Posts by Phil A

BT Fon

So with the new BT Fon service, you voluntarily give up some of your bandwidth for others to use and it's legal for them to connect but if you do it off your own back and leave your wifi unsecured and are happy for them to connect, it's illegal? Logic...nah

I'm going the other way...

Come on, a warehouse is almost by definition suitable for forklift use...In the dim and distant past, I held a forklift ticket and there is a certain expectation that any goods will be packed to be able to survive normal movement from a forklift - and the raised surface is probably a simple raised bump to prevent rain from coming into the warehouse. If it's a pallet of paint, it's messy but not the end of the world. If it's a $1.4M server, it should be packed maybe a little better than a load of boxes wrapped in pallet wrap?

Recycled Private Eye

Hmm, that cartoon could have been about Prince Edward and translated into Spanish. It looks exactly like how Gerald Scarfe would portray him...

Of course, there would be no point in searching for "Portada del jueves censurado y retirado por orden del juez Del Olmo" on Flickr.com

Do unto Microsoft....

Isn't this a bit like 1982 when IBM created the PC and opened up the design to anyone who wanted it? OK, Apricot, Amstrad and lots of other long gone names made some good PC clones then but who made the big money? MS of course - in a way, I hope that IBM have learnt their lesson and can make some money from their huge investment in IP now by sharing and profiting from it (probably a first, calling IBM the underdog!)

Risk reduction

Or the chip designer that had multiple redundant server rooms on 4 floors - it's just a shame that they were one above the other and when the roof leaked, the water just ran down the cable ducts from floor to floor and took out all four.

Maybe next time, one in each corner of the building?

Hotel bookings, airline bookings, hospital bookings

Hmm, if hotels and airlines have been managing to book online for many years now and interoperate between disparate systems, it shouldn't be so hard so yep, about a million quid sounds reasonable. HL7? Yep, another interoperability standard, good idea but not rocket science. Look at any travel website - how do you think they manage to book with all the different airlines and hotels? Hell, Amazon even publish their API.

Real world rounding errors

It's not always a mathematical error - sometimes the problem can be a misunderstanding between two parties on how rounding is to be done. In engineering contracts, the tradition is to do all calculations to four decimal places, only rounding to two when a financial value is displayed. Sounds simple enough but there's still plenty of scope for error. For example if something has a value of £1.2486 and you want to use 10 of them, you could round at the beginning to give £1.25 * 10 = £12.50 or round later to give £12.49. A penny doesn't sound much but for using high quantities of a small value (eg 60000 of an item costing 0.0375 could give an error of £150 by the above method). It gets even worse if you have multiple cost lines and vary on whether the rounding is done at the total or individual lines. Finally, how do you round a .5 value? Mathematically (and I believe in banking), the convention is to round to the nearest even digit so 1.5 gets rounded to 2.0, 2.5 gets rounded to 2.0 and 3.5 gets rounded to four. On average, this should give a lesser error. Interestingly, Microsoft isn't even consistent, Excel rounds upwards ROUND(2.5,0)=3 but Access rounds as described above.