The Government has been getting serious on cyber security and all things techy in the last year or so. And with the recent spate of high profile hacking stories, the subject of web attacks appears to have shot even further up the Whitehall's agenda. So much so that Tory MP Francis Maude – the cabinet minister in charge of the UK's cyber security – this week said the threat from cyber attacks is equal to that of nuclear weapons. Yikes…
OnLive boss Steve Perlman has been talking up his cloud gaming service, ahead of its UK launch this autumn. He claims games publishers feel constrained with what they can do with the Xbox and PS3, which are getting 'long in the tooth'. He also claims he can't see how the next generation of consoles will be able to compete with OnLive. Big talk indeed, we'll see if the ambitious service can live up to it when it lands here later this year.
Legendary PC developer and boss of ID Software John Carmack also had a pop at the current console generation, claiming smartphones will very soon surpass their capabilities.
Meanwhile, Dell has warned that surplus, old technology is clogging up the channel, and soft consumer demand is causing a price slashing 'bloodbath' at the bottom of the market.
In a story that will sound familiar to those who believed the wide plethora of fuzzy predictions Tomorrow's World made a living out of, a group of, British universities this week announced they are aiming to push forward efforts to create better intelligent speech recognition systems which, they claim, will soon result in human-like interaction with computers and 'smooth talking' gadgets. If such a thing emerges, we particularly look forward to how this will change the dynamic of error reports and crashes. Rather than being palmed off with a barley comprehensible error report box after our PC randomly dropped the ball and lost a 500 word document, we could actually make it apologise. Much more satisfying, no?
In news of a more corporate nature, Microsoft signed a hugely important alliance with China’s biggest search engine Baidu this week, giving the software giant a key foothold in the area. It's especially important when considering global leader Google’s withdrawal from the vastly populated country last year.
Speaking of Google, this week it asked businesses to hold back on using its newly launched Google+ social networking platform to promote their brands and services, quite frankly claiming it isn't ready.
Barely a week goes by without another contender to the tablet throne, however information derived from component supply volumes could imply Amazon's tablet will dominate its other non-Apple rivals.
The same method has been used to conclude that the iPhone 5 will not be much more than a minor upgrade.
And that was the week in tech. Have a good weekend.
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