Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster

With the latest incarnation of its search engine, Google is making the World Wide Web as we have known it for over 30 years invisible, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to most people, who will be happy to let Google become their universal user interface to everything. And yet Google still depends on the Internet to supply all the information it is analysing and repackaging. It risks killing the very thing that sustains it.

From Walled Culture.

Newham and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Yesterday I had another meeting with Richard Steel, CIO of Newham, who was generous with both his time and information. After our introductory session a few weeks ago, we got down to the nitty-gritty – the server side. I was impressed by spaghetti-like complexity of the diagram showing the links between the disparate services and their databases: running a borough is clearly an incredibly complex job, and it's clear that we are still in the early days of automating that process.

Two things emerged during the morning, one good, and one bad...

On Open Enterprise blog.

The European Computer Driving What?

The European Computer Driving Licence is not a joke, despite its Monty Python-ish name. More to the point:

The ECDL Foundation will now include a module on the use of Sun's Star Office Writer, Calc and Base applications for word processing, spreadsheets and database work.

So, shame on me that I've never heard of it, and good on them for creeping out from under the Redmond shadow, albeit only a smidgeon.

Trying to Resolve Resolvo's OO.CBT

I'm torn.

On the one hand, OpenOffice.org is a powerful and therefore complex program, and so benefits from a little bit of training. On the other hand, the OO.CBT interactive tutorial from Resolvo (free for home users), while quite well done, is written entirely in Flash....

Ah well, you'll just have to make up your own mind on this one. (Via OpenOffice.org Training, Tips and Ideas.)