@jeffy[pooh

".....1.20095042 times INFINITY in miles per Imperial gallon"

my thoughts exactly....

\We need an icon of a pair of cojones, we really do.

Price of fuel?

If everyone uses one quarter the petrol, will the price go up 4 times?

Gray goo?

Look, captain. The inhabitants of Earth committed suicide by tiny robots.

Easily solved

I'd outlaw bonuses tomorrow.

It seems that the performance of salesmen is easy to measure, and so they can get paid bonuses. The performance of the engineers that make it all possible is much harder to measure, so they only get paid basic wages.

Why on earth should anyone be paid extra for just doing their job?

If sales people want performance related pay, let them go self employed and become distributors or retailers. If they want a salary, then live off it.

give me all your ideas and I'll give you a doughnut

Right.

You have pointed out the obvious flaws in this idea, apart from one.

Why on earth would I want to do anything to benefit VodAlone?

GPL Education

I'd like to see genuine educational opportunities - a bit like the OU, but open source. or like the education offered by evening classes from organisations like the WEA.

People who have skipped, or been denied, formal education are often working too hard at low paid jobs to have time to try again. But there is often a few hours a week they can devote to all sorts of displacement activities on the internet.

What about a collaborative education system, where people with suitable qualifications could create small scale teaching material, run seminars, hold closed forums with students and other teachers only admitted, and award small scale certification? Once that was established, then a higher layer could be provided where someone with, say, a dozen of these units under their belt could do a bit more work and glue them together to gain some sort of formal qualification?

Along the way, those in a teaching capacity would also have demonstrated knowledge and commitment and communication skills and would also be entitled to some sort of formalised recognition.

It would matter not if the government were involved or not, as long as users and employers both recognised the outcome as worthwhile evidence of learning, effort, and commitment.

Yawn Yawn

No empty shops in existing malls - shock horror.

M$ does not buy retail fashion chain to evict them from leases - astonishment.

Customer has to move instead of shops being on conveyor belt - outrage.

New business does not emerge from egg fully matured and established - customers storm.

Company I do not trust opens shops nowhere near me to sell products I do not want - Disinterest reported.

My fear

I fear that this thing will only allow you to get apps from the on-line gaol that the iphone uses.

If Apple have the cojones to make it truly 'open',. I'll buy it. And probably buy some of the apps from their store too.

@Michael C

Don't listen to the others mate.

I used to be brought laptops at the rate of 2 a week by people "which didn't seem to be working right". They were either Dells, or clogged up with Norton anti-virus which could not be removed. Or worse of all, both. I grew to hate them.

Then they started to ship Ubuntu. I was delighted. But an Ubuntu laptop cost more money and had less ram/disk/Ghz as a windows one.

So buggerm. Millenium hand and shrimp.

Yawn

Yet another me-too winmobile phone with improbably minor differences from all the others.

For glod's sake, surely a company as big as Tosh can have an original idea occasionally?

Paris, 'cos she always likes what she's already had.

Why?

Why does it have to be an iphone? Why not mail in a picture from any mail client that supports gpg encryption?

Sorry

But to me BMC will forever be associated with a rosette and with cars made out of ferrous oxide lace.

http://im.edirectory.co.uk/p/2104/i/bmcrosettelarge.jpg

Mine is the one with a roll of gun-gum exhaust bandage in the pocket.

@Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Oh glods, no. A microsoft screwdriver. Only works with screw 2.3, whose direction of driving changes half way down, and which can only be used to fix microsoft wood to microsoft wood. After driving three screws you have to buy a new screwdriver and not give the old one to anyone else.

aaarrggghhhh.

Whot?

So you can bully the ISO into adopting something as a standard, then persuade the US patent office to patent it afterwards? How can that be right? or legal? or enforceable?

@deege: Linux Home Basic

Thirdly: no-one is spending the sort of money marketing Linux that MS & Apple are spending

The success /despite/ lack of marketing reminds me of the first 3 J.K.Rowling books, made popular by word of mouth consumerism.

Been Here before

Moller, Skyvan, macro, Terrafugia.

Let's see a few hundred in everyday use before we get excited.

Been there

Best travel advice for Leadenham is similar to that I was given for the village of Queen Adelaide.

Take a brick with you.

