Posts by Pete 2

The internet of cars

> a "connected" car sending significant data – both telemetry and perhaps video – might need the bandwidth of 4G.

This might sound like a good idea in isolation, but even a 4G network would soon collapse if presented by a whole motorway-full of cars, all streaming video - mostly of the cars in front and behind: all of which would be streaming exactly the same views back again - and engine management telemetry and all the other stuff that is unquestionably *possible* even if of questionable *worth*.

From my understanding, the IoT is more suited to being a "below the radar" network of small devices sending bitsy little packets on an infrequent basis: the comparison with tweets being not just the size, of the records, but their value, too. It's not meant to turn every road-borne vehicle into a Formula-1 racer, complete with live video feeds and EMU/biometric data. That would never scale (but would make a fortune for 4G carriers).

Selling to the sellers

> expand into location-based mobile advertising

An advertisement is an advertisement. Most people have seen enough of them (or soon will have) to become totally immune to their powers. Either that, or the more impulsive and impressionable people who will forever be influenced by them will go broke.

Either way, the point of new advertising technology is not to sell more stuff to the consumer: we either ignore them, block them or would buy whether the ad. appeared on a mobile phone screen or on a billboard. No, the point of wizzy new technology is to convince those people who want to advertise their products to buy advertising space. That's the only real sale (as anyone who's watched Mad Men will surely have worked out) that ever takes place in the advertising world.

So add adverts to apps. Add location awareness, with local discounts, "today only" offers, e-vouchers, wowchers, "likes", groupons and all the other stuff. It makes no difference - I'll still ignore them. If I want something, I'll still search for the best price and most trustworthy vendor: not for whatever pops up on my screen as I walk past a coffee shop. If vendors want to spend their money, it would be better spent on improving the product and lowering the price.

Dance together, but don't get Tango'd

> Array lifespans of four to five years seems to be the minimum

The key thing about storage is to not buy too much. That's where a partnership can be helpful.

Few companies will have small or zero growth requirements. They will know that their organic data growth will be X% per year. They will also know that the price of storage is ever-decreasing. That both gives them leverage and puts them in a spot.

On the one hand, it permits a buyer to dangle the carrot of long-term sales in front of a storage vendor: knowing that they will need a certain number of TB every year can be as attention-focussing as having their nuts in your fist. However being beholden to a single supplier for upgrades over a 2, 3 or 4 year term can lead them to (mistakenly) think it's they who have you by the short'n'curlies. And extricating yourself from what seemed like a good deal, when it all goes sour, can be an expensive and career damaging chore.

There is also a danger from dealing with the "Upstarts": those storage outfits who have been going a few years, but haven't joined the hallowed ranks of the "established" vendors. Apart from the obvious: them feeling the heat if the market turns nasty, there is also a big question of how they will support customers who are not in their mainstream marketing area. Will a U.S. based Upstart be ready, willing and able to provide excellent service to an EMEA-based organistion: or will you find yourself subcontracted out to the lowest, local, bidder? And at the back of the queue where feature requests and bug-fixes are concerned? There's also a consideration that a lot of Upstart's "growth" strategy can be summed up as: race for growth and sell out at the top. In which case you find your storage strategy has quickly become a dead-end business for one of the major players - who only bought the Upstart to get their customer base, or their tech. You will have gone from being a profitable fish in a smallish pond to being an annoying sideline in a sea of enterprise players.

A solution looking for a problem

> There's always NAT, of course, to keep IPv4 alive, but we're told that's rather 20th century:

IPv4 has one enormous advantage over IPv6: it's here already.

The v4 vs. v6 situation strikes me as similar to 3D-TV. Yes, it might well be better, but the old system is good enough. There are a few early adopters who have, well, adopted it early - but there doesn't seem to be much interest in the other 99.99% of the world tossing their perfectly good, functional, tried and tested systems merely on the say-so of a few "leaders".

