NYT discovers Tablet PC

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Yep. Here’s the evidence.

SAN FRANCISCO — The high-tech industry has been working itself into paroxysms of excitement lately over an idea that is not exactly new: tablet computers.

Quietly, several high-tech companies are lining up to deliver versions of these keyboard-free, touch-screen portable machines in the next few months. Industry watchers have their eye on Apple in particular to sell such a device by early next year.

Tablets have been around in various forms for two decades, thus far delivering little other than memorable failure. Nonetheless, the new batch of devices has gripped the imagination of tech executives, bloggers and gadget hounds, who are projecting their wildest dreams onto these literal blank slates.

In these visions, tablets will save the newspaper and book publishing industries, present another way to watch television and movies, play video games, and offer a visually rich way to enjoy the Web and the expanding world of mobile applications.

“Desktops, laptops — we already know how those work,” said Brian Lam, editorial director of the popular gadget site Gizmodo, which reports and hypothesizes almost daily about these devices. Tablets, he said, “are one of the last few mysteries left.”

On this day…

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… in 1957, the Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit, thereby triggering the alarm in the Eisenhower Administration that led to the setting-up of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which funded the development of the Arpanet, which led to the Internet… Read all about it here. (Warning: shameless plug.)

There’s life in them thar fogeys

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This morning’s Observer column.

WE ARE all slaves of some defunct economist, said Keynes, who until the recent disturbances in the banking system was widely regarded as defunct himself. But it wasn't just bankers and politicians who denied their indebtedness to ancient economic principles. Newspaper and print publishers generally also ignored the axiom that, in a competitive market, prices tend to converge on the marginal cost – the cost of producing one more unit of the good(s) in question.

The internet provides a pretty good approximation of such a market…

How to deal with Iran: an aside

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From a column by Timothy Garton-Ash.

A textbook example of what democracies should not do was provided last year by a joint venture between Siemens and Nokia, called Nokia Siemens Networks. It sold the Iranian regime a sophisticated system with which they can monitor the internet, including emails, internet phone calls and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, much used by Iranian protesters. In today’s politics of people power, that is the equivalent of selling a dictator tanks or poison gas.

So, to be clear: a German company, Siemens, which used slave labour during the Third Reich, sold a Holocaust-denying president the instruments with which he can persecute young Iranians risking their lives for freedom. Think of that every time you buy something made by Siemens.

Indeed. Last time I looked, the BBC had outsourced all of its IT systems to Siemens. We didn’t hear anything about that during the post-election demonstrations.

Welcome to dreamland

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I watched Gordon Brown’s ghastly Conference speech and thought that Simon Hoggart got it right.

But there was a dreamlike quality to the whole speech. The gist of it was, that after nearly 13 years, Labour wants a crack at government. Having constructed a short, sanitised version of a past that did happen, he launched into a future that probably never will: whimpering bankers flee from the wrath of the British people, grateful old folk get free care at home, sinister-sounding “action squads” will sort out troublemakers on problem estates, no more hereditary peers, a plebiscite on PR, green jobs for green people, as he almost said, and a weird Victorian notion of an institution for fallen women – a barracks for single teenage mothers. There will be “family intervention projects” for the most “chaotic” families. “Blimey, it’s the fip-man at the door. Put that spliff out and get the dog off the baby’s tea.”

And asbos will be strictly enforced, no doubt by the same action squads that will stop binge drinking and bankers’ bonuses. But as the late Linda Smith said: “Don’t knock asbos – for some of these kids it’s the only qualification they’ve got.”

The whole fantasy, that Labour has another five years in office to do all the things it never quite got round to in the last 13, pleased the conference mightily.

They’re going to dream massive buy-two-get-one-free dreams and reach deep inside themselves like the monster from Alien. They loved it.

As regular readers know, I’ve thought for a long time that the reason Tony Blair hung on for so long was that he knew Brown would be a disaster. In that, at least, he was dead right.

The ‘Web Squared’ Era

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Web 2.0, the name we gave this phenomenon in 2004 when we named our new conference, turns five on Oct. 5 (the anniversary of the first Web 2.0 Summit). In our ongoing quest to understand where technology is taking us, the milestone serves as an opportunity not so much to look back but to examine the landscape ahead. Whereas the advent of Web 2.0 marked a profound shift in the meaning of the Web, this next phase is less a new direction than an exploration of what becomes possible when the building blocks of Web 2.0 (such as participation, collective intelligence and so on) increase by orders of magnitude.

We call this step Web Squared.

— Tim O’Reilly, writing in Forbes.com.