Wednesday, February 5, 2014

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Stoke-on-Trent sends fat people motivational texts

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 02:23 AM PST

Stoke-on-Trent council thinks that it is a jolly good use of community charge payers' cash to bother lardie people with "motivational texts" to suggest they move about a bit more.

According to Computerworld ,  the council is spending £10,000 to text the overweight.

Over 100,000 people in the region are overweight or obese, the council said, and the texts are for those who are aged at least 18, have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or over,

Apparently the people have proactively signed up to receive the motivational messages and will be sent daily texts, a weekly questionnaire and a follow-up questionnaire. A sample of 500 recipients will also have a telephone interview. All this, plus the licence for the NHS-owned Simple Telehealth text service is equal to £10,000.

The council said it is a tried and tested approach used by private sector organisations like Slimming World, and that this 'early intervention' initiative is cheaper than 'cure'.

"Our public health team are using the texting technique as just one part of a comprehensive set of public health activities to help and support people in changing their lifestyles," said Adrian Knapper, Cabinet Member for health, wellbeing and culture at the council.

Knapper said that £10,000 was sod all when you consider it costs that to perform just one intervention operation to help people manage their weight.

Still not sure that if anyone will listen to a text from the council not to eat a cheeseburger would stop anyone. Hell if my council texted me and told me not to eat a sticky bun I would eat two. 

HP comes out fighting against Autonomy

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 02:10 AM PST

The maker of expensive printer ink, HP has claimed that Autonomy, the software firm it bought in 2011, overstated profits at one of its main British units by 81 percent in the year before it was sold.

HP had to write down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion and accused the management of accounting irregularities.

Autonomy was founded and led by British entrepreneur Mike Lynch, who has repeatedly denied the allegations. Until today, HP has not said anything specific about the write down.

Now, Reuters  is saying HP said it had refiled 2010 accounts for Autonomy Systems Limited, one of its British operating units, revising the annual revenue down by 54 percent to 81 million pounds.

Net profit for the period was reduced by $133 million according to the filing. The drop, $133 million at 2010 exchange rates, compares with reported 2010 net profit for Autonomy as a whole of $217 million, according to the company's annual report.

Lynch had previously said that differences in IFRS and US GAAP accounting standards appeared to have had a role in some of HP's allegations.

However, HP was not mincing its words. It told Companies House in the UK that extensive investigations undertaken by Hewlett-Packard into the past accounting practices of the group, have revealed extensive errors, including misstatements, in the previously issued financial statements.

HP claimed that the reduction in profits was due to "fundamental errors", with the remainder put down to differences in accounting policies used by HP and Autonomy.

Lynch's spokeswoman, Vanessa Colomar, said that the size of the adjustments in the 2010 results did not fit with the scale of HP's $5 billion writedown and he was continuing to reject these allegations by HP. 

US democrats try to bring in net neutrality again

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 02:08 AM PST

It looks like the US Democratic Party is going to have a crack at bringing back net neutrality, something which was taken away from Americans after the telecoms companies complained.

Net neutrality is the idea that ISPs must treat all internet data the same. Under its regime, ISPs are not allowed to selectively speed up or slow down information requested by their customers due to their selective gatekeeping of the services impacted.

While the rest of the world enjoys having net neutrality, the United States, which claims to have invented the internet, insists that it is communistic and bad for business. They claim it as government regulation of something, which has worked just fine. Of course that logic does not really hold water because the Internet has succeeded because it is an open platform and it is only recently that telcos have being trying to screw customers for more money.

Until last month the only thing that was ending net neutrality was a ruling by the FCC which basically claimed it had the right to police it. That was shot down by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Democrats in the House and Senate yesterday introduced the Open Internet Preservation Act, a bill that would reinstate now-defunct net neutrality rules that were shot down last month.

Those in favour of net neutrality view the regulatory scheme as key to a free, open, and level playing field. The Preservation Act is short and merely "restores" what was "vacated" by the court's decision.

But apparently the law has not got a bat's chance in hell of getting the law through. Republicans are almost entirely united in opposition to the Internet rules, meaning the bill is unlikely to receive a vote in the GOP-controlled House.

There are also some other dangers which the GOP has not seen yet. If there is no net neutrality and ISPs decide who gets full services, it means that they now have control over what is on the internet. That means one of the fruity religious groups that the US seems to love growing can order ISPs to remove content that they find blasphemous and immoral. It would be tempting to say that is why the religious GOP would want something like that, however we think it is probably because they take too many campaign donations from telcos.

Still, it will be interesting to see what happens when the US finds itself suffering as its internet development falls behind other countries because its telcos have become too greedy.

