Status-Q

A man in Bangalore was arrested and put in prison because he posted some disrespectful pictures of an Indian national hero on Orkut. This particular hero died over three centuries ago, but I guess he could still be upset, if you believe in reincarnation.

Now, there are some worrying questions here about freedom of speech in India, but they’ve been somewhat overshadowed by the discovery that the chap in question didn’t actually do it. The authorities went to Google (Orkut’s owner) for information on the perpetrator of this heinous crime. Google duly handed over the IP address, so they then went to the ISP concerned, who told them the user of that IP address, and he was promptly arrested and put in prison.

Unfortunately, the ISP, Airtel, seems to have slipped up and given the wrong information. After three weeks, this was discovered, and Mr. Kailash was released. The police are saying it’s not their fault, and that he should sue his ISP. Many of us have been tempted to sue our ISPs for a variety of reasons, but wrongful arrest isn’t usually one of them!

Anyway, there are some interesting lessons here for people like me who are dreadfully lax when it comes to campaigning about privacy issues. I’ve always said that I could never be a good conspiracy theorist because I don’t have sufficient faith in the competence of most authorities to construct a decent conspiracy.

But perhaps it’s the incompetence, not the conspiracies, that I should actually be worried about!

My friend Brian Lemaster, whom some of my readers will know, left the world of technology a little while back to join his family’s lumber business in Atlanta, which was founded in 1946.

Last week, this happened:

Fortunately nobody was hurt. At least, not physically.

But that must be an experience he and his family won’t forget very soon…

My thoughts are with you, Brian!

(As demonstrated tonight by Dr Tom Smith of Davas Ltd)

Start with a good opening slide:

This will help get the audience’s attention, if anyone turned up:

Explain clearly the theory behind your subject:

and reinforce your points, where possible, with some practical demonstrations.

Make them memorable.

Of course, if you chose the wrong career, say, accountancy, rather than firework manufacture and display, you may be at a slight disadvantage with some of these.

A nice story from the Register – well, rather a depressing one really – about Camelot, the UK’s lottery operator, having to withdraw a recent scratchcard competition:

According to the Manchester Evening News, to qualify for a prize, punters had to “scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card”. Sadly, as the card had a decidedly wintery theme, this initially-shown figure was often below zero.
…
Among these was Levenshulme’s Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted “she had left school without a maths GCSE”. She explained: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop.”
…
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.”

They had to withdraw the competition because rather large numbers of people had the same complaint…

Many thanks to Michael for the link.

It had to happen eventually, but perhaps it really is beginning now… in Japan at least. PC sales are falling, according to this AP article.

I have always looked forward to living in a post-PC world.

The personal computer as we normally picture it has been such a successful model over the last quarter of a century that it has stifled quite a lot of innovation because many ideas, which might otherwise have exciting new tangible forms, are easier just to do on a PC. But as PCs become less of a focus, we should see new types of interaction becoming more common.

Mark Weiser’s famous article, “The Computer for the 21st Century“, talks about when core technologies become really powerful: when you don’t notice them any more.

The most frequently-cited example of this – highlighted by Don Norman – is the electric motor. There was a time when you could buy a ‘household electric motor’ and a range of accessories which would allow you to use it as a blender one minute, and a vacuum cleaner the next. But you know electric motors have become really significant as a technology when you start thinking of a washing machine as a washing machine, and a drill as a drill, rather than as incarnations of an electric motor.

Perhaps that’s what we’re starting to see in Japan.

Millions download music directly to their mobiles, and many more use their handsets for online shopping and to play games. Digital cameras connect directly to printers and high-definition TVs for viewing photos, bypassing PCs altogether. Movies now download straight to TVs.

More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.

Now, to be fair, it’s not clear that people are actually doing without traditional PCs, they just aren’t upgrading their old ones very fast.

But this is a start. One thing that characterises appliances like washing machines, at least for most of us, is that you replace them when you have to. You don’t buy a new one so you can boast to your friends that this years’ model has a higher-wattage motor.

This is not the end of personal computing. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

What fun!