As antidote to all the iPad2 hype, Cory Doctorow is pleased with his Lenovo ThinkPad X220, pleased as punch about how undramatic, yet graceful, his computing life has becomeThis article titled “My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.21 UTCThis week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.I had some snags getting this machine in, partly because of supply-chain problems with Japanese components from factories affected by the tsunami and earthquake, and partly attributable to Lenovo’s less-than-stellar ordering system, which stands in sharp contrast to the quality of its machines.I switched to ThinkPads full time in 2006, after owning practically every model of Apple PowerBook released to that date, starting with a PowerBook 145 in 1992 or so. They were generally good machines, design-y, and they ran the Mac OS, which was the only operating system I used on my desktop. I’d administered various flavours of Unix before then – some Silicon Graphics Irix machines, a couple Apple A/UX machines, and then a series of GNU/Linux servers – but by the time I bought my first ThinkPad, I hadn’t done anything Unix-y in years and couldn’t do much of anything without intense search-engine assistance.My ThinkPad switch was inspired by a desire to try out the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, which I’d heard great things about. So I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu – Canonical, the company that oversees Ubuntu, does two releases per year – burned it to a CD and stuck it in the computer, and, a few minutes later, I was up and running. At the time, I promised to document my joys and frustrations with GNU/Linux, but a few months later, once I’d been soaking in the OS for a while, I went back over my notes and discovered that there was practically nothing to report on that score.For a week or two I did a lot of mis-mousing and mis-typing as I learned where Ubuntu’s equivalents to MacOS commands were. A few years later, I experienced the exact same sensation after we redid our kitchen and the builders insisted that regulations required us to move our cutlery and dishes to new places and I spent two weeks opening the cutlery drawer and finding myself looking at a load of pots and pans.One day, I woke up and I just knew where everything was, which is exactly what happened with my Ubuntu switch.The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there’s very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I’ve used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I’ve ever used, and what’s more, it fails with incredible grace.This graceful failure is wonderful stuff, and after a lifetime of using computers I’ve decided that it’s the thing I value most in my technology. Ubuntu is free – free as in beer, costing nothing; free as in speech, in that anyone can modify or improve it. That means that on those occasions where I’ve had a bad disk or some other problem, I could simply download a new copy of the OS, stick it on a USB drive and restart from the drive to troubleshoot and repair the OS. I don’t have to take a rescue disk on the road with me, don’t have to try to run out to the Apple store at 8:55PM to try to buy another copy of the OS before the shop closes. Anywhere I’ve got a working computer and an internet connection, I’ve got everything I need to fail gracefully.Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux “distribution” – that is, a carefully curated collection of free tools, gathered together, tested and packaged so as to provide an elegant, coherent computing experience. In this regard, it’s not so different from any other OS. There is a committee of design-oriented, thoughtful people who make aesthetic and technical decisions about what I should be doing with my computer and put them all together – this committee includes passionate users, developers and Canonical employees. Ubuntu has its own version of an App Store, though Ubuntu’s version, derived from a GNU/Linux project called Debian, has been around for years longer than the Apple, Android and Microsoft versions. Practically everything in it is free – and it’s been tested and reviewed and described to a nicety, so that whenever you have a need you can just search the Ubuntu Software Centre for something to solve your problem, evaluate the small list of returned options, find the app you want, click and install. If you don’t like it, you can install another.But this free business has serious knock-on effects in the graceful failure department. Ubuntu’s Software Centre can be instructed to spit out a simple list of all the apps (“packages” in Ubuntu-speak) you’ve installed. Any time you need to set up a new machine or recover an old one, you simply feed the list to the package manager and it will fetch all your apps and install and configure them without any further intervention. This is nothing short of miraculous when compared with the clumsy, desperate fumbling with original disks and serial numbers from the commercial software world. That’s what free-as-in-beer gets you.But free-as-in-speech also delivers benefits to the failing computer and its user: any time you want to do something with your computer that Canonical hasn’t countenanced (or has rejected), it’s pretty trivial to do so. You don’t have to jailbreak Ubuntu to get it to run unapproved software. In fact, Ubuntu allows you to add programs from unapproved third parties with the same Software Centre, and hooks those programs up to its automatic updater. For example, I subscribe directly to the updates to Banshee, an excellent, powerful, free, open replacement for iTunes. These updates tend to be a little ahead of the official Ubuntu releases, where each revision is tested before it is packaged and updated.This is “curated computing” at it absolute best: you get all the benefits of obsessive, bold design from a closely coordinated team that shares a coherent vision for the way the computer works. But you also get to disagree with them as much or as little as you want. You can sit down and use Ubuntu and it will get out of your way and just let you do whatever you want your computer to do for you, with no drama. But when you find the need to tinker, Ubuntu reveals as much configurability as you could care for, starting with installing unapproved programs and drilling all the way down to rewriting parts of the OS if you have the ability and desire to do so. It’s a system you can trust, but not a system that you must trust.I must disclose that Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, once made a donation to my former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped fund my position at the time – there were no conditions attached to this funding – and that he subsequently personally commissioned a short story from