Tech Pragmatist

Google looks like it is gearing for a tactical assault on the internet telephony market, expanding its arsenal in a way that will allow it to go up against Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Apple’s iChat and the many others in this space. (Via Mr Carmo).

Count me in to this little campaign.

The MSE site is running an interesting poll:

Which of these is CLOSEST to your view of the shape of the economic growth?

• ?. I haven’t a clue.
• L. A flat(ish) period will follow the sharp drop we’ve just had.
• V. We’ll now have a sharp rise following the sharp drop.
• W. We’ve had a sharp drop but it’s going to drop again.

The poll has been answered presumably mostly by my fellow Britons, and as of this posting (16th Sep) there were only a third saying the same as me, namely W shaped. Nearly half said L shaped. It will be interesting to watch events unfold with this knowledge.

I’m not a twitter user myself, I find the noise too much to cope with, but Mr Wilson’s comments on the balance between informing and spamming a carefully built selection of readers are sharp and incisive. I also think they are generally applicable to any scenario of building a readership, whether that be a national newspaper (balancing the content/advertising ratio and the cover-price), a blog (ratio of advertising space to content space) as well as Twitter.

Evidently, even after being online and publishing for a long time, new tools and techniques are still giving us pause for thought on the same subjects, as Mr Wilson said:

I thought I had it figured out pretty well but now as new services pop up that include the social (and viral) element of spamming your followers, I am facing some new questions.

This little article sums it up beautifully:

Frankly, we have to applaud this move from Apple. Insofar as Apple has put itself in a position of gatekeeper, pruning such shady apps from the store only improves it. [But] When even well-made, highly regarded apps have trouble getting approved, it’s clear there is still much more room for improvement.

Thanks to MacUser I found this article from Mr Gruber. This takes the App Store to a new low in my book, and reinforces my instinct not to develop for the iPhone or iPod Touch. No matter how useful the devices, I wouldn’t have the time for this sort of silliness.

Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.

Update: Mr Gruber has posted an update with portions of an email from Phil Schiller. This is quite a long and thought-provoking post, but I like Mr Gruber’s summary:

That Schiller was willing to respond in such detail and length, on the record, is the first proof I’ve seen that Apple’s leadership is trying to make the course correction that many of us see as necessary for the long-term success of the platform.

This is a pretty big deal for Oracle.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management (MDM) of Product Data positions Oracle in the Leaders quadrant. The Gartner Magic Quadrant positions vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and their ability to execute on that vision.

">Gartner magic quadrants are keenly watched by anyone in the consultancy industry (buying or selling). MDM is one of the latest buzzwords in the BI and data management industries. It basically means having a single understanding of your data across your enterprise, but it lives on a foundation of common definitions (what do you mean by ‘Customer’ and ‘Order’ and do all of your systems, databases and employees have the same understanding of the term?).

Unfortunately I can’t say exactly where in the top right quadrant Oracle is, or where the competitors are, without paying a hefty sum to Gartner to see the info and an astronomical sum to be able to share the info. Suffice to say that getting into that quadrant is hard enough, regardless of who else may be playing in the same space.

I missed this first time round, but I completely agree that money and time can be saved:

“But [Ofcom] shouldn’t be making policy, it shouldn’t have its own communications department, the head of Ofcom [Ed Richards] is paid almost half a million pounds,” Cameron added.

This is a great little summary article of most of the non-relational data store paradigms around and some good links to examples of the software that implement them:

Relational databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and various commercial products, have served us well for many years. Lately, however, there has been a lot of discussion on whether the relational model is reaching the end of its life-span, and what may come after it.

Should you care? Which database technology should you be using?

Apple have finally released an app for the iPhone that answers the question “How can I carry my files around with me?”. It uses MobileMe and allows sharing of files via emailed weblinks. Big files (>20MB) and zip files are still unsupported, but it is a good start and compares well to other apps of its type.