Posts by Jon Press

USP?

They'd be better off with a UPS.

Who you gonna call?

It would help if there was one place to go when this sort of thing happens.

It would help even more if they were not totally supine.

If a 'human' calls you it's the TPS but if it's a machine then it's the ICO.

I called the latter and they apparently need to know the name and address of the caller before they can take actiom. I had a CLI but they have no power to trace it - all they do is ring the number and hope someone will volunteer to incriminate themselves...

The Heir Abhorrent...

... was already running out of friends. Sounds like backs might be turning in the family too.

What about the 5th HD channel capacity?

Not that I see much point in putting money into 3D (or indeed the Olympics), but for those people who do, isn't there an unused chunk of Freeview HD capacity declined (twice) by Channel 5?

I assume there's already intrastructure planned to support additional "red button" streams, so it can't be much of a stretch to set up a temporary HD channel.

A grave error.

(body)

Telly Tax

Paying Netflix, Lovefilm, Sky, Sony, BT and every other would-be content provider separately would be bad enough, but integrating their proprietary interfaces into every TV is a logistical nightmare for hardware providers.

I really don't think IPTV is going to take off for anything except free content (like iPlayer) until there are some common standards for delivery and payment.

Until then, the advantage of a "telly tax" is that it gives access to a wide range of DRM-free content through one simple annual payment with significant economies of scale.

While there may be transport savings...

... having large numbers of people work from home will cause a significant loss of business rates that will have to be recovered somehow. Probably by taxing people who work from home.

Anyone notice that one of the flexible "Anywhere Working" case studies is the London Symphony Orchestra? It's difficult enough getting an organ to synch up with an orchestra in situ, I can't help feeling the conductor's going to have a hard time when all the players are Skyped in.

"1952's Dr. No"

"Not the Italian government horse"

Just as well; they communicate using the entire horse's head.

Allegedly.

Can you still get parts for DECtalk?

I wouldn't want to be the one to suggest converting him to Android...

I have a Mini10...

... with a 1366x768 display and with an extra Gig of memory in it, it's quite a capable little machine. I wouldn't want to edit HD video on it, but apart from that it serves pretty well for software development, media consumption (it's also got hardware video decoding assistance) and general home and office chores.

I don't think there's much wrong with the form factor, it just that they were being sold into a consumer market for which tablets are simply more appropriate and the flexibility offered by a general purpose computing platform isn't very important.

Unfortunately, I suspect ultrabooks might have exactly the same problem.

Most of that £1m...

... is probably the cost of protection for getting through the subway alive.

Don't know if it's a regional phenomenon...

... but the Channel 4 News breaks consist entirely of trailers for Channel 4 programmes and the breaks on other programmes/channels are regularly padded with trailers.

Doesn't look like there's advertising available to fill even nine minutes per hour.

Despair of Meerkats

Attempt to watch an episode of The Gadget Show (I know...) on Demand 5 (at least on the Sony Portal) and you get the same bunch of animated meerkat toys in exactly the same commercial before the start of the programme and then at 15 minute intervals thereafter. And again in every bloody episode of everything that follows.

Anyone who might have thought Smart TV was a good idea will by now have slit their wrists.

Which will at least spare them the horror of trying to negotiate the iPlayer interface with a remote control.

Judging by the blur in the first picture...

... it would appear to rotate at high speed. Don't know if that's the reality-distortion generator in operation or the picture five years down the line after the earthly remains of His Jobsworth have been spinning with increasing agitation at its centre.

Merkozy beat me to it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16075890

It's not a good sign...

... that RIM, not unknown for its pursuit of intellectual property cases, apparently either didn't bother to research the new moniker or took a different view of the meaning of "incontestable". Eyes, ball, etc....

TV + Phone/pad control?

A interactive TV solution which uses a phone/pad as an input device instead of the rather clumsy long-reach remote control might actually work - you could have a full keyboard in your hand (as well as a range of other input options) and be able to see the TV display duplicated on your phone when you looked down (or indeed supplementary information relevant to what you're watching). As well as providing a bigger screen for video calling. It's certainly in Apple's interests to extend the walls of the iEmpire and it would make Google TV look (even more) unfinished.

Though there's still that 16:9 vs 4:3 issue...

Typists have more to complain about than Novell

WP for DOS was a favourite of power typists - who could enter and format large chunks of text without taking their hands off the keyboard. It was indeed the "perfect" tool for the typing pool.

Word for Windows meant people could more easily type their own letters and memos and the job for which WP was designed was eliminated. Whatever shenanigans may or may not have gone on behind the scenes, it was the change in the way offices operated that was WP's undoing.

Mind you, I can't help feeling that the perceived efficiency of DIY dictation is an illusion compared to Ms Witherspoon taking down your articles professionally.and bashing our your bons mots as her flying fingers blur before your eyes.

Return of the Overseer

No Victorian factory would have been complete without its complement of Overseers checking on everything from productivity to moral behaviour both in and out of the workplace.

I'm surprised that this patent doesn't extend to the home - you wouldn't want anyone badmouthing their colleagues or the company in private, now, would you? Or failing to put in their extra few hours of unpaid overtime. Or meeting up with the employee of a competitor. Etc.

I'm sure it can all be built into your Xbox and you might even get a slight discount for the privilege.

How come you invite such unsuitable candidates to interview?

I've been on both sides of the interview table and quite frankly "playing the game" is in my experience the principal reason that the wrong pepole get hired. Both parties should be reasonably confident before the interview is even scheduled that they are a resonable match: the interview can only be a final sanity check. If you're discarding people as unemployable at the interview stage your process is missing some steps.

