Category: billblog

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Unlike some of my friends and family I’m not a heavy user of online auctions, and although I have an account on eBay my reputation as a seller or buyer doesn’t really matter that much to me.   At the moment I’ve got 100% positive feedback but the number of transactions is so small that it doesn’t really signify.

However heavy sellers and those who make a substantial proportion of their income from the site care deeply about the reports they get from other buyers and sellers.

Their concerns about negative feedback are well-grounded: in 2002 Paul Resnick and his colleagues did a proper randomised control experiment to assess the value of an eBay reputation, looking to see how much people would bid for articles from sellers with different scores.  They found that sellers with established reputations can expect about 8 per cent more revenue than new sellers marketing the same goods.

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Hotel view




Hotel view

Originally uploaded by BillT.

I’m at a two day seminar in London, and it’s taking place – strange as it may seem – in the conference room on the third floor of the north tower of Tower Bridge. And fortunately the hotel has a nice view 🙂

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Who is Listening?

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

Members of the British Parliament have been shocked to discover that one of their number was bugged by the secret service, violating the forty-year old ‘Wilson doctrine’ that offers MPs immunity from the sort of snooping they are happy to allow on the rest of us.

Two conversations between Tooting MP Sadiq Khan and Babar Ahmad were apparently recorded in the prison where Mr Ahmad is being held on remand while awaiting deportation to the United States on charges relating to his support for terrorism.

The real problem for MPs, of course, is not that they will be specifically targetted for surveillance but that they will inevitably be caught up in operations against other people.

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Open computing

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

In the far off past when I was a professional programmer writing software for money I relied on a variety of tools to fix the inevitable errors in my work. These tools would look at my thousands of lines of code and check that I had all my brackets and semi-colons in the right place and that I hadn’t mis-spelled the names of variables or functions.

I also relied on more serious debugging software, programs like ‘dbx’ that could investigate the inner workings of other programs, monitoring them as they ran and giving me complete access to the instructions I was executing and the data structures they were manipulating.

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Freedom to Roam

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

Sometimes it is only when the niggling pain goes away that you realise just how irritating and distracting it had become.

A sore tooth can sit for weeks just beneath the threshold of consciousness before you finally decide to do something about it, and you leave the dentist full of optimism, hope and love for all humanity now that you can think clearly.

Well, like a man who bangs his head against a brick wall because ‘it feels so good when I stop’, I’ve finally given up grubbing around for open wireless connectivity on the move and invested in a 3G modem for my laptop.

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Home is where the hard drive is

[Also on the BBC News website, as usual]

One of the more interesting announcements made at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was that BT Vision, the on-demand TV-over-broadband service, will be available on the Xbox 360 later this year.

It was one of several media-related announcements from Microsoft, including  deals with both MGM and  Disney-ABC that will see Rocky, High School Musical, Lost and many other films and TV series available to download on Xbox Live.
BT plans to use the Xbox 360 as a set top box rather than simply joining Xbox Live, so you’ll only be able to get the service if you have BT broadband at home.

And they won’t be streaming live TV, so Xbox owners won’t be able to throw out their Freeview tuners for a while yet. According to BT ‘the console does not have the capability for live TV or enough space for practical downloading of content.’

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