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Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana – study
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Andrew Orlowski
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Modern technology depletes human cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs, according to a psychiatric study conducted at King’s College, London. And the curse of ‘messaging’ is to blame. Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users, in a clinical trial of over a…
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EFF founder must be cheered for founding EFF – EFF Founder
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Andrew Orlowski
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He made it. Now it made him If you think that backslapping awards and honorific titles are a feudal relic – an archaic and degenerate indulgence of the old world’s imperial plutocracies, think again. They’re alive and well in the New World – and flourishing in the even Newer World of Cyberspace! Which, we can’t…
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Hoax paper fools cybernetic boffins
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Andrew Orlowski
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An MIT student has had a paper consisting of computer-generated gibberish accepted by technology conference WMSCI. The pretentious gathering bills itself as “an international forum where researchers and practitioners examine Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics key issues” Comp sci undergraduate Jeremy Stribling told us that he didn’t single out WMSCI because of its subject matter, although…
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Linus Torvalds in bizarre attack on open source
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Andrew Orlowski
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Do as I say, not do as I do Normally we expect an attack on free software to come from one of the usual suspects: payola analysts, right wing “think tanks”, or Steve Ballmer. So it’s an odd day when Linus Torvalds himself weighs in against the principles of the movement. Torvalds launched a blast…
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Never Hurd of the new HP boss?
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Andrew Orlowski
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There’s a theory that British Prime Ministers, and England football managers, alternate between being bishops and bookmakers. A risk-taking rascal is succeeded by a dull, safe pair of hands, until the public clamor for the rascal once again. By replacing the high-profile Carly Fiorina with the low-impact Mark Hurd from NCR, Hewlett Packard would appear…
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MIT invents computer that runs away
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Andrew Orlowski
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MIT has taken the unfriendly computer interface to its natural conclusion: and created a computer that runs away from you. We’ve all had experiences with user interface elements that run away from us: toolbars in Windows, or the drive icons on the Mac OS X desktop, for example. But “Clocky” goes all the way –…