Why Zoom?

I have posted a blog on Why Zoom? has become so popular in terms of getting consumer mind share.

I wonder if it’s based on Microsoft forgetting its history. I am sure the ultra low cost of using Zoom helps but Microsoft’s entry cost for Skype is the same and at the end, someone has to pay for the server room cycles.

Perhaps in the hypergrowth stage best of breed works but I suspect that an integrated offering will win out in the end.

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Stack Ranking

Many company’s, particularly US owned, staff evaluation schemes are based on ranking their staff, and additionally rewarding the top 20% and firing the bottom 10%. (This idea comes from the US, probably from GE; firing people because they are not as good as someone else is illegal in the UK and much of Europe.) Basically it is not about continuous improvement, it’s based on a world view that thinks people are lazy and need fear to make them work hard. Fear of not getting a bonus, or fear of dismissal. This cynicism and hate will never build a successful firm. …

Time to move on from XP

Time to move on from XP

Microsoft have just ended support for XP; there are to be no more updates which means it’s a growing security threat! Not all organisations have moved forward yet, and probably even less home user including me. Microsoft’s behaviour over the last two years has not been helpful to consumers. Firstly, the ‘upgrade’ to the new look and feel of Windows 8 trashes consumer’s self administration skills. Making new systems do what they want and knew how to do on XP is hard. Secondly, moving forward using virtualisation technology as advised by this article at hongkiat remains difficult, partly because of Microsoft’s aggressive digital rights enforcement . Microsoft’s behaviour is not unusual, nor illegal, but there’s a lot of people who aren’t happy and Microsoft’s historic success is based on consumer adoption. They’re changing up, we probably need to also. …

Nokia exits the mobile market

Nokia exits the mobile market

So Nokia have given up and sold their mobile handset and presumably the mobile infrastructure to Microsoft. Last year, Nokia, the World’s No. 1 mobile phone manufacturer but were struggling to meet the onslaught of Apple’s iphone and the rapidly alternative  growing of Android decided to shit-can their two Linux projects and exclusively throw in their lot with one of the then weakest phone operating-  and eco-systems, Microsoft! Coincidently they had just hired Steven Elop as CEO, whom they had poached from Microsoft. …

Defeat ripped from the jaws of victory or what do you call two ex monopolists?

After last night’s triumph in replacing my home hub with a third party gateway,  I was musing about BT’s ability to support their Hub and my suspicions that there is a DHCP bug on the home hub and how large organisations really need to understand the software they use and how open source products make skills acquisition easier; although  BT have no excuse, since the hub is a Linux derivative, hence open source but they outsourced the development, and for months have denied any knowledge or responsibility for its functionality. …

Wish, Boomy icons and imagemagick

I need to write a program for managing my windows host, well actually, someone else’s windows laptop. I fired up TCL/TK and discovered that I haven’t copied my tcl/tk icon library from my home systems and I decided to improve my library, which is a big mistake.

I went looking on the ‘net and found the lovely Boomy icons. Annoyingly the transparency representation doesn’t work on my platform and the lovely transparency on the GIFs comes out a delightful shade of pink. There is no .bmp set; the .png set work and look fine. GIMP allegedly supports batch operations, as does Imagemagik. I have been impressed with Jonathan Soma’s trip map http://www.triptropnyc.com/ site about the New York transport system, which uses Imagemagik ever since I saw it, so an excuse to play with it would be good.

The alternative might be to find and install the TCL/TK IMG package which seems to be at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkimg/.

I have opened a wiki page here, to record my notes, successes and failures, which now includes how to use ImageMagick to perform a simple format conversion. …