Customers just hope Windows improves
The Wall Street Journal has published some fascinating details of the EU anti-trust investigation into Microsoft. An internal memo to Bill Gates dated 1997 is quoted as saying: "The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead... It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO [total cost of ownership], our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties... Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move"
I wonder whether this implies anything about the average CIO's leadership, dynamism, and ability to think 'out of the box'?
I wonder whether this implies anything about the average CIO's leadership, dynamism, and ability to think 'out of the box'?
4/22/2004 01:18:00 pm: permalink
No EU software patents - again
From the Register: the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is organising an online demo in which websites will post protest pages or banners expressing their opposition to software patents. More than 1100 sites have signed up for this protest... James Heald, FFII's UK co-ordinator, condemned the "back-room stitch up" that led to the proposed draft text now under debate. "All of the important amendments passed by the European Parliament in September are completely ignored. The draft text is deliberately blind to all of the problems which the Parliament tried to address," he said.
4/15/2004 09:27:00 am: permalink
Change is not inevitable
In IT, culture and change Martin Brampton writes: People who stand in the way of economic forces are accused of a hopeless attachment to a traditional way of life that is bound to be swept away in the end. Something is wrong with this argument, though. It seems to equate economic forces with natural forces. This analysis is itself culturally specific because so much of what counts as the economy is shaped by our own creations... People talk as if the limited liability joint stock company were something natural. In fact, it is obviously a product of the laws we have chosen to enact for ourselves. So if the next few years [are] going to challenge our fundamental assumptions about life and work, we should carefully consider our response. There is no good reason to assume that it is those assumptions that must go. The economic forces that are creating the challenge are just as much based on assumptions and we are entitled to question any of them.
4/13/2004 11:19:00 am: permalink
North Sea seabirds turning into "living dustbins"
20,000 tonnes of litter is thrown into the North Sea every year, and it often ends up in the stomachs of seabirds. As this report from Friends Of the Earth says: scientists found that 96% of dead fulmars studied had 0.6g of plastic fragments in their stomachs, double the amount found in fulmars in the early 1980s... Fulmars were used in the study because they eat almost anything and do not regurgitate what they ingest. Other items found in their stomachs have included ropes, polystyrene cups, mattress foam, plastic bottles, toys, tools and cigarette lighters.
4/13/2004 09:41:00 am: permalink
Convergence of real and electronic worlds
This piece of newsblurb caught my eye as it emphasises how electronic systems and processes are now central to the smooth running of the real operations of UK businesses...
The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has confirmed that it will introduce Mandatory Electronic Reporting (MER) from April 2005. It says: Following a successful pilot by KPMG, we have decided to use the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) to collect, validate and distribute the data in the Integrated Regulatory Return.
The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has confirmed that it will introduce Mandatory Electronic Reporting (MER) from April 2005. It says: Following a successful pilot by KPMG, we have decided to use the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) to collect, validate and distribute the data in the Integrated Regulatory Return.
4/11/2004 09:02:00 am: permalink
Wireless networks MESH
From ZDNet UK: Mesh technology allows new wireless networks to be created, or existing WLANs to be extended, without needing a wired connection to each base station... Each device on a mesh network receives and transmits its own traffic, while acting as a router for other devices; intelligence in each device allows it to automatically configure an efficient network, and to adjust if, for example, a node becomes overloaded or unavailable. The advantages include ease of setup, the ability to spread wireless access over a wide area from a single central wired connection, and the inherent toughness of such networks. More information from O'Reilly and LocustWorld.
4/11/2004 08:32:00 am: permalink
Relaxtron?
Blank - Befunge - Piet - False
Some examples of bizarre obfuscated languages. Not at all useful but strangely compelling nonetheless...
4/08/2004 05:11:00 pm: permalink
After the crash
BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links. Wierd!
4/08/2004 09:10:00 am: permalink
Dive into Python
In keeping with the OpenSource spirit of the language Dive Into Python is an online book to take you from novice to pro. It even includes a chapter on unit-testing (which is nice...)
4/07/2004 01:24:00 pm: permalink
Chemical toxicity: how much do you want to know?
In the EU there is "little or no health and environmental safety information for more than 95% of the 30,000 to 100,000 chemicals on the market. The chemical industry claims that their products are safe, despite this lack of information." If you want to you can lobby your MEP to resist any weakening of the draft REACH legislation (the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals, key components of the framework of the regulation).
4/07/2004 09:21:00 am: permalink
World Health Day: reducing traffic accidents
Road crashes kill 1.2 million people annually and are the second leading cause of death among people aged 5–29. More on World Health Day here.
