India’s $35 tablet: a stalled revolution | Suhasini Sakhare
India's new $35 tablet computer needs manufacturing success and demand if it is to revolutionise IT literacy – it has neither Kapil Sibal, India's minister for human resource development, recently announced that Indian scientists had developed a tablet computer that could be manufactured for just $35 . The device has been developed primarily for students and is part of the government's ambitious plan to connect 2,5000 Indian colleges with broadband. The thrust is no doubt linked to MIT's 2005 offer to Asia to make available know-how for building $100 laptops . But it needs two critical support struts – manufacturing success and demand – to be successful. On the manufacturing side, the bill of materials currently going into the tablet has come up to $47. This does not include labour, supply chain costs or profit. Even if the government sticks to its current stance of subsidising the product by $15 it is unlikely to retail at $35, let alone the $20 the government eventually hopes to sell it at.
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India's $35 tablet: a stalled revolution | Suhasini Sakhare
Death to the mouse: Apple’s trackpad hits the shops
The first whiff of an Apple trackpad was as far back as 2008, with a fresh bout of enthusiasm when the patent application was unearthed earlier this summer . Now the rumour has become a reality with the first Magic Trackpads released for sale through the Apple Store. Why yet more fuss for yet another Apple product? Because it symbolises the end of an era - the end of the mouse. As ever, Apple's brilliance is in refining consumer electronics to a form factor usable by the mainstream; the trackpad indicates the much needed death of the RSI-inducing mouse, another piece of hardware that Apple didn't invent, but did popularise . Magic trackpads are £59, wireless, 80% bigger than the trackpads on a MacBook Pro and work from 10 metres away. Eventually, a touchpad could replace both keyboard and mouse through a touchscreen interface
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Death to the mouse: Apple's trackpad hits the shops
Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray
Once we found fun things to do with computers sold as serious machines. Now gadgets are marketed as nothing but toys As a boy I managed, after much persistence, to persuade my parents to buy me a Sinclair Spectrum 48K+ (the one with the black, concave keys). To do this I had to convince them it was not merely a machine on which to play games but an important tool that would teach me computer programming and aid my schoolwork.
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Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray
Jimmy Doherty: ‘Mac owners all seem a bit smug’ | Celebrity squares
Jimmy Doherty tells us all about his life as a luddite who looks like a nerd What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? That's an easy one for me – it's my iPhone. It allowes me to email and receive email wherever I am. You suddenly realise: how did I ever live without it? You can also listen to music with it and play games. When was the last time you used it, and what for? This morning to have a look at these questions. What additional features would you add if you could? A lie detector would be quite good – that would be awesome. Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time? Only if people stop lying
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Jimmy Doherty: 'Mac owners all seem a bit smug' | Celebrity squares
Apple’s next trick: the trackpad for desktops
What's better than iPhone 4.0? How about a new Apple touchpad to replace keyboards for its desktop computers... Published on Engadget , these images were leaked with perfect timing [insert marketing conspiracy theory here] hours before Steve Jobs will introduce the [spoiled] next generation iPhone at Apple's Worldwide developer conference in San Francisco. Take a metaphorical look backwards at Apple's road map: iPhone spent three years training consumers how to use a touchscreen, and was then followed by iPad. Take a look forwards, we'll all be using touchscreens at our desktops, as I said on the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast recently. Beyond that, it probably gets a bit conceptual and Minority Report. But here it is: The leaked images were published by Engadget , who point out John Daring Fireball Gruber and MacRumours wrote about an Apple trademark application back in for a ' Magic Trackpad ' and rumours dating back to 2008 . Digital media Apple Computing iPad iPhone Steve Jobs Jemima Kiss guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Apple's next trick: the trackpad for desktops
Quality control will save capitalism | Ben Van Vliet
Instead of blaming computer trading systems for market crashes, we should look to these unemotional machines for the answer We now know that automated (or high-frequency) trading systems did not cause the stock market's "flash crash" of 6 May . At best we can figure, an institution executed a large sell order, which drove the market down. The downward pressure triggered lots of stop-loss orders that other market participants already had in the market. For a brief moment, buyers evaporated, and … crash. But, before there was time to panic, automated trading systems recognised the situation for what it was – a tremendous buying opportunity. The market bounced back as quickly as it had fallen. Automated trading systems do not create crashes, or even volatility for that matter.
