Will jetpacks ever take off?

8 November 2010 Last updated at 09:48 GMT Help

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Reading rights

4 November 2010 Last updated at 14:16 GMT Buy an e-book and all you get is a licence to look, says Bill Thompson.

Reading on screen has to get more like reading a book, says Bill Thompson

The recent rapid growth of the market for electronic editions of contemporary fiction, with some titles selling more in digital marketplaces than they do in printed form, seems unlikely to tail off. The latter part of 2010 may mark the point from which future historians date the transition to screen-based reading for literary fiction as well as reference works.

Amazon recently announced that during September it sold more Kindle books than print books for the top ten, hundred and even thousand bestselling books on its US website, and other retailers will no doubt see the same as Christmas approaches.

Page turner

Everyone involved in the book trade, as we will probably continue to call it for some years, is trying to decide how to respond to this change and anticipate the imminent arrival of the sort of creative destruction that has swept through the music industry, but few seem to have many good ideas.

Independent publishers like Faber & Faber and Canongate, both of whom I spend time talking to about the impact of digital publishing (though not for money), are trying hard to remain relevant, and initiatives like the new electronic publishing service, Faber Factory, are a sign that they understand the changing market.

However, even they are not yet willing to accept that the price of electronic texts is too high, and that readers will not pay the same for a bunch of bits as they will for a bound book, since the market knows that it costs less to send electrons over a network than it does to buy paper, make books out of it and ship the physical objects around the world.

Continue reading the main story

we should not allow the law to treat the products of creative expression in the same way as we do physical property”

End Quote Bill Thompson They also seem unprepared for the fundamental shift in the whole basis of their business that digital distribution brings about.

Something important happens when the text of a book is peeled away from the physical book, exposing the important distinction between the law as it applies to property and copyright law, and this has significant implications for how publishers make money - or even whether they will do so at all.

When you buy a book you take ownership of the wood pulp, ink and glue that makes up the object, and anyone taking it away from you without permission is stealing. But you do not own, and never have owned, the copyright.

If the author is still alive or died fewer than 70 years ago then that list of words and punctuation, in that precise order, may be protected in various ways, limiting your ability to reproduce some or all of the list.

When you buy an digital copy to read on your e-book reader, phone or laptop all you get is the copyrighted bit, and what you pay for is a licence to have a copy or copies of the text.

You don't "own" an object - all you have is an agreement, and the things you can do with it are limited both by copyright law and by the terms of the legal licence agreement you enter into when you make your purchase.

Kindle and iPad users are acutely aware of this, because the digital rights management system used to limit copying of purchased e-books makes it impossible to share one with a friend in the way that we are all accustomed to do with physical books, while the licence makes it impossible to sell our second-hand e-books to others and defray the cost of new purchases.

Lending list

Amazon recently announced that it will let Kindle owners "lend" books, but only for two weeks and only once per title. It clearly expects to get a lot of positive publicity for following the approach of other e-book readers like the Barnes and Noble "Nook", but all they have done is to highlight exactly what we are giving up as we move from buying books to licensing content for our digital devices.

Limits on lending rights could hit libraries

Perhaps the worst thing about the new feature is that Amazon will give publishers a veto over sharing their titles. For a company with a reputation for pushing publishers into distribution deals that they find very difficult to work with, Amazon seems very wary of doing anything that might upset the rights holders.

When the new Kindle shipped with a feature that let it read texts aloud in a synthesised voice it only took a few angry huffs and puffs from the US Author's Guild before the facility was made optional, to be turned off at the behest of the publisher.

And now Amazon is careful to announce the publisher-friendly aspects of its new feature, highlighting the fact that when you pay your money for a Kindle edition you aren't buying a book, and you certainly aren't buying an e-book that is in any way equivalent to a printed codex.

I'd be happy with a system that let me transfer my purchases rather than sharing them - I don't expect my one download of a copy of the new Jonathan Frantzen to provide for the reading needs of my entire extended family at the same time, but lending my Kindle - or in this case my iPad - means lending every book (and every other app), which is not the same as just lending one book.

