Invasion of Privacy?

According to an article on vnunet.com there are plans by one of the major DVD manufacturing companies to embed chips into the discs so that their movement can be tracked to help combat piracy. Now this just screams "wrong" to me. I'm not sure how it can help combat piracy, but it will help to track wherever you go with the DVD, and to some degree what DVDs you own as once more and more discs have these chips they will know what chip embedded discs are in the same locale.

Developing Software by the 15% Rule

"Before undertaking a development project we create a statement of work (which acts as a contract and a specification) that outlines what we’ll do, how many hours it will require, and how much it will cost the client. As part of the contract we commit to invest up to the amount of time outlined in the document plus 15%. That is, if the statement of work says that the project will take us 100 hours to complete, we’ll spend up to 115 hours (but no more). As to where-fores and why-tos on how this works, read on."

Software by Rob : Developing Software by the 15% Rule

Recently saw this quote, and couldn't agree more with it. Software development is something that is extremely hard to accurately schedule due to the nature of it. Obviosuly going past the stated time will cause increase in cost of the project (thinking of labour costs etc.) and this will mean less profit, and past a certain point would become a waste of time.

technorati tags:software, development

Stingray! Stingray!

One of my friends over at Bloopy has created yet another one of his badtaste masterpieces. This time it features the crew of the Stingray, and a certain wrestler of crocodiles.

Watch: Revenge

New Site Design!

Well finally after a week of designing it, my new website design has gone live. So far I've published articles there that cover web development and web design. Articles so far include topics such as "Understanding Apache htaccess" and "Making Mobile Content".

Summer Memorabilia 2006

The other weekend I was at the NEC, Birmingham (UK) for the summer Memorabilia convention. Whilst there they had a stage interview with Marina Sirtis (Cllr Deana Troi of ST:TNG), Garret Wong (Ensign Harry Kim of ST:Voyager), and Robin Curtis (of several Trek movies). Whilst being interviewed they were asked what the future of Star Trek on television is. Garret's answer was that there are no plans, at least not until Rick Berman's (executive producer) contract lapses so Paramount don't have to involve him.

Well the video is now up on YouTube, so go watch!

Paramount vs. Rick Berman