-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Ron did a great job of generating some interesting archcasts at Spark. Here is the first of them with David Linthicum.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Phil has posted the Spark at Mix slide decks for me at: http://www.looselycoupled.com/ev/Spark.ppt
Thanks Phil!
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
I'm a happy person because of this blog. Come on MS, do the rest of the framework and I'll never say another bad word against you.
Of course if MS sold, say, Windows Vista for the Mac, then I'd be even happier. It could just be a Wine like subset, but can cost as much as Window usually does. All I ask for is DirectX and a good representation of Win32 APIs. Now that's something that'll never happen. It's a bit like the fact that no PC maker will ever make a laptop as nice as a Mac for cost reasons. Sony have come close on occasion, but I can't think of anybody else and my Sony hatred still knows no bounds so they're not getting a break.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Yup you heard me right...
Looks like T-Mobile are about to launch such a thing. Is this the start of a data price war between the Telco's?
Well you know what that means if it is!
Customer wins :)
First round to T-Mobile, next move to... (Orange?)
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
In case you missed the cool news from earlier this week, it will be possible to build games for the XBox using managed code (C# or VB) and a new .NET API for the XBox graphics engine.
Mike Zintel (whose team builds the execution engine to support it) has some cool pictures and info about it here.
Fun stuff! :-)
Scott
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
I write this a little late, limited or no hotspots at the hotel ment when I left the show that getting net access was a little tricky. I actually type this on Thursday morning sat in StarBucks drinking a brew (the queue for the morning coffee is huge, the americans _like_ their morning coffee) and watching the hotspot fall over (someone has already asked me if its working for me). In some respects the final day was the busiest and best, the sessions were not great with the exception of the InfoCard session in the morning. I attended the future of media and the web session but split to chat in the sandbox. I was getting a little tired of Marc Canter at this point, he was leading this session and while I do have respect for Marc he can become a bit much :)
Later on I will be starting the journey home, this is my first time in America. What do I take from my couple of days here, Vegas is an amazing place, bright, bold and always alive. Americans in person are warm and friendly people, I already know this from my many net friendships but come away with a renewed feeling of freindship from meeting them in person. They are also generous and the best hosts a person could wish for, I look forward to coming back to the USA in the future. A little "fun poking" :) american geeks (well ok mainly Microsoft) start every sentence with the word so. So they also end every sentence with an implied question? (ok thats hard to come accross in writing but next time you talk to an american, listen and you will see what I mean). I am pretty sure that americans think us "limeys" have some funny things about us :).
So :) the final day at Mix, it was a great day of mainly chatting to folks. I talked to loads of Microsoft folks and have made many connections. I enjoyed in particular talking to Andrew Whiddett, head dude at REZN8. After the amazing NASCAR demo I learned he also created the PDC NetFlix demo and has more to come. In the WPF world they don't come much more guru than this guy so it was good to talk with him. I also hugely enjoyed talking to Kathy Anderson, FrontPage MVP to the stars and a really friendly person. We talked about expression and EWD, frontpage and communties and I will be defenitaly dropping her an email to stay in touch.
The end of the show resulted in a massive end of show networking session, split into topical tables you could sit down with your lunch and chat to the folks around you. I hung out with Wayne, discussing expression and EWD with the folks around me. It was good to hang out near the WPF tables to chat with folks around their about their experinces and pains, and to communicate that to the Microsoft folks. My final night here I spent dining at the Baliago, the fountain is much, much better than the film let me tell you, if you ever come to vegas, see that. On a final note, I did't attend any MS geek dinners of any kind, the networking I did do was much more informal and any MS geek dinners that did occur were invite only (if you a no-one your not coming, I have no time for that).
Well my brews drunk (actually a while ago, keep prentending to drink so I can keep my table ;-), better go get some things to take home and finish up my packing, see you on the other side.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Just posted on RegDeveloper is my piece on Subversion vs Perforce, taking a look at two popular cross-platform SCM systems, one open-source, one proprietary.
If you like Perforce but also like free, it's worth noting that Perforce is free for up to two developers, or for non-commercial open source projects.
Tags:
subversion
perforce
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
The Bebo website is growing fast among teenagers, but there are concerns that teens may be sharing too much.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
(or at least, my personal take on it!)