There is one bright spot in all this, though. Amazon's business model offers us the clearest possible demonstration that we should not allow the law to treat the products of creative expression in the same way as we do physical property.

The idea of "intellectual property" deliberately conflates the two and allows politicians to pretend that laws about physical property should extend to digital downloads. We need to challenge this unjustifiable elision if we are to think seriously about copyright and business models in the age of electronics.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet. He is currently working with the BBC on its archive project.

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How to make Big Ben strike 13

4 November 2010 Last updated at 07:00 GMT Help

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Eye chip 'helps blind people see'

3 November 2010 Last updated at 00:49 GMT By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News Miikka Terho is given the task of reading letters which together misspell his own name

A man with an inherited form of blindness has been able to identify letters and a clock face using a pioneering implant, researchers say.

Miikka Terho, 46, from Finland, was fitted with an experimental chip behind his retina in Germany. Success was also reported in other patients.

The chip allows a patient to detect objects with their eyes, unlike a rival approach that uses an external camera.

Details of the work are in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Professor Eberhart Zrenner, of Germany's University of Tuebingen, and colleagues at private company Retina Implant AG initially tested their sub-retinal chip on 11 people.

Some noticed no improvement as their condition was too advanced to benefit from the implant, but a majority were able to pick out bright objects, Prof Zrenner told the BBC.

However, it was only when the chip was placed further behind the retina, in the central macular area in three people, that they achieved the best results.

Two of these had lost their vision because of the inherited condition retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, the other because of a related inherited condition called choroideraemia.

RP leads to the progressive degeneration of cells in the eye's retina, resulting in night blindness, tunnel vision and then usually permanent blindness. The symptoms can begin from early childhood.

The best results were achieved with Mr Terho, who was able to recognise cutlery and a mug on a table, a clock face and discern seven different shades of grey. He was also able to move around a room independently and approach people.

In further tests he read large letters set out before him, including his name, which had been deliberately misspelled. He soon noticed it had been spelt in the same way as the Finnish racing driver Mika Hakkinnen.

"Three or four days after the implantation, when everything was healed, I was like wow, there's activity," he told the BBC from his home in Finland.

"Right after that, if my eye hit the light, then I was able to see flashes, some activity which I hadn't had.

"Then day after day when we started working with it, practising, then I started seeing better and better all the time."

Soon Mr Terho was able to read letters by training his mind to bring the component lines that comprised the letters together.

The prototype implant has now been removed, but he has been promised an upgraded version soon. He says it can make a difference to his life.

"What I realised in those days was that it was such a great feeling to focus on something," he says.

"Even having a limited ability to see with the chip, it will be good for orientation, either walking somewhere or being able to see that something is before you even if you don't see all the tiny details of the object."

Electrical impulses

The chip works by converting light that enters the eye into electrical impulses which are fed into the optic nerve behind the eye.

It is externally powered and in the initial study was connected to a cable which protruded from the skin behind the ear to connect with a battery.

The team are now testing an upgrade in which the device is all contained beneath the skin, with power delivered though the skin via an external device that clips behind the ear.

This is by no means the only approach being taken by scientists to try to restore some visual ability to people with retinal dysfunction - what's called retinal dystrophy.

A rival chip by US-based Second Sight that sits on top of the retina has already been implanted in patients, but that technique requires the patient to be fitted with a camera fixed to a pair of glasses.

Charities gave the news of the latest work a cautious welcome.

David Head, of the British Retinitis Pigmentosa Society, said: "It's really fascinating work, but it doesn't restore vision. It rather gives people signals which help them to interpret."

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The Technology newsbucket: Gmail shuts out Facebook, the last Windows?, Android exploits and more

Photo by futureatlas.com on Flickr. Some rights reserved

A quick burst of 15 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Building the Simple Enterprise >> TechCrunch
Linked, because it's wrong in so many ways. It begins: "In the enterprise, simplicity simply doesn't sell. Complexity, on the other hand, justifies costly software licenses and a swat team of consultants and systems integrators." It reads like someone who has never considered that the needs of an enterprise - the laws to be obeyed, disclosures to be considered, procedures to be followed - are orders of magnitude more complex than an individual's. Enterprise software often stinks, but it's not because it's unnecessarily complex. It's because it's trying to deal with complexity in a limited time and budget.

