UK bans yachtsmen from sailing abroad

That's not quite the headline you will see but it is the precise effect of proposed rule change being introduced by HMRC, the UK tax authorities.

Under UK law, pleasure boats are allowed to use "red diesel" which is coloured with a red dye to indicate that the taxes payable for road fuel have not been paid. Red diesel is all you can buy at most UK marinas and harbour. There is no alternative available.

HMRC says it will introduce a measure to ensure that "red diesel for use as fuel for propelling private pleasure craft can only be used in UK waters. All purchasers of red diesel for use as fuel for propelling private pleasure craft will be required to sign a declaration to that effect." The gory details are here (PDF).

So if you have a sailing boat with a diesel engine, or a motor boat, or if you want to hire a yacht this year, or perhaps go on a course with a sailing school, you'd better not plan on crossing to France (or anywhere else).

Of course, the reverse restriction applies too. If you're a foreign yachtsman or woman and want to refuel when you arrive in the UK, bad luck. Unless you plan never to leave again, you'll have to find some way of purging your fuel tank as you reach the limit of UK territorial waters so you don't get caught out taking your red diesel away from the UK. A good way of cutting back on pesky foreigners cluttering up our harbours, but a pretty stupid idea otherwise.

Workarounds? Well, you can make multiple trips to the nearest garage and fill up with "white" diesel. I have a sailing boat rather than a motor boat and only need to fill my tank a couple of times a year. With a couple of jerrycans it should only take me a few dozen trips. For those lucky souls with a great big gin palace and a need for a few thousand litres of fuel each time they fill up, the situation will be different.

More background here is available on the HMRC website here and from the RYA. There's a petition too.

Although this legislation takes effect from April 1st, it is apparently not an April Fool's joke. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Tethering an iPhone in the UK

(Updated to reflect responses from O2 and Three)

I currently seem to be spending too much on communications related stuff.

I have O2 landline and O2 broadband at home; an O2 iPhone contract and two 3 contracts: One for a USB modem and another for an iPad. That's three mobile contracts in all which somehow feels like too many.

The least used is the USB modem, but if I'm out of the office and away from home, I need some kind of Internet access for the laptop to get serious work done.

So how about using the iPhone with tethering as an alternative to the USB modem? Sounds like it should work.

O2

Starting with O2, a search for "tethering" on their website brings up a page that tells me I need the Internet Tethering "Bolt-On". This sounds good because in addition to Internet access through the phone, it gives access to The Cloud's WiFi hotspots, and (it says), BT's Openzone's hotspots are to follow. Quite when this will follow, though, is uncertain - these's no date on the mentioned and the content of the page isn't dated.

So I follow the nice link to "Buy an iPhone Internet Tethering Bolt On". Result? "File Not Found". Thanks, O2.

I'm an O2 customer already so let's try a different approach. I can log into "My O2" and see my current tariff and select from a menu of "Bolt-Ons". There's a nice selection of them, but not one mentions tethering and there's certainly not one called "Internet Tethering" which is what O2's website has told me I need.

OK, O2, you've had your chance. Let's try elsewhere.

Three

I currently use 3 SIMs in both my USB modem and iPad and I'm generally impressed. Their 3G coverage seems more extensive than O2's and while attempting to maintain a working data connection on a moving train appears impossible, the mobile Internet appears accessible when I'm stationary - even in out of the way places like Lochinver way up in the north west highlands of Scotland.

Same approach: Let's try searching for "tethering" on 3's home page. "Your search results", it proudly tells me: "0 Results for tethering".

Well, at least that's straightforward. I guess they want me to buy a MiFi box instead but that's one more piece of stuff to carry around. No thanks.

Orange

The same search on Orange's web site pulls up an interesting list of links.

There's an explanation of what tethering is, a good description of what you need to use tethering and a useful explanation that says "to enable tethering you must have subscribed to a tethering bundle, or an iPhone tariff that includes tethering". Cool.

So let's look for a "tethering bundle". Oddly, the "Orange Shop" doesn't talk about bundles at all. Perhaps the new word is "Plans", so I try those. No mention of "tethering" in the maze of the Pay Monthly "Dolphin", "Panther", "Canary" or "Racoon" plans that I can see. (What's with the names? Am I supposed to identify with one of those?)

I'm not really interested in Pay As You Go plans but I take a look there as well. That adds "Monkey" to the bizarre zoo but is still unhelpful when it comes to tethering.

I'm getting tired at this point, but a quick look at SIM only plans for iPhone shows no information about tethering either.

Bye bye Orange.

T-Mobile

There's no search box on the home page. That's novel, at least. How about "Help & Support"? A search on that page brings up a list of links which tells me about tethering but fails to convince me that it is something that T-Mobile actually offers. A scan through tariffs does nothing to change this.

Vodafone

At last.

A clear explanation of how they support tethering and how they charge for it. Vodafone FTW. Who'd have thought it?

STOP PRESS - O2 responds

After posting this on August 11th and tweeting about it, I had a couple of responses. The first was from O2 who pointed me at their "latest tariffs". These indicate that tethering is included in their "Data Bolt Ons". For £3.00/month, you can get tethering along with an extra 100MB data. There are other bands at £6 and £10/month with successively more data.

However, there's still an inconsistency in the price list:

The pricing table shows the £3 month tier (unlike the £6 and £10 tiers) does not include UK Wi-Fi, though oddly enough if you click on the "More info" link, you are told that "all our tariffs come with unlimited Wi-Fi through The Cloud and BT Openzone".