Over the last couple of months, I've been interviewing candidates for a couple of different roles at Microsoft at a rate of almost one a week. Interviewing is definitely something of a skill, both for the interviewee and for the interviewer. A good interviewer doesn't ask random questions, even if it seems that way - they're trying to get a candidate to reveal enough about their character, skills, temperament and awareness that they can determine whether they'd be a good hire for the team.
I enjoy the mental stimulus of being on either side of the desk for an interview: as an interviewer, the challenge of trying to get through the mask that people sometimes put up to find out where someone's real talents and weaknesses; as an interviewee, the process of finding out more about yourself and the areas where you personally need to develop. Either way, it's a process of continual learning.
One thing that surprises me is how many potential new hires fall into the same "traps". I don't try to catch people out or set trick questions, but I see people who don't do themselves justice in the way they present themselves. Here are a few ways I see people shooting themselves in the foot, based not on any individual candidate but a broad aggregation of the perhaps 15-20 that I've interviewed in the last year:
- Stock Microsoft interview questions often start with the phrase "Tell me about a time when..." The goal of questions like these is usually to find out more about your actual performance in a real-world scenario, rather than your best-case performance in a hypothetical situation. It's interesting though how often I get answers that focus entirely on the project or organization someone has worked on, rather than their individual contribution. Of course, we're looking for people who work well in a team setting, but telling me about a project that you worked on that was particularly successful doesn't give me any indication of whether you were the star performer that turned it around or whether you were a knuckle-dragger that just happened to be associated with the project. Tell me what things you did, what impact they had, what you learnt from the experience, rather than making me want to hire someone else from your project team!
- Show passion for both what you've done in the past and what you're interviewing for. I want to see evidence that you care about the job enough that it's not just another notch on your resume. Even if you're historically a star performer that we'd be lucky to hire, I want to be convinced by you personally, not just by your performance on paper. Do some reading around the area; if you know the interviewer's names, search for them on MSN Search (or Google if you really must!) and find out what their interests are, what they've written about, and what they have a passion for - not to flatter them, but to demonstrate your commitment to the role.
- If I ask you where you're weak, it's not a trick question. It's amazing how few people are prepared to own up to any flaws at all. Sometimes people do this fake thing where they highlight a strength as a weakness ("people say to me that I care too much!"). I don't believe that you're completely perfect - really, I don't! What I want to see is that you're aware of your limitations, you're not so arrogant to presume that you can't learn anything or accept feedback, and that you have the ability to reflect on your own character. Give me something - even if it's just that you're not a morning person!
- Lastly, demonstrate vision - share your hopes, your dreams, your ambitions. Tell me where you see this job as a stepping stone to - where you'd like to be in five years time. I want to see that you have a sense of the strategic - that you understand the industry, that you have knowledge that stretches beyond the specific requirements of the role you're interviewing for.
In general terms, it's in both the interviewer and the interviewee's interest to determine whether the person is a "good hire" or a "bad hire". No matter how much you want a job coming into an interview, pretending to be someone you're not (more technical than you really are, more interested in a certain type of work than you really are) to land a position doesn't lead to satisfaction in the long run, when you wind up getting bad performance reviews because your skills just don't mesh with the requirements of a role. On the other hand, if you can find a job that really matches your interests, skills and goals, you'll have great fun doing it and naturally excelling in it.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Heck, I've wanted to throttle the OAB lots of times - but that's not the reason for this blog entry :-). Chris had a challenge as the customer he was doing some work for wanted to manage the network bandwidth when all of the users in the company were downloading a full copy of the Offline Address Book. When this happened, network activity went a bit crazy and the WAN became unworkable (not surprising - it was a big company). Chris was trying to work out a way so that not all of the clients could download the OAB at the same time.
I told Chris that before he started with anything drastic, it's a good idea to read this article and learn how Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2003 OAB work together. There are quite a few articles on this particular topic, and also a Best practices guide, so I had a look around for some extra pieces of info for him.
One way of throttling the full offline address book to limit the effect on the LAN is mentioned in this kb article. You need to have Exchange 2003 SP1 installed, and you need to edit the registry and add a new value:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\ParametersSystem\
1:On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
2:Type OAB Bandwidth Threshold (KBps) for the name of the DWORD, and then press ENTER.
3:Right-click OAB Bandwidth Threshold (KBps), and then click Modify.
4:In the Base area, click Decimal.