me. Neither of these interactions had any bearing on my decision to try and continue using Ubuntu – I tried the OS on advice from Google’s Chris DiBona, and continued to use it due to my overall great experiences with the technology.Speaking of great experiences, I mentioned the Lenovo hardware warranty above. This as graceful as failure gets. For £127.44, I get three years’ worth of on-site, next-day, hardware replacement service. I used to keep two Powerbooks on the go at a time so that when one suffered a technical disaster I could switch to the other one while I waited one to three weeks for Apple to fix it. With my ThinkPad, I just call a toll-free number and the next day, or sometimes the day after, a technician comes to my office or hotel room practically anywhere in the world and fixes my computer. This warranty is provided through IBM Global Services – IBM flogged its ThinkPad business to Lenovo years ago, but held on to the services division – and it has been almost impeccable in the three or four times I’ve used it.Nine years ago, I quit smoking. My doctor asked me what I planned to think about when I craved a cigarette. I told him I would concentrate on the health benefits, and he shook his head. “You’re 31 years old. The major health benefit you’re going to get from quitting smoking is that you’re not going to get cancer in 20 or 30 years. That’s not going to shore up your willpower when you crave a cigarette tomorrow.” So I thought about it and realised that I was spending one or two laptops’ worth of money on cigarettes every year. And from then on, whenever I got a cig craving I just thought about all the lovely laptops I’d be able to buy in the years to come by not giving my money to the death merchants whose products were killing me. Every time I get a new lappie now, I get a real thrill, a funny phantom association with good health.I was once a computer hobbyist. I loved to geek out about computers. I can still really get into the subject, but for the most part, I just want to Get Stuff Done with my computer. I am pleased as punch to have arrived at such an undramatic place in my computing life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMy new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heavenRelated posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social ComputingFree FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update WebsitesI opened my Mac mini
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/my-new-ubuntu-flavoured-thinkpad-is-computing-heaven
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May 23 2011, 4:20am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/16/apple-studies-patent-infringement-claims-by-lodsys
Patent holding firm Lodsys claims revenue from Apple iPhone and iPad 2 app developers, but critics say it is abusing the patent system
This article titled “Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 16th May 2011 16.24 UTC Apple’s legal department is understood to be “actively investigating” claims by Lodsys, a patent holding company based in Texas, to have a claim against iPhone and iPad developers who use in-app purchase systems.
So far Lodsys has served papers on about a dozen iOS developers who it says are infringing its patent 10/732,102, which it bought in 2004 from the inventor, who filed it in the 1990s, covering user interaction over a network.
Apple is not expected to respond to the claims, which have been passed to it by affected developers, until later this week.
Lodsys is asking for 0.575% of US revenue for in-app purchase. Although that may not be substantial for individual developers, one told the Guardian: “0.575% of the in-app purchase market across all platforms would be a very nice figure to have indeed. And, of course, it’s 0.575% for this patent today. Tomorrow it’s another 1% from some other company, and so on.”
Lodsys says that Apple has licensed the patent covering in-app purchasing – but adds that it can still claim for payments that use the technology in developers’ own apps. “The scope of [Apple's] licences does not enable them to provide ‘pixie dust’ to bless another third-party business applications [sic]. The value of the customer relationship is between the Application vendor of record and the paying customer,” notes the blog’s author, believed to be Lodsys‘s chief executive, Mark Small. “The operating system is acting as an enabler and the retailers are acting as a conduit to connect that value.”
In a series of blog posts, the company notes that Google and Microsoft have taken out licences, but notes that “so far no one has asked” whether apps written on those platforms might be liable for licence fees.
A number of iOS developers received couriered documents last week from Lodsys claiming payments were due following their use of in-app purchases.
The move has worried app developers, who see it as a dangerous and slippery slope where they become liable for payments to third parties after using the in-system APIs that they are required to by the mobile OS company. Apple does not allow apps that use other systems for purchasing to be sold through its app store, and Google is also tightening its rules on app APIs.
Lodsys is also suing a number of larger companies including Samsung, Brother, HP and Motorola Mobility.
Lodsys comments on its blog that:
“There are lots of bills in life that it would be preferable to not pay if one didn’t have to. Lodsys is just trying to get value for assets that it owns, just like each and every company selling products or services is, trying to do business and make a profit. It’s odd that some of the companies that received notices had such a visceral reaction. Some of these companies have our favorite apps, for which we paid the asking price. We realise you have to get paid for your work and so do we.”
One developer told the Guardian: “They do imply they’ve have a horrible weekend, but then again, I seem to be the one who hasn’t slept properly since Friday, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who sent the letters in the first place! It feels very hypocritical for them to paint themselves as the victim here.”
Florian Mueller, who has tracked patent disputes in the US and EU, suggests on his blog: “Lodsys is trying to abuse the patent system in a way that could ultimately destroy the entire mobile apps economy, which is not only thriving on its own but has been and continues to be a key factor in making new mobile devices so useful and popular.”
He says: “It’s actually questionable whether Lodsys’s patents would survive a well-funded effort to have them declared invalid,” adding: “Even if they could be upheld under the system as it stands, there’s no way that those patents represent a fair deal between society and” Lodsys, which bought them from the inventor.
