Category: Stories
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Windows Metro Maoist cadres reach the desktop, and pound it flat
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The revolutionary dogma of Metro is sweeping through the old Windows desktop, too, a new leak of Window 8 confirms. The leaked build, newer than the public release of a fortnight ago, abandons the 3D design elements introduced into Windows in 1990 for a resolutely two-dimensional world. The ‘legacy’ desktop in Windows 8 is denuded of anything that takes advantage of human depth perception, such as window shadows, gradients or sculpted controls.
It’s a flat, flat world.… Read More
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The IPO Enquiry
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Sketches from the three hearings held by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Intellectual Property’s enquiry into the IPO in April and May 2012… Read More -
Orphans, giants, and your disappearing digital rights
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They’re at it again. Who? Take a guess: if it’s not the Daily Mail, then it’s probably the BBC. The corporation has once again been caught pinching photos, wrongly attributing them, and pretending nothing ever happened – in a triumph of crowd-sourced “citizen journalism”.
But this incident of photo-lifting is slightly more noteworthy than most: the BBC used a photograph taken nine years ago in Iraq to illustrate its story about the massacre at the weekend in Syria.… Read More
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Shoreditch’s sparkle leaves BBC presenter ‘tech-struck’
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“I haven’t felt so good having spoken to a businessman for ten minutes in about 25 years. That’s not normally how I feel! So thanks very much!”
And thanks to you, BBC presenter Fi Glover, for sharing the feel-good factor with us.
Glover was bringing the miracle of Shoreditch’s internet companies into the nation’s living rooms as part of a mission for Radio 4’s One to One slot. She had vowed to find out, in her words, “what do these … Read More
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Popper, Soros, and Pseudo-Masochism
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A new report by intellectual property campaigners has again put the UK on the naughty step.
This year, as last year, activists list the UK alongside Brazil and Thailand as having the most “oppressive” copyright laws in the world. The report was published by an international NGO called Consumer International, but this delegates the work out to a Soros-funded group called A2K.
It’s certainly a bold point of view. How does it arrive at this conclusion? Helpfully, we have the … Read More
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Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism
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The writer Toby Young tells a story about how the modern 100m race is run in primary schools. At the starting pistol, everyone runs like mad. At the 50m point, the fastest children stop and wait for the fatties to catch up. Then all the youngsters walk across the finishing line together, holding hands.
I have no idea if this is true – it may well be an urban myth. But the media class’s newly acquired enthusiasm for teaching all … Read More
