Business Rates councilscam

In the UK each business has to pay Business Rates (National Non-Domestic Rates) tax to the local council. you would have expected it to be equivalent to council tax on a similar sized home, but actually it is vastly more.

A 3 bed house pays £1,400 per year council tax. A 5 room business pays £2,500. For that massive increase, they only get a single rubbish sack, no other services are provided!

GNU+Linux on mobile laggy

Three years on, iphone still dominates the new media smartphone market. Nokia limps along after it's massive head start with Symbian.

GNU+Linux is nowhere near.. too many bugs, too little (if any) QA. GNU+Linux is may never get and succeed in the quality niche.

QA and UI consistency has to be massively improved, will it change? I hope so, but no company has managed it over the last 3 years.

International Domain Name mistake

Bad news for the Internet recently, International Domain Names (IDN) were passed by ICANN.

If you think about IDN, imagine if this was allowed for telephone numbers too!?

ICANN should not have buckled under unreasonable force from China on this point. It's only going to adversely affect biz with other countries too, as none can now enter a companies email address, unless they know the encoded equivlent in latin text. All email clients also need to be updated, and while abroad no Chinese staff will be able to email their colleagues in "pin yin" or any other language.

Consider beijing.cn, ICANN had already made the mistake of allowing this to become 北京.cn, the latest mistake allows this to be http://北京.中国/ (That is, I hope they didn't opt for the whole middle people's republic country name: 中华人民共和国)

So if you want to access this beijing.cn site, and you don't have Chinese input, you have to write: http://www.xn--1lq90i.xn--fiqs8s/ likewise, if you wanted to email 胡錦濤, you'd have to write xn--0jx757a5xn@n--1lq90i.xn--fiqs8s, oops!!

While Latin characters are in such wide spread use and Arabic numerals, it does make sense to relly on these 36 characters for our domain identifiers!

Symbian two phase construction

Saw this old announcement, but how long till Symbian drops the epoch past, ditches C++ manual two-phase construction push pop stack and let's us build and debug simply using GCC and eclipse without such a complicated build system!?

GNU+Linux on the mainstream?

Apple Mac OS was always clear and simple, take a look at any GNU+Linux distribution and you'll see any number of overcomplicated messages for basic functions such the laptop battery indicator. Is decimal place really needed? does know the .2 in 34.2% make much difference?

Time to pay for email?

Guardian has an interesting article The end of free email.

Like calling an organisation or person, I have to pay the cost of the
phone call! Likewise for sending them a letter (with the exception of
organisations offering FREEPOST addresses). Perhaps we should do the
same for email, 1p per email externally to start with?

"One of the best ways to deal with externalities is to create a market. This means we start respecting other people's inbox as their own property, and stop dumping into it without consideration. We create a system that forces people to bear more of the costs of their actions."

Interesting to consider the options to try cut back on both unnecessary email and spam email. Having authenticated SMTP servers on a white list would make it much eaier to see who was actually emailing too.

Missing weight in laptop adverts

I'm amazed retailers get away with this, they advertise laptops in magaines and newspapers, even gadget specialist mags like T3 and Stuff.. and they miss out the weight! Vital info when considering a laptop etc