Technology

A group of start-up marketers see value in getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text to their friends and admirers.

No repairs for 'biohazard' Macs

A Mac user claims that Apple voided her warranty and refused to repair her machine because it was "contaminated" with cigarette smoke.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

Which is safer: technology that disables a cellphone in a moving car, or that makes the conversation completely hands-free?

Customers buying Sony and Barnes & Noble's electronic reading device now will receive them next year.

SAS, the giant private company that specializes in business intelligence software, is facing new rivals, as well as free alternatives to some of its products.

A reporter test-drove a Chevrolet Volt to see how it performed after its electric power supply was depleted.

Private messages hacked from a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics.

Dimensional portal invasion back on track

There were emotional scenes last night at the headquarters of underground international atom-smasher science alliance CERN, as joyful boffins celebrated the successful restarting of the Large Hadron Collider. The colossal machine circulated its first beam around the entire 27-km supermagnet circuit at 22:01 Swiss time, and sent the opposing beam round the other way at midnight.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

Made for map lovers, apparently...

Review  TomTom's Start is essentially the satnav specialist's new low-end model. Rather than say so, though, it's not pitching the product on price but for its simplicity. It's a device designed to get you from A to B and nothing more.…

UK TV channel forecasts end of language

Roll over Wittgenstein, Channel 4 has a bold claim to make, thanks to New Media guru Benjamin Cohen. It's trumpeted in what must be the weirdest press release we've received in years - or at least since the Blooks one.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

Prado and Google launch new collaboration

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• Carbon research never mentions Google

Alex Wissner-Gross, the physicist quoted in several articles about Google's carbon footprint, is putting some distance between himself and comments attributed to him over the search giant's environmental impact. He told TechNewsWorld.com:

One problem: the study's author, Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, says he never mentions Google in the study. "For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google," Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. "Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site."

Wissner-Gross did say that a search using Google has "definite environmental impact" and that they operate energy-intensive data centres, but Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch says:

But the "tea kettle" statistic that has been repeated ad nauseum simply isn't his.

Wissner-Gross asked for a correction, but none has been made.

That doesn't mean that Wissner-Gross isn't talking about Google's environmental impact, which he does in this CNBC interview, but he puts this in context of the global IT industry. The presenter seems shocked that Global IT has the same carbon footprint as all of the world's airlines, according to Gartner. But she also doesn't qualify the ffigure with real numbers, currently 2% of global emissions.

• Google
• Carbon emissions
• Carbon footprints

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If the credit crunch is interfering with your plans to hit the slopes this winter, Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip might provide a tiny amount of solace.

The latest in a line of snowboarding games bearing the stamp of the best-known pro-boarder is designed to work with the Wii Fit Balance Board, and therefore approximates the real-life boarding experience better than any previous game. Admittedly, more mature boarders will find the teen-oriented storyline irritating. But the control that the Balance Board brings is impressive, and it does force you to bend your knees and is hard on calves and upper thighs, just like a real snowboard.

Every time you open a new resort (locations include Canada, Chile, the Alps and Japan), you're presented with challenges that test either your ability to nail tricks or to board accurately (by, for example, picking up trash). Plus there are boardercross races, and events on half-pipes and off big kickers. The graphics are mighty impressive for a Wii game – especially when you fall amid a faceful of virtual snow. But when you learn how to unweight for jumps, then chain tricks using judicious mid-air weight-transfer, proceedings become deeply satisfying.

It won't teach a novice how to board, but it will help tone you up for the slopes – even five minutes' play will induce a sweat.

• Games
• Wii
• Nintendo

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EA's approach to big franchises is always to pick a genre and copy its best exponent … and this time, it's the turn of Star Wars Battlefront.

LOTR: Conquest allows you to play out the key battles from Peter Jackson's trilogy, from Helms Deep to Gandalf's Balrog-bash, crammed into two single-player campaigns and a 16-player online mode. Each level follows the same pattern – namely, a frantic struggle against up to 150 onscreen foes to regain control points from the enemy.

Succeed and you can move on to the next objective or switch character class – from fighters, to mages or hero characters. Yes, it's one of those games that almost plays itself, but it's gorgeous to behold and a promising start to the gaming year.

• Games
• PC

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The Wii clearly isn't short of a minigame collection or two, with Wii Sports, Wii Play, Carnival Games and the numerous other titles offering a pile of quick 'n' easy games for casual players.

Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party is one of the latest additions to the genre. Looking for deep, lengthy and rewarding gameplay? RRRTV isn't for you. Fancy shaking a Wiimote violently while pretending to be a jockey before going back to watching Corrie? Then this may be up your street. There is a thin plot of sorts – the "rabbids" have hijacked a TV station – but this is much the same as previous RRR games.

So expect simplistic racing, rhythm and other dumbed down mini-versions of popular gaming genres. The inclusion of Balance Board (Wii Fit) support makes thing more interesting with some of the games allowing you to dance or sit on the board. Multiplayer is obviously the way to go, but some niggles detract. Nevertheless, this is a solid party package that will appeal to casual Wii owners.

• Games
• Nintendo
• Wii

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Reeling from low sales of the latest iteration of their prize property, Eidos has announced that they're set to revamp the Lara Croft character, reinventing her as more "female- friendly" in a cynical attempt at wooing a new audience

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Last week saw yet another depressing announcement from the One Laptop Per Child project – more redundancies, further cutting back on the project's commitment to its free and open operating system, and a general scaling back and winding down of one of the most ambitious, inspiring projects of the past 10 years.

In case you missed it, OLPC's mission is to put a small, flexible, hackable laptop in the hands of every child on the planet. There's been endless debate on the wisdom of this. Detractors say that the developing world needs food, literacy training and mobile phones – not laptops. These sceptics are sure to see the OLPC's woes as confirmation that the project was doomed from the start.

But I disagree, on both counts. I believe that the world's poor will derive lasting, meaningful benefit from widespread access to technology and networks. And I believe that laptop computers will eventually find their way into the hands of practically every child in the developing world, even if the OLPC project shuts its doors tomorrow.

First, the case for laptops as tools for sustainable, appropriate, community-driven development: the original, audacious OLPC plan envisioned its laptops as pedagogical and development wonder-boxes. They were to be wide open and trivially modifiable by their owners, ensuring that inspired young programmers could develop any and all software and hardware add-ons that suited their needs. Their networking stacks were built on the idea of forming ad-hoc meshes that made it easy to connect any OLPC units to one another, and to share Internet connections among them.

In short, the OLPC vision is to deliver to children in the developing world the capacity to play and work together to produce tools and networks and communities at the lowest possible cost, with the highest possible flexibility. Poverty and its associated problems – hunger, poor health, lack of education and disenfranchisement – are fundamentally information problems. Poverty is exacerbated by the high cost of discovering how your peers have solved their agricultural problems, of accessing government services, of communicating with distant relations who have gone to the city to earn on behalf of the family. Poverty and oppression thrive in situations where people can't communicate cheaply and widely with one another about corruption, injustice and violence.

The success of mobile phones in defraying these co-ordination costs shows just how profoundly technology can change the cycle of poverty. Whether it's electoral monitors armed with mobile phones who watch the ballots move from the polls to the counting houses in Kenya, the citizen reporters who exposed the brutality in Myanmar, or the fishermen and farmers in Africa and Asia who use networks to find the best market for their goods. A mobile phone network can multiply the food, education, health and democracy that is already there, and be used to bring new resources besides.

But mobile phones are necessarily an interim step. Adding software to most mobile phones is difficult or impossible without the permission of a central carrier, which makes life very hard for local technologists who have a very particular, local itch that needs scratching (and forget about collectively improving the solutions that do get approved – when was the last time you heard of someone downloading an app for her phone, improving it, and republishing it?). Mobile phone use is always metered, limiting their use and exacting a toll on people who can least afford to pay it. Worst of all, the centralised nature of mobile networks means that in times of extremis, governments and natural disasters will wreak havoc on our systems, just as we need them most.

By contrast, an open laptop with mesh networking is designed to be locally customised, to have its lessons broadcast to others who can use them, and to avoid centralised control and vulnerability to bad weather and bad governments. It is designed to be nearly free from operating costs, so that once the initial investment is made, all subsequent use is free, encouraging experimentation and play, from which all manner of innovations may spring.

It may be that OLPC won't be the entity that puts a laptop into the hands of every child on the planet. Certainly, they've disappointed me more than once along the way: for example, the decision to add remote kill-switches to the machines to deter thieves (incidentally creating a situation where a thuggish state or despot could shut down the network), and the decision to emphasise running Microsoft's proprietary, non-customisable, toll-bearing operating systems at the expense of the free, locally modifiable GNU/Linux systems they started with.

