Don’t get me wrong, I quite like technology. I’m the kind of person who’d be admiring the massive metal foot of the Terminator even as it stomped my skull into the dirt. But when it comes to eBooks, not only am I not sold, I’m sat on the shelf hiding my price tag behind my back and shooing people on towards the muffins opposite.
And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them - digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.
1. The fact I have to use it at all In the normal, grown-up world, there are standards for things like MP3 players. That’s why every MP3 player I’ve owned in the past five years has worked, right out of the box, with both the manufacturer’s own library software and Windows Media Player. Every MP3 player, that is, apart from the one built into my iPhone.
2. Its high-handed approach to my system resources
iTunes is a program for managing your music files. All right, it does other things too (though I’d prefer it not to), but there’s absolutely no need for it to be running all the time. So why does it need to secretly install services and startup items? Read the rest of this entry »
Before I get too much grief, I’m fully aware that I’m about six months too late to start jumping on the slam-Facebook-bandwagon, but it’s starting to annoy me so much I can’t hold in my stored-up anger any longer.
It’s not even that I want to use Facebook or even have an opinion about Facebook. The fact is, I have to use the darn thing if I want to keep on communicating with my brother. Read the rest of this entry »
A lovely blue Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA8EX just landed on my desk to be reviewed, which is great, because it has one particularly exciting feature – it’s completely waterproof. Eager to test this out I ran down to reception where we have a huge fish tank, and I dropped it in.
We’ve seen recently just how muddled a regulatory body Ofcom seems to be. There was the nonsensical claim that rural households in Britain are as well connected as their urban neighbours, swiftly refuted by a ThinkBroadband.com survey - and anyone who’s ever been outside a major city.
There was the bottling of speed sanctions on ISPs in favour of a laughable broadband code, essentially giving ISPs carte blanche to continue attracting punters’ cash with fantasy headline speeds.
But for final damning evidence of Ofcom’s ineffectiveness, I point you away from the world of IT and towards this excellent, and deeply unsettling, New Scientist article. It explains (far more eloquently than I could here) how Ofcom has essentially given permission for documentary makers to pretty much make things up, on the basis that it’s only news programmes which need be presented with “due accuracy”.
If they won’t crack down on something as huge as that, what hope for an end to “up to” speeds?
I’ve just tried downloading Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope (a contradiction in terms, given that the idea of a telescope is to look beyond our world, surely?).
Given that the software is partly aimed at kids, it’s good to see Microsoft has made the installation process nice and simple.
It’s been a good couple of weeks since Microsoft started pushing out XP Service Pack 3 through Automatic Update, yet I’m still to see hide nor hair of the blighter.
I’ve got Automatic Update turned on and other patches are coming down the pipe with depressing regularity, but not the big boy.
I’ve headed off to Windows Update to see if I can manually tempt the swine on to my system, but the site seems oblivious to XP SP3’s very existence. I’m being offered Office Comaptbility Pack Service Pack 1 (packs for packs? Give me strength), an update for Outlook 2007 and the first Service Pack for Office 2008 Accounting, but not a sniff of the final Service Pack for the most popular operating system in the company’s history.
There have been several blogs from various members of the PC Pro team about the joys of sat-nav recently. First I gushed about the ease with which I drove 1,400 miles in a couple of days, and barely got the map out once. Then Darien got all excited about the beat-the-ETA gameeveryone inevitably ends up playing to liven up long journeys.
But this… well. This is just brilliant.
According to CNN, General Motors is developing a windshield that “combines lasers, infrared sensors and a camera to take what’s happening on the road and enhance it” for ageing drivers. Read the rest of this entry »
You may not have noticed this, but Google is quite a dominant company. Chances are that almost everyone you know has a Google email account, a sign-in for Google Docs, and uses its search engine every day. So you do have to wonder how anyone is going to break its stranglehold - something I asked one of its email competitors today.
The chances are that you will have heard of GMX, but the chances are that you also won’t have used its services. Read the rest of this entry »
Bad news from AMD this morning: a quarterly loss of $1.2B. That’s rather worse than last quarter’s losses of $360M, and it’s led to the departure of CEO Hector Ruiz.
It’s a shame, but really not that surprising. AMD has some great products, but it doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. In fact, its behaviour in general hasn’t made a lot of sense lately. Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t get me wrong, I quite like technology. I’m the kind of person who’d be admiring the massive metal foot of the Terminator even as it stomped my skull into the dirt. But when it comes to eBooks, not only am I not sold, I’m sat on the shelf hiding my price tag behind my back and shooing people on towards the muffins opposite.
1. The fact I have to use it at all
