Posts by Roland Bavington

extra reading

For those of you who are interested there is a great discussion on compression over at Quora.

http://tinyurl.com/5uvg633

Roland

Such a shame to see it go

It was such a pleasure reading everyones comments. A lot of them resonated with me and the names of different early computers and the front pages brought back a lot of happy memories.

I too had a Microtan 65 and was somewhat shocked to find out it didn't come with Basic! It took me about 3 months to work out how to program from the booklet of Opcodes and how they affected each register. I also read Byte magazine like some of the other correspondents and was fascinated by the world of "grown up" computing it revealed.

All in all the magazine and it's writers contributed greatly to the person I am today and I am greatful it existed.

Am I the only one?

For me the potential benefits outweigh the potential problems.

I would like the goverment to be able to look for terrorists and criminals efficiently.

The conspiracy theorists as usual are worrying rather too much. To believe that MI6 or any other part of the goverment is going to care what the vast majority of people are doing or have the resources to work out what that is and spend time on it is to forget our basic insignificance as individuals. the government will treat 99.9% of us as statistics 99.9% of the time and I for one welcome tools that will help them work out who to focus on.

Since I don't do anything illegal the downside potential is only that the government shifts the goalposts on what is illegal to include things that I do which doesn't seem likely in my lifetime in Britain or that I will decide to start doing illegal things.

As others have said, much more likely is that either the thing will never be built, wont work when it is built or will be insecure and create even more possibilities for other naughty people to spend my money for me.

Whether it's built or not money will end up in the pockets of people and organisations who don't really deserve it which is the real shame. The Big systems Integrators and Consultancies will lobby for work through relationships built up over years and years of days out, lunches and favours done and no doubt they will get it because of course they have all proved so adept at delivering large IT projects for government in the past, right?