Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Dell mulls shipping computers with Google's Chrome operating system, open data enables a live map of London's tube network, and news of a recording deal for an iPhone musician.
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"'We have to have a point of view on the industry and technology direction two years, three years down the road, so we continuously work with Google on this,' Amit Midha, Dell's president for Greater China and South Asia told Reuters in an interview."
Google's Chrome operating system is expected to launch in the late autumn, and if Dell chooses to install Chrome OS on its computers, it would be a major boost for the rival to Microsoft Windows.
• It took less than a week for a computer whiz to come up with something clever that makes use of newly-available data about London's transport network. . But as Wired points out, the map can sometimes be amusingly inaccurate, though it's not clear whether that is the fault of the data, or the program written to use it:
"Watch for a few minutes, and you'll no doubt see some of the errors in the data feed - trains travelling far faster than could be possible, or taking wild routes off the track, haring off below parks or housing estates as if they'd suddenly decided that they'd seen enough of the same old boring routes, and wanted to try something different."
Wired's Duncan Geere has admiration for the people running the train network:
"Zooming in close to a busy station such as King's Cross or Hammersmith also reveals some of the difficulties faced by the Underground's controllers and drivers, with trains entering and leaving the station as often as every 5-10 seconds."
• Perhaps fearful that modern technology threatens to make them irrelevant, librarians at the University of Illinois found in games like Doom and Second Life. Project co-ordinator Jerome McDonough explained why to Ars Technica:
"The really simple, one-sentence answer is because games are important. In the United States we're looking at about 80,000 people who are directly employed by the gaming industry and maybe another 240,000 people involved in related, tangential industries that rely on gaming companies for their existence. So just as a monetary phenomenon, games are important. You probably saw the sales for Modern Warfare? We're talking a single game that realized over a billion dollars in sales."
But Mr McDonough said that it's not only monetary value which justifies the efforts of the Illinois team:
"You also can't understand some other parts of our cultural world unless you preserve some of the game world. There's a lot of sort of interpenetration of media. On the importance of preserving a game like Doom - well, if you're preserving something like The Simpsons, you're not going to be able to understand the Doom references that they made visually in a few Simpson episodes unless you've got a copy of Doom sitting around."
We're tempted to say "Cowabunga, dude!"
• For music lovers, including Amnesty, Friends of the Earth and the NSPCC. One of Fair Share Music's founders, Lee Cannon, told Music Week that part of the inspiration is a carrot rather than stick approach to illegal file-sharing:
"The music industry needs to motivate people into purchasing music rather than prosecuting people that don't. Our unique music platform is a step forward in the download-to-own market - not only doing good for recording artists and song writers, but is also doing good for a wide range of extremely worthy causes."
• Finally for today, who knows, perhaps YouTube phenomenon applegirl002 will soon be selling records on that site and elsewhere, after signing a recording contract. :
"Kim Yeo-hee, a Korean woman best known as applegirl002, has garnered enough viral Internet stardom and following to sign a record deal with a label in her home country. Using iPhones and music-generating apps to accompany her, the classically trained musician has received more than 4.2 million views on YouTube."
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