The news that Sir Clive Sinclair has passed away makes me sad, like a few million others who got the chance to own a microcomputer of their own for a ridiculously low price in the 1980s. Sad that a quick search of the text in that obituary doesn’t even find a single instance of the… Continue reading Uncle Clive, R.I.P.
Tag: IT
Tough enough?
Watching a feature film on commercial TV with ads earlier this evening – not something I do all that often these days – I was interested to see Samsung’s latest ad campaign referring to their new phones as : “Our toughest foldables yet.” Not the highest bar they’re setting themselves there, I thought. Then I… Continue reading Tough enough?
Thermocline of Truth
Rob Millar provides us with an excellent explanation of why the Royal Mail let the prosecution of so many postmasters happen when the organisation couldn’t believe1 that their new IT system was screwing up so badly: [Generally speaking,…], those at the bottom of an organisation have a fairly accurate view of what’s going on. They’re… Continue reading Thermocline of Truth
Ian Betteridge on the Surface Duo in the UK
I continue to be fascinated at the cack-handed way Microsoft have launched the Surface Duo. I’ve just spotted Ian Betteridge’s thoughts on the Surface Duo from March 2021: Yes, the cost here is ridiculous – £1300 at a time when the price has been reduced to $999 in the US – but I’ve always loved… Continue reading Ian Betteridge on the Surface Duo in the UK
Time travel
I really wish I’d read Craig Mod’s piece on The Healing Power of JavaScript earlier: [As we join the story, Mod has decided to use some of the time afforded him by the pandemic to rebuild his personal web site…] In that spirit, as I moved my homepage I also rebuilt it as a so-called… Continue reading Time travel
An experiment
Matt Webb is running an interesting little experiment on his site, aiming to build an awareness that someone else is reading a given page at the same time as you are) and letting readers highlight a portion of the content on that page for other readers who happen to be around at the same moment… Continue reading An experiment
Irresistible
I’m indebted to Tim Bray for the pointer to jwz’s They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo, which I must have read at the time but which I don’t think I posted about here: I’m going to draw a line through 1930s agitprop, Ronald Reagan, methane-breathing zombie space aliens, the Mozilla logo,… Continue reading Irresistible
Shameless
Further to this earlier post about how Microsoft planned to have Microsoft 365 track user productivity, Microsoft issued a graceful apology, very likely delivered through gritted teeth for that feature that someone sneaked into the software they were planning on selling to businesses everywhere they could: Jeffrey Snover, a veteran Microsoft engineer and CTO of… Continue reading Shameless
Twenty years on, take 2
Further to this, Paul Ford finds himself talking more seriously about what the web has become twenty years on: 2000 me: Wow you still work on the web, that’s amazing. It must be so easy to publish really interesting web pages. 2020 me:Technically, well, yes. Anything you could do 20 years ago, you can do… Continue reading Twenty years on, take 2
MS -365
As if the whole use-Microsoft-Teams-to-extend-the-working-day-to-include-commuting-time thing wasn’t enough, now Microsoft seem to be keen on extending Microsoft 365’s reach to quantifying worker productivity: Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365. A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’… Continue reading MS -365