Baterbee scam - please

http://flankk.blogspot.com/2006/05/barterbee-scam.html

His description misses out that fact that you choose how many points to place your items online for.
"You're in Charge! — You decide how many points you want for each item"

The only economically worrying facet is this injection of points that happens when new people join up, it's like Moscow printing more money to prop up their economy in the middle part of the 20th century.
"* 5 points and $1 placed in your account to get free item on BarterBee."
Flankk says "Points keep adding to the system causing perpetual inflation" is incorrect or certianly overestimating the point, you get 5 when you sign up the rest are accrued by an input of goods, it's not points for nothing in the long term.

Barterbee is a simple online trading system that to all intents and purposes is using that $1 for shipping and yeah ok scrappig something off the top to pay for the sites and listings etc.
"It's Easy! — We provide BarterBee shipping mailers."

flankk's argument "Essentially, BarterBee cons victims into trading their DVDs for something valueless, points; they promise the points can be exchanged for something valuable"
Is implying that the idea you can't exchange your points is, well, wrong.

I believe, their revenue stream must be advertising.

don't digg this story bury it.

For now I will continue to apply my mind to the ideas in flankk's blog but I believe it's a lot of FUD. Really the issue as I see is that you are locked into this faux currency keeping you at Baterbee, however you know that when you sign up, it's not a con... you know like Necter points, you know you can exchange them in like 5 stores on the planet... ok and underestimation maybe.

iWeb

My iWeb update finally appeared and weighing in a nearly 100 megs, I probably shouldn't be wasting bandwidth with folly such as blog posts...
http://idisk.mac.com/mcornes-Public/iWeb update.png

A few misc items

***misc***
Well after my Jedi fun with the MacSaber I saw a video of usefull intentions towrds the motion sensor. It's on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw the smackbook. Although I'm still having doubts about beating up my one and a half grand laptop.

Managed to go and touch a macbook the otehr evening. I like it, the keyboard is interesting, I don't think it will stop debris falling through as some have suggested but the few minutes I've had with it were pleasent enough good tactile feedback. Still not as nice as the Dell I once typed on. The machine's magnetic lid thing is inovative it felt very solid I held it under my arm and I think I felt more comfortable holding that there than my MBP.

It was so nice the Malteese market girl was somewhat gutted that she'd opted for an iBook when she did, I had to spend an hour defending my avice based on the none universal office kit that is used daily. On that note Patricia has decided to start using my best tool for the job idea and begun a torrid love affair with iWorks. Producing brochures, postcards, leaflets and presentations willy nilly. All of which look delicious. I personally am not buying into the fuss, both products have some nice features over their MS counter parts. However someone she demo'd the presentation too from Keynote said it did look smoother than Power Point and that person has been completely put off Apple by my Zealousness they're scared they'll become indoctrinated now if they try it out for themselves.

Went for a fantastic dinner the other evening, which was only marred by someone quite unexpected piquing my inner Start Wars geek and having a 90 raging debate about subtle nuances of the original trilogy.

It's all change at work we've had 18 new appointees now... a horrifyingly high turnover in my opinion, not that all of them are replacements some are simply new positions through expansion.

I discovered some lovely time-lapse video software that hooks into my eyesight, here is my first effort some pretty clouds... dead original init... easy to do though.
http://gawker.sourceforge.net/Gawker.html
so I made this...
http://idisk.mac.com/mcornes-Public/Windy.mov

Also found this http://www.flickr.com/photos/visualseed/86410009/in/pool-macintosh/ and felt a worrying emotional connection.

diggnation might be going to London England soon!

so what do you want again

I use my computer to code, watch some TV and listen to music. I hate as a rule writting documentation, project specs, plans etc I love, I LOVE plans... as anybody from prevsious collaborative projects but handouts, help sheets - guides, user manuals. I think I do an OK job of it, not great that does come from being technical Even when your'e stepping through a process to write a guide you still do lots of little thigns you don't even notice you're doing. When I've written a plan I like even more sticking to plans. Therefore when at work I suggest we hammer out specificiations to help projects come together more effectivly, rather than running in with fairly chunky changes a week before something is going live we've all got an idea what to expect. It is rather annoying to have this idea dismissed on. I don't want this post to sound like a Professional Issues lecture but documentation is a good thing.