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Quality control will save capitalism | Ben Van Vliet
Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
The failures of the database state have been laid bare, but most of the leadership candidates don't see where Labour went wrong The liberty deficit left by the last government – the gap between the freedom enjoyed by UK citizens in 1997 and what was left in 2010 – is not something that Labour has got its head round yet. The candidates in the leadership election talk about reconnecting with the public, but Balls, Burnham and the Milibands simply don't grasp that they have effectively excluded themselves from the only liberal-progressive act in town. Diane Abbott gets it , but the standard male products of the New Labour curia have got a long way to go. One reason they wrote themselves out of the picture appears in a study from the Centre for Technology Policy Research at the LSE, which is summarised by Ian Grant in Computer Weekly this week. The LSE thinktank concludes : "Despite a spend of as much as £21bn (a year) on public sector IT, it is difficult to find any compelling examples of direct productivity gains and improved public services." Much of the money was spent on intrusive databases – last year, I estimated a total of well over £33bn. We were told it was necessary to give up our personal information to allow the joined-up delivery of services. Prospect magazine praised the programme and declared that personal data was like a tax that we owed to the state; that privacy was luxury we could no longer afford in the modern era. Transformational Government , as the programme was known, was driven by a simple faith in operational savings that were entirely theoretical – "an anachronistic and ultimately ineffective approach from which the UK has only recently begun to distance itself". The following are the crucial lines from Ian Grant's report: "Transformational Government [used an] outdated, 20th-century approach of imposed command and control enabled by large central databases. It distracted government from its own policy aspirations and ignored where the technology of the internet age was heading – towards more localised, autonomous, distributed and consumer-responsive services built around common technical standards." In other words, the statism that demanded we give up personal data and submit to the surveillance society not only had few tangible benefits and was a vast waste of money, but was based on decidedly old thinking that was entirely unsuitable to the internet age
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Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
Facebook ’sexiest video’ malware spreading virally, warn experts
Fake video installs adware – while Microsoft compares its Internet Explorer 6 to 'nine-year-old milk' and urges upgrade If you get a posting on your Facebook wall telling you "this is without doubt the sexiest video ever! 
:P :P" which seems to be accompanied by a video titled "Candid Camera Prank [HQ]" then don't click on the video: it's a lead-in to malware. Clicking the link will take you to what seems like a Facebook application which then tells you that your video player is out of date – and encourages you to download a file. If you do, then the same "video" plus link gets posted using your avatar to al your friends on Facebook -– meaning it is spreading virally. It's not clear at present whether Facebook has acted to halt it. You should, however, expect that it will mutate in the coming hours/days (depending on how determined the virus writer is), so it might not be exactly that message or video frame. The key element in the attack is that it tells you to download a file. At Sophos, Graham Cluley notes that: "Judging by the number of messages posted on Facebook, thousands of people received this attack. If you were one of them, you should scan your computer with an up-to-date anti-virus, change your passwords, review your Facebook application settings, and learn not to be so quick as to fall for a simple social engineering trick like this in future." The file seems to install a piece of adware called Hotbar , which thus generates revenue for the malware writer. (About Hotbar: "displays a dynamic toolbar and targeted pop-up ads based on its monitoring of Web-browsing activity. The toolbar appears in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. The toolbar contains buttons that can change depending on the current Web page and keywords on the page. Clicking a button on the toolbar may open an advertiser Web site or paid search site. Hotbar also installs graphical skins for Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express
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Facebook 'sexiest video' malware spreading virally, warn experts
A fond farewell to the floppy disk | Wendy Grossman
The 3.5in disk was revolutionary in its day, but it's becoming harder and harder to keep up with the flow of obsolete formats When I was a child I was very fond of my vinyl record set of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
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A fond farewell to the floppy disk | Wendy Grossman
A fond farewell to the floppy disk | Wendy Grossman
The 3.5in disk was revolutionary in its day, but it's becoming harder and harder to keep up with the flow of obsolete formats When I was a child I was very fond of my vinyl record set of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. I say "vinyl", not "LP" because those records spun at 78 revolutions per minute. They were thick, heavy, and seemingly robust enough to last forever. Yeah, OK, you're already laughing at me because, of course, those records had been made obsolete by the time I was old enough to drink. Now that I'm 56, I've seen the vast excitement over the arrival of VHS tapes – and the shrug that accompanied their demise. Plus: Betamax videocassettes, reels of recording tape, DAT tapes, audio cassettes, eight-track cartridges , and 5.25in floppy disks. Now, Sony announced this week , 3.5in floppy disks are set to join the ranks of dead media. To be sure, it's hard to mourn something with such tiny capacity. My digital camera takes images that won't fit on a single floppy disk (which, by the way, held 1.4MB of data, not the 1.44MB beloved of marketers), and stores these on an 8GB – gigabytes! – card the size of a postage stamp. A 1.4MB floppy won't hold a single average-length pop song; it might just manage a book-length manuscript in today's bloated word-processing formats. But the 3.5in disk was revolutionary in its day.
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A fond farewell to the floppy disk | Wendy Grossman