Downtime

HP staff have voted to strike

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:44:01 +0000

Staff at HP have voted to go on strike in objection to job cuts and reductions to their benefits.

But will they avoid strike by reaching an eleventh hour agreement like the Fujitsu staff last week?

Texting killed the reindeer star

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:49:17 +0000

Well over half of people will dispense with Christmas card this year and send a text message instead. According to a survey carried out by www.rightmobilephone.co.uk people only seem to bother sending cards to family members. Downtime thinks it's better to send neither because it is the thought that counts after all. Bah Humbug.

Lotteries pose business continuity risk

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:48:04 +0000

News that a group of call centre workers won a staggering £91m in the lottery should come as a warning to businesses outsourcing or offshoring work. We wonder how many will continue to field calls from angry customers? Imagine if a syndicate at an Indian offshore location won that much money. That amount would go a long way. Entire offshore teams could tell their bosses what they really think of them on the same day. There goes you low cost software development.

Catholic Church asks Google how to connect to masses

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:46:47 +0000

The Catholic Church is receiving tutoring from internet experts about how best to communicate in the modern world. Officials from the likes of Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are helping Catholic officials in Europe in a four day conference. Where God has failed technology will succeed they hope. Downtime thinks the Catholic church has more fundermental theological problems which will take more than a You Tube video to fix.

Barrichello gets consolation prize

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:45:10 +0000

Formula One driver Rubens Barrichello has had a cash bonus. Despite losing this year's championship he is going to receive at least $500,000 from Google after a court ruled that damages should be paid to him after fake profile of him were hosted on the internet giant's Orkut website. Some people have all the luck. I wish a social networking site hosted a fake profile of me. That money would come in handy.

Virtually pointless non-fire night

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:24:34 +0000

As virtualisation of just about everything gains popularity due to cost saving in the enterprise world, health and safety red tape has succeeded in making bonfire night virtually pointless.

Organisers of a Guy Fawkes party in Devon say safety officials have forced them into a virtual bonfire.

Revellers will have to make do with projected image of a bonfire on a giant screen, electric heaters and bonfire sound effects because of the mountain of paperwork needed to organise the real thing.

Downtime goes error-free

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:17:44 +0000

Downtime is indebted to Pulitzer prize winner Joseph Hallinan for writing the book on mistakes, why we make them and how to avoid them. It is called Erronomics, no doubt a tribute to the earlier Freakonomics, which showed why drug dealing is poorly paid, unless you are the boss. Downtime hopes that the title of Hallinan's book is not in itself a mistake.
But Downtime thought that readers would be more interested to know how to avoid mistakes. The rules are:
1. Make a list. And check that your heart surgeon uses one too, because it cuts their error rate 47%.
2. Guess twice; your second is likely to be better.
3.Write it down. The palest ink is more reliable that the strongest memory.
4. Get more sleep. Your decision-making capacity is better with a blood alcohol level of 0.05% than after 17 sleepless hours.(That does not mean what you hope it means.)
5. Do less. Multitasking is error-making.

Party comes to an end as fugitive discovers policemen can read

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:06:35 +0000

A fugitive from justice was arrested after alerting the US authorities to his whereabouts through Facebook.
Maxi Sopo, who was wanted for falsely obtaining more than $200,000 in credit, wrote a number of extravagant boasts on his Facebook profile after fleeing to Cancun, Mexico.
Status updates from Mr Sopo said he was "loving it", described himself as "living in paradise" and said he was "just here to have fun".
Not content with publicly disclosing the information on the internet, Sopo added a former justice department official to his friends list, who promptly tipped off his old employer.

Call centre automation takes macabre twist

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:56:13 +0000

The Register brings news that Japanese programmers have developed an algorithm which can tell, just by listening to your voice, if you are about to die.
The software was developed by trawling through six months' worth of records from the Yokohama ambulance service, corelated with data filed by paramedics about how alive the caller was when they arrived.
Of course the program will be of literally life-saving value in helping ambulance services decide which emergency calls should take priority.
However, technologies have a habit of straying from their original application and, just as the space programme gave us the non-stick frying pan, Downtime can not shake the uneasy feeling we may be seeing the Japanese doomware pressed into the service of some gruesomely sadistic TV gameshow in the very near future.

Bloggers mob libel lawyers, restore free speech

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:21:26 +0000

Just as starlings can mob predators like hawks, so too Twitterers and bloggers managed to drive off newspaper editors' most feared predator, libel specialist solicitors Carter Ruck.

Carter Ruck had stopped the Guardian from publishing a report about a parliamentary question. Normally, newspapers are allowed to publish all parliament's business.

Carter Ruck withdrew its opposition after the blogosphere rose up in the Guardian's defence, published the documents at the heart of the issue on Wikileaks, and parliament went on with its work.

Downtime now awaits a blog attack on Downing Street over its cancellation of the Serious Fraud Office's investigation of BAE Systems' Al-Yamamah deal.

Scandinavian sex tourism saga continues

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:19:52 +0000

After Danish tourism bods pulled a promotional You Tube video that basically described the nation as a place to get your leg over without worrying about a problem nine months later, the Swedes have a bigger problem.

Millions of Chinese men are trying to find the whereabouts of a town in Sweden which is 100% inhabited by women. It was apparently set up by a man hating widow in 1820. And these women are also desperate for men.

According to internet rumours, the women have turned to same-sex relationships to satisfy their desires. And any men attempting to gain entry risk being beaten by the blonde sentries at the gates. Scary

Single, dead female

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:53:44 +0000

Proving that social networking can be murder, a jilted lover killed his partner in south Wales when she changed her status to single on Facebook.

Brian Lewis is to serve a minimum of 14 years in jail after strangling and stabbing his partner to death.

A strong warning to socials networking devotees everywhere to think twice before posting any provocative updates to personal profiles.

Smart phones, not users

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:51:16 +0000

Twitter members are so addicted to the microblogging service that thousands are risking their lives to do it.

One in ten motorists are using mobile devices to send tweets while on the road say researchers, even though they are 23 more times likely to have an accident.

Smartphones are said to be fuelling the addiction and could be responsible for many of the set going from being "dead cool" to just plain dead.

Downtime notes that "smart" applies to the phones, not the necessarily the users.

MOD leaks plugged on Wikileaks

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:51:01 +0000

Downtime didn't know whether to feel insulted or honoured by the inclusion of investigative journalists among the Ministry of Defence's list of people to defend the realm against.
The comment about us hacks appeared in Wikileaks' copy of a 2001 46Mb MoD file, which gave chapter and verse on how to avoid information leaks.
Nuisance people, according to the MoD, include parliamentarians, foreign agents, terrorists & criminals. The document tells squaddies how to deal with leaks, sexual entrapments in Russia and China, diplomatic pouches, allies, classified documents & codewords, compromising radio and audio emissions, even computer hackers.
The MoD seemed pretty sanguine about it, noting it was an old document, so posed no security threat, but Downtime is checking into who's guts have replaced garters in Saville Row.

Regulator speaks as it sees

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:43:21 +0000

Cyril Connelly, a British critic, said that no-one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

This is absolutely true. And so it is with the over-35s media experts at Monitor, the independent regulator of NHS Foundation Trusts.

On Monitor's website are the wisest words ever issued by the regulator. Downtime would go so far as to say that Monitor takes us to the extreme limits of wisdom.

Dictionary in hand, this is what we read on its website:

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah