The Big Boys’ Mea Culpas

I find it interesting that companies can get things so wrong. News Corp just sold off Myspace for a fraction of its original price today, effectively admitting it didn’t get social media. Microsoft famously came late to the table with the Internet, and then has been late to more or less every party since. It’s … Read more

Keys to the Kingdom

In this week’s Loose Wire Service column (which runs in print publications, more here), I write about those unsung heroes of productivity: programs that store globs of text for you so you don’t have to keep typing the same thing. Last time I talked about how the keyboard is often a quicker way to launch … Read more

The New Windows And Organising Your Stuff

This month’s PCWorld gets hold of an early prototype of the next Windows, which, apart from the usual ‘interface enhancements’ illustrates what I think is going to be the most important change in how we store and retrieve files. The magazine says that the new ‘Longhorn’ version Windows Explorer — the program which lists what … Read more

Hardware: A Computer For the Price of a Pedicure

If you’re cheap, skint, or just like buying stuff that doesn’t cost very much, check out the $169 Lindows WebStation. The Lindows WebStation is “the first ultra-affordable, ‘unbreakable’ computer designed specifically for Web work.” Just plug it into a broadband connection and you’re off. Apparently it’s idiot proof too: “It’s literally impossible to destroy the … Read more

Column: search software

Loose Wire — Organize Me: Give us some software that really makes the information age meaningful   By Jeremy Wagstaff from the 3 April 2003 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review, (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Every time I visit a computer shop I get nostalgic for the dotcom boom. In those … Read more