From Bill Thompson’s Flickr photostream. It’s the first time I’ve ever been grateful for my MacBookPro’s tendency to overheat!
Category Archives: Asides
Chutzpah
You have to admire RyanAir. They have to shut down their website for three days to install major upgrades. So they’re using the necessity as an excuse for another fire-sale!
Sony gets revenge for Betamax
Revenge, they say, is a dish best eaten cold. Well, Sony must be chewing fossils, because Toshiba has given up on HD DVD…
TOKYO – Toshiba’s decision to no longer develop, make or market high-definition HD DVD players and recorders will mean consumers can start feeling more confident about buying the victorious rival technology – a Blu-ray disc player.
Analysts say competition is expected to heat up among the manufacturers of Blu-ray players and recorders, which include Japanese makers Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Sharp Corp. as well as Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea.
In making the announcement, Toshiba Corp. President Atsutoshi Nishida said he wanted to avoid confusion among consumers…
Laid off? Share the pain with Twitter. (And get job offers.)
From the Los Angeles Times…
SAN FRANCISCO — When Ryan Kuder lost his job last week, everyone knew it. That’s because he chronicled the experience of his last hours at Yahoo Inc. through a stream of electronic dispatches laced with gallows humor.
Using Twitter, a service popular in Silicon Valley that allows users to broadcast short messages to an unlimited number of people, Kuder posted periodic updates of his final, caffeine-fueled day as a senior marketing manager at the Internet company, starting with his last commute to the Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters and ending with margaritas at Chevy’s.
“Ironic that I just got my PC repaired yesterday. Won’t be needing that anymore.”
“This is a serious downer. Trying to drown it in free lattes. Which I will miss.”
“Dear BlackBerry, What great times we had. I’ll miss you. At least until tonight when I stop on my way home and buy an iPhone. Love, Me.”
McMansions
What’s wrong with modern Ireland, in a nutshell. Plus, of course, the sales figures for SUVs.
The fame game
Heather McCartney has released a YouTube video detailing how her live has been made a living hell by media intrusion. Mariella Frostrup is not very sympathetic.
Last weekend, while the rest of the film world was occupied at the Baftas ceremony and Heather Mills McCartney was doubtless debating which court costume would best suit her, I was visited at home by a friend who’s also one of this year’s Oscar nominees.
Despite the purported dangers of the paparazzi, she took the tube, without even a pair of Prada sunglasses for protection and, after lunch and a quick briefing on the joys of the Oyster card, returned by the same mode of transport to her West End hotel. Then again, you’re more likely to find a celebrity snapper on the tail of your limo than poised at the entrance to Covent Garden station. It’s proof for those who need convincing that if you don’t turn your life into a circus, you won’t draw a crowd.
Right on! (As we ageing hippies say.)
Testosterone losing its Nuts?
At last, some good news for civilisation.
ABC’s magazine circulation results for the second half of 2007, out last week, arrive full of blighted hopes and clouded futures. Are young men, oozing testosterone, the key to the future? Not when you see Loaded down 30 per cent in a year, Maxim 40 per cent, and Nuts and Zoo 8.9 per cent and 12.8 per cent off the pace respectively. Boobs and booty seem to be more of a turn-off than turn-on these days. And over in the celebrity gossip enclosure, too, Heat, Now and Closer are all down around 12 per cent (with 5.4 per cent saying Goodbye! to Hello!
Yippee!
Why are governments so bad at IT?
The Economist has an interesting survey section on this.
Why is government unable to reap the same benefits as business, which uses technology to lower costs, please customers and raise profits? The three main reasons are lack of competitive pressure, a tendency to reinvent the wheel and a focus on technology rather than organisation.
Governments have few direct rivals. Amazon.com must outdo other online booksellers to win readers’ money. Google must beat Yahoo!. Unless every inch of such companies’ websites offers stellar clarity and convenience, customers go elsewhere. But if your country’s tax-collection online offering is slow, clunky or just plain dull, then tough. When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead…
Internet 2 reinvents phone network
From Technology Review
Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, is designing a new network intended to open up large amounts of dedicated bandwidth as needed. For example, a researcher wanting to test telesurgery technologies–for which a smooth, reliable Internet connection is essential–might use the network to temporarily create a dedicated path for the experiment. Called the dynamic circuit network, its immediate applications are academic, but its underlying technologies could one day filter into the commercial Internet, and it could be used, for example, to carry high-definition video to consumers…
This might be interesting as an academic experiment, but it’s nonsense on stilts in the context of the commercial internet. You cam imagine Hollywood and the multimedia companies slavering at the prospect of ‘premium’ Internet service “with a direct connection from our studios to your home”.
BlackBerry rage
From Technology Review…
Research in Motion Ltd. said customers in the United States and Canada ”experienced intermittent delays” for about three hours Monday beginning about 3:30 p.m. EST. RIM said no messages were lost, and voice and text messaging services were unaffected.
”It is too early to determine root cause at this time, but RIM does have a team addressing this issue in order to define the problem and prevent it in the future,” the company said in a statement.
The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with smart phones like the BlackBerry Pearl.
Outages have been rare in the BlackBerry’s nine-year history, but when they do hit, subscribers who have become addicted to the gadgets are quick to unleash their fury.
”I’m mad — it’s enough already,” said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc.
Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smart phone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the blink again.
”I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares,” Gold said…