Three

A colleague tells me that he uses 3's "personal hotspot" feature successfully. I tried searching for "personal hotspot" using the search feature on 3's homepage with no results, so it is a little hard to know how this works.

STOP PRESS 2 - Three responds

Turns out that Three includes tethering. Kudos to Three. And boos to their website. They have a blog post describing tethering.

Is Zittrain confused about Apple?

Or is he confused about freedom?

Zittrain's opinion piece "A Fight for Freedom at Apple's Core" in the Financial Times (February 3rd, 2010) caught my eye.

It's worth reading, but I think it is largely wrong, partly because Zittrain does not make it clear what kind of freedom he is talking about, but also because he gets so many facts wrong.

Zittrain's argument seems to be that Apple used to be open but is now closed. That the freedom that was present for the original Apple computer has disappeared for the iPhone (and presumably, the iPad).

In reality, the iPhone is closed in some respects and open in others. Zittrain's opening statements, that the original Apple computer allowed you to write software, is true - but fundamentally misleading. The iPhone does too.

Sure, the iPhone doesn't boot up to a BASIC prompt, but that's because it's a phone (and media player, email device and much more). But if you want to write software for it, you can. And you can do this freely: Apple make the tools and SDK available at no cost; with these tools you can write fully fledged iPhone applications.

This makes the iPhone much more open than the early Macintosh computers. If you wanted to develop software for these, you needed to buy tools from Apple or third parties. This was sufficiently expensive that it could rule out casual software development for the Macintosh by amateurs.

Apple seems to have learned from this. They now make a rich set of software development tools available for the Macintosh and the iPhone. Both are accompanied by good documentation. And it all costs nothing; you can download them now.

What's changed with the iPhone, is that Apple now provides an online store for the sale and distribution of applications. Apple decides what is allowed in the store. This makes Apple, as Zittrain says, the "gatekeeper". But it also provides advantages: small-time software developers now have a global route to market and a means of being paid for their wares. And iPhone users have an easy means of finding software that (mostly) works and which they can pay for safely too.

So while Apple does exercise some control on the primary means of commercial distribution, it is not altogether a bad thing. Look at the figures: there are a huge number of applications now available and being downloaded from the App store (over 130,000 and 3 billion respectively, according to Wikipedia)

Users of the iPhone "No longer own or control the apps they run" writes Zittrain. What does he mean?

Users "own" the software they buy from the App Store as much as they "own" any software under a commercial license agreement. If you've read one of these (does anyone? Even Zittrain?) you will have noticed that they almost always tell you that you do not own the software. Instead, you own a CDROM (assuming you have any physical asset at all) and have bought limited rights to use the software under particular circumstances. Along the way, you will probably have agreed that the software need not work and that you indemnify the company that licenses the software completely against any damage the software might do.

And what on earth does Zittrain mean by "control"? I have no idea, and he does not say.

Nor is it true that customers of the App Store "rent [the applications] minute by minute." No they don't. Where does this stuff come from?

"Hope lies in more balanced combinations of open and closed systems," according to Zittrain, implying that the Apple scheme is unbalanced and therefore bad without really having provided convincing evidence for either.

What is the right balance? One that delivers the most benefit to the greatest number of customers. That market is world has changed a great deal from the time of the early personal computer. The vast majority of personal computer and smartphone buyers will not write any software. They are buying a tool and they want it to work.

I think there are some interesting analogies with the motor industry. Early owners of motor cars could reasonably expect to have to be an expert mechanic, to understand how the car worked, effect their own repairs and perhaps make their own modifications. The modern car is a "closed" system. Sure, you can find places that will let you download new software for the ECU, and there are keen hobbyists who tweak things, strip the engine, change the exhaust, buy different wheels, spoilers and so on.

It seems to me perfectly reasonable that computers and smart phones will go the same way, at least for the majority of users. Computer hobbyists will persist, happily downloading device drivers from random sites on the Internet and debating the performance of different motherboards. But that is not what interests most users. The change will take a while, but it is coming, and coming faster in the smartphone world than it has with conventional personal computers.

As seamless user experiences go, the iPhone is a great example of how things can be done, and of how successful they can be in the marketplace.

What happens when you virtualise a data centre?

Virtualisation is still a hot topic in the bits of the IT business that I do work in.

No longer is virtualisation restricted to the "low hanging fruit" - non-critical, low end servers that can easily be consolidated and at low risk. People are now looking to embark on the next stage and virtualise their business critical applications. Increasingly, a virtual machine will be the default home for a new application.

As it becomes more pervasive, virtualisation changes the dynamics of the data centre. In many large organisations, it takes many weeks or even months to get a new server installed. Even when the hardware procurement process is pretty streamlined, there are still delays in waiting for the kit to be delivered, finding a suitable change window when it can be installed, finding space for it, connecting it to the power supply, getting it hooked up to the network(s) and perhaps to storage.

By contrast, a virtual server can be created almost instantly.

Not surprisingly, this can stress some operational processes which have previously relied on the server delivery bottleneck, together with space and power constraints to provide a natural buffer to otherwise unbounded demands for more servers.

What happens in the longer term, once these issues have been ironed out? I'm assuming that in many cases, the number of physical servers in the estate will be reduced. That's part of the justification for the virtualisation exercise in the first place. But what about the total number of servers (virtual and physical)?

I would be interested to see statistics on the number of virtual servers that enterprises end up with, some years down the line. Does this rapidly exceed the original number of physical servers? And how do the long-term growth rates compare to those for the physical estate prior to the virtualisation exercise?

Does anyone have any data they are willing to share?