Journalism, radio and stuff like that
Have you seen the BMW-designed Mesh PC? It mings.
And then there are the Ferraris – the Acer Ferraris, that is. “Technology and innovation are driving forces behind man’s greatest achievements,” the blurb says.
“They are the foundations of past victories and the essences of future successes,” it continues. “Look, we’ve made a red laptop with a picture of a horse on it!” it really ought to add.
A fun wee piece I wrote for PC Plus has ventured online:
Back in the good old days, Microsoft did desktops, Google stuck to search and Apple made toys for people in polo necks. No more.
The superpowers of the technology world are at war, and like real wars, the battle is happening on several fronts. They’re fighting on the desktop, they’re fighting on mobile phones, they’re fighting in the browser and they’re fighting in your front room.
Who will prevail, and who will end up in a bunker?
What they don’t seem to understand is that online privacy is like curtains: you don’t block the windows because you’re running a meth lab or a brothel in your house; you block them because you don’t want weirdoes peering through the window when you’re watching TV Burp.
We know people will pay for niche content that’s directly relevant to their jobs or their hobbies, but will they pay for general stuff – The Sun, for example, or even access to their local paper?
According to BT and the Carphone Warehouse, it seems that implementing the proposed three-strikes system would cost at least £2 per connection per month – an enormous amount of money that will have little or no effect on file sharing.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to subsidise Spotify?
Look around you the next time you’re at a gig, or in an airport, or anywhere else large numbers of people are gathered. You’ll see loads of iPhones, many of them in the hands of idiots.
Smartphone apps are great – unless they’re putting you out of business. Today’s Techradar op/ed:
If you can scan the barcode on a flat-screen TV, a fridge, a Fimbles DVD or anything else you’re thinking of buying, you can instantly discover where there’s a better deal. It could be the shop next door, or a website. That’s seriously bad news for high street shops, because the internet will undercut them almost every time.
As you might have heard, Modern Warfare 2 – which comes out today – includes a bit where you’re doing terrorist things. It’s causing a bit of controversy, and of course I have an opinion on that.
What we’re seeing here is something much more interesting than mere headline chasing: it’s a dramatic example of how videogames are trying to grow up.
If we want our games to grow up with us, we need to be grown up in the way we react to them – and that includes dumping the “we must protect the children” crap when games come with an 18 certificate specifically saying they’re not suitable for kids.
If it weren’t for Firefox, you’d be reading this in IE6 – the software equivalent of the horrible Trabants the East Germans tooled around in before the Berlin Wall came down. It’s a browser, certainly, in much the same way that a Trabant is a car. But the Trabant isn’t a great car, and IE6 certainly isn’t a great browser.
Lord Mandelson’s draconian anti-filesharing plans are designed to save the music business. But does it need saving?
Thanks to evil music pirates, sales of singles in 2009 are, er, higher than they’ve ever been. “This truly is the era of the digital single,” Martin Talbot of the Official Charts Company says.
“The UK Top 40 is now almost entirely comprised of digital singles,” the British Phonographic Industry says. So does the music business really need saving from technology – or is technology saving it from itself?