Posts by Saul Dobney47 posts • joined Sunday 18th March 2007 18:09 GMT
The interesting projects seem to be ones that are more hardware based - so writing software to control things like motors, sensors etc where the controlling computer sits on the device giving it some autonomy.
The Pi is small enough and cheap enough that you can add it to lots of wheeled devices then program the devices to be dodgems, or catch, or football... and see what happens.
The probable comparison will be with TV gameshows or theatre productions where there is copyright on the 'format' of the show even if the precise content is different. Copyright on maps may also have a similar precedence. However, the text book manufacturers may be shooting themselves in the foot. There is no dispute about the content and changing formating or rearranging the order of the content is relatively easy and could be done via crowd-sourced editors quite quickly. The law suit draws publicity, and attracts the interest of crisis-stretched educational departments. The publishers could easily win the battle only to find themselves opening a war they'll never win.
How on earth did this get to be a patent?
On the other hand Facebook aren't trying to hide their intentions...
"In one embodiment, a method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain ... logging the actions taken on the third-party website in the social networking system ... correlating the logged actions with one or more advertisements."
"the actions taken by users can be correlated to the vast array of information attributes that the social network system maintains in order to improve analytical and targeting processes"
"...the user can be informed of online activities that the user's friends have taken outside the social network system ... Social ads thus allow advertisers to enjoy the credibility that consumers naturally give to their friends through word of mouth advertising"
"One benefit of mixing the newsfeed stories and the social ads in a single list presented to a user is that there may be little or no differentiation between advertising and general information that a user would want to know"
"The user's experience can be integrated between the third party website and the social network system such that the information is used in both domains"
"...If the user clicks on a particular friend, the social network system may communicate to the third party website a list of items that the friend has purchased"
So all that Skype spam I get with fake IDs seeking connections is good ID data?
My guess is that no-one's done good quality price research here yet. A good quality full-specced sub £170 tablet will sell in huge huge volumes because people will buy several (it's a bit like Nintendo DS's once one child has one - all the children in a family have to have one). I can be reading tech news while watching football on TV, while my other half reads the Daily Mail and the children mess around on Facebook for instance.
Apple's shown there is demand at the luxury end of the market (a bit like a coffee table showpiece) but it's not at a one-per-child price. Rather than compete to sell one against Apple, compete for the much larger volume of several per household.
In continental Europe there's this thing called Privacy written into various national constitutions and actually European Human Rights directives, which says even stuff which is apparently public is still subject to privacy rules. The exception is if you can show an explicit public interest. A shop tracking a customer does not have a public interest defence - the only way allowed in certain European countries is for the customer to have agreed to the data collection (explicit opt-in). Even if you think the information is public. Without the opt-in the shop is not allowed to do it. The principle is that organisations/businesses hold the minimum information. Information being public is not a defence.
As you're in America, I'll give you some time to pick your lower jaw off the floor.
The judgement is interesting to read - including the dissenting judge. Hopefully this will go to the Supreme Court because it is weird. They say that the isolated DNA for the specific gene does not exist in nature and is therefore a created entity - as such it can be patented.
But, lets say I apply a process to an extract of human DNA. If in doing so, I get sections of DNA that fall under the patent simply by the process of snipping and extraction, I can't see how the patent has been breached. These samples would be elements discovered and are not creations as such. The ruling is perverse - it's like patenting an animal's fur or skin. The fur does not exist in nature other than as part of the animal which is the test they have applied here. But the process of even though that fur or skin or leather has useful properties, simple removal or extraction does not make it any less natural. Just because DNA is a molecule, doesn't make it any less like fur, skin or flesh.
Take it as a loss leader. Make the programmes. Put them on real TV, then put them on Youtube. Use Real TV ads to part fund the process, and repeat. Eventually you get a channel on Youtube from all the series Google has part-funded. Or buy a TV station.
There are huge numbers of new ideas and new start-ups pursuing new ideas. You only notice the ones that win out at the end of the day. Why? The problem isn't having the idea, but getting the implementation right - Microsoft had tablet touch screens in the OS before Apple; it had a pocket device OS. It didn't get them right. But it had them.
