Posts by David Griffin

This is attractive for many reasons

Imagine this was the norm

- I could print at my local print shop then go round and collect. Maybe a library ? Maybe a shop with a nice photoprinter. Maybe google would take a cut for connecting me with the nearest good printer using google maps search.

Handy in an airport. Print from your gate seat then go and buy the prints from a nearby kiosk.

great for a hotel business centre.

- I would imagine the printer could alert the right people if it had an error too.

- Printers would work on any computer platform - forget drivers etc. Printing from phones or whatever.

- Conventional "home networks" frequently don't do what they are supposed to with Windows networking and when they don't, NOONE seems to have any good suggestions how to fix.

- There are no security concerns as far as I can see. Your printer makes an outgoing connection to the central server and connects to your account. There is no route for incoming connections and your firewall remains in place. To send you junk someone would have to hack your google print queue account.

- I'd love to be able to web browse all printer queues and know what had printed. Windows print queues are so opaque - can I cancel it ? Who sent that job ? Once it's not Windows defining what a print queue should look like I expect to see a lot more innovation and useful features.

- Intelligent queues - imagine if an "urgent" job could jump the queue in a small office ?

- Internet fax receiving for small business - just make it come out of the printer and save me a phone line - I love it !

When all the tablet hype has settled down...

I was reading a PDF of a book in bed on my Dell Mini9 a couple of weeks back and realised that it is REALLY nice for that

- it stands up by itself at whatever angle I want

- when I want input I have keyboard or mouse without losing screen real estate

- it works with all the files I already have, right now !

Conversely I tried an iPad in PCWorld and it was quite awkward to hold, not nice to enter data on when sat at a table, and pretty expensive.

Obviously depends what you want if for but for consuming media the mini laptop form factor is actually not as inconvenient as the hype makes out, and when you want to interact with data who can beat a fast typist who knows all the keyboard shortcuts ?

Plus my early Mini9 is totally solid state and doesn't cook your nads.

HomePlug rocks - but something is missing

I have used it now for a while. No way will wireless go through my old stone house.

But what I REALLY need and noone seems to offer is a way to do a similar thing with old fashioned telephone wires.

In fact my ideal is a HomePlug node that has a phone and ethernet socket on it. That way I can set up a few DECT base stations around the house and get phone coverage everywhere in my house without drilling holes.

Surely this is technically possible ?

What a load of tosh

A few facts

- Trident (and other nuclear deterrence) has proved no use in Falklands, Balkans, Iraq or Afghanistan. ie you can still be beaten in conventional wars even while having a deterrent.

Was Galtieri given pause for thought by our deterrent ?

- Retaliatory strike capability assumes you know who did it. If a suitcase nukes goes off somewhere in blighty who do we respond against ? We still don't really see to be sure who did 9/11 even though we know the nationality of the actual hijackers, and there sure as hell won't be much evidence after a nuke goes off.

- Suppose crazed terrorists get control of Pakistan. Is our plan to nuke a load of innocent civilians in Pakistan if they (the terrorists) nuke us ? Seems a bit extreme, as said civilians won't have had anything to do with it. And if so, would the Jihadists care ?

- Suppose China becomes more of a threat. Hmm. So when they point out one day that they own London, will we nuke them ? They don't need military domination when they have financial domination do they ?

Take Israel. They have an enemy nearby in the region who hates them and has nukes pointing at them. Oh hang on, that's Iran's situation. Sorry, Israel has an enemy in the region who would LIKE to have nukes pointing at Israel. They have a huge technical head start and an awesomely effective air force, secret service etc. Yet they can't get at an Iranian bunker (or they would have done by now). So who would they target with a deterrent ?

I fail to see any actual real world scenario in which

- Britain potentially gets nuked by a first strike

- We would know who did it

- The would be perpetrators are actually dissuaded by our possession of a deterrent so don't actually do it.

If Jihadists finally get a nuke, is the logic here that they will only bomb a non deterrent holding country (er.. .Denmark, because of those cartoons) ? If so, why are Israel so worried about Iran, surely Israel are perfectly safe behind their deterrent.

If we want to be safe we should spend some money learning not to piss so many people off abroad, and the rest looking after our own house.

In my humble opinion...

They won't even take the most basic step

Problem is not what technology COULD do to help. It's the will to do it that is lacking.

About 10 years ago someone was killed with an injection into the blood that should have gone into the spine. Someone wrote in the BMJ that since lumbar needles are so different, and since medication is made up by the hospital pharmacy, it would be easy to create a separate syringe type. Lumbar drugs are then only dispensed in a lumbar syringe, which only takes a lumbar needle, and no nurse or Dr will ever stick one of these in a vein, as they are so glaringly different. Problem solved.

Except noone actually did it and we still read these stories of needless death every 2 years or so.

What good SEO is about

If there's one thing I've learnt from all my exposure to SEO it is this

- make your site clearer and more relevant to the user and it will get higher

- this way Google's huge resources and talent are working in your favour.

This announcement does not change that.

If the user has clicked on your site (or its ilk) before then your site is more relevant and deserves to be higher in their personal search.

The less reputable side of SEO (the "something for nothing" guys, with their link farms etc) deserve to fall by the wayside, as they just reduce the quality of everyone's experience.

Hysteria anyone ?

The "load management" idea is that devices which are opted in to be load managed (ie an overnight dishwasher or washing machine run) can be started at an appropriate time. If at the start of the night the elecCo know there are 50,000 dishwashers waiting they can ramp up a nuclear power station and then trigger the washers steadly throughout the night so as to use power steadily, or else wait for a predicted midight wind power srurge and run them all then.

Clearly apart from shutting off the whole house they cannot access devices that have not been designed for this facility.

But a pal of mine in this industry says that meters are simply not accurate enough yet to use for separating "scheduled" night use from ad hoc use, so they won't be able to offer cheaper tariffs for "book ahead" overnight slots (the only possible carrot for consumers).

But the idea of being able to tell who is on holiday / out, or which non license fee payers are watching Corrie, is far more worrying. Especially if the govt approaches them asking fo rthe information. Can I trust someone like NPower (frequently caught lying on the doorstep to get people to switch) to keep that sort of data safe ?

Of course, you might ask whether I can trust my visa card issuer to keep my purchases in the heathrow departure lounge (also an indicator of an unoccupied house) confidential.

They probably cannot mandate this technology in a house but they can make you pay more if you don't install it, and insit it goes into new houses. Trueman show, anyone ?

And anyway, soon the overnight elec won't be off peak at all as we'll all be charguing our prius's up then, won't we ?

Smartly intelligent

I have met a lot of people with PhD's who were clearly intelligent but not always very smart.

Plus there's always the other meaning of smart (as in something you say when you see someone trap their finger in a filing cabinet - "Ooh, that must smart a bit").

Maybe the LG phone i so intelligent it's eye wateringly painful...