This morning’s Observer column…
I have seen the future, and it’s scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in – ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin…
This morning’s Observer column, which has items about Apple, YouTube and Facebook. Sample:
The release of the new iPod range provided an insight into the company’s technical strategy. At the top of the line is the iPod Touch, which looks, feels and operates like the new phone – except that it doesn’t make or receive calls. It is, as one wag put it, ‘a de-phoned iPhone’. A better way to put it is that the iPhone is an iPod that makes calls. The music player is at the heart of Apple’s technological strategy, which leads to the thought that the company’s next laptop will be an iPod masquerading as a tablet…
This morning’s Observer column…
Aw, isn’t that sweet? The nice folks at Facebook are anxious to ‘help more people connect and find value’ from their social networking site.
Let’s see how that will work in practice. Someone types ‘John Smith’ into Google – and up comes his Facebook public search listing. To find out more about this fascinating chap, however, the searcher has to either log into Facebook (if s/he is already a member), or subscribe to the service if s/he is not. Either way, the searcher is lured into Facebook’s walled garden.
Does this help John Smith ‘find value’ from Facebook? Well, maybe – if he’s desperate for his personal details to be accessible to anyone on the web. But the main beneficiary of this erosion in users’ privacy will be the company that operates Facebook, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
Of course, Facebook’s owners protest that members can avoid this by adjusting their privacy settings. But you only have to look at a few Facebook profiles to see that most subscribers either don’t know how to limit the amount of personal information that is displayed on their profiles, or simply cannot be bothered. So, coming soon to an office near you: some really embarrassing job interviews…
This morning’s Observer column…
It’s an odd way to start a revolution, to put it mildly. The iPhone is a lovely piece of kit – in effect, a sleek, powerful personal computer running an industrial-grade operating system. It has the capability to be a really disruptive device in an industry that badly needs disruption. But it comes shackled to an unpopular, low-tech mobile network. So acquiring one is like buying a Porsche engine and fitting it to your lawnmower. People figured out quickly that you could cancel AT&T’s internet service to get its browser to work only via wi-fi; but you couldn’t use it on any other mobile phone/data network. (And still had to pay the 18-month AT&T subscription.) This was not a fundamental technical limitation of the device, but a technological shackle designed by Apple to drive business to AT&T…
This morning’s Observer column…
Irish Novelist Edna O’Brien once wrote a novel called August is a Wicked Month. Tell that to the folks who run Skype, the internet telephony service that 200 million people worldwide now habitually use for voice calls and instant messaging, and you’ll be rewarded with rueful nods….
This morning’s Observer column…
‘Political language’, observed George Orwell in his great essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ Much the same applies to the output of the public relations industry. One of the most important public services that mainstream journalism can provide, therefore, consists of decoding PR-speak: translating its half-truths, unsupported assertions and evasions into plain English…
This column is really a celebration of John Gruber’s lovely translation of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’.
Orwell would have loved it.
This morning’s Observer column…
There’s an ancient adage in the computer industry – it may have originated at Microsoft – which says: ‘Always eat your own dog food’. What it means is that if you are writing software other people are going to use, then you must use it yourself. If you’re going to ask other people to commit their time, data and perhaps even sanity to using your product, you should take the same risks yourself…
This morning’s Observer column…
First, the numbers. China has 137 million users (compared with about 190 million in the US), but the online population is increasing at such a rate that in about two years there will be more Chinese than Americans on the net.
Within China, however, there’s a deep digital divide: Chinese users are overwhelmingly urban, young and male. A third are students, while a further third are business users. The deepest divide is the urban vs rural one; internet penetration among city dwellers is 20 per cent, compared with only 3 per cent for rural districts. (The comparable US figures are 70 per cent and 61 per cent respectively.)
Given that China’s rulers see the net as a critical enabler of development, a key policy issue for the regime is how to bridge the urban/rural gap. Fallows cites research suggesting that the two big obstacles are lack of connectivity and a huge skills deficiency…
This morning’s Observer column…
‘You can’, my mother used to say, ‘have too much of a good thing’. Since she was generally not in favour of good things (which she equated with self-indulgence), I habitually disregarded this advice. But I am now beginning to wonder if she may have been right after all. This thought is sparked by an inspection of my email system. I have 852 messages in my ‘office’ inbox. Correction, make that 854: two more came in while I was typing that last sentence. My personal inbox has 1,304 messages. My spam-blocking service tells me that, in the past 30 days, I received no fewer than 3,920 invitations to: enhance my, er, physique; invest in dodgy shares; send money to the deserving widows of Nigerian dictators; and purchase Viagra. I am – literally – drowning in email.
And I am not alone…
This morning’s Observer column…
A new spectre is haunting the planet – technolust. We psychiatrists define it as the self-indulgent craving for attractive gadgets offering at best only marginal improvements over older devices but inducing fleeting, orgasmic, smug superiority in their possessors.
Technolust was thought to afflict only a small minority of the population – generally investment bankers with more money than sense and pony-tailed geeks with neither. But developments in the US have led scientists to fear that the condition is reaching epidemic proportions and affecting people regarded as immune to infection…