Shiny gadgets and clever computers
Last.fm isn’t telling the RIAA that you’ve pirated the new U2 album. But you might be.
Why go to the hassle of trying to get data from websites when the users will hand it to you on a plate?
We’re sure that some of the people listening to the leaked album simply forgot that Last.fm tells other people what you’re listening to, but we’re also sure that a fair number of them were boasting. Look at me! I’ve got something I shouldn’t have! I am cool!
There’s a huge discussion on Fark.com based on a brilliant question:
Youngish [Fark user] has no comprehension what her adult life would be like without the internet or computer technology. Describe your pre-internet life
It’s a brilliant question because the potential answers are so big. Baby Bigmouth wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the internet – I met Mrs Bigmouth online – and my job wouldn’t exist without it either. And yet the whole thing has happened in a very short space of time, so Baby B was born into a world where the things we already take for granted – broadband, YouTube, Google, iTunes, Facebook – are all just a few years old. And eventually she’s going to ask me, what were things like before the internet?
What would you say? Would you sound like a Daily Mail reader, hankering for a simpler time? Or would you be more like the Yorkshiremen in the Monty Python sketch where they exaggerate the awfulness of their upbringings? Is answering the question like trying to explain what the world was like before fire, electricity and the wheel?
The days run away like horses over the hill…
Is Half-Life 2 the future of indie movie-making?
The potential is mind-boggling, but let’s be honest: we’re not quite there yet. The constant fast-cutting in Escape from City 17 can’t disguise the fact that some of the in-game footage doesn’t quite gel with the real footage, the Combine Citadel looks like it’s been glued into the background with Pritt Stick and we’re pretty sure that none of the $500 budget was spent on the script.
Overall, though, it works – and to our eyes it’s no worse than the CGI in the most recent Hulk movie, which cost $150 million to make and still looked like it had been thrown together on a ZX Spectrum by an angry toddler.
Six companies Microsoft should buy:
Microsoft isn’t short of cash, and it recently – and unsuccessfully – offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion.
The idea was to catch up with Google, but the big G isn’t the only firm doing well in areas where Microsoft isn’t. So perhaps Microsoft should widen its net.
From video and music to shopping and social networks, we think these six firms should be on Microsoft’s shopping list.
Leaving aside the fact that the paperback book is pretty much perfect, Amazon’s device doesn’t do colour and you’re not going to use a $359 gadget to kill wasps, there are three big problems with it.
The first is that despite the redesign, it still looks like something Noddy and Big Ears would use. The second is that Amazon has removed some key features, making it less flexible than before. And the third is that it simply isn’t good enough when you compare it to other gadgets.
I thought using the full product name as per Amazon’s own listing – “Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)” – throughout the piece would be funny, but it seems I’m the only person who does.
I’m still really excited about e-books, but I don’t have any gadget lust towards this one at all.
A nice rant from Paul at Techradar:
Windows 7 should be given free to owners of Vista Ultimate as a final ‘sorry we screwed you over’ Ultimate Extra.
Ultimate users! Let’s head for Microsoft HQ with flaming torches!
Is it Tuesday already? To celebrate the news that Woz is doing the US equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing, here’s a cheery look at some of the other daft things he’s done. Sadly there wasn’t enough time to Photoshop a pic to make him look like The Joker.
When we discovered that Steve Wozniak would be competing in Dancing With The Stars, we had two thoughts: one, could we get Steve Ballmer to go on, too? And two, is there anything Woz won’t do for a laugh?
The answer to both questions, it seems, is no. For the tech industry’s very own Joker, tomfoolery is never far away.
And here’s one about blogging for money.
Is there an alternative to ads? Not really. Citizen journalism photo agency Scoopt shut its doors last week because it couldn’t persuade papers to pay a decent whack for images – it seems that major media outlets would rather get you to send in your snaps for free – and the wages offered by firms via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are pathetic. Write a review? Five cents. Do some digging into historical figures? Three cents. Build a space rocket, fly to Mars, discover intelligent life and bring it back in a cage? Seven cents.
The Onion, via Paul @ Techradar.com:
Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work
Me, on Techradar: OMG! 132 versions of Windows 7!
We’re the first to mock Microsoft when the firm deserves it, but the Windows 7 line-up simply isn’t as complicated as some reports would have you believe. For the majority of us there will be two choices, just as there were with Windows XP. Home user? Windows 7 Home Premium. Home worker or small business? Windows 7 Professional.
Also on the site: Become an App Store millionaire: how three iPhone developers made it big.
“Look at it this way: most people show up to work, or school, or whatever, and they are eager to show their friends what cool new things they’ve got on their iPhone. Of the 50 apps they may have on their iPhone, they may only get a chance to show five of them to their friends. If your app is one of those five, and it can prove its worth in ten to fifteen seconds, then you’ve got yourself a successful app.” [Steve Demeter, developer of Trism]
This one was slightly delayed because I’ve spent most of the last few days in bed feeling sorry for myself. Better late than never, though.
It came from nowhere and spread like a virus. Suddenly everybody we knew was on it – telling us what they’d been up to, uploading photos, sending flirtatious messages and logging on as if the site were crack and they were addicts.
In no time at all it had millions of users of all ages, and it was regularly name-checked in scandalous newspaper articles. People were using it to arrange affairs, or to waste time at work, or to post things they’d later regret.
And then we all dumped Friends Reunited for Facebook.
Good point from No Rock’n’Roll Fun:
Ed Stourton summarised the position of the Digital Britain report as seeing access to broadband as being on a par with access to power and water: an essential service for the way we live now. It’s impossible to see how you could square a belief that broadband is an essential service with arbitrary removal of that service on the whim of a record company.