December 2009
11 posts
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Parkinson's Law (from The Economist, November... →
Always worth a re-read:
From this we might be tempted to conclude, provisionally, that the rate of increase in administrative staff is likely to be double that of the technical staff at a time when the actually useful strength (in this case, of seamen) is being reduced by 31.5 percent. It has been proved, however, statistically, that this last percentage is irrelevant. The Officials would have...
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Microsoft barred from selling Word (for now) (via... →
A Texas judge has ruled against Microsoft in a patent infringement case: “The US Court of Appeals has ordered Microsoft to drop support for editing Custom XML in Word, essentially stopping the company from selling current versions of one of its flagship products and affirming a $290 million patent infringement judgment against the software giant. The injunction, which goes into effect on...
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A Cold Lesson in Systems Engineering →
An amusing lesson in the law of unintended consequences in an Engadget article “LED traffic lights don’t melt snow, do cause accidents”
A number of cold weather American states are reporting their dismay at finding out that LED traffic lights are so energy efficient that they do not produce enough excess heat to dissipate any snow that covers them.
I predict the fix will be, of...
Ok, thanks from some magic from the Tumblr @staff, we can now post to Tumblr from Twitter clients like Tweetie 2. How cool is that?
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IBM focuses on collaboration via social networking... →
Great article on IBM’s approach to using social networking tools to enhance inter- and intra-company collaboration:
“We’re probably the leader in social software for business,” said IBM’s Brendan Crotty in a briefing here at the company’s Silicon Valley Lab here last week. “We’ve done a lot of work around ROI working with customers to understand...
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AT&T getting a bum rap on network performance →
There’s been a lot of moaning about AT&T’s performance as a carrier for smart phones, most notably the iPhone. This has been fuled by an ad war between AT&T and Verizon, with Verizon comparing their 3G footprint with AT&Ts (while omitting AT&T’s EDGE data network footprint entirely) and a recent Consumer Reports article rating AT&T below Verizon. Now,...
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Dell 10K reveals Home PC pricing woes
You probably saw this coming, but Dell’s recent 10K filing shows continued evidence that the commodity low-end PC market is an increasingly bad business model. MacNN has a great quote on the tradeoffs manufactures are forced to make:
The shift to the low end reflects both the popularity of Dell netbooks like the Mini 10 but also an economy that among Windows PC makers has favored very...
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FCC requests comments on transition to VoIP →
The FCC has filed a Public notice calling for comments for “Commission to consider whether to issue a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) relating to the appropriate policy framework to facilitate and respond to the market-led transition in technology and services, from the circuit switched PSTN system to an IP-based communications world.”
