Category: Stories
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EMI hires the Biggest Brain in Sadville
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Andrew Orlowski
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How desperate is EMI? Desperate enough to hire the co-founder of Sadville? Amazingly, yes. Not only is a graphics programmer joining the storied British music group as head of “digital strategy” – he cheerfully admits he doesn’t know anything about the music business. And he doesn’t even like music – he’s only bought five albums…
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Why didn’t Nokia become the next Sony?
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Andrew Orlowski
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When, a few years ago, I described Sony and Nokia as the only two companies who could call the shots in consumer electronics, a few eyebrows were raised. Sony, yes. But Nokia? I anticipated that success in smartphones would be a beachhead into a bunch of other consumer electronics markets. Few noticed that Nokia already…
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TV tells CO2-emitting children to die early
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Andrew Orlowski
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Carbon Cult sickos are under fire for an interactive website that tells children they should die because they emit CO2. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” site invites young children to take a “greenhouse gas quiz”, asking them “how big a pig are you?”. At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC…
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Rationing: the UK’s parallel currency
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Andrew Orlowski
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Environment Minister Hilary Benn again rebuffed calls this week for WW2-style energy rationing to return to the UK. He was responding to a Select Committee report urging ministers to issue 45 million Britons with an energy trading “credit card” – a mammoth techno-bureaucratic exercise costing several billions of pounds a year to operate. What’s interesting…
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Microsoft hands Google the future of digital books
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Andrew Orlowski
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While Bill Gates now holds a lucrative monopoly on digital images, his successors don’t see the same prosperous future for the digital word. Microsoft is withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitisation project and will cease to scan books, the company said on Friday. It’s abandoning its Live Book Search venture – a curious decision,…
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Failing Web 2.0 stars pray for copyright abolition
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Andrew Orlowski
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Two articles were published today of some note, and if you can put them in context, you can begin see the true, scary picture of internet economics today. The one that’s usually too scary for the posh papers or broadcast media to describe. Exhibit One is a deadpan report in the Financial Times, bylined to…