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This site is designed to be a resource for re-purposing on our own terms the BBC content that we, the licence payers have paid for.
Archive for April 2008
Spotted on Hugh McLeods’s blog – “how does a software company make money, if all software is free?” – an observation about the difference between closed-source aka Microsoft and open-source:
It took me a while to figure this out, but what applies to Open Source, also applies to Microsoft.
When you buy a Microsoft product, you’re not just getting ones and zeros. There’s also a form of “social contract” implicit in the commercial transaction. You gave them money, this entitles you to certain expectations.
A few weeks ago, I met a young developer who worked in an IT department of a large insurance company. I asked him what kind of software did he use. Answer: About 75% Microsoft, 25% Open Source. I asked him why did he not use more Open Source? I thought IT people loved Open Source?
“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”
And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.
Which is only true for a given subsection of the Microsoft user base. If you don’t have access to that level of support – and most organisations below a certain size don’t – then you’re thrown back on the exactly same type of community resources regardless of whether you’re using open or closed source. The difference being that the open-source model provides the visibility of the source code, and the potential for fixed that this presents.
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RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller.
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“Twitter exposes some of its functionality via an Application Programming Interface (API). This document is a reference for that functionality, and aims to serve as a reference for developers building tools that talk to Twitter.”
From the Tell-Me-That-It-Wasn’t-Bleeding-Obvious-That-It-Wouldn’t-Work-The-First-Time-Around department:
Plans to use satellite tracking to monitor sex offenders have been shelved by the government.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said the project had been suspended pending further “developments in technology”.
A two-year pilot scheme found that the equipment could be blocked or distorted by high rise buildings or even trees.
However, just in case your faith in the ability of government to deal with the bleedin’ obvious was beginning to recover a little, fear not. Woo and technological pixie dust still have a part to play in government:
Ministers are now believed to be planning to use lie detectors as a new technique to deal with paedophiles.
Legislation was passed last year to expand the programmes of polygraph or lie detector tests.
It’s discredited technology, so it’s no great suprise that the MoJ are about to order a gazillion pounds-worth. Probably from EDS.
However, they are at least being honest about the reasons for this:
Napo’s spokesman said: “The polygraph is likely to be of limited value because sex offenders can manipulate the outcomes.
“It remains the case, however, that sufficient controls should be in place for each individual case to maximise public perception, ” he said.
Which translated from PR-speak means, “We know that they’re fucking useless, but this looks good in a Daily Mail headline so we’re going to do it anyway.”
Biometrics as the *sole guarantor* of someone’s identity is a daft and broken idea, despite what our nodding dog of a Home Secretary has to say on the subject. As if further proof were needed, the German Interior Minister lost his fingerprints to the Chaos Computer Club, and now No2ID are offering a £1,000 reward for the fingerprints of Gordon Brown or Nodding Dog.
Herr Schauble now has a somewhat plausible defence if his fingerprints turn up at the scene of a crime somewhere, and no doubt Brown and Smith’s Special Branch bodyguards will now have crockery collection added to their list of tasks when protecting our Glorious Leaders.
Which got me wondering – if enough people were to put their fingerprints into the public domain (or at least the information needed to create artificial fingerprints, as per the Chaos Computer Club procedure), would this poison the value of fingerprints as a biometric identifier? If I could point to an online and freely-accessible database that contained my fingerprint data, could I then turn around and claim that while *you* think that those are my fingers, they might equally belong to somebody’s who’s made themselves their own pair?
New York Times: Charlton Heston, Legendary Actor, Is Dead
This week’s New Scientist cover story is about the “Collapse of Civilisation“, and it’s well worth reading – as if the sub-prime banking crisis isn’t enough, civilisation is only two square meals away from collapse at any given moment.
I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which explores the reasons why a number of formerly successful civilisations disappeared. He focusses primarily on ecological factors as he’s mainly concerned with ancient societies – the New Scientist article looks at modern Western civilisation, but their conclusions are equally gloomy – basically, modern civilisation is amazingly vulnerable.
It doesn’t take long to figure out why, and it took me right back to playing around with supply chain models during my MBA. Building reliable systems is about removing single points of failure, because failure probability is usually multiplicative. Put crudely, doubling the components halves the risk of failure. So coming from a background of designing networked systems, my instinctive reaction is double-up critical equipment and build in backup paths and redundancy. And where consumable items are a factor, the response is to hold buffer stocks.
But that’s a problem from a supply chain point of view, because duplication and buffering are adding in redundancy and inventory – both of which have a cost associated with them. I remember reading somewhere that the scheduling systems for components at Nissan’s Sunderland plant have to take into account the traffic conditions on the A1, because if there’s a jam it delays the trucks bringing components from the seat factory up the road. That’s apocryphal, but entirely believable.
So rather than a supply chain, we end up with a single-point-of-failure chain.
When you start to look at where the single points of failure lie, it starts to get scary – the average supermarket would be cleaned out within 3 days, so if there’s noone to drive the trucks with replenishments, the food supply is disrupted very quickly. The joke about the Little Chef restaurant being unable to serve an omlette because they haven’t been delivered suddenly isn’t quite as funny anymore.
Personally, I’ve always thought that the point at which to start worrying about the impact of a pandemic is when the schools are closed – because at that point, it takes parents out of the workforce, and most organisations would collapse as a result.
Treating supply chains as a network problem and reducing the single points of failure would seem like an obvious insurance policy, but that’s difficult to do when the financial systems are biased against this kind of thing. Simplistically, shareholder capitalism is about maximising short-term shareholder returns through minimising costs – and a just-in-time inventory system with little or no buffer stock is a very efficient way of cutting cost out of operations. So while operating “fatter” might be a hedge against disruption, it’s discouraged in the short-term, because disruption is only a future probability, while the need to cover this year’s dividend is a certainty.
Maybe capitalism will be our downfall after all?
