Daily Archives: January 15, 2009

The flip side of Moore’s Law

Posted on by

From this week’s Economist…

Constant improvements mean that more features can be added to these products each year without increasing the price. A desire to do ever more elaborate things with computers—in particular, to supply and consume growing volumes of information over the internet—kept people and companies upgrading. Each time they bought a new machine, it cost around the same as the previous one, but did a lot more. But now things are changing, partly because the industry is maturing, and partly because of the recession. Suddenly there is much more interest in products that apply the flip side of Moore’s law: instead of providing ever-increasing performance at a particular price, they provide a particular level of performance at an ever-lower price.

The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop. Netbooks are great for browsing the web on the sofa, or tapping out a report on the plane. They will not run the latest games, and by modern standards have limited storage capacity and processing power. They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves: sales of netbooks increased from 182,000 in 2007 to 11m in 2008, and will reach 21m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm. For common tasks, such as checking e-mail and shopping online, they are good enough.

The Evening Pravda

Posted on by

Aw, isn’t this nice.

The billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is to buy London’s Evening Standard tomorrow, in a dramatic move that would see him become the first Russian oligarch to own a major British newspaper, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

Lebedev is poised to buy a controlling stake in the ailing title, following a year of secret negotiations with Lord Rothermere, its owner and the chairman of the Daily Mail General Trust.

Under the terms of the deal Lebedev will purchase 76% of the newspaper, with the Associated Newspapers group retaining 24%. His son Evgeny, who lives in London, is due to sign the deal with Daily Mail General Trust tomorrow. The agreement will make Lebedev the paper's controversial new proprietor.

It’s a logical move, really. After all, the KGB already controls all Russia’s media outlets. It needed to diversify overseas.

So will Mr Lebedev be interfering in British politics? Perish the thought. “My influence would be next to zero,” he declared. He promised an “absolutely” hands-off approach, and said it would be up to the Standard’s editor-in-chief and journalists to agree the paper’s editorial line. Absolutely. But now at least his friend Vlad will get a fair deal from the Russophobic British press.

Wonder how long it will be until he has a peeerage.

Don’t Blame the Internet

Posted on by

Here’s something to make the troglodytes on the Today programme choke on their muesli.

Last year, after the social-networking site MySpace found that its members included some 29,000 registered sex offenders, the nation’s top state prosecutors demanded a technological fix, asking that the industry “explore and develop age and identity verification tools for social networking web sites”. But a new study concludes that such technologies are unlikely to thwart anonymous predators and that the threat facing children online is no worse than it is in the real world.

“Our review found too little evidence that any given technology or set of technologies, on their own, will improve safety for minors online to any significant degree”, says the report, written by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group of 29 businesses, nonprofit organizations, academic groups, and technology companies that conducted the investigation with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, at the request of 49 state attorneys general. “Moreover, the Internet itself, the ways in which minors use it, and the communities in which they participate, all change constantly, and the available technologies are quickly evolving.”

While no single age-verification solution can solve the Internet’s problems, tools are available to those who choose to use them, and social-networking sites cooperate with law enforcement and actively root out reported problems, says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who led the effort. Some 40 technologies are already on the market, including age-verification products and Web filtering and blocking programs.