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Does PAYG not exist in the US or something?

I can buy a mobile for as little as £20 from the supermarket and just pay for my calls on it. The minimum is often pretty teeny, like less than £20 a year.

Here for instance.. Cheapest phone is £29.99 with £20 in free calls. It's not an Apple iphone (of course) but it does mean it's entirely legit to include the cost of a forced contract in the phone price.

Hell you can get a 3g Video mobile with a camera for £34.99 including £30 in free calls from here.

If a phone is only available on contract it's not "scaremongering" to include the contract in the price. I accept things may be different in the US.

And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices.

Actually, no, they won't, because people here aren't stupid. To get digital TV, you buy a digital TV set-top-box for knock-down prices and plug the handy SCART cable into the back of your existing analogue TV. You can pick them up in supermarkets for next to nothing, and there are no subscription fees (at least in my country).

Where did this whole oh-noes-I-need-a-new-TV thing come from, anyway?

I never mentioned TVs and neither did you. I also never said difference, I said TOTAL.

You said "Receiver".

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.100-5118.aspx

It took me all of 2 seconds to find that one which is under $40 + tax in the UK, so presumably a third cheaper for you.

hint : At least pretend to read posts before mashing the keyboard in response.

Tesco's recycling efforts. The most recent thing they're doing is offering extra Clubcard points to those that don't use any disposable bags (which doesn't seem to be mentioned on that page).

Has anyone been to a tesco and confirmed this? I checked their website and the nearest they had for office http://direct.tesco.com/search/default.aspx?search =office&confirm.x=0&confirm.y=0was office chairs. Google mentions press releases that confirm this, but no one seems to know exactly what the office suite contains, and most importantly I couldn't find any mention of compatability with MS Office. If it *is* compatible with Office, that'd be kind of neat.

Of course, I suspect, like many others, that's it's just repackaged OpenOffice.org, but we'll have to see.

As someone from the U.S., just navigating their website sucks. http://www.tesco.com/ doesn't even seem to have software, let alone a MS Office replacement.

First of all, Toshiba isn't exactly a, how shall we say, 'household name' in the U.S./Western market.

There, fixed that for ya !

I could go on and on. In fact I would be surprised if anybody in the UK hadn't heard of Toshiba.

Bollox.

In the UK, online grosary shopping is very common, with all the major supermarket's doing home delivary. Just take a look at http://www.tesco.com/ or http://www.sainsburystoyou.com/ although the fact that it's amozon that is creating the store is kind of freaky. I mean its not like they have a *food* distubution network to start with - food goes off, books don't...

I have never seen a linux box on sale there. http://www.tesco.com/electrical/search.aspx?Ntt=co mputers&VSI=9&Ntx=mode%2Bmatchall&Nty=1&N=0&No=60& Ntk=primary&Ns=P_SORT_Price

BT was once the state telephone monopoly and part of the Royal Mail. What it did was once very good indeed. When it was sold off the asset strippers that bought it made inroads into its services that it has never recovered from.

Their internet service was once the most deplorable I have ever come across. Not having a BT line anymore, nor having come close enough to touch them with a 10 foot pole since, I can't say what it is like at the moment.

Having said that, I find it hard to believe a British supermarket provides an outstanding internet service.

I'm in the UK, but most of the major supermarkets do home delivery now.

Tesco and Waitrose to name a couple.

Is this a serious post or a wind up? This happens already... http://www.tesco.com/ etc

Here in the UK, we have legislation that protects personal information. Tesco have a public declaration on how the information is used, and in general consumers are happy: http://www.tesco.com/clubcard/clubcard/index1.htm

If you don't want Tesco to know you've bought the Vaseline and a spatula, simply don't hand over your Clubcard when you buy.

Online Takeout delivery never went away.

From where I am in England I can order groceries online from:

http://www.tesco.com/superstore/p/help/quick.htm
http://www.asda.com/asda_shop/sys/web_sys01_b_init ialise.jsp

Pizza from:

http://www.papajohns.co.uk/pizzas.aspx?StoreID=194 (Papa Johns in York)
http://www.dominos.co.uk/

Those are the places I remember anyway, but suffice to say that it's pretty easy to get things delivered online.

http://www.tesco.com/superstore/p/help/welcome.htm

can you say 'online shopping'?

