The Real Reason For The Excercise
The site requires far more information than necessary to administer a poll. It looks to me like a cheap way to build a list of customers who are prepared to pay for premium internet service.
Posts by AD 4
7 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009
BT bids bumpkins to beg for better broadband
UK.gov fishes for ID ideas
Half of UK road users support usage-based road charging
Friday 27th August 2010 19:17 GMT
Powerful road lobby?
Do we really have a powerful lobby for road transport? Taxes on road transport continually go up while subsidies from government to rail and buses go up.
The deflation in car running costs has come from improvements in reliability and fuel economy, and the inflation in rail costs comes from it being a labour-intensive industry and the extra safety regulations that need to be adhered to. There is not much difference that lobbying can make to these factors.
Friday 27th August 2010 11:46 GMT 
Depends on the question
"Do you support road charging in general, at some point over five years in the future?"is a very different question to "Do you support road charging on your route, starting in the next couple of years?" as the Manchester referendum discovered.
I expect the government to be bigging road charging up as an insurance in case electric/fuel cell cars prove viable. Assuming that the highest milage users would be the first to switch to alternative fuels (as they would save the most money), revenue from fuel tax could decline far more rapidly than the government to could make a case for and implement road pricing.
Excel revolutionary needed to crush web-forms anarchy
Monday 14th June 2010 21:55 GMT
It's not the technology that stops the innovation
I completely agree that such a tool is needed to overcome the complexity of developing for the web, but I don't see it happening soon due to:
- The big software vendors (microsoft/oracle/adobe) are doing just fine selling development software that is overly complex.
- Start-ups would have a huge task marketing a product against the FUD from the big guys.
- There have been changes in corporate IT since the 90s that demand proven security/reliability/compliance to existing standards that any such tool would need to overcome. Some companies I have worked for would probably not install Excel, if it had not already been invented.
Was Microsoft's Office 2010 worth killing Clippy?
Thursday 13th May 2010 11:56 GMT
Excel vs. OO Calc
I used to used Open Office Calc as a spreadsheet but have gone back to Excel. OpenOffice Calc has all the features that most users would need but the more I used OO, the more Excel showed itself to be a much better engineered product. In particular, the display of rounded small&large numbers was not as precise as excel and the performance of the product rapidly detererates with large data sets.
I want to use open source software but in this case it falls short when I need to get work done.
IT workers grumble about lack of career path
Tuesday 21st July 2009 20:06 GMT
The difference between IT and most other careers
The difference between IT and most other careers is that someone on the bottom rung can have a higher market rate than people in the rungs above. Usually, companies set up their pay and benefits structures to motivate their employees to put in extra work, build up experience and get to the next rung. That doesn't work when the market rate for a DBA, system admin or programmer with 5 years of specialist experience is asking for more pay than a line manager with 5 years experience.
Other professions have structured themselves differently, surgeons get more than hospital admins, sales people can earn more than sales managers, footballers get more than football managers, film stars get more than film producers. They can still motivate and develop people without needing a hierarchical structure.
The companies that don't understand this are the ones that are dependent on contractors because their own pay structures mean they can't pay their employees the market rate.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
