USB 3D?

Seems to sell TVs.

Please remember that HP now is not HP at all (not the original greatly caring and outstanding company that it was many years ago) but a mishmash of all the other companies that have been sucked into the corporate soup and stirred around into an unidetifiable sludge.

However great a company, dilution will kill the original ethos.

Equally, a software company is mainly the ethos and the current staff - their ability to perform in their chosen environment.

There are many excellent Dilbert cartoons covering the fate of innovative smaller companies subsumed by mega companies.

All the reasons that the original company was a success are almost immediately destroyed by the bland culture of the subsumer.

So a company with a realistic stellar valuation can have most of that value destroyed almost immediately merely by being taken over by the wrong kind of company.

Which in turn leads to the new owner trying vainly to understand where all the value has gone and then deciding it must have been the victim of a hoax because nothing else fits in with current corporate thinking.

This may be the truth in this particular case - but once lawyers are involved then truth generally takes a serious battering down a dark alley.

Oh, and yes I did work for a while for a company that was Borged by HP.

The only good thing was the redundancy :-)

Irresistable force?

A post asking for pictures of sluts, aimed at teens?

Surely only a matter of time before the entire local population appeared tagged as sluts.

Including grannys, pets, farm animals and the occasional piece of architecture.

Could anyone swear that they could resist such overwhelming temptation?

Or really consider that the postings were in any way serious?

Once the posts started accumulating, there would be the irresistable temptaton to post something more outrageous than the last one.

So why all the fuss about one poster, but no hunt for the person who originated the whole thing?

Sounds like a bunch of bored kids looking for an excuse to trash stuff.

[Memories of the riots in the UK.]

Oh, my humble contribution top left ;-)

Why oh why? Think about the children!

Amongst all the guff (interesting and otherwise) I haven't seen anything that states WHY schoolkids need to learn to program.

O.K. - you grew up with a BBC Micro and it never did you any harm - well, look, you're posting on here aren't you.

But kids today need to learn to use consumer electronic devices which have already been programmed - so learning Office Automation suites and web browsers will equip them to function in their long term employment.

As more and more resources are available mainly or only online it is vital that all school kids know how to browse the web, fill in forms, write emails.

General literacy would be a great help.

Phones, games consoles, video players - kids don't need training on these; they are the trainers.

Assembler, C, C++, Python?

WTF?

Why do they need to know this?

I grew up before PCs were invented, and landed in mainframe IT quite by accident when I needed a job after University and took a programming aptitude test. The rest is a rather murky history.

As an ITphile we had computers in the house when our kids grew up - and they played games on the Atari STE and then word processed and played games on the PCs running Win95 and NT4 Workstation.

Good marks in school, them days, if you did your work on a PC.

Copy and paste from various resources produced impressive projects as well.

Neither showed any particular desire to program nor was there any need for them to do this.

Although I can program (after a fashion) I haven't for a few years - I mean, why do I need to?

What problem is it solving for me?

Strangely, one child has sort of followed in my IT footsteps though the other certainly hasn't.

As far as I can tell neither has suffered from lack of opportunity to program at the medium to low level whilst at school.

I learned my programming as an adult, learning a number of different languages and technologies over the years, so you don't have to learn it at school.

You can learn programming at any age, when there is a need.

Reading, writing, managing money, health & hygiene, cooking - these are much more basic survival skills.

Woodwork, metalwork, electricity and plumbing, general DIY; these would not go amiss either.

O.K. - there is a need for people to produce applications for electronic devices but this is going to be market lead, and the vast majority of school children are not going to end up in this area. They are going to end up as users of electronic devices. What is the ratio of Android phone users to Android application developers?

I applaud anything which brings home the message that there are real bits of stuff inside the shiny cases and you can actually make them do stuff yourselves, not just use other peoples apps.

However I see this mainly as a platform for hardware experiments - where you can do something simple and see something interesting as a result,

Robots, control gear, spy cameras, hi-tech stuff you can make work yourself.

Printing "Hello world" on a screen (instead of typing it in your word processor) seems very lame. Far less interesting than posting something on Facebook, Twitter, whatever.

So I say again - why do they need to learn to program?

[Probably more productive to teach them Mandarin.]

Two stage strategy?

If they want to successfully monitor email then they need a two stage strategy.

Firstly they remove the 90% of emails which are SPAM, thus winning the hearts and minds of all thinking beings.

Then they have only the last 10% to peer at for bad people sending bad messages.

Unless, of course, civilization is doomed to extinction by the lack of Cialis.

Nobody mentioned cost so far, nor Windoze....

It is a long time since I was involved in part of this, but I was involved :-)

To me, MIME was a commercial enabler, and a cross platform enabler.

In the '90s most offices (those not on VMS and dumb terminal systems) ran WIndows of some sort.