NAT was brought in as a workaround for the impending filling up of IPv4 space and it's been very good as a workaround or that problem (much as Intel's arcane x86 architecture allowed them to back 16-bit addresses into an 8-bit world. It wasn't as pretty as the 68k linear space, but it worked well enough.) . And as far as the IoT is concerned I would be quite happy if my personal IoT was contained fully within a NAT'd environment - with little or no external "discovery" possible: or that *my* IoT be accessible only through a protocol gateway that was under my personal control: much like a router's firewall is, today.

I hope they're not *too* good

> the Bank of England's “ethical hackers” will attack 20 major banks and other financial institutions

One of the things that old consultants tell young consultants is:

Teach them everything they know, but not everything you know.

So one should not be surprised if the "ethical hackers" don't hold back one or two of the juicier holes as a sort of pension plan. Maybe the plan needs some extra-ethical hackers (one's who've already made their pile) to watch over the merely "ordinarily" ethical hackers?

Oh, and don't have the penetration testers stationed too close to any international airports.

How many of those to the pound?

Not a bad price, but why does the Amazon advertisement specify the price per kilo, too?

The narcissism of small differences

> If such tiny UI refinements don't impress you ...

What does impress me, when I see it, are new features: things that I wanted to do in Version 1.0 that are now possible in Version 2.0. If they are things that I didn't even know I wanted to do (until I tried it), then that is a true improvement: real innovation.

But so far as Ubuntu goes, as a full-time user since version 8, I'm still waiting. Though to be fair, I'd probably say the same about any other O/S release, including OS/X or Windows. That WinXP still has such a large user-base would indicate that there are millions of other people who regard an O/S in the same way: unless there is a new killer app or feature, why change?

But so far as GUI design is concerned, the best thing it can be, is (like a good butler) completely invisible, yet indispensable at the same time. It should "know" what I am going to want and have it ready for me - with the minimum of fuss, time and keyclicks or mouse movement. Anything that comes between me and what I want to achieve is unwelcome.

You can sell anything to the young

> Nobody makes things that bad by accident, surely

They don't (it takes years of practice). However, if you make something truly bad, then you can still rely on the young, callow and stupid (meant in the nicest possible way, of course: let's call it trusting, open-minded and willing instead) to queue for hours to buy it. Provided of course you pitch it as being the latest thing that all their friends will have. Be the first on your street ... etc. etc.

For oldies however, it's a much harder sell. They (we?) tend to ask difficult questions, such as "yes, but what does it actually do?", or (case in point the up-coming Ubuntu LTS release) "but what will I be able to do with it, that I can't do with the old one?". There's also the not insignificant point that after some years, one tends to have all the stuff, clothes, gadgets and media that's useful, decorative or beneficial, already. After that it's more a case of just replacing worn out or broken stuff.

People with life-experience tend to be a lot more skeptical about novelty. Maybe it's a once bitten thing. Maybe it's a case of the money I have, I've had to work for (rather than being given an allowance, that just drops into my pocket), so I'm more cautious about what I spend it on. Whatever the reason, it's difficult for a wet-behind-the-ears sales person to sell to someone who can ask relevant questions, often based on experience, than it is to someone who just thinks "ooooh, shiney".

What that means is that all the marketing mulah will go on persuading the persuadable to spend their cash in one direction, or another. And not on the lost cause of enticing those who carefully read reviews, weigh up the pros and cons and then go off, in search of the best deal. What use is a full-page glossy ad, or 60 seconds of Superbowl publicity to those people?

What's in a name

If you're going to call the "space port" Baconur, then surely the rocket launch vehicle should be renamed Blue Streaky. Or would that be a bit too rash - errr.

Pixel wars

People will buy this simply because the numbers are bigger than on competing phones.

They do it with phone camera resolutions (and PnS cameras, too) - bigger is better - even though no phone has a lens that makes multi-megapixel cameras worthwhile (nor do they have screens that are capable of displayng such images).

However none of that matters in the uncritical, see-want-have, mine's more expensive bigger than yours, specification and useless feature-driven world of mobile phone marketing.

If a manufacturer wanted to really revolutionise the world of tablet and mobile phone screens, they'd make non-reflective ones. Ones that could actually be read on anything approaching a sunny day.

The immediate and the important.

