2014 – Page 7 – davelevy.info

Luke Sorba on #lab14

My friend and comrade Luke Sorba, a Labour Councillor in Telegraph Hill ward, who mainly blogs on Facebook was Deptford’s delegate to Labour’s Conference this year and his comprehensive written report, was presented to the General Committee last night; it covered the rear guard actions by the Blairite rump, a reflection that some ex-ministers showed an arrogance to the membership, disappointment at the lack of debate on the conference floor and concludes with a paean to Ed Miliband’s heart and courage. …

The German Commissioner, Oettinger

Earlier this week Germany’s appointment to the Commission, Gunther Oettinger, allocated the Digital Economy portfolio blotted his copybook by blaming the celebrity victims of a porn leak as stupid prior to his EP confirmation hearings, at which he also didn’t do too well. However, if second division, and appointed for domestic reasons, he isn’t the only one. …

Professionally published again

I have finally been published on my employer’s web site blog. The article, Conflicting Data Requirements: Privacy versus Transparency looks at the countervailing tendencies by governments legislating for citizen privacy and tax transparency. The article concludes with a series of technical challenges to meet the needs of both political initiatives. The article was syndicated on the Tabb Forum, and you can read that here. The article was originally provoked by a Gartner Press Release which suggests that location and the need for specific jurisdictional compliance will reduce as costs and … …

The Riot Dog dies

The Guardian reports that Loukanikos, a stray dog in Athens that had spent its time supporting the demonstrators against austerity has died. Here’s a picture of him, probably thinking of bones,

…

English Revolution

I have just seen the first of Melvyn Bragg’s documentaries in a two part series called “Radical Lives”. This was about John Ball, a radical priest in England who in 1381 supported the Peasants Revolt. The documentary does a fine job in describing the feudal economic and racist oppression by the scions of the Norman invasion. The original poll tax was levied at this time and the reaction from the peasantry was swift and violent. They rose up and marched on London, sacked the Tower of London and executed several leading government officials. …

Value, Solidarity and Exchange

A couple of thoughts provoked by my trip to Labour Party Conference, one on the value of copyright, one on solidarity and one on the unfinished Hargreaves Review reform, the establishment of a digital exchange. …

Left & Right Wing Rights

One of the big stories from the Tory Party conference is the resurrection of the proposal to leave the European Council’s Human Rights court. Several correspondents elsewhere question both the moral sense and the political tactics of pursuing this policy. David Allen Green has created a page on his blog to act as an index on the pro and anti views and includes links to the Conservative Party proposals and press release; the views of most lawyers are against the proposed reforms. …

Some thoughts on E-Commerce for small vendors and big technology

I had to give my credit card over the phone last week to buy a book and was sort of interested in why a site such as this didn’t have it’s own shopping cart. It’s not that it’s too hard!

SaaS is the obvious option, but many organisations prefer and need to own their brand which is not easy with Ebay and Amazon and both these organisations are regulated within the US jurisdiction which may not be appropriate. Amazon is also exceedingly expensive charging a margin rather than a cost+ service fee. Given the publicity around Amazon’s tax affairs, some publishing organisations may feel that Amazon dilutes their brand.

Lifehacker have had a look at the SaaS solution and concluded that building your own is best. (Hmm, it doesn’t sound right but hey!) So they then had another look at the problem, in an article called “How to set up your own online store” which points out that many hosting services will offer shopping cart functionality but they deal with what to use by describing the key functionality as a “free shopping cart script”, and it would be remiss of me not to mention that there are a number of wordpress plugins.

Looking at today’s answers, its sort of interesting how many other solutions have fallen by the wayside, and from my point of view the netscape e-commerce suite which Sun ballsed up but we can see now that it’s life time was always going to be short.

What was once sold as shrink wrapped software has become SaaS, and software is no longer a feature of hardware!

ooOOOoo

For some reason this took years to publish, as ever backdated to when I started it. The wordpress plugin originally linked to has now gone. …

Commoditisation killed Sun Microsystems

Eric Raymond, wrote a short article on his blog, “Commoditization, not open source, killed Sun Microsystems”, which I commented on. This blog article says a little bit more than I felt I had room for on someone else’s blog, and I probably abused his hospitality there. I have thought long and hard about this, because I worked there and thought it i.e. the company was worth saving. Here’s what I said on Eric’s blog, and a bit more. I start by saying that the first thing about Sun’s failure is that it all depends on where you want to start; Sun’s failure was baked in long before the 2000 fall from profit. …

@LabourDigital

I left Manchester and travelled home on Tuesday Morning, i.e. 23rd I reckoned I could catch up on Ed’s speech and the only fringe of any interest was the @LabourDigital policy launch planned for 4:00 p.m. I checked it out on the web, but it didn’t really come to my notice as anything other than a minority interest until it was reported in the Register on Sept 28th by Andrew Orlowski, not to be confused with Aleksandr Orlov, who seems to have picked up the territory. The @LabourDigital’s policy statement is here. It contains 82 recommendations, which they summarise with four headlines and seven additional teaser policies. …