For those readers who missed Visions of the Future - The Intelligence Revolution on BBC4 on Monday, Sneak thought he’d offer his own summary. In the programme, futurist Dr Michio Kaku set out to explore the ways in which artificial intelligence was set to change our lifestyles.

Tele-immersion and virtual worlds were demonstrated as the future of social interaction. Kaku outlined an important family gathering – say, Christmas dinner – in years to come, where instead of people having to travel hundreds of miles to sit around a table and argue over Monopoly, they could simply transmit 3D images of themselves into a virtual meeting space, all the while from the comfort of their own sofa.

Viewers were also introduced to a pair of newly-weds, who had met through Second Life after taking a fancy to each other’s avatars (which needless to say bore very little resemblance to the real thing). The wife explained how creating her virtual self had led to a whole life change – she had met her husband, moved from the US to the UK and had even given up her old career to concentrate full-time on her Second Life jewellery store business. The fact that she made more money selling virtual bracelets and necklaces to decorate computer-generated images is either an indicator of how poorly paid she was before, or of how many people there are out there willing to shell out real money for unreal goods – Sneak fears it’s the latter.

Sneak’s initial reaction to the visions outlined in the programme was that this shift towards virtual living is just another sad step towards the disappearance of human interaction. However, he was more positive about one aspect of this future scenario –glasses that can download information and images onto the inside of the lens.

Sneak could definitely be won round by the prospect of sitting through yet another company strategy meeting, all the while entertained by the latest blockbuster movie transmitted via his spectacles rather than having to view the usual round of PowerPoint slides.

November 7, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been fighting the anti-red tape corner this month, vetoing an internet retail security bill that would have prohibited online merchants from storing sensitive customer data after a transaction has been completed. Big Arnie argued that the law would have increased the costs of compliance, especially for smaller firms.

But while the move is likely to be welcomed by retailers, internet shoppers across Californian might be less pleased that this potential for greater privacy has been Terminator-ed.

Arnie has also been busy recently entertaining Tory party leader David Cameron during his US tour. The mind boggles at what the cigar-smoking, weight-lifting ex-movie star and the hoody-hugging, tree-loving ex-public school boy found to talk about – but perhaps we’ll see Dave driving a hydrogen-powered Humvee around Whitehall, and Arnie favouring a bike as a result.

October 17, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe surprised some observers recently when it gave an unusual commercial name to its Project Apollo software.

AIR, which stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, seems an odd name but some watchers believe that the company has cunningly inverted the moniker given to the new school of applications Adobe wants to dominate - Rich Internet Applications, or RIA. However, Adobe may have been too clever as www.adobeair.com takes browsers not to the software giant but to a maker of “America’s coldest evaporative coolers”.

June 25, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

So The Apprentice is finally over for another year, leaving posh boy Simon Ambrose to ride off into the sunset (well Brentwood) with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help build a golf course in Essex.

Sneak only hopes he has a better experience than last year's winner Michelle Dewberry, who according to a recent interview with The Guardian got to see very little of Sir Alan’s famed business acumen.

"We were going to offer a service to a consumer so that if you have an old telly you pay us and we'll collect and recycle it," Dewberry reflected in the article. "Unfortunately we didn't make provision for the fact that consumers already get that service for free, or they will once a new regulation is implemented."

That would be the WEEE directive then, a piece of legislation that has been on the cards for a decade.

As Dewberry admits with studied understatement, the realisation that Sir Alan's new Xenon Green venture was set up to sell a service that people could get for free left her "in a bit of a predicament".

Far be it from Sneak to offer advice to a man who got out of the computer business just before the home PC revolution, but perhaps the next Apprentice series should see Sir Alan giving himself a due diligence refresher course.

June 21, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been some pretty risible attempts at making technology firms appear “green” recently but digital music is surely a more environmentally-friendly alternative to disk media, right?

Not necessarily. According to a Reuters story, sales of recordable CDs are still growing as users burn files. Also, discarded MP3 players are seen as problematic because they are full of heavy metals. Who would have thought the type of music had anything to do with it?

June 20, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

The annoying “captcha” tests designed to spot spammers may soon be making themselves useful, if no less annoying. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University plan to replace deliberately wobbly and obscured text used to dissuade bulk comment spamming with accidentally wobbly and obscured text taken from old, out-of-print books that are too faded or fuzzy for automated character recognition. The ReCaptcha test aims to kill two birds with a single brick: spammers are deterred and old books get digitised. It’s a neat idea, but to be useful, the system has to present at least two words: one that’s known or previously deciphered by others to actually weed out gibberish answers, plus another new word to actually help with the ongoing deciphering. So we can look forward to doubly annoying tests in the future. There’s no such thing as a free lunch after all, nor a free digitisation service neither.

June 1, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good news for hoarders: HP is looking for firms running old HP servers and will award a new rx2660 server plus support to the owner of the UK's oldest installed HP-UX system. The earliest eligible systems are therefore HP Series 9000s from about 1983.

The rules stipulate that the wizened computer must be in daily use, and that age will relate “to the date of purchase, not of installation”. Servers that have seen nothing but a store cupboard for decades are therefore eligible, providing you can get them up and running without igniting their dusty innards for long enough to grab the prize.

And sadly cheats can forget dumpster-diving or car-boot sales: secondhand systems are ineligible.

May 10, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has only just got used to the idea that Windows XP is headed for the short, steep and slippery slope to software oblivion, but apparently Microsoft is not finished throwing out stuff. Waiting for a Tube train this morning, Sneak was confronted by a large advertisement for Microsoft Office 2007, bearing the slogan, “Forget about yesterday. It’s a whole new day.” This is a bit of a questionable sentiment: Sneak for one would quite like any and all documents carefully prepared yesterday to still be available today, whether or not Microsoft’s software can be bothered to remember where it left them.

April 17, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the “you couldn’t make it up” department comes news that mobile marketing technology provider Sponge has chosen to work with a public relations company called Flannel. Sneak can’t wait for the inevitable phone call in which Flannel talks about Sponge’s liberal use of SOAP. Whereupon Sneak will forced to pull the plug.

April 2, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

You probably won’t have much sympathy if your name is John Smith, but yesterday Sneak bumped into Duncan Ross of Teradata, who grumbled that another employee called Ross Duncan keeps getting all his interesting email. The problem seems to be that Duncan’s address tends to leap to the front of the automated fill-in queue when colleagues start typing Ross’s name into the “To” field. Or possibly vice versa. Of course mixups in the other direction do also occur, and Ross reports that he hesitated the other day before forwarding on a message meant for Duncan, confirming details of a business trip to Australia. Who wouldn’t have been tempted? No doubt the wrong Ross/Duncan could have breezed through the airline check-in process and enjoyed a stay in a nice hotel near Bondi Beach, with the innocent Duncan/Ross carrying the can for not turning up at some tedious data warehousing event.

March 27, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)