Archive for 2010
Bat Bombs 29 Aug 2010
I have been listening to the audiobook of Bill Bryson’s At Home, which is superb. I like Bryson’s work anyway and was a particular fan of A Short History of Nearly Everything. So I am very much enjoying At Home and the insights it brings (he does like asking questions you don’t generally think of, [...]
Author Seth Godin Goes Non-Traditional 23 Aug 2010
Seth Godin has been the author of 12 books that have been released the ‘traditional’ way, which is to say, by a publisher in hard copy, but he’s vowed his latest book is the last to be done that way. He doesn’t specify what alternative method he’ll use, just that the publisher route is too [...]
Wave Goodbye 5 Aug 2010
It seems awfully fast for Google to have pulled the plug on Wave. It was only first launched in May 09 and out of beta May 2010. Most non-techies haven’t even heard of it yet. New communication mediums don’t take off overnight, they’d have been looking at decades for a reasonable level of adoption. If [...]
Who’s Going to Police Space? 23 Jul 2010
I don’t usually see malicious plots at every turn, but this phrase from the BBC’s Spaceman blog caught my attention: Our customers are principally two major groups. The first group is sovereign clients – other countries that do not have the kind of access to the ISS that they would like to have, and that [...]
What We Do Online Echoes in Eternity 21 Jul 2010
I only just started reading this NY Times article and it was enough to scare me. I’m very careful about what I put online and the web came fairly late to my childhood, but imagine having stuff from your teenage years pulled in front of you when you go for a job in your thirties. [...]
The Future of Space: Asteroid Mining 19 Jul 2010
io9 gives some opinion and sums up this Wired article on how mining asteroids could provide the funds and incentive to get us into space. I share their opinion, we’re going to run out of resources on Earth, we already know it. One thing we’re not good at is reining in our consumption. Once we’ve [...]
New airships to protect British troops 13 Jul 2010
Airships are going to be making their way back to the mainstream. Use by the government should help legitimise the new wave.
More Website Rip-Offs 10 Jul 2010
So I wrote about this last month but the BBC have announced the costings for another government website, which cost £105m over three years. The COI report has some detail – £6.2m on strategy and planning, £4.4m on design and build, £4.7m on hosting and infrastructure, £15.3m on content provision and £4.5m on testing and [...]
Why Football Rules 6 Jul 2010
I’ve never really thought about some of the regulations in the game of football from the perspective of making the game portable, so I found Ed Felten’s take on How Not to Fix Soccer interesting. I’ve long been aware that a lot of US schools shun American football in favour of regular football (I’m not [...]
Government Websites are a Rip-Off 25 Jun 2010
What caught my eye in this article about the new government trying to simplify all the government websites, it was the costs: Just 46 websites cost £94 million to build, with staff costs of £32m Go a read that again, £94 million. That’s in excess of £2 million each! The government websites don’t do enough [...]