Google points finger at Facebook hypocrisy, blocks Gmail import >> Ars Technica
"Facebook has long been a one-way valve. You put data in so you can connect with friends, and then you can't get it out and use it the way you would like to, even as the company is trying to corner the market on your identity.
"And Thursday night Google called out its rival on such data-portability hypocrisy: It banned the huge social network from allowing its users to connect their Gmail contacts to see who among them are also on Facebook to get the friending frenzy started."
The closing of diplomatic relations often presages war.

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith >> The New York Review of Books
"I can say (like everyone else on Harvard's campus in the fall of 2003) that "I was there" at Facebook's inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused.." And now she examines The Social Network. A fantastic piece. Bring a long drink.

New browser RockMelt oozes into beta >> CNET News
"RockMelt is indeed a "Facebook browser," if only because Facebook is the social-media service that's best integrated into it at launch. It's clear that ultimately the browser's team plans to make it more customizable with other services. The ultimate goal, you could say, is revamping the traditional browser many of the Web-browsing behaviors that have popped up in the past few years--social-media sharing, Twitter clients, RSS alerts, and speedier search--and works them into an interface that aims for convenience rather than confusion."
Ohh, you mean like Flock.

The last Windows ever >> BankerVision
James Gardner, who writes this, is the chief technology officer at the Department of Work and Pensions. The DWP has just done a deal to get Windows 7 (it's presently "struggling along" on XP), but "Personally, I think it likely this is the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys, though."
Why? Because "I think they'll be fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that's coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most stuff will arrive via the browser."

Microsoft's Linux Patent Scare Trumps SCO - InternetNews:The Blog - Sean Michael Kerner
From March, but interesting: "Microsoft convinced Japanese hardware vendor I-O Data to sign up for Microsoft patent licensing to protect against Linux patent issues. Over the last three years Microsoft has been successful at getting multiple vendors including Amazon, Novell, Brother International Corp, Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd, Kyocera Mita Corp., LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and TomTom International BV to buy into their argument that they need protection from Linux patent infringement."

Researcher outs Android exploit code >> The Register
Relies on flaws in WebKit that have been fixed in Android 2.2, but only 36% of users have that. Its effects are limited to what the browser can read - thuogh that could include the phone's SD memory card.

Investors back #TechCity – Concentration of startups "will attract" capital >> TechCrunch Europe
I'm not sure that the headline is completely supported by the quotes that appear, though: there's a lot of doubt that governments can really create the hubs.

Xserve will no longer be available after January 31 >> Apple
Lots of people sang its praises, but Apple's servers never got the market traction: if you're savvy enough to set up a server, you're probably savvy enough to load it up with Linux instead. So that's the second time Apple has tried to get into the server market and given up.

HTML5 Testing >> W3C Blog
"..it seems that people are trying to draw conclusions from the tests or from the results, including whether one browser or another is better.
"An increase of 135 tests isn't meaningful. It's way far from making the results significant in fact. We'll need several dozens of thousands of tests to make those results indicative. Still, while working on the HTML5 specification, there is an advantage to figure out where we have interoperability issues already."
Is this the W3C version of "yes but no but yeah but no but.."? (Thanks @DerekJohnson for the link.)

Bank of America, Citigroup Said to Test IPhone for Mobile E-Mail >> Bloomberg
"The banks are testing software for the iPhone that's designed to make it secure enough for company messages." The two banks employ 524,000 people, though not all will shift away from BlackBerrys. Even so, I'd expect that BoA and Citigroup will be getting some earnest calls from RIM's top people in the near future...

Viral Spiral: most shared video ads of 2006-2010 >> Unruly Media
From the makers of the Viral Video chart: see who has been topping the video ads. (Flash required.)

