Coming soon — an Android NetBook?

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From Technology Review.

Skytone, a Chinese manufacturer, has started showing off the first netbook to run Android, an operating system developed by Google that currently runs on just a single device, the G1mobile phone. Using Android makes sense for Skytone because its netbook is minimal (even by netbook standards): it supports 128 megabits of RAM and only up to 4 gigabytes of storage on a flash-based, solid-state disk. And importantly, its central processing unit is an ARM11 chip–the same model found inside the iPhone.

The Eye of the Needle

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I’ve often thought that, in the obnoxiousness stakes, Andrew Lloyd-Webber ranks just below Jeffrey Archer, the so-called ‘novelist’, in that the same joke can apply to either:

First man: Why did you take an instant dislike to Jeffrey Archer/Andrew Lloyd-Webber?

Second man: I found that it saved time.

Now comes a lovely blog post by Sean French

In today’s Mail on Sunday Andrew Lloyd-Webber compares the tax-raising Labour Party to Somali pirates.

Thirty years ago I was, in a way, an employee of Lloyd-Webber. In my gap year I worked as a stagehand at London’s Palace Theatre where Jesus Christ Superstar was then in its sixth year. I used to collect the ointment jar from Mary Magdalene and prepare the incense for the orgy scene in the temple. I estimate that I sat through the musical about 150 times.

I will make no comment about the effect of that experience on me and my feelings towards Lloyd-Webber, except to say that it would give me great pleasure if circumstances arose so that he was able to experience Somalian piracy at first hand.

Me too. Strange: until now I’ve felt quite hostile towards those pirates.

ISPs to do the government’s monitoring for it

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From a BBC report.

Communications firms are being asked to record all internet contacts between people as part of a modernisation in UK police surveillance tactics.

The home secretary scrapped plans for a database but wants details to be held and organised for security services.

The new system would track all e-mails, phone calls and internet use, including visits to social network sites.

The Tories said the Home Office had “buckled under Conservative pressure” in deciding against a giant database.

Announcing a consultation on a new strategy for communications data and its use in law enforcement, Jacqui Smith said there would be no single government-run database.

Communications data is an essential tool for law enforcement agencies to track murderers and paedophiles, save lives and tackle crime

But she also said that “doing nothing” in the face of a communications revolution was not an option.

The Web vs the Cloud

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Interesting thought.

The Web was perfectly named. Every point connecting to other points, not always directly, but your requests and data would get there. And even if part of the web were to be destroyed or taken down in some way, then the remainder would exist. Cloud Computing will retain this aspect of the web design as its backbone form of communication. However, the Cloud Computing concept is also perfectly named.

Whereas with the Web we could, from any point on the web, see pretty much everything else, with the Cloud we will not be able to know what’s taking place in the system, just as we cannot see today what exists inside of clouds. They are murky, dense objects that reveal almost no depth at all. In fact, if you’ve ever seen airplanes fly in and out of clouds, you know that once they are a few feet on the inside they’re completely obscured. And it’s the same with Cloud Computing.

We will have access points to access these future Cloud Computing systems, the ones which from all outward appearances will seem like a regular website. However, the evolution of computing power over time has mandated (from a business perspective) that the available data be mined for usable information which can then, in some way, relate to profit — either through better services offered to users, or for marketing and sales revenues through more directly targeted campaigns.

While everything on the outside appears to be as it was before, what’s happening on the inside of the new cloud-computing systems will be completely different. And I have, as of yet, to see a comprehensive analysis of how our privacy, our data security and our online lives will be affected by such a system.

To me, Cloud Computing models offer the greatest possibility for data control–and the abuse of that control–that I’ve ever seen.

Twittering executives

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Lucy Kellaway has been looking at what business executives do with Twitter. She is predictably funny about it:

Despite the dismal use to which executives are putting Twitter, more and more are signing up for fear of being left behind. Last week I met a British business leader who told me that he had just joined, but complained that he was now so focused on turning the details of his day into pithy tweets that he was finding it hard to pay attention to what he was doing. Worse, once he had composed his Tweet he felt insecure and unpopular as only three people seemed to be following him….

Labour’s affair with bankers

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Gordon Brown sucking up to Richard S. Fuld, CEO of Lehman Bros, just after opening Lehman’s new London HQ. Photograph from tonight’s ‘Dispatches’ on Channel 4.

Terrific FT.com column by John Kay.

What would have happened if the Financial Services Authority or Bank of England had sought to block the competing bids from RBS and Barclays for ABN Amro – a contest which, we now know, would bankrupt the bank that won the race? The phones in Downing Street would have been ringing insistently and it is easy to imagine the government’s response.

Little has changed. The government continues to see financial services through the eyes of the financial services industry, for which the priority is to restore business as usual. For a time in 2008, it seemed possible to argue that a package of temporary support for the banking industry, combined with substantial recapitalisation of the weaker players, might stabilise the financial sector and prevent serious knock-on effects.

But the problems of banks are much deeper than were then acknowledged and the destabilisation of the real economy has happened anyway. Government now provides taxpayers’ money to financial services businesses in previously unimaginable quantities. But there is no control over the use of the money, no insistence on structural reform or management reorganisation, no safeguarding of the essential economic functions of the financial services industry and no accountability for the damage that has been done.

It is as though the teenage children and their friends were to wreck the house and then demand that the grown-ups clean up before the next party. Their parents are too intimidated to do anything more than ask Uncle Adair to keep an eye on them and excoriate the hapless Fred who made off with some of the silver.

M$ falters

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Well, well. This has been a long time coming.

On Thursday, Microsoft set the wrong kind of record, as it reported the first year-over-year quarterly revenue decline since it first sold stock to the public in 1986. In its third quarter, which ended March 31, Microsoft said its revenue fell 6 percent, to $13.65 billion, from $14.45 billion. It reported net income of $2.98 billion, or 33 cents a share — a 32 percent drop from the $4.39 billion, or 47 cents a share, reported in the period last year….

Of course it’s not really a reflection on anything M$ is doing. It’s just that it’s so tied to the business PC market that it’s bound to be badly affected by the downturn. Nobody’s upgrading at the moment. And I guess lots of companies (and customers) are waiting for Windows 7.