re: keeping your skills nearer the edge

>"it won't happen to me because I'm someone who's prepared to focus on learning and keep my skills up to date as I go along"

Obviously, the joys of being in IT in your 40's & beyond still await you. Good luck in keeping your ever expanding skill set up to date and relevant to what you actually do - or are just banking on doing what ever you did in your 20's for the rest of your career?

Re: Reversed Ecosystem? @AC

Been out of data mining and n-cube/star datasets for a few years - just trying to think on the fly about what sort of things people do with an offline data set to justify having it on more than a few spindles and data mining and analytic's came to mind.

Re: A kind of Global Warming for the IT industry?

>Their developers honestly came to them and asked "Can't you just turn on the auto scaling feature?"(as if it was a switch) ... A CxO I can understand possibly saying that - but a developer?

No surprise to me. I've found over the years that many developers to be ignorant of the fact that the default single dev user/desktop install of a product they do to permit standalone dev and test doesn't always include the enterprise functionality and libraries that will be used when the product is deployed in operations, hence there is a high probability their code will break...

This knowledge/understanding has enabled me to very early in a project to ask the software dev team relevant questions so that they can avoid getting egg-on-the-face later on... [Aside: this doesn't mean that the dev's were/are wrong to install the dev product, only that they need to be aware of it's limitations and use their knowledge and skills to work accordingly.]

Re: Confort zone

>It's the difference between learning to ride a bicycle (if you can remember that far back) and riding one.

For the adventurous who wish to reconnect with the learning to ride experience I can recommend getting a unicycle; I suggest that moving to Windows 8 from any previous window's environment is similar - yes keep with it and you'll get used to it so that you don't accidentally let the mouse get too close to the screen edges or swip your finger too quickly across the touchpad and so switch app's etc. etc. - but for everyday use it's less hassle to stick with a bicycle.

Re: Bunch of nancies @Jason 7 11:23

Re: Bunch of nancies

>And don't give me all that "Oh you shouldn't need to configure an OS to work" crud as we all tweak and configure our OS to our liking when we install it. I doubt very few here just install and go without installing any further apps/software/GUI tweaks.

It may be a surprise that for practically all previous MS desktop deployments, many enterprises did roll out the full as-is out-of-the-box-experience to the end users and only really used group policy etc. to set up security settings (limited user permissions) and domain access details. Remember in the corporate world, add-ins (such as Classic Shell) are another thing to be integrated and maintained and to go wrong when MS release an update, hence need a business case to get included, as although the software may be free the creation and maintenance of a reference build isn't.

Re: Just to generate print in the media?

"Give me a nice, clean primarily-text-based interface and I will show you someone who is getting things done, rather than watching things do."

Are you asking for a return to the highly functional and 'clean' Win3 UI by any chance?

Interestingly, I suspect that the vast majority of Enterprise applications (eg. ERP, CRM etc.) will continue to have UI's that are based on Win2000 classic shell (which isn't too far off the Win3 UI), because as you rightly point out they purpose is to help get work done and not to look 'modern', 'cool' or any of the other words MS use in their adverts...

Re: What is missing

>I want to run an app I hit the start button and type the first few letters and hit enter.

Those app's (ie. the one's you can remember the names of) should be pinned to your taskbar.

However, when I want to play a game say, I would like to see a list of possible games rather than play guess the filename of an installed game.

Also it is only having used Thinkpad/Lenovo laptops for a while that I know that their backup application is called "Rescue and Recovery"; however, I knew from my very early explorations on that all Thinkpad/Lenovo applications were listed under the "ThinkVantage" tab on the menu and so was able to find it again with relatively little effort. The standard Win8 interface offers no such support - as I pointed out in a comment on another article, it wasn't until I had installed Classic Shell (and hence was able to easily browse/scan a menu) that I discovered that HP had included a Win8 getting started guide as part of their standard install suite.

Re: Out of the box

>It's the out-of-the-box experience that should be the priority for 8.1.

I think we'll find that the biz context out-of-the-box experience will most probably be included in later release, probably Win9, given that in 2012 MS were suggesting businesses, having just upgraded to 7, would skip the win8 release...

The irritation is that if MS were being truly a hard nosed commercial operation, they would of done an XP SE release (hence chargeable) that was effectively XP-SP4 plus all the functionality that they could of put in XP but decided for commercial reasons to include in Vista and Win7.

Re: This seems rather half-arsed

The problem MS have is: can they actually put the start button back without the third-party start button/menu vendors crying foul and potentially having their complaint upheld by the EU?

Re: I think the real story here is... @Flocke Kroes 29May 15:39

I think you missed off the Ms variant of Plan B - revoke your VLK keys.