Mueller fears that if Lodsys prevails it will buy more patents and use them against small app developers who would be unable to defend themselves; and other companies would follow its business model, “shaking trees for money that you just can’t lose because your opponents can’t even defend themselves”.
The risk to the mobile app economy is huge, says Mueller, and this move by a small, relatively unknown company might be the final straw needed to get the mobile companies, including Apple – which is the largest mobile phone vendor in the world by revenue – to lobby the US administration finally to do something positive about software patents. The problem is, what?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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May 16 2011, 11:39am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/01/the-cyberplague-that-threatens-an-internet-armageddon
The unchecked rise of malware could culminate in a massive global event that would change forever the way we use the broadband internet
This article titled “The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.04 UTC In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the “creeper” on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the “reaper”. Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world. For as we became more and more dependent on information and communications technology, we were also subjected to a plague of what came to be called “malware”. It’s an ugly term, as befits something that covers a multitude of sins, all involving computer code designed with destructive or malevolent intent. It includes not only viruses, which are programs that replicate by copying themselves into other programs, but also worms (self-replicating programs that use a network to send copies of themselves to other machines on the network, with or without human assistance) and Trojans (similar to viruses but instead of replicating they infiltrate a computer and perform some illicit activity, possibly under remote control). Malware also refers to other evils: the junk mail we call spam; “phishing”, or trying to hoodwink internet users into revealing bank account passwords etc; page-jacking, which makes it difficult or impossible for a victim to get rid of a web page; and other scams. The malware plague has gone through several phases. It began in a harmless and experimental way with the creeper and a worm released on to the internet in 1988 by Robert Morris, a student from New York State’s Cornell University. Morris wanted to find out how many computers were connected to the internet so he wrote a small program that would install itself on every machine it found and send back a “present and correct” message. But there was a flaw in his code that meant the worm replicated. On 2 November 1988, network administrators realised something was up because their machines – and the network itself – had slowed to a crawl. In the end, the culprit was identified and carpeted, though it doesn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm: Morris is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Malware began on the internet, but its next phase involved the stand-alone machines we now call personal computers. In 1982, a Pennsylvanian teenager named Rich Skrenta created the “elk cloner” virus that infected the Apple II, then the most popular personal computer in upmarket US households. Skrenta’s virus covertly altered the floppy disk needed to boot up the computer, displaying some doggerel on the screen on start up. It was annoying but harmless. Early PC malware tended to be like that – irritating but not terribly destructive. And malware spread slowly, because most of these PCs were not networked; infections spread by “sneakernet” – ie users sharing floppy disks. The real trouble began when domestic internet use exploded in 1993. From then on, an infected PC was a potential menace not just to its owner, but to other machines with which it communicated. For many people, early malware was a baffling phenomenon. It was seen as something akin to physical vandalism in the real world – hooligans despoiling an environment for no obvious reason. What motivated them? Nobody knew, though several psychologists had a go at explaining it. The notion that malware was motiveless destructiveness was fuelled by the fact that much of it was imitative, carried out by “script kiddies” – non-programmers who downloaded DIY virus-construction kits. In the 1990s, malware development accelerated. When Microsoft released Windows 95, it rapidly became the de facto standard for the PC industry and the world’s IT systems came to exhibit the characteristics of a monoculture: millions and millions of PCs across the globe, all running the same software, all sharing the same security vulnerabilities. At the same time, domestic broadband connections became common. Suddenly, there were millions of machines, operated by people with little understanding of computer security, with shared vulnerabilities and fast connections to the network. Most importantly, malware found a business model in the late 1990s. The fragility of the monoculture could be exploited for profit. Spamming – junk emailing – could now be done on a truly gigantic scale. Hitherto, it had required identifiable servers with broadband access to the net. But the new broadband environment offered a better infrastructure. All you had to do was find machines with fast connections, unpatched security vulnerabilities and non-savvy owners and infect them with a Trojan that would turn them into relay stations for spam (and which could be turned off just as easily, to avoid detection). Spamming works because it can be very profitable. It costs very little more to send 10m emails than it does to send 100. If you’re selling a packet of Viagra for $20 and you have a response rate of 0.1%, you’ll make $20 from 1,000 emails. But if you send out 10m and have the same response rate you’ll be earning $200,000 a day. This is the kind of serious money that makes organised criminal gangs sit up. The idea of covertly suborning networked PCs was a critical breakthrough for malware because it enabled malefactors to set up “botnets” – networks of compromised machines that could be remotely controlled. Nobody knows how many of these botnets exist, but there are probably thousands of them worldwide and some are very large. A list of the 10 largest in the US in 2009, for example, estimated that they ranged in size from 210,000 to 3.6m compromised machines. In