From a pool of start ups, you know something will develop, but you never quite know what will be best. A corporate can hammer away billions trying to guess. Or it can co-invest small sums with potential winners and see which ones thrive and which die. Going for a single company-line approach will always have the risk of being too slow and simply not hitting the sweet spot.
Microsoft's risk has been developers moving out of Windows to program apps and mobile phone devices. Particularly if corporate IT depts move to developing for non-PCs. They have to bring Windows and .NET to ARM and small devices. It's just surprising it's taken so long for them to see the danger.
Tried a 7inch tablet UMPC at 800x480 and it's just too much of a compromise. Webpages are either made smaller and unfocused and unreadable on a zoom out, or get clipped one side or the other with too much scrolling left and right needed. May be a higher resolution 7" screen will work, but it doesn't make a good web-experience.
Does this mean you can't clean our spam entries from comments sections without then falling foul of Chapter 19?
Multiple systems, not replacements. There are a lot of us now out there with a number of computers in the family, each for different purposes. Netbooks are sort of like magazines lying around the sofa. A film comes on, you flick over to Rottentomatoes to see if its any good. Or just browse for houses/cars/books/gadgets while the footie is on the TV. Or to save buying the paper in the morning, you just pick up the netbook/iPhone by the bed and flick through the newspaper sites without bothering to get out of bed.
Cheap. Fast start up. Cool on your lap. Readable resolution for the web. WiFi. Simple to keep charged/long battery life. Don't know if it will be ARM or Intel, but it certainly isn't Windows. And as price is the key (sub $250), I'm not sure that it's Apple either.
Add a random token to the login URL. Offline the user hashes his or her password with the URL+ token. The user log-ins with the hash. The real password is never sent and it can't be worked out through a man-in-the-middle attack. Easy to implement, impossible to phish.
There seem to be three parts to this
1. Something to parse a stream and break it up separating out the mark up from the content - creating content as a flat file/continuous stream and an index based on the mark-up (the metamap)
2. The principle of a flat file with a metamap. This is obviously ancient technology since it's the basis of all market research and stats software (eg SPSS and VAX based survey software)
3. Something to rebuild the document from the flat file and ad hoc indexes. Again market research software would fit here rebuilding individual questionnaires from data plus a question map.
The first should be obvious but I can't find a specific example. Obviously parsing a text file for control data pre-exists - It's the way email works, or earlier forms of EDI etc but it might be claimed these might not produce a direct map and data separation?
For me it dropped from 1000+ a day down to about 50-100 around the first/second week of May. I assumed that some of the bots had been turned off.
The FT (this month) switched to the S&P index on the front page instead of the Dow Jones. Open source stock market indices anyone?
Trademarks are partly for the protection of the consumer (but also help the owner). Think of buying a camera on Ebay. If some tries to sell you a Cannon camera and you think you're buying Canon. Trademark means that if they are 'passing off' the fake Cannon brand as Canon then the seller can be sued. It allows consumers to make mistakes but still get the brand they expected.
Now of course IP lawyers, being lawyers, try and use the law for extortion. However, the law on trademarks isn't that bad and nowhere near as mad as US patent law. US companies do register their tag lines but "The best a man can get" being registered is the whole phrase - not words, since you can't register generic terms and you have to look at the categories for registration. You can't register the single word 'best' for instance in any category.
Not so long ago there was the story of a Russian who thought he'd brought the 'patent' to some word or other, clearly sold a trademark by an unscrupulous lawyer who should have known better, so if you don't know the difference between Trademark and Patent, I'm sure there is someone out there who'd be pleased to take your money.
This on the other hand is a plain FU by Google.
Google screwed up. They should sue their trademark lawyer, who shouldn't have let them get close to trying to use the name. The original owner has got lucky because of the lawyer's blunder - there really isn't any excuse.
Big companies (with deep pockets) can move their business anywhere. They simply open an office, 'transfer' ownership of something nebulous and intangible like a brand and then use things like 'brand licensing' fees to extract money from one country as an expense to the place they want to pay corporation tax in - eg Ireland or a canton in Switzerland. The 'license fee' just absorbs all profit in the high-tax country. If you play this game enough then you end up being Enron.
