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Police will be able to hand out £100 on-the-spot fines to dangerous drivers, who will also risk three points on their licence, says the Department for Transport.
The gatso speed camera, vigilant but limited
At present offences such as the tailgating and undertaking are left unpunished, says Phillip Hammond, the Transport Secretary. ‘The police, under pressure of resources, have simply stopped addressing this offence. By giving them the fixed-penalty notice procedure, we hope to allow them effectively and efficiently to address poor driving skills and behaviour on our roads, while at the same freeing up court and police resources to tackle the really dangerous drivers that are the real problem on our roads.’ Under pressure of resources. No additional resources were announced, only a simplification of the penalty procedure.
For the plan to be… Read More
Robots equipped with two-way video communication have been around for a while, but the trouble is they don’t look enough like something from a creepy Doctor Who episode in which people are trapped inside balloons, unable to touch or feel.
Fortunately, Tobita Hiroaki of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory has created a set of floating telepresence miniature airships, with the face of the virtually present operator projected onto the front, so that’s been solved for good.
The problem is a real one: offices are designed around people who can walk around them having conversations with other workers so working from another location, whether it’s home, another office or a factory floor, is a limited experience. If people don’t answer their phone or email there’s no way to get in touch with them, and nuances of communication can be lost if you can’t see the face of the person… Read More
Nokia sold fewer mobile phones than Samsung in Europe in the first three months of this year. Not just smartphones, the entire mobile phone market. The Finnish king is finished, relegated to second place with Apple, BlackBerry and HTC snapping hard at its heels.
The Nokia 3210 from 1999 and a Samsung Galaxy II from 2011
This is huge news, not just because it’s the end of an era that’s lasted from the beginning of mass uptake of mobile until now, but also… Read More
Max Mathews, who has died in San Francisco at the age of 84, was a pioneer of digital music. He wasn’t the first to make a tune on a computer, but his was the first popular music program and he took part in one of the truly seminal computer performances. Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built For Two) has become the song that computers sing, thanks to this rendition on an IBM 7094 from 1961:
Mathews programmed the arrangement, and two engineers from Bell Labs, John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum, made a computer sing for the first time.
Since then, when engineers want to demonstrate the musical… Read More
Reports of the end of mechanical typewriter production are a little premature. Swintec of New Jersey still have production plants in the far east churning out models designed for use in prisons, made of clear components so they can’t be used to smuggle drugs.
A clear Swintec typewriter
Swintec’s ingenious but depressing range are all electric, so it does appear that the entirely manual machine, imprinting type using only a system of levers, is now an extinct species unless you count this Barbie-themed model. Having retyped many essays and articles on a handsome but very heavy Imperial 66 having found a typo halfway down the page I can’t whole-heartedly mourn the loss, but there are typewriters of the past we can still celebrate for their style and engineering.
Olivetti… Read More
Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung over the similarities in design between the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy range has an injured tone.
The iPhone patent and the Samsung Galaxy S, from the lawsuit
‘Instead of pursuing independent product development, Samsung has chosen to slavishly copy Apple’s innovative technology, distinctive user interfaces, and elegant and distinctive product and packaging design, in violation of Apple’s valuable intellectual property rights,’ it alleges. It includes some photographs that do show remarkable similarities between the products.
Eyebrows have been raised around the world at this. The work at Xerox Parc developing a mouse-driven graphical user interface has been mentioned many times, itself the subject of lawsuits between Xerox, Apple and Microsoft and widely acknowledged as the founding art of personal computer design.
Even more… Read More
‘This device … is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs,’ said Rep Jesse Jackson Jr to the House of Representatives last Friday. Here he is, decrying the loss of jobs such as those in ‘libraries, bookstores. Jobs that depend on paper. In the not-too-distant future, such jobs will not exist.’
Children in his representational district are being given iPads, and their textbooks are downloaded rather than handed out. Borders, he says, are closing stores because people can now get an iPad and download their books, magazines and newspapers.
He’s absolutely right. Lots of jobs will be lost because of this new technology. Not just the iPad but laptops and Kindles; Netflix and LoveFilm instead of Blockbuster; Ocado and Tesco Direct instead of big supermarkets full of assistants.
Patrick Walker, YouTube’s senior director for content partnerships, recently said ‘the only threat to anyone's industry is their own apathy, not the march… Read More
I won’t be going anywhere near a record shop tomorrow, despite it being international Record Store Day. Nor, I suspect, will you, and there are excellent reasons for that.
The now-defunct Revolver Records in Bristol. Go through the yellow door and hand over your pocket money
The dingy vinyl merchants of my youth were enormously charming places for the 17-year-old me. I would spend hours rifling through the racks of Revolver in Bristol, talking to the impossibly knowledgeable and cool guys behind the counter, finally handing over my pound notes and blinking my way back into the sunlight.
CDs caught on at the end of the eighties but I spurned them. Lacking the warmth of sound that my records could offer I… Read More
This week, Microsoft have cars on the streets of London taking photographs for their StreetSide addition to Bing Maps. Looking at the New York pictures, though, it’s not clear why they’ve bothered.
Take these two views, for example:
Fifth Avenue on Bing
Fifth Avenue on Google Streetview
Looking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the front of Sak’s, the famous art deco department store. On Google StreetView the stripes of the flags are bright and crisp, the decorative ironwork above the windows is sharply visible and when I pan across the road to Cole Haan the gold figures on the doors shine brightly in the sunlight. On StreetSide the colours are muddy and dull, the faces haven’t… Read More
Italian geeks love an unboxing video as much as anyone, as the 40,000 views on this video about Olivetti’s new Android tablet, the OliPad 100, shows.
The tablet looks good, and at €399 for a 10” screen, 1Gb of Ram and a dual-core A9 processor seems like a bit of a bargain. You’ll have to go through an Olivetti dealer to get one, but if you want a tablet and really don’t want an iPad it would well be worth it.
Their website is a marvel. There’s a tab marked ‘Advanced caring’, that wonderful big red ‘O’ logo on every page and a some historic designs on the photos page that’s like wandering through a museum of European confidence. Nobody uses a typewriter any longer, but isn’t this a beauty:
The Olivetti Valentine
Or this one?
[caption id="attachment_100006552" align="alignnone" width="460"… Read More
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