Posts by John L Ward

3d tattoo printing site hacked

Never a cloud...

Plus it seems that many of the digital exemplars that seem to work are simply a new face on an already working system, such as the one for application for a replacement driving licence (which was, let's face it a (not so) glorified electronic form...).

I bet that a lot of civil servants who have had their noses put out of joint by the abrasive attitudes of the GDS lot are just quietly sharpening their knives for when GDS finally lose enough support to keep them and their rather large contractor rates going without any major results...

...and the SIs who are looking at the silver lining of mending all of the 'good work' done by those exemplars.

Plus ca change...

It's not just farmers...

...since as one of those IT people that work from home in the countryside 1-2 days a week, i would really love proper broadband speeds so that I can also catch up with Breaking Bad on Netflix.

It just seems sad that while BT are not coming anywhere near my home with fiber in the near future, they are also being allowed to stop community broadband initiatives such as B4RN (Briadband 4 Rural Networks) by upgrading specific exchanges and thus preventing the community broadband getting the funding to actually connect people up in rural areas.

Still waiting for my 100 meg SDSL...

Forget scottish independence...

London is in more need of independence...or we are in more need of independence from it...

So why not make London (well, everything inside the M25) into a city state, leave it to raise it's own taxes, build it's own airport in the estuary etc. - you could even extended it to the South East if that made sense.

Then you move all of the UK institutions out of London, revitalising other UK cities - this includes UK government, which could go to Birmingham/Manchester (or even a virtual parliament shared with Edinburgh/Cardiff).

Job done.

Throw the switch, Igor...

Information has always been at the heart of IT - properly designed IT systems take the core information a business needs and models how they interact with that information, realising some elements in systems that make it happen faster, better, cheaper and without forgetting the 'wetware' bits.

Anything else is either imposition of a process by IT on the business (SAP anyone?) or the politics of the organisation (the NHS NPfIT failed because it did not understand what it was really trying to achieve and failed to control the scope of what it was delivering, a lot of due to the politics of the 'what does it mean for me' crowd).

Shelfware? The over aggressive sale of software to under-informed users desperate for a solution to past mistakes in IT decisions.

Open Source? tends to end up as nice implementations to solve a particular business problem (fragmenting information) or in larger systems that need expensive technical resource to oversee and customise, sorry configure (well we all like to twirl the propeller on out hat every now and then, don't we?)

XaaS? Again it tends to drive more information fragmentation - until someone comes up with a proper solution to orchestrating the flow of information (including service confidence monitoring, security etc.) between the crufty old in-house systems and the bright shiny clouds.

If only people spent more time looking at the arrows between the boxes in the LEAN process flow charts - each one is a 'communications event' with some 'information' passed across it - then they would understand more about what to do with that information and have a reasonable chance of ending up with a solution that worked properly with that information. Instead we rush like 5-year olds to the shiniest software vendors Christmas tree.

And as for the 80% of information the IBM say will be without provenance (i.e. unverifiable in truth or origin), by 2016 or so (that's unverifiable, I can't remember what the presentation said...) let's leave that to the 'Super Hadoopers' to give us some insight that we can test against our own known facts.

Off to get out the Tea (as a) Service and a plate(spin) of Virtual Hobnobs...

Shurely not...

...just a focus on what it means to individuals.

If the technology improves as it surely will, at some point it will begin to affect worldwide logistics. Many cheap items have poured into Western markets based on simple mass-production and low cost shipping. Even in higher value items the reduced costs of mass-production can be seen, for instance paying more for smaller memory chips than their higher capacity replacements as the production lines tail off.

If you take 3D-printing to one logical endpoint, the economies of scale argument will yield, at least in part, to the flexibility of local supply - in the case of the washing machine part, why mass produce a part having made an expensive injection mould template, spend money producing and storing it in the hope that the 20,000 units you have made will sell out eventually (although in a decreasing return vs. cost of storage and sunk cost). Even it if moves to the professional 'print and collect' model of local (country or region-based) commercial part printers, this changes what is currently a complex logistics component (ha!) of the manufacturing cycle to the delivery of raw materials to those localised printers.

It will probably also have other, less expected effects - for instance manufacturers who design their products to be more (or let's face it, less) able to be repaired or modded using 3D printed parts - printed iPhone ear-clips anyone?...

So IMO the more interesting space is how and when it will start to impact all those container ships circling the world full of mixed goods and spare parts (which incidentally have been credited with removing one of the key advantages behind the EU economic model at about the time that the treaty was first signed...).

Is it me?

"Imagine modern tech but powered by hot air."

Yes, seen a lot of that in my time, with Oracle probaly at the front of the queue - step forward Mr Ellison and recieve your brass and gunmetal self-adjusting tiepin.

We're all so busy thinking back...

..., yet as someone who went from home electronics (ah the joy of cutting Veroboard) through the early efforts of Sir Clive (dodgy 16k RAM packs anyone?) to the joy of the BBC B and on, I'm just wondering what kind of conversations my children (and theirs) will be having in years to come...

"What? Apple are dropping support for the A4??? What about my iPad? Steve Jobs will be spinning in his grave!"

"Who?"

etc. etc.