Technovia

links for 2007-11-30

• Office Hours: How Bill Gates uses Office - Help and How-to - Microsoft Office Online
  Bill Gates on how he uses Office 2007 and Tablet PC.
  (tags: billgates microsoft tabletpc office)
• What the Google Intranet Looks Like
  A very interesting article on the Google intranet, which looks like a model for tech intranets everywhere. And yes, they eat their own dogfood.
  (tags: google)

Non-functional stuff that apparently works?

Cory on the iPlayer:

"Some 25 years ago, the BBC was pumping out BBC Micros to help Britain become a nation of technological literates. Today, Auntie is locking up online 'broadcasts' with nonfunctional anti-copying technology that not only takes away the freedom we enjoy with over-the-air broadcast"

So if it's non-functional, how can it take away our freedom? Surely that can only happen if it actually works?

Bye, Dad

As some of you will know, my Dad died on Tuesday after a short illness.

He'd been ill with pulmonary fibrosis for a few months, and although he'd been in and out of hospital he'd been able to have a pretty good quality of life up until the last week or two, when his condition deteriorated quickly. But he didn't suffer, and you can't ask for too much more.

He was 79 years old, and had had a good life - just over 20 years of happy retirement in which he saw his three kids and three grandkids grow up and make lives for themselves. We'll all miss him so much.

Sydney Betteridge, 1928-2007

links for 2007-11-27

• Apple Mail in Leopard with the same old error - heise Security
  "In March 2006 Apple defused a security problem in Apple Mail that made it possible to inject disguised malignant code. In Leopard, the patch was apparently forgotten." Stupid, stupid, stupid.
  (tags: apple mac macosx mail bug virus malware)
• » Zoho Writer opens up read AND write offline functionality | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com
  Extremely neat: Zoho should be congratulated on getting full read/write support using Google Gears for Zoho Writer before Google Docs.
  (tags: zoho web2.0 wordprocessing)
• New World Notes: Second Life User Activity Triples in Under a Year
  A nice rejoinder to those "death of Second Life" features that were so popular a couple of months ago.
  (tags: secondlife)
• Bad Science » Make your own ID
  How "biometric" is being used as a magic word by government ministers, who fail to understand the science and don't realise that it's not infallible. Please can we have more science-educated politicians please - and I say that as a humanities graduate.
  (tags: politics government IDcards uk)
• Mike Swanson's Blog : Wallpaper Images
  Some really lovely nature pictures done as desktop backgrounds, including widescreen versions.
  (tags: wallpaper nature)
• Is Apple about to implement data persistence for Safari? - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  Please god, let it be so.
  (tags: iphone ipodtouch safari macosx osx)
• Some Thoughts on the Facebook Beacon
  Why Facebook Beacon is a bad, bad thing.
  (tags: advertising be facebook Marketing opinion privacy socialnetworking)

Kindle: For users, the numbers just don't add up

Amazon Kindle Book Pricing Number Fudge - Technology Evangelist:

"If Amazon wanted to give a more HONEST example of Kindle ebook pricing, they would have compared the Kindle book prices to what those NY Times bestsellers cost in hardcover form on their own site.

It turns out that Amazon sells brand new hardcover versions for $16-17 for the titles mentioned above.

This is a significant difference, because it more than doubles (almost triples) the number of titles one would need to purchase before one breaks even on the Kindle.

Also, notice that the current USED price for the title mentioned above is only $2-6 below the NEW price. In theory, this means you could buy a new copy and sell it to someone else for a net of half of the Kindle. You can't sell - or even give your Kindle version to a friend."

Kindle is a great example of the process of messing up the change from selling atoms to selling bits. For any change like this, there are benefits to be had. The question, though, is do you concentrate on features which benefit the user, or do you use the switch from atoms to bits to try and increase your profit margin hugely?

Although Kindle at least provides something of a service - all that EVDO which users aren't paying for - the books themselves fail to add enough value for the price users are being expected to pay.

Technorati Tags:
Amazon, Kindle

Windows Vista's biggest enemy is Windows XP

Windows XP Twice as Fast as Vista?| Zoli’s Blog:

"Devil Mountain Software, the outfit that had previously declared Vista SP1 a Performance Dud came to the conclusion that Windows XP SP3 Yields Performance Gains - about 10% compared to XP SP2. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the very same tests show the outgoing operating system, XP twice as fast as Vista, the ‘flagship’ OS. "

The biggest problem which Microsoft faces is that a lot of its users are used to software which is just "good enough", so much so that they really don't want anything more. And Windows XP really is just good enough. Why upgrade? The answer that Microsoft makes them hear is simply "you have no choice - you're buying a new PC and that means Vista".

Technorati Tags:
Microsoft, Windows

River of News fails

The user experience has been a disaster (Scripting News):

"The NY Times has totally ignored the NY Times River, which makes the Times work on mobile devices with ease of use that they so often report is eluding them"

I don't know how many times that it's worth saying this, because Dave isn't listening but... "River of News" approaches don't work for everyone. In fact, for the majority of people - the kind who aren't constantly scanning the feeds - River of News fails miserably. It had no concept of importance other than "Most recent", and in news that's almost never the most important factor to someone.

If a bomb goes off somewhere in London, it's more important to me than other events. I want that front and centre of my news, more than anything else - more recent but unconnected stories are no use to me. If they push the important stuff off the front page, then I am missing things which I need to know.

River of News effectively abdicates responsibility for judging what's important to a reader. Whether that's done by human editors or machine algorithms isn't important - what matters is that in order to well-serve readers, it must be done. River of News simply fails to do it.

Technorati Tags:
Dave Winer

What the Kindle is good for

Bynkii:

"The Kindle, while utterly horrid for replacing books, is fantastic for replacing dead trees in what I call 'disposable reading', aka newspapers and magazines. (You'll note I've left off blogs. That's deliberate. I still pretty much hate the New Media Douchebags who are, mostly due to mass stupidity, and ease of manipulation, the 'A-list' of the 'blogodorkosphere'. There are about six 'blogs' worth reading. This one ain't one of them. Daring Fireball is. Other than those few, stop reading blogs with shitty writing. It rots your mind.)"

I don't actually think that the Kindle is all that good for magazines, which thrive on high-quality, high-colour design, but for newspapers? Yup.

Technorati Tags:
Amazon, Kindle

Testing

posted from iPhoneSlide.com

blogging light

Blogging will be light over the weekend, as I'm away in glamorous Kent.