Farwell then, netbooks: it was nice knowing you

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Nice piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian on the rise and fall of something that was once the New New Thing. Conclusion:

Netbooks had a short but interesting life – going from the one-time saviour of the PC industry, to just another mispriced attempt to push some low-powered Intel chips and garner more money for Microsoft.

But the squeeze on pricing, plus the fact that Windows licences aren’t free, meant that they got pushed into a tiny niche: worse specifications than slightly pricier laptops, no margin for the manufacturers, and worse battery life and portability than the burgeoning number of tablets with custom apps.

The questions that do remain is what’s going to happen to the various government contracts in countries such as Greece and Malaysia to equip schools with netbooks – or whether those contracts have finished, or been discontinued.

What, too, about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project? Essentially, it’s trying to get netbook-like devices to classrooms in developing countries. There hasn’t been much news of huge wins this year, though, going by its end-of-year blogpost. Perhaps it will function independently of the death of consumer netbooks.

So farewell, netbooks. It was nice knowing you, but ultimately, you were just another PC.

One of the most marked differences between the technology and old-media industries is the speed with which product categories come and go. The Netbook is a classic case-study of this.

One big question: Google still seems to be pushing its Chromebook.

Delhi gang-rape: the mote in Western eyes

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Terrific Guardian piece by Emer O’Toole about the subliminal racism of much Western comment about the horrific death of an Indian rape-victim. Male violence against women is depressingly common in most societies — including our own. So, as O’Toole points out, there’s “a misplaced sense of cultural superiority” underpinning much Western media coverage of the Indian atrocity:

For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction. This is the strange kind of reportage you tend to get on the issue.

Thirty years on

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The Internet — in the sense of the network based on the TCP/IP family of protocols — is 30 years old today. Google asked Vint Cerf, who with Robert Kahn was co-designer of the system, to mark the anniversary with a blog post explaining how it came about.

TCP/IP was tested across the three types of networks developed by DARPA, and eventually was anointed as their new standard. In 1981, Jon Postel published a transition plan to migrate the 400 hosts of the ARPANET from the older NCP protocol to TCP/IP, including a deadline of January 1, 1983, after which point all hosts not switched would be cut off.

When the day came, it’s fair to say the main emotion was relief, especially amongst those system administrators racing against the clock. There were no grand celebrations—I can’t even find a photograph. The only visible mementos were the “I survived the TCP/IP switchover” pins proudly worn by those who went through the ordeal!

It’s typical of Vint that he should downplay the brilliance of the TCP idea, not to mention his own role in it. A fuller version of the story is told in my book on the history of the Net. As a taster, here’s the text of the relevant chapter.

Why a desktop OS doesn’t work on a tablet

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Perceptive piece by Scott Gilbertson in The Register. Sample:

So far, despite Microsoft’s best efforts, the tablet world is still very much orbiting the twin stars of iOS and Android.

Having used a Samsung Windows 8 tablet for a few months, I have a theory as to why: you think you want a full desktop computer on your tablet – I certainly did — but you don’t. It simply doesn’t work.

In the case of Windows 8 you can blame some of the “not working” on the buggy, incomplete software that is Windows 8, but not all of the problems can be attributed to a shortcoming of touch APIs.

Much of what makes a full desktop interface terrible on a touch screen tablet is simply the whole desktop paradigm was never designed to be used on a tablet and it shows. The Metro interface for Windows 8 is excellent; different, but in my experience really well done.

Where Windows 8 on a tablet falls apart is when you try to bring the software keyboard to the traditional desktop interface on a tablet. The software keyboard takes up half the screen, which makes even simple tasks difficult. How to you rename a file and move it? First you tap it to select it, then you tap the button to bring up the keyboard, then you type, then you touch away the keyboard, then you touch the file again. It isn’t just awkward and slow; it’s downright antagonizing.

Yep.

Steve Jobs’s yacht released

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From The Register:

The yacht was launched in October, with the team that worked on the custom-build project receiving a specially engraved iPod from the Jobs family. Starck, however, had been promised nine per cent of the estimated €150m cost of the boat as a commission, but the Jobs family claimed that Venus had not been as expensive as first planned and disputed the charge.

After the yacht completed sea trials and arrived the Port of Amsterdam earlier this month, Dutch bailiffs boarded her and put Venus in chains until the legal dispute was settled. The impounding order has now been lifted and a settlement achieved on Christmas Eve, Le Monde reports.

“The Venus is not under arrest,” said Gérard Moussault, the Dutch lawyer representing the Jobs family. “A solution has been found and a guarantee has been deposited in a bank account so that the boat can leave.” He declined comment on the exact amount.

Phew! That’s all right, then.

LinkedIn endorsements turn you into the product

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This morning’s Observer column.

for much of my time on LinkedIn, things have been mercifully quiet. There’s been the odd connection request from someone I know; a persistent stream of annoying invitations (always declined) from total strangers seeking to add me to their “professional network”; occasional requests from ex-colleagues for recommendations; notifications of achievements, promotions, awards etc that have come the way of my contacts. Small beer, really.

Recently, however, baffling emails from LinkedIn began to trickle into my inbox informing me that so-and-so had “endorsed” me. What it meant, apparently, is that so-and-so had affirmed that I do indeed possess the skills that my profile claims I have. Not having asked anyone for such endorsement, I was initially perplexed.

Then the trickle turned into a steady stream. It seemed that everyone on my contact list had, somehow, been badgered into confirming that my online CV wasn’t fraudulent…