> A programming blunder ... were sent out late – specifically, 368 days after the previous annual statements

Surely you mean a TESTING blunder: that the code (or more likely: the integrated environment in which it was run) was not put through a sufficiently realistic set of test scenarios. Or if it was, then nobody looked at the results.

A more interesting possibility is that the code was tested AND the bug was found. But t'management thinking was: "it won't affect us for a year ... there's plenty of time to sort it out later". But somehow that never happened.

Not your average customer

> ordered ... in November and received confirmation it was on backorder and due to ship on 3 March.

So the guy was prepared to wait 3 or 4 months for something he could have bought off Amazon, from stock (well: in stock today - maybe not then) and presumably from any number of other companies.

He then goes "Mr Angry" on them (OK, that might be reasonable, if they'd sent him a power cord instead of some sort of headset) and starts quoting the ins-and-outs of british law to a hungarian customer services person.

Given the disparity between the two sides' stories, there does appear to be more than we're being told here. But this won't put me off buying from Misco - though I'd never wait that long for a backorder.

Free to fail

> Have you ever tried to build a business case which competes with free?

Yes, thank you.

As the next line alludes, you invoke the fear of uncertainty, the downside of the lack of indemnity (yes, it's free: but who can you sue if it all goes wrong?), and the small matter that the exec who signs off isn't spending his/hers/its own money - so "free" isn't that big a deal and can make them look amateurish if they are proposing a merely "domestic" quality product.

In the past, you could also invoke the lack of standards, ISO-ness, SLAs and all the other foundations upon which an IT empire could be (shakily) built.

However, as of now one can look at the financials of the suppliers:

> Those valuations are going to plummet

and the impending shake-out in the industry as some major players disappear up their own internet connections. Who'd be the one to recommend a free/cheap/low-cost supplier that could easily be out of business in a year, or less?

Having a cracking time

> attempting to break them over the next 12 months ... attacking all submissions in every way possible

One would hope (but not expect) that these attempts would extend into the world of social engineering and coercion - just as they would in the real world.

Password security has technical integrity as only one part of the whole regime.

The ideal password security system would contain features that would be unknowable to, or unusable by, people to whom the security credentials did not belong

watching them watching you

> iWindow, to block out all the nastiness of the real world and replace it with shiny happy vistas

Hmmm, and then have little webcams in them so your windows can watch you.

The support that never was

> the slow but steady death of customer service

In truth, we've never had good customer service. Sure, some owner-run shops may have "the guy" who knows the in's and out's of all the limited range of stuff they sell. But that is the closest you'll ever get - and you're paying high-street premiums for their over-the-counter stuff you buy. Not exactly 21st century, chasing the cheapest price no matter what, do everything online, way of making purchases.

The biggest problem is that so much of our "stuff" is too complex, too cheap to have been designed and tested properly and too mass-produced to have spare parts available, or for every single item to work perfectly (even the first time).

So yes, it is annoying when you have to call an anonymous call-centre. While I'm not trying to defend them, they do have their own problems: such as the utter, mind-boggling, ignorance of most of their callers. People who neither know what they have bought, are aware of its limitations nor sometimes even realise it needs batteries for it to work (confession time: I was, once, firmly convinced that the TV had gone "phut" until another person, who shall remain nameless, confessed to having removed the batteries from the remote control as the ones in her torch had gone flat). It's these sorts of problems, which must account for the majority of a call centre's enquiries that their systems are meant to deal with - not the geek who calls up to know how to change the dynamic dns settings on their router.

Come and look at this!

As a senior IT bod said to me one time, when I was doing some work for a mobile phone outfit.

"it's an IBM engineer getting his hands dirty".

And so it was: a hardware guy, with his sleeves rolled up and blood grime on his hands, replacing a failed board in an IBM mainframe.

The reason it was so noteworthy, even in the early 90's was because it was such a rare occurrence. It was probably one of the major selling points of IBM computers (the other one, with just as much traction, is the ability to do a fork-lift upgrade in a weekend and know it will work.) that they didn't blow a gasket if you looked at them wrong.

The reliability and compatibility across ranges is why people choose this kit. It may be arcane, old-fashioned, expensive and untrendy - but it keeps on running.

