On one level, they’re just another cold call. Just another waste of time. Another reason to consider dumping your landline altogether (unless you’re like me, of course, and they have your mobile number too). Gah! I’m talking about the infamous Microsoft Call Centre Scam. It starts the same way each time: “Hello, sir, my name […]
It’s time to ditch the idea that, when not paying for a service, we’re the product. Tim Cook (billionaire chief of Apple) brought it up again in September, and recently Mark Zuckerberg (billionaire chief of Facebook) got a little angry with the accusation.
Everyone loves a good apocalyptic prophecy. The latest is in regards to ‘Content’, that slippery concept allied to ‘Creatives’, trashing a couple of basic grammatical rules in its attempt to escape too-close a reading.
Funnily enough, I finally get around to reading Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom, and she pops up on the next episode of the Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast! I do love a good coincidence, especially when it tells me there’s a new book out: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.
The temptation to name each New Year the ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’ became so regular in the mid 2000s that it evolved into a metajoke. If magazines and websites still do it, it’s with tongue firmly in cheek. Every now and again a Raspberry Pi comes along and a few eyebrows guiltily rise, questioning, […]
Is Wikipedia more useful than the Encyclopedia Britannica? It’s a difficult question to answer, with many ‘depends’. But there are a couple of factors which say that it is: It’s free to access;
Here’s a little thought experiment about less-than-free elections. I know we love the concept of letting everyone vote, letting everyone have their say in who runs the country. But the thing that frustrates a lot of voters, and hamstrings politicians, is the idiocy of the general public.
Privacy in the digital age: We can argue whether or not we should be concerned, but there’s no question that the amount of private data that companies collect on us should be carefully thought about.
In Warren Berger’s book Glimmer he talks about the Five Whys concept of the design company IDEO. It boils down to asking yourself ‘why’ you do something, and then asking ‘why’ you gave that answer, to the tune of five times.
Update: I wrote this article exactly a year ago, and now MS have revealed that the next OS after Windows 8 will be… Windows 10. the madness continues. Microsoft (MS) are having a tough time of it at the moment. They built their empire on the back of the dominance of the desktop and laptop […]