1. When you tire of talking to the locals, you can hold a worthwhile conversation with the Brick.

2. If you stand on it you might be able to see somewhere more interesting.

Mine's the one with a brick in each pocket.

Nokia and @Sean Timarco Baggaley

""Nokia alone have produced over 700 mobile phones in over two decades. If any company should know how to beat Apple in the mobile phone market, it's Nokia. So what the hell is their excuse?"" Quite right Sean. Quite right.

They may have produced 700 phones over that time, but they are indistinguishable from each other, and from most others. Like the manufactuers of cameras and motor cars they are stuck with a "me too" mindrut where they only make what is already selling. Innovation is risky so basically they don't.

Ignoring things like DAB radio, IR remote control emulation, Garage door opening nodes, microcash, football ground eticket admission (all of which have been pundited and never appeared) how about telephony? How come at least one model in the range can't take dual SIM cards? How come you can't bundle your home and mobile numbers and have both ring when either gets an incoming call? How come voicemail can't be transferred to the phone like text messages, to be replayed when out of service?

There are hundreds of potential innovations (like auto-power down at a set time each evening for my work phone) and yet Nokia - and the rest of them - just make the same phone over and over again because the marketing departments are cowards.

So if Apple stir things up and make something people actually want, well bloody good show.

text books

6 months ago various fora were discussing using these things for text books

Fat chance . I was worried then about how you would sell your books at the end of the course. Here's your answer.

EMP?

You can take my company email system out whenever you want. And the born-again osbourne I have to lug round with me that takes 17 minutes to boot and load windows.

anyone seen the alligator?

>"There are no environmental concerns we've identified at this point,"

where's me steamroller got to?

Is it near the drop hammer?

Meteorite anybody?

Mine's the one with the aerosol of hydrofluric acid in what's left of the pocket.

For Glod's sake

For Glod's sake, palm, pay the licence fee. Stop behaving like a teenage hacker.

Oh, and let me buy the phone without a contract, you morons.

Send a gunboat!

Hmm. Dodgy manufacturer of iron busses in India threatens sovereign government. Which of the two has armed forces, eh?

I'd tell em to pi** off.

@AC 'Old news #'

I know exactly what you mean.

Some years ago I was managing a heterogenous network on a survey ship, connected to the outside world by VSAT at isdn speeds.

I had a bit of a browse around the universe one night. I discovered I could print documents in my local district council - their print queues were all visible over the internet. I sent them a few quotations for consultancy to stop it happening, including printing them on their printers, but heard noting,

Biscuits and Cookies

There is a technical difference. Britain has always had both sorts.

A Biscuit - apart from the US breakfast scone, which is sort of warm stodge - A Biscuit is cut from rolled dough, while a Cookie is made from a dollop of batter. There is a tool called a biscuit cutter.

Industrially things are similar - biscuit dough is rolled and cut (or stamped). Cookies are dropped from a depositor nozzle, sometimes with a wire cutter to interrupt the stream.

Just to complicate the matter, my Mother-in-law came from Canada with a recipe for anzac biscuits, which are deposited and then rolled. Then the Scots have drop scones, which I understand are a weapon of the besieged, used to drop on incoming armies. At least one scottish scone is made of stone.

In the US, as far as I can make out, all styles are called 'cookies', and you have to shop for a cookie cutter. It seems a shame not to have the distinction.

The definitive biscuit is the ginger biscuit, not available in the US as far as I know. Just to confuse you further, the proper name for it in the bakery trade is a 'Ginger Snap'.

Now, let us consider the products of Messers Carr. Until they were bought by United Biscuits they sold four different versions of Carr's water biscuits (High bake, low bake etc). These appear to be now called Water Crackers - perhaps since Kellog acquired the company. This is probably the correct name. Water Crackers originated in the southern states of the USA before their civil war. Carr adapted the principle and made something less sweet and less salty, more like the traditional Bath dry biscuit. But they are undoubtedly crackers - crackers are moulded and cooked simultaneously between heated irons. c.f. Jacob's cream crackers, where the cream is cream of tartar.

