big puzzle

The big puzzle is why the traditional recording industry thinks it has a right to survive in the 1920s form that it has perpetuated for so long.

Entertainment changes all the time.

Where are the sheet-music stores that used to be on every high street, in every department store?

Where are the variety shows, at the end of the pier or on TV?

What happened to Top of the Pops or the 6:5 special or Juke box Jury?

When did you last go to a dance in a village hall?

where are the music halls?

Where are the Town Waits, combining music with guarding the walls?

I think that the 'record labels' may well go the same way. I don't think they will be missed.

Paris, cos she can normally spot when things have finished

Long overdue

I've been protesting for most of my adult life that, given a marvelous soup of elabourate and stable hydrocarbon molecules about the most stupid thing in the world is ot burn them.

problem is the free market always falls to the position of least resistance and most greed.

All been said

I can't offer any better insight into this lunacy than the comments already offered.

Except when the Disney store opened in Peterborough I thought 'What? what on earth do disney have to sell?' but they made it work by selling crap.

Maybe that is the business model?

wierd

Surely an all-in-one would need a separate A4 feed tray?

WAI ?

Have a look at http://www.parcelforce.com/portal/pw/content2?catId=5800020&mediaId=10200111

"We are working on making our website more accessible following principles laid down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)."

Apart from the lunacy of that link pointing back to the page it is on, I suspect that the WAI does not require the restriction to a single browser.

Paris, because she knows only one way to do things.

Mee Too

I'd like to add my vote for the 'not with windows on it' lobby

unfair pricing

I bought neither an HP nor a Dell Linux laptop, much as I wanted to. By the time you specc'd them to the same ram and hard disk as the Winjows version they cost 30% more.

No matter how determined I am not to give any more money to the empire of evil, I don't see why I should be ripped off for it. Instead I bought a second hand one from a backstreet shop and put ubuntu on it. OK, the camera doesn't work, but who cares? I have no use for it anyway.

Bushwacker

It reminds me of a smaller version of the Bushwacker car-yacht-helicopter-submarine that I used to read about in the Eagle when I was a lad.

Oh look a wheel..

Oh look a wheel..... we'd better re-invent it.

Oh for heavens sake

I use Humyo. It is quite good, although the upload by adsl is tedious. It sounds like they had a bad experience and are doing everything they can to put it right. And, even you acknowledge, no data will be lost.

That's actually bloody clever of someone. Can you imagine any of the government systems managing to do that? in 60 to 120 minutes?

Look, it's not an iron lung. No-one died. It's not a missile shield or a near-earth-orbit asteroid database. It is where a lot of people hide slightly less than perfectly legal mp3 files, and their holiday snaps.

Why is it so absolutely, positively, definitely so essential that every bit of data in the world has to be available every existing microsecond? Libraries close at night and at weekends. The British museum is closed in the dark. Even the prime minister goes on holiday.

OK, so they fell down on some sales claim. Big deal. I never used it for anything where that mattered. In fact, I have always used it on the assumption they will go bust tomorrow and vanish in a puff of green smoke. And anyone who doesn't is a moron. Lets all get hysterical because the BBC made a claim that Johnathon Ross was funny, or because Golden Delicious apples are Greenish and Inedible. A few vorsprung durch technik motor cars go wrong. Are the rest of them useless as a consequence?

Its time to grow up. It's made by humans. It will be fallible. We do fallible oh so well

Paris, because she is fallible. And because you get less than it says on the box.

Blimey

Blimey. They were expensive enough as it was.

Paris probably understands things going up all the time.

Green technology

I'm surprised this wasn't sold as 'green' because the earpiece is obviously made of cardboard.

Paris - she understands a mockery. Perhaps her new best fiend will want one.

a pox on them

"the ability to charge for guaranteed service levels to content providers - - could promote innovation and investment in networks"

That's a hell of an innovation, getting both ends to pay instead of one. I thought I was already paying for a service good enough to use these providers. I'll want a hell of a price cut when this comes in.

Just where to the government expect 'providers' to get the money? They will charge me, that is what they will do, and everyone will be worse off

aBstrads the lot of them

Minor quibble

That web page says "Technology previews of various KDE applications for Windows and Mac OS X are available". I didn't see anything to justify your implication that the whole desktop is available for Windows or Mac, and I would be quite surprised if it was

And..

And I suppose you have to pay for a licence for the XP? And where the black enamel will you get it, now that they only sell Vista?

Do they think we are stupid, or something?

At last

A nokia that can charge off the usb.

Took long enough, lads.

I already have a usb-power adatptor on my internatinal plug converter, one for my car that came with my Ipaq charger, I can use the one that came with my tomtom.

