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. For example: All these factors emerge from Wikipedia’s nature as a Free (public, open source) encyclopaedia, with many uses being made of it that weren’t in […]
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.
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. So, for example (from Glimmer): I think this example is a little forced, but the idea’s […]
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 […]
If books are ‘under threat from new media’, then these new media are undoubtedly the Internet and ebooks. You get some great writing online, and in so called long-form too, but you stumble on these things while you’re doing something else, and your mind can’t possibly know what it’s missing, and whether it’s read a […]