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The Weekly Round-Up: 15.08.08
'Shark eats internet'...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 15 August 2008

'A fool and his money are easily parted' was always a good idiom, even before Al Gore invented the internet.

Since the web and ecommerce arrived it's become even more of a truism. The Round-Up can attest to this first hand following the disastrous night in 2003 involving Amazon, one-click shopping and a bottle and a half of Rioja.

The arrival of the iPhone throws this eternal verity into sharper relief. Now before iPhone users get shirty and start sending in spreadsheets showing ROI and spouting off about great user experience, flawless convergence and how they found their wife using an iPhone, the Round-Up has one and loves it - a wife and an iPhone.

The Round-Up is in fact referring to the recently launched iTunes App Store.

Again, before you start pontificating about the reasonable prices and how many programs are actually free, the Round-Up should point out it's referring to a simple app called 'I am Rich' and it was anything but free.

The past tense is important as the app was pulled by Apple this week. It cost a cool $999.99, the most an app can cost on the store. You'd be wrong to think you must get a lot of bang for your buck as all it did was add a little icon of a red gem to your screen. That's it. Although it was a nice looking gem.

That didn't stop eight people from snapping it up, earning its developer several thousand dollars.

One purchaser complained that he'd bought the app accidentally. He only rated the app with one star out of five, in case you were wondering.

That still leaves several punters who presumably are happy with their pointless purchase. Presumably with foolishly large disposable incomes.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the German developer Armin Heinrich said he had refunded the man in question as well as a second who decided he could find a more effective way to spend $1,000. Which is a nice PR move from Armin - you might even call it a good Heinrich manoeuvre.

Professor Noel Sharkey is at it again. Sharkey, as you'll almost certainly not recall, is a robotics expert from the University of Sheffield and he's no stranger to making bold predictions about our likely trajectories into a future of robotics.

This week, the news is rosy. According to Sharkey Robocop will become a reality within the next 75 years.

Yes, by 2084, abusive drunks or knife-wielding thugs, or possibly a combination of the two, can expect to be dispatched to the cells by a robot on the beat.

Sharkey said he expects the streets to be patrolled by robots with "human-like features and expressions", which would certainly represent a marked improvement on the incumbents.

He also said that the robocops would free-up police officers' time. But Sharkey added a cautionary note.

He warned the robots would have to be constrained to prevent them from inadvertently using excessive force due to their "super strength" and "inability to feel pain".

The Round-Up suspects that robotics experts insert these caveats as a disclaimer for posterity's sake.

"These robotic policemen wiped out all of Cambridge in one day of carnage! What have you got to say about that?" "Didn't you read the small print?"

Anyway, this is Noel's second go at future-gazing this year.

In February, the futurologist boldly predicted robots of the future would be more like the Terminator than R2-D2 or a high-tech version of Dixon of Dock Green.

That's the Terminator of the first film, by the way, and not the sequels where the killing machine developed a moral compass in an attempt to save the human race and improve the franchise's merchandising opportunities. Basically, the Terminator before he sold out.

In February, he - Sharkey not the Terminator - warned that robots are the future. Terrorists and other ne'er-do-wells could take advantage of developments in robot technology and turn the machines to evil ends and where would that leave us?

Presumably, part of us be would lying in a crumpled bloody heap on the ground, another part of us would draped, steaming, over a lamppost and another part of us would have been hurled many kilometres by a super strong killer robot.

Sharkey warned us that we can't "put the genie back in the bottle", presumably because some insane civil rights legislation concerning lamp-imprisoned sprits has been extended to cover robots.

While we can't stand in the way of progress we can make the active and life-preserving decision not to plug the AA batteries into the killer robot. Must we consign our species to gory extinction purely to satisfy ideology?

From killer to cop. It's a big turnaround in six months. One day robots are slaughtering the human race, six months later they're helping old ladies across the road and are the heart of the local community.

The Olympics grind on interminably and the hope for lots of British gold medals remains as futile as wishing for a sunny day in August.

The coverage is pretty ubiquitous, which is a good thing if you enjoy watching the cream of the sporting world compete on a grand and wildly expensive stage but a bad thing if you're sick to the back teeth of watching footage of people hurling themselves extravagantly off planks of wood and into a swimming pool to wild applause. Guess which camp the Round-Up belongs to.

If you share the Round-Up's sentiments, you'll no doubt be hoping for some sort of break in service, possibly technical.

One potential disaster occurred last week when a cable was severed by a man mowing the lawn. Did it bring the Olympics coverage to a grinding halt? No such luck, thanks to huge amounts of planning and the existence of contingency plans.

There used to be a time when the internet could be brought down by sharking biting through a cable. If your memory is hazy find out here how a shark 'ate the internet' back in 2001).

These days, the planning and the technology are far more savvy. If you want to know how savvy you're best off hearing it from the chap in charge of making sure it all goes swimmingly.

That'll be Jeremy Hore, chief integrator for Olympic worldwide IT partner Atos Origin, in his exclusive silicon.com diary.

Luckily you can always rely on Microsoft.

During the opening ceremony, amid all the fireworks the real damp squib turned out to be the Blue Screen of Death. Check out the pictures on Gizmodo.

You'll notice the BSOD struck home just as a Chinese athlete was being hoisted on a wire to the stadium's roof to light the Olympic flame.

In an opening event governed so entirely by technology it must have been a reassuring sight for the man on the wire, in front of an audience of hundreds of millions worldwide and carrying a flaming brand. And wearing white shorts too.

And guess who was sitting in the crowd enjoying the show.

Bill...

In other news this week, Gordon Brown has a new website.

Oh no, he doesn't. Oh yes, he does. Oh no, he doesn't.

Look, he does, it just crashed a few times in the opening week. When the site is up and running and not simply spewing 404 errors it looks pretty good.

Intriguingly, it has the word 'Beta' in the site's masthead. This is either an outrageous nod at trendy web 2.0 speak or a searing and honest appraisal of Brown's government.

Consider this: beta software can be operationally unstable and lead to significant loss of data...

Finally, business and pleasure don't mix, according to serious, suit-and-tie-wearing social networking website LinkedIn.

The site has warned of the danger of the "frolleague" - the latest neologism to make a determined and overly confident march in the general direction of the Oxford English Dictionary's lexicographers in search of recognition.

What in the name of hell is frolleague? Well, a frolleague is someone who risks harming your career prospects by requesting you as a friend online.

While three-quarters of workers believe there is a need to keep professional and personal contacts separate, frolleagues are becoming more regular.

One in three workers feels obliged to accept a professional contact as a personal one but doing so raises the risk of mixing business with pleasure - with potentially unfortunate results.

LinkedIn said it's becoming increasingly important to keep professional and social lives separate, flying in the face of conventional wisdom that suggests if you're going to be spending upwards of 40 hours a week with a bunch of people you may as well get along with them.

In fact, if you are the kind of person who rates career prospects above connecting with fellow humans you now have an excuse why your friends list is smaller than a wren's wedding tackle. Not that anyone would ask you anyway.

But if you need some top tips on avoiding this heinous threat, follow the link.

And, yes, in case you were in any doubt, this silly season is most definitely upon us.

In the spirit of the silly season, the Round-Up leaves you with the alternative headlines of the week:

'Hello, I'd like to order 200,000 iPhones, please'.

Fruity frolics galore from BlackBerry.

This is local wi-fi for local people, we'll have no charging here.

And of course don't forget the caption competition.