Charles on… anything that comes along

Splendid stuff - no, great journalism - by John Lettice over at The Register with
‘Independent’ report used MS-sourced data to trash open-source software. He got hold of a report quoted - but not released - by Microsoft which it alleged showed that Newham council would save more by upgrading to WindowsXP and buying lots more licences than using its old hardware and getting OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.

Capgemini, it appears, simply took some numbers Microsoft fed it and said they were right. Er, guys, that’s not how we think of independent consultancy.

By comparison the consultants netproject, looking at the choice, said: “Once all the differences are taken into account we believe that the high cost of the licence fees for the new Microsoft Products more than outweighs the additional costs involved in the migration to open-source software.”

So how does it work out cheaper for Newham? By being a case study for the local sector, Microsoft gives it cheaper licences. Somehow it reminds me of the double-glazing salesmen offering to cut hundreds off the already-inflated price if you let them put an ugly billboard to their work outside your house.

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• Why is RAM exponentially expensive, when NetNewsWire is so hungry for it? (4 April 2006; score: 44.21%)
• Let's change the rules on interviews, Microsoft-style (20 September 2004; score: 39.25%)
• Wow, that's Microsoft territory: 92% of HD MP3 players sold in US are iPods (13 October 2004; score: 37.89%)

I have a horrible feeling that when Peter Cochrane writes in his Uncommon Sense column that VoIP spam - it’s coming that he’s absolutely right.

What will we call it? Apart from the usual rude phrases we shout at telemarketers, I mean.

A nice point he makes: Over 100 years of continual engineering development have led to performance standards from telcos that have yet to be attained by other industries… the established reliability of a local switch is the fabled 5 x 9s, or 99.999 per cent uptime - that’s a yearly downtime of less than five minutes.

Such performance has led to the notion that you can always rely on the telephone no matter what. This is not something that can be said of mobile networks or indeed VoIP, where I sometimes think it would be nice to see reliability figures exceeding 9 x 5s (55.5555555 per cent).

Drat. And it was all looking so bountiful on the new frontier.

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• That wheezing noise? It's Portable Media Centers (or Centres) (24 July 2004; score: 58.5%)
• Word of mouth: why Skype is so interesting (9 March 2005; score: 56.86%)
• Please accept this spam as confirmation of your existence (20 July 2004; score: 49.28%)

Robert Scoble at Microsoft is justifiably worried about the way that RSS is growing out of control. Basically, if everyone lets their aggregators read websites, rather than visiting the place with a browser, the traffic goes through the roof - rather like that school puzzle where you put one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the next, four on the next, then eight… (Quick! How many grains in all? Answer in the comment.)

Scoble’s maths for 1,000 people subscribing to a feed, vs 1,000 who visit the web page sometimes: 20% will leave their aggregator on all day long pulling down the feed once per hour (200 people x 24 pulls a day x 30 times per month) = 144,000
20% will leave their aggregator on at least one hour a day, pulling down the feed at least once (200 x 1 x 30) = 6,000
30% will leave their aggregator on at least a few hours a week (let’s say five hours) (300 x 5 x 5) = 7,500.
10% will only pull down their feeds once per month (let’s say five hours a month) (100 x 5 = 500).
10% won’t turn their aggregator on at all. 0.

So, that comes out to 8,200 hits for HTML vs 158,000 for RSS.

Of course this ignores that the RSS feed will be rather smaller, in data size, than the web page which may be covered in graphics. But as a trend it’s still uncomfortable, because you’re simply getting more hits on the server coming from different places.

At the limit (as a mathematician would say), it becomes a DOS attack, or indistinguishable from it: an infinite number of requests for an infinitesimal amount of data.

Update: on going there and reading the comments on the post, one finds someone has pointed out: you failed to note in your post that RSS Feeds from MSDN are way too bloated. As someone who has subscribed to the feeds probably from the beginning, I know at least one MSDN Blogger who claims to blog from MS Word (I think he calls himself Noah - can’t recall the surname now) and whose individual posts can go as high as 200 kb (because of the MS Word bloat).
My point is, if these MSDN Bloggers can output Strict HTML (without the fluff I see in their feeds), this will help cut down their overall bandswidth size).

A nice irony if MS Word’s bloat is the cause of Microsoft’s problem with too much data load from RSS.

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• Being snitty is easy. Being properly critical isn't. But is that the Wikipedia way? (18 April 2006; score: 12.61%)
• Is it really so hard? (7 July 2004; score: 0%)

A day or so ago I said the Electoral Vote Predictor would make anyone but Karl Rove (who makes Peter Mandelson look a total novice) shudder. Yesterday it went from “Kerry 237, Bush 275″ (that’s electoral votes) to “Kerry 264, Bush 222″ in the course of half an hour. That’s impressive, not to say completely undermining of one’s trust in polls. Well done, readers!

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How sweet - my piece about WinFS and its Cairo origins is on Slashdot. (Among the comments is a pointer t0 a similar, but arguably better - and certainly more acid - article at Linuxworld on the whole Microsoft Cairo/WinFS/Longhorn stuff. Had I seen it, I would have cribbed it shamelessly..

Now, this will sound nitpicky (it is nitpicky, in fact) but what is the “independant.co.uk” of which the Slashdot poster speaks? If you try to email me there, you’ll get a bounce.

Or maybe not. When I tried the URL, it exists - and says firmly “http://www.independant.co.uk is not available. Please check again soon.“. Move along, nothing to see…

Apparently it’s registered to Karen Hanton of Warwick Square Mews, London, who registered it in 1999. Hello, Karen! How’s it going with the mipselling domians?

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• Another hour, another flaw (7 July 2004; score: 0%)
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