Nice piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun about proposals to enforce the age ratings on video games:
I’d argue that enforcing age ratings on games is perhaps essential, and not because I’m worried about seven year olds playing GTA IV. I’m worried about 31 year olds not being able to play GTA IV.
A slightly inflammatory piece by me on Techradar: why the music industry doesn’t deserve government help.
Now, like General Motors, the record companies are hurting – and like General Motors, they want the government to save them. GM wants cash; the record companies want ISPs to act as their policemen, while the Digital Britain report suggests a broadband tax to create a new organisation to fight piracy and find new and exciting ways for DRM to annoy us.
Why doesn’t the government tell them to get stuffed?
The New Music Strategies blog linked in the article is well worth your time.
Wired Magazine has a fascinating piece about the rise of the netbook:
For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did.
And Richard Cobbett’s posted a great piece about the Kindle and ebooks in general:
I’m aware that there are some people who will happily read a novel on the iPhone. These people are crazy.
Between now and the 17th of March .net’s giving away free subscriptions via the mag’s Twitter account. More details here.
More words on the Internet. First, six companies Google should buy including, yep, Twitter:
Google’s search spiders are amazing things, but they can’t do what Twitter Search does: let you see in real time what six million people are saying. Bringing Twitter into the fold could work in two ways: as a search tool in its own right, and as a way to refine web results based on ‘trending’ – that is, up and coming – topics people are chatting about. For Twitter users, Google could offer better reliability: while Google Mail has been up and down a bit over the last few months, you’re still much more likely to see the Twitter Fail Whale than have problems with a Google site.
Then, 3G sucks when you’re in the sticks.
On a good day, outside, you’ll see the little 3G icon. Go indoors, though, and it disappears. That’s on a good day. On a bad day, like yesterday, there’s no 3G signal at all. We couldn’t even use GSM. Phone calls? Yes. Data? Nope.
The further from the cities you go, the worse it gets. And Scotland, like Wales, Northern Ireland and the North of England, doesn’t have too many big cities. If you stick to the big motorways, the cities and the very biggest towns you’ll get decent coverage. Everywhere else – and in Scotland, most of the country is everywhere else – you won’t.
Arena’s confused – it can’t make its mind up whether it’s going after GQ readers or Loaded readers, and falls flat between the two
Today’s Guardian reports that Arena is to cease publication after 22 years.
In the same post, I wrote this:
Perhaps the problem is that there’s no real need for a men’s magazine, because most other magazines are for men. Computer magazines are largely read by men. Car magazines are almost exclusively read by men. Music, film… men men men men men.
I think that’s still the case. Any sign of this?
A magazine that isn’t aimed at sniggering schoolboys, that doesn’t write ten-page features on the correct way to wear cufflinks, that doesn’t tell me that I need to spend 18 hours a day in the gym to get the perfect body, that doesn’t cover a single subject (cars, gadgets, books, music) and that doesn’t hate, fear or envy women. A magazine that doesn’t make me skip 90% of its pages. A magazine that I wouldn’t be embarrased to have in my house.
First up, a feature: seven reasons why Apple should make a netbook (and a few reasons why it shouldn’t). Here’s one of the reasons why it shouldn’t:
An HD Touch would be more compelling
Take one iPod Touch, make it twice the size, give it some desktop-style apps and you’ve got something that no other computer firm can deliver (or, we suspect, even imagine). You’d have all the things you expect from an iPhone, plus decent e-book reading and document editing. How great would that be? Bluetooth support for an external keyboard, 3G modem as an option, best computer ever.
Then, a column: if Confessions of a Shopaholic was about tech instead of handbags, we’d think it was great. Tech Firms! You’re doing it wrong!
…the tech industry is just like the fashion industry. It sells you stuff and tells you you’ll look like Audrey Hepburn or Brad Pitt; six weeks later it’s shouting “You look like your gran!” and telling you to buy something else or kill yourself. An overpowered laptop is no different to a £1,000 It Bag: it’s just more crap that helps fuel credit crunches and contributes to climate change. When we’re eating each other for food and having fist-fights with polar bears in the High Street, we’re going to regret it.
The column isn’t up yet. I’ll post the link when it is.
Update
Here’s the link: why netbooks prove that the tech industry’s gone nuts.
Two by me, one by Neil Mohr that I thought was really interesting. First up, Cloud Computing – or Clown Computing?
So much for the cloud.
Can we really rely on web-based services and software? If you’re expecting us to say no, surprise!
Then a look at some of the interesting things Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Mozilla have got cooking in their labs including:
4. Google Mars
Fancy looking for Martians or discovering whether The Watchmen really do have a base on the Red Planet? Google Mars brings the power of Google Maps to nearby planets. Sadly Street View and Local Search aren’t yet available, so if you’re trying to find a kebab shop you’re out of luck.
This piece by Neil Mohr caught my attention: 3D gaming. Is it ace, or is it arse?
At its best with Left 4 Dead, some primal instinctive part of the brain lights up as you realise you now have depth perception. Zombies flailing towards you suddenly have a natural order and a beauty as they spiral in space with a well-placed shotgun to the head. Blood spurts in awesome Jackson Pollock-esque fashion onto your virtual camera lens that views this apocalyptic world. This is the 3D at its best; it works straight out of the box complimenting the gameplay, even enhancing it.
Yay! But it’s a qualified yay:
At its worst, though, it’s a frustrating mess. A crosshair that makes you feel you’ve drunk five pints, constant ghosting from lights and effects, while struggling to make the stereo effect work at all without inducing eye-strain. Somewhat akin to magic-eye pictures, it’s an effect that you gradually get more and more used to or not at all.
Many laptops, such as the MacBook Pro, are real desktop alternatives. But they also cost an awful lot of money, and they’re hefty things to carry around. Any time I’ve used a laptop when travelling – on planes, on trains, on ferries – I’ve wished I had a smaller computer (particularly on planes, where you get less room than a veal calf). Unless you need serious horsepower from a mobile PC, a top-end laptop is a daft buy: even the titchiest machine is perfectly capable of DVD playback, office applications and anything else you might need on your travels.
That was before the invention of the netbook, which is the smaller computer I wanted whenever I tried to unfold a Powerbook or MacBook Pro in a plane seat. With netbooks becoming so handy (particularly in the battery life stakes) and cloud computing making it easy to share and/or sync stuff between multiple machines it’s bordering on insanity to buy a fully-featured laptop for travelling: with netbooks going for £300 or less (and refurbs starting to appear from the likes of EuroPC) you really need to be rich or daft to buy anything bigger.
As my 2006 post put it:
The little laptop will be smaller, lighter and therefore more portable than a big beast of a machine – and you’ll be less upset if it gets broken, nicked or blown up by terrorists because you’ll still have a working machine at home.
I’ll be testing a Samsung NC-10 fairly soon, so I’ll eat my words if it’s a load of crap. But I suspect it won’t be.
Yes. Yes, it is. Guess where the link goes? That’s right! Techradar!
Overall, we like Safari 4 a lot. We’re not convinced we’ll actually use Top Sites or the visual History Search, but flashy gimmicks aside it’s a fast and pleasant way to do stuff online.
I wrote this four years ago