This move is so self-evident that it is preposterous that we have waited this long. I have been saying for 15 years that the standards authorities should have required phones to have a standard connector to avoid the waste of manufacturing custom power bricks. USB is, de facto, an implimentaiton of this idea. Not as good as a proper international standard (I had in mind 3 mandated connctors for 'up to 500mA', 'up to 8A' and 'up to 24A' that everything - games consoles, laptops, etc would have to use, along with a pair of auxilliary contacts for voltage selection on the larger devices) but welcome nevertheless.

public betas

You are right in what you say about mobiles.

I reckon each verison of windows mobile before the present one was a beta, that people paid for. And since I won't have anything more to do with it I have no idea whether 6.1 professional is a beta or not.

I do like AC's remark 'It hadn't been done yet so we didn't know what to copy'.

Sorry

I just can't cope with yet another filum of some sales droid doing his patter.

Take a few pics, write some editorial. Include some facts. It will be downloaded, read, and digested before the video thingy has even half initialised.

Please, enough.

So who do we go to?

Every drive manufacturer seems to be following the price curve downwards, and I suspect they all have similar skeletons in the cupboard.

I have two WD 320GB laptop drives that mysteriously disconnect while in use. They are fine after a reboot, but hey. Having yer linux system freeze is just no fun. I am casting round for an alternative but find horror stories all over the place.

The free market is supposed to provide choice and opportunity. If the only choice is between idendical dodgy products then what is the point?

Where are the twice-the-price but more-than-twice-the-quality alternatives?

No 10

Our own dear No 10 petition site is interesting as a playground for single issue nutmungers.

The issue that got the most votes by far was the one about not banning the red arrows from the London Olympics. Before it had been up a week the government added a disclaimer that the whole thing was untrue and no such decision had been made. It went on to accumuate another 700,000 votes after that, suggesting that over half a million people do not believe the government even when it tells the truth.

Next higest voterush was the one about road charging, and the vhemence and rate of voting did get noticed and the policy submerged for a bit (it will, of course, come back disguised as a green policy or for national security)

Paris. Cos she knows what most people think about most of the time.

One in three?

Those one in three who have not updated would not happen to be those who find WIndows Genuine Armlock to be unfair and intrusive would they?

Dambusters

He was the gate corporal in 'Dambusters', Tha knows...

Not surprised

The general demise of the high street and the economic downturn were hardly likely to leave Dixons untouched. They are an entirely unremarkable box shifter, so they are likely to have exactly the median experiences.

I don't think their habit of trying to shift stock that is 1 to 2 years behind the leading edge helps. Nor yet their habit of charging rather more than the 'street' price for things.

The spotty youths and the 'warranty' sales are too soft a target to bother going on about, of course.

Paris, 'cos she was hoping to get a job behind the counter.

This is twoddle, really, isn't it?

one tenth of the money spent on rescuing dodgy banks could have given every schoolkid a linux laptop and a vista one, and a whole bunch of connectivity. And had enough cash left over to employ people in schools who actually know what IT is all about, and probably a pretty decent party as well.

Instead we let M$ feed the kids.

Mindless.

Not just US IT

I worked as an Instrument engineer on Research ships for 15 years. Salary in 1991 - $350 per day. Salary in 2004 - $250 per day. If I were daft enough to take it now, they are offering $115 per day.

I currently work as a commissioning engineer on large industrial plant. My salary, in £ sterling, is exactly what I was being paid as a commissioning engineer in 1988. and, frankly, only around 25% more than I was getting in 1981

A friend who is an office temp was getting £12 an hour in 1989, and is getting £11 an hour now (both 'while you work' figures)

yes but

What about the unanswered questions?

Is it triband gsm + 3G ? Or is it bound to some minority, USA-only, carrier? wont work in europe?

can you sync the address book to anything other than Outlook?

Will they sell it unlocked and sim-free?

WIll they sell it in the UK at all?

Can you both connect and charge with a mini-usb connector?

does it have a 3.5mm headphone jack

How much free storage does it have?

Can you plug in storage cards without dismantling it?

Will you be able to run TomTom on it, or does the GPS depend on an always-on data connection?

Will I have to sell the kids to buy one?

It looks like exactly what I want, an advanced phone without windows mobile. I just hope it is ready for the market.

Turn them off

I work for a multinational, and one of the directors has recently said that he doesn't want us using the phone while driving, even after they paid to have hands-free kit fitted.

I've taken to turning mine off. If it could be set to 'text only' that would be fine, I could here it chime and then stop when convenient to read what they have to say. Perhaps we should campaign for all new phones to have a 'text only' mode

curious

This looks like enormous fun, and I shall be trying to take part.

