New Labour’s latest dog’s breakfast

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Wonderful column by Ted Wragg in today’s Education Guardian on the new Education Bill. Excerpt:

Let me work out the logic. There will be a verbal IQ test, on the basis of which final-year primary school pupils will be assigned to one of nine ability bands. Then equal numbers from each band, about 11% a time, will go to each school. Ah, so children will actually be assigned to a secondary school. Fine.

No, wait a minute. Parental choice is paramount. Parents will choose which of 10 types of specialist school they would like their child to attend. So it’s all about choice then. Except that the government wants schools to opt out from local authority control and decide their own admissions policy. I’ve got it, at last. Schools will decide.

Hang on. Parents can even start up their own school. They will really be in the driving seat in schools. Yes, yes, I see now. It is parent power, after all. Yet if your children are outside the quota for their band, then a fleet of buses will ferry them across town, presumably to a school they didn’t want to go to.

Er, I’m confused again. I think I’ll just brush up my Spanish and get my “linguist” scout badge instead.

Kenneth Baker, sorry, Tony Blair, is very keen on grant-maintained schools, oops, silly me, trust schools, and wants to set up city technology colleges galore, er, I mean, city academies.

He goes on…

To call these proposals “a dog’s breakfast” would be to insult Britain’s pet owners, who take care to feed Bowser a balanced diet. They are the ultimate disaster from the No 10 wheeze factory. Leave Tony Zoffis free all summer to dream up a barrel of monumental bollocks, and this is what ensues.

Microsoft to cannibalise its core business

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Amazing news. Early next year Microsoft plans to launch a new Web site called “Office Live” in an attempt to create a new platform that will liberate some of its applications from user’s hard drives. (Translation: to head off Google’s plans to make the PC platform irrelevant.) Office Live, Microsoft said, will be targeted at the 28 million small businesses worldwide. It will have “elements that enhance regular Office applications” while others will work independently of the software suite.

(Reality check: where did that number of 28 million come from? There must be 28 million small businesses in the US alone.)

Some of the tools promised for the site will allegedly help small businesses build an online presence as well as offer applications to automate tasks such as project management, expense reports and billing, among others.

“With Office Live services, we make complex technology affordable and easy to use for small businesses, empowering them to reach their business goals,” said Rajesh Jha, general manager of Information Worker Services at Microsoft. (Don’t you just love that cant about “empowering”!) Meanwhile, Chairman Bill was rolled out to put the best spin he could muster on the development. “It’s a revolution in how we think about software,” he told reporters and industry analysts. “This is a big change for…every part of the ecosystem.”

You bet. Especially the Microsoft ecosystem.

Here’s Good Morning, Silicon Valley‘s take on the development…

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie today outlined the first steps in a critical change in the company’s business — a move into providing software and services over the Net, prodded by the specter of being disintermediated on the desktop by Google and Yahoo and in the business market by companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite. But this venture, which Ross Mayfield describes as nothing less than the “third coming of Microsoft,” comes with a whole new set of challenges for the company. For one, eventually it would put Microsoft in competition with itself as services vie with packaged software (though Steve Gillmor thinks Gates is ready to bite that bullet). The other problem is that it seems to take Microsoft about three tries to get something new close to right. In the past, that meant users were pretty much forced to suffer through a couple hinky iterations, there often being no viable alternatives. Hardly the case this time. Microsoft will be trying to move into a territory with some significant and experienced occupants — a territory in which, as Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble notes, the company is already regarded with distrust and dislike.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the increasingly popular Web-application development framework Rails, sees it this way: “Microsoft is now entirely optional. No part of the stack needs Microsoft. Not on the client, not on the server. And I think that’s a pretty tough challenge for a company that used to be a necessity. … To be frank, I don’t ever see the good times coming back for them. Microsoft will have to move to higher grounds. Get out of the infrastructure race. Like Apple did. There is no dominant future for the Microsoft tool chain for Web development in sight. But I doubt the company will acknowledge that before it’s game over.”