5: In the Value data box, type the value that you want to use, and then click OK.
For example, type 5000 to configure the server to use 5000 kilobytes per second (KBps) as the bandwidth threshold for offline Address Book download throttling. 5000 KBps is approximately 40,960 kilobits per second (Kbps), or 40.96 megabits per second (Mbps).
If you have Exchange SP2 however, you can take advantage of architectural changes in the OAB v4 and utilise LZX compression and Binary Delta compression Data. (Read about BDC here, and there's a good blog entry on the Exchange team blog explaining how OAB v 4 works).
Hopefully this will give Chris good enough pointers to ease the WAN strain....
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Very quick post for a VERY cool tip in Photoshop. We have all wanted to find out what that background color of a website was for a comp in photoshop. I have done screengrabs in the past, pasted them into photoshop, got the eyedropper, selected the colour... yawn! what a hassle.
But there is a much better way of doing it...
Check this out. Way cool!
http://avalonstar.com/2006/02/06/confused-eyedropper/
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Today Norman Kember and two Canadian hostages were rescued by coalition forces. Good news! Now these men worked for Christian Peacemaker Teams who had this to say. You can’t be serious! These men were not released, they were rescued for cyring out loud. A simple “thanks” would have been nice! Jeez, words fail me. Thankfully, I don’t have [...]
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Ever wondered what the bad guys were doing with your computer?
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
On Jigsaw, what Michael said.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
UK film fans will soon be able to legally download and keep blockbuster movies for the first time, says Universal.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Greg Linden used to work at Amazon.
From time to time he'll recount one of his 'early days at Amazon' stories on his blog giving some insight into the development challenges in building the world's largest online shop.
In his latest post, Greg talks about the "Customers who bought this also bought" feature, internally known at Amazon at the time as the 'similarities' feature. One of the early problems with 'similarities' was the 'Harry Potter' problem.
See, everyone and their dog bought Harry Potter:
"This kind of similarity is not very useful. If I'm looking at the book "The Psychology of Computer Programming", telling me that customers are also interested in Harry Potter is not helpful. Recommending "Peopleware" and "The Mythical Man Month", that is pretty helpful."
So he was asked to fix the Harry Potter problem, which he did.
The fix not only provided a better shopping experience at Amazon, but also resulted in Jeff Bezos walking into Greg's office, bowing on his knees and chanting 'we're not worthy, we're not worthy'. How cool is that?
One interesting point to note here, maybe even a self-referential observation. And that is I found Greg's post about recommendation systems via the personalized version of Findory which he developed, itself a recommendation system that does a good job of avoiding the Harry Potter problem.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
So whilst going through the RSS feed today a few places mentioned Sky have started delivering movies via broadband. So I registered this evening. Registration is reasonably simple although you will need your Sky viewing card number. Once you confirm you are a customer you get prompted to create an account. The account will need a password which has at least one number in it, this is not made clear. One 49.6Mb download later and I thought I was ready to go. I installed the software, ran it, logged in and was promptly told I needed to update. The update downloaded automatically and I was prompted to install it. Finally I got the software started.
The client application is flash based and rather slow to login and download information. Once your login is authorised you are presented with a choice of channels, Movies and Sport (I assume this depends on your subscription details). Not being that interested in sport I selected movies and was presented with
a featured download (Layer Cake) and a list of genres to browse. Oh, and a nice advert for Intel Centrinos. To download a movie you click "View Details" and click download. The details view also has links to movie web sites and the ability to search for other movies by the same director or featuring the same actors.
Once the download starts the problems begin. It's a P2P application under the hood, and not a well behaved one. The amount of bandwidth it sucks is swallowing all my available bandwidth and there appears to be no way to tune it. I only realised it was P2P when I was trying to work out why nothing was downloading. The P2P system needs port 8080 open incoming, which I had blocked at my firewall. Again there appears to be no way to configure the incoming port. "Best" of all the P2P aspect runs as a Windows Service, kservice, described as the Delivery Service Manager. Once you exit out of the browsing application the transfers keep going. And going. And start again after you reboot. Before you log into your machine. And there is no visible indication of this anywhere, unless you start the front end application again (waiting for 5 minutes to login because kservice is now taking all your bandwith) and looking at your queue. I have no idea if there will be a ratio on the uploads to your fellow peers, if you are on a limited bandwidth service where you get charged by the Gb then Sky By Broadband is not for you, as you have no control.