Sorry, i actually agree with you on this, however you chose an unfortunate example.

Label seen on Tomato Ketchup bottle: Allergy warning - may contain extract of Tomato

Is that just gross stupidity, or are you buying really shitty ketchup that doesn't even contain tomato? Anyway, that's nothing...

Tesco Organic Skimmed Milk cartons' 'allergy-advice' small print reads as follows:-

"Contains milk".

You specify a delivery slot (depending on the company this can be in one- or three-hour increments) place your order and wait.

They're delivered from the local store in small vans with refrigeration units. If something is out of stock they'll deliver a replacement item. Anything you don't want (ordered too much milk? pears overripe?) you can send back with the driver and the amount is deducted from your bill.

Tends to work very well.

Although the CNN article focuses on the US experience, the UK has had successful and profitable online grocery shopping for several years. UK chain Tesco was one of the first - with an in-house developed software system - and now most of the UK major chains have followed suit with similar systems.

The Tesco system was initially thought to be un-economic as it simply comprised staff going round existing stores and loading carts that where then delivered using small vans to homes in the locality - but apparently its been profitable since the outset.

Tesco's approach is compared to that of WebVan (who feature in the CNN article) in this document written by a Prof at Wharton (free - but registration required)

More recently, a WebVan style UK Grocery operation called Occado has started too - working with upmarket Grocer Waitrose. Their approach is to use central warehouses to fill orders and distribute.

All this competition has resulted in competition between providers both on price (several offer the service 'free' for spends over a threshold of about 75) and quality (for example, discounts if delivery times are missed, or the goods / brands you order are not in stock etc.)

Also consider the grey pound (the elderly), makes life a hell of a lot easier.

I admit you may not get the best pick of tomatoes, but how much stuff do you buy that is pre packaged anyway. I wonder why they havent started doing this years ago.

Here in the UK, the Tesco and Waitrose supermarket chains have been taking orders over the net and delivering the goods by truck for several years. It's no longer remarked upon as being anything special.

Tesco were the first to realise that using their regular staff picking goods off the shelves of their regular supermarkets was a low-investment and very cost-effective way of linking orders to delivery trucks.

Paul

All implications and conspiracy theories aside...

The new standard for robots.txt files (in place for about 2+ years now, IIRC) allows you to disallow the lot and then specify exceptions.

Example:
http://www.tesco.com/robots.txt

Benefit? You don't end up giving people a handy shopping list of places you don't want them poking around.

So what strikes me most about this little discovery is that whoever wrote this robots.txt file is a complete doofus.

Oh, and Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Tim
http://www.bloggerheads.com/

Oh wait, my local supermarket does this already, and uses this info when I log into their online shopping section to populate my favourites list, so I don't have to bother searching for things I purchase regularly. So does Amazon. This is an infringement of my civil liberties because wasting my time is an inalienable human right... or something.

Seriously, what can someone actually do with my purchase history? Maybe target me with adverts for things I might want to buy? (no, I am not a good person to try to sell feminine hygein products to. And no I don't want to consolidate my debt, thank you. HINT TO ADVERTISERS: The only banner ad I have ever clicked on deliberately was for food.) Maybe they could use this information for blackmail, after all I wouldn't want it getting around that I make my own pizzas, or the men from Domino's will be after me.

Honestly, it's not like I buy things over the counter for spreading sedition. I use my other identity for that...

Is that not the case in the US? Don't the main supermarkets do this as standard?

Cheers,
Ian

Tesco UK have an ordering site optimised for PDAs and other small screen devices.

It's so easy to walk into the kitchen and see what I need, then order with an 802.11b enabled PDA.

We've had online stores in the uk for about a year now, maybe 18months. Initially, I think Tesco started off with a home delivery service, and its still going strong.

Later, other large stores have joined in the fun, incluing Asda (recently bought by WalMart), Sainsburys, and others (that I can't think of right now).

