Me, on Techradar: GhostNet is a wake-up call. Upgrade Windows or switch to Linux.
Compromising old Windows boxes is like stealing candy from a baby. Compromising Linux boxes is more like stealing candy from a baby that’s locked away in a subterranean vault with armed robot guards, packs of savage Rottweilers and lots of Indiana Jones-style traps. On the moon.
Starter Edition is essentially Windows 7 with a completely arbitrary three-application limit. This restriction is “designed to ensure that users get the best possible performance” from their netbook. That’s kind, isn’t it? Why not go the whole hog and slap the Windows 7 logo on MS-DOS? That’d go like lightning!
Like many four-eyed people, I really don’t like wearing glasses. Sadly I’m stuck with them. I used to wear contact lenses, but I had to stop a few years back when my prescription changed: I’m slightly astigmatic, but I’m on the borderline – and that means I’m too astigmatic for normal contact lenses and not astigmatic enough for toric lenses, which are designed for people whose eyes are shaped like rugby balls.
On paper, contact lenses are just fine; in my eyeballs, they’re not. If lenses enable me to read, I can’t wear them for driving a car at night; if they enable me to drive at night, I can’t use them for reading. Again and again I’ve tried lenses which all the tests say are perfect in my eyes, but which don’t give me perfect vision.
I still hate wearing specs, though, and a few years ago laser surgery started coming down in price to the point where it wasn’t the preserve of millionaires. I looked into it, looked into the side effects and looked into what’s considered a success – and I discovered that what a laser clinic would consider 100% successful wasn’t necessarily 100% successful from my point of view. As with contact lenses, it’s entirely possible to have a successful treatment that doesn’t give you perfect vision. Side-effects can be quite serious, and even if the correction is acceptable it’s a short-term fix, not a permanent one.
That put me off a bit, but the main thing that put me off is the risk of it all going wrong. My late grandfather, a keen reader and writer, had laser surgery many years ago (for medical reasons) and it went wrong, essentially blinding him. Being unable to read, to write… that’s pretty much the worst thing imaginable for me.
That doesn’t mean laser eye surgery is dangerous. Lots of people get it and are delighted with the results. But the worst-case scenario is too scary for me, and my experience with contact lenses suggests that it wouldn’t work for me anyway.
Which brings me to Which? magazine, whose researchers have been in a few high street laser clinics.
clinics played down the level and possible duration of risks and complications, which can include permanently poor night vision or some loss of sight in extreme cases. The spokeswoman said that almost half of Which?’s researchers were not told that even if they had laser eye surgery, they would probably need glasses when they were older.
Optical Express say the article is “misleading and poorly researched”, but Which?’s comment seems sensible enough to me:
people need to be aware of the potentially serious and long-term risks, so that they have realistic expectations and commit to the procedure with their eyes open.
I’m quite sure the pun is intentional.
Before we pay too much attention to the headlines and the soundbytes, though, we should perhaps wonder if there are more sinister invasions of privacy than a Google car taking shots in the street.
For example, we could start with newspapers.
Flicking through Sky last night, Living TV’s various channels had an unfortunate line-up of programmes. These were the listings for three consecutive channels at the same time last night:
New stuff on Techradar: Local news is dying – and why you should care.
It’s not an either/or thing: knowing about the latest tech from across the pond doesn’t mean you don’t care about what’s happening in your town. But you can only care about things you know about.
Also, I’ve updated the browser battle piece to cover the new Chrome 2 beta and the final release of Internet Explorer 8. I still think Firefox is the best everyday browser (on PC) right now, but Chrome 2 is seriously bloody quick. On slower PCs or netbooks, that’s the one I’d go for.
There’s a new beta of Chrome 2. It’s fast, but there are still a few things missing.
Also: iPhone 3.0 – it’s all about the apps.
It helps if you remember that the iPhone isn’t really a phone. It’s a portable computer that just happens to make phone calls, an operating system that’s going to be available on 30 million devices.