addition to spamming, botnets can be used for a wide variety of purposes. They can, for example, launch “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attacks on e-commerce or other web sites. Each machine in the botnet bombards the targeted site with simultaneous requests, repeated incessantly, to the point where the site’s servers buckle under the load or the site becomes unusable by legitimate customers. More sinisterly, botnets can be used for blackmail, effectively extracting protection money from retail sites to ward off the threat of a DDOS attack. Nobody talks about this in public, but it goes on. Domestic PCs that have been compromised by Trojans can be put to other uses too. For example, they can covertly monitor their user’s keystrokes when logging into banking and other sites, thereby stealing passwords and credit card details. At a recent presentation by officers from Soca (Serious Organised Crime Agency), I was struck by a slide that showed how highly developed the online market in stolen credit card data had become. It showed a marketplace for “USA 100% APPROVED TRACK2 DUMPS” in which Visa debit card details were going for $8 and American Express details were $10. On another such marketplace, American MasterCard details cost $15 while European credit card details were going for $40 a pop. “Buying large quantities,” it said, “prices are negotiable for every customers.” (Grammar and spelling are not a speciality in this particular netherworld.) We’ve come a long way from the creeper and elk cloner. The driving forces behind contemporary malware are financial gain and organised crime, much of it with its headquarters in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe. One of the most blatant examples of an online marketplace in stolen credit card data was CarderPlanet.com, a website ostensibly based in Vietnam, but operated by people based in Russia and Ukraine, and now shut down. A senior US secret service official described CarderPlanet as “one of the most sophisticated organisations of online financial criminals in the world” which had been “repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community”. Some of the principals behind CarderPlanet were arrested after an intensive campaign by the US authorities. But one of them, Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov, was subsequently released by the Ukrainian authorities and has allegedly started a political organisation called “the Internet Party of the Ukraine”. The latest round in the malware saga came in June last year when the Stuxnet worm finally broke cover. Stuxnet infects Windows computers and spreads mainly via infected USB sticks, so it doesn’t require the internet for dissemination. Once a USB stick infects a machine, it uses a variety of tricks to infect other machines on the local network and to take control of them, but with an added twist. It looks for a special kind of programmable logic controller (PLC) made by the German company Siemens. If a PLC is found, the worm infects it using a vulnerability in the controller’s software and changes its code and thus its behaviour. This is scary because these Siemens controllers play a critical role in virtually every industrialised plant in the world, including water treatment plants, electricity grids and oil refineries, and nuclear reprocessing facilities. One target of Stuxnet was Iran’s controversial nuclear weapons programme, specifically the gas centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. It is claimed that the worm reprogrammed the Siemens PLCs to cause over 900 centrifuges to spin uncontrollably while at the same time feeding back “normal” data to the plant’s operators, thereby concealing the problem until it was too late. The fact that this has set back Iran’s nuclear programme by several years has led to speculation that the worm was the creation not of criminal hackers, but of a state agency (possibly Israeli or American). This hunch was supported by the fact that Stuxnet seems a pretty sophisticated piece of malware. Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, estimates that it would have taken eight to 10 accomplished programmers six months to design, implement and test it under laboratory conditions. It’s difficult to imagine the criminal hacking fraternity having the resources to do that. Why has malware become so pervasive and so difficult to combat? The main reason is that malevolent innovation is the downside of the open architecture of the PC and the internet. The combination of an open, programmable PC and a network that is open to anyone created a “generative system” which was uniquely hospitable to what has come to be called “permissionless innovation”. This had some amazing benefits – it gave us the world wide web, for example, Wikipedia, the Linux operating system and the Apache web-server software that powers a majority of the world’s web sites. But it has also given us the malware plague. There is another, deeper, fear – that the mysterious botnets that have been assembled by the merchants of malware may one day be used in some co-ordinated way to engineer a massive global event – cyberspace’s equivalent of 9/11, if you will. If something like that were to happen, then the response of governments everywhere would be draconian. Just as civil liberties in western democracies were massively eroded by the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror”, so the freedoms we have hitherto taken for granted in cyberspace would be correspondingly curtailed. The day might come when you’ll need a government licence to connect to the internet. Bob Thomas’s creeper could have a creepy inheritance.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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May 1 2011, 9:06am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit
Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.
This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.
We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”
At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.
Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk
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April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/how-the-ipad-revolution-has-transformed-working-lives
Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. As iPad 2 launched, Charles Arthur looked at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology, and five users tell us about how the iPad is feeding into the way they work.
