I promise I’m not going to harp on too much about this, but today marks the moment when Loose Wire becomes not just a column and a blog (and an occasional podcast) but a book. LOOSE WIRE, A Personal Guide to Making Technology Work for You is now available for pre-ordering here. The book is … Read more
Britain is quietly introducing RFID (Radio Frequency Identity) tags to rubbish bins (trash cans) in a bid to measure the individual waste of each household and charge them accordingly. Some Britons are up in arms about this, saying that households have not been informed and calling it an abuse of privacy. Is it? The UK’s … Read more
We journalists are a boring, predictable lot. Whether we’re in the UK, US or Australia we all use the same clichés. Well, cliché, actually: ‘at the end of the day’. Knowing I was a sucker for monitoring the Internet cliché Factiva (co-owned by Dow Jones, who owns WSJ, the paper I write for) sent me … Read more
Is HP’s anti-telecommuting move just a bid to shed expensive jobs? Thanks to my old chum Tom Raftery (thanks for the accommodation, Tom, and congrats on the baby!) Bernie Goldbach reckons it is. And he makes the important point that customers considering H-P as part of a core IT package during the next 12 months–ensure … Read more
I’m researching a piece on how to cut back the amount of stuff you have to read, particularly RSS feeds. So I have spent the morning reading blogs related to the tools I’m writing about. In the process, of course, I find more than 20 new blogs that are interesting enough for me to add … Read more