Banditry

Dear Lenovo -

Congratulations on making some of the best and most rugged laptops available; buying IBM’s PC business was a good idea (even if you have been dogged by Japanese suppliers‘ ineptitude at battery manufacturing).

However, now that your machines no longer fall under the IBM umbrella, there are a couple of bizarre Big Blue eccentricities you might want to remove. In particular:

1) put a Windows key on the keyboard. I know IBM and Microsoft always had an uneasy relationship, but that’s no excuse. I’d wager 95%+ of your PCs use Windows, so it’s utterly Pyhrric to leave it off.

2) put the USB ports on the right hand side. Most people are right-handed; most laptop USB ports are used for mice and memory sticks which are best accessed with your right hand.

3) remove the umbelievably irritating website navigation buttons that are immediately above the arrow keys, which mean that when filling out online forms and aiming to move the cursor you instead go back to the previous page and lose everything you typed.

Otherwise, carry on as you were.

Regards,
John B

George Osborne has floated a new public sector recruitment policy to be applied should the Conservatives get into power: all media advertising for government jobs will be pulled and instead a central website will be set up (at an alleged cost of £5m a year) to offer them.

Given that he could be the next-but-one Chancellor of the Exchequer, I hope that Mr Osborne is making a cynical appeal to public ignorance of recruitment markets and eBusiness costs, rather than believing this plan to be a good idea in its own right.

We’re the Tories, so let’s nationalise stuff

For starters, the £5m a year cost is a gross understatement. In the private sector, market leading online job site Monster.com spends $187m on non-marketing non-wage costs to offer 12 million jobs a year. The civil service site would offer about 1.2 million jobs a year (20%ish turnover on 5.5ish million public sector workers); even assuming Monster’s size generates no economies of scale, then this takes the cost up to $19m (£10m).

Now, given that it costs the government £40,000 a year to run a blog, and given that Monster.com’s original setup costs have been written off, do we think that the real cost will be in the £5m bracket, the £50m bracket, or the £500m bracket…?

I don’t understand, unless he is merely appealing to ignorance (or the desire to stick one to the Guardian, which currently has the highest market share for public sector recruitment), why Mr Osborne would float a policy of nationalisation that’s guaranteed to result in another public IT disaster.

Wanted: blind janitor with 1337 5k177z

In any case, there is absolutely no way the government could rely on this site for job advertising.

While Sir Humphrey may be the public stereotype of a civil servant, many public sector roles are not highly skilled. The median wage in the public sector is £488 a week, slightly above the private sector median wage. There are an awful lot of people working in the public sector on low incomes with poor literacy and IT skills (after all, how much of an IT whizz does a park-keeper need to be?), so recruiting them over the web is not going to produce a good selection of candidates.

A sizeable proportion even of better-paid people (particularly senior age groups, disabled people and ethnic minority groups, against whom the government is attempting to avoid discriminating at the moment) also do not currently use the Internet for job applications. We’ve all met senior bosses in the private and public sectors who are very good at their jobs but who rely on their secretaries to print and type their email.

Even among people who are able to use IT for basic work purposes, many may not be willing to trust the online channel for something as important as job recruitment - according to consulting group Forrester, 68% of people don’t even fully trust the web for shopping. A government website is obviously more trustworthy than dodgydavesphishingsite.com, but plenty of people are seriously paranoid about technology.

They’re doing it already, and it isn’t enough

For an obvious, concrete example of why the site wouldn’t be enough on its own, simply Google for online job application statistics, as I did earlier. Nearly all the initial hits are online recruitment pages for public sector roles. And guess what? Despite already having access to this channel, these employers recruit through other channels as well…

A list of government recruitment sites wouldn’t be a bad idea - at the moment, there is no central resource that points applicants both to the civil service careers site and to the London councils careers site, as well as all the other arms of government and quango-ery (apart from Google).

But turning this link-list into a mega-IT project in a doomed plan to annoy the Guardian would be a tiny little bit silly.

(via Tim and The Daily Pundit, both of whom approve more than they should)

It’s been reported that the major cause for the delay in Airbus A380 deliveries is that the entertainment systems are enormously complicated, require millions of miles of cabling to be squeezed into the aircraft, and are completely different for different airlines so there’s a risk of serious screw-ups if staff work on two different configuration types at the same time.

This means that not only is everything taking than expected, but each airline needs to have all its planes built in series - so Emirates won’t get any planes until all of Singapore’s are finished, and Virgin won’t get any until Emirates’s are done. And this means that Airbus is having to give everyone massive compensation while losing credibility for future business.

Since Airbus is effectively French, this doesn’t matter too much: as with Alstom and every other sizeable industrial concern, the French taxpayer will pay if the business runs into serious financial trouble (yes, I know it’s supposed to be a joint venture, but if a business is even a bit French, that’s good enough for them…). However, it’s a bit of a shame to let everything go so wrong when the solution is so obvious.

Instead of installing a wired entertainment system, set up a wireless network covering the whole plane. Since laptops have wi-fi enabled by default, the plane will have already gone through detailed testing to ensure that wi-fi doesn’t interfere with the plane’s systems. Keep the power supplies from the current wire specification, and junk everything else.

Then you can put a networked computer (with a friendly operating system, obviously) at every seat, providing audio and video via a library on a networked server, plus web access. Popular choices can be stored locally to cut the strain on the network. Anyone with a laptop can connect to the wi-fi too, like on trains.

The terminals for this should cost far less than $500 a seat, or $40,000 for the whole plane - and they’re the only cost incurred under this scheme that wouldn’t be incurred anyway. Because the whole system is software-based, airlines can customise and upgrade it easily. Customers get a better experience and everyone, except Boeing, is happy.

So why aren’t they doing it? My guess is that the aviation industry is run by grizzled veterans who don’t really have a clue about this wireless malarkey. So nobody involved with the whole business, either Airbus or airlines, has even thought about going beyond the traditional ‘wires and dumb terminals’ model. If you happen to be an airline bigwig or hang out with them, do feel free to pass this one on…

I’ve been getting some bizarrely customised-for-this-site comment spam recently. For example:

As well as the main critical mass ride there’s now a north london version.

Those Friday Thing folk said that boobah is “a bit odd”

Today is the European Day of Languages. I wonder if David Blunkett is taking part?

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the way politicians and journalists are pronouncing place names associated with the war on Iraq.

When we moved here, Mrs Stefanou told us this was one of the nicest bits of Crouch End, while her son told us it was a great place to be because it was so easy to get to Crouch End from here

I wonder how robust this statistic is? And does this one only tell half of its own story?

You had your last chance girl. Now you will get a sound lesson in obedience and respect for your elders. Take off your clothes.

Actually, the last isn’t particularly customised-for-this-site. But you get the idea - the spambot is not only using randomly selected nonsense phrases to get past filters looking for the traditional ‘viagra ch3@p cl1ck h3re’ kind of spam, it’s picking ones that are relevant for a vaguely political, vaguely pedantic North London-y blog.

Perhaps the idea is that I’ll probably be busy, bored or drunk when I’m moderating my comments, therefore probably won’t notice that the commenter’s name is ‘cheap-prescription-drugs’ and their alleged blog URL is cheap-prescription-drugs.com, and therefore that I’ll probably let their spam through…

I’ve got a new piece up at the Sharpener, on the rather excellent geek-toy that is Google Trends.

I’ve got a new post at the Sharpener on the BBC’s use of DRM. If you like that kind of acronymery, get over there.