Google wants to mirror and index every byte of your hard drive, relegating your PC to a “cache”, notes on a company PowerPoint presentation reveal.
The file accompanied part of Google’s analyst day last week. Google has since withdrawn the file, telling the BBC that the information was not intended for publication.
The justification for this enormous data grab is that Google would be able to restore your data after a catastrophic system failure.
This may not be news to most of you, but in light of DiMA’s Jonathan Potter blaming music publishers for the sorry state of digital downloads, it’s a topical reminder. Music companies – and we blur the distinction deliberately for the moment, for the sake of simplicity – paid songwriters in two ways. For what … Read more
Few start-ups encapsulate the desperate utopianism of the times so much as Fon Technology.
Created by the Argentinian dot.com billionaire Martin Varsavsky, who built and sold the Spanish portal Ya.com and ISP Jazztel before the bubble burst, at the heart of Fon is a soulful of hope.
More than three quarters of web surfers don’t realize Google records and stores information that may identify them, results of a new opinion poll show. The phone poll, which sampled over 1000 internet users, was conducted by the Ponemon Institute following the DoJ subpoenas last week. This suggests that the battle for internet privacy is … Read more
About a year ago, a man I’d never met before showed me pictures of a dramatic episode in his life. These showed him driving his wife to the hospital, where she was about to give birth. There were dozens and dozens of these pictures, and in each one his wife was looking progressively more grumpy. … Read more
An early taxonomy of excuses. Mostly variations of “It’s the user’s fault.” “He who feels punctured must have been a bubble – Lao Tsu A funny thing happened last week. Author and broadcaster – and veteran OpenOffice user – Andrew Brown wrote a piece in The Guardian a fortnight ago demolishing some of the more … Read more
But still we do it. Actually, we don’t – even with 3.5G networks it’s almost always quicker to ask a stranger than it is to look something up on a mobile phone. And more fun. Punters are giving flaky mobile data services the cold shoulder, a survey has revealed. 64 per cent of those surveyed … Read more
Ever the master of public relations, Microsoft has always been able to figure its way out of a tight spot with the use of a judiciously leaked memo.
Remember when AOL merged with Netscape back in 1998? Time to take a leak. Remember 2000, when Symbian was stealing the thunder from Microsoft’s cellphone strategy? Time to take a leak. Remember when the antitrust settlement talks had hit a sticky patch? Time to take a leak. Remember when Microsoft’s security woes finally became an issue? Time, once again, to take a leak.
The purpose of these releases is to bolster morale and focus the staff – Microsoft always seems to need a No.1 Enemy – and inform the press that it’s on the case.
(The memos Microsoft doesn’t want you to read such as this one and these two, are always more entertaining and enlightening.)
And so it goes. We know you’re very busy people, so in the spirit of the excellent 500-word “digested reads” offered by some of our better newspapers, we give you the précis of the latest Gates and Ozzie memos.
. My invitation to define Web 2.0 – Tim O’Reilly was clearly struggling – biggest postbag at The Register, ever: five a minute for 24 hours. You’ll see from the suggestions that even before most people had heard the buzzword, they already knew what it portended: a consultancy racket. See the original here, and the … Read more
Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.
Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they’re talking about.)
Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that’s almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, … passionate, you haven’t met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it’s a religious crusade.
In the inkies, Wikipedia has enjoyed a charmed life, with many of the feature articles about the five-year old project resembling advertisements. Emphasis is placed on the knowledgeable articles (by any yardstick, it’s excellent for Klingon, BSD Unix, and Ayn Rand), the breadth of its entries (Klingon again), and process issues such as speed.
“We don’t ever talk about absolute quality,” boasted one of the project’s prominent supporters, Clay Shirky, a faculty tutor at NYU. But it’s increasingly difficult to avoid the issue any longer.