Posts by Rod

Sales slide at PC World, Currys

British Retail down the tubes....finally

Poor old DSG. Now they learn that electronics only "sell themselves" when people can be bothered buying! Having lived in various countries round the world, I can say, with some authority, that I know what the problem is - british retailers suck. I mean, there's more depth to my analysis than that, but "sucks" is a good summary.

People will still buy stuff when times are hard, but they need the assurance of a competent assistant, a warm cosy feeling that the staff have the customers interests at heart and they need to know that, if they take the trouble to go to a PC World, Dixons etc that they will have a first-class experience. At the moment, they are **ahem** a ways off giving that.

So, I give the same response when retailers whine about a "bad christmas" on the high st - There's no such thing as a "bad" market, there are just bad retailers.

Aussies to get 3G iPhone in June... and unlocked?

Selling iPhone to sheep?

No need to get too excited about what happens in Australia. Apple are only interested in Oz, because they may be able to work out a way to sell Apple kit to sheep in the future - in the meantime, the market is so small, they are glad to do anything to part aussies from their "hard-earned".

MoD coughs to laptop triple whammy

Raging incompetence rulez ok.

Simple solution here for the Govt in general. All data relating to, or from, the citizenry needs to be classified data. Stick a "Confidential" classification on it and it won't get lost. Don't bother with "Restricted" - that's controlled slightly less than illicit photocopies of the Times crossword .

Yes, this will drive costs up, but not as much as widespread identity theft? The only downside is that the news hacks will have to look a little further for stories about Govt imcompetence (but not **that** far eh?)

Swedes to probe cow-belch threat to planet

Disgusted of Surrey

Articles about "Swedes probing cows" are beneath your usual journalistic standards! "Stop" I say.

"disgusted" of Surrey.

Israel electric car project aims to wipe out oil

WTF - no oil......

Set aside the green/anti-consumerist thang and also the Crypto-fascist Jew/Arab/Amercian (delete as necessary) thing and think on this. One day, Oil reserves will fall off (either in fact, or become uneconomic to develop). At that point, biofuels only slow the pain, not remove it (not enough land to grow food and fuel see?). When that happens, how do we travel? No planes, no cars, no trains etc on petrol/diesel or AvGas.

Provided you got a prime mover (hydro/tidal/wind/nuke) you can generate electricity. You can either stuff it into batteries, or use it to power a process to make combustible liquids/gases (i.e Hydrogen). However, you need some tech to make it into transport.

The benefit of this type of venture is to challenge the status Quo and thrash out new tech. We need smaller, greener, faster charging batteries. We need stronger, lighter and more tractable motors ( and vehicles to put them in, from trains to cars) and we need to work out how to make money out of these things (hey, we're not talking eco-greenie socialism here!).

If you can't be assed then you can't be assed, fair enough. Personally, I think this type of thing is great - making money and getting ready for when fossil fuels cough and die. What's not to love?

Apple MacBook Air wins Greenpeace's approval

greencool?

Funny how Greenpeace like anything "cool". Cool enough, apparently, to ignore the fact that these get shipped by the caseload from china, where the manufacturing processes rate slightly better, in environmental terms, than a Victorian steelworks.

Apparently, as long as they are easy to chuck away, nobody much cares about the impact of making/shipping them in the first place?

I doubt that these are any "better" than most other machines off the line, or in the pipe right now. You don't see Greenpeace rushing to give plaudits to HP or IBM now do you? Nasty big Corporates. Stick to friendly, cuddly, Californian Apple - they're not a nasty big Corporate now are they? ......err......hmmmm.

iPhone turns blue as IBM creates Lotus client

Gimme More Bill.....or Steve....whoever....

IF only Bill could get his gnomes to design Outlook so it can manage more than 2000 users without having to spend the equivalent of a small country's GDP in support, I could live without Notes.

So nobody likes using notes? Who cares.....only users complain and what kind of IT people would we be if we make systems decisions based on what users want? pffff.

Long live Notes......if we can give people iPhones to use with it, all the better. The kewl factor might stop them whinging about the notes client - then I can enjoy lower TCO, less helpdesk calls and be the "cool guy who gave us iPhones" as well.

Never forget, users are shallow and easily pleased. Trinkets work. Go Steve.

:-)