Dell to Ditch 25,000 BlackBerrys in Bid to Promote Own Service [and WP7] >> WSJ.com
Big win for Windows Phone 7, which will run on the Dell Venue Pro that will do the replacing: "In a direct shot at BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., Dell Inc. plans to move its 25,000 employees over to its own line of smartphones and then aggressively market a service to help other companies do the same."

How one company games Google News >> CNET News
Ever heard of Red Label News? Probably not: "Upon clicking on any of the Red Label News stories, it became instantly clear that all of the stories were pure spam: ads from Google's AdSense and Amazon's affiliate program wrapped around barely cohesive sentences of SEO-friendly keywords along with a few links to other stories about the news." Does Blekko do news yet?

First RS-232 to dock connector interface approved by Apple, controls telescope >> The Unofficial Apple Weblog
When iOS devices are being used to control hardware like this... things are getting interesting.

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious

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Whitehall website 'a revolution'

8 November 2010 Last updated at 16:36 GMT David Cameron: "This is a complete revolution in how government operates"

David Cameron has launched a website where departments set out business plans and timetables to achieve them.

He said it was a "complete revolution in how government operates" and would allow people to check on the progress of policies on a month-by-month basis.

The PM said the old "target culture" had encouraged short-term thinking.

But Labour's Liam Byrne warned against "ripping up targets" without an alternative in place to guarantee public service standards.

The transparency website brings together a range of information - including basic details of ministers' meetings, hospitality, gifts and overseas travel, timetables for implementing policies, staffing structures and salary ranges for top civil servants, some of which was already publicly available but was published separately.

Other information - like how much individual police forces cost each taxpayer, how many under 18s get pregnant in different areas, what percentage of people released from prison commit another crime across different local authorities and how much it costs to produce and issue a passport - will be published over the course of 2011/2.

Mr Cameron launched the website surrounded by cabinet members and flanked by deputy PM Nick Clegg and the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell - the head of the civil service.

Continue reading the main story Norman Smith Chief political correspondent, BBC Radio 4

The government's business plans have been given an awfully big political build-up. In the prime minister's words they represent "a power shift" from government and "one of the biggest blows for people power".

But haven't we been here many times before? First, we had John Major's much mocked Citizen's Charter, then Labour's Public Service Agreements and only this summer the coalition launched a series of Structural Reform Plans.

Government sources say the difference between the coalition's approach and that of previous governments is targets.

The business plans don't contain targets. Instead they have timelines and milestones.

What's the difference? Government officials say milestones empower the public to assess what progress has been achieved. Targets are Whitehall-imposed.

Somehow, one suspects, it is a difference that may still elude many.

The PM said it would be a move towards greater transparency in Whitehall, part of a "power shift" giving people enough information to hold government to account.

Each department will have to produce a monthly progress report - and the secretary of state will have to account to the prime minister if they are not on track.

The departments' business plans show when they are due to start, due to end and what progress has been made.

It also shows that three projects are already overdue - two at the Cabinet Office relating to publishing details of big IT projects and guidance about the cost of IT projects, and a Ministry of Justice strategy to reduce re-offending and improve rehabilitation - which was due in October.

Mr Cameron acknowledged that the information might create "a rod for our own back" when people noticed missed targets but said the publication was "good management".

He said "bureaucratic accountability" under Labour had "bred bureaucracy", created inefficiency, crushed morale in the public sector and encouraged people to go for "short term wins".

"Instead of bureaucratic accountability to the government machine, these business plans aim to bring in a new system of democratic accountability, accountability to the people."

Targets vs milestones

"So reform will be driven not by the short term political calculations of the government but by the consistent long-term pressure of what people actually want and choose in their public services."

He said the website would strike a blow for "people power" by "shining a bright light of transparency on everything government does".

Announcing the plans in the Commons, Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin was mocked by Labour MPs amused at concept of a "horizon shift"- something Tory MP Edward Leigh also described as "Yes Minister" language - and the concept of the "milestones" as opposed to Labour's targets.

