* Posts by Steve Mills

5 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2009

BOOST! LEGO's computing future and its ground-breaking past

Steve Mills
Happy

No photo of the Dacta interface box...

Oh the joys of lego dacta. Programming light sensors (that could tell the colour of bricks), motors, conveyor belts, and pneumatic systems - although the latter I seem to remember was manual, not programable)

I'm surprised there is no mention of the old LEGO Technics Dacta interface box:

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/PRODPIC-6998.jpg

You plugged all the sensors and motors in to this and connected it your computer. Many a times I remember hitting the big red stop button as my creations went haywire or were about to commit some act of self destruction.

Worthy of a photo in the article me thinks - although that might just me being nostalgic: I'm pretty sure this box of tricks and my teachers enthusiasm is what sent me on a career of application development and delivery.

Piketty-Poketty-Poo: Some people are just itching to up tax to capital ...

Steve Mills

Or alternatively

It's not levied at an item level, but paid based on your yearly consumption...

"Spent £25k this year, then pay 10% spent £250k this year pay 50%"

This has the effect of making the loaf of bread one price for the low consumer and another price for the high consumer.

Whether this is equitable is a matter of philosophical opinion. It is however economically indifferent to the current model we have today where although the loaf of bread has the same sticker price, someone on a larger income has to earn more to pay for it due to a progressive tax regime.

Google extends app refund window to two hours

Steve Mills

Genuine question

Does apple have anything like this? I've paid for apps in the past but couldn't work out how to refund ones that were sub par. Generally considered my time to work it out was worth more than the £1.50 or so the app cost, but as a matter of principle i would love to know for next time.

Google Maps API now costs $4 per 1,000 requests

Steve Mills
Stop

RTFM

Until now if your site was not freely available to the public - ie you had to pay to subscribe to the site or the site was limited to a certain set of users, e.g. Your company employees, then the terms of service forbade you from using the free api and you should have been using the premier api at cost of around £7700.

I need to read the new terms but it actually may be cheaper now for some people.

Spoken as someone who has done commercial implementations of google maps with corporate CRM and sales systems.

Researcher: Twitter attack targeted anti-Russian blogger

Steve Mills
FAIL

Novel

Is the implication here that someone tried to "Silence" a bloger /twitterer and his/her views by sending spam to millions of people that directed them directly to their blog/twitter/facebook account?

Seem like a bloody stupid way of making his/her opinions disapear.