The King William’s College quiz is hard. Probably too hard, in that you kind of know or don’t know the answers. There’s not much scope for working things out by logic. I guess that would make it a logic test not a quiz, though. The old English sense of mocking is definitely still there.
Archive for December, 2004
Nice Bloglines | My Blogs page for zero graphics / mobile users.
A surprisingly dull Google Zeitgeist this year, despite the nice interactive version.
More on privacy. An interesting thought from /. Now that US self-service postage kiosks take a picture of most transactions and that the cost of embedded cameras and storage space are plummeting, surely every interaction will be photographed in this way? It’s already happening at many cash machines - no outrage there, as I remember.
I haven’t tried DrScheme, but it looks like a great way of starting to learn to program. Using a simple (but extensible and rich) language has to be the best way to learn, as you’re guaranteed to need to use a whole pile of languages before long. Starting down the road of a Java or VB could prove trickier - the initial learning curve is so steep.
I must get into del.icio.us: here are some mindmapping resources.
FreeMind is free mind mapping software as it says on the tin. It looks pretty functional, if less customisable than MindManager. The price looks good, though. There’s another concept mapping tool that looks useful.
It strikes me that lots of countries have ID cards (100 apparently including Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain) and I don’t hear massive outcry about their lack of or curtailing of freedoms. So it seems to me that there are two options a) there aren’t the doomsday scenario restrictions and detailed tracking of individuals causing innocent people to be affected or b) there are but no-one has noticed. It is difficult to separate these two in any meaningful manner. Knee-jerk reaction to a perceived change in freedom that has no noticeable impact on citizens isn’t helpful. Surely some sort of lobbying to establish what sensible restrictions should be put on the use of the information (just as with the ever-growing DNA databases) would be more sensible?
Part of the reason I’m interested in this is that joined-up government (e.g. I can change my address in one place and have it ripple through elsewhere) depends on a unique customer ID. To have a unique customer ID requires verification and authentication which kind of requires a physical method of presentation like an ID card (that can be used for e-transactions as well). If you want the former, you kind of need the latter.
I oscillate on this issue: joined-up goverment should be fantastic, and I believe most mobile phone and credit card users are pretty trackable anyway. However, forcing the symbol of many fascist states on the population and using known-false arguments (ID card = lower terrorist potential) to push the issue leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.
I’m sure the manufacturers won’t like being listed as The Worst Products of the Year, but its exactly the sort of naming and shaming that we should have on the internet. Don’t ever get suckered again.
Useful list from the Grauniad of the best websites in various categories.
The games producers are making more money than and beating record openings vs the movie studios. Surprising then, that nearly every game is available on P2P networks and that this ‘gross piracy’ is not affecting their sales.
Very funky picture of a hole in space caused by an absorbent cloud of material.
Slip a Geek Book Under the Tree sees Wired magazine find some interesting additions for any geeky shelf.
Nice article by a guy who built a teleprompter. A little too much effort, I think, but still fun.
Off-the-Record Messaging is a way of having secure (encrypted), authenticated communications over instant messaging with no chance of retrospective compromise (cracking the conversation key doesn’t mess with previous converstations) and deniability (you can plausibly deny any knowledge of the communication). I don’t really understand, but I think that it is important. Secure conversations with deniability gives all sorts of options to the good guys and the bad guys.
PC photo printers can be as good as or better than professional printing on the high street. Not good news for Boots; great news for Kodak and Epson.
96% of government services will be available online by 2005. Interesting factoid: there are 657 services identified across the whole of central government: this is equivalent to the services provided by one (large) local authority.
Interesting research on consulting salaries from BLT. They appear to be based on what applications through BLT claim on their CVs, rather than survey information. I don’t know how this affects the accuracy, but they seem reasonable. Interesting that my first ever pay packet as an analyst was £16k + £4k bonus - not far off the starting £22k level of today (that’s a 2.7% CAGR - thanks to Datamonitor for teaching me this).
The R Project for Statistical Computing looks interesting. We’ve just been struggling with Microsoft’s MapPoint - so much that we’re ditching it in favour of Maps on Tap.
Pay without Performance has pointers to the continuing growth in inequity between company leaders and their staff. Not nice but I don’t know how one might stop this kind of thing.
The most telling detail for me is the observation p98, that every single CEO in the S&P Execucomp Database has a defined benefit pension plan. This, while bosses everywhere have been shifting their employees onto defined contribution plans, where they, and not the company, bear all the risk, and while the Republicans in the US are trying to do the same with Social Security.