But so what? I remember the decades during which I (and others of my bent) went around telling people that PCs and the internet were destined to change their lives for ever, no matter who they were, no matter what they did. Over those years, we had many failures, mostly due to bad preconceptions of why and how our loved ones and co-workers would benefit from our beloved systems. We told our grandmothers that the PC would be the ultimate cookbook, told our bosses that the internet would let them field better sales brochures, told our kids that educational CD-Roms would teach them to read faster. From Sinclair to Commodore to Acorn, computing platforms rose and fell, breaking up on the cliffs of the unguessable public taste.

Slowly and surely, though, IT infiltrated every social group. Whether you're looking for an underground dance party on Friday or help coping with your terminal cancer or a way to feed your compulsive need to acquire plush stuffed animals, the internet is where you live. Each new group came online when one key person within it figured out what all this technology was for, as far as his social circle was concerned. My grandparents steadfastly ignored PCs until they worked out that all their friends were getting scads of email from their grandchildren, while they were stuck with a few paltry letters and cards. In record time, a PC and internet connection were purchased, installed, and mastered – at least, far enough to tackle the key task for which the machine was purchased.

The protean nature of IT is its greatest weakness – it's impossible to say what it's for – and its greatest strength – it's for anything you can think of. The OLPC detractors who say that the rich, northern minority can't know what the world's majority need are right. And that's why giving the world's poor access to the tools that they can use in any way they can imagine is so powerful. It's a break from the centuries-old model of development and aid. It's an invitation for the world's majority to simultaneously access all of human knowledge as equal participants in the global conversation, all the while having the power to modify their systems to match their needs.

Early PCs such as the 1975 Altair were unrelentingly hostile to their users
and functionally useless except as systems for occupying the spare time of their owners. And yet, these early efforts led inexorably to the continuous refinement of technology, as larger and larger populations of users were captured by the promise of these systems. The eventual failure of the Altair (discontinued in 1978) did not invalidate the promise of computing. It would have been a visionary entrepreneur indeed who invented the perfect system the first time out.

Likewise, the OLPC may falter and vanish. But the vision of a world where we can all talk to one another, where we can all modify our tools to suit our needs, where we are not charged a toll for our access to democracy, communities and ideas – that will live on forever.

• One Laptop Per Child
• Computing

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Tuesday's edition of Chatterbox

• Games

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Nadine Stavonina de Montagnac: For Gary McKinnon, Asperger's has had a profound effect on his ability to fit in to society. When will we accept this disability?

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School inspectors yesterday dampened ministers' hopes that tens of thousands of students would soon be logging on to online classrooms.

Ofsted said many schools and colleges in England were reluctant to embrace new technology which enables teaching and learning to continue online and out-of-hours.

In 2005, the government asked its agency which promotes learning through technology — Becta — to ensure the majority of schools and colleges made more effective use of technology. But today's study by the inspectorate found the take up of online classrooms was currently more of a "cottage industry than a national technological revolution".

Inspectors looked at the online classrooms — or virtual learning environments — of 23 colleges, 12 schools and seven other educational institutions.

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are similar to intranet sites. Teachers can return coursework on them, provide notes for pupils who have missed lessons and post mock exam questions. Schools and colleges started using them in 2000.

Christine Gilbert, chief inspector, said some schools and colleges were using VLEs as "dumping grounds or storage places for rarely-used files, rather than for material that enhanced the face-to-face learning done inside the classroom".

She said: "The best VLEs allowed learners to reinforce their routine work, or catch up on missed lessons. In those best cases, the material offered was fun and helpful. In the least effective examples, documents had been dumped on the system and forgotten." In some cases, she said material posted was unhelpful.

However, in one adult education centre, a student who had moved to France kept in touch with her French class through the online classroom. In another, students used the VLE on Christmas day.

None of the educational institutions surveyed gave comprehensive cover to every subject they taught on their VLEs. Older students in colleges were more likely to use the online classrooms than pupils in schools, Ofsted found.

Gilbert said: "Although young people use computers and the internet routinely in their personal lives, there was no great expectations on their part that a VLE would replace a significant part of their face-to-face learning.

Melanie Hunt, director of learning and skills at Ofsted, said take up of VLEs had been slower than hoped partly because teachers may not have had sufficient encouragement from their managers. She said some teachers had not been trained to use the online classrooms and, particularly in primary schools, could not spare the time to keep the VLE up to date and post materials on it.

A spokesman from the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "This snapshot survey from Ofsted looks at just 12 schools out of 23,000 and makes it clear that while good progress is being made, it is early days and there is more to do. The bottom line is that we are the world leaders in schools ICT with the highest levels of embedded classroom technology in the European Union; one computer for every three pupils; and almost every single school with broadband."

• IT for schools
• Teaching
• Schools
• Ofsted
• E-learning

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