This article titled “How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives” was written by Charles Arthur and Killian Fox, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.05 UTC A friend recently went to a business meeting. He prepared by pulling his laptop out of his bag. All of the clients responded by taking their iPads out of their briefcases. These were not gadget freaks or latte-quaffing Hoxton-based web designers, as some imagine iPad users to be. They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn’t a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job. A year on from its arrival, and with the faster, thinner, second-generation model released in the UK on 25 March , Apple’s iPad tablet computer still divides opinion. A large group of people insist it is an “overpriced toy” with limited functionality – no keyboard, doesn’t run Microsoft Office, can’t play Flash video, can’t expand its storage. But a growing number believe that, on the contrary, the iPad represents a new frontier in computing. And they simply don’t care what the first group thinks. They’re getting on with using their machines. We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine’s fading battery. The iPad seems to be different – a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco, argues that “the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply”. That certainly sounds like the iPad. It shows that it is possible to have something that does all the computing functions you want with a big screen that also has long battery life and weighs almost nothing, certainly compared to a laptop. It is portable and durable, and the touch screen adds another dimension. Though it has the most prominent tablet in the market, Apple isn’t the only player (see its rivals assessed below). Dozens of companies are using Google’s free Android software to power tablets, and Google is helping them along with a custom version called “Honeycomb”, designed for iPad-sized Android tablets. An estimated 17 million tablets – from Apple and others – were sold in 2010, and that number is likely to keep growing. But is it really changing the way we work? We interviewed a range of people in different professions to see whether the iPad is all hype – or whether in future we will all keep taking the tablets. CA Margaret Manning – businesswoman Margaret Manning first realised that her iPad was going to change how she worked when she was in hospital, recovering from a minor operation, about a month after buying it. “I realised I could comfortably do emails, download a book to read, watch a film, whatever,” she says. “There’s no other device that you can do that with. You certainly can’t read with a laptop in bed.” Manning, 50, is the founder and chief executive of Reading Room, a London-based web development agency employing 170 people. She takes the iPad with her to client meetings and presentations: “It’s got a wow factor,” she says. “I did a presentation that I ran off it, and all the people in the room went, ‘Ooh’,” she recalls, adding: “They were all bankers.” To Manning, the iPad’s chief virtue is its versatility. She can carry it in her bag to go to clients, check work emails in a coffee shop or train, and then take it to a bar later and kill some time playing a game. It’s become her laptop, TV screen, iPod and iPhone. “It’s adaptive to today’s digital age. You can create and consume content in a different way.” Key to that is the screen size. “The iPhone was a step towards this, but the format is vital. This allows businesses to start using it in a way they couldn’t with the iPhone.” She cites an app that Reading Room has developed for Grains Research Development Corporation in Australia which lets farmers examine crops for disease by comparing them, in the field, to pictures on the iPad. That could be done on a laptop – but it would be cumbersome compared to doing it on the handheld screen. She revels in the simplicity of the interface, and says battery life is key: “If it was shorter, that would change the relationship. If I had to travel with plugs and extra batteries that would change things. The iPhone’s battery life is too short – it hacks me off.” Are there any drawbacks? “There are two things that it doesn’t do well: the keyboard – if I travel with it, I have to take a lightweight keypad – and voice calls. You can use Skype [the free internet voice call service], but not everybody has Skype, and I can’t use it to call a client. ” CA Frasier Speirs – teacher “Nobody has lost a file for a year now,” says Fraser Speirs. “Which used to happen every week – someone coming along and saying they couldn’t find where they’d saved some work or other.” Speirs teaches computing studies at the private Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, and is also the IT co-ordinator there. Last year he went to his bosses with a radical plan: equip every one of the children in both the primary and secondary schools with an iPad. And not just for computing studies: for every lesson. Speirs wants them to replace textbooks, though he admits that is still some way off. But the iPads, with their simplified approach to filing (you can’t choose where to save a file), have made at least part of his life much simpler. The lack of a keyboard wasn’t an issue. “The problem with laptops in the classroom is the battery life, and the size and weight. When Apple said that it would last for 10 hours, and we realised it actually did, that was really important. And the size and weight matters too for younger children.” The primary pupils only use them in school; secondary pupils can take them home. And teachers have them too, which has changed their view of computing. Speirs thinks it is time to reconsider how and what we teach children in an internet-connected world. “Previously, we taught technology just for business needs – Excel, PowerPoint. But now technology is there to assist learning. What do we teach, when you can look up facts in two seconds flat? The answer I think is much more about challenge-based learning, where you give the pupils a high-level goal, and have the teacher support them in achieving it.” But what happens when those children leave school and encounter laptops and even desktops in businesses? Speirs isn’t worried for them. Children starting at Cedars now will graduate in 2024, he points out – and any company still using desktops by then will be hopelessly behind the curve. CA Richard Bowman – physicist Will the iPad soon become a fixture in science labs alongside Bunsen burners, microscopes and graduated cylinders? Richard Bowman, a 24-year-old physicist doing his PhD at the University of Glasgow, reckons so. His field is optics, and in partnership with colleagues at the University of Bristol he recently developed an app that allows users to manipulate microscopic objects simply by touching the iPad’s screen. Before iTweezers, Bowman employed a desktop computer and a mouse to control optical tweezers, an instrument that traps and moves microscopic particles using laser beams. Now, he does it all on his iPad. “It’s quite a natural interface,” he says. “It’s like you’re touching the actual particle and pushing it around. We can also move particles up and down with the pinch gesture, which is hard to do with a mouse.” It may be some time before iTweezers appears on the market – “there are loads of intellectual property issues” – but Bowman has already had interest from scientists in various fields, including chemists at