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 Simon Morris's Blog
Flogging a Dead HorsePosted by javakiddy on June 30, 2008 at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)Today is apparently Bill Gates' first day away from Microsoft. As he leaves, some have suggested Microsoft's star is now in the descent, as Google's star climbs ever higher. Is this really the case, is Google destined to become the next Microsoft? When a company attains a certain dominance in the market, isn't it hard to unseat them? After all, they can afford to hire all the best people! Cast your mind back to IBM's nervous toe-dipping when it came to the fledgling micro computer market in the Seventies, or Microsoft's initial head-in-the-sand attitude towards the internet in the Nineties — being big doesn't always make you right. Indeed the larger the organisation, the better it gets at sustaining incorrect assumptions in the face of mounting contradictory evidence. (One wonders, for example, whether a concept like transubstantiation could ever have survived in a religion with only a handful of members?) There's safety in numbers, for sure, but only by way of passing the buck for a bad idea. Shared responsibility can often mean no responsibility at all. In the right environment bad memes can survive unchallenged, and humans seem particularly good at creating those environments. We believe because the people around us believe, not because we have given an idea careful contemplation or scrutiny. What's important is that the group has clear goals; how well those goals stand up to reality is of secondary concern. As the song says: "any dream will do!" Knock KnockPosted by javakiddy on May 30, 2008 at 02:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)Allegedly invented by accident, the humble Post-it Note has likely been responsible for more potential breaches in computer security than any single virus, rootkit or keylogger. This handy little aide-mémoire is home to 'to do' lists, phone numbers, doodles, and (inevitably) passwords. Most people wouldn't tape their front door key to their front door, yet they'll happily stick their computer password to the front of their computer monitor. One time, in a book shop, I had to endure a customer loudly direct her workmate (via cell phone) to riffle through her desk drawer for the letter containing her bank PIN number. To this day I still cannot decide what was more brain-dead, the fact that she stuffed the letter into an unlocked drawer, the fact that said unlocked drawer was in a semi-public place, the fact that she revealed its existence to someone else, or the fact that she repeated the number loudly for all the shop to hear as it was read to her! Incidents like this might be amusing, if not for the fact that we're moving towards an age when all our data may be held remotely (on 'the cloud') and accessed via Rich Internet Applications. But solving this problem could open up another one: as focus shifts from physically protecting locally stored data, to asserting access permissions on remotely held data, will we need to lose our anonymity to protect our privacy? Anti-Social NetworkingPosted by javakiddy on April 17, 2008 at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)For a while now I've been mulling over an idea for a new type of social network, one which is actually social in nature and not just name. The key to my idea is harnessing the ad-hoc connectivity of wireless mobile devices to move the network out into the real physical world. It's a curious little idea which, like most curious little ideas, involves a lot unknowns which have to be worked out. The aim is to bring like-minded people together, be they fans of the same sports team, devotees of Opera, potential love interests or employees and their ideal employer. Oh, and once they've found each other it can recommend a restaurant all parties will enjoy (with a small referral fee, no doubt — even I know you need a revenue stream!) Mind you, everyone seems to be jumping onto the social networking bandwagon at the moment, and just because I find my idea interesting, doesn't mean the great unwashed masses will. If I had more killer business instinct I'd be land-grabbing a chirpy domain name in all its ".com", ".org", ".co.jp" variants, and readying my bank manager to receive the millions as they start rolling in. As it is I'm happier just to get a basic prototype working, to see if it actually works as a concept. As software increasingly moves on-line the consumer (we are told) benefits from the added flexibility. But the developer has to jump through more hoops just to get a basic prototype up and running. Time was when you compiled your binary and passed it around on a floppy to your friends. Now you have acquire a server, install and configure it, register a domain, pay for bandwidth... It's a lot of messing just to test out an idea. Fortunately Google have come to the rescue with the launch of their Google App Engine, promising to get rid of the pain so I can concentrate on the code. But what am I giving up in return for this shortcut?  |
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July 2008
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Simon Morris started coding professionally back when 1 MB of RAM was considered decadent. He eked a living writing games for a while, before winding up scribbling R+D code at a top UK university. In early 1996 he discovered Java, drawn immediately to its latent potential - which, he reckons, it still hasn't even begun to tap. He now owns a laptop with more than 1 Mb of RAM (but doesn't like to boast about it).
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