Joel Spolsky he makes a great comment about a project plan not only to write it but then it's not an icon to be worshipped on high... get it off the shelf and read it, know it, use it. Change it. I don't believe that these documents are or should be cast iron. I was a great proponant of the idea of the organic document in previous projects. Does having an organic document then actually help prevent specification creep ? No, you're not going to stop the mad child eating beast that is spec creep. You could write the best spec in the world, lucidly describing every nuance of the system that you're modelling. Then someone will come in five weeks later and inform you that they forgot to include the fact that you need a new box / field / menu / colour / widget. You can't and should't refuse this if you do the system is a bad model even before distribution.

Private sector IT service companies try to restrict this sort of behaviour, whereby the client actually gets what they want, by leveraging incredibly large fees for making changes even simple ones like wordings in a menu - therefore the system doesn't get changed, it fits the spec the company gets paid but the users don't get what they want - the system isn't used and merely becomes the thing of a public enquiry some months later.

Hazel Blears, the Police minister in the UK last month decided to sign off on spending £367m on a new police database management system. From what I have briefly read, it's a big agragator to bring together all the current systems. Then today a third response from Ms Blears office to the Bichard report tells us that over 50% of British Constabularies have causes for concern regarding their database and data systems. Data integrity and accuracy was highlighted as an intelligence failing that contributed to the deaths of two British School girls some years ago.

New systems are supposed to go through an acceptance test, this is clearly often carried out by managers who sign off that a system is excellent, without ever actually unleashing it on the real users. Recently the debacle over the MOT computer system that the UK Home Office didn't even know it had paid countless millions for failed as soon as real load was placed on it up and down the country.
Last week Accenture was left defending itself to a select committee regarding it's rural payments system that had cost £34m... no sorry in the end UK Gov paid £54m for it not to work.

Would these continued errors in the public sector have been caught by good specifications ? There is a problem with the developers writing the spec, just as you can't expect the designers to test their own system. I realise that there are cost restrictions to this ideal. However I know of large companies who treat public IT contracts as a gravy train. People will instantly damn Thatcher for treating everything like a business lay the blame squarely at her door. However this is a non sequitur, consumers have rights and get good deals. The reason public IT services are in a mess isn't because they should have all been conceived and developed internally like a mass produced 10^6 pair of wellingtons. It is however because those managing them and collaborating with the private don't know what they are doing. Of course you can't expect an IT graduate to work in the public services to oversee their peers raking it in in the private sector. That is after all what you outsource for... to find a skill set you don't have. What you can expect is that the person whilst not an IT graduate should at least know if they are being taken for a ride. That can spot a gaping hole in a specification if asked to read one, that's why they're written in the first place, well should be.

When I want a knew roof in my kitchen I didn't call a builder and provide him with a plan complete with measurements, a list of suppliers and a supporting cast of half a dozen lackeys. No I call him up and ask him to provide a quote for a new roof. Then I call 4 or 5 others. These all then come and visit my kitchen and work out what they reckon they need to do and gimme a number called a quote that should be itemised. If this number changes when the work is on going I damn well want an explanation. If as part of that I discover he's also trying to rewire my house and is charging me for setting up my digital television and washing my dog, I tell him to get stuffed. If he then does so leaving me with no roof, I'm not giving him a damn penny. I don't heartily laugh and cut a cheque for all the jolly good hard work he's done thus far. That is the impression I get regarding government IT projects at the moment. I doubt the proposed ID card system will be any different.

The force is shiny with this one.

http://isnoop.net/blog/2006/05/20/macsaber-turn-your-mac-into-a-jedi-weapon/

Well funny, we'll see how i deflect the flying post it notes around the office now. I wonder how it'd react to a cricket ball bouncing off its shiny shell.

