Somewhere, a man in a room is carrying out a job of utmost importance. The man in the room has seen the future, and understands how dangerous it could be. His job has no ending, just the infinite delay of that dangerous future. The man in the room is in some small way responsible. The […]
Author: MDGreaney
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. These billionaires are, unsurprisingly, out of touch with the rest of us. […]
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. Basically, content is everything. This is content. And this. Content is words, pictures, songs, videos. Just about the only thing that […]
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. Coding Freedom is an […]
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, […]
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. If it wasn’t for this idiocy, then candidates […]
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. The problem is the difficulty of knowing how much is collected. Would knowing more help us change our daily habits? […]
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 […]
In this article I’m going to introduce some of the key concepts I think should be considered when building a hypothetical ‘Perfect Computer‘. Some of these concepts are based on the techniques of Steve Jobs, who in the last post we discovered wasn’t an inventor, but had a strong Grand Vision coupled with a terrifying […]