I’ve never seen this properly studied, and only rarely taken into account by software developers: the opportunity cost of committing to one service or program over another. In a word: Why is it software that’s in charge, not the data itself? An obvious one is Twitter vs Jaiku. Which one to embrace? Jaiku actually has… Read More »
Traffic is all about rules. But which rules work, and which don’t? A smart planner will always be observing rules and seeing how they might work better. Lifts, for example, have never been optimized for how people organise themselves inside the lift. Buildings will often arrange lines for getting into a lift, but not for what… Read More »
Watching BBC correspondents and analysts poring over footage of the British sailors being ‘interviewed’ by their captors on Iranian television reminds me, as it must others, of the Vietnam war, and how captured American pilots were wheeled out for propaganda purposes. What has this got to do with technology? Well, if you recall, one Jeremiah… Read More »
John Graham-Cumming, the father of the excellent Bayesian spam killer POPFile, has written a review of my column collection, Loose Wire. It’s a fun read (the review, not the book, although the book is. Really.) He even adds a word to my lexicon: ‘wagstaff (v): to poke any new technology with a long stick, make… Read More »
The BBC has asked me to make some predictions about the coming year, something I’m always loath to do because I seem to get it wrong. Anyway, here are my notes. They’re based in part on my own bath-time musings, and partly inspired by the thoughts of others (tried to credit them where relevant.) 1999… Read More »