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SpinVox
by
Andrew Orlowski
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The Register has built up a picture of the company that makes believing SpinVox’s revised claims extremely difficult. Sources suggest SpinVox, a privately held company, is employing a far larger number of transcribers than it publicly states, even today. These sources also point to extreme difficulties in maintaining its operations as the company scaled, winning…
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SpinVox: Why I Quit
by
Andrew Orlowski
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“The worst kept secret in the mobile industry is out: disgruntled Spinvox call centre staff have been telling the BBC that they’re not actually robots, or even highly advanced man-machine cyborg hybrids.” …
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To the Moon – with extreme engineering
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Apollo space program as a triumph of power and industrial might. The superpowers’ space programs were, of course, political and chauvinistic, designed to showcase national wealth. But there’s a better way of looking at the program, Dennis Wingo reminded me recently. Masses of money helped put man on the Moon of course, but the Moon…
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The Tragedy of the Creative Commons
by
Andrew Orlowski
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The Creative Commons initiative fulfilled a major ambition last week – but it’s taken only days for the dream to turn to crap. Google granted the wish by integrating the ability to search images based on rights licences into Google Image Search. Yahoo! Image Search has had a separate image search facility for years, but…
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The bogus logic of ‘sustainability’
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Did you know people in Haiti, Burma and Armenia are all better off than in Britain? And the Congo is happier than the USA? That’s what the London think-tank New Economic Foundation reckons in its second “Happy Planet” rankings. But even NEF admits that its “happiness” rating or HPI doesn’t really measure human happiness, and…
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Google’s vanity OS is Microsoft’s dream
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Andrew Orlowski
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No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google’s vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business, although both will obligingly huff and puff about how serious they are about this new, phoney OS war. Since both of these giants are permanently…