On the other hand VAT is important for consumers, but not corporations (because they claim VAT back). So if you sell VAT items of less than £15 you pass them through the Channel Islands where VAT is not liable for competitive advantage, but so long as you're not at a price disadvantage choosing where to pay VAT may not be that important.
This comment is being written on a Mac. The PC workhorse (XP) is over on my desk. The children use Ubuntu. If I'm honest, the Mac is a disappointment. It crashes a lot more than XP even though it's used for fewer hours in a day. I was disappointed the UI hasn't really moved on since the 1990s and it's still has a one app at a time focus and many elements just aren't intuitive in a way that I thought they should be on a Mac (Ubuntu works better than XP or a Mac for a few things). The mac does boot quickly though and has a great power connector and sits comfortably on my lap while I'm typing.
However, to be fair, I don't really care about the OS. The real test is can I replace MS Office with Open Office over the next 6 months without customers noticing. At that point the OS becomes redundant and it will just be the hardware spec that will be important when purchasing.
I wonder if Budvar would up the ante and now claim trademark infringement against AB? This has shown is that AB don't have the trademark. Do Budvar actually have it?
@Paul Taylor
"Why should one company be allowed a monopoly on ordinary words?"
That's because that's what a Trademark is. It's the whole point of a trademark since Bass in 1875 (fancy naming your beer after a fish).
Wikipedia at least has an argument of fair use and is non-profit making. I've got a feeling Google will struggle to wriggle out of this other than by trying to pass liability (and costs) back at the advertisers.
I would have thought the Government could do worse than require all specs, docs and code to be published as open source code for all Govt projects then allow evolution to happen. We, the taxpayers, do own the code I presume.
Patents appear and disappear without making it to a product, but still this has to be placed in the context of Microsoft reinventing itself as a rental company delivering OS and software and services to multiple devices in the home and office (and not just the normal 3 box PC) eg with Azure. As the netbooks show, an Microsoft OS is on is the major component cost in a low-cost PC. This is unsustainable for the manufacturers or for Microsoft itself. And with multiple devices sharing resources you need a different sales and delivery model. Splitting up the OS allows M$ to move to a light and cheap base OS. And secondly offering it via rental means a mobile phone model of low cost upfront fees and long term revenues. After that it's simply a question of price - say £100 a year for full MS or zero for unfamiliar Linux? Which do you choose.
Read part B. The data they use is up-to-date and much better than for part A in terms of use for estimating price elasticities (though mind you GHS and EFS are both self-reported studies, albeit very long term and well regarded). The Neilsen supermarket data will be live and real. I can't comment on the results, but at least the data for this half is better.
The article's good so far. It doesn't quite factor in the links in to the M$ office apps to the cloud and synchronisation and personal spaces this is just a starting point in the same way .Net was. Oh, and I would expect a bunch of non-M$ companies to offer Azure and Azure-level services. If you have to stick with M$, M$ will seriously damage it's channel relations.
And please not the preposition argument. You are soooooo wrong. English is not Latin. Go and read a decent book on English usage then go away, clear out, take off...
The cloud is not about taking stuff off your personal computer or internal network, its about having your data and applications anywhere, irrespective of device or where you are.
If you have a single or even just two computers then the cloud doesn't make too much sense. But once you realise that some people work off 5-6 or more computers in different locations (saves carrying them about and the risk of loss or damage) and then need access via non-computer resources such as mobile phones, or want to connect devices like cameras directly, and want to be able to share and distribute that data to others then the cloud is very strongly the direction things are going. You can't do it non-cloud - what are you going to do, walk about with a memory stick and hope you don't lose it and that it doesn't get stolen?
Yes, big corps with big data centres already have some of this type of stuff running internally under remote access. But it costs. If people like M$ (and I don't think M$ will be the only people offering these M$ services because of competition rules and issues like some people don't trust M$) run these services then the cost will be strongly driven down.
And the data will be distributed/mirrored with redundant backup and sync'd to your offline hard-disk. M$ is betting very very very big on this model of computing. These small-scale announcements and press releases really aren't doing justice to the scale of the Microsoft gamble.
