David Rhode is a double Pulitzer-winning journalist with the New York Times who just escaped seven months as a captive of the Taliban - yet you won’t have heard about it.
It’s extremely newsworthy, but coverage of the kidnapping would have made Rhode a more valuable hostage. The higher profile the captive, the more attention the captors and their demands get - and the lower the chance of a happy ending.
In situations like this, news organisations often agree to hold off on reporting certain events. They lose a story in the short term, but a reporter gets a better chance at coming home.
In any case, for better or worse, everyone gets their story eventually.
This mutual cooperation used to be relatively straightforward to organise - journalists, especially war correspondents, are a pretty cliquey bunch - but it is one of the long list of things that have received a thorough shaking-up in the internet revolution.
While Barry Collins was researching his free upgrades to Windows 7 news story, he stumbled across possibly the most ridiculous offer I’ve ever seen: you, my lucky, lucky friends, can download Windows Vista Home Basic from the Microsoft UK store for £137.01. Excluding VAT.
Now before everyone rushes off to bag this bargain, I should point out that you can also buy Home Premium for £166.37! Obviously excluding VAT again, Microsoft has to make a living you know.
A quick trawl online reveals the going rate for the full version of Vista Home Premium is around £130 inc VAT - and you can buy it for less than £90 inc VAT if you’re willing to opt for the more restricted OEM version, which is tied to the motherboard you first install it on (so if you build a new PC, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows).
So, taking away VAT, Microsoft is charging a premium of over £50 if you buy direct from its store. It would be amazing to discover just how many sales it’s made for these two excellent picks, but sadly I don’t think I’m going to get much joy out of Microsoft on that one. My guess? A princely zero.
Yes, it makes extremely comfortable and effortlessly trendy furniture, but it doesn’t get social media.
Habitat is in the middle of a disapproval-a-thon on Twitter right now, after the company, or someone acting on its behalf, added Iranian election hashtags to tweets about its “totally desirable Spring collection”.
Well, the idea was to attract attention, so it worked. In a way.
I’m sure I can’t be alone in having a passionate love/hate relationship with Twitter. I steered clear of it for a long time, believing it to be a timesink and unwelcome distraction to my already communication-filled life. And now that I have joined the throng - as has PC Pro via @pc_pro - I haven’t really moved away from that point of view.
The problem is that the stream of information moves so fast. Even using the quite impressive TweetDeck, I find it impossible to keep track of the endless streams of communications happening. And the thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to hear what the likes of Jack Schofield at The Guardian have to say, but, well, he says so much! As do the numerous other friends, colleagues, influencers and publications that I follow. (more…)
I’m a big fan of mobile broadband. In theory. The idea of a connection wherever you go, the promise of lower costs than fixed broadband, the possibility of even higher speeds than fixed! The reality, which I’m living through right now, remains frustrating.
For the last few days, I’ve had to “rely” on mobile broadband as I wait for my broadband connection to go live in my new house. The trouble is, it doesn’t work at all well. The first problem is reception: I don’t live in central London but in deepest Bucks, and that means I can only get a GPRS connection. (more…)
Since Wolfram Alpha launched at the weekend, I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in which the author asks it inane questions and laughs when it falls flat. Even our own Darien Graham-Smith (along with several others in the office) seems almost delighted to prod and poke at it to find instances where Wolfram’s big pre-launch claims can be mocked - usually by comparison to Google or Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, this is something that was bound to happen given the publicity the site has received in recent weeks from the mainstream press. The big problem occurs because most people are attempting to hastily test the new engine without any real reason to be using it. (more…)
So, after months of anticipation, Wolfram Alpha is finally here. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it a big disappointment.
I mean, obviously it was never going to slay Google on its first day. But after watching Stephen Wolfram’s pre-launch screencast I did believe it was at least going to be a credible alternative information source, offering authoritative and structured answers in a way no traditional search engine could aspire to.
Sadly, now Wolfram Alpha’s here it turns out that it doesn’t bloody know anything.
Last week, Microsoft announced some details of anti-piracy measures in Windows 7. It sounds like they’re going to be slightly less intrusive than those in Vista, and probably roughly as effective.
I don’t exactly resent all this product validation stuff. I’d prefer it if Microsoft didn’t feel the need to do it; but I accept that the company has a legitimate interest in dissuading casual copying, and to me a one-time online authorisation doesn’t seem an unreasonable way of going about that.
But I do resent all the weasel words and spin that surround the process. (more…)
OK, I admit that no one will be the slightest surprised to hear that ryanair has irritated a potential customer. However it’s always fun to hear of others misfortunes and it might just save you from a similar experience…
David Rhode is a double Pulitzer-winning journalist with the New York Times who just escaped seven months as a captive of the Taliban - yet you won’t have heard about it.