Glasgow University who are using it in experiments with crystals. In the meantime, he’s developing a more commercially viable iPad app called LabVIEW with his colleagues in Bristol: “It puts virtual dials and sliders on the screen to let you control your experiments in the lab”. One serious limitation of the iPad, according to Bowman, is that “Apple are quite restrictive in what they’ll allow to run on it. You have to register as an Apple developer and use their tools to do things.” But, he adds, “I think the iPad is definitely here to stay – its capabilities are increasing all the time – and multi-touch interfaces definitely are the future. If you can control several things at once, it means you can interact with your experiment better, it can happen faster, and you can do things that you couldn’t do before.” KF David Kassan – painter When David Kassan bought an iPad last spring, his intention was to use it simply as a portfolio to show to prospective clients in the art world. Kassan, 34, is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints “really realistic lifesize figures” using oils on wood panel, and the iPad, he says, is “like a perfect art portfolio. You can adjust the colours, it’s a cool thing to hold, and it’s easier to update than a printout. That’s the reason I got it.” But on a trip to Europe last summer, Kassan started messing around with the ultra-basic Brushes app on his iPad. “I sketched people in subways and airports, and did studies of paintings in museums. I started using it as a completely portable, full-colour sketchbook. It meant I didn’t have to bring watercolours or an easel with me. I could just slide it out of my bag and start using it.” Now he finds himself painting much more when out and about. “I’m an observer of everything – that’s my job – and the iPad is a great tool to see things around me and be able to record them so that my eye gets keener. Also, if I’m in a museum I can do a study of the colour of a painting, not just the drawing and compositional aspects, which is all I’d really get to understand with pencil and paper.” Kassan believes that the device has improved his “real painting”, but does this mean that the paintings he does on the iPad will never qualify as “real”? Actually, he says, “I’m working on a piece right now, a lifesize head that I’m trying to do exactly like my real paintings.” Using a more advanced app called Artrage and a Nomad touch-screen paintbrush, he hopes “to make it as realistic as possible, print it up and sign it. I thought I might put it in my next solo show in October to see what it’ll sell for.” KF Richie Hawtin – musician/ DJ Early last year, the DJ and producer Richie Hawtin was putting together a live show to mark 20 years of Plastikman, the most prominent of his many musical alter egos. Due to its scope, the show posed a considerable challenge to the British-born techno megastar. “When you do an electronic performance, traditionally you have a mixing board with all these knobs and faders to create the sound,” he explains. “For this show, each song called for a whole different set of knobs and faders.” What Hawtin needed, in order to control all those diverse environments at once, was a touch-screen device. The iPad came out in April. Within two months, Hawtin and his team had integrated it into the Plastikman performances. Six months later, they formed a company, Liine [www.liine.net], to turn the apps they’d developed into commercial products. One of these apps, Griid, “allows you to navigate a musical environment that would be hundreds of screens deep if you were trying to look at it on a normal laptop. With your hand movements you can zoom from left to right, find the instrument and the melody that you want, and start, stop or modify it with a quick touch.” Another app, Kapture, “allows you to take snapshots of different states of your performance. If something amazing comes together, you can capture that moment just by touching the screen, and return to it later. Then you can then morph all these moments of the show together.” Both apps interface with the popular Ableton Live sequencing software and can be used in the studio as well as onstage. Harnessing touch-screen technology, Hawtin says, is like “following a dark path with a torch and stumbling upon new techniques. The show has evolved into something that we didn’t even realise was possible.” Being able to use both hands on a screen, rather than being tethered to a mouse and keyboard, “transfers a bit more of your spirit into the technology you’re using”. Ever the restless techno-pioneer, Hawtin is now looking forward to future devices “that can sense not only left or right movements but how much pressure you’re applying to the screen. That, as far as musicians like me are concerned, will be the next huge development.” KF
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March 27 2011, 4:51am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?
Some social apps are really cool but it’s unlikely your actual friends are using them
This article titled “Are social photo apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble?” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 11.28 UTC Another day, another innovative smartphone app based around photo-sharing. Color is the work of a team assembled by Bill Nguyen, the entrepreneur who previously sold streaming music service Lala to Apple. Backed by $41m (£25.3m) of venture capital, it lets users post photos tagged with a location, browse the latest pics of people around them, and form ad-hoc groups to bundle together shots from a group of friends in the same place. It brings to mind another hotshot photo-sharing app that launched last year: Path. There, the focus was on sharing pictures with just 50 close friends and family members — a deliberately restricted social network. It provoked similar excitement among the big US tech blogs. Here’s my question: are these kinds of apps trapped in a Silicon Valley bubble? Not in the financial sense — although that $41m for Color may fuel the debate around that too. More of a cultural bubble, where it may be a little too easy to assume that all your friends and family will be quick to catch on to the same cool new apps as you. Put it another way: if I made a list of my 50 closest friends and family members, none of them are using Path already. They won’t know about Color. And judging by my experience trying to tempt them onto Foursquare in recent months, they won’t be interested for a long time either. For now, all these apps only let me connect with other mobile industry geeks like myself. That’s where the suspicion of a bubble comes in: the assumption that if all your friends and colleagues aren’t using these new apps already, they’ll want to when you talk about them. Color may have an additional focus on strangers sharing pics, but while that’s a perfect storm of virality in Silicon Valley, it’s rather more of a lonely cul-de-sac in, say, Bishop’s Stortford. The answer may simply be to wire in Facebook, as Path does already, to widen the distribution to … well, to your real friends. An app like Instagram has its own social network, but I suspect much more social activity around its filtered photos is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Color is an interesting app with lots of money behind it. Investing in features that break it out of that Silicon Valley cultural bubble will be essential if it’s to amount to more than a geo-restricted social plaything.
