Peter Cox’s Blog

Just fyi, and for all my fellow geeks out there, I won’t be playing the massively over-hyped Halo 3.  I’m old enough to remember when Bungie wasn’t a polyp in the corporate gut of Microsoft, and when they produced damn good games for the Mac - one of which, Marathon, will always be a legend.  [...]

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I’ve always felt uneasy about the widespread searching (in the US) of shoppers’ bags on the exit from certain stores - Circuit City and CompUSA come to mind, but there are plenty of other offenders. The presumption is that every consumer is a potential shoplifter, and that every megalithic company has a right to [...]

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A few years ago, we had a sniper living in our tree-house. I know this sounds odd, but it’s true.  The kids loved it, and we had many happy hours practicing siege techniques, conga lines and so on.  He came from the Oregon region and, in addition to being a SWAT sniper (have you seen [...]

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Had a lot of contact with the NHS (Britain’s National Health Service) this week.  For American readers, the NHS is NOT what you quaintly and dismissively term “socialized medicine”.  It is, in fact, the jewel in the British crown of state, a huge leap forwards towards a more human society and world.  Research shows that, [...]

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It was a nice idea while it lasted. But now that the UK iPhone is a looming reality:

“Mobile phone operator O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, has won the exclusive contract to sell Apple’s much-hyped iPhone in the UK costing £269… Customers have to sign up for an 18-month contract on a tariff of £35, [...]

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This is a cool idea.  The Internet is infested with design pirates - some surprisingly big names on this list - now it’s time for them to get their public come-uppance.

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Is this really a shock?  Most Western interventions in Iraq for the past century have been oil-motivated.  And if, as seems likely, peak oil production has already occurred, then the world’s second-largest oil reserves automatically become a target, by fair means or foul.  It certainly explains the lack of exit strategy (we don’t plan to [...]

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An interesting “Web 3.0” concept is “The Cloud” – a term used to describe, inter alia, that portion of cyberspace in which data resides – yours, mine or anyone else’s.  I’ve always been obsessive about backing up data, yet no solution I’ve yet used has given me the degree of protection that makes me feel [...]

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Walking to a meeting yesterday, I strolled through a late-afternoon sun-dappled Berkeley Square (no nightingales) and down Berkeley Street into what seemed to be a gun siege. You know that feeling when your “spider sense” sometimes kicks off? I had it in spades. There were close to fifty police milling [...]

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