So they could easily exchange complex attachments because Windows understood what they were - due mainly to file name extensions.

So each business (or part business) had a network and some mail servers.

ccMail, MsMail, Novell, Lotus Notes (whatever happened to that?) and a few others.

Within the networks they could exchange documents fine - it was just sending outside the organisation was a problem.

The main problem was cost.

There were plenty of email gateways - but for each one you had to licence another email system and the licence fees were not cheap!

SMTP provided email interaction without licencing the protocol.

MIME enabled rich information about attachments to be included.

These two things freed email users from being tied into one supplier by large licence fees.

Microsoft Exchange Server killed off the prorietary email systems by the usual Microsoft tactic of finally getting it right about 10 years after several other firms had fought for market domination by being better than Microsoft in a chosen field (much like IE finally killing off Netscape, Novell withering once M$ networking finally got its act together).

M$ tends to lose all the early battles but win the war.

So really MIME was not necessary for medium to large corporates because they already had solutions in place.

It did however make inter-corporate working easier and cheaper.

The real impact was for non-corporate users and non-Windows users.

Having a standard which was not tied to major commercial email suppliers and not tied to Windows file extensions made email effectively supplier/vendor/OS independant.

Which is nice :-)

Finally, X.400 could do all the transporting of complex document types to and from all kinds of different devices in all kinds of different languages and character sets - essentially everything that MIME could do (possibly more).

However it was so analy complex and difficult to implement that PCs couldn't hack it in the early years - just not enough power.

SMTP was simple by comparison, although feature poor at the start, and could at a pinch be worked from a teletype connected directly to a port on the mail server.

Just my own take - back through the mists of time.

Amazon franchise stores?

I think there could be a market in the UK for a store where you could have your purchases delivered, and even order using a PC in the store (O.K. Argos on steroids).

Hmmm....could this save the local libraries?

This removes the major barrier to online shopping - being there to receive the delivery.

This is one area where the traditional Royal Mail scores heavily - there is usually a local delivery office where you can pick up packages if you are not in when they arrive.

However this is not really an Amazon thing unless they branch out and receive packages from all carriers from all online stores.

Is this just an indication that the online market is becoming saturated and the demand for revenue growth is forcing increasingly marginal and desperate 'strategies'?

Or is it, as suggested above, just a vanity move with a store in each major capital?

Cheers

Dave R

Decent security costs far too much - up front.

In a previous life I worked for a major UK Telco on many things including OSI software and PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).

In both cases IMHO the standards were exhaustively thought out by paranoid boffins who lived in an abstract world but were very good at theorising obscure threats and potential problems.

With OSI the standards were more or less ignored in favour of the RFCs developed on the pricnciple that we are all good chaps so let's work together as easily as possible.

Loads of adopters because it was cheap and easy.

Followed by years of retrofitting the things that the OSI specifiers had thought out but which weren't cost effective to implement on day one.

Implemented, obviously, because security weaknesses had been exploited and financial damage had been suffered.

With PKI the software to build a CA was readily available and almost anyone could issue certificates.

The big and horrendously expensive challenge was to implement the infrastructure in a secure manner so that nobody could spoof credentials and no unauthorised person could create valid credentials.

All the cost and hard work was in the physical security including network separation and in complex process and procedure to validate all applicants for certificates.

So no surprise that corners have been cut all over the place - it just costs too much to implement and police.

Until it all starts costing so much money that the problems have to be fixed.

Anyone hear the sound of yet another stable door swinging in the breeze?

I am puzzled as to why the regular in depth scans on the CA systems with industry leading AV software to check for virus and other malware attacks didn't locate the threats until after someone noticed the network doing bad things.

Or is this another thing that was judged too time consuming and expensive?

One further rambling on PKI - if everyone who had an email account also had to have a certificate to go with it and only signed email from a current good CA was allowed through major mail hubs then SPAM could be cut down enormously.

Cost a bit to implement though, wouldn't it?

I wonder when this will cost in?

At last an explanation..

...for the banking systems all crashing around the same time....

All in the timing?

A lot of stuff going on at the same time - BBC main page, HSBC, NatWest/HSBC.

Good for conspiracy theories.

My conspiracy theory is that all the banks are scheduling their upgrades to take place at the same time so if it all goes nipples to the sky no one bank stands out as incompetent.

On the other hand this may be a global conspiracy which will make the occupation of St. Pauls seem like a minor event.

Or not.

Not just BT

I have had reason to use Virgin Broadband (aka NTL) technical support on a few occasions - few compared with the amount of time I have used the service.

When dealing with people with recognisable UK accents (I even understand those North of the border) I have had universally excellent service.

