A Time of Magic

You might think that upgrading the software on your PC is a bit of a pain with it asking various questions that you sometimes need to guess the answer to but just think how much worse it is when you’re upgrading the software on a major online site.

For a start, the 24/7 nature of the Internet often makes it very difficult to choose a quiet time of day if your site has a global appeal. A site operating over the business day will be in use from, say, 9am to 5pm which sounds simple enough. However, that 9-5 day in Los Angeles is matched by one in Sydney running 4am to 1pm Los Angeles time and another in London running 5pm to 1am the following day. So, if you’re based in LA then just adding customers in Sydney and London means that your “business day” runs from 4am one day to 1am the next. Oh, and that’s forgetting the west coast of Australia which adds another two hours to your day.

So, in theory, if you’re based in LA your quiet time for the update would be from 1am to 2am each day.

Is it any wonder that problems arise in software updates on major sites such as the current hassles PayPerPost has?

If you book a long-distance flight then chances are you’ll find that the airline you’re actually flying on isn’t the airline that’s listed on your ticket. For instance, a flight from Barclona to Sydney on Lufthansa is, at best, only Lufthansa from Barcelona to Frankfurt and from there it’ll be on Singapore Airlines. Why?

The reasons for this go way back into the past when there were “national airlines” and bilateral arrangements were negotiated on their behalf by the various governments. For example, at one time you could only fly between America and Britain on British Airways or American Airlines and that remained the case for many years which, of course, led to all of us paying much higher fares than we really needed to.

Within Europe many of these restrictions have been killed off by the European Commission who regard competition as a “good thing” and so it is. The discount airline Ryanair could never have gotten off the ground had the old-time restrictions remained in place. One effect of those restrictions was that, since it’s an Irish airline, it could only have flown between France and Ireland yet in many of the airports that it uses it flies from, say, France to Belgium, Germany, etc.

But what about code-sharing? Well, that exists to get around those old-time restrictions which also ruled out cross-border purchases of airlines. The relatively recent AirFrance/KLM merger could never have happened even 10 years earlier and even now it’s not possible for a foreign airline to buy any American owned airlines (so much for America promoting competition, eh?).

With code-sharing airlines are effectively able to operate as one without requiring to merge as such. Singapore Airlines would probably like to buy Lufthansa for its European routes but can’t do so at the moment so instead there’s code-sharing.

With the rise of the Internet many courses that would have sailed under the name of “correspondence course” moved online and no longer does “correspondence course” have the negative associations as it did in years gone by.

So they’re up to date now, but are they any good?

Over the last three years I had the chance to compare one such course which offered an online version for the first year and in-person tution in the second two and found that there is a world of difference. Comparing the first and second years, the number of hours of tutorial time was fairly similar if you added up the total number of hours and if you’d looked at the overall specification of the course you’d have found them fairly similar.

In practice they were completely different though. For one thing the online version split up each four hour face to face tutorial into four separate online ones. They had to: the sheer intensity of the online version meant that you just couldn’t have ran for four hours at a stretch.

It was a language course and the oral exam highlighted the difference in the two methods the most. With the face to face version the discussion phase was marked by the usual pauses in conversation that you get in normal conversations; in the online version there were no pauses at all.

Certainly if you’re persuing a language course, do it online if you can as the vastly increased intensity of the tutorials will pay equally large dividends in the value you get from the course.