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The real reason behind that Cisco lawsuit
So Cisco are suing Apple for the use of the iphone name. I heard this numerous times today and my initial reaction was ‘how could Apple have been so dumb?’ But then I noticed that every news report seemed contractually obliged to mention that the iphone ‘which Apple describe as magical’, was a really cool product – and who are this Cisco bunch anyway? And then idiots like me blog about it – in this day alone Apple have recouped more in advertising and blogosphere chat than any lawsuit will cost them. When you’re Steve Jobs and you have cool looking gadgets, all publicity really is good publicity. On the…
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Academici.net
I guess it was a result of my post about an academic LinkedIn, I got invited to join Academici.net. It seems to be what I was talking about (I’m a bit embarrassed I didn’t know about it), so I created a profile. While it is definitely more academic focused than LinkedIn, I still felt that it was a bit oriented towards getting a new job, and not so much around creating joint research proposals, or collaborative articles, or visiting fellowships, say. It has a good feature set – to quote from the email: An on-line journal to publish abstracts, drafts, papers or upload any kind of documents and the option…
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Limewire and iTunes talking behind my back
I thought I’d have a play with Limewire (while respecting copyright laws naturally), so downloaded it onto one laptop. For those who haven’t played with it, Limewire creates a folder for shared files, which you download to and share with others (it also offers to search your hard disk for any media files to search, which is a bit of a security nightmare, so I declined). While I wait for my Toshiba to be mended, I have put iTunes and all my music on another old, laptop. When I started this up iTunes created a menu item for my shared Limewire folder, which was on a different computer. This puzzled,…
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The pointlessness of plagiarism detection
Today I was invited to sit on an e-cheating panel at the Web Based Education 2007 conference in Chamonix. Unfortunately I can’t make it, but it prompted me to consider the whole plagiarism issue. This was something I had to wrestle with a good deal when I chaired T171 You, your computer and the Net back in 1999. We had 12,000 students, so trying to find a plagiarism proof assessment method was a priority. This was back in the early days of e-learning and there were lots of people waiting to see it fail. Rather like distance education in its early days, e-learning suffered from a legitimacy deficit, so it…
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When internet shopping goes bad
As I am normally an enthusiast for doing everything online, I ought to report when it doesn’t work out quite as planned. For Christmas I bought my wife a Nano (yes, despite the fact that the last one corrupted, and that I have all those DRM and performance issues with iTunes, it is still cool looking and good for running). I ordered online a week before Christmas, and paid for next day delivery via City-Link. Sadly these turned out to be something of a keystone cops delivery firm. It was despatched on Monday, for delivery on Tuesday. I checked the tracking website and it was loaded on to a van…
