Apple’s ‘Kill Switch’

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Useful Economist.com piece about “the struggle to balance openness and control”.

“I AM RICH” is an iPhone application that made a brief debut on Apple’s software store this month. It cost $999.99 and did nothing more than put a glowing ruby on the iPhone’s screen. Seeing it as cynical rather than practical, Apple yanked it (after eight people bought it).

Apple has fought with developers and killed applications before. Indeed Apple’s boss, Steve Jobs, acknowledged that the iPhone has a “kill switch” that lets the company remotely remove software from people’s handsets. “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Apple’s corporate culture is famously closed. By closely overseeing their hardware and software, the company believes it can better ensure that everything works properly. Opening their systems to independent developers entails a loss of control that they find hard to handle. Other companies can sympathise…

The article also mentions Jonathan Zittrain’s book.

Moules ‘n Boules

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Every Friday evening in the Summer, villagers and guests in Cotignac gather to eat moules marinières and (afterwards) play Boules. The latter is not for the faint-hearted. Think of it as the French equivalent to croquet: banal in appearance and vicious in reality.

Facing up to one’s responsibilities

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I’m not a fan of the French President, and became even more irritated by his antics down the road on vacation in Cap Negré, where he’s been running a kind of holiday camp for chopper-ferried celebs like U2’s Bono. But at least he knew what to do when ten French paras were killed in Afghanistan. First he interrupted his holiday by flying out to see the troops, and then he was in Les Invalides at 11.30am yesterday for the ceremony to honour the returning dead. Compare that with the fact that Tony Blair never turned up at Brize Norton to greet the coffins of soldiers he had consigned to battle. Or the way that George Bush has always studiously avoided any public encounter with his returning casualties.

The political Olympics

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Tom Friedman on the Georgian mess…

If the conflict in Georgia were an Olympic event, the gold medal for brutish stupidity would go to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The silver medal for bone-headed recklessness would go to Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the bronze medal for rank short-sightedness would go to the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams…

Hmmm… Not quite. The Gold goes to Saakashvili IMHO.

So what’s new?

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This is the time of year when US News & World Report publishes its list of the ‘top’ US universities. And guess what? Harvard comes out top, followed by Princeton, Yale and MIT & Stanford tying for fourth place. Average annual fees for the top five = $35,636.60. Just thought you’d like to know.

Hype Cycle 2008

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One of the most useful analytical devices I’ve ever encountered when lecturing about new technology is the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Here’s the one for 2008 (courtesy of TechCrunch).