The one time I rang at the weekend and got someone who did not sound as if they spoke English as a first language it was like talking to a lump of unintelligent putty and totally unproductive.

I am not suggesting that our Asian bretheren are unitelligent; however they lack understanding of the UK life experience, technical infrastructure, speaking UK English as a first language etc. and so cannot hope to give us the same level of support as you will get from technically literate UK staff.

All this (understandably) gives overseas call centres a justifiably bad reputation.

This is not even confined to IT - my son recently had a bad experience trying to reserve a space for his push bike on a train.

When I talked to the train operator directly there was initial puzzlement then when I explained that he had been talking to a call centre the response was " Ah, he must have been talking to Network Rail. Talk to us next time and we can sort it out easily."

Hmmm....off shore call centres strike again, methinks. I have stopped the rant at this point as all sorts of things are wrong with the railway booking systems and I could go on for ages. Sigh.

Oh, and I was told a totally fabricated and scurrilous tale about an interview for a job at a BT call centre. The candidate passed with flying colours, and as a final test was asked to form a sentence using the words yellow, green and pink. He thought for a while, then said "The phone goes green green, I pink it up and say yellow this is BT, how can I help you".

Handset or PC?

To me the main reason that data on 2G/3G etc. has not really taken off is that most content is not suitable for a phone handset.

When WAP first came out, most web content was too complex and there were attempts to produce WAP portals which would offer cut down content suitable for the handsets.

At that point most web content would have displayed well on my EEE PC (if it had existed then).

Now content is so rich and so loaded with fancy video and special effects that I struggle on my EEE PC and my older portable to view the website in the way that the cutting edge design intended.

Nice on my new 1440 * 900 Dell portable, though :-)

Not much good on a phone handset :-(

For me, mobile data is all about freeing portable PCs from fixed ADSL/cable connections.

You can get the rich content you have come to expect when you are away from your cosy nest.

Now if only the coverage, reliability, bandwidth etc. etc. wasn't totally crap. (Speaking as a Virgin customer).

If I want to talk to someone or send a text message I use my phone.

For getting serious data off t'Internet I use a PC.

Then again, I am from the keyboard generation and can't think through my thumbs.

Cheers

Dave R

All Windows applications supported?

In my view the reason that Windows is dominating the Netbook market is because some 'must have' applications only run on Windows.

In my personal case I bought a Linux EEE PC 900 and was very pleased with it, but ended up installing XP because Virgin Mobile Broadband didn't run on Linux.

I ended up with Virgin Mobile Broadband because at £5 a month to an exisiting Virgin customer it saved me £120 a year against other options.

I could also run Microsoft Autoroute linked to my Garmin eTrex GPS - I haven't yet found a comparable Linux application.

So I don't initially see how a cut down Linux used to run a web browser is going to persuade me to move from Windows XP.

[Unless, of course, it will also run all your native Windows applications faster and cleaner than under Windows.]

Oh, and no idea what your foster parents died of, why, when or whatever. My sympathy, however, it must be tough....

Reluctant Virgin

I use Virgin 3G/GPRS via a dongle for Mobile Broadband.

No mention of Virgin in the article, but it must be the worst one for coverage.

When I can't get a connection and search for other mobile operators there are usually one or two - 3 and Voda seem to be the most common.

However at £5 a month I can't bring myself to spend £15 a month for any of the competitors.

She was only sixteen, only sixteen.......

....and I loved her so.

So we got married.

As we demonstrated our mutual love and affection in a very physical manner in the honeymoon suite I looked into the tastefully ceiling mounted mirror and thought "Cool - I'll just snap a Polaroid for the family album".

Now I'm banged up for child pornography!

"Similar circumstances arose when the age of the child – in respect of possession of indecent photographs of children – was raised from under 16 to under 18 in the Sexual Offences Act 2003."

I am assuming that a picture of two naked humping bodies would generally be considered "indecent".

I can also see that private acts between consenting adults which are completely legal could constitute pornography if published in still or moving pictures.

What I cannot see is that it can be legal to have sex and marry (not necessarily in that order) at the age of sixteen but that pictures still fall under CHILD pornography.

Does not compute!!! [IT angle].

Paris because she still looks barely more than a child.

Why don't they extend the deadline by a week?

Let us step through this slowly for the hard of thinking.

31st January - Web site keeps crashing because of high demand due to last minute chancers like myself piling on to beat the deadline. Not many people (relative to those trying) manage to file.

No problem - tell everyone the last day has been extended by one day.

1st February - Web site keeps crashing because of high demand due to last minute chancers like myself piling on to beat the deadline. Not many people (relative to those trying) manage to file.

....a pattern begins to emerge........

Why not just extend the deadline by a week and take the pressure off the website? Then perhaps the demand will ease to a level with which the web site can cope, and everyone gets to file.