• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”

• New Zealand Launches Hookup Airways – Not sure whether this is a good idea or a bit creepy. An intercontinental flight is a long time to spend cooped up with a bad date!
• Scientists put psychic’s paranormal claims to the test – If you can prove a paranormal claim under controlled conditions you can win $1mm. The prize has gone unclaimed since the 1960’s.
• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages – “Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he’s ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence.” Despite the title I’d say it’s mostly correct, and funny if you’re geeky enough to understand the references!

• Birds show off their dance moves – Funny video, fascinating science, bad music…
• Intelligent Design Sort – It would seem that intelligent design has “uses” outside explaining the diversity of nature. It works for Computer Science too. Who’d have thought it?
• Scrap ID cards now, say Cabinet rebels – Maybe there is some benefit in the dire state of the economy…

A few years ago I was subcontracted to one of the large consultancies. I was taking over from someone who was, supposedly, quite senior and the task at hand, I was told, was very hard. I should take copious notes as she wouldn’t necessarily be around afterwards to help me. Making a mistake or missing out any one step could be disastrous to the whole process. If I did everything properly each new installation would take about a week.

• Scientists Agree: It’s in His Kiss – “Over 90 percent of human society engages in what, if you get right down to it, seems like a very strange thing to do: putting faces together and trading spit.” Seems like a very appropriate thing to discuss on Valentine’s Day…
• Anti-Bootlegging Measures and the iPhone App Store – There’s a lot of talk about cracked iPhone apps at the moment and the measures that developers are taking. The interesting and surprising thing here is how effective a polite message is, at least in the case of a Mac app.
• 1234567890 Day – Finally, an event worth celebrating…

• Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge – “A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.”
• The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – All the glitz you see in the Pre demo and videos may come at a price.
• Tags: Database schemas – Interesting article on how sites like delicious might handle tagging. Yummy until v2.0 uses the “Scuttle” method. Subsequent versions modify this a little for performance reasons.

Introduction

I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot again, but I’m afraid I might have to. If you read my discussion of the C programming language you may imagine that I’d like C++. After all, C++ fixes some of C’s idiosyncrasies, adds object orientation and a whole host of new features.

You’d be wrong though. In many ways I consider C++ to be a step backwards from its parent and this piece will hopefully explain why.

This originally started as a question on Apple’s support boards:

With the current AppStore model (which seems to be a money machine for developers) I do not understand why anyone would give away their applications. At least charge $0.99 and get something back for your hard work.

So, why do you give away your apps?

With the caveat that I have not actually submitted anything yet…

My motivation in writing an application was entirely for the pleasure of doing it. If I never do anything with it once it’s “finished” my goals have been achieved. So my only objective in pushing it to the AppStore is for other people to get some benefit from using it too. There is little incremental cost in doing so and zero cost means that it gets the widest possible distribution.

• Ars Book Review: “Patent Failure” – Interesting book review about the effect of patents on an industry. Apparently cost more money than they make in anything but chemical and pharmaceuticals.
• Lucky to be a Programmer – I don’t program as much as I used to but this explains why I love to when I get the chance.
• WordPress 2.6 – Usual drill. I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, the underlying software of ZX81.org.uk. If you see anything wrong please let me know!
• 20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA – Still in any doubt that computerised voting machines are a bad idea for free and fair elections?

• Dear ISP, I am not a target market – “Some things should just not be for sale, no matter what assurances are on offer or who they come from. Regardless of how the data is acquired and processed, and despite the powerful ISP friends Phorm has made since the PeopleOnPage days, spyware is spywa
• Happy now, bitches? – A fair and balanced analysis of yesterdays announcement of the iPhone software developer kit and “enterprise” functionality.
• Polls say 88% want EU referendum – About a year ago the Daily Mail (I think) published a poll saying pretty much the same thing. But they also asked “Do you understand the Libson treaty?” and about the same percentage of people said “No.” (Can anyone find a link?) Is democracy best served