statesman
TweeBating – online, real time
Last week I sat around a large table on the top floor of Bush House in London with about twenty other people while we talked about the ways radio is changing and tried to imagine how English-language programming on BBC World Service could take advantage of the online, multimedia world that is emerging around us. I was invited because I appear on Digital Planet each week to think out loud about the impact of technology on our lives, but this was an internal BBC meeting rather than an open seminar, and the discussion was never intended to be made public. That didn’t stop one of the other attendees, technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, from recording a segment of the introductory remarks that Ben Hammersley, the associate editor of Wired UK, made and posting it online via AudioBoo.
Continue reading »Bill Thompson’s new job
There’s a new Twitter page set up by Bill Thompson. He’s a UK-based writer and broadcaster who generously allows p2pnet to republish his musings. Bill has a weekly column on the BBC WebWise site, and contributes both on and off-line to The Guardian, The Register and The New Statesman, among others.
Continue reading »The Net: binding us together
Norman Borlaug, whose work in Mexico and India led to the ‘green revolution’ in agricultural production, died last week and was widely commemorated for his important work. While the introduction of new crops and the use of irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides certainly enabled us to feed millions of people, the crops were delivered at a price, and we should not forget it and Borlaug’s green revolution, like every revolution, had a negative as well as a positive side. New farming practices create dependencies on machinery and chemicals, and the the patents that protect genetically modified crops limit the ability of farmers to do things like retain seed from one harvest to plant next year, forcing them instead to buy anew each year.
Continue reading »‘Proud to be a C/UNIX programmer …’
In the autumn of 1984 I completed the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge University and started looking for my first job in the computing industry. Cambridge was a good place to be a programmer at the time. Trinity College had built its Science Park on the northern fringe of the city in 1970 and the university’s permissive approach to intellectual property meant that it was relatively easy to spin off an idea and see how it worked out without severing all links to a departmental salary.
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