iPhone IE vs UK - guess who is being ripped off

The iPhone tariffs for Ireland are out. Unlike US and UK tariffs the data is not an all-you-can-eat affair.

Here's the Irish one:



and here's the UK one:






Notice 1Gb cap on the Irish one and incredible difference in minutes and scabby texts. And are they really charging for voicemail, that doesn't sound right?

New Laptop

Upgraded my laptop at home to XPS 1530. Of course I considered an Apple (given that I'm in the US regularly), but even at dollar prices it is still well overpriced. The build quality is really nice (never thought I'd say that about Dell) and the screen is really good (although you cannot get 1920x1200 in the 15.4 form-factor - whereas you can get it if you switch to the much lumpier Dell Precision Laptop).

Overall I found the dell site pretty annoying to navigate when purchasing. For me the key features are:

• Screen Resolution - I develop in Eclipse and anything sub 1600x1050 just doesn't cut it, but the Dell site doesn't let you filter/narrow on screen resolution, just overall form-factor (15 / 17 inch). For me this is the most important feature.
  
• Processor (obviously)
• Hard-drive speed. This is really confusing - different models support different drive speeds (annoying).
• Weight - for instance check out this rather amusing sales line on the XPS 1710: "8.71kg of media muscle". nearly 9Kg!!! They should develop some sort of "Dell-Fit" exercise program to go with it.
  

So what about the supposed crappiness of Vista. Well I've shoved 4Gb into it, so Vista runs very, very smoothly. So no problems yet.

Does McCreevy have no shame?

You really have to question whose interests McCreevy serves. It certainly isn't consumers. The irish commissioner for Europe's Internal Market is backing a proposal to extend copyright from it's current life+50 (expires 50 years after the death of the artist) to life+95 (note in the UK it is life+70). Now I'm for Copyright for artisitic works, but what is patently missing from the proposal is any real justification for why the terms need to be extended (that is beyond the fact the the BPI and their European counterparts are lobbying hard). Is it just me, or shouldn't an internal market commissioner be mostly against extending protectionist measures. But given his previous position on software patents, we really shouldn't be surprised.

Hilariously the Tory opposition in the UK has agreed to back the proposal provided the BPI provide ""positive role models for young kids to look up to, draw inspiration from, and aspire to be". So lots more X-factor for everyone - brilliant.

Workday Acquires Cape Clear

Workday has bought Cape Clear. So from today I'm a Workday employee. This is very exciting, not least because Workday are an amazing organization, but for me the real win here is being able to focus our software on making integrations simpler to write, run and manage. Workday are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP player (HR, Financials, ..). They figured early-on that integration was a key requirement when selling SaaS solutions. People love SaaS, but how do they connect it to their own systems? Workday's acquisition of Cape Clear is a signal of just how critical that requirement is.

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