Apple Newclear laptops

Well I find that UK Premier has grown some cahones, he's gone Nuclear. I am not supprised, I think it is a sensible, safe, environmentally concious option. I'm interested to know how we're going to build them. Despite the new clutch of Nuclear Power Courses that are only just beginning we're not going to have any of our own nuclear engineers for about a decade but no fear I hear we can outsource the building of the new facilities. Apparently the Iranians might be considering offering a new consulting service regarding nuclear plant, commissioning and maintenance. The Israelis will also assist in the decominsioning of any older plants.

MacBooks released, bout time. I am not a fan of the shiny screens, shiny cases good. Shiny screens bad. It's blatently so people in the stores go... "ooo shiny"
The specs are an interesting bunch, it's all online you be the judge. I've got my MBP I'm sticking with it... integrated graphics is causing a lot of concern about the new line up.

Interesting time at work, apparently we're taking the web app to infinity and beyond... all I can say is does anyone remember curtains ?

If anyone wants to travel to NYC later this week for the Cube opening, gimme an e-mail I'm looking for some company.

It was like a dragon racing by...

I recently had cause to train ride around the country, it was the first outing for my shiny laptop. I have to say, I prefer flying, the entire process I find more streamlined, I go to ourflagcarrier.com I print out a ticket, go to the airport and I'm happily directed to a door and step on the plane, one complimentary Gin & Tonic Later I'm at my destination. On the train, I've got work out which line, which stops, if I need to change, where to sit, do I get a first class upgrade it's all just so much work. The only advantage I found was that I could simply opt to miss the train I booked for the return and get on a different one forgoing my booked seat, now I don't know if you can do this at an airport or if you can, I'm sure it's not quite as assured. I liked the fact that all the coaches on my train had power points on all the tables for laptops, cell phones etc.

Of course you can cut things slightly finer on the trains, mounting mere moments prior to departure. Security implications and the logistics of airports mean I must arrive some 30 minutes prior to departing on an internal flight and an hour if travelling internationally.
Delays are risky on both, I suppose you tend to get less engineering works causing closures at 20000 feet. I have had to cancel dinner plans when travelling on both services.

I was only a child when the national rail services were privatised in an attempt to improve service, investments and safety whilst netting large sums of money from the private sector for the administration. I never experienced nationalised rail travel, I have some memories of leaving family members on trains and those trains be large horrid dirty smelly things, which could of course be partially linked to the circumstances. In-spite of that the manner in which the railways were privatised I believe is widely accepted to have been flawed. Whether this opinion is held primarily by the vocal left purely on ideological grounds I do not know. Or what the results of a survey of rail users about their experiences, the costs, and thoughts on safety etc over the past 30 years of rail travel might conclude.
In the same vein I never travelled on our flag carrier when it was a nationalised commodity. People seem less inclined to remember the process of privatising the flag carrier, possibly because that was a privatisation success and as such serves not the vocal lefts objectives.

Maybe in the context of the "long now" a train is more rewarding as few hundred mile journey takes maybe 3-4 hours varying on the number of stops. This means I can sit back and write drivel like this. I can catch up on my lengthy pod cast lists, I managed to conquer several TWiTs, three Mac Geek Gabs, and a Mac OS Ken that I had missed. On a plane, the same journey means you're in the air for maybe 60 minutes, 10 assent, 10 decent so I can't have my laptop out for 20 minutes out of that hour. Clearly then the distances I'm talking about might be influencing my perception of those short comings. When I fly intercontinental I'd get hours with my laptop out.

On that idea I have seen discussions recently that the aircraft actually have a proprietary power connector rather than a standard socket, and people are wondering if you could actually power a mac book pro from these little power sources even with an adapter. Does the train socket draw power from the line or is there a huge battery under the train with the juice in ? Either way has implications when contrasting with air travel.

Customer services I always think are better on aircraft. Excluding my complimentary G & T, I enjoy being welcomed aboard by the attractive lady or handsome gentleman, them using my name and directing my to my seat, asking if I need anything, a pillow, a blanket, coitus perhaps ? Where as on the train today I have been shouted at for my ticket, mumbled at because I asked about a first class upgrade and been given a paper cut by the ticket attendant when he snatched my ticket.

