Posts by Nick Kew

This may be a subjective impression, but Germany seems to take a healthy attitude to intellectual property, including declining to be infected with US-style massive patent abuse. For them to get frustrated at other countries licking the boots of patent trolls seems entirely consistent.

But I guess for them to say so is about as useful as the people who warned ten years ago of the banking bubble. Noone thanks you for taking away someone's fun, no matter how dangerous or damaging it may be.

Payback?

I was bitterly disappointed when Nokia messed up Maemo, leaving Android with no serious competitor in the relatively-open space.

Seems Google may be willfully conceding the maps space to Nokia. Payback?

Nostalgia

Altavista was the best in the pre-Google era. Head-and-shoulders above the rest.

In fact when Google first appeared, I don't think it was a better search engine than altavista. Where google scored for me was in a simple, uncluttered presentation. Altavista was beautiful to look upon, but out on the information dirt-track that came with the cost of long load-times, often measured in minutes rather than seconds.

Thank you Google

Tax-and-benefit regimes have been byzantine corruption-magnets for generations. And not just since they became much more formalised and universal after 1945[1].

We're now in a position where the economic bubble has burst and excessive corrupt and other feelgood (non-investment) spending by governments can suddenly no longer be swept under the carpet. Yet instead of fixing the rotten system, governments try to bully people into ad-hoc payments. That leaves the core of corruption untouched, and low-profile financial engineers without any legitimate business free to reap ever-richer rewards.

By analogy, think Patent Trolls. Think NTP vs RIM: the case that may have sown the seeds for the latter's downfall by moving the whole company from an innovative techie outfit to a defensive one bound by lawyers and red tape. Google, like RIM, has a real business doing something useful. NTP, like many nameless financial engineers, did not.

Google appears to be taking a stand for the rule of law and against arbitrary ad-hoc bullying. They've made it very clear that if the rules tell them to pay more then they will. That looks to me like taking a stand against a system that nurtures large-scale corrupt practices, and I commend them for it.

[1] I became acutely aware of it living in Italy in the 1990s, when many corrupt politicians were being locked up there. By contrasting that to the UK, I could see our heart of power - and hence corruption - is not the elected politicians, but the judiciary itself, and a network of nods-and-winks spanning primarily the City. How clever to be, quite literally, above the law and enjoy judicial immunity from any of the mess that engulfed Italy.

Just what Nokia needs

If Huawei wants Nokia, it's because Nokia has considerable assets and they're going cheap following Nokia's three or four years of failing. For Huawei it might also see it as a workaround for western protectionism in the guise of security concerns.

Could spark a bidding war if others see potential in those assets.

Nominees and Funds

Most (by no means all) of our big companies are listed on the stock exchange. That includes Private Equity, though not privately-held business such as (AFAIK) Lidls, nor partnerships like John Lewis or accountant and solicitor firms.

And who owns listed companies? Shareholders! But most of those shares are in funds: pension funds, mutual funds, investment vehicles, and the like. Even those whose beneficial owners are individuals are commonly held in nominee accounts: indeed, for shares held in a SIPP or an ISA there's no alternative.

In fact one might say, the whole history of our financial system has been working to distance owners from assets and obscure the relationships. That's a lot to reverse! Perhaps he really does want to finish the job NuLab started and pump up house prices to suck in ALL remaining assets in the productive economy?

There's a cultural issue in the UK: companies see you as a loser if you still have your hands on code past your mid-20s. Not only do older hacks have to look elsewhere (e.g myself to open source work and a US employer), it means the youngsters are doing a low-status job that they know they have to grow out of to progress in their career.

This is not universal: Silicon Valley has a much healthier blend of ages, as do online communities.

£1? Luxury!

When I was proprietor of a failing business, I got by on £2 per week (at today's prices). For two years, between running out of savings and starting to make an income.

If the core nutrition is pulses and value-line pasta (and similar), then extra ingredients that add flavour and goodness - like onions, mushrooms, chillies, green veg - turn it into a tasty meal. And if you use lentils in place of chickpeas, you escape the need for long preparation.

And I'm not even a Yorkshireman.

Police Yoof commissioner?

Could it save anyone getting egg on her face?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-22057246

It's the brain drain

Pay peanuts, get .... well, UK industry doesn't even seem to want anything more than twentysomething grads. Where's the career path? Oh, right, it's into a Suit, selling Hot Air to the Public Sector. Or else it's to Silicon Valley. Or variants on a theme.

Faced with no opportunities beyond the early career, is it any wonder folks go elsewhere?

Your chance to invest in touchtype

Touchtype is backed by venture capital: specifically Octopus Investments' "Titan" funds (who are paying me a chunky tax-free dividend next month from another successful investment).

They have an offer for subscription open right now: an opportunity to buy in to a share in Touchtype, along with about 50 other early-stage companies hoping for growth.

Common roots

In the beginning were homebrew hacks. Then two webservers emerged as leaders: things you could download and could run more-or-less out-of-the-box. Both NCSA and CERN servers were open source.

NCSA begat early Apache, which ruled the world in the second half of the '90s. But by the turn of the century, people were doing better. Apache 1 begat three new servers: Apache 2 from the same development team (modulo its evolution over time), and lighttpd and nginx as independent efforts, all drew on parts of the architecture and codebase. But their focus was different: Apache 2 with a lot of powerful APIS became a highly flexible and extensible applications platform, while nginx and lighttpd focused on raw performance in a more limited task. nginx has for some time looked like the winner in the "lean and mean" space, but is not designed with extensibility in mind!

And so we have horses for courses. The open source of NCSA and Apache 1 served its purpose, as different developers incorporated bits of them into new and improved products, serving different needs. Though of course there's still plenty of common ground: the regular web server or proxy, where any of them meets the needs of the vast majority of users without sweat.

And the good news

The good news is that Google has recently been spotted detecting this and marking infected pages as such:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/malware--hacked-sites/szxNTFptv1k

An open invitation ...

.... to London's dogs, to join him?

Having been infected with the anti-chinese propaganda, I wondered about this when I first heard of a chinese translation of my book.

Turned out the publisher was legitimate, and working with my publisher. The translator was very polite. The royalties arrived a few months later. A good experience.

Internet Watch Foundation?

So what action has the US taken against the "Internet Watch Foundation" censoring the web here in the UK? Do tell us if it looks similar, or tells of double-standards?

Does it not strike anyone else that, to be in a Debenhams in the first place, you've already run the gauntlet of their smells and cosmetics area on the ground floor and stink so much you can't taste whether the coffee is good or bad?

Shakeout

The Giants Nokia, RIM. Now HTC. And where are the traditional second-rankers? Anyone might think there was an industry shakeout happening! Though perhaps it's also the rise of chinese competitors to the point where the 'merkins pulled the strings of naked protectionism.

Question: why do fashions have to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Why does noone produce a phone with keyboard quite as good as the Nokia E71 any more, unless you count the whopping £500 two-hander blackberry bolds?