AVOID !

If Daisy Group have taken over this company, then I would be avoiding them like the plague. Every company I have dealt with that has been owned by or taken over by Daisy Group has turned into a disaster. I would say those people who are keeping their jobs should be sending out their CV's right about now, they won't keep their jobs. One client of mine had a mobile phone contract with a mobile phone provider which was taken over, mid contract, via Daisy Group. Under Daisy's leadership, none of the original staff stayed, the company broke the terms of it's original agreement and Daisy made it a nightmare for my client to leave their contract, eventually requiring the intervention of the mobile phone company itself.

If I were an 2e2 client, I'd be making plans today to leave, your contract won't be worth a thing now these clowns are in charge.

This is just my take given what clients of mine have been through.

PS...This will be the first of many cloud failures I predict.

Lovefilm to the rescue

£125 seems rather excessive - this is available via Lovefilm.

I can't help but hope we'll see the headline that Apple has had to go crawling back to Samsung to ask if it will make it's iPhone 5 screens after Sharp crashes out of the business. It would be even funnier if Samsung said yes......at twice the price to cover it's escalating legal bills!

Press miss out on Ashes coverage - Showing sport from London instead

How come the British press missed out on this superb tournament, instead focusing on a few people aimlessly running around in London's East End. I would have preferred to have has this televised instead.

How about a European tournament next year, with competitors bringing not only balloons and payloads, but also their own nations beer, that we can see three battles at the same venue, for altitude, payload functionality, and best beer.

I'm sure we can get a contingent of BBC reporters in for that one!

BTW, congratulations to all concerned, all these photos are of superb quality and something to be proud of.

Has an omission been made in the team listings, or is there no entrant from UK?

Why is Blackpool council wasting it's money send delegates to Infosec?

I don't get why a representative from Blackpool Borough Council is burning through council tax payers money at Infosec in London and pontificating about BYOD practices when the council has presided over some of the most moronic wastes of money in the last 15 years which has systematically destroyed any sort of commercial future for the town?

This is the council which has spent 10's of millions of tax payers money rebuilding a tram infrastructure run by a private company which made so little money they couldn't afford to maintain it themselves. They should have just made it a dual carriageway right along the promenade, at least that would have had value for residents and those in the town that do work (a minority). They wrecked the promenade road and removed traffic capacity without thinking about how to increase it anywhere else to compensate. They ahve put buildings on the promenade which everyone believes are ugly and the butt of jokes locally, which no one seems to use. The deficit the council is running at means they are wrecking local services.

All this, whilst this idiot is pointlessly prattling on about BYOD to accomodate people wanting to carry vanity with them rather than learning how to use the employer supplied devices effectively.

In case you're wondering, yes I am unfortunate enough to live in Blackpool and keep harbouring this hope that the town realises that it is no longer a viable tourist destination, and realises it's future is in commerce and as a commuter belt town for Preston and Manchester with excellent road links.

I will be writing to my councillor asking why this fiasco is being paid for by me!

Those who do not blindly believe in Anthropomorphic Climate change are simply saying that the present evidence presented is of insufficient quality to convince them.

The climate change models are provven to be inaccurate, I have not heard of a single prediction made by a climate change model which has actually tracked with what is happening in the real world, there would appear to be many contra indicators that anything we do is having a measurable effect on the climate. I have still to see the evidence which shows a climate change which is irrefutably caused solely by something man has done, which could not possibly have happened without man's influence. I am sure if that could be shown, then we could start talking about the supporters of anthropomorphic climate change actually having a fact to work with, up to now everything is conjecture based on manipulated data and questionable models.

If the Prof. is suggesting that we should be made to believe in anthropomorphic climate change, rather than the onus of irrefutable proof being put on those expecting us to change, then maybe the salutation of Prof should be changed to reverand?

The public will decide it's fate

This whole initiative is going to cost those that join up $$$$'s, and they've not asked the fundamental question, who will buy?

The public right now seem pretty happy with 1080p MKV's of the latest movies with Dolby Digital and DTS sound, and increasingly TrueHD and DTS-MA, if the numbers of these files being downloaded is anything to go by. People are used to the freedom this gives them, so the question becomes, what does the user gain from this? Forget about selling most users on the whole 'It's licensed by the movie makers" line, most of the public don't care, they just want a high quality file that they can play on their big screen TV, Tablet and laptop, if it does that, they really don't care where it comes from.

This is yet another standard set to die like Ultraviolet and "Triple play" sets with time limited digital editions.