 

Apple asks a court to stop telling it what to do

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 01:51 AM PST

Jobs' Mob has been channelling Amanda Knox and insisting that it does not have to be punished for breaking the law.

Apple has been found guilty of running a cartel with publishers which aimed to push up the price of ebooks. The judge ordered an antitrust monitor to be appointed to Apple to help educate it how to avoid screwing its customers by illegal means ever again.

However Apple whined to the court that since it never believed that it had done anything wrong in the first place, having an outsider telling it what to do was annoying.

Apple urged a federal appeals court on Tuesday to put a court-appointed antitrust monitor on hold, arguing that his efforts were harming the company's business and stopping it screwing over customers, er coming up with new ideas for products.

The iPhone maker asked the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to halt monitor Michael Bromwich's work while the court considers Apple's bid to remove him altogether, a process that could last several months.

Theodore Boutrous, a lawyer for Apple, in explaining why the company would suffer irreparable harm if the monitor is allowed to continue before the appeals court has a chance to decide whether his appointment was appropriate in the first place.

A US Department of Justice lawyer told the court that the monitor was essential to ensure that Apple complies with the law, after a federal judge last summer found the company liable for conspiring with five publishers to raise e-book prices. Apple cannot be trusted to comply on its own.

Finnuala Tessier said that the preliminary injunction demands that Apple fully understands why and how it needs to comply with antitrust laws, not a year from now ... but today.

Apple has accused Bromwich of aggressively and unnecessarily pursuing multiple interviews with top executives, including Jonathan Ive, the company's chief designer. We would have thought that was his job.

It has also complained that Bromwich's fees and duties would cost it millions of dollars, however the lawyers it has paid to make these ridiculous requests have also cost it millions so we cannot see why it is so upset.

We also do not think these arguments are going to fly. The judges seemed sceptical saying that the company had a fair bit of cash to play with.

"Maybe if they had spent some of their very valuable time keeping the company from violating antitrust laws, perhaps they wouldn't be in this position," Judge Gerard Lynch said.

Apple has long said that it was perfectly justified in setting up a price cartel with publishers and it is convinced that an Appeals court will agree with it. 

Microsoft heads into a new error

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 01:46 AM PST

Software King of the World Microsoft has announced that its new supreme Dalek will be Satya Nadella who will replace the shy and retiring Steve Ballmer.

Nadella, who has a name a bit like Nigella, is tragically not interested in cooking or being strangled by PR executives, has a big job ahead of him.

The 46-year-old Indian native and former enterprise business chief might find his hands tied with Bill Gates and Ballmer still on the board. Steve Ballmer might not go quietly, in fact Ballmer does not do anything quietly.

As we expected Sir William Gates III is demoting himself and giving up the board chairmanship to fellow director John Thompson. Historically that means the team who fuelled the PC generation are no longer in power, although some would say that the PC is gone anyway and has been replaced by tablets.

It looks to us that Vole is now being run by a triumvirate; Satya is the new CEO, Gates is the product adviser and John Thompson is running the board. However triumvirates only work if all three get on, and one of them is not bedding an Egyptian queen. It also helps if one of them is a Lepidus who does little to get in the way of the other two.

However there are already questions over whether Satya is going to be allowed to make the big changes that Microsoft needs to make, both at the product and people level. At the moment Vole is lots of competing fiefdoms with managers spending more time bumping each other off than producing new products.

Lately Vole has been focusing on "devices and services" rather than licensing software, and has been trying to copy Apple, just as the latter's star has been falling.

Investors hate that idea and want to stop Vole ploughing billions into mobile devices and focus at what it is good at.

Gates is promising to be a regular sight around Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus after pledging to spend a third of his time as the new CEO's adviser. He thinks that Nigella's cloud computing expertise qualifies him to lead Microsoft into the new arena of mobile computing.

"Satya's got the right background to lead the company during this era," he said. "There's a challenge in mobile computing. There's an opportunity in the cloud."

Still Nigella is laughing all the way to the bank. He gets a salary of $1.2 million, a maximum annual cash bonus of three times that and a stock award of $13.2 million for next fiscal year.

It is more than Ballmer took home. That is mostly because Steve was too shy to take stock awards, which he deemed unnecessary given his ownership of $12 billion worth of Microsoft shares.

Still it is a lot less than Marissa Mayer, who got a compensation package that could total more than $70 million when she took the helm at Yahoo two years ago.

Nadella, who describes himself as a cricket and poetry lover, called the appointment "humbling" in an email to employees. In a videotaped statement, he said he would focus on "ruthlessly" removing any obstacles to innovation. Given the fact he has a whole Volehill of managers who are clearly in the way there could be a lot of sackings. 
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