Sky estimate that a 1 hour film will take 1 hour to download. Those of you who know how P2P works will know this is a hard claim to make. It's been over an hour now for me since I finally started a download and I have 6% of a 110 minute film. If you were expected to download something a few hours before you caught a plane, forget it, plan days in advance.
How is the video and DRM experience? I'll let you know once it completes downloading, if it ever does. I had to turn the P2P service off to get enough bandwidth back to do something useful tonight.
[12-01] Update : Andy Ward suggests using NetLimiter to control the bandwidth available to content delivery service and this works very well. Thanks Andy
The delivery service, which appears to be written by Kontiki Inc scatters itself in two places, c:\program files\kservice and c:\windows\kdx. As well as installing a service it also adds a Run entry for c:\windows\kdx\khost.exe. I had tried setting the service startup type to Manual last night and rebooting, however once khost intialises it will start the service. Uninstalling the Sky application leaves the delivery service behind, not good. Looking at the
Kontiki help pages they talk about an entry in Add/Remove programs for "Delivery Manager"; this doesn't exist. They also talk about system tray icons so I am concluding that it was a choice by Sky to install the P2P service in a vague "stealth mode".
Of further note is the actual Sky application itself; a Microsoft .net application, hosting a flash movie and Windows Media Player. Folks, either choose .net or flash, layering both feels like overkill.
I should note that Sky actually do tell you it's a P2P application in the Terms and Conditions;
If you download and save content to your computer system (a "File"), during the license period for the relevant File, we may upload parcels of content from the File from your computer system for the purpose of transferring Files to other users of the Service.
and surprisingly they're also upfront about what data will be transmitted to them
During the installation process for the Sky by broadband Application, we will detect and store the machine name, KontikiNodeId, CPU, PC bios, videocard, network card and IDE Controller information specific to your computer system, for the purposes of identifying your computer system and your eligibility to access and use the Service each time you log-in to the Service.
Now if only my download would finish I could comment on the video quality...
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
A jet engine that could reduce flight times between London and Sydney to two hours is ready for launch in Australia.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
My email seems to be going a little screwy right now (currently hosted by my old ASP.NET provider - CrystalTech). Their webmail has never been that great to use, and anti-spam/virus has also been a little flaky – I ended up just rejecting any emails with any attachments.
So, I’m now looking to find somewhere else to host my emails. I could move it onto my VPS, but I’d rather not have something as essential as email at the will of my tinkering! It’d also be nice to have really, really solid anti-virus and anti-spam protection that I just don’t have time to administer.
Essentially, I’m looking for something along the lines of MessageLabs, but usable (and affordable) for an individual. I also need IMAP (rather than POP3 – I access emails all over the place), and a good webmail app would be really nice too. Finally, it has to just be a hosted email service, I don’t really need any webhosting as part of the package.
So, does anyone have any good recommendations?
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Sony has revealed its plans to distribute games over the internet to the forthcoming PlayStation 3.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Microsoft has provided a version of the Visual Studio Tools for Office "v3" for the users of the Beta 1 Technical Refresh of Microsoft Office 2007.
Download
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Something which I'm still waiting for in IE7 is support for the richtext boxes you get on most web sites (DevFusion, Hotmail/Live Mail, this blog etc...)
At the moment when blogging I'm having either to turn on my other IE6-computer (can never be ar$ed) or type in all HTML tags which is a pain.....
(FF doesn't support this one either)
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Well like most people, I've been longing for MS to add in support for CSS's min-height in IE7...
I was slightly disappointed to see that the new IE7 beta didn't support it - but I was wrong :p Oops, made a fool of myself there ;)
You just have to have it running in the right mode, so while I was being lazy writing a test document I didnt include the doctype, so it reverted to its old methods.
This works :D
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<html>
<head>
<title>min-height</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="min-height: 200px; background-color: red;">
hello
</div>
</body>
</html>
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
From IEBlog ...
We are pleased to release the beta 1 refresh of the IE Developer Toolbar. The community feedback was incredibly helpful in finding a lot of problems and in planning for new functionality. We've combed through the replies to the initial release blog post and on the IE wiki at Channel 9.