So far off beam it is untrue. M$ has assets of $73bn and cash or equivalent of $23bn according to it's company report. Yahoo was going to be a cash purchase and they'd still have had plenty of money in the bank.
It has been true that M$ has been trying to play catch up on search and websites and they have burnt money and failed big time so far. But the current SaaS direction for M$ is not about search or websites. It's beyond that and more about software and access to software and data - traditional M$ areas of focus. Software now has to work online and offline. Applications have to be available what ever the point of access. Data needs to be stored somewhere and sync'd between offline and online instances. Merge current desktop apps like Office so they are available anywhere and no longer device reliant and merge seamlessly into online storage, sharing and access and protection control. You rent apps, rent space, sign in for access and get advertising and private search across friends. That's the bet M$ looks like it is taking and would be expected to announce during the coming months.
I can remember a time when people argued about what the operating system should do, rather than what it should be called (eg pre-emptive vs co-operative multi-tasking, the battle of the GUI's, plug-and-play, network management etc).
My problem is apart from 'support new hardware' I struggle to think of a 'feature' that would make one OS really better than any other. XP is stable enough now that I can't remember the last BSOD, Ubuntu is knocking rough edges off Linux and is usable 90-95% of the time. OS10 is OK if a little one-app-at-a-time in terms of usability. But I switch between the three daily and it's relatively painless. With things like Open Office and open source cross-platform and web-apps the OS is becoming irrelevant.
So what one OS feature would really make a difference?
M$ has had something brewing for at least 24 months. My guess is that it involves big data centres, application streaming, remote storage and synchronisation, and remote software distribution and cloud-based development tools. I'm sort of expecting that Microsoft will start renting space on the internet and that space will include applications (eg M$ Office), data, shared areas and collaboration tools so rather than buy Office, you'd pay a monthly streaming fee that means you get your apps that can be used from any machine you have available with access to your and shared data immediately from that machine. Essentially what you need if you start having two or more personal computers/data access devices for different modes of use.
Streaming apps means you get to work offline too and with full blown adult apps - the major weakness for Google. Then once you have data in the M$ cloud, M$ does the searching and indexing for you across files that you have and have access to. Google can't cross the access permission boundary so can't provide the same level of search possibly reducing it's value overall in the long run.
In time you get your full OS distributed this way too - a lite OS to connect to the cloud, then stream down non-standard device drivers and necessary apps, but move a chunk of services off the PC (eg scheduled tasks, database) and into the cloud to give faster start up times and better more robust performance.
However, I would guess they will not be the only supplier, so you can sign up with M$ directly, or sign up with a third party running the same stuff if you don't trust M$. Box shifters will add subscription options for Office on their price list.
For a web-developer, don't perform actions on GET variables without a check token. GET should be for display only otherwise.
Secondly for CMS builders don't allow anyone to include a <FORM> or <INPUT> variables in a user-defined content area. One big reason is that it makes it simple for a rogue user to fake the login page for the CMS and harvest usernames and passwords. Second reason is it allows people to build fake Google Checkout or Paypal pages that redirect to harvester sites. And, naturally, never allow the user to include JS in any way.
it's not new as a concept - the idea flows back to 1996. It's just no-one has made it work because making money at it is going to be difficult and dangerous. If you get great ratings you have no need to advertise. So you want people to advertise on a site that might give them a bunch of bad ratings.
But then the gaming starts. Competitors start writing bad reviews on your business. The business starts writing good reviews (Tripadvisor suffers from this). The comments descend into a mess and then someone realises Yelp are responsible for the listing and, if they are surpressing good reviews, they are artificially reducing your ratings themselves - that's corporate liable. So I wonder when the first writs will fly.
Flown with everyone in the last three years (from BA to Thomsonfly) and things are becoming more difficult as the airlines become squeezed. Even BA is introducing maximum bag sizes for hold luggage from November.
Things I like about low cost flyers.
1. Normally, they are lower priced than the regulars and it's easier to arrange routes and fly into places near where you want to go and there are more departure options (eg Swiss were trying to charge me £1571 for a regular single from Zurich to Birmingham this summer - eh?!)
