Atomic Razor

As predicted....

Vodafone stymies T-Mobile's iPhone exclusive

iTWire - Vodafone stymies T-Mobile's iPhone exclusive  

Remember folks, you saw it here first a few months ago.  This is just the start of this sort of thing around Europe too.  Apple might have got AT&T to stand for the 3 card trick but the rest of the world is a little more savy.

I'm also interested to see this put as Vodafone being spiteful about missing out on the deal.  As I understand it from people inside Vodafone, Apple were angry at being told that they couldn't have a share of the revenues.  More fun to come, mark my words.

In My End is My Beginning

I have finally finished The Book of Fantasy, edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo and A. Bioy Casares. It is every bit as good as Ursula K. Le Guin says it is in the introduction and as Ivan Towlson said it was in the OUSFG newsletter some time in the late 1980s in an article discussing recommended collections fantasy and science fiction.

The title is a little misleading. Almost all of the stories are certainly fantasy by pretty much anyone's definition (one or two could be thought of as being strictly non-fantastic, but they have the sensibility of the fantastic about them), but Borges's taste for fantasy is very far from Tolkien, much less Robert E. Howard. There are also few science fiction writers represented here and none of those that are offer a science fiction piece. What he have here is, perhaps, the fantasy of ideas rather than a fantasy of things. There is nothing utopian  about any of these pieces. I am sure the world looks a very different place from Buenos Aires (in 1907 or 2007) than it does from New York.

Like Borges's own stories, the ones here are dense and intense. Many of them are quite short, but they are far from quick reads as one can get. All of the stories here would repay reading, although I hope that Borges would have understood that there are so many books and so little time. There are many stories here that will live with me ("The Drowned Giant", "Enoch Soames", "The Music on the Hill, "Where Their Fire is Not Quenched", "Macario", "Pomegranate Seed", "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" ). I wish I had read this book twenty years when I would have young enough to have been (more) influenced by it.

Blog Is...

...never having to say anything more.

I know that Rand Simberg (Transterrestrial Musings "Coming Hone") is a bit of a soft target for this sort of thing, but this is a classic example of something you see around the Blogosphere - especially from reasonably well known Bloggers who've let their egos get ahead of their critical thinking.

Rand's had some classics over the last few years.  There was his request for a refund on the way after the "Mission Accomplished" thing and it turned out that less money had been spent than predicted at that point.  Then there have been the multiple "Oil is over priced, it's coming down real soon now" posts. 

The ability to latch onto a single item in support of your worldview and then build a Blog Post around it with absolutely no fear of having to revisit your position is probably the key for this type of personality.

It's interesting.

Me?  I'm glad that a lot of Iraqis feel they can come home from Syria.  As I understand the Syrians haven't exactly been making them particuarly welcome there and the conditions (at least those reported in a BBC report I watched) looked pretty miserable.  It's a few hundred thousand.  But which few hundred thousand?  Will these be the entrepeneurs, the teachers, the doctors, the professionals that have left?

For the record, and for other Bloggers, editorial isn't all there is to journalism.  There's a lot more to it than that.  It's probably why Paul and I aren't terribly good bloggers.  I worry about the questions behind the editorial too much.

Tell It Like It Is...

Five problems with Google Android

Well, actually there's a couple of things in here I'd take issue with but generally pretty much spot on.  Plus I'd add that having a connection API without building the underlying connection architecture is a recipie for disaster.

I'd also take issue with his comments about using SVG rather than pixel rendered graphics.  IT'S A PHONE - it's a constrained platform with limited memory and processing power.  That's why they tend to use drawn UIs rather than dynamically rendered.  Sure if you've a 800Mhz power house in there and huge amounts of memory it doesn't matter.  But then your BOM costs are through the roof.

You are Right and I am Wrong

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Robert Peston

Before any points it out, Northern Rock do owe money directly to the Treasury. The fact that this had to be done (because NR couldn't afford to finance its original BoE loan facility) suggests that the situation is even grimmer (and legally more fraught) than I had assumed. A question that to ask is whether the Rock is in fact currently (technically) insolvent. Nationalise, Mr Darling, nationalise now. Like drawing a tooth, the pain will be more bearable the sooner it is done.

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Bad Day at Black Rock

Some moron was just bleating on the Ten O'Clock News that a bank shouldn't let you down. This is idiot is a Northern Rock shareholder. Share prices can go down as well as up. That's how the capitalist system works. Thanks to Northern Rock's imprudent business  model, the fair value of its shares is zero.

It's also not true that the taxpayer has lent money to Northern Rock. The Bank of England has, which is not the same thing at all. The bank has lent Northern Rock money. That is what banks do. And the bank has a reasonable expectation that the money will be paid back. Northern Rock is not a sub-prime lender. Most of its customers will be able to continue paying back their mortgages even if, as the IMF suggests, the UK property market experiences a downward correction of up to 40% over the next few years. The problem is that it is probably illegal for the Bank of England to continuing lending money to Northern Rock, but Northern Rock will find it difficult or impossible not to carry on refinancing itself from the open wholesale money market. Which means that is a problem. It is politically unacceptable for Northern Rock to be allowed to go bust (it would be the first British bank - excluding Barings - to fail since the 1870s), but it is unlikely that a buyer will be interested in Northern Rock without the BoE's guarantees and loan facility continuing. Having said that, a buyer is likely to get Northern Rock for free now. Nationalisation is probably the only sensible, if politically problematic, alternative. The business can then be split up and reprivatised, either selling the highest value component first  or carefully parcelling out equal amounts of risk among the lots. Whatever way, we haven't heard the last of Northern Rock and this could well prove Labour's Black Wednesday. I can only hope that some mechanism can be found by which Dr Ridley gets to experience first hand the full Darwinian nature of HM prisons (having said that he'd probably find it a cakewalk after Eton).