4/07/2004 09:12:00 am: permalink
Shock result: HotBot 1 Google 0
I was ego-surfing to see if there were any links that lead here and it became clear that HotBot's query=linkdomain feature is better implemented than Google's q=link. Nice to see that the search underdogs still have some tricks up their sleeves!
Postscript: Not sure how I missed the Technorati search for links first time round. Though zero links is still zero links whicheverr way you slice it :-(
Postscript: Not sure how I missed the Technorati search for links first time round. Though zero links is still zero links whicheverr way you slice it :-(
4/06/2004 07:49:00 pm: permalink
BPEL for Java
The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a programming language for specifying business processes that involve Web services.... BPELJ is a combination of BPEL and the Java programming language allowing the two languages to be used together to build business process applications.
4/06/2004 01:24:00 pm: permalink
Are we cool? Cool.
I saw Starsky and Hutch recently. Its mood of comfortable nostalgia for the 1970s was kind of cheesy but it fits with what I have read about aggregate happiness peaking in 1976 and heading downwards ever since.
4/06/2004 01:06:00 pm: permalink
DoubleThink and Newspeak revisited
This article quotes soldiers in Iraq addressing a crowd: "Demonstrations are an important part of democracy but blocking traffic will not be permitted". Seems like a good time to re-read George Orwell...
4/06/2004 12:58:00 pm: permalink
Rwanda ten years ago: their blood on our hands
From Reuters newswire: "Dallaire only failed Rwanda because he tried to save us. The world and the U.N. didn't fail Rwanda because they never even tried," said Beatha Uwazaninka, a 24-year-old who escaped death at the hands of Hutu killers by hiding under a pile of dead bodies... Lieutenant-General Dallaire, 57, on his first return visit to the tiny central African country since 1994, will on Tuesday present to Rwandans his memories of the bloodshed and make recommendations for future peacekeeping missions... The retired Canadian soldier has been deeply traumatised by his mission's failure to prevent the deaths of some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates, butchered by Hutu extremists who often killed with machetes and spiked clubs.
4/06/2004 12:49:00 pm: permalink
Bumblebee for XQuery
BumbleBee is an automated test harness for evaluating XQuery engines and validating queries expressed in the XQuery language.
4/06/2004 12:46:00 pm: permalink
Elena in the Dead Zone
An account of a bike ride in the Chernobyl region. Chilling and compelling.
So one roengen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roengens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach... Radiation will stay in the Chernobyl area for the next 48.000 years, but humans may begin repopulating the area in about 600 years - give or take three centuries... It appears that the people with the most courage were the first to die here. Maybe that is true everywhere.
So one roengen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roengens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach... Radiation will stay in the Chernobyl area for the next 48.000 years, but humans may begin repopulating the area in about 600 years - give or take three centuries... It appears that the people with the most courage were the first to die here. Maybe that is true everywhere.
4/05/2004 09:16:00 am: permalink
Not "ceased to be" but "not yet in existence"
The Parrot VM (Virtual Machine) looks interesting - it is register based (not stack-based) and while it is being created to support Perl6 it should be language neutral. In fact efforts to port Ruby, Python and Tcl to the Parrot VM are underway. But don't hold your breath while waiting for it to arrive on a machine near you: the project is still at a 0.1 release...
4/05/2004 08:50:00 am: permalink
Gaim is back in the game
The latest Gaim release supports the ever-changing Yahoo protocol once more. But for how long this time...?!
4/04/2004 09:29:00 pm: permalink
Roll your own PDF
I occasionally want to generate PDF output from files (e.g. when making presentations or articles publicly available on the web). Before I used OpenOffice.org - which has very nice PDF generation features - I found the GPL-ed Ghostscript / GSView and used that instead. It generates PDFs from PostScript files, so you need to generate the PostScript file first using the print-to-file option of a PostScript printer driver, but that's a fairly painless operation.
4/04/2004 05:37:00 pm: permalink
Mounting a Linux partition in Windows
Linux has support for NTFS Windows partitions (if read-only at present) but unfortunately I can't find a way to mount an ext3 Linux partition in Windows XP (as in XP plus all the service packs, security updates etc etc). I found ext2ifs and tried it, which allowed me to see the partition as a separate drive in Explorer, but unfortunately I got the dreaded blue screen of death every time I navigated to that drive with my mouse. Alas...
