Stories

Should iPods carry health warnings?

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An Australian head teacher has banned pupils from bringing their iPods into school, because they encourage social isolation. “People were not tuning into other people because they’re tuned into themselves,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.

As we noted this week, all kinds of fascinating social possibilities elude the iPodder. Music is a social activity, but the children are only responding to corporate advertising that encourages solipsism – “to shield ourselves,” as Oscar Wilde put it, ironically, “from the sordid perils of actual existence”.

But there are other solitary pleasures that are bad for us, and nanny governments rarely miss the opportunity to scold us about them.

The EU demands that cigarette manufacturers display excruciatingly personal warnings.

In Brazil, the consequences of smoking are dramatically illustrated, as we see here –

Warning: Fumar Causa Impotencia Sexual

But would this couple even have got as far as the boudoir, if they’d been iPod users? They’d have looked right past each other, and gone home to blog about their near miss, alone.

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How computers make kids dumb

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A study of 100,000 pupils in 31 countries around the world has concluded that using computers makes kids dumb. Avoiding PCs in the classroom and at home improved the literacy and numeracy of the children studied. The UK’s Royal Economic Society finds no ground for the correlation that politicans make between IT use and education.

The authors, Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of Munich University, used the PISAtests to measure the skills of 100,000 15 year-olds. When social factors were taken into account, PC literacy was no more valuable than ability to use a telephone or the internet, the study discovered.

“Holding other family characteristics constant, students perform significantly worse if they have computers at home,” the authors conclude. By contrast, children with access to 500 books in their homes performed better. The negative correlation, the researchers explain, is because children with computers neglect their homework more.

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New Microsoft Longhorn chief is indigestion expert

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Microsoft has a new star hire to head up its Longhorn project, Mike Sievert. And he brings a deeper and richer personal experience to the job than many of his marketing counterparts in the technology industry.

Sievert took up the post of Corporate VP for Windows Product Management, to give him his full title, at the start of the month. He joins from AT&T Wireless, which has just been acquired by Cingular, and before that he was at E-Trade. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But once upon a time, Sievert held one of the most important marketing posts in the nation: he was brand manager for the United States’ favorite indigestion remedy, Pepto-Bismol®.

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‘We must now embrace the tele-phone’ – dotcom pundit

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A year ago Intel demonstrated a small contraption that allows people to talk to each other – even if they’re not in the same room, without using wires or string. At the time we saw no possible use for such a device. Dogs, as we know, love fetching sticks – but this seemed to be much too fragile for robust outdoor activity. Intel called this the portable ‘tele-phone’.

But now we must mend our ways, shift our gears, and adjust our paradigms once again – for the concept has received a powerful endorsement from one of the dot.com era’s most lauded “thinkers”.

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Digital memories: cheap to take, cheaper to lose

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The consequences of the dotcom bubble – being remembered this week five years on from the start of the crash – aren’t just financial. The largest loss of wealth in human history created a wasteland of dead pages and broken links. Now many of the same Dotcom People are back, persuading us to trust them with our most valuable digital memories. And judging from the rhetoric alone, nothing has been learnt.

Preserving stuff on the internet isn’t a given, as we discussed with David Rosenthal, here. Because of carelessness, corporate burn-out, or government pressure, material gets lost. Sometimes material disappears as if by magic. But there is no magic – just the usual suspects. Rosenthal, an alumnus of Sun and Nvidia, has spent five years devising a decentralized peer to peer system LOCKSS for librarians and archivists. It’s a system that ensures documents are preserved through redundancy. But it may be five years, he told us, before the protocols are scalable enough for such a system to be used by you and me.

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MS-DOS paternity dispute goes to court

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The parentage of the MS-DOS operating system is to be decided in court. Tim Paterson, who sold the Intel-compatible operating system 86-DOS (aka QDOS) to Microsoft in 1980 is suing author and former Times editor Harold Evans, and his publisher Time Warner, for defamation. Paterson’s work became Microsoft’s first operating system – it subsequently rebadged QDOS as MS-DOS version 1.0, and it was made available with the original IBM PC.

In his book They Made America published last year, Evans devoted a chapter to the late, great Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research. Evans described Paterson’s software as a “rip-off” and “a slapdash clone” of Kildall’s CP/M, then the leading operating system for micro computers.

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Space is the place, says Esther Dyson

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Fly her to the moon. Please. 

In a remarkable case of life imitating satire, Esther Dyson has decided to host a space conference.

No, we’re not making this up – and no, we can’t think of anyone more appropriate.

“It’s not that there aren’t space conferences, but nothing as tacky and commercial as we want to be,” Silicon Valley’s space cadet tells the New York Times.

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Doonesbury savages Pepperland’s copyright utopians

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As anyone involved with the original Apple Newton project knows only too well, when Garry Trudeau’s satirical eye engages a target, there’s only one winner. The Doonesbury cartoonist has a gift for holding up a mirror to bad ideas so they collapse under the weight of their own absurdities. This week[*] Trudeau has turned his attention to the “Creative Commons” project.

Beginning with Monday’s comic, radio interviewer Mark questions aging rock star Jim Thudpucker about “free music”. Thudpucker returns with a barrage of techno utopian babble that suggests he’s been inhaling the heady vapors of the blogosphere.

“There are no rock stars any more!” insists Thudpucker. “With file sharing, we’re being liberated from the hierarchical tyranny of record sales… Careers henceforth will be concert-driven, fragmented, and small!”

“And fan bases?” asks Mark.

“Will be kept in Palm Pilots!” replies the blog-brained Thudpucker.

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Strength through pessimism! Keeping your stuff safe

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“We have a lot of optimistic engineers – but not enough pessimistic engineers,” reckons David Rosenthal. In the 1980s, Rosenthal designed the NeWS windowing system with James Gosling. In the 1990s he was NVidia’s fourth employee, or really the first person the three co-founders hired. But for the past few years Rosenthal has been tackling an issue that’s very close to Register readers’ hearts – we know from your mail.

On Monday we discussed the permanence of digital media – or more accurately, the lack of it in our story, Digital memories: we can forget them for you wholesale!. Why should any of us trust our family albums to digital media such as a web photo service when we can’t guarantee it’ll be around?

In this age of wiki-fiddlers and other careless coders, where the line between marketing hypester and developer has been blurred, the premium that’s placed on data integrity seems to be at an all time low. And the lossiest seem to work in “web services”. Uh, look out!

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Nokia enters the data dispenser biz

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Every bar has a condom dispenser. Why doesn’t every store have a data dispenser? Because you don’t want to shag a computer, of course. But this is an idea that remains largely unexplored.

At 3GSM last week, Nokia tiptoed into a market that one day might be enormous: the “proximity server”. If you’ve attended a tech conference in recent years you might even have used one without giving it a second thought. San Francisco pioneer WideRay has been in the business for five years: it beams the schedule to attendees on demand via Infra Red or Bluetooth. Inside the server is a cellular SIM, which updates itself from the network. But it could beam anything: ring tones today, MP3 files tomorrow. With an increasing number of punters having Bluetooth phones, the market potential increases daily. When we looked at the idea almost two years ago, it seemed proximity servers could have deep consequences, such as the potential to transform product branding, or at least make the retail experience less daunting for shop-o-phobics.

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