http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog Sun, 02 May 2010 22:21:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It is annoying to see the annoying company Ryanair - whose motto I imagine to be "if they're stupid enough to fly with us, they're on a mental level with sheep and should be treated as such" - given occasional credibility over ludicrous ideas without anyone asking the straightforward question. Such ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/02/why-ryanair-will-not-implement-or-will-withdraw-its-toilet-charge-because-it-will-cut-profits/ This piece first appeared in The Independent around September 2000. Given all the talk about some handheld(ish) computer released by some company or other, I thought it might be interesting to look back on... A couple of notable phrases: "Microsoft's failure in this market is unusual.." and at the end that ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/04/handheld-computers-how-it-looked-in-september-2000/ Hot on the heels of Kevin Braddock, who posted (and then rescinded) a long list of PRs who had sent him annoying emails, I've been noticing a rise in the number of rubbish emails - badly targeted, irrelevant, trivial, stupid - that have been landing in my inbox. The cause, as ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/06/how-pr-fail-works-or-fails-to-work/ From The Independent, November 13 1999: See, I love it when you can come back to things after ten years. Count the things that have come true. BY CHARLES ARTHURTechnology EditorDoorknobs that talk, computers that you swallow and phones that don't ring if there's nobody to answer them will all be reality ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/15/just-run-that-past-me-again-professor-negroponte-about-the-talking-doorknobs/ So finally I had to take Stefan's advice. Having upgraded to Wordpress 2.8.5 over at the Free Our Data blog (where I've been having problems with a hacker who's been inserting spam links invisibly into the end of the page), I ... Oh. And while I was writing that, I noticed ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/23/i-found-the-hacker-and-im-wondering-where-else-he-might-be/ Another day, another little hack on freeourdata.org.uk's front page - once more adding spam links to it in invisibie links (using the stylesheet command div style="display:none"). What's interesting this time though is that the person doing it has decided to be a bit more subtle. Rather than doing it all by ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/16/the-hacker-leaves-more-footprints-but-how-many-sites-have-this-problem/ Clifford Stoll once noticed a hacker breaking into a system he was working on because of a fractional difference in the totals for the timesharing accounts - something like 0.13cents, if memory serves. Well, there's a hacker attacking the Free Our Data site (not, apparently, blog), but we're not on timesharing ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/13/cat-and-mouse-with-a-hacker/ I thought you might enjoy these: the first appeared in The Independent in April 2000, and the second in July 2000. Notable how many of these forecasts - for the music industry, notably not the book industry - have come true. Why, how farsighted of me to see things that were ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/08/how-i-saw-what-was-going-to-happen-to-sir-alan-sugar-and-to-the-music-industry-in-2000/ So the other day I finally finished reading The Celeb Diaries, which purports to be a sort-of week-by-week (except sometimes it's day-by-day, and sometimes month-by-month) diary of Mark Frith's time as editor of Heat magazine - from right back in the days when it was struggling to sell 70,000 copies ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2009/07/29/what-i-learnt-and-didnt-learn-from-reading-the-celeb-diaries-by-mark-frith-ex-editor-of-heat/ (No, that isn't Judy Murray in the seat in front.) On Friday I was at Wimbledon, at the centre court, to see the men's semifinals. Thank you, Electronic Arts, which invited me and a few other journalists (from the Sun, Sky, Comic Relief and a few others) along for a ... http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/index.php/2009/07/04/at-centre-court-seeing-federer-and-what-murray-got-wrong-against-roddick/