Hats off to the business brains at T-Mobile, who have hit on a take-the-money-and-scarper scheme worthy of the backstabbing wannabes from TV show The Apprentice. Fans of the show will know that offering customers value for money is a shortcut to a taxi home, so presumably Sir Alan will be applauding T-Mobile’s pricing plans for the newly introduced Wi-Fi service on Heathrow Express trains. The shuttle service between Paddington and Heathrow takes just 15 minutes from station to station - plenty of time for business travellers to hook up and answer a few key emails. But what is the minimum time you can choose to pay for, should you wish to take avail of the Wi-Fi link? Well, you have to pay for an hour, obviously.

April 26, 2007 Travel | Permalink | Comments (1)

Microsoft seems keen to remind everyone that it has more money than it knows what to do with. Instead of lighting cigars with $100 bills, the company has instead decided to sponsor black cabs. Apparently a number of London’s Taxis are wearing Office 2007 livery, and people hailing these at certain times will travel gratis on Microsoft’s tab.

Sneak wonders if such tie-ups will spread. For example, the world’s favourite search provider could team up with the world’s favourite airline, making it even easier to despise them both, if such a thing is possible. Or Virgin Trains and Virgin Media could share lists of customers with low expectations.

However, avoid hopping into a taxi sponsored by an open source company, or the left and right hand sides of your ride may part company at a fork. Plus you’ll probably have to get out and push.

April 23, 2007 Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has only just got used to the idea that Windows XP is headed for the short, steep and slippery slope to software oblivion, but apparently Microsoft is not finished throwing out stuff. Waiting for a Tube train this morning, Sneak was confronted by a large advertisement for Microsoft Office 2007, bearing the slogan, “Forget about yesterday. It’s a whole new day.” This is a bit of a questionable sentiment: Sneak for one would quite like any and all documents carefully prepared yesterday to still be available today, whether or not Microsoft’s software can be bothered to remember where it left them.

April 17, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Charles Simonyi recently became the latest loaded space tourist to buy a $20m ticket to the International Space Station. Not everyone will know Simonyi’s name, but most will be only too familiar with his work: he made his fortune leading the development of Word and Excel at Microsoft.

Sneak feels for the regular astronauts. It’s well known that psychological stress is an issue for those trapped in orbit, floating in a tin can, far above the world, where no-one can hear you scream. How much worse must it be to have a man who made millions from Microsoft’s deranged Clippy float up to you and say: “You look like you’re having a nervous breakdown - can I help?”

April 10, 2007 Travel | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak’s bolthole is just around the corner from Marshall Street, the unfortunate corner of London in which WAGs Boutique is filmed. When the two rival reality-TV shops are open, long queues of optimistic followers of low fashion clutter up the entire street. And the lines have been getting steadily longer.

Given that the queues are composed of impressionable people eager to throw their cash at a pair of shops that happen to be on the telly, hoping no doubt to be featured in the programme, and also given that the TV companies are clearly keen to rake in dosh by whatever means necessary including fake phone-ins, Sneak wonders why these two streams have not been taken to their logical confluence. Why not create a sort of eBay TV which could simply auction off chunks of primetime airtime to the highest bidder, no matter how lowbrow their proposed content?

No, hang on, we already have ITV.

April 5, 2007 Television | Permalink | Comments (0)

Want a reason to buy a Sony PlayStation 3 on expenses? Of course you do. Actually, you might make a case for buying hundreds and putting them in racks in your datacentre. The first distributed computing project for the PS3, launched 23 March, has already blazed a shining trail.

In the style of the pioneering Seti@Home screensaver, the Folding@home project cadged the spare computing cycles of console owners to model protein folding, to help fight disease, and has seen more than 50,000 volunteers contribute online.

What’s more, each PS3 is much more valuable to the project than a handful of dull old business PCs. According to science journal Nature, the PS3s contribute some 330 teraflops - “more than the 276 teraflops from the nearly 2 million PCs signed up since Folding@home launched in 2000”. The big flop difference is down to the console’s sheer number-crunching grunt, optimised as it is to model explosions, gunfights and car crashes in intricate three-dimensional detail.

So, can you get away with the same “it’s for work, honest” ruse if you’d rather have an Xbox 360? Sadly, nope.

Seti@Home creator Dave Anderson told Nature he's already talked to Microsoft, “But that conversation didn't go anywhere.”

April 5, 2007 Top tips | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s becoming abundantly clear that it would be unwise indeed to throw out paper maps just yet. Canadian newspaper the Toronto Star reports that a pair of car thieves drove straight into the hands of the Mounties after blindly following satnav directions in their stolen 4x4. The shortest route crossed out of Canada, into the US, and back again. And of course it turned out to be a shortcut to the slammer as their stolen wheels were detected at the border. Meanwhile, it turns out that the directions on offer from Google Maps are just as suspect. Ask for a route from, say, London to New York and it doesn’t tell you to proceed to Heathrow and hop on a 747, but suggests you take the Channel Tunnel to France, drive to Le Havre, and then:
"Take the ramp onto Quai Frissard [0.6 mi, 2 mins]; At the roundabout, take the 4th exit [0.6 mi,
2 mins]; Swim across the Atlantic Ocean [3,462 mi, 29 days]..."

April 3, 2007 Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the “you couldn’t make it up” department comes news that mobile marketing technology provider Sponge has chosen to work with a public relations company called Flannel. Sneak can’t wait for the inevitable phone call in which Flannel talks about Sponge’s liberal use of SOAP. Whereupon Sneak will forced to pull the plug.

April 2, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)