Open Source Intelligence

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Extraordinary essay by a serving CIA officer about the importance of publicly-available information relative to the stuff obtained by the cloak-and-dagger crowd. Abstract:

We need to rethink the distinction between open sources and secrets. Too many policymakers and intelligence officers mistake secrecy for intelligence and assume that information covertly acquired is superior to that obtained openly. Yet, the distinction between overt and covert sources is less clear than such thinking suggests. Open sources often equal or surpass classified information in monitoring and analyzing such pressing problems as terrorism, proliferation, and counterintelligence. Slighting open source intelligence (OSINT) for secrets, obtained at far greater expense when available at all, is no way to run an intelligence community. Also, we must put to rest the notion that the private sector is the preferred OSINT agent.  In the end, I would contend, the Intelligence Community (IC) needs to assign greater resources to open sources.

Link via Arts and Letters Daily

The irrationality of the music industry

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This morning’s Observer column…

Q: What’s a record company?

A: An organisation whose survival depends on suing those who are potentially its best customers.

I exaggerate – but only slightly. Scarcely a week goes by without some salivating music industry executive detailing the latest batch of lawsuits launched against file-sharing teenagers. In an interesting variation on this litigious theme, Candy Chan, an American parent of one of these errant youngsters, refused to settle on behalf of her 13-year-old-daughter, Brittany. When she announced this plan of action, however, the record companies decided to go after the kid directly.But in order to do this they had to find a way of neutralising mummy. So they petitioned the court to push Mrs Chan aside and appoint a legal guardian in her place.

Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. The whole saga of music downloading is set to become a business school case study on the lengths to which an industry will go to defend a business model that technology has rendered obsolete…

Update: It looks as though sophisticated use of the Internet by bands is much more extensive than my reference to Arctic Monkeys implied. Here’ for example, is an intriguing Wired article about Myspace.com.

Blender

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This image comes from Quentin’s entertaining spoof about Apple jewellery. It pointed me towards Blender, an astonishing Open Source modelling package. The only problem is that, being a slow learner, I need to take six weeks off to learn how to use it. Quentin seems to have mastered it in a few hours. Sigh.

Convergence, my eye

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Having a BlackBerry makes one reflect on those flyblown theories that all our communications will converge on the mobile phone. I’ve just spent a few days in Donegal where I was for the most part deprived of wired connections to the Net, so the BB became my prime communications channel. And it works fine — in the sense that stuff gets through. But wading through a stack of email messages on a small screen, and replying to them using an ingenious but fiddly keyboard (which, for example, always assumes that when I type ‘see’ I really mean ‘are’), is not something I would wish on anyone. It’s fine for a few days, in extremis, but not really viable as a sole platform. And although it’s terrific to be able to access Google or BBC Online from anywhere with a GPRS signal, browsing on such a small screen is purely for masochists. The laptop has some life in it yet.

Corporate hypocrisy

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Walmart is one of the creepiest firms in the US (and one of Wall Street’s favourites). It pays its employees so little that many of them are eligible for food stamps. And, as part of its ‘human resources’ services, it even provides help desks which advise employees on how to claim for this kind of welfare. Now, according to this week’s Economist, the company’s Chief Executive has said that “Congress should consider increasing the minimum wage.” The thought that Walmart might increase its employees’ minimum wage without troubling Congress doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.

And after you’re finished mopping the bathroom floor, be sure to write up that portable music device contract

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Lovely post in Good Morning Silicon Valley…

At a court hearing to review Microsoft’s progress in meeting the sanctions imposed in a 2002 antitrust settlement, a U.S. District Court judge upbraided the company for handing some of its partners a contract that would have forced them to stop bundling rival music software with their MP3 players (see “Sorry, just an old chunk of monopolist boilerplate we had on a save string”). Microsoft maintains the contract was a gaffe, a proposal drafted by low-level business person who did not understand the company’s obligations under the antitrust settlement, which seems something of a stretch to me. “This maybe indicates a chink in the compliance process,” District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said. “This should not be happening at this point in the decree. I realize people make mistakes, but this should not be happening.”

Old habits die hard…

Facing the storm

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There was a wonderful storm in Donegal on Tuesday afternoon. We went out to Muckross Head to watch it in all its awesome glory. One of the kids just sat staring at the sea as it seethed and crashed on the cliffs below. Unforgettable.