PushingJelly

A long time ago, in a distant career I worked on-site support for a large telecommunications company in central London.

The company – at the time anyway, were big Mac users and they hired the computer company I was working for to supply a technical guy to fix their machines. It was a very comfortable place to work and after some time I began to feel more like a member of their staff than of the computer suppliers. Read more

Every Thursday there is a mini-bus provided by the company I work for that travels to the Canary Wharf complex in London’s docklands district. Canary Wharf is a complex of office towers and underground shopping and is fast becoming the ‘new city’ of London. The offices are populated by corporate headquarters of banks and many other big businesses.

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I have been watching OQO keenly for some years, set up in part by the design geniuses that brought the world the Ti PowerBooks, the company produce the coolest tiny portable computers known to man (or woman) kind. Steve was offered the products by the designers when they still worked for Apple and (probably rightly at the time) he turned them down. They have a new device out which is based on the UMPC standard and it rocks. If the long rumoured Apple “lightweight” Mac portable is anything as good as this, I’ll buy one on the spot. 

 George W Bush visited the Brooke US Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas this week to say ‘hi’ to some of the vets brought back from Iraq and patched up.I felt revulsion as I looked at the Reuters slideshow, not at the poor disfigured servicemen and women but at the man who calls himself a leader (“The leader of the free world” sic.) feigning understanding and sympathy in front of these heroes who put their selves in harms way on his bidding.Just one question:

So George, were the oil rights really worth this?  

The generally accepted theory is that because of the economies of scale and the advancement of technology, high tech devices get cheaper over time. This should be especially true in the case of telecommunications where the cost of installation of new technology is born by the early adopters and over time, when the initial costs are recouped, it gets cheaper and then there’s an advancement is speed/quality and the prices are raised again.

Vodafone offered, until recently a mobile broadband service for £25 a month. They offered two modem options; fast and faster – but the tariff per month stayed the same.

This week, the company released a new style version of their 7.2 ‘faster’ option which as ‘selling features’ seem to be bigger and rounded and has flashing lights all around it. Bizzare when their target audience is the business market.Even more bizarre however is the increase of the tariff to £30/month – another £60/year. Why? the bandwidth allocation of 3GB/month is the same as before and the speed remains the same. This is especially annoying for me as I was thinking of buying one.

I probably won’t now. It’s not the money – I had allocated the funds, but just I hate being fleeced, don’t you?