2. They try to leave and arrive on time and don't wait for late passengers. BA is so useless - it's always late.
3. You don't have to pay for stuff you don't want and you can always buy water/sandwiches on the ground first - BA only provide a drink and a small bag of snacks - hardly great service.
4. You can change the ticket for a small fee without having to pay for the outrageously expensive flexible ticket that the majors sell - regular £60, flexible £320.
5. You can avoid Heathrow - even with T5, still hate it. Still rubbish connections to anywhere but London and always late to leave.
But they are getting much more pernickity. You really have to check the small print, especially on baggage now.
* BMIbaby has a smaller check-in bag size and some European low cost have introduced a 6kg check-in bag maximum, presumably to increase the number of hold bags
* Ryanair has a 15kg maximum hold bag size, BMI it is 20kg. No aggregating - which isn't very good for a family - and the policy is not evenly applied, you might travel out with a heavier bag OK, but then get charged on the return. And it's extremely expensive for heavier bags. (By the way BA will do this too from Nov)
* Some airlines force you to go through check-in even where you have no bags
* On board prices are extreme (Easyjet is cheapest but still expensive)
* You have to unclick a lot of options they try to add - it's easy to miss that insurance option, particularly since it will probably be invalid if you already have other travel insurance.
If they do cancel flights they have to pay and there's a penalty charge they must pay (up to £250 per person). It's EU law. Naturally this is not widely advertised by them.
On the plus side it is a useful tool to verify good practice. On the negative side, the release of the product means anyone and everyone can run it against any website they like, so in the short term more sites are likely to get plundered.
If you go to cloud computing, accessing the cloud through multiple devices and multiple applications that may or may not be on-line you end up with a data in different places with different levels of synchronisation.
For instance, you take the office's presentation portable for travelling. Edit the presentation off-line while on the plane travelling to the client. When you get to the presentation you will need to synchronise with the cloud version. You then give your client access to the presentation in a read only version. And when you're get back at your desk on your production PC you can fix the typos and clarify a few points to ensure the version the client is using to communicate the presentation around his building is up-to-date as possible.
In a multiple device, multi-access framework on- and off-line and collaborative synchronization and access control are fundamental. Why take a laptop home? You can have a whole bunch of devices in different locations.
From what I've read this is the area Live Mesh is targeting, but it's not entirely clear, but someone has to be targeting this since it's a cornerstone for using the Cloud.
There's a lack of perspective. Artists have come believe that for six weeks in the studio, they're due 46 weeks off because they should be able to live off the sales of that 6 week's work (and even retire off the proceeds).
As an alternative look at classical musicians who don't have the luxury of large recording contracts and work at music like a regular job. It's how musicians used to work - you don't play, you don't eat. It doesn't stop you becoming rich or famous, it just takes more time, more dedication and more skill.
The thing with the internet is that for small bands it doesn't make that much difference - it increases the audience, gets more people to gigs and has the potential of getting more buyers to find your music. And the upside is there with the internet you should be able to earn a hell of a lot more per copy of your music sold with no middle men involved (at least if the MCPS dragged itself into the 21st Century). If you're a musician who is willing to work, the Internet should work for you as it has the ability to increase your income as a live act and distribute your music to willing buyers, network with fans and generally make money at your music.
It's the larger and more famous acts that copytheft affects most as it slows down the gravy-train and cuts into the stupidly large income for them and for their record producers/advisors etc.This is what's hurting the industry - major acts simply stop being so valuable because of the copying. But then they do have really abnormal expectations of what they should earn from a few days work.
I'd be after more working musicians playing live please, and fewer high-rollers, fat cats and manufactured acts. I would have thought Billy would be with the workers on this one (and Billy was the first live music I ever paid to see).
It's man-in-the-middle attacks with a redirect from a rogue website that I'm most worried about. Email is obvious and relatively simple. But what happens if someone sets up a fake website includes a payment link to a fake checkout.google.com page and simply harvests credit card details rather than sending them to Google. It can look secure, SSL certs can be bought for $15. All it needs to do is show a 'Sorry timeout page' and you wouldn't know you've been hit.
