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Should iPods carry health warnings?
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Andrew Orlowski
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An Australian head teacher has banned pupils from bringing their iPods into school, because they encourage social isolation. “People were not tuning into other people because they’re tuned into themselves,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. As we noted this week, all kinds of fascinating social possibilities elude the iPodder. Music is a social activity, but the children…
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How computers make kids dumb
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Andrew Orlowski
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A study of 100,000 pupils in 31 countries around the world has concluded that using computers makes kids dumb. Avoiding PCs in the classroom and at home improved the literacy and numeracy of the children studied. The UK’s Royal Economic Society finds no ground for the correlation that politicans make between IT use and education. The authors,…
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New Microsoft Longhorn chief is indigestion expert
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Andrew Orlowski
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Microsoft has a new star hire to head up its Longhorn project, Mike Sievert. And he brings a deeper and richer personal experience to the job than many of his marketing counterparts in the technology industry. Sievert took up the post of Corporate VP for Windows Product Management, to give him his full title, at…
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‘We must now embrace the tele-phone’ – dotcom pundit
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Andrew Orlowski
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A year ago Intel demonstrated a small contraption that allows people to talk to each other – even if they’re not in the same room, without using wires or string. At the time we saw no possible use for such a device. Dogs, as we know, love fetching sticks – but this seemed to be…
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Digital memories: cheap to take, cheaper to lose
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Andrew Orlowski
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The consequences of the dotcom bubble – being remembered this week five years on from the start of the crash – aren’t just financial. The largest loss of wealth in human history created a wasteland of dead pages and broken links. Now many of the same Dotcom People are back, persuading us to trust…
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MS-DOS paternity dispute goes to court
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Andrew Orlowski
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The parentage of the MS-DOS operating system is to be decided in court. Tim Paterson, who sold the Intel-compatible operating system 86-DOS (aka QDOS) to Microsoft in 1980 is suing author and former Times editor Harold Evans, and his publisher Time Warner, for defamation. Paterson’s work became Microsoft’s first operating system – it subsequently rebadged QDOS as…