Ersatz Alex Options
If you were looking forward to the talk at OpenTech I cancelled, this will give you about 60% of the content.
Read More Ersatz Alex Options2017
The pre-history of the Friedman unit
Those of us who blogged through the Iraq War will of course remember the Friedman unit, a measurement of time defined as how long it will take until things are OK in Iraq, conventionally equal to six months, named for Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman of the New York Times. But I didn’t realise the unit has…
Read More The pre-history of the Friedman unitWho is the man….SCHACHT!
I’ve just been re-reading the end of Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes. Here’s something interesting. Skidelsky frames the debates in Whitehall about British proposals for the post-war economic settlement and about the negotiations with the USA as being between two key groups, whom he defines as the multilateralists and the Schachtians. Schachtian, of course, is…
Read More Who is the man….SCHACHT!Quick campaign post
This Chris Cook piece about campaigning strategy is good. Here’s something I noticed which he doesn’t call out specifically. The party leaders’ activities by ITV region are actually very similar. Going by Chris’s table, Theresa May has made 23 visits and Jeremy Corbyn 22. Both leaders have concentrated their operations on two regions, Greater London…
Read More Quick campaign postThe NHS hack and GCHQ
It looks like the worldwide ransomware attack on Windows XP machines originates from one of the exploits in the so-called Shadow Brokers dump, a collection of exploits developed or bought by the NSA. Oliver Rivers asks: Where was GCHQ? Well, the answer is more like: Where was CESG? Or LCSA? Through the Second World War…
Read More The NHS hack and GCHQThe NHS hack and technical debt
So the NHS got hacked. Jeremy Hunt saved £5m a year in payments for extended Microsoft support and now look what’s happened. This reminded me of something important. Software engineers have a concept of “technical debt” that is worth remembering. Technical debt arises when you decide to put some work off to the future, so…
Read More The NHS hack and technical debtIn colour
Really good Ross Anderson interview: It’s as if you had a forest where all the animals could see only in black and white, and suddenly, along comes a mutation in one of the predators allowing it to see in color. All of a sudden it gets to eat all the other animals, at least those…
Read More In colourScale and scalability
I’ve been thinking a lot about scaling and the economics of the cloud recently after reading this. Specifically, this quote: The costs for most SaaS products tend to find economies of scale early. If you are just selling software, distribution is essentially free, and you can support millions of users after the initial development. But…
Read More Scale and scalabilitySome links on my current preoccupations
If you want something completely weird, try this. The Swiss government is still so furious about the whole business with the whistleblower who sold German tax authorities a stack of CD-ROMs with lists of tax evaders that they had their intelligence service spy on the German excisemen. But German counterintelligence found out about it somehow.…
Read More Some links on my current preoccupationsBlog Like It’s 2007
What with all the North Korea excitement, I thought it might be time to check on what the US Navy’s aircraft carriers are up to. This is always a useful way to distinguish “loud media yelling” from “something that might actually happen”. This information is helpfully collated here, but is in no way secret. To…
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