Both methods of transport have fabulous views and remind me why I think we have a marvellously luscious country. Green rolling fields mixed with copses and hamlets dropped around in beautiful scenes. All interspersed with our great industrial heritage, mills, factories, mines etc themselves complemented by modern glass edifices all makes me grateful that this stupid ape wa born on our damp little island. Views from the sky are equally inspiring, although I doubt worth as much detail. When flying intercontinental I would suppose there can be little inspiration from all that blue, unless you studied at some oceanographic centre in your past.

Getting an internet connection is effectively out of the question using either method, although recently there has been word that some companies might deploy WiFi on some train services, I imagine first class only. That then would be a big hitter as far as train travel is concerned I estimate.

A colleague of mine who loves trains claims that he prefers them because he can leverage more control akin to vi over word I estimate.

Musical Hubris

Apple approach to problem solving making things work then getting out of the way. In the light of the Apple victory over the record industries idea of variable pricing. Since everyone has touted this as Apple wins, apple victorious apple is still in charge so without hubris a discussion

I'm happy that Steve succeeded in arguing that moving away from static pricing would be dangerous, we are only just maybe at the end of early adopter phase with buuying music online... I'll be convinced when my mom buys her first track, she's resisting at the moment for the case, the album art, and the plastic disk. So Steve was successful in convincing the music industry to keeping standard pricing across the board. I prefer that I can just hit buy on my iTunes store and know that for a single track I'm gonna find a £0.79 charge on my Credit Card bill. Whether the tail end market would have benefited from variable pricing is up for discussion. Some people are claiming that Steve can now put the fear of God in to the music industry because everyone owns an iPod and if you want them to keep getting legal music do it our way. or we'll rewind 5 years and people could not pay you a dime and listen to illegally downloaded music.

Some quick beer mat calculations I heard were that a track on iTunes $1 price break down went as follows
$0.70 Labels +
$0.25 Visa +
Bandwidth costs +
Apples Profit

They reckoned that Apple were making a penny per track. This concurs with something Gruber wrote the other week about Apple's primary objective is to sell hardware, they are a hardware company. Everything else is used to sell hardware, OS X - used to sell macs, Bootcamp - used to sell macs. ITunes - used to sell iPods - used to sell Macs. So does apple effectively use iTunes tracks as a loss leader ?

Apple is apparently the 7th largest record seller in the States. Why are they this popular, with the French government trying to appease the seller of 80% of the worlds online music downloads. I have previously blogged about the ease of use compared to other services or business models. I still have a Napster account, I still pay them a tenner a month and was considering cancelling until my beta 6 Parallels install started playing sound in my Windows XP setup. I like the idea of being able to listen to all their music as long as I'm online, it's rare that I am not near a web connection. So despite my current economic arrangement with Napster, I still if I want to buy music by it from iTunes. This isn't because I want to play them on my iPod - I don't have one. Rather I know that Apples DRM is more user friendly.

Napster has long been called the poodle of the RIAA since they chose to use the MS DRM which, I agree with the TWiTs, is so much more invasive. I can download a track and know even if I've got to move it over to a CD and use as my friendly troll calls it "lousy or lossy analogue conversion" without bothering to much, I believe this is fair use under the spirit of the license. If I picked up a Napster track the DRM actually monitors any CD I burn, if I want to bung it on a mobile player I've then got to pay and extra fiver a month, as I recall. Apple have solved the problem none intrusively. They have got out of my way allowing me to enjoy the music my way, do they trust me more than Microsoft. Recently the Real CEO accused all iPod owners of pirating most of their music on their iPod.

One take on these juxtaposed methods is that Apple wanted to help the customer first to enjoy music, and Microsoft did want to help users enjoy music they worried first about placating the music industry, where Apple maybe couldn't care less about the industry, they were selling iPods before selling music. Sure now iTunes is a big proponant of iPod sales - but are the record companies also gonna throw that 70 cents away, remember iTunes just recently solid their 1 billionth song, that's a lot of 70 cents.

Windows Update

http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/05/20060511170823.shtml

Given the update list;

Mail
-I wonder if Rui will be happier ?
Preview
QuickDraw
Ruby
-Could this make it work out of the box without manual editing ?
Safari
-Does this fix the much reported image of death ?
securityd
-I wonder what this is about ?