What’s important isn’t what Apple is adding for end users, but what it’s giving developers. With version 3.0, they’ve just been given a whole bunch of new toys to play with
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but Graham Linehan has beaten me to it: on the 8th of March, the Scottish Sunday Express ran a contemptible piece of shit by Paula Murray about the survivors of the Dunblane massacre. There’s a PDF link here. For some mysterious reason, the paper has wiped the online version. As Linehan writes:
As others have pointed out, the gist of the story is that these kids are showing disrespect to their dead classmates by… being alive.
Here’s an example of Paula’s scoop: “For instance, (name deleted), who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died, makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out.”
Rude gestures. Boasting. Drunkenness.
If only the doctors and counsellors who treated the wounds and mental scars of those children all those years ago had had the foresight to say: ‘Now, children, you most now go forth and live the lives of angels, not only in tribute to your dead schoolmates who no doubt would have wanted you to live puritanical lives, but also to avoid the predations of journalists barely worthy of the name who, as soon as you turn 18, will ransack your private lives in search of cheap, revolting scoops.’ All this could have been avoided.
Tim Ireland may have discovered a teeny-weeny little bit of hypocrisy. On her Facebook page, she boasts about getting wasted.
In her attack on Dunblane survivors, Paula Murray castigated and demonised survivors of that tragedy who “boasted about alcoholic binges”, which is EXACTLY what she’s doing here.
Obviously, this is just cherry-picked text, and making a judgement based on these statements alone would be a wrong.
So to back them up, here’s a series of photos of Paula getting pished with her mates
Still, the Press Complaints Commission is on the case.
The editor of the Daily Express, Peter Hill, left the board of the PCC last year following front page and high court apologies from Express Newspapers titles the Daily Express, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Daily Star Sunday over a string of false stories about the disappearance of four-year-old Madeline McCann, which resulted in payments of £550,000 in damages to the McCann family.
Back to Linehan:
The press likes us to believe they’re a properly regulated body, but they’re anything but. First of all, The PCC seems to be a completely toothless organisation by design. It is made up of representatives of the major publishers, who are obviously not inclined to be too hard on themselves. Also, unlike Ofcom and the Advertising Standards Authority, who have easy-to-use complaint forms on their websites, the PCC don’t even accept third party complaints – in other words, unless you are the person named in a printed article, they’re not interested in hearing your opinion. So when faced with an affront to our humanity (which is what I believe this Express story is), there is no official channel for us to register our anger. That’s right – if you are offended by something on TV, Radio or in an advert, you can complain; if you’re offended by something in the print press…well, you’re just going to have to walk it off, because literally no-one wants to know.
While we’re on the subject of contemptible pieces of shit, what’s wrong with this picture? Clue: she isn’t dead yet:
I wonder, what company owns OK?
Copyright ©2009 Northern and Shell Media Publications.
Do they publish anything else? Yep, the Express and Sunday Express. According to the corporate website:
Northern & Shell is determined to maintain all its products and activities as benchmarks of excellence to its readers, customers, advertisers and business partners.
Benchmarks of excellence? Jesus wept.
A great post by Charles Arthur: When the diggers come for your town square, will you know why?
People who run shops and market stalls are starting to get worried about whether they can cover their bills, because the council did a stupid, mindless, thoughtless thing and nobody stood up quickly and loudly enough to point out that it was a stupid, mindless, thoughtless idea that would hurt peoples’ livelihoods during a brutal recession. I’m not holding my breath for the leader of Saffron Walden’s town council to appear on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, either.
How about you? How are things in your town? Would you be surprised if you turned up in the market square and found it being ripped up by diggers? Sure, as “Bruce” observes in the comments to Watson’s post, you know about the iPhone getting cut and paste, and you’ve got an opinion about the new Facebook UI. Now tell us how much you know what’s being done with your money a mile down the road.
It’s all going a bit Batman. Who’s going to keep Google on the straight and narrow?
We’re not suggesting that Google’s founders dress up like animals and beat up bad guys in their spare time, although if they do then we’d love to see the evidence. But online, Google is developing superpowers – and sooner or later, those powers will turn Google to the dark side.
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© 2010 Gary Marshall. All Rights Reserved.
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