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March 24 2011, 10:57am | Comments »
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Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire
If Google is the new Microsoft, is Apple the new Google or is it Facebook? Well no, not exactly. Google Apple facebook
This article titled “Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 6th March 2011 00.18 UTC Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry’s mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.” That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world’s magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it. Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the “most admired” company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title. The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it’s much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software. On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It’s not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn’t last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it’s the computing bit that really matters. Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company’s charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple’s renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996. This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What’s more plausible is that Apple’s corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO’s personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate. This gives Apple unparalleled power. Lots of other organisations offer paid-for downloads, but none has the credit card details of so many internet users who are accustomed to paying for stuff online. This was one reason why proprietors of print magazines began to slaver when the iPad appeared. Here at last was a way of getting people to pay for online content: just make it available on iTunes and let Apple collect the money. Sure, it rankled that Apple took 30%, but – hey – at least it would bring to an end the parasitic free riding that was endemic on the web. Henceforth, the web was dead: publishing magazines as iPad apps was the future. Then Apple abruptly changed the rules, stipulating that any publisher selling a digital subscription on a website must also make the same subscription offer within the app, from which Apple would take a 30% cut. Publishers have been furious about this, but there’s nothing they can do about it. If they want to do business on the iTunes store, then they have to do it Apple’s way. In itself, this was just an example of the Big Unfriendly Giant flexing its muscles, but it could be a harbinger of things to come. Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven. Eco’s metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino. You can’t install anything on it that hasn’t had the prior approval of Mr Jobs and his subordinates. And if you are foolish enough to break the rules and seek your own route to salvation, then you may find when you next try to sync it with iTunes that it has turned into an expensive, beautifully designed paperweight. If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is.
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March 5 2011, 6:28pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple
Will the iPad 2 really be announced out on Wednesday? Yes, it appears so. How much will it weigh? “more tablets than Mesopotamia” lol.
This article titled “Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Observer on Sunday 27th February 2011 00.06 UTC According to his business card, John Wang is a wizard. Chief innovation wizard to be precise. He certainly seems to be working his magic at HTC, the Taiwanese firm where he oversees new products at a company that is rapidly becoming one of the hottest brands in tech. This week is set to be another Apple week – the second generation of the iPad is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday. But in the UK the biggest-selling launch is likely to be HTC’s. The hyperbolically named HTC Incredible S is Wang’s latest smartphone and has received glowing reviews so far in the tech press. Later this year HTC will launch its iPad rival, the Flyer. With tech firms churning out more tablets than ancient Mesopotamia, Wang says the Flyer will not be another “me-too” device. “Whatever we do has to be quietly brilliant,” he says. He says the Flyer was designed to weigh the same as the average paperback book (420 grammes), about half the weight of an iPad, and will be far smaller. And while it will be a touch-screen device, Wang says it won’t be defined by touch – users will be able to draw and write notes on any part of the device. The aim, he says, is to produce something different, something that produces “moments of delight”. In order to get to these moments HTC has a “magic lab” where ideas are worked through. One idea from the lab is a technology that makes its smartphones ring loudly in a bag or pocket, but softly when picked up. Wang started the lab five years ago and its engineers work through ideas to make their devices as simple and user-friendly as possible. The Incredible S, for example, has buttons that change their orientation depending on which way the phone is held. “When people use the word innovation they are often referring to the 1.5ghz, the 4.4in display, megapixels,” he says. “But it’s often the details, not the specifications that make customers think ‘that is so right’.” The strategy seems to be paying off. According to technology analysts Gartner, HTC sold 3m smartphones in the UK last year, compared with Apple’s 5m. In the last quarter of the year HTC sold 1.1m, close to Apple’s 1.4m. Overall, the company made a net profit of $500m (£310m) for the last quarter of 2010, a leap of 160% from 2009′s final quarter. Sales surged 153% from a year ago. The firm, formerly known as High Tech Corporation, started life in 1997 making notebook computers. It has been building a position in smartphones for years, but Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi says the turning point for HTC was the launch of Google’s Android mobile operating system in 2007. The success of Android and HTC’s close co-operation with Google gave the firm a new lease of life in mobile. Google and HTC are close partners: the search giant’s team used HTC phones when they were developing Android. Initially Android looked like a dud, but it now outsells all its competitors combined in the US. Next up is the tablet, where Google is also keen to make its mark. “I think we are just at the beginning for innovation in the tablet market,” says Wang. Graham Stapleton, chief commercial officer for Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy, said the retailer had seen enormous growth in HTC sales in recent months. “Their customer traditionally has been more of a business/professional user. In the last 12-18 months they’ve targeted more of the pioneering customers, people who want the latest technology.” He said HTC was becoming a brand people asked for unprompted. “That’s a huge change. They’ve done an incredible job over the last 18 months.” It hasn’t gone unnoticed. HTC and Apple are now locked in a patent spat, with each side accusing the other of ripping it off. Milanesi says that’s the price of success. “Can Apple go after Google? No, they don’t make phones. They will go after who they can go after,” she says. It’s probably the biggest compliment Apple is ever likely to pay them.