Even spotting fake URLs can be hard even with plain text. Would you spot the difference between http://checkout.google.co.uk and http://checkout-google.co.uk on a quick glance (or http://www-mastercard.co.uk or http;//www2-barclays.co.uk etc)?
The only way I can see to beat phishers is that any access codes you use should be created as a hash of your password with the page URL through a simple offline coder. You never enter the real password/code, only the hash, so rogue URLs will always generate an incorrect hash.
My guess is that they're aiming for some form of virtualisation. The reality is that few software companies write for OSX and little bespoke corporate software is written for the Mac.
The Gordian Knot as ever with Apple is how to get large businesses to even consider migrating away from Microsoft. The infrastructure costs are huge for a business - this is even ignoring the premium price of Apple hardware and software.
If OSX can allow bits of Windows to run in a sandboxed environment using native DLLs, for instance streaming apps from a server while for all other purposes being a Mac, then Apple may be able to create a migration path for businesses, whilst dangling the prize of a supposedly more secure, more robust and easier to use and easier to support system in front of IT Directors. If it can't it will remain the glossy consumer electronics company it's always been.
I don't see that ARM will lose all it's markets. Mobile phones and peripherals markets where 3rd party apps aren't as important and cost and wattage issues dominate. Multicore makes sense given disparate data input streams, I don't see Intel getting into these, at least not without serious improvement in battery technology.
But there are plenty of mobile applications coming up (and current applications which could be used more mobile) where power consumption is valuable as it allows portability, but not as important as having access to desktop quality apps type functionalitiy. For instance, in the web-tablet market, ARM-based processors lack oomph and they need a dedicated software fork to keep the browser up-to-date. Much easier to use x86 and plug in standard Firefox.
And having multiple OS options, is not the same as having compiled out-of-the-box applications ready to stream or run on a portable device. Multiple OS is a valuable option to manufacturers as it allows development flexibility and control, but not to users who just want to flick and go.
It's not to say you won't have an x86 core with ARM-containing support chips in key peripherals such as DSP but it's the apps that drive the CPU, not the other way about.
I'm an ARM shareholder and although I don't see low-power x86 taking away all ARM's markets it will be a big long-term threat for at least half the market.
As small devices have increasing amounts of memory and storage it makes sense to bring them into the x86 line where the three mainline desktop OS's are. For hardware companies it gives you access to a larger set of possible apps and developers for things like in-car entertainment, PDAs, games terminals, point-of-sale devices, home tablets etc.
The OS/App companies are already thinking about different ways of delivering applications without the bloat install problem - such as application streaming - www.stream24-7.com, or SaaS, or browser delivered apps. Bringing mobile devices into this world long-term makes total sense.
It's never the cost of the patent - it's the cost of lawyers fees to protect the patent - you can't afford a patent if you can't afford to protect it.
It means small inventors facing problems end up having to sell the patents to lawyers, who then just try to exploit the 'asset'. Since patent litigation is expensive it's cheaper for richer companies being sued to settle or buy out, so the lawyers always win all ways round.
Reduce the legal input and patents can become manageable. Firstly, the obvious - improve the process for awarding patents (ie drop frilvolous patents).
In disputes the first step should be to force a preliminary 'revalidation' process to be carried out by the patent office at the patent-breakers cost at the outset - they can always skip this step and just say 'valid patent' with no costs and no implication as to veracity for others.
If the patent is not validated, the revalidation costs would be payable by the patentee (forces patentees to get their prior art and non-obviousness right).
Then once the patent is revalidated let the lawyers in to sort out where and how the patent might be infringed and allow retrospective readjustment of revalidation costs. At least then you have something both parties see as having tangible intellectual content.
Seems like Microsoft is really stuck in the doldrums. While you can't total bet against a company of their size and market power, it seems to be open warfare on all fronts and MS is currently getting beaten everywhere - even if the skirmishes are small at the moment. I guess some heads and headcount corrective actions will be seen in the next few months.
Examples: Vista seems to be a rerun of the WindowsME screw up. They've either got to create a Vista-lite or extend the life of XP otherwise the serious corporate customers will walk.
Xbox has warranty issues (which cost $95 per box sold) and market share issues against PSP3 and Wii.