Updated [23/03/06] : A refresh of beta 2 of the developer toolbar is now available that will function in the latest available builds of IE7 as well as IE6.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
The Media Center Show #49(MP3 - 23mb- 1 Hour 14mins 1secs)
LISTEN HERE the RSS feeds are HERE
The Media Center Show with Orb Networks
Welcome to show 50!
This week on the show I have two Media Center MVP’s (Microsoft Most Valued Professionals) talking about Media Center and Vista.
Orb’s Ian McCarthy reports from MIX06 and I have email and skype messages in to the show
Plus a chance to win One Voices’ Media Center Communicator
Send your questions and feedback to isdixon@gmail.com (feel free to send your questions in mp3)
or you can send your questions and comments in to the show Skype Line “MediaCenterShow”
Don’t forget your to check out Media Center Show Gear
The forums are at Iandixon.co.uk/forums
Show Times:
00:50 Welcome to Show 50!
01:30 Email MCE with Sky
02:59 a Skype message from Brian Frost
05:03 Media Center Presentation Application over the web
06:47 MIX06 Keynote
07:20 MIX06 Report from Orb’s Ian McCarthy
12:09 Vista Delay
13:15 A Message from One Voice
14:04 Welcome to the Media Center MVP’s
19:00 How has Media Center progressed
20:48 Supporting Vista
23:45 Common support issues
26:00 Stability
27:50 Extenders
30:00 Windows Media Connect devices
31:22 Corey’s Media Library size
35:00 Content delivery methods
37:45 YouTube.com
40:00 DRM (again!)
44:08 Blueray and HD-DVD
46:00 More on DRM
54:51 XM Passport
58:00 Cable Card
1:03:00 Vista Beta
1:07:35 Thanks to Corey and Andy
1:08:00 Email the show
Music by Ian Dixon
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
If you have multiple tableadapter method calls that you want to run within a transaction, the following is the simplest way to do it.
Key points:
- Use TransactionScope from System.Transactions namespace
- Expose your connection property for the TableAdapter (if it is in a referenced project then you will need to change a the connection modifier in the DataSet designer to make it Public rather than Internal)
- To avoid having the transaction promoted to DTC (and thus degrading performance and requiring the DTC service is running on the Sql Server), make sure you use only one connection, and ensure that you have opened it manually before you call the tableadapter methods.
ProcessStageTableAdapter adp1 = new ProcessStageTableAdapter();
JobCategoryTableAdapter adp2 = new JobCategoryTableAdapter();
using (TransactionScope tsc = new TransactionScope())
{
using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["MyConnectionString"].ConnectionString))
{
conn.Open();
adp1.Connection = conn;
adp2.Connection = conn;
adp1.Insert("New Data");
adp2.Insert("New Data");
tsc.Complete();
}
}
This will work great with SQL Server 2005. For other options see Sahil Malik's post and for general info on transactions visit Florin Lazar's blog and the Msdn Transactions forum
HTH
Ian
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Lots of Office SharePoint Server 2007 stuff covered in Bill Gates' and Kurt DelBene's keynotes and other sessions.
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032293536&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
-- Jeff
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Big firms are helping to spread adware by being careless about where they spend their cash, a report says.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
CMS.RAPID 1.3 will be launched on Monday March 27.
In addition to a number of fixes and minor improvements, v1.3 contains completely new features:
- Support for multiple Taxonomies
- New Attachment Placeholder
- Site settings set through querystring
- Ability to add Web Based Console actions through configuration
- New Posting/Page level cache setting
- Authoring Preview added during edit (optional)
- Mandatory fields for CMS users first time sign in
- Channel Placeholder - Common information at a channel level
- Multiple base inheritance
- New Links Placeholder
- New Rapid Metadata Placeholder
- New Image/Banner ad rotation control
- Optional inclusion in A to Z
- Extra Xslthelper functions
- New Pages in path control
- Revert to a previous version
CMS.RAPID is a solution accelerator / framework that enhances the core functionality of MCMS2002.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Hooray for literarily allusive techie blogging (pity, though, about the release slip)!
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
The sessions have now been submitted for Developer Day 3.
