Useful Tech Review interview. Includes a link to this video of nine-year-old kids replacing the motherboard on the XO laptop.
Wii Are Amused, apparently
Hmmm… I wonder if I can believe this story…
The gadget-loving Queen has become HOOKED on Prince William’s new Nintendo Wii games console.
William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton bought him the £200 gift for Christmas – but he now has to share it with his grandma.
A Palace source told The People: “When she saw William playing a game after lunch at Sandringham she thought the Nintendo looked tremendous fun and begged to join in.
“She played a simple ten-pin bowling game and by all accounts was a natural.
“It was hilarious. William was in fits of laughter. He was enormously impressed at having such a cool gran.
“And although she is 81 the Queen’s hand-eye co-ordination was as good as somebody half her age.”
The Wii was this Christmas’s musthave gift. Players can create their own customised on-screen lookalike – just like our jokey Elizabeth pictured above.
Kate, 26 on Wednesday, watched as William, 25, unwrapped the gift at the Royal Family’s festive gathering. Our source said: “He loves his gadgets and boys’ toys. So it was the perfect present for him.
“His only difficulty nowis prising it away from the Queen’s clutches. She showed all the signs of becoming a Nintendo addict.”
Still, HM the Q is a long-time Leica M user.
Wonder if she now has an M8. I expect she can afford one.
YouTube audience surges
From the latest survey by the Pew Research Center
# 8% of internet users said they had ever visited a video-sharing site such as YouTube. A year ago, in December 2006, 33% of internet users said they had ever visited such sites. That represents growth of more than 45% year-to-year.
# 15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site “yesterday” — the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site “yesterday.” Thus, on an average day, the number of users of video sites nearly doubled from the end of 2006 to the end of 2007…
Downhill all the way
Useful piece in the current issue of the Economist about the woes of the music industry. It opens with a salutary tale:
IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
In public, of course, music executives continued to talk a good game: recovery was just around the corner, they argued, and digital downloads would rescue the music business. But the results from 2007 confirm what EMI’s focus group showed: that the record industry’s main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away. In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before—faster than anyone had expected. For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in Canada. (Sales were flat in Germany.) Paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs. More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing…
Clarkson stung
The strange thing about Jeremy Clarkson, Britain’s leading petrolhead, is that he’s clever enough not to have to be a charlatan. But he can never resist an opportunity to get a laugh from the boys in the saloon bar. So it’s nice to see him coming unstuck.
TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column.
The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people’s personal details on two computer discs.
He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing.
But Clarkson admitted he was “wrong” after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.
Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.
“All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I’ve never known such a palaver about nothing,” he told readers.
Thanks to Brian and Atam for the link.
What Bill Gates did next
The Mac is back
Martin Kettle is in the US covering the New Hampshire primaries and has just produced this insightful piece on the guy who will turn out to be the tragic hero of this election: John McCain.
There’s also an intriguing video of Suzanne Goldenberg exploring the paranoia and control-freakery now surfacing in the Obama camp.
So what does that Obama victory mean, exactly?
Nice acerbic piece by Gary Yonge, contrasting Barack Obama with those great black hopes of yesteryear, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
By the time Obama came of age, there was no civil rights movement to emerge from and few union halls to go to. But thanks to the gains of the civil rights era he could attend the nation’s best universities (Columbia and Harvard) and get a fantastic job. With no roots in the black politics – the soil was too barren for anything beyond community organising – he emerged from academe. Politically speaking, he was not produced by the black community, but presented to it.
In this respect, Obama shares a great deal with a number of black politicians of his generation who have come to the fore in recent years. Among them are the Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick (Harvard); the Newark mayor, Cory Booker (Yale); the Democratic Leadership Council chair and former Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford Jr (University of Pennsylvania); and the Maryland lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown (Harvard). Obama’s trajectory is not the rule; but nowadays it is by no means an exception.
In most of Obama’s rhetoric, Yonge muses, “race is virtually absent from his message but central to his meaning. He doesn’t have to bring it up because not only does he espouse change, he looks like change. He has the role of an inadequate and ineffective balm on the long-running sore that is race in America. His victory would symbolise a great deal and change very little.”
Thanks to Pete for the link.
Reckoning the odds
Dick Cheney famously warned in the context of terrorism that if there is even a one per cent of something very bad happening, we should act as though it were a certainty. Since the odds are approaching 100 per cent that if humankind continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will alter the planet in ways that no one can predict, Cheney’s rule should make him, on the subject of climate change, a soulmate of Al Gore.
Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution, writing in the Financial Times, January 5/6, 2008.
Twilight of the Clintons?
The best and most revealing television coverage of the US Primaries this time isn’t coming from the TV networks, but from newspapers. See, for example, this extraordinarily revealing video report of Hillary Clinton’s first day in New Hampshire. It comes from the Guardian, not the BBC. It reinforces what Roy Greenslade discovered (see previous post).