4/04/2004 05:33:00 pm: permalink
ThemeMeat
I've been browsing through some new GUI themes (Medulla, Giraffe, and Cosmic Waves) Maybe I'll add them to my current list of favourites (Snail, Petroglyph, and Dali)
4/04/2004 02:37:00 pm: permalink
From X to Y to ?
XWindows is in use (in a bandwidth-greedy-and-hard-to-configure kind of way?) on plenty of Linux / Unix desktops. Next stop: a comprehensive, elegant framework for a complete windowing system, including a standardised graphical user interface toolkit [that] addresses many of the problems associated with current systems, whilst keeping and improving on their best features. called Y-Windows?
4/04/2004 02:14:00 pm: permalink
Recursive acronyms have a lot to answer for
But YAML (that's "YAML ain't markup language") seems interesting nonetheless.
4/04/2004 02:13:00 pm: permalink
Knoppix to the rescue
Getting Mandrake Linux on to my laptop was easy and proved that it could be done. (Which was nice!) But I wanted more than a 'beginners distro' - I am a software professional after all. I ruled out Gentoo because I don't have enough spare time to regularly recompile each new software release. Plus I had heard such great things about the apt package manager that wanted to try Debian. But how to install it?
The basic Debian install process is notoriously unfriendly (to be fair the project developers are trying to do something about that) and I certainly wasted a lot of time trying it out. But fortunately I found Knoppix and I haven't looked back since. Thanks to a hard-disk install of Knoppix and several package updates I now have wickedly fast Linux laptop running the latest 2.6 kernel and WindowMaker desktop.
The basic Debian install process is notoriously unfriendly (to be fair the project developers are trying to do something about that) and I certainly wasted a lot of time trying it out. But fortunately I found Knoppix and I haven't looked back since. Thanks to a hard-disk install of Knoppix and several package updates I now have wickedly fast Linux laptop running the latest 2.6 kernel and WindowMaker desktop.
4/04/2004 11:50:00 am: permalink
Palm Goodies
I love my WIFI-enabled Palm PDA if only because I can now blog, catch up with email and surf the web from any room in the house! It's so much more convenient that lugging a laptop around, and only a little less powerful. Mostly.
These are some apps that I have downloaded and use regularly:
These are some apps that I have downloaded and use regularly:
- Plucker (and JPluckX): great for holding web site content for offline browsing
- Hand RSS reader: manages most (but not all) of the RSS feeds I watch
- Tic-Tac-Toe: much used by my kids
- TuSSH: a Tungsten SSH client
- Adobe's PDF Reader: essential!
4/04/2004 11:37:00 am: permalink
Just what we need, another new language
Prothon is here for no purpose less grand than to provide the most performance with the least development effort both in initial design and for all ongoing support....
1) Simple is better than complex.
2) Explicit is better than implicit.
3) Readability counts.
4) There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it.
5) If in doubt, copy Python.
1) Simple is better than complex.
2) Explicit is better than implicit.
3) Readability counts.
4) There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it.
5) If in doubt, copy Python.
4/04/2004 11:28:00 am: permalink
Python for dotNet
Available from Brian at zope.org -- but not available from IronPython (yet?!) despite this hype at PyCon2004.
4/04/2004 11:23:00 am: permalink
So, what the heck is a continuation anyway?
On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 02:20:03PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> Oh, I see. A continuation is a function call where, not only do you get to decide what you return, you get to decide where you return it to.
Now you should see how they make co-routines neat: Routine A says "send these return values back to routine B". Routine B does some work on them, and sends them back to routine A.
Sounds good to me...
> Oh, I see. A continuation is a function call where, not only do you get to decide what you return, you get to decide where you return it to.
Now you should see how they make co-routines neat: Routine A says "send these return values back to routine B". Routine B does some work on them, and sends them back to routine A.
Sounds good to me...
4/04/2004 11:20:00 am: permalink
OldVersion dot com
An archive of old versions of software: "because newer is not always better".
4/04/2004 11:07:00 am: permalink
Start here
Reading around my views and opinions sometimes leads me to stumble upon interesting web pages or sites - this blog is where I will record some of them. I expect most of the entries will be focussed around software development, social and environmental issues, news events, and other topics I have a strong interest in. But who knows?
Enjoy :-)
Tim Bacon 2004-04-04
BTW the URL of this blog (whichwasnice.blogspot.com) was inspired by a great character from the Fast Show, a TV comedy that was "brilliaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant".
Enjoy :-)
Tim Bacon 2004-04-04
BTW the URL of this blog (whichwasnice.blogspot.com) was inspired by a great character from the Fast Show, a TV comedy that was "brilliaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaant".
4/04/2004 10:55:00 am: permalink
