Via Ben Brooks, a nice email from Bill Gates (PDF) that showcases his frustration at using Microsoft.com in 2003. The interesting thing isn’t that Microsoft’s site sucked back then, nor that it had usability issues, but that Gates’s email shows his thinking wasn’t in fact a million miles away from Steve Jobs’s. So why he’s still firmly behind Ballmer as CEO of the shaken giant is baffling.

From The Metro:

Baroness Greenfield is concerned about the banality of Twitter

Baroness Greenfield doesn’t understand Twitter.

Baroness Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology, fears [social networks] may be having a negative impact on users.

It’s true. Those damned social networks, which keep you in touch with people and enable you to share ideas and communicate. THEY ARE EVIL.

She claimed that a focus on developing internet friendships and the constant feedback they involve had the potential to ‘rewire’ the brain, making people expect instant gratification and reducing their ability to concentrate for prolonged periods of time.

Ooh! Look at that cute LOLcat!

Sorry, what?

Baroness Greenfield suggested the ‘banality’ of the information exchanged on Twitter could become a problem.

The banality in my Twitter feed today being arguments about the US debt ceiling, tons of comments on design, responses to Daily Mail/Liz Jones idiocy regarding the NHS, and articles arguing about the pros and cons of activism.

In other news, the banality of information exchanged by professionals (say, professors of pharmacology), TV pundits and people in pubs “could become a problem”, but it all depends on who you’re conversing with.

The academic said: ‘Why should someone be interested in what someone else had for breakfast?

Why should we be interested in the views of someone who’s clearly never used Twitter, but nonetheless feels compelled to churn out the same old ill-informed arguments about the service?

It reminds me of a small child (saying): “Look at me Mummy, I’m doing this, look at me Mummy, I’m doing that”.

Unlike, say, a professor of pharmacology doing an interview for a newspaper and parroting the same old garbage we’ve heard a thousand times before?

‘It’s almost as if they’re in some kind of identity crisis.

It’s almost as if they’re keeping in touch with people and letting them know what’s going on in their lives, from the banal to the extremely exciting and interesting. Not everyone juggles sharks for a living, every second of the day, Baroness Greenfield. And not everyone can be a professor of pharmacology with a poor understanding of Twitter.

In a sense it’s keeping the brain in a sort of time warp.

MY BRAIN IS DOING PELVIC THRUSTS ON TWITTER! PLEASE SEND HELP, BARONESS GREENFIELD!

What’s that, Informa? You chucked a dart at a giant calendar and hit 2016, and so are now claiming Google tablet sales will overtake the iPad in five years? What, you’re all insulted by me suggesting you made this up? Really? You mean you actually have some kind of analysis tools for this kind of bullshit and don’t just pull it out of your arse at random? You really think you can predict the future patterns of this kind of technology, when the entire market didn’t even fucking exist five years ago? And you know that the market is going to trend towards Android, because, what? Because you think it will? Because Google has pimped its OS to any company with a credit card? Because that’s more or less (ish) what happened with Windows and the Mac, and Apple never learns because it’s closed and BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH?

What about the iPod, dickheads? Didn’t Apple retain the lion’s share of the market in that sector throughout? What about new disruptive technology that doesn’t exist yet, which may or may not be designed and released by Apple? What about the fact that right now, no bugger nor his dog can match Apple on price and build quality and experience? What about the simple, plain fact that Android tablets aren’t selling well, to the point companies making them only reveal how many have shipped?

Maybe you could try answering some of those questions next time, analysts, rather than shitting out yet another random point in time when you think the iPad will be ‘inevitably’ overtaken by Android.

Gary Marshall for TechRadar on BT being ordered by the High Court of Justice to block access to Newzbin2, a site largely devoted to sharing illicit copies of files, as reported by the BBC and others. This is an unbelievably fucking stupid decision. Marshall:

It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious: anyone with even a passing knowledge of how piracy works knows that going after specific sites is a giant game of whack-a-mole. But there’s more to this than piracy. Blocking copyright infringement sets a dangerous precedent.

The people who want to access Newzbin2 will be able to find workarounds, so piracy won’t be affected to any great degree. But it’s that second point that’s most important here. UK law now has precedent for ISPs to be compelled to block sites deemed to be infringing copyright, censoring content due to the demands of a corporate entity. What next? BitTorrent? YouTube? Anything the media industry and government decides people shouldn’t have access to? That might sound alarmist, if it wasn’t for the Tory-led UK government already considering a national firewall.

Oh, Gawker. With your publishing Adrian Chen’s piece bitching about tech news being boring, all you do is bleat about the kind of thing you do: tech news churn. You use the news about the Facebook iPad app as an example of unexciting news, along with the follow-ups about Facebook blocking the app. Yeah: yawn. Except that iPad users the world over are HUGELY FUCKING EXCITED about the app, and so that news wasn’t boring to them. The follow-ups? Yeah, well, that’s tech blogging, isn’t it? Post often, post crap and hope enough eyes end up on the ads. Rinse. Repeat.

Perhaps if more sites were a little more demanding about their stories, a bit choosier about what they published, rather than firing tons of noise into the digital ether, journos writing phenomenally boring tech news pieces wouldn’t be moaning about tech news being so phenomenally boring. After all, it’s not like tech itself is boring. I’m sitting here right now surrounded by GADGETS FROM THE FUCKING FUTURE. I am firing my words directly into people’s eyes, via the magic of the internet. Tech right now is fucking amazing. And any writer who thinks otherwise needs to consider if they’re in the right job; and anyone who thinks they’re churning out tech news that isn’t exciting, or that tech news in general is dull: do a better job.