Don't forget the best candidate may not be desperate for your job. Unless they're unemployed, in danger of being unemployed or pathetically anxious to get out of a present job or get more money then the main purpose of the interview (for the candidate) is to find out whether they'd enjoy the job on offer and there's a reasonable chance that the job won't immediately disappear or morph into some brain-rotting droid role. Turning up in jeans and a t-shirt (if that's your habitual wok attire) and dealing with the interviewer(s) in the same way you would if they become your colleagues rather than as a helpless supplicant is a perfectly reasonable strategy to ensure the potential employer wasn't lying about the promised working environment and will deal with you honestly later on, If the recruiters aren't prepared to compromise on their arbitrary criteria to get the best candidate, they're not doing their job properly.

Mind you, recruiters could save everyone a great deal of time by specifying those arbitrary criteria up front. If they include "you will wear a suit", "we will ask you about your reading habits or other aspects of your personal life which are none of our business", "we will ask a nonsense question we read in a self-help book" or "we will ask you for a sample of your handwriting" then we know in advance where to avoid. Because, even today, an expletive in the face often offends.

"Forward-thinking executive"

Those were the days...

Halting development of Flash Player for browsers on handhelds

Guess Android's going to have to look for another USP.

.. the right to cancel the PlayBook promotion without notice

Delete "promotion" and you're probably close to the truth...

Can you impose a charging ceiling?

The FAQ simply refers to "automated billing of excess map loads" - nothing about whether you can put a cap on the monthly charge. If the containing page gets cached somewhere can you reliably control the user count?

Interesting focus on open source...

Look past the usual key/leader/deliver/influence drivel in the job descriptions and there's a very clear focus on open source and cloud-based solutions (linux/python/ruby....) and on adopting a rather different development model to traditional government IT projects. It's a distincly non-Civil-Service approach and it will be interesting to see whether Sir Humphrey gets behind it or will be found underneath removing the wheels.

The two-stage send process that is the norm ... was over-looked

Was "overlooked" or was "actively bypassed"?

In the former case you need some technical control over sending data to thousands of recipients not just a note pinned to the wall. In the latter case you need a member of staff pinned to the wall.

Still, congratulations to Team Register for managing to foreswear Liam Fox's enthusiasm for the passive voice - at least until the third sentence.

Failure to understand the difference between Amazon and Google?

Amazon makes it money from selling stuff. It has a large established distribution infrastructure for shifting physical goods as well as a large IT infrastructure to catalogue its inventory and collect payment for sales.

For Amazon, reselling its IT infrastructure is a win-win: it's an additional source of income and reduces the cost of running it just for Amazon's core business. Add to that the additional revenue from reselling its reseller infrastructure (payment services and fulfilment). It's core business isn't threatened - it's now so big that noone else is going to be rushing out to build the same scale of warehousing and only Apple has the same level of business to offer to suppliers of downloadable content.

Nearly all of Google's revenue comes from putting adverts in front of eyeballs and then watching what those eyeballs do. As soon as you abstract Google's services into APIs you remove the eyeballs and the revenues that go with them. What's more, the services for which Google charges are sofware applications which can pretty quickly be emulated and distributed across a cloud service - the only thing that distinguishes them is that they're from Google. Allow 3rd parties to build similar apps on top of the Google infrastructure and you're lending your brand to the competition.

That's not to say that Google's apps couldn't benefit from some extensibility, but that's about APIs that consume stuff from 3rd parties, not APIs that allow 3rd parties to consume stuff from Google.

As a former micro-business...

... I wouldn't start one again.

They are more resilient, usually, as they depend on enthusiastic (stupid?) owners who will adjust their takings from the business, if necessary making them negative, in order to keep things going in hard times.

They're plagued by temporary "tax breaks" and special "promotion" that cause their business objectives to be continually twisted to adapt to short-term government policies and which constantly distort competition by unlevelling the playing field with monotonous regularity just so Joe Soap MP can have his photo taken with someone in a suit or a lab coat. They're constantly under the thumb of the VATman, the taxman, employment law and every sort of "compliance" scam from having the right-sized health and safety poster to portable appliance testing. The owners of small businesses that were previously encouraged by government policy to incorporate are now being hit with big captial gains tax bills when they come to retire and sell up as some idiot of a politician decided they'd just change the rules for a laugh.

Meanwhile, big business chooses when, where and if to pay tax, routinely gets to dictate favourable legislation and pays for its failures with other peoples' money.

Micro businesses don't want special rules, but they'd quite like different rules that actually apply to everyone. Since that's unlikely, my advice to anyone thinking of starting one is to forget it.

I gather there's a role going as Special Adviser to the Defence Minister with lots of international travel and sounds like a lot less effort.

Maybe it's just me...

... but £160 seems expensive as a remedy for a missing USB host port. Especially when you can stream a large number of channels directly from the broadcaster without it.

Without wishing to be cast as a smut ogler...

... as I'd never do something so reprehensible and, indeed, bandwidth-consuming (apparently).

Nevertheless.

There were 21.8M households in the UK in 2008, of which 15.8M had no dependent children, according to the ONS. As one of the 15.8M, I'm getting a bit tired of the constant pandering to breeders. It's a "bonfire of the quangos" and serious belt-tightening for every other part of society - isn't it about time to expect parents to make more responsibility for their lifestyle choices?

And your average teenager is going to have no problem getting opted-in, of course, so it's transparently-empty rhetoric from Old Mother Cameron. Pass me the sick bag.

Not many "confirmed bachelors" in the Bible, but...

Pleased as man with man to dwell

Jesus, our Emmanuel