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February 27 2011, 8:05am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Information overload? Time to relax then
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/22/information-overload-time-to-relax-then
Yes, it’s all about filters, recommendations and information management, but are there any new tips on offer here? Probabilism may have something to offer. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to wait for someone to email you again because you’ve simply deleted their email without reading it though.
This article titled “Information overload? Time to relax then” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 22nd February 2011 08.37 UTC The title of a fascinating Clay Shirky presentation has it that “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, and though I rely extensively on filters to make my online life manageable, I find myself wanting to quibble with Shirky. After years of discovering a new information resource, being consumed by it, finding it too much to bear, then getting on top of it, only to find myself being sucked under by another, faster information resource, I’ve concluded that the real secret to beating information overload isn’t better filters: it’s cultivating a “probabilistic” frame of mind. The first online resources I used were dial-up bulletin board systems in the 1980s. At one point, I created accounts on every single BBS that I could connect to with a local phone call (in Canada, where I grew up, local calls weren’t metered, but long distance calls were charged by the minute). That was because most of my local bulletin board systems were hobbyist systems with one or two phone lines, and most of the time, a connection attempt would be foiled by a busy signal. In order to get my fill of online time, I’d have to create logins on dozens of systems and try to call them all until I found one that was free. Then the number of bulletin board systems increased, as did the number of lines the average BBS sported, and the number of users on bulletin board systems. Many of them joined up with syndication systems such as FIDONet, which imported the online discussions from distant bulletin board systems all over the world. I went from reading every word posted on every BBS to reading just a few choice forums. Then I had to winnow down the list of bulletin board systems I used, and then further winnow the list of groups I read. Finally, I had to content myself with skimming most of these groups and actively participating in a small number of groups that were right up my street. This was a real struggle at first. There is a world of difference between reading every word uttered in a community and reading just a few choice ones. But soon the anxiety gave way to contentment and even delight: it turned out that “overload” has a wonderful corollary: redundancy. Anything really worth seeing wouldn’t just appear once and vanish. The really interesting stuff would find its way into other discussions, and early conferencing systems made it easy enough to back my way through the forums I was ignoring or skimming to find the important thing I’d missed. This pattern went on to repeat itself again and again. Once, I could read all the Usenet discussion groups my ISP carried, then only a selection, and then only one or two plus a longer list of groups I’d dip into now and again when time allowed. Once I could read every new website that went online and was posted to Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web (now called Yahoo). Then I could only visit the interesting ones; then I could only visit the last three or four interesting ones, then I had to abandon the project altogether and just discover new sites piecemeal. Again and again, this pattern re-emerges: once I could read all the tweets emitted by everyone I followed on Twitter; now I just skim the last 20 or 30 a few times a day and rely on retweets to bubble the good stuff to the top (I do my bit by retweeting things when I think they deserve it). Once I could read every item in my list of RSS feeds; now I periodically mark them all as read without looking at any of them, just to clear the decks: if there’s something good in the missed material, someone will repost it and I’ll see it then. This is even true for my email, the most “deterministic” of media for me. Now I’ve got a mailbox for people I’ve corresponded with in the past and another that collects mails from previously unseen addresses – the latter gets a lot less attention than the former, but if I miss something and accidentally delete it, the sender often figures it out and resends the message (I keep a list of the people from whom I’m awaiting email replies and give them a nudge every so often, on the assumption that other people probably have similar probabilistic approaches to their mail). There are fascinating implications for a world of probabalistic resource use: for one thing, it points up the importance of “signal amplification” through retweets, reposts, and other recycling of interesting tit-bits – these are critical to the successful use of a medium that can’t be consumed by any one person from tip to tail. It also suggests that the most important strategy for coping with information overload is to simply relax and not worry about missing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity lurking somewhere in one of your inboxes – it’ll be around again shortly.
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February 22 2011, 2:46am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Grace Hopper on Ada Lovelace Day
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/03/23/grace-hopper-on-ada-lovelace-day
Grace Hopper, Inventor of the Compiler - for Ada Lovelace Day I decided to write about Grace Hopper on Ada Lovelace Day since there’ll probably be plenty of other blogs about Ada Lovelace herself, being known as the First Lady of Computing and all that. Grace Hopper is known as the originator of the first truly high level programming language, namely COBOL which was based on her FLOW-MATIC system. Her unique idea was that computer programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than mathematics or machine code. COBOL came pretty close to this with long winded structures like SUBTRACT WS70-TOTAL COSTS FROM WS80-TOTAL-INCOME GIVING WS10-BALANCE or PERFORM Z10-PRINT-LINE UNTIL WS40-LINES-PRINTED > WS_PAGE LENGTH So COBOL encouraged programmers to write code that others could understand, and it also allowed programmers to get new programs up and working with a lesser number of testing iterations, which was handy when you only got one overnight testing slot per 24 hours.
Ada Lovelace Day Ada Lovelace Day 24th March 2009 is the first Ada Lovelace Day, where people are blogging about women in technology that they admire. The aim is to highlight female role models and encourage women to become leaders in technology, or maybe carve out a career in the US Military like Grace Hopper.
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March 23 2009, 9:12am | Comments »
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