Online MSN just hasn't got close to Google and is probably behind Yahoo. Microsoft Live isn't currently competing with the range of Web2.0 sites like Facebook.
Office seems secure(ish), but no-one wants to upgrade since the old one is perfectly fine and no-one wants the cost of retraining sizeable numbers of staff for a new interface. Open office is OK but not quite as slick and productive - it still feels a bit like Lotus Smartsuite.
On browsers, IE is losing share to Firefox (currently around one third of the market).
On portables, the PDA market still hasn't emerged, neither has the tablet market particularly. MS is just another battler on mobile phones and it's been roundly squashed in the MP3 market.
On servers, Linux and open source DBs are eating into their share and providing exposure to Linux for corporate IT buyers diminishing FUD about open source on the desktop.
What was the most accomplished competitve business outfit ever where it would always be out manoeuvring the competition with its "embrace and extend" philosophy so the customer almost couldn't go anywhere else, seems to be turning into an old dinosaur. (You may dislike the software, but as a business it's remarkable. It crushed a serious number of market leaders who should have unassailable positions including DR Digital, IBM, Lotus, Wordperfect, Borland, Netscape, DBase, Novell).
Can Apple take advantage? No. Apple's always been a consumer electronics company that happens to know about computers - it's taken them ages to realise Sony should be their number one competitor. Mac may be nice, but it's F expensive and I don't believe they've got the bottle (or support resource) to sell the OS without the hardware. Google fronting up Linux might. But Linux still has to get way less geeky - even stupidly simple things like removing the in-jokes when naming applications, and naming them according to what they do.
E-petitions should just be the starting point for a proper full democracy. Essentially parliament would run as it does now generally setting laws, budgets etc as it sees fit, but e-petitions over a certain level (say 500,000) are merited with a debate in parliament. For such petitions, if more than say 100 MPs agree after the debate a formal online e-referendum could then be announced and run. For these e-referenda there would be a pass mark (say 60%) at and a minimum size for the e-referenda to be considered quorate (say 3m). If this passes, then a full-blown official referendum becomes obligatory, only after a full proper referendum successfully passed would the act be enforced. Rules such as compatability with human rights legislation, limits that an issue can only be raised once every twelve months, fixed referenda day once a quarter (like Switzerland) would generally make the hurdles high enough that only serious issues make it through the net and would ensure that no person is disenfranched by the process.
Would be nice to think we could actually have proper democracy and not the political party farce that allows a government to go to war despite the wishes of the people.
I work in market research and this is the classic problem with 'importance' questions. In practice what the survey should be doing is trying to understand the trade-offs being made between different levels of service provision - conjoint analysis is one such technique for doing this, but it's a bit beyond simple questionnaires
Google is an advertising company. It sells advertising on your computer screen to the highest bidder. It makes its money by keeping a constant salesman by your side, and if he can be looking over your shoulder all the time not just guessing against keywords more money for them. Lets face it would you give all your personal secrets to an ad agency?
Or imagine. You're buying jewellery as a birthday gift. A quick search on the internet and now Google knows. Google will be paid more for jewellery ads (because they have bigger profit margins) - et voila jewellery ads will keep popping up. Now, your wife notices. Except it's not her birthday coming up...
And then imagine if it wasn't jewellery by something more risque?
I'm also sure there are a lot of famous, and not-so-famous, people who wouldn't like Google (or a disgruntled Google employee) to reveal their searches, so Google has to be absolutely double skinned watertight on this if non-anonymous searching is where it thinks the world is going.
Got one of the Origami devices specifically for browsing the Internet while watching TV instead of burning a hole in my jeans with a laptop. It's too expensive, currently too heavy and takes too long to boot up, but at least the screen size is right (tried this with PDAs and they are awful), the processing unit is not on my lap but stands up free so I don't bake my nether regions. I don't need a keyboard for browsing and I can Skype while watching Wales trounce England.
It is the minimum space for hand bagage on planes yet still allows me to take powerpoint presentations with me that I can still be editing to the last minute, and I can stream video (and maybe in the long term apps too) at home across the wireless network to it without needing a separate optical drive.
If these things got to a decent price we might get a few for home use, so we can all browse at the same time.
