Posts tagged as "licensing"

The Cloud May Be About To Get Stormy

If you read the technical media and the blogosphere, we're all on an inexorable march towards The Cloud. No-one seems exactly sure what The Cloud is, but we're going there. As I wrote in a previous post, I use a simplistic definition for The Cloud; any form of storage that I connect to over a network connection classes as Cloud storage. It is, perhaps, an overly simplistic definition, but until a more formal and agreed definition surfaces, it will suffice for now.

I'm also, in some cases inadvertently, a reasonably prolific user of Cloud storage. I store large amounts of data in The Cloud; photos, software, general data, web pages, databases, emails and so on. With safely secured backups of course, as Cloud services are just like any other computer resource; sometimes they fail and go offline.

Talking GeoBabel In Three Cities (And Then Retiring It)

You're invited to speak at a conference. Great. The organisers want a talk title and abstract and they want it pretty much immediately. Not so great; mind goes blank; what shall I talk about; help! With this in mind, my first thought is normally "can I adapt, cannibalise or repurpose one of my other talks?". This sometimes works. If there's a theme which you haven't fully worked through it can serve you well.

But a conference audience is an odd beast; a percentage of which will be "the usual suspects". They've seen you talk before, maybe a few times. The usual suspects also tend to hang out on the conference Twitter back channel. Woe betide if you recycle a talk or even some slides too many times; comments such as "I'm sure I've seen that slide before" start to crop up. Far better to come up with new and fresh material each time.

Geographic and Transport Data; a Tale of Capricousness, Whimsy and Downright Insanity

The industry I work in thrives on data; we consume loads of the stuff and in turn we generate petabytes of it. I'm talking about data in general, not the geographic, mapping or place data that I usually write about.But the longer I work in the Internet industry the more convinced I become that, as an industry, we need to get our act together. How else to explain the bizarre, rapidly changing and capricious nature of how we gain access to, use, pay, don't pay and disseminate data?We're socially conditioned to assume that free does not equate to good, hence the adage "there's no such thing as a free lunch". So stuff that costs is good and stuff that's free isn't. But normal rules don't apply here.

Deliciousness: data, licensing, WordPress autosaves, cheese in space and lots of Nutella

More intriguing, interesting and just plain bonkers stuff from the information hose pipe we call the internet:

  • Starting off with a serious note, Ed Parsons, my opposite number at Google, wrote a great blog post on the knots that data licensing can tie you up in and why you end up paying more for a leased digital version than you do for the physical paper version.
  • WordPress started bugging me about an auto-saved version of a blog post I didn't want to keep but couldn't get rid of. Turns out there's no way to do this from the WordPress dashboard but some MySQL hackery did the trick.
  • "I am, and am VERY badly affected by being in close proximity to WiFi and other microwave transmission sources. Not that I’d expect you or anyone else who isn’t adversely affected to believe me". The rest of the story on the Daily Telegraph blog is priceless.
  • Ofcom confirmed what anyone with the UK ADSL line already knows, that the average UK broadband speed is just over half of what's being advertised and paid for.
  • A US highway exit sign got every word misspelled, apart from the word "exit".
  • Forget putting men on Mars or getting the Space Shuttle working; we put cheese into space, tracked it, lost it and found it again. Makes you proud to be British.
  • Someone likes Nutella. A lot.
  • And finally, if your iPhone gets a text message containing a single square character. Turn it off. Turn it off now.