IT Week Insider Vol 9 No 7

Hello, and welcome to the IT Week Insider

This week we put an end to our monkey experiments - those sort of things are in really bad taste, and monkeys have never looked good in lipstick anyway. We also decided to stop providing a choice between straight and simianised versions of the Insider. You just get this one.

So, for the few that prefer the unadorned facts, we suggest you read this while drinking a mug of tea with the spoon left in it. The sharp stabs to the eye may take your mind off the Insider's peculiar content and style.

To the rest of you, enjoy:

Editor's choice
Comment: ID cards promise dark days for victims
George Gardiner has something to get off his chest. It's a tattoo of Sonny and Cher, but then we all made mistakes in the 70s. Aside from his bizarre taste in body art Georgie-boy also offers a good line in doom-mongery. This week he lay in bed at night fretting about what might happen when your identity is stolen in a world where biometric ID cards are supposed to have made such thefts impossible. We're not sure George. Tell you what though, let's go to the forest and ask that lonely fallen tree.

IT Week Podcast
News Editor Madeline Bennett chairs a lively discussion dissecting the key events of the week. This week the team goes forehead to forehead on email charging, Oracle's tendency to splash out, and all that's hot at 3GSM.

Comment: Online firms must move carefully
We all recoiled when Alan Stevens told us he would be writing about a moving experience he recently went through. Fortunately he wasn't talking about moving his arse-hair to the top of his shiny head. No, he kept that one under his hat. He was referring to the ease with which internet service providers can ruin your business when you move premises. So, plan your transition carefully, or count the cost, warns Al.

News: Nokia supports roaming between Wi-Fi and GSM
Take a load of monkeys, shave their faces, put them in smart jumpers and give them a quick cramming on mobile telephony, and you'd have a group of 'people' who could see the sense in offering seamless roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi networks. It's as obvious as that. So, why has it taken Nokia so long? Who knows? Not us anyway. We are too busy trying to escape from a load of belligerent, jumper wearing monkeys who've managed to get hold of a razor.

IBM goes crazy, kicks kittens
Not really, but the firm has done something that will make people put their hands to their mouths in shock - well, a few geeky people anyway. This week the firm that no-one ever got fired for buying from announced that it will add Power5+ dual-core chips to its pSeries Unix servers and is introducing a new Quad Core Module (QCM) as well.
And If that was not exciting enough, IBM was also boasting about new TPC-C performance tests that showed a pSeries box is not a complete waste of money after all.

Intel pushes SIM cards for laptops
Nobody likes having to take a business call on a crowded train, but imagine how loudly the Guardian readers will tut when you hold a great stinking laptop up to your ear and shout "Hello!". Luckily for laptop users, that assumption was our own stupid one, and has nothing to do with Intel's plans. Intel is pushing SIM cards in laptops because it might make it easy to support both data transmissions and voice-over-IP calls. Which, when you think about it, makes a lot more sense than the whole, I'm on the train, burning my ear theory.

Editor's blog:
IT Week editor Lem Bingley gives an inside view on IT Week.

IT Sneak blog:
Odds and ends from the weird world of IT.
To respond to any of the above, contact us (or the monkeys) at itweek_letters@vnu.co.uk