So really, I don't see how this is news for everyone.

Undergound shops? Yeah, these little shops are well underground In fact, you have to go DEEP underground to find a shop that would sell region free players!

O.K, I guess it depends on exactly where you are in this big place called "Europe", but hey, I've got stacks of R1 disks...

You actually buy your groceries online?

In the UK this is actually now fairly common, you see lots of Tesco Online vans running around if you're out and about during their "peak" delivery hours (just after people get home from work).

Bong! They do use this stuff - well, something like it. I use Tesco in the UK, and I get a bunch of vouchers through the mail every quarter. There are a few 'general purpose' vouchers for points, and a few 'specific purchase' vouchers which give you a discount off a certain class of good. I noticed, in the bunch of vouchers which arrived this week, that all 5 (I think) vouchers were directly relevant to me, and I'll probably use all of them. I really don't think this is a coincidence, since there are a number of things I never buy from that supermarket (meat, alcoholic drinks, fresh fruit/veg, pet food, as examples), and none of the vouchers hit those classes - and previous voucher drops have hit those things I never buy there. Either they've got very lucky picking their vouchers, or they're tailored to me. The voucher 'target' is printed onto the voucher separately from things like the T&Cs, so I know they can do this kind of thing.

Hey, it impressed me :-)

The dotcom I used to work for (redundancy - bah!) used to use a specialised office food delivery service - I imagine it was expensive.

Then we moved to Tesco's delivery service. I think delivery used to be free for orders of £50 or more, but even if they were charging £5, it would have been well worth it to get supermarket prices and to have a beefy guy drag all the juice, bottle water and snack treats up the stairs.

I can't immediately find a link, by it's regularly reported that Tesco's online home shopping is the largest web grocer in the world, in terms of turnover.

I've registered for their shopping service, but as my local Tesco is only a few blocks away, it's easier for me to pop down a couple of times a week. They occasionally send me "wish you were here" postcards.

I have amazing brand loyalty to Tesco, which is a bit weird considering they're just a supermarket. I've bought a fair selection of financial products through them.

Oh, and it probably doesn't hurt that they've just listed my site on their ISPs website, next to other sites with budgets ever so slightly larger than mine. :)

The key to Tesco's success is twofold. First, it's already a well-known brand -- it's our largest supermarket chain. And secondly, it distributes the goods from existing stores, so no extra warehouses etc. to build. (Our second largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury's, tried and failed to make the warehouse model work.)

Instead, icons representing the items to be purchased are dragged into an iconic representation of a shopping cart.

Prior art! :)

Believe it or not. Although they use a custom Windows program instead of a web page.

A Price Check on "Coke" give "No Matches". A check on "Cola" spewed out this beauty:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e4e'
Operation was canceled.

/whatsinstore/browse.asp, line 25

So where do I enter my credit card number? :)

The website you are complaining about is not refusing your user-agent for any privacy reasons but instead is doing so because of Javascript.

Lots of sites that contain javascript have different versions for MSIE and Netscape. Heck, my homepage has the similar browser sniffing code.
Unfortunately poor website developers forget that there exist more browsers than Netscape and MSIE, thus they do not create non-Javascript enabled versions of their site. A quick visit to the website confirms an excessive amount of javascript being used.

This is obviously not a privacy issue but instead one of poor website design. Anyway all your user-agent contains is your browser version and OS version, hardly devastatingly private information.
The Queue Principle

For ".banc," NSI recommends that a "core group" of global banking industry representatives be appointed as registry gatekeepers.

World Trade Organisation protestors and conspiracy theorists everywhere are likely to love this...

I can understand the country domains: presumably the government of the country is in some whay responsible.

I could understand domains for large NGOs like the United Nations.

But this suggestion seems to be a recipe for disaster. Next thing everybody will want to register their own top-level domains. Can I have .allan?

The UK have already tried someting similar with .plc.uk and .ltd.uk for the two main company types here. This arrangement is a complete failure: everybody registers .com (for example http://www.tesco.com/) and if that is unavailable .co.uk.

The suggestion here will also fail, for the same reasons.