Posts by Is it me?

Ex-Sun boss punts Apple-Microsoft-world 'tried to sue me' missive

Hmmm

Could all this, I'll sue you if you sue me stuff really be the incumbents protecting each other and keeping start-ups out.

Tories promise medals not money for science and R&D

I seem to remember that...

Quite a lot of R & D Tax credits got used up by banks researching new and innovative mathematical formulas to hide bad risks, avoid tax and such, and look where that got us.

Still what would one expect from a country that values accountants over scientists. We used to have a saying in my University, "On leaving students either revert to normal human beings or become chartered accountants", the latter being the first choice of most science graduates as there's more money in being an accountant. In fact some engineering and geology students found it more lucrative to become brickkies and oil roustabouts than pursue their degree.

Giving someone a medal is just about par for a party that pampers the rich, who are mostly accountants. (Just to be fair and balanced my party is little better, and marginally in front of the other, Nick & Gordon).

Politicians like to cut science because none of them are cleaver enough to understand it and as it's difficult to measure success and claim it for themselves, they don't care.

Microsoft flaunts cross-platform gaming goodies

Great!

I'll truely believe when I can play HALO on my Wii

Google now owns location advertising

WTF

Is this obvious, too damn right it is, Marketing and Emergency Services have been using this type of technology for years. Its standard GIS requirements to do any of the following, tell me all the x within a distance of y of z and do something, tell me all the x with y minutes of z and do something, tell me all the x within y minutes of z corridor and do something.

So that might be

Tell me all the properties burgled within 5 minutes of the M1 and display a house icon coloured to represent the type of theft where a red ford Cortina has been registered by an ANPR camera within 1 hour of the burglary.

Tell me the ambulance that is within 5 minutes of this location and connect me to them via airwave.

Send a letter with some vouchers to every address with an active club card and a spend of over £100 per week within 30 minutes of this Tescos.

All of the above are common GIS queries that are regularly used by a wide variety of organisations across the world. So Google, what's so neat about your idea then?

Oops! Mobile masters of universe forget mobiles make phone calls

A Dumb Pipe for Skype

Hmm. Won't this make it a de facto Monopoly. A single world wide carrier on a propriety protocol, so they will be able to charge what they like.

MS and Oracle's big dev tools - who needs 'em?

What I Want from an IDE

As a software manager I want a development environment that allows me to move seamlessly from requirements to testing with full traceability.

As a developer I want a tool that helps me build code by taking away the mundane tasks so I can concentrate on building software to do cool stuff.

What has happened with the main IDEs is that they have assumed that the former requirement necessitates a single tool that does everything, well a lot more than is needed. Thus when I start up JDeveloper or Visual Studio, they give me a whole host of stuff that I just don,t need for the task I'm doing, and take a long time about it. What you really need is a collection of less functionally rich tools that allow the key tasks in a system delivery process to go on together, but not interfere. At the risk of using IBM terminology, You should have say, an Architect's workbench, a requirements work bench, a design workbench, a development and so on to cover the key tasks. When you get to development, the design should be relatively independent so you can feed into database and language work benches that are highly efficient for their target, and not trying to be development tools for anything and everything in the same screen.

The other thing that gets me about IDEs is they are awful at providing diagrammatic output., why? Is it beyond the whit of the companies to provide a PDF, or even a BMP of a picture?

A long time ago Oracle had a really good development tool for designing systems for implementation into Oracle Forms on Relational Databases. I'd always hoped that JDeveloper would do the same for Java, but apparently no, yet it can't have been that difficult to do. PowerBuilder managed to be a relatively good Object oriented IDE, and a darn sight easier to use than VB.

Oh well I guess the market knows best.

Citizens rail against government data sharing

You might think that but I couldn't possibly comment.

I believe that Tesco has the biggest database of personal information in the UK, but they don't share, so far as I know, it because they get competitive advantage from it. Experian and Equifax also hold large amounts of information about us, but no one seems to care, about that.

Bust share medical records across the NHS, which might actually save your life, ooh can't have that.

