Awww, didums. In one particular instance, a leading open source map was compared against a professional TomTom map, and shown to have a third less residential road coverage and 16% less basic map attributes such as street names. Worse still, it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included ‘a high number of fields and… Read More »
Microsoft Delivers a Blow to Open Source with Visual Studio 11 When I read this headline, I thought, “oh, oh, Microsoft are going to try and compete with the open source compiler by giving away Visual Studio 11â€. After all, they’ve got the money for it, and charging developers to write software for your operating… Read More »
WHMCS, a client management company has been hacked. 1.7GB of data was stolen. The data leak comprises 500,000 usernames, passwords, IP addresses and in some instances credit card details. As I keep saying: the only financial information that would be stored in the company database when you pay via bitcoin is a magic number that… Read More »
At the Future of Money and Technology conference yesterday, the VP of American Express got an uncomfortable question (for him). His response caused amusement and tweetnoise. For the benefit of the search enginges.. Richard Nevins Q: What does Amex think about bitcoin? A: Next question. [cue laughter] Christian Lanng Q: What do American Express think… Read More »
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a well-known example from game theory. The basic idea is: Two men are arrested as being involved in the same crime. The police offer both the same deal: testify against your partner and you will go free and your partner goes down for twelve years. If you both remain silent, you… Read More »
Here’s the thing about spammers: they send millions of emails. They are able to do so because the marginal cost of sending is very small. I have heard it said that if they get one hit in a million, then they can be in profit. Some fools repeatedly suggest that a charge per email is… Read More »
Do you have an Internet-enabled phone? Are you with O2 (or one of the companies that piggyback their network, like Tesco, Giffgaff, etc)? Then they’ve been giving out your phone number to every web site you visit while using mobile data. O2 customer Lewis Peckover recently discovered that when you’re browsing over 3G on O2,… Read More »
From East of Eden: “Say, Carlton, how do you go about telegraphing money?†“Well, you bring me a hundred and two dollars and sixty cents and I send a wire telling the Valdosta operator to pay Adam one hundred dollars.†This particular bit of East of Eden (which is excellent, quite apart from this particular… Read More »
On the potential discovery of faster than light neutrinos. Einstein’s seminal work was “general relativityâ€, which is about gravity, space and time. General relativity is utterly beyond me; but special relativity (broadly) is taught to A-Level students without much difficulty. Firstly: it’s not really about “photons†having a particular speed; and us suddenly discovering some… Read More »
I mentioned a while ago that I was becoming unhappy with Google’s attitude to openness with Android phones. I felt that I would end up rooting and installing a more open ROM at some point. That point has arrived; triggered by Google automatically upgrading Google Market on my phone, using up the tiny bit of… Read More »