This man has slowly been irritating me for years...

[WeasteDevil]

yes, years! And finally, I've had enough!

His name is Bill Thompson. It's not an attack on him as such, but rather the proliferation of his like. You get these people that comment of social aspects of technology whilst the bloody publications that pay them wrap it up a technology news or comment. It's just mindless fecking waffle for the most part, probably stemming back to a book written by Nicholas Negroponte called "Being Digital". The difference is however, Negroponte, despite his failings, is not a technological idiot. His philosophy is way over the top in driving to ease social deprivation and his own philosophical wants, but at least he knows what's under the hood so to speak. I cannot believe that people, especially myself have put up with numbskull opinion placed before us as facts and real technological journalism in the mainstream for so bloody long.

Just look at the latest piece of his (obviously paid for by the BBC and published under technology news):

Finding the freedom to roam

Regular columnist Bill Thompson is enjoying the new freedom offered by his laptop and 3G connection working together.

Sometimes it is only when the niggling pain goes away that you realise just how irritating and distracting it had become.

A sore tooth can sit for weeks just beneath the threshold of consciousness before you finally decide to do something about it, and you leave the dentist full of optimism, hope and love for all humanity now that you can think clearly.

Well, like a man who bangs his head against a brick wall because it feels so good to stop, I've finally given up grubbing around for open wireless connectivity on the move and invested in a 3G modem for my laptop.

No more will you find me wandering down dark alleyways in search of an elusive open network, or hoping that the train slows down long enough on the run into Stevenage station for me to pick up "Netgear", "default" or "belkin54g" long enough to download my e-mail.

I have to admit that this change of heart has not come about because such activity might be illegal, since I firmly believe that simply joining an open network should not be considered a crime.

The law has clearly not kept match with the capabilities of the technology especially since many people leave their networks open in order to offer a service to passers-by.

And an iPhone or iPod Touch will automatically connect to "known" networks, so if my home network is called "default" I'll join any other open "default" network as I walk the streets.

So I'm confident that a well-constructed defence would establish that the previous convictions under the Communications Act were not justified.

But now I won't even be tempted to latch on to other people's wireless, because I have a little white box, called a dongle, that plugs into a USB port on my laptop and can connect to the phone network.

It works on the train, it works in my favourite (wi-fi-less) cafes in Cambridge and it works in my car sitting by the side of a B-road trying to figure out where I am on Google Maps.

I've been able to get my e-mail and surf the web on my phone for ages, but it has always been a second-best solution, and I'm unwilling to shell out for an iPhone even if the user interface does solve many of the problems I've had with small screens.

But since I have my laptop with me nearly all the time I don't need to compromise on a small screen or inadequate keypad.

New generation

And life is good.

The toothache has been sorted. The ringing in my ears has stopped. I can breathe freely and that sharp pain whenever I bend over sideways has finally cleared up. I can be online whenever and wherever I want to be, and life is good.

The new generation of data modems are already being sold as an alternative to slow broadband for home PCs when ADSL over copper wires is either not feasible or just unreliable.

And it can't be long before someone realises that the external dongle isn't really needed, and offers a laptop with a built-in 3G modem and a slot for a SIM card.

It isn't a perfect service, as I found out last weekend when I tried to stream video from the re-opening of Wysing Arts Centre in the middle of the Cambridgeshire countryside.

You really need a 3G connection for anything at all substantial, and when the connection falls back onto the old GSM/GPRS network it can cope with e-mail but little else.

But it is a viable alternative to wi-fi in cities. As well as being a lot cheaper it lets you move around without dropping the connection because it uses the cellular network.

I can also see how these 3G services could be used in countries without an established telecommunications infrastructure.

Many cybercafes in African countries already use a cellular phone to provide access to the internet, but these dongles could improve the speed and quality of service without needing several phone handsets.

When I first got an always-on internet connection from home I couldn't believe how liberating it was.

This was in the days before home broadband and involved rather a lot of complex fiddling to get SSH tunnelling going over a pair of Centrex lines into a small Linux box on my desk, and if that means anything to you then you've been in this business too long.

Now I'm finding the same sense of freedom comes from having easy, fixed-price access on the move.

Instead of deciding whether to shell out £5 for an hour's access in the railway station or risk the quality of coffee in a well-known fast-food chain just to get free access I can plug in and go.

Once again, the technology has demonstrated its ability to surprise me, and yet again I realise that we are only at the beginning of the transformation which began with the early networks of the 1960s.

This is technology news is it?