To be honest it's getting as bad as windows... OK I'm exagerating just a little
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303737
Apparently none of the above.

I'm a mac, and I'm a PC

I've just discovered that the apple test users on iChat are running two of the new apple ads. The Virus one and the rebooting one. I like the latter because the mac seems genuinely concerned for the PCs well being "I'm gonna go get IT" I think it's quite cute really.

Hello... hello... can you hear me ?

It's back, It's back... is it a unibin ? OK It's back... it's now .10 revisions later. I bet it doesn't have gosh darn video though.
It is 16 megs coming down then 24 megs unpacked. It is indeed Intel when running on my mac book pro, meaning it launches in a jiffy and hasn't horribly slowed my entire machine down to a crawl.

Before I dialed my first universal binary call it's running at about 14% processor power.
When dialing out it's using about 78% of my dual cores, 58 Megs of Real memory, and has reserved itself a possible 441 of virtual memory. It is running accross 18 threads at the moment.

In a call I'm on for 29% processor usage.

http://www.skype.com/helloagain.html

Apple victorious against Apple

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4983796.stm

Thought I'd let you all know this. Given I wrote at length regarding this some weeks ago, I dutifully sat refreshing the BBC Tech page from 1030 onwards.
Enjoy, our Apple Music Store.

IE Beta 7

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=14528

This has been bubbling around for some days now. I find it very annoying that Google are allegedly whinng about this. As other comentators have pointed out, MSN didn't complain to my knowledge, their search offering at that time wasn't out of this world, still they did have a business model around searching.

Google do have the largest advertsing engine on the web, this is their primary source of income and I can understand their will to protect it. A number of cents everytime you use a link provided by the google bar or google search in firefox goes right into the pocket of Google, that adds up to some crazy money.

However to compare the use of MSN in IE to the anti-trust compaints of the late 90s is absurd. IE was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed. This latest incarnation:
1) Doesn't form a part of the OS, current reports are that it is completely disasociated from the OS, many hope this will:
a) Close off some legacy security holes that came from IE to the OS
b) Win the hearts and minds of the DOJ by being pro active in allowing other browers to become the default without mandating IE is still used on some level like control panels modern view, was powered by IE
2) In the same vein as b) above, the fact you can add new browsers easily is mirrors in the fact in IE v7 beta, you can add as many search providers as you can shake a stick at, including google if you so desire.

People should stop banging on about MS abusing their position, they gained that position by making good business decisions, they may have taken some advantage out of the position at some point, but this is business after all - it's not like they've been feeding chemical pestcides to children from crop spraying for a couple of decades is it ?

Google should certianly not be so hypocritical given the direct comparisons between the firefox search box and IE.

This litigeous soceity is getting worse and worse, RIM are getting sued by a patent holder, again. I sometimes wonder who is issuing all these patents leading to these law suits, at least in the UK you can't patent something that is already in the public domain.

A gaggle of media

Well last night, real player universal binary arrived on my mac. Despite the UK mirror not having the most up to date version a quick click to the US mirror and I have a native running real player on my macintel. Very good I hear you cry, excellnt, BBC content now works with Safari and my beloved Radio4 Widget is working after a 6 week sabatical. However real isn't being picked up by firefox, or there isn't a plug-in available yet, so hopefully that will be fixed in a few hours.

This morning, my mac crashed which was annoying, my mac book doesn't seem to ever get past a week of sleeping and waking without needing a bit of a slap. The Maltese Market Trader's iBook last time I looked had an uptime of 34 days which makes me somewhat jealous.

After my mac restarted, I saw the new flock of Apple Mac adverts, mostly ammusing because His Jobsness hinted at these last week and I was reading a blog somewhere over the weekend that was lamenting the fact that apple doesn't have a decent mac ad campaign, and hasn't since the switch set of ads. I do wonder how long till I see this on UK terrestrial TV.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Ironically the second one I watched was the macs don't crash one, so Mac Book take note, "I'm gonna go get IT" - love it. The Maltese Marauder easily commented that they had a young hip "cute" -her exact word- guy for the mac and a slightly rotund stuffy type for the PC. Naughty since the mac is approximately the same age as the PC, give or take.