Now to the el reg angle. How is it that Creationists are trying to stop the teaching of Darwinism, but have not yet tackled Astronomy?

Paris, 'cos she thinks she is a star

@MattW

The problem with one blade rotating and hitting the failing one is that in the weather we have had since the new year the wretched things were not turning at all...

As predicted

Vista with knobs on.

It's like detroit. Same crap cars, more chrome.

"looked after children"

Is "looked after children" some sort of PC euphamism, or is this woman of low educational attainment?

planned shelfware?

There is a chunk in the official M$ response that puzzles me:

"(a large number of which are still actively being used) "

Sorry, why else did they suppose people bought them?

Go on apple

Stick a 3g broadbeam connection in, charge for the connection via itunes, and connect us to bbc iplayer for streaming TV

Stupid stupid

I can't see why the patent people didn't show them the door straight away.

This is an idea so old, and tried so many times, that it is absurd to consider patenting it. M$ should be fined for wasting government time

For glod's sake

And the Royal Navy runs our warships on widoze...

Paris, cos even she would not buy a zune

competition

All ISPs offer the same clunky service for the same subscription. If there were a demand for a faster/uncapped/lower latency/better service for a couple of quid more someone would already be selling it.

We all converted to BroadBand so that we could stream radio and TV - that is what the adverts told us, and frankly that is what we ought to be getting. If we have to pay 10 quid a month to get iplayer, what are we paying the existing 20 quid for?

I would cheerfully pay 5 pound a month for some clunky old service that did email and usenet and a bit of web browsing and a bit of downloading overn ight by torrent. I am already paying 20 quid for what was sold as a high speed service. It is not, then heads must roll.

Accidental roaming

I've had 'welcome to france' messages pop up when I was walking along the Jurrasic coast footpath.

And an HP 613C that, even turned off and in the luggage rack of the plane, picked up 'welcome to russia' texts while flying home from Korea.

well derr

"We now understand the importance of ensuring our licenses are up-to-date and the potential threats we were exposed to"...

...and we are still competent people to run the company... ?

Perhaps they should use software you don't have to pay for instead?

Old Yaster

I've been using Suse since 7.2, and remain fond of Yast. Probably because I grok how it works.

I ditched 10.2 because it went all politically correct and removed drivers for my wifi and graphics, but tried 11.0 on my netbook. That, too, came without proprietary drivers but it did include scripts for fetching them and my netbook has wired ethernet. If only I hadn't needed 3rd party web sites to tell me what to look for it would have been even more impressive.

I'm happy with the pragmatism of getting into bed with M$, but I did think that it was silly to give them money for no good reason. I'd be up in arms if I were a shareholder.

I agree that Mandriva is probably the best thought out and supported distro, but it works best if you give them money and the 'barrow boy' style of marketting where the minute you paid for something they tried to sell you the same thing, or a better one, and bombarded my mailbox... well it put me right off.

Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora are all fine products. But then, so is Mint, Knoppix, Elive, Sabayon, PClinuxOS, CentOS.... it doesn't seem worth picking between them, and people who have 'views' about Novell have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Unlike Windows, which seems to be sold by only one vendor as far as I can make out.

Little chef

Lots of little chef feature The Cloud, at quite a high price.

Amusingly my corporate VPN connects anyway, without paying...

@Timo

I've used Starbux in Newport,RI; Galveston; Norwich, VA;Statten Island, Manhattan & Seattle this year, and in every case wifi cost me around 5 bucks an hour. I've never seen free wifi in Starbucks.

features

It has to be said that I will never buy another phone with windows muddle on it.

That means I will be able to buy a nokia for a year or two, but after that it will be the iphone or nothing as far as I can seee.

I wonder how they stay in business?

I used to pay for Opera, back when that was what you did, because it was so good. People who didn't pay got an ad supported version. Now the only revenue stream seems to be the odd mobile phone vendor who is not a microsoft slave. I wonder how they pay the wages?

I still like Opera, and use it on Linux and WIndoze.

Linux

I'd be quite interested one of these if it did not come with windows.

Colour me indifferent

I had to read the story to understand the headline, but apart from that I don't care. People inside the iphone bubble might, but this is really a spat about nothing.

Paris, 'cos it is a vacuous story about a fashion icon

slave shops

I must admit that I would be looking for a different job rather than working in that sort of slave shop, but I do know that a lot of people are not that lucky.

I suspect that in the UK an industrial tribunal would be involved by now. I'm glad (again) I am not a left-pondian.

devil-bill, because it should always be said

Or they could just fix it

The alternative would be to make an OS that is secure, of course.