For some inexplicable reason Google Earth’s maps of Oxford have been of terribly low-quality for years – so poor that one could not make out even where the roads were, let alone particular buildings.
All that seems to have changed – someone has clearly flown over Oxford on a sunny day taking some nice pictures. Who’ll be the first to find a red tricycle?
Senior French politicians may not use the BlackBerry.
We have become very used to storing data in what Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others refer to as “the cloud“. Data stored ‘somewhere on the internet’ – on servers managed by someone else – is terribly convenient. We can access what we need, from wherever we are, on whatever computer or device is closest to hand. Some people get very excited about this sort thing.
And yet it is (mostly) a very bad idea, from a security point of view. All the data we store online is generally stored unencrypted, meaning that whoever happens to be storing it in the “cloud” or moving it around for you can read it.
With a service like Google, you cannot be certain at any given moment exactly where your data is being physically stored – and so what legal rules cover its handling. It is this that has the French worried.
Why does it make sense for Google to provide email, calendar and other online applications for free? In part, because in so doing it can gather more information about it’s customers – such as their names, for a start. Which is not to say that they have evil or nefarious intentions, but that doesn’t mean that putting information about yourself into the hands of web companies is a great idea either. Between security holes, poor implementations, deals to sell data, company acquisitions and the like, it’s hard to know where that data will end up eventually.
And data stored online may not even have the legal protections that data stored on your disk has. It is only this week that the Federal Government in America was told it might need a warrant for data stored in online email accounts, for example, a debate that I’m sure I’ll comment on as it unfolds.
If only the data was encrypted, sent to the internet, and decrypted when we need it. But for three reasons, protocols like this are rare: they can reduce functionality, can be difficult to present in a user-friendly way and make the make offering to store the data less attractive to service providers.
But while we’re being cynical, let’s also note that a French ban on official use of the Blackberry, even if it makes good technical sense, also opens the door for a more French for the provision of mobile email.
Steve Jobs makes at least two major presentations each year, one in January and one in June. I’ve written about the January 2007 announcements before. The June ones (made on Monday) seem to have been more an effort in spin than an announcement of new technology.
He made much of the fact that games are being ported to OS X. Now it seems as if what he meant was that some Windows games will be released running under some kind of emulation. Not exactly the same thing, really, or nearly as significant. It is, for one thing, hardly new.
Then he made much of the fact that developers would be able to write “Web 2.0″ applications for the iPhone. It wasn’t, he said, full access to the phone (which is what developers wanted), but it would enable programmers to write software that integrated well with phone functions. It was a way of allowing development that Apple had thought long and hard about.
But re-watching the video and really reading the fine print, it looks as this too was an effort in spin. A web-browser had already been announced, so the ability to use web applications was hardly new. Jobs avoided promising that ‘web applications’ could be downloaded onto the phone, meaning that third-party applications will only run when an internet connection is available. It is noticeable that within the demo, the application show was accessed via Safari, not via its own icon. And ‘access to the phone features’, such as sending email or making a call, does not seem to mean ‘tell the phone to send data’ but rather ‘launch Apple’s own email program when you click on an email address’.
We’re not even talking, then, about ‘widgets’ in the OS X sense – mini web pages that appear to the user to be individual applications; we’re talking about viewing web pages on a web browser. If they’ve thought long and hard, then, they haven’t come up with anything new.
Jobs had some of the most important members of Apple’s developer community in one room, and then tried to impress them with not one but two rather misleading announcements. I am not an expert, but that doesn’t seem like a very smart move to me.
There has been considerable astonishment at Apple’s announcement of a version of their web-browser that will run on windows. After all, despite what Apple claims, Safari does not have greatest reputation even among OS X users, and it is not as if Windows users do not have a wide choice of browsers already.
All of this misses the real point, I suspect. Apple has announced that it will allow limited development of third-party applications for the forthcoming iPhone. Developers will be allowed to develop “web” applications that run within the Safari web-browser.
Allowing Windows users a version of Safari gives them the pseudo-SDK needed for iPhone application development. If Apple manages to persuade a few Windows users to use their browser, then so much the better – it will certainly get the Apple fans cheering, but a futile attempt to re-open and win the “Browser Wars” is hardly worth developer-time.
While we are on the subject of yesterday’s keynote address at the Apple developer conference – my personal UI peeves are needless transparency (why make my eyes work hard?), icons that look very similar except for subtle, artistic differences, and file managers that display previews of files instead of icons.[1] Leopard looks set to deliver all three. Terrific.
[1] The latter has been attempted by every major operating system, and everyone can get it to work well for demos and poorly in the real world. It looks good in a folder of very different documents, but in a folder of letters that all look very much the same at 20x20px, it simply sucks up computer resources without providing any utility at all.
This is a worrying tale.
But then, as I’m always telling my students, check the footnotes!
The Americans are attempting immigration reform. Here is some excellent commentary on the idiocy of the current proposals.
Windows Vista was, by any reckoning, late. One of the major reasons was that Microsoft was attempting to take its ageing code-base, much of which of course dates back to a time when personal computers were solitary creatures (my Windows 95 machine was quite shocked by the addition of a network card), tending to commune with each other little and sporadically, if at all. Baring the occasional infected floppy disk (which I never came across), one was pretty safe.
These days, of course, that kind of attitude just doesn’t cut it at all. But now it seems that Vista may be no more secure than XP. Of course, anyone can write a controversial report – it’s a way of getting good coverage in the press, and Microsoft themselves do it often. But one only has to scratch the very surface of the – admittedly lovely, perhaps, for those who like that sort of thing – user interface, to be left with the impression that not much has really changed underneath it all. I very much hope to be proved wrong.
A thoughtful piece on the NakedTranslations weblog highlights a curious feature of the English language and its use of gender.
Since almost all inanimate objects are considered neutral (unusually), rather than masculine or feminine, a speaker of English can demonstrate sentimental attachment to a well-loved object by giving it a grammatical gender it would otherwise not have had – referring to a boat with the pronoun ‘she’ being the classic example.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the stronger presence of grammatical gender in other languages actually makes this a rather unusual feature of English.
The language log reminds us all that just because someone says “I’m sorry” it doesn’t mean they have apologised. Context and grammar are everything.
Which reminds me: I’m sick of the phrase “I take full responsibility.” In days gone by that meant accepting blame and punishment. These days it seems to mean little more than, “I wish you would accept the matter as closed. I do.”
Unless you are happy to have complete strangers use your wireless connection, it might be time for an upgrade.