The other major legacy of OS/360 was, of course, The Mythical Man Month who's readership is stil the most reliable way of telling the professional IT managers from the wannabees who only have buzzwords as a knowledge base.

Pump the Primes

Judging by the specs and what the advertisement promotes, this box appears to be the "front end" for Amazon Prime users.

Although it can play android / phone style games, it's not going to supplant a hard-core gamer's platform and most people will have whatever other games they like on their phone or tablets anyway. Most of its other features and attributes appear to be aimed at content consumers: specifically the content that Prime users can get for free - if you leave aside the small matter of paying £80 a year for "free" content.

(And given that Amazon Prime costs $79 in USAland and £79 over here, what's the betting that the hardware will exhibit an equally usurious price-translation, too?)

Data is like oil

A lot of (western) countries dislike being reliant on countries that they consider less stable, or not idealogically aligned with their views, as their only source of oil and gas. What Snowden's security leaks have done is to make a lot of (western) countries think about their data security in the same way they think about their energy security. And for the same reasons.

What we learned from the story of the Natwest Three is that one party in the UK can strike a deal with another party in the UK, that is legal in the UK. However if the emails which make up that deal touch american soil, then american laws are applied and - since the UK government is about as useful at looking after its citizens interests as a Rottweiler is at guarding your sausages - you're banged up : Jim. Unless you can personally afford to foot the bill to defend yourself against the might (and drawn out proceedings) of the US legal system.

Sp apart from not wishing a foreign power to know everything you ever committed to email, phone conversations, downloads or Dropbox, there is the not insignificant matter of legal hegemony, which is just as wide-reaching and just as insidious.

One good thing

That must have been the first media discussion of british IT entrepreneurship for a long, long time where nobody mentioned the Raspberry Pi. Maybe there is some hope after all.

The lost moment

> The test rocket motor enclosure sits way below the box at the end of a long carbon fibre rod:

... and when it fires, there will be (hopefully) a nice big force imparted to the end of the rod. Given that the other end of the rod is attached to something else, what will start spinning?

Years ago

... on a website far away there was a presenter called Joanne. She had a piece of work called lpportraits which depicted (quite well, I thought) this exact same thing.

The year was 2011, the website was rocketboom and the link is here

http://www.rocketboom.com/lpportraits/

cheapskates!

> it made perfect sense to bring the aircraft over

And here was me hoping it would be flown over on the back of a Jumbo Jet

Persons, places and things

So if you tweeted:

It's great to see Paris again or

Just got back to Devon, or even

Philly is a sight for sore eyes

Would you infer a location, the name of a partner or even just being reunited with your pet dog?

Given the old adage that There are lots of girls in Watford called Chelsea but no girls in Chelsea called Watford, this sort of "magicking data out of nothing" is a very haphazard affair.

Do this if you want to destroy IT

> "You have to let the user work in the way that they want." ... while unifying their environment

How does that work - exactly?

You can work the way you want to, as long as you use a "unified" environment. That sounds to me a lot like You can have any colour you want, so long as it's black.

Personally I have always considered standards to be a good thing (so long as they are sensible ones). So we have standard sizes for paper, at standard length*width ratios (in almost every country, except for a few "outliers") - so that you don't need to buy "HP" sized paper to fit in their, and only their, printers. We have standards for petrol, so that a Ford car will run on any brand - and we have standards for I.T. so that someone can fill your job while you're off sick, or in the slim chance you get promoted (hint: never make yourself indispensable: people that a company can't do without can't be promoted) or find a better job.

So to have every worker doing things their own way is the shortcut to chaos. Even if they do decide to document it, then "doing it their own way" doesn't even mean the documentation has to be in your national language - or Klingon.

Apart from the basic mistakes in the thinking, this piece of inspiration from Microsoft just sounds like a collection of marketing phrases and management b/s mixed together in an attempt to convince people who should know better, that following this path will get them a better, happier and more efficient IT implementation - and workers who feel enabled and valued (and since it's always and only ever about money - willing to work for less, too). Right up, that is, until the time when you get someone else's "done their own way" work to pick up and support.

It'll all end in tears,