March 2006 Archives

It turns out some bloke from Hastings decided to produce his own Sci-Fi show and release it on the Net. It's been made on a shoestring budget of about £250 per episode and there are only four episodes available but fair play to the cast and crew for sticking their necks aout and creating some credible content - especially when you consider the first episode cost £50 to make and was shot on a handheld camcorder with torches for lighting !!!

Acoording to El Reg a PowerPoint presentation shown at the company's recent Analyst Day stated:

... With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).

We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. (...) This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.

As we move toward the 'Store 100%' reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache."

Speaking for myself, I don't want my personal data in the hands of anybody but me. Think of the implications for personal privacy - it's horrific! The US government have already tried to force Google to hand over search data, now imagine the situation five years from now with Google being forced to hand over information which includes your IM conversations, credit card purchases etc etc.

I have nothing to hide, but this is my PERSONAL information. It's bad enough that I can't fly to the States these days without Homeland Security getting all my information or that the British Police are considering installing number plate recognition cameras every 400 yards on our roads so they can see who's going where and when...

Big Brother is watching us everywhere we go - the question is, how closely? The great catch-all is that Bush and Bliar(sic) simply turn around and tell us "it's to stop terrorists" and that's the end of the conversation - perhaps it would help to stop terrorists if Dumb and Dumber instructed their lackies to actually arrest the suspects they have under surveillance - or is it politically advantageous to allow them to explode the odd bomb now and again, just to keep the general populace living in a state of fear?

Maybe I'm being a liitle too "Conspiracy Theorist", but then again - who can tell?

Take Kate Moss for instance, the one-time fashion model and walking advert for weight problems is all over the British tabloids like a cheap suit, why? because she snorts a lot of Cocaine. Her ex-boyfriend, the human wreckage known as Pete Docherty, is also all over the papers, why? because he sucks up more powder then a Hoover at a carpet cleaning convention.

Are we really so vacuous that the drug-taking antics of a couple of nobodies is our number one form of entertainment? It's astonishingly sad that this should be the case at a time when there are so many more important things going on - the "War" on terror gathers pace with the US torturing everybody in sight, Muslims are still killing one another over a cartoon that was crap at best and Tony Blair proves he's blinder than David Blunkett by continuing to allow members of the Cabinet to get away with all manner of wrongdoing by insisting they didn't break Parliamentary Rules. It's like a "Get Out of Jail Free" card without having to buy the Monopoly set ...