BLOG – Currents – 09 Feb

One of the good things about this article moving into blog form is that I can move a little sideways in some of the subject matter. As last week's blog showed I can also spend a few more words in putting them together.

I recently watched a documentary from Frontline called The Vaccine Wars. The subject matter was essentially about the supposed link between the Measles Mumps Rubella or MMR vaccine and autism. The Internet play the large part in this process as special-interest groups used websites and other techniques to spread their message on this issue.

It all started with a report published in the medical Journal Lancet by a doctor who had supposedly performed a study that linked the MMR vaccine with autism. Because of this children all over the planet will not given the vaccine because their parents believed what was said in the study. Sometime later it was revealed that this doctor had used a sample said of less than 10 children most of home had been referred by a lawyer currently involved in action against the pharmaceutical company that made the vaccine. Years later the report was removed by Lancet, a publication that has very well-defined political leanings and has been caught out quite a number of times in the last years.

In the documentary at least six contries had performed Independent studies that all concluded the autism levels and those that took the vaccine and those who didn't with the same. In other words the vaccine could not be said to be responsible for the autism.

The Internet however has turned into a powerful force to the spread of information valid or not. In the right medium, at the right time, the right message (even if it is the wrong one) can reach millions of people in a very short time. It is the nature of people that some of them will believe anything in the case of this vaccine autism link the belief is strong in a significant number.

There is no police force for the Internet and I for one support this in almost all instances. Exceptions are of course paedophile networks and a few other areas like this that are contrary to international law. I do believe in the free exchange of information and as such I expect to see information that is patently incorrect. One example of the moment is just about all of the world's mainstream media who are currently, with very few exceptions, all from one political side of the spectrum. The gaps today are taken up by various blog sites.

In the case of the vaccine example many websites still exist that support this link for the simple reason that those running them have a child with autism and that child had the vaccine. Science is irrelevant where emotion is involved and we are in the developmental stage where what people read must automatically be true. This is of course a generic observation but the Western post-modernist’s world does not require proof, fact checking, verification, or investigation to accept what is being said as fact.

Yes the Internet should remain free but with the amount of information it now contains the user needs to be more discerning. The very nature of the Internet makes it much easier to verify facts or get alternate opinions are explanations. Not to do so is simple hubris or in some cases abject laziness. In the world of reporting is becoming more common for a presenter to grips information off the Internet, a Twitter feed, and blogs often as a single source and present this to the public as fact. The art of the journalist is a vanishing one. The days of multiple sources and cross verification are slipping away.

Thankfully, for the most part, the world of information technology, and technology in general is a clear-cut one. If you can ignore the moral aspects that may be associated with the technology reporting is fairly simple. You do the research and you report on. A hard drive is a hard drive, monitor is a monitor, and a computer is a computer. When you start getting into services and software that can be some grey areas but in general if it doesn't work, or doesn't do the job then it is probably not a good product.

Industry News

According to the people at IDC in the fourth quarter of 2010, 100.9 million smartphones were shipped compared to 92.1 million PCs. This is the first time that smartphone sales have been bigger than PC sales. Comparing the whole year the PC is still one 346 to 302 million but the trend is clear. Nokia is still number one but fading fast compared to Apple. Linux has been performing very strongly in the smartphone market in the form of android. The reason for this is simple phone users don't care what operating system is being used all I care about are the applications. Android is providing a huge number of applications that don't require the mandatory step of stopping by an Android only store to purchase. Prediction: Apple will never change this policy and so they will never be the leader of the pack.

Sir Elton John made a comment recently that indicated an April release for the iPad 2. The unit is expected to have a web cam on board, finally. There is no confirmation of this release date but it will be one year from the release of version 1.

Mozilla is planning to release for new versions of Firefox this year. Until now uses her to wait about 12 to 18 months for a new version of the browser. I suspect that Google had some influence on this because they release a new version of chrome every couple of months or so. More frequent releases are well within the Web 2.0 paradigm. Firefox 5 is expected to have a new account manager a better user interface and support 64-bit Windows. They also expect to include full CSS/HTML support in the near future.

The new range of cheaper Blu-ray disc players are coming out in the lower price bracket. What has not been improving our Blu-ray disc sales. It doesn't matter that the hardware is getting cheaper only that the discs are generally more expensive than the DVD equivalent. For many people DVD quality is still fine.

On the subject of smart phones when it comes to security they tend not to be, so much. If you think about it security concerns for your PC or notebook are very similar to what they were 10 years ago. Most people know about firewalls, anti-malware software, backing up their data and tiding up from time to time. By comparison many users have very little about the smartphone, particularly when it comes to security.

You occasionally see the term "super phone" to mean something generation above the earlier smart phones. These typically have full Wi-Fi implementation, direct connectivity to an applications store, advanced multimedia capabilities, and all sorts of other connectivity options and layers that just weren't there in previous models. In a small environment, particularly business one, this is probably not much of a problem.

At the enterprise level things become a little different. It has been my experience over many years that executives in particular like to have everything included in their portable device. Let's face it the modern smart phone is really a full-blown computer. Also everybody wants a slick looking, nice new phone. The problem is that malware is now being specifically designed to target an extract data from them. There are a raft of privacy concerns. The smart phone, or super phone, is fast becoming the biggest headache for the enterprise IT systems manager.

The glasses free 3-D TV bubble seems to have burst. Okay not really a Toshiba only made half the sales are expected of units sporting the new technology. To be fair the screen sizes available at the moment are only 12 and 20 inch so until a larger units become available I don't expect to see any significant sales. Also the new sets are only available for sale in Japan where everybody wants the