This time last year I gazed into my crystal ball and made a bunch of predictions about what we may see in 2008. I actually don’t think that I did too badly at all.
Archive for the 'Technology' Category
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Thanks to me living in Scotland, I was unable to watch the Germany vs. England football match on television last night. The game was broadcast south of the border on ITV1 but STV had to go with a repeat showing of Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis instead for some reason or other. Scotland played Argentina but this was shown on Sky Sports satellite channel, which my flatmate and I decided was too extortionate many months ago.
I was about to switch on the radio and listen to the game on BBC Radio Five Live when I remembered about Zattoo. This allows you to watch a selection of TV stations on your computer in several European countries for free and – most importantly last night – included in these channels is ITV1 London.
Yesterday the BBC announced that their main channels will be simulcast online from next week. This is simply massive news and will no doubt cause UK ISPs some major headaches with the inevitable increase in traffic this will bring.
Cool as this is, I do have worries about the implications this has for the television license here in the UK. Previously you were usually okay if you didn’t own a television set but with more channels being online it will soon be assumed that you must be watching tv programmes if you own a computer and no doubt it will be up to you to prove otherwise.
I’ve mocked Twitter whenever it has been mentioned at the weekly Edinburgh Coffee Morning – and it’s mentioned quite often with people like Mike Coulter in attendance. I think my main mistake in the past has been relying on my FriendFeed as a hub for all my updates. You simply just don’t get the interactive conversation element of Twitter and it’s only now that I’ve happened across a lot of my @replies that I missed months ago. I’m now all set with Twhirl and Twinkle so I don’t miss anything again.
I decided to give Twitter another shot last week. Within minutes, 10 Downing Street and the geek luminaries zefrank, Chris Pirillo and Jason Calacanis were following me too. This is probably down to them using TweetLater or something similar rather than a manual process (unlike Steven Fry who added me after a couple of days, although I’m led to believe that it’s his PA who adds his followers).
Things are going crazy at the moment. The staggering milestone of one billion Tweets was reached last week. This may have something to do with Barack Obama making heavy use of the micro-messaging format.
Update: since posting this, Twitter had been up and down like a kangaroo on a tramampoline. Database upgrades several times per day? Come on, don’t play us for fools!
After what feels like forever, the next US President will finally be decided upon at the polls tomorrow. Obama is the clear favourite but his victory is not guaranteed by any means. There’s the Bradley effect to take into consideration for a start.
A more tangible effect will be observed by the use of the voting machines. Since 2001, $3.9 billion has been spent on solving this non-problem. Non only do these machines not have any verifiable auditing process, they are expensive, insecure and inaccurate. I’m not just talking about the hanging chads fiasco but actual vote switching. I’m far from being alone in thinking that this is a serious issue.
I’m usually all for throwing technology at things but only if it actually improves a process. The voting process in the United States is overly complicated compared to the UK or Canada (as covered by Robert X. Cringely in 2003). Earlier this year, the Dutch governement de-certified voting machines and reverted to a pencil and paper based system (Google translation).
It reminds me of the story of the Fisher Space Pen for NASA. There was apparently an investment of $1 million by Fisher to research and develop these special pens.
The Russians just took pencils.
Okay, I promise that this will be the last post bashing ISPs for a while. This one is special though and displays shocking behaviour on several levels. Not being happy just spying on what you look at in order to sell your data or crippling the service they provide to you if you have the gall to actually use it, some ISPs have started altering pages you request in between the page being requested being sent to you and it displaying in your browser.
“Unlimited” broadband packages were highlighted on The Gadget Show on Channel 5 last night. Mike Fairman, Head of Broadband for O2 attempts a pathetic analogy to some guy in front of you in the queue taking all the food in an all you can eat buffet. If that happened to me I would expect the restaurant to give me more food. Besides, the general concept is not an exercise in gluttony. Instead of all you can eat it should be all you care to eat.
It’s hard work being an Internet service provider these days. What with all those iTunes downloads, user-generated video sites like YouTube, IPTV and video-on-demand services like the BBC iPlayer eating up bandwidth. That’s just the legal stuff. Those nasty P2P file sharing services are still very popular1. What on earth are they to do?
Introducing bandwidth caps for their users would prove unpopular with customers. Spending money to upgrade their hardware is unpopular with them. Throttling the amount of bandwidth available to certain services (BitTorrent traffic for example) seems to be the accepted course of action at the moment.
I mentioned recently that Barack Obama is pro Net Neutrality and I’m aware that not everybody knows what this is exactly.
Yesterday saw the launch of the first phone based on Google’s Android platform – the HTC manufactured Dream G1 with T-Mobile as the carrier.
Like the first version of the iPhone there have been some strange decisions: Carrier-locked, non-standard headphone jack, poor Bluetooth implementation, no tethering, voice dialling, video capture (or playback outside YouTube on the G1), VoIP or Exchange support. Unlike the first generation iPhone there is no desktop synching or multi-touch (John Gruber makes an incisive-as-ever comment on this) but on the plus side there is 3G, a slide-out physical keyboard, MMS and cut-and-paste.
Apple will carry on improving the iPhone. In a couple of years I’m expecting perhaps a graphene-based ultracapacitor instead of a battery or fuel cell (try getting one of those on a plane), an OLED screen with tactile keyboard and integrated camera.
Alongside these patents that have yet to come to market, there are around 200 others on the iPhone and a lot of them are related to the all-important interface. A friend was struggling to find the silent mode due to the lack of the traditional:
Menu → Options → Sounds → Ringer → Silent → On
The moment I flicked the switch at the side of the iPhone to turn the ringer off, a look of burgeoning appreciation of the way Apple does things spread across her face. An annoyance I do have with this is not having an dedicated icon on the screen to indicate that the ringer is off but – like the lack of MMS, A2DP, video capture or SMS forwarding – this is easily solved with a software update.
On my travels I was always keeping an eye out for complimentary wireless Internet access points as I didn’t really feel like paying the exorbitant data fees. It would have cost me £7.50 per megabyte or, to put it another way, £45 to view this picture of Lake Wanaka at full-size, although this came down slightly (more so for within the EU) after the introduction of the 3G iPhone.
My rule of thumb is if I can mention something in the pub and my non-geek friends have heard of it then it’s pretty much guaranteed to be a success. Even among my switched-on geek brethren Twitter isn’t all that popular.
Just when I had something possibly exciting to broadcast Twitter was unavailable again. I could have sworn that the monkey man himself, Steve Ballmer, walked in to the restaurant last night. I tried again and then checked Twitter’s status to find that it wasn’t actually down at all. It just wasn’t working.
At the risk of invoking Evan’s ire, Twitter is next to useless at the moment. Okay, so it may have broken the news of the Chinese earthquake. It can get you out of jail. There are stories of the LA firefighters using it and it can even tell you when to water your plants. Twistori is interesting but Twitter needs a sticky killer app before the masses adopt it but before that can happen it really has to get the stability problems sorted out.
Switching hosts and abandoning Ruby on Rails may be a start but there’s a long way to go.