I know of one UK organisation who agreed to this action, because their existing keys had been so widely abused, it was simpler to issue new keys to the systems on the in-house network as and when users called the helpdesk...

Re: Got your receipt?

>FAST will not accept a license certificate unless you have a receipt to prove you bought it yourself.

I take it that you (or the organisation you work for) have received a visit...

Given that as far as MS are concerned a correctly attached licence certificate is sufficient evidence for a machine to be licensed to run specific versions of their products, I don't see how FAST can ask for more.

Re: the world's most pirated software?

No

FAST (and BSA) are using the word "pirated" because of its sensational and emotional impact.

The vast majority of FASTs & BSA's victims are actually companies who have volume licensed products but for various reasons have not kept close tabs on their licenses. Hence have ended up with more products installed than they have formally declared. I suspect that this is what Perth and Kinross Council were really guilty of.

Remember, because of the way Windows (since 95) activates, it shouldn't be possible to have multiple physical machines (ie. ignoring VM's) using the same license key unless it is a volume license key.

However, there are some that do take advantage of things, so some "system builders" in reconditioning PC's don't do a complete clean install of Windows, but leave the license already on the machine intact. By "system builder" I mean both third-parties (who refurbish PC's for resale) and in-house IT organisations (who supply used PC's to employees for use at home).

Obviously with the rise of VM's and the non-availability of licenses from MS and resellers for Windows XP and other older MS products, we can expect more organisations and individuals to fall foul of MS licensing conditions...

Re: Single system...

>You have to understand the practicality of trying to get everybody onto one system. Its not going to work.

It worked very well for the PSTN. Although I would agree the telco's have been very slow at positioning themselves as end-to-end VoIP service providers who can offer a QoS that the traditional Internet operators will find hard to match.

>A better system would be that networks have to be open to 3rd parties.

I think you'll find that if you implement H.323 you'll be able to connect to most telco networks.

re: xkcd.com/927/ Tom Wood

I get the feeling that 'VoIP' standardisation will get a little like office document standardisation. So rather than use the standard (H.323) and enhance it to support new functionality, user organisations will adopt the MS/Skype defacto standard then wake up in 10 plus years to the problems they've created for themselves...

Re: The UK networks are able to prioritise emergency services (and other "important") mobile users.

You're forgetting the wireless phone-to-base-station link. Whilst once a mobile has been able to register with a base station and been identified as belonging to the emergency services it calls will get priority over the mobile operator's backhaul network. However, gaining access to the base station is still a free-for-all that consumes bandwidth.

Yes building and running your own mobile infrastructure is expensive and non-trivial - that is why all emergency services use the Airwave network. As for just paying the carriers - Airwave was originally BT Quadrant before being split off and sold to Macquarie...

About the only real question mark was the decision to use TETRA rather than TETRAPOL which was widely deployed to emergency services in Europe.

Re: Bill is right this time. @Obviously! 28May 14:02

"Everyone/corp have a DUTY to pay the tax due of them and not weasel their way out of it!"

And just what exactly is the tax due of them?...

I think you'll find that all the companies being investigated in the UK, US and EU do pay the tax due of them - as defined by the various national laws.

Likewise the many contractors who pay themselves small salaries and large dividends...

In my opinion it is an anomaly that a company's annual accounts give no real information on the taxes actually paid. Given the current debate it would be interesting to see a full breakdown of taxes paid (eg. VAT, NI, PAYE, Corp tax etc.).

Re: Operators

The Operators really will make or break this service.

My gut feeling is that the best candidates will mostly be 55+ and have previous call handling experience most likely in a directory enquiries or similar environment.

For dementia sufferers (and other clear user groups) it should be possible in time (ie. assuming the service grows) to assign users to a team of dedicated operators.

Re: It's sunny outside today - Buy a nokia

The irritation is that the only screen technology that has been shown to be fully usable outdoors and indoors is e-ink, add in a reading lamp (and ambient light sensor) and the range of lighting conditions in which it can be easily read increases still further.

For 'basic' phones that primarily require the screen to display text, e-ink is more than sufficient - okay we can debate and cite research over whether black on white, white on black, amber on black etc. are more readable.

The only explanations I can offer for the absence of e-ink displays in phones todate are that such displays in phone sizes are either not in production or are relatively expensive compared to 'normal' LCD displays. Hopefully the prototype phones demonstrated at Mobile World Congress back in February are a sign of things to come.

The Fuss Free Phone service does mean that a user can make calls using one hand whilst walking down a country lane in bright sunlight and using the eyes and other hand to direct traffic - try doing that with a smartphone....