Oh, by the way, the proper name for a Bath dry biscuit is a Bath Oliver. Nothing to do with our civil war, they were named for a Dr Oliver who ran a watering place in Bath. The ownership of the recipe has passed hand over hand to a company called Fort, nothing to do with Fortean Times, although they taste the same.

points of view. Not exactly consistent

1. Why do people assume that a programme that looks a bit like MSoffice will behave /exactly/ like MS office in the odder corners? A VW passat, a Peurgeot 407, and a ford mondeo are all jelly-mould 4-door saloons, driven using a wheel and 3 pedals. That doesn't mean you can expect to fit the same pollen filter to all 3 air conditioning units.

2. Why do the OOo developers still ignore issues going back to 2001 to which long strings of duplicates get added?

Go OO - but please read bugzilla now and again.

Disapointed in Palm

and not only for the carrier-specific tying of the Pre.

If they wanted to sell an iTunes compatible they should have negotiated with Apple from an early stage & paid a sensible licence fee for each one connected. That would probably have been a dollar or so.

Apple would have gained some iTunes customers, some cudos, and an insight into the pre to aid their own product differentiation.

Palm acting like a freeloader was juvenille and bound to end in tears.

Paris, 'cos she understands marketing herself.

Yawn

Said it before - not interested in winphones.

Why is the same hardware not available with a choice of OS?

you started it

"Although comparisons with David Blaine's legendary twatdangle are inevitable, our use of the term to describe 37-year-old Arquette's stunt is a little unfair"

So don't do it then.

Bugs fixed?

I hated the transition to office2003. The new way to handle styles was horrid. New ways to 'flow' pictures and captions numbered out of sequence. Anchoring pictures to the paragraph horizo- ntally but the page vertically. TOC formatting even more broken than before. Yuk. Did it convert frames to text boxes? No. It just stubbornly put them in stupid places. Page flow that respects footers for text but dumps pictures over them. Ugh.

I doubt any of this is fixed.

New sports?

Perhaps he can persuade the IOC to introduce sports his girls can represent NZ at?

(I have to admit my first thought was 'sheep impersonating')

I'll get me goat.

Then of Dieves

I stopped using Ebay around the millenium, fearing the legitimacy or even the existence of some of the things I saw. How did tinpot traders come to have stocks of motherboards before the manufacturer's wholesalers? Where did they get graphics boards with 4 times the memory of anything on the builder's web site? How could one chap successfully auction a branded chainsaw a week at 25% of the wholesale price? Another Offer multiple instances of a fountain using a photograph from a local paper of a one-off product sold to a local stately home? who on earth sells puppies at auction, or indeed buys them like that? (at least that one seems to have stopped, at least on fleabay)

I reported to ebay the multiple listing of Alfa Romeo service CDs which Alfa said were only available to main dealers, on licence, and not for sale anywhere. Nothing happened.

I had huge volumes of paypal phishing the moment I created the account. It stopped within days of my closing the account. PayPal said their systems were secure. Right.

Turning it into money?

I used to purchase every other release of Suse - you got a good quality distro, on DVD, with seriously good printed documentation and a few weeks of support.

Then they got bought up, went 'open' and stopped selling boxed versions. I'd still be giving them 40 or 50 quid a year if they would take it from me.

A serious comment

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

But But But

I voted for the time machine. Once you have one of those you can arrange to collect all the others as appropriate.

Who would /not/ vote for a time machine?

@daftvader

Yes, people have rootkitted lnuxes. There have been a few stories of infection.

But there are dozens of distros, there is Solaris, BSD, and perhaps if a few years time HP will rediscover unix.

A diverse ecosystem is always going to have higher natural immunity than a monovarietal monoculture.

@ Max Watson

Last time I did a system restore from a windows boot disk it rolled back SP3, 2, 1 and all the security updates. It took a couple of days to get the machine anything like working safely.

I own two paid-for backup systems that will make a bootable recovery disk from the current image. Because of anti-piracy both require the windows boot disk to be inserted before they start. On my older machines they reject it as counterfeit.

I have been using Suse since 8.2, and am currently migrating everything to either Suse 11 or Ubuntu and will never, ever, build or buy another windows computer.

NI number

When the welfare state was created everybodies National Insurance number was lifted from the wartime ID card scheme. I still have my old ID card - it was required until the end of rationing in 1953.

We would not need a new identity system if the government had not given away free NI numbers like so much confetti. Properly managed, they alone would have been enough to keep track of who was entitled to what.

Since they government undermined this venerable, and once fool-proof, system what faith can we have in anything else they propopse?