Musings from Bill
This Christmas period offices will be empty of staff as the country shuts down for the extended celebration that has become the norm over the last few years. Many staff will head home from work on Friday 22nd, not to return until January 2nd. They’ll leave behind the wreckage of the Christmas party, a pile of unopened mail and, if they are at all typical, a lot of glowing lights.
Continue reading “Have yourself a carbon-wasting Christmas…”
[Also to be found on the BBC Website later today]
For anyone with an interest in copyright, patents, trademarks and the panoply of laws, licenses and regulations surrounding intellectual property the publication of Andrew Gowers’ ‘Review of Intellectual Property’ was keenly awaited.
Continue reading “Getting the balance right – more on Gowers”
My laptop is dying. After over two years in which it has been my constant companion, I think it is reaching the end of its useful life.
The case is bruised and battered, worn and scratched with a few unusual indentations. The ‘5’ key often sticks. The CD drive has died with a disk still in there, and is invisible to the operating system. And the battery life has dropped from three hours to around 90 minutes despite all my efforts to revive it.
It is clearly on its way out.
[As ever, also on the BBC News website, with better pictures…]
Over the last twenty years the global economy has been shaped and reshaped by computers and the growing reach of the internet as a public communications network. Businesses now rely on the net in the way they relied on the telephone back in the 1950’s or the railway back in Victorian days, and new ways of doing business are constantly emerging based around the capabilities of the network.
[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]
I’ve got a very nice smartphone, but it’s costing me a fortune because I keep checking my email and looking at websites, and I forget that on the phone I’m paying for every byte that I send or receive.
[As ever, read this on the BBC News website too]
Not content with occupying vast chunks of the television schedule for weeks at a time Endemol, the company that produces the ‘Big Brother’ reality TV programme, has announced that it will be hosting a special edition of the show inside the Second Life virtual world.
Participants, or at least their online representations in the form of cartoon-like avatars, will be confined in a house with transparent walls, and the winner will become the owner of a whole Second Life island.
[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]
While it is certainly interesting to note that Google’s UK advertising revenue this year is likely to outstrip that of Channel 4 and may soon approach ITV’s, we should not let our reading of these particular runes get out of hand.
Nine hundred million pounds is not really that much money, under five per cent of the total spent advertising to us all each year, and the Google model is so very different from the TV model that any claims that Google is taking money from commercial TV should be treated with scepticism.
Continue reading “Joining the dots”
[As ever you can read this on the BBC News website, and Kieren writes to tell me about the IGF Community Forum, where a lot of the issues will be debated over the coming week… worth visiting if you’re not in Athens]
It would be nice to think that next week’s first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum will mark the transition between today’s Western-dominated internet and a true global network, but I’m not expecting too much.
The news that Sky has outbid Channel 4 in the auction for the rights to show the next two series of the multi-layered enigma that is ‘Lost’ has caused a stir in media-watching circles.
Whether or not you care about the activities of a disparate bunch of crash survivors and the people and phenomena they encounter on a desert island, and I confess that I was so bored by the first series that I stopped watching, the deal seems to have merited a lot of attention.
While cosmologists explore a universe which exists independently of them or, except at the quantum level, their choices as to what to observe and how, things are rather different for those of us who study what is happening on the Internet.
For although the physics of electronic circuit design and the mathematics of signal processing provide some boundaries to the possible and force engineers into ever more inventive approaches to getting more processing cycles per second or bits per square centimetre, much of the design and implementation of the network architecture is a matter of choice.
Continue reading “Meet the new flaws, same as the old flaws..”