Me, on Techradar: Twitter’s about to be invaded by the masses. We have a cunning plan.
Author: Carrie
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Leave
BritneySteve alone!Techradar again: Steve Jobs is sick. Leave him alone.
Imagine you’d had a close encounter with cancer a few years back. You turn up to work with a bit of a cold, and your boss gives you a worried look. “Is the cancer back?†Er, no. I’ve got a bit of a cold. You go for a coffee. “Oh god, is the cancer back?†asks the bloke from sales. No, you say. I’ve got a cold. Back at your desk, somebody accidentally CCs you on an email. It turns out that everybody in the company has become a doctor, they’ve all diagnosed you with cancer, and they’ve emailed your family to break the news.
…that’s exactly what elements of the press pack and blogging crowd have been doing to Steve Jobs since June.
The inimitable Ian Betteridge argues the exact opposite.
Steve Jobs is also a senior executive of a publicly-traded company, and with that role comes certain responsibilities. Steve has responsibilities to his shareholders – and, importantly, so do Apple’s board of directors.
The illness of a senior executive is a classic area where boards need to be strong, and work for the shareholders. It’s a tough time for everyone, but the role of the board, as I’ll explain, means they have to look at things in a way which is impersonal – and which some might find insensitive.
So who’s right? There’s only one way to find out…
I’ve been looking for an excuse to embed a Harry Hill video for ages.
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Tim Cook: who hell he?
With Steve Jobs on a leave of absence, Tim Cook is running the show. I’ve written a profile of him over at Techradar:
He wears blue jeans and trainers. He’s a workaholic. He’s incredibly intelligent, doesn’t miss a detail, and can destroy you with a single question.
He’s had a brush with mortality. He’s intensely private. He eats, sleeps and breathes Apple.
Does Tim Cook remind you of anybody?
I’m also writing a column about the Jobs-related press coverage. I’ll post a link when it’s done.
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Life imitates arse
A few months ago, I wrote a column for PC Plus suggesting that bandwidth was a utility that should be available to everybody.
If unrestricted, fast internet access is something we need – and from where we’re sitting, it is – then perhaps the solution is to expand the USO, the Europe-wide Universal Service Obligation that means every EU citizen must be able to get a landline if they want one. It doesn’t cover broadband, but it could – and if it offered financial sweeteners to providers while mandating net neutrality, it could deliver unfettered high-speed access to everyone.
Today, The Guardian reports:
[Lord] Carter is understood to be considering replacing the universal service obligation under which BT must provide all with a phone line, brought in when BT was privatised, with a new industry-wide obligation to provide broadband for everybody.
In other columns I’ve suggested making the Internet nicer by automatically emailing every post, email and comment to your mum for approval. I’ll let you know if the government goes for that one too.
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Hey, Microsoft! Why don’t you give Windows 7 away for free?
It boots in less than a fortnight. It doesn’t make our laptop shoot up to 100% CPU usage for no good reason, generating enough heat to cook a moose. It goes like lightning on machines that struggled with Vista. It’s very good. In fact, it’s great. Which is why Microsoft should give it away.
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In my head, I’m Ian Rankin
The rather sarcastic Stuff Journalists Like website (which, incidentally, would be an awful lot better if the writing was better) sometimes gets a little bit too close for comfort:
Stuff journalists like: writing a book
Buried under nearly every journalist’s notebooks, papers and clips is an idea for a book.
…Unfortunately, a good percentage of these ideas for books will stay just that as journalists are usually burnt out on writing after a full day day of writing for their newspaper, blog, Tumblr and Twitter.
I was looking for something this morning and stumbled across my Book Ideas folder, where I’ve written outlines and in some cases several chapters of four or five different novels. They’re pretty good, I think, largely because only one of them is about a journalist – and he’s only a journalist because it gives me a chance to have him mutilated by gangsters, which is always good. Unless you’re writing a children’s book. But every single one of them has run out of steam, sometimes at the outline stage, sometimes after five or six chapters. The enthusiasm flags and they become Great Big Scary Things That You’ll Never Finish.
Stuff Journalists Like nails the problem: you get brain-dead when you’ve spent all day working, and when you’ve been stuck in front of a screen all day the last thing you want to do after dinner is sit back down in front of a computer again. There are episodes of The Wire to watch! Partners to talk to! Videogames you still haven’t got round to playing! Exercising to do! Magazines to read!
You’d think that the natural ebb and flow of freelancing would be ideal for fiction writing, but it isn’t. That’s partly because work expands to fill the time available, so if you’ve got a spare day then the job you’re doing will magically expand to fill that time, and it’s partly because the time you don’t spend working is spent doing admin, hiding from the taxman, pitching for new work or dicking about on the internet and pretending it’s research.
Which makes me wonder, how do other people do it? Not necessarily writing, but doing anything creative when you’ve got a full time job, a family to feed and a very short block of time before you fall asleep on the sofa? Is it just about determination and willpower, or do you need to manage your “spare” time as ruthlessly as you do your work time? I’d love to hear other people’s experiences.
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Is the Palm Pre an iPhone killer?
Who cares? It looks nice though.
Full details here. Summary? Fast 3G, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, touch screen, 3 megapixel camera, GPS, integrated IM, SMS and MMS, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, 8GB on-board storage and Webkit-based web applications. It’s almost certainly going to cost a fair whack of cash, though.
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Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have to put up with this crap
It’s Friday, which means time for another Techradar opinion column. Today’s offering: why Apple and Microsoft’s keynotes sucked.
I love my job.
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Why Police snooping powers are a step too far
The nice people at Techradar.com have kindly given me a regular blab slot to talk about tech, and the first one is up: it’s about the powers that will enable the police to install keyloggers and other spyware on people’s PCs without a warrant.
Imagine if the Home Office decided that the best way to fight terrorism was to ban curtains.
“Hang on!” we’d say. “That means Creepy Dave across the road will be able to see me in my underpants!”
The Home Office would nod sagely. “That’s true, but you know who else has curtains? Terrorists! Terrorists and gangsters! So it’s curtains for curtains!”
The Home Office hasn’t banned curtains just yet, but it’s getting closer.
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Hallelujah
The fact of the matter here is that the best ever version of ‘Hallelujah’ was by Jeff Buckley and the worst ever version of ‘Hallelujah’ is Bono’s. Every other version of ‘Hallelujah’ between now and the end of time will sit somewhere between those two recordings.
As for whichever ‘crusades’ are currently running regarding the Buckley version – apparently there’s one in The Sun – we fail to grasp how any of this is a ‘real victory for real music over Simon Cowell’s plastic pop rubbishzzzzzz’ given that none of it would be happening without The X Factor. “Readers! Let’s really teach Simon Cowell a lesson and show him that he’s powerful enough to get Jeff Buckley in the Christmas Top 5 without lifting a single finger.” “Oh and let’s show that The X Factor is manipulative and not about music by making people buy a song not because they like it but as a token of their dislike for something else.” LOGIC FAIL.