Continue reading the main story

The question hanging over today's launch though is whether the public are yet ready to abandon decades of habit which has led them to say "we elected you - so why's our school/hospital/police force so hopeless?' ”

End Quote Nick Robinson BBC political editor Seeking to explain the difference, Mr Letwin said: "A target is an effort by a government, of which there were many in the previous government, to determine what the whole of the public service, through micro-management, would achieve - they were often not met. What we are talking about is actions which lie under the direct control of government and it is absolutely right that we should manage ourselves."

But Labour's Liam Byrne, who broadly welcomed the plans to publish more details, called him the "minister for milestones".

He added: "There will be no power shift if he is going to destroy the power of NHS patients to be treated within 18 weeks, the power of parents to get one-to-one tuition for their children if they are falling behind at school, the power of citizens to summon police officers to talk about issues of local concern."

He asked Mr Letwin to "review the ending of basic rights to high quality public services" adding: "Because when it comes to public services, the public wants guarantees and all he has offered them this afternoon is an online gamble."

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Moving data to a new PC

Belkin's Easy Transfer Cable for Windows 7

I am running a laptop with Microsoft Vista. I replaced the original hard drive with a bigger one, but that is nearly full. If I were to buy a new laptop with an even bigger drive using Windows 7, how would I best transfer all the contents – programs and data – from the old to the new laptop?
Mark Lavender

Both Vista and Windows 7 include a program called Windows Easy Transfer, which is designed to transfer your data to a new PC, but not your applications. People who don't have a copy can download the latest version from Microsoft.

Windows Easy Transfer can move data between PCs using a transfer cable, a USB memory stick or thumbdrive, an external hard drive, and so on. The drawback with using a cable is that you'll have to buy one for the job, and you might never use it again. The advantage of using an external hard drive is that you can use it to keep backup copies of your data.

Windows Easy Transfer walks you through the process, and you can get a good idea of how it works by looking at the step-by-step illustrations at How-To Geek: Migrate XP to Windows 7 with Easy Transfer and a USB Drive. However, you have so much data, it's going to be a very long process. It would be better to move large sets of data, such as movie or music folders, first, then use Windows Easy Transfer to move the more personal data, such as email and bookmarks. Personally, I do it all manually anyway.

Some programs will move applications as well as data. Examples include Zinstall's XP7, Avanquest's Laplink PC Mover Ultimate, and Spearit's Move Me. O&O Software's Migration Kit for Windows 7 also uses Laplink PC Mover.

This sort of migration can be handy if you can no longer find your original discs. However, some applications are not designed to be moved – security software, for example; some applications may only be valid on your original PC; and some applications are designed to be installed from the web.

For the best results, it's probably better to install all your applications manually before transferring your data. There are now sites that will "bulk install" a selection of programs from the web. The leading examples are Ninite and AllMyApps. Once you have everything running to your satisfaction, you can uninstall any major applications from your old laptop, if your licence only allows you to run them on one PC. (In some cases, a software licence allows you to run a program on both a desktop and a laptop.) Making a fresh start on a new PC should prompt you to think about which applications you actually need and which ones you can do without.

You should also think about whether you actually need to have all your data on one laptop, and therefore whether you need a new laptop at all. If they are mostly music and video files, for example, you could move them to an external hard drive or a small server, such as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. Alternatively, you could back up multiple PCs and store all your files on a Windows Home Server such as an Acer EasyStore or HP MediaSmart server. Nowadays, a small media server should have at least 1TB of storage and be expandable to 4TB. Not many laptops offer more than 500GB.

Whichever approach you choose, look for a system that can move data as quickly as possible. Even USB 2 feels slow if you need to move hundreds of megabytes. Faster options include eSATA and the new USB 3.0 standard. In the future, Intel Light Peak optical connections will offer much faster data transfer using a USB-style cable. Intel Research showed a laptop using Light Peak in May, as I reported here in Intel said: Let there be Light Peak.

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