We expect the government to know all sorts of things about other people so that they can prevent child abuse, benefit fraud, and so on, we all want the government ot stop these things and hold data on all those nasty anti-social people, but not on us, oh no.

Be real, to catch bad guys you need information on good guys as well, a lot of the current methods of catching bad guys depends on the ability of the investigators to detect aberrant behaviour. Before computing a lot of this was detected socially, by individuals, but know a lot of our lives go on on cyberspace hidden by pseudonyms and obfuscation, that can only be detected by knowing stuff about everybody. BTW this also works for a surprisingly large set of other more benign applications in health, finance and government making life better for you.

I can think of one country where everything is centralised, and citizens get excellent service delivery, sadly, it's also a despot. At least we can argue about it, not like their citizens, but we have to put up with disparity of service delivery.

Microsoft made a phone, and I hate it already

Why would you buy a redfly anyway.

I don't see what this gives you over a cheap laptop/netbook, what advantage is there over having a phone and a computer. I quite often type on my computer when talking on the phone, how would you do that.

French poised to seize Port of Dover

£15m Annual Profit for £400m

Doesn't sound like good business to me. Now if it's "Give us the dosh", we'll build the terminal and give you an annual return of £45m, that's good business.

ID minister promises virtual immortality for all Britons

Here's a thought

If you have a national ID system (wanted or not) and you were a criminal, faking your death would be a good way to vanish from the system, and then you could create a whole new ID, gold standard. However, if you retain the old identity on the register, then as soon as you register your biometrics the system will detect the fact you already exist.

If you are going to have an ID system, you don't want one that's full of holes, and certainly not blindingly obvious ones, like removing people who are dead when they die, far more logical to retain a record until their physical age has passed say 120, or however the oldest person has lived to plus a margin.

You have to do this because there is no single register that contains the birth, death, adoption, naturalization and deed pole records that contains details of all the living and dead who could apply for a card if they hadn't died prematurely.

Woman sues rail line for 'exploding' toilet

Didn't Mythbusters

Explode that myth?

Amazon deletes a 6th of its catalogue in book price barney

Do you not understand how books are created?

Kindle started off as a niche product, so product can be sold as a loss leader, but as take up increases then it begins to eat into margins of other distribution mediums, and this needs to be equalised. The price of a book is dependent on:

A) The Author

B) The cost of type setting

C) the cost of printing

D) the cost of marketing

E) the cost of distribution

F) the publisher's margin

G)the wholesale margin

H)the retail margin

Publishing is going through a sea change in how it operates, electronic publication may be cheap, but if 50% of your distribution is Paper, you don't want to make that channel so expensive that no one buys paper, because then suddenly you are stuck with Sony, Apple and Amazon as your only delivery mechanisms, and BTW, ultimately probably 90% will eventually be through one of these players.

Thus as a publisher you have to cross subsidise your editions to enable you to maintain a balance delivery approach to your clients.

Just because you want to use a Kindle doesn't mean everybody else does, and I suspect that up till now everybody else has subsidised you.

Book readers are $250, a hefty investment for the poor and elderly, books are free from libraries, and cheap from book stores in comparison, and thus accessible to many more people than they would be through electronic means.

Handbags at dawn chaps!

You can see Amazon's side of this, they won't want Apple eating into their closed eco-system any more than they do Sony. Personally I prefer the Open solution that I can lie back and read in a nice hot bath.

It's called a book, it's completely open and not tied to propriety technology, it's green, easily recyclable, low carbon footprint and requires no energy to use.

Also costs a maximum of £15 if you drop it in the bath.

Just because it's new technology, doesn't mean it's good technology, now where's my abacus.

Oracle sues support firm over 'massive theft'

Taken a bit of time hasn't it?

This isn't the only site, just do a few searches on Google for a problem and quite often you'll find one site has skimmed another, usually one that wants to charge.

In fact if I ran a legitimate site, I'd do some searches on my problem base and see who else had exactly the same answer.