Lets sum it up:

A) He's a wannabe dentist, or has had serious tooth problems in the past.
B) He likes walking into walls because it feels good.
C) He walks down dark alleyways.
D) His home network IS called default.
E) He has never tried using a mobile phone for a long time on a fast moving train (he's in the UK though) - FFS, the train should provide you with WiFi itself.
F) He's got shit loads of money to have his computer connected to the Internet all of the time using a mobile telephone operator. Probably because the BBC is wasting taxpayers money to shove up his ill informed and rather pointless arse!

What is the tosser trying to say, and how the hell is this classed as technological news?

 

[peterstorey]

It's just mindless fecking waffle for the most part, probably stemming back to a book written by Nicholas Negroponte called "Being Digital". The difference is however, Negroponte, despite his failings, is not a technological idiot. His philosophy is way over the top in driving to ease social deprivation and his own philosophical wants, but at least he knows what's under the hood so to speak.

Negroponte was visionary when he first wrote in 1994. No one else was mapping out the digital future quite like him.

 

[WeasteDevil]

Negroponte was visionary when he first wrote in 1994. No one else was mapping out the digital future quite like him.

He didn't quite get it right did he? Because he let his emotions get away with him. "Being Digital" was not really a technology book, but rather a sociology book.

 

[peterstorey]

He didn't quite get it right did he? Because he let his emotions get away with him. "Being Digital" was not really a technology book, but rather a sociology book.

Yes. But that was the brilliance of it - he saw the impact not the technology. He cut a sadder figure later on with his wearable tech and all that shite - he'd had his 15 minutes.

 

[WeasteDevil]

Yes. But that was the brilliance of it - he saw the impact not the technology. He cut a sadder figure later on with his wearable tech and all that shite - he'd had his 15 minutes.

He's having it again with his laptop for the poor people of the world. His intentions have always been in the right place, just never realistic. Then again he is a professor.

I just opened the book again (paperback 1995) - after years without reading it, and simply opened it at page 188. The first paragraph is...

In the future, we will have the telecommunications and virtual reality technologies for a doctor in Huston to perform a delicate operation on a patient in Alaska. In the near term, however, a brain surgeon will need to be in the same operating theater at the same time as the brain; many activities, like those of so-called knowledge workers, are not as dependent on time and place and will be decoupled from geography much sooner.

Lovely writing, lovely thoughts, but he missed something didn't he in his technological enthusiasm and how it would affect society? He won't be the first, and he won't be the last. However, he's (was) actually right, he is (was) correct on the technological level, just fails (failed) on the sociological level - which was the thrust of his points. Unlike the likes of Bill Thompson et al who totally fail(s) on both yet fill our pages full of their nonsensical babble.

 

[peterstorey]

Because I liked the book so much ( and because its influence on me then influenced a major telco to invest $$M in "Being Digital" in a specific sense) I went to see him lecture at the ICA in the early 2000s. It was very disappointing, like one of those concerts where the artist is basically fecked and everybody is just going along for the memory of the good old days.

 

[WeasteDevil]

Because I liked the book so much ( and because its influence on me then influenced a major telco to invest $$M in "Being Digital" in a specific sense) I went to see him lecture at the ICA in the early 2000s. It was very disappointing, like one of those concerts where the artist is basically fecked and everybody is just going along for the memory of the good old days.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I like Negroponte, loved that book, and I think it would be brilliant to sit down with him for a few hours over a few pints of Old Peculiar (if he likes that type of thing). Totally the opposite to the thought of sitting down with Bill Gates for even a minute, as I'd throttle the bastard. What I was trying to say is that it was books such as "Being Digital" that spawned this terrible flux of pseudo techo-sociological journalism (nowhere near the insight offered by Being Digital) that we have today, to the point that even the BBC will publish such crap on their website under news on an almost weekly basis.

 

[peterstorey]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I like Negroponte, loved that book, and I think it would be brilliant to sit down with him for a few hours over a few pints of Old Peculiar (if he likes that type of thing). Totally the opposite to the thought of sitting down with Bill Gates for even a minute, as I'd throttle the bastard. What I was trying to say is that it was books such as "Being Digital" that spawned this terrible flux of pseudo techo-sociological journalism (nowhere near the insight offered by Being Digital) that we have today, to the point that even the BBC will publish such crap on their website under news on an almost weekly basis.

Well that's because we have so much technology imbedded in our society now that cnuts who have no engineering background/scientific understanding think they know what they're on about merely by being users.