News and comment on what's happening in the technology industry, and the direction it's heading.
Jack Schofield spent the 1970s editing photography magazines before becoming editor of an early UK computer magazine, Practical Computing. In 1983, he started writing a weekly computer column for the Guardian, and joined the staff to launch the newspaper's weekly computer supplement in 1985. This section launched the Guardian’s first website and, in 2001, its first real blog. When the printed section was dropped after 25 years and a couple of reincarnations, he felt it was a time for a change....
Oracle’s Larry Ellison has come top of a list of the 25 highest-paid executives of public companies during the past decade, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. He made $1.
Americans can now legally “jailbreak” their mobile phones, and take excerpts from protected DVDs for educational purposes, or to create non-commercial works for outlets such as YouTube. They can also legally circumvent copy protection on ebooks for the purpose of using “read aloud” features, and legally circumvent obsolete dongles in order to continue using protected software.
ARM has announced that Microsoft has “signed a new licensing agreement for the ARM architecture” which is widely used in mobile phones and other portable devices. These include Microsoft’s Zune media player and smartphones running Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7.
Many of the major players in the entertainment and technology industries are uniting behind a new form of digital rights management (DRM) -- that is, copy protection -- called UltraViolet. The Web site at uvvu.
When you go to your local coffee shop, casino or other location, you can check in with a location-based game such as Foursquare. But in many cases, that process could be automated: your entrance will already have been observed by local CCTV cameras, including the ones that operate inside shops and government offices.
Four of the world’s six biggest PC manufacturers are now Asian companies, with Acer and Asus representing Taiwan, Lenovo from China, and Toshiba from Japan. Hewlett-Packard still tops the list by number of units sold, and Dell is either second or third.
Apple has achieved what might once have seemed impossible: it has made the iPhone a bigger joke than Microsoft Bob. The iPhone 4’s defective antenna design has now featured on the BBC’s Top Gear programme, and been the subject of a David Letterman “Top 10” list.
Microsoft is taking an appliance approach to cloud computing with the announcement of a “cloud in a box” version of its Azure platform. At its Worldwide Partner Conference today, Microsoft described it as “the first turnkey cloud services platform for deployment in customer and service provider datacenters”.
America’s Consumer Reports has lab-tested Apple’s iPhone 4 and now says it can’t recommend it because of the antenna issue. Basically, it’s defective as designed.
It’s hard to get excited about a thin-and-light notebook PC when you’ve been carrying them around for more than a decade. However, when Toshiba unveiled the R700, it impressed even a cynical old Portégé and IBM ThinkPad user like me, so I borrowed one.