Regarding the new API from The Guardian (which looks rather neat), one of my friends Twittered this: “Twitter fastest with the news, even in their building. Reading about the product online before they’ve announced it in the room!” At which point, to my shame, I lost my Twitter-tem...

Alan Patrick sums it up nicely: “In fact its indicative of the industry’s malaise that Apple made such a big splash by making a phone that merely “did” the ‘Net easily, loaded applications quickly, and had a decent size screen. Hardly revolutionary technology, but they ...

The new Mac mini offers more for the same amount of money (unless you’re in the UK, that is, but we’ll get to that later). So why are so many of the online comments like this one, from Cult of Mac? But if the Mac mini is offering more for the same price, how can it be overpriced? The sim...

The government has said on a number of occasions that it wants the banks to resume lending money to home-buyers and small businesses at the same levels as before the start of the credit crunch. There’s only one problem: doing so would be a sure-fire way to bankrupt the banks. And either the go...

In a comment on Rogers Cadenhead’s blog, Seth Finkelstein perfectly captures what the deeper reason behind the TechCrunch/Last.fm poor reporting is: “The basic problem is that there’s no profit (from attention) in being right, but there is in being first.” The first post on a...

The TechCrunch/Last.fm controversy has been all over the net over the weekend, and there’s not much that I can add to it factually. The one thing I will say, though, is that TechCrunch has behaved irresponsible: not so much for the original story - everyone gets it wrong sometimes. But when yo...

Information Week’s Eric Zeman decided that the fact he hadn’t heard much about Android on the first day of Mobile World Congress meant that the platform was in trouble: “Um. What gives? Many manufacturers have committed to the Android platform. Where are the handsets? Mobile World ...

Looking through some old work, I found this post - an article I wrote in 2005 for the Irish Times on Windows Vista, and why it was doomed to fail. I identified three key problems: Lack of effective (at the time) competition from Mac and Linux meant that Microsoft wasn't being pushed very hard to...

Looking through some old work, I found this post - an article I wrote in 2005 for the Irish Times on Windows Vista, and why it was doomed to fail. I identified three key problems: Lack of effective (at the time) competition from Mac and Linux meant that Microsoft wasn't being pushed very hard to...

You might have gathered from some of my more recent posts that I've switched platform. My main machine is now a Dell laptop, running Ubuntu 8.10. I've been using Macs since 1986, and have owned one more or less continuously since 1989. Machines that have been through the mill of my day-to-da...