This is how to get people out of cars

If the Government had any sincerity in their desire to get people out of cars, stop trying to pitch public transport, it's as desireable as spending time in a public toilet on a Saturday night, and instead encourage employers to to implement truly effective home working environments. You'll reduce stress, wasted resources in people sitting in traffic jams, make the roads faster flowing (due to less traffic) and given the cost of public transport or fuel, it will probably be cheaper for the employee.

Maybe the way to do this is to give grants to get companies to adhere to a target (say 20% of all work done from home) and possibly penalise those that don't achieve a minimum standard (5 or 7%). Obviously in the case of manufacturing, shiop employees etc. this would not apply, but for most administrative and desk based work, I can see little reason why this would prove a technical problem, more a cultural issue for old fashioned bosses, and amployyes who want to be seen by their management.

Personally speaking, I worked from home full time for 6 years, and now work form home a couple of days a month, and far prefer it to working in an office, no travel, no distractions from banal conversations with others and a better working environment. Why would anyone reasonably want to maintain the office work paradigm?

You ain't seen nothing yet

This is not only going to run and run, but will probably turn rather nasty before we're finished.

The situation for the 4G auction is rather different than the 3G one which went before it. When the 3G auction took place, there was far more money and cheap credit around, so the teleco's could make big bids in the full nkowledge that there was a demand for something faster than EDGE.

This time around the teleco's know the government is desperate for the cash, they are still trying to make money on 3G spectrum they purchased and the demand for faster mobile access doesn't seem as strong this time as 2G to 3G. The teleco's are more than happy to file injunction after injunction, take decision to the EU and challenge the government on any and evey point in the auctio document in order to protect their profit margtin and their business. It doesn't matter to them if this takes years to go through, because the longer this is delayed, the greater the utilisation of 3G is, and the more likely it is that the government will capitulate to their wishes as the government need the money from this auction.

The rent or lease options to me look unlikely. What if the telecos don't want that option, they simply don't rent the spectrum and we either have to hope that someone new comes along with very deep pockets to build 4G infrastructure and site new masts throughout the UK (and how long would that rollout take?) or that the rent is so low that it suits the telecos, but that's sure to be bad for the government coffers.

I fear we are still years away from seeing 4G in the UK.

Gone downhill since I joined

I've been with VM since they were Telewest offering free dial up access back in 1999. I then moved to their 1MB broadband offering as soon as it became available. Back then they were superb, the customer service was the best available and any issues were swiftly resolved, usually within an hour or so. All the techies I spoke to were well trained and knew their stuff.

Then NTL got involved and it started to go downhill, but if you got through the front line tech support then the guys were still very capable.

Then it became Virgin Media and the rot set in, overseas call center operators who would ahppily lie to you, if they understood you, and customer services who were only interested in selling you more products, rather than actually answering your questions.

I am still with them solely because their 50 Mb service is finally stable since we moved to R30 of the SuperHub firmware and I cannot get BT Infinity in this area. Most of the issues would be resolved if they moved their CS back to the UK and recruited quality UK support engineers, then actually invested in their backbone so it didn't die in the evening when you try to stream iPlayer HD streams.

Custom firmware helped sales in last 12 months

I can't help but wonder if the availability over the last year of custom firmware has helped drive sales of the hardware.

If you look back, the XBOX 360 was hacked in a matter of months and it was taken for granted that XBOX 360's could have their DVD drives flashed with new firmware to give them 'enhanced' functionality.

Until the last year this has been denied to PS3 owners, so maybe a proportion of these new owners now see the PS3 as offering a better value proposition now the running costs of buying games has been reduced through the benefits of custom firmware?

Could it be that the locking down of consoles and the lack of availability of custom firmware has an inverse effect on sales of hardware i.e. the more secure the platform, the weaker the hardware sales due to higher running costs?

Short sighted for media business

I suspect this will have a bad knock on effect on media sales in the UK.

Right now we're already paying high prices for media, which is driving scores of people into the hands of various torrent sites and download repositories. Now you're talking about taking away the mechanism by which UK citizens can legitimately purchase CD's and DVD's at lower prices, and whilst the VAT man loses £130 million, the media businesses gain from actual sales of media. Now, in the middle of rising prices and pay freezes in almost every market sector, you want to ramp up prices of media by 20%??? Are we trying to drive traffic into the hands of bittorrent sites? What the media business should do is fight against this with eveything they've got, because the losses to the media business could be double or triple the VAT losses.

I should mention, I don't like the media business, I just see where this is going!