Words (Almost) Fail Me

:: Welcome :: - Maun Homeopathy Project

Please, please tell me this is a joke. A homeopathic clinic in Botswana for AIDS sufferers. And Jeanette Winterson has donated her fee from her article "In Defence of Homeopathy" to it the organisation that runs the "clinic". Is it possible to petition Oxford to have her degree rescinded on the grounds of gross and negligent stupidity? I am feeling pretty angry now. I hope she has read this article, not that I suspect it would make any difference to her opinion. I suspect that Winterson would get on well with Scarlett Thomas.

The point is that even if you encourage the use of homeopathic remedies as a harmless placebo for the relief of the side-effects of anti-HIV/AIDS drugs, you'd be better suggesting a harmless allopathic remedy, or, better yet, an an allopathic remedy that might actually actively reduce the side-effects (I know, I know).

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Hello, world calling, pick up the phone.....

This sort of thing from one our local rages really does annoy me...

Aerospace Notebook: Oil money is driving big orders in Dubai

The quotes, specifically which have me grinding my teeth are, "analyst Adam Pilarski estimates that every man, woman and child in Dubai would have to make 1,000 airplane flights a year to fill the seats in all those planes" followed by, "

Contrast that, he said, with the United States, which has a population of about 300 million and about 700 million jetliner passenger flights a year.

"It doesn't make any sense," said Pilarski, senior aviation analyst with Avitas, an industry consulting business. "This is loony tunes.""

*sigh*

I don't know who Mr Pilarski is, but one must only assume that he's a cretin of some order.  Emerits and Qatar aren't buying planes for their local markets - they're buying them for 2 distinct market segments.

First is the global long haul sector where they've been working to establish themselves as a global hub - with some success.  They offer excellent levels of service with great cost structures and they're not dry states.

Second, Dubai, in paticular, has been extremely sucessful in setting itself up as the next Spain for European holidays, and they've done it by aiming at the high end of the market with excellent hotels and resorts.

There's the third point that Dubai has been an important trading post for centuries and they don't want to lose that position either.

The customers probably aren't American of course, they're Indian - flying the millions of migrant workers in and out needs planes, they're Western European to handle the millions of British, German and Swedish holiday makers they get. 

The final nonsense from Pilarski, again missing the point about people in the rest of the world, "One act of terrorism and all the tourism goes away," Pilarski said."

There's only one thing to say about that BOLLOCKS.  I don't see people staying away from Eygyt because of acts of terrorism.  I hate to feel jingoistic, but most people are made of sterner stuff than that.

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A Fellow Traveller...

“Welcome to dork talk”

If you don't already, please take some time to start reading Stephen Fry's Blog.  Unlike Mr Fry I just don't have the words available to me to describe how excellent his stuff really is.

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Grand Designs

M.I.T. Sues Architect Frank Gehry - New York Times

The nitwits who designed this building and the nitwits who commissioned this building should be tied to chairs, locked in a room and forced to read Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn. And when they have read it, they should be made to read it again. Until They Get It. One of the points of a building is not to leak. I'll repeat that for the hard of understanding. One of the points of a building  is not to leak. If the building you designed leaks, it is not because that is what roofs do. It is because either you designed the roof incorrectly or the roof was built incorrectly. Now, the Frank Gehry's Stata Building looks cool. Now, I'm as much in favour of the cool as the next man. Probably more so as I am rather image conscious for a geek. But I also recognise that cool is very often not practical and buildings should be beautiful, but they should also be practical and flexible (also properly built and maintained). If you design  a quirky building, it's going to require a quirky roof. And a quirky roof is more difficult to design, more difficult to build and more difficult to maintain than a non-quirky roof. There is a reason why most building are rectangular boxes. If you are going to design a quirky roof, it behoves you to pay particular attention to ensuring that the roof does not leak. That is the job of the architect to make sure that roof does not leak, not swanning around the world in designer suits on masturbaory power trips, psychoanalyst in tow, giving lectures on how architecture is "frozen music" and that architect is the true "engineer of the human soul", sketching out grandiose plans on the back of a paper napkin at an upmarket sushi joint before being sucked off by identically ambitious, star-struck and nubile interns in identical five star hotel suites in London, Moscow and Tokyo.

OK, OK, I'll stop now. I'll admit I'd like to have the chance to work in the Stata Building (RMS and Tim Berners-Lee do), but I fear the novelty (as with the Erotic Gherkin) would quickly fade.

And the idiots knocked down Building 20 to build this piece of junk. Frankly, just making them read HBL is too good for them. I think beatings with iron bars are called.   

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