Posts by Watty-7

Generous Alibaba to scatter 0.9% of annual revenue over Southeast Asia to develop tech talent and infrastructure

Erm…

The plural of training is training. (Paragraph 6).

The Wight stuff: Marconi and the island, when working remotely on wireless comms meant something very different

Funny how we all have different histories…

I grew up on the South Wales coast near Lavernock Point, where we were proudly and frequently reminded that Marconi made the first transmission across the sea to the island of Flatholm in the Bristol Channel. Yes, it’s only a few KM but still.

Anyhoo, no one ever mentioned the role of the Isle of Wight in between this first transmission and the first transatlantic one - and this BBC Wales article also resolutely refuses to acknowledge it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/waleshistory/2012/05/marconi_wireless_open_sea_lavernock_point_flat_holm.html

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Incentives drive behaviours

Until managers are given performance based objectives and measures, it is not possible to make big improvements in quality. Make managers and project clients responsible for production quality

Epic move: Judge says Apple can't revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks 'Where does the 30% come from?'

30% is less than the 70% cut wholesalers and retailers take from physical game sales...

Ok - there’s a strong argument that there is no competition in the Apple and Google App stores. But don’t forget the cut they take is based on their distribution network and reach. Revenue for digital distribution is higher than physical store sales and at the same time the margin that developers receive is higher in this model.

Does that make it fair? Maybe, maybe not. But as Marx told us, seize both the means of production and distribution. The question should be ‘should Apple control distribution in their ecosystem’. Developers and consumers are already better off with Apple’s digital distribution than they were with physical stores or media. Consumers also have more choice as independent developers can thrive more easily. Do the benefits of Apple’s walled garden outweigh the costs of developers margin control?

Data-matching won't help much with electoral registration

Really?

I'd be very interested to find out more about the methods used for matching addresses. I suspect that for most local authorities, the leading enterprise software solutions were way out of their price range and it sounds like they defaulted to manual labour to eyeball the data. I also suspect that the free/low cost/open source software options are not mature enough to deal with particularly cruddy data.

Even so, address matching is available from a number of bureau service providers who could probably clean this much more cheaply than a handful of people can. I know of both providers and software options that can offer a 95% + match rate for residential addresses (business addresses are a different matter, but that wasn't the point of the exercise - assuming that voters don't live in business properties).