You can now vote on the sessions that you would like to see. Based on the voting you will be able to determine what the content of the day will be.
http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/votesessions.asp
PS my session is in the Data and Systems section :)
TSQL or not TSQL that is the question for DBAs
With the introduction of CLR in SQL Server 2005 many DBAs are reluctant to enable this feature due to worries of what could be done. I will show some practical reasons for using SQLCLR functions, procedures and how to manage them. We will cover some of the major concerns including, security, performance, management and support, performance and security. ', WIDTH, 500, SNAPX, 5, SNAPY, 5);" onmouseout="return nd();">Do you want to use the CLR in SQL Server and need to convince your DBA? Then this is the session for you. With the introduction of CLR in SQL Server 2005 many DBAs are reluctant to enable this feature due to worries of what could be done. I will show some practical reasons for using SQLCLR functions, procedures and how to manage them. We will cover some of the major concerns including, security, ... 
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
The sessions have now been submitted for Developer Day 3.
You can now vote on the sessions that you would like to see. Based on the voting you will be able to determine what the content of the day will be.
http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/votesessions.asp
PS my session is in the Data and Systems section :)
TSQL or not TSQL that is the question for DBAs
With the introduction of CLR in SQL Server 2005 many DBAs are reluctant to enable this feature due to worries of what could be done. I will show some practical reasons for using SQLCLR functions, procedures and how to manage them. We will cover some of the major concerns including, security, performance, management and support, performance and security. ', WIDTH, 500, SNAPX, 5, SNAPY, 5);" onmouseout="return nd();">Do you want to use the CLR in SQL Server and need to convince your DBA? Then this is the session for you. With the introduction of CLR in SQL Server 2005 many DBAs are reluctant to enable this feature due to worries of what could be done. I will show some practical reasons for using SQLCLR functions, procedures and how to manage them. We will cover some of the major concerns including, security, ... 
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Widespread use of 3G mobile phones may change the way people interact and increase creativity, a study suggests.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Good to see more places are picking up on this little horror:
caluml writes "The Guardian is reporting that the current UK government is trying
to sneak a new law though in an innocuously named bill called 'The Legislative and
Regulatory Reform Bill,' which would get rid of that pesky, interfering need to put
laws to the Houses of Commons and Lords to approve. [via Slashdot]
Since 1997 New Labour has included clauses in large numbers of Bills that state "if
the minister thinks its good, then it is good" (paraphrase). This 'new' Bill brings
all that into one tidy place and stops them having to write these pesky clauses in
new Bills.
The really big question for Labour voters - how would you feel if the Tory party
tried a Bill like this. If this Bill goes through, are you happy that the Tory party might have
these powers one day?
Tragically, it has now come to pass that we need a written Constitution.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Good to see more places are picking up on this little horror:
caluml writes "The Guardian is reporting that the current UK government is trying
to sneak a new law though in an innocuously named bill called 'The Legislative and
Regulatory Reform Bill,' which would get rid of that pesky, interfering need to put
laws to the Houses of Commons and Lords to approve. [via Slashdot]
Since 1997 New Labour has included clauses in large numbers of Bills that state "if
the minister thinks its good, then it is good" (paraphrase). This 'new' Bill brings
all that into one tidy place and stops them having to write these pesky clauses in
new Bills.
The really big question for Labour voters - how would you feel if the Tory party
tried a Bill like this. If this Bill goes through, are you happy that the Tory party might have
these powers one day?
Tragically, it has now come to pass that we need a written Constitution.
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
This is a facinating look into the BBC's plans for delivering TV over the Internet and integration into Vista.
http://blog.mix06.com/virtualmix/archive/2006/03/17/BBC_demo.aspx
Ian
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
-
Published on 23 Mar 2006 from
Here's some Mix06 day 2 and 3 pics, links and stuff...
Scott Guthrie's presentation went down well -
Wallace McClure liked the Atlas features he saw and met up with some Microsoft folks after the Atlas session.
eBay's Alan Lewis presented on using eBay Web Services to build a live.com gadget. He's built a gadget that searches through the eBay site and presents the results on the Live.com.
Met up with Nick Swann, over from the UK.
Shawn Morrissey (below) from the Windows Sidebar team was happy...the BBC showed off some of the very cool stuff they are doing with his product.
There was an unofficial microformats and structured blogging session at the end of the second day run by Marc Canter and Tantek.
It was fun. That conversation is ongoing.
Here's a video of the Bill Gates and Tim O'Reilly chat on day 1....
Those O'Reilly boys are everywhere...here's Jeff Pepper and John Osborn from O'Reilly Media:
Jeff Ba