Tim Worstall is an Englishman who has failed at many things. Thus his turn to writing, the last refuge of many who could make a living no other way. He is, as an example of his business and financial perspicacity, the head of the international scandium oligopoly: the only commodity which has not risen in price in the past decade.
You want to put 3D gun designs on the web? You'll need a 2D printer
Comment Psst! Meet me in the Rotterdam nuke-material bazaar
Much fun has been had over the Liberator, the 3D printed plastic gun.
Our editor - a man who knows about such things - here at El Reg has pronounced it a piece of crap. Innumerable people have declared that it's either the end of civilisation as we know it or proof perfect that the Commie statists will never win. My own …
Adobe price hike: Your money or your files, frappuccino sippers
Analysis We count the costs of signing up to a cloudy Creative Suite
So, Adobe: can it justify shifting its Creative Suite to a contentious new licensing model?
Some say it is making life more difficult and expensive for those users who'd prefer to simply purchase the software outright, while others say it's just a decent business trying to do right by everybody.
I refer, of course, to the …
Will Michael Dell become the Marlboro man of the PC age?
Comment You've come a long way baby... now get off the stock market
The mooted Dell takeover, the one to take it private again, is now happening. The big question is why?
Why come off the public markets to operate as a private company again? The obvious and logical answer here being that the people buying the company think they can make more money this way than by not doing it. Why do they think …
Why mergers LOSE money, but are GOOD for the economy
Takeovers never deliver... and disties are no different
So the distribution sector has had yet another round of consolidation. Mergers, takeovers - these are the things that make an M&A banker's heart* thumpety-thump with joy.
The big question, though, is whether this actually does any good for the shareholders of the various companies - you know, the people who actually own them? …
Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?
Comment Actually it was nurses and firemen and teachers
Lies, damned lies and statistics: we all know the saying, but you'd be surprised just how many of these “facts” manage to enter the national consciousness, emerging as Guardian headlines and stories on Radio 4's Today.
Allow me to tiptoe through the process as to how this happens.
Let's start with this lovely little chart:
A …
Forget value-added broker jokes: Could YOU shift nuclear plant scrap?
The stock doctors: What they actually DO (besides talk)
Why do brokers exist? All we ever do is just sit around and talk to people, so what value do we add to the economy? Or what value do “asset managers” like the late Howard Strowman add? And will the existence of such be a permanent feature of the tech distribution landscape?
Regular readers will know that I spent the 1990s …
How to keep your money safe if the euro implodes
A Channel Reg cut-and-keep guide...
This is your handy guide to surviving the coming disintegration of the euro. Umm, OK, the coming possible, maybe even likely, disintegration of the euro.
The current betting from the major banks is that there's a 50 to 75 per cent chance that Greece will leave before the year end. There's at least one Nobel Laureate who thinks …
Why on Earth is Microsoft moving to Euro pricing now?
Analysis Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps
I find it quite amusing that a company would decide to have uniform pricing right across a continent in a currency that looks like it might not survive the phasing in period of the new pricing regime. But that's what Microsoft seems to be doing.
As El Reg has pointed out, pricing is now to be standardised on the euro price list …
IT distributors: The only people adding value to the world economy
More than just middlemen...
Why distributors? More specifically, why electronics distributors? Why have these intermediaries in the markets at all?
Yes, obviously, someone somewhere has to have pieces of kit on a shelf somewhere for when a customer wants to make an order. Someone has to crate it up and ship it off too: but why do we still have distributors …
Disk drive crisis: Economists are terrible weathermen
How globalisation becomes a washout
Hang on a minute. This globalisation thing, isn't it supposed to have stopped nonsense like this? You know, it rains a bit and so we all run out of something?
When we all lived on what could be grown or made within 5 miles a bit of flooding understandably led to shortages, but now we've the whole world to supply us why does …
The amazing shipping container: How it changed the world
The other reason everything says 'Made In China'
Keith Tantlinger has just died. He's someone you almost certainly haven't heard of and someone who – along with Malcolm McLean (no, not McLaren) – changed our world to the extent that it would have been almost unrecognisable to our forefathers. They also – if you want to squint at it – made the European Union redundant six …
Wikileaks loses briefly-open Icelandic payment channel
Back to Bitcoin, banks and brown envelopes for Assange™
So WikiLeaks and Julian Assange™ have been frustrated again: on the money front that is. They're back to cash, Bitcoin and bank transfers as a method of receiving donations.
There had been a hope last week that DataCell would be able to start processing donations, for it had made an agreement with the Icelandic bank Valitor to …
Cloud storage survey FAIL: May have to, er, back up
Comment Doh! Own numbers show local disk costs plummeting
The self-seeking company-commissioned survey is anathema to all right-thinking people. This is especially so when journos simply repeat its assertions without examining it for bias and agenda.
However, when the research conducted by said company actually undermines the very case for the service that the company is trying to sell …
You have to have standards – or do you?
Part one 1 livre of pate, half a pound of cheese and 200g salty biscuits please
Given that so much of the time and effort expended by you technical and computing types revolves around standards, just how important are they in the larger sense? And if they are important, who ought to be devising them, and should they be voluntary or imposed?
This might sound a tad odd in this modern age, for the default …
Kogan turns consumers into working capital
Is there such thing as an economic free lunch?
When everyone is selling the same things, made in the same Chinese factories, how can a retailer manage to gain an edge? That's the problem that Kogan Technologies had: and its solution is, to be fair, pretty cute.
Kogan is already Australia's largest online retailer of consumer electronics, so it was obviously doing something …
Cobol cabal will take over THE WORLD Australia
Old skool is cool, Cobol h8ers
The old advice was “Go west, young man”... but it seems the new one should be “Learn Cobol, youngster”.
That at least is the implication of a report from Australia on the languages and environments that are heavily used.
The Sydney-based Object Consulting has released a paper detailing those languages which will no longer be …
Can Oz compete in the outsourcing market?
Neighbours should be there for one another
Could Australia become one of the next outsourcing hotspots? The country certainly has part of what people are looking for: a well-educated English-speaking (well, up to a point) workforce, technologically adept and almost certainly with more knowledge of other English-speaking cultures than any of the others have of that in Oz …
North Africa will need more revolution before it attracts IT tourists
Comment Soviet-like red tape still choking small firms and free markets
Woo Hoo! Tens of millions of well-educated, young and above all, cheap workers for the capitalists among us to go and exploit! Quick, quick, get out the airline schedule and book that seat to Tunis, or Cairo or – coming soon no doubt – Algiers. Money money money, it's a capitalist world!
pyramidinvestnorthafrica
Hmm, what, …
Grey marketing is great - if you're the importer...
Opinion Distributors toe an ever-shifting line
Let's face it: those of us who are in the distribution channel (and that means the distribution channel for absolutely anything, not just tech goods) are in a bit of a bind when we start to discuss grey or parallel imports.
For we're absolutely outraged at the idea that anyone might try to bring in cheaper versions from other …
Honest startups versus City bastards - the CGT conundrum
Analysis And how Alistair Darling didn't exactly solve it
Why the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, had to propose altering capital gains tax (CGT) back in the autumn is pretty simple to explain. There was a certain amount of vociferous shouting (led by the Guardianistas, of course) that the sight of private equity barons paying less tax than their cleaners was a moral …
Opinion
Joe Fay
Server boss comes to London, become hostage to fortune
Dale Vile
Vendors, dealers live in parallel universes
Tim Ayling
Er, what does that mean? Anything you want it to
Eddie Pacey
Get your money up front if you want money up front