Firstly, Microsoft finally ended the nightmare that was Vista, with the full release of Windows 7. The launch has been a resounding success, and undoubtedly, Windows 7 will usher in a new and successful era for Microsoft. Even self-confessed Mac fangirl Cali Lewis of geekbrief.tv admitted it’s a great operating system, much to the chagrin of some of her own fans. Those holding their breath since XP can finally upgrade to something they see as decent, and those on Vista can look forward to a faster, less cluttered and more satisfying user experience.

Meanwhile, Google just announced their new Google Maps Navigation software, which will give Android 2.0 phone users a turn-by-turn GPS navigation system. It includes voice activation, integration with Google’s StreetView (so you can see exactly what each turn looks like) and of course it leverages all the Google Maps and Google Search features we’ve come to know and love, so you can, as the blurb says, “search for ‘the Museum with the King Tut exhibit’”. Oh, and it’s free. TomTom and Garmin employees are probably already updating their CVs.

To top it off, Google also announced their new OneBox music search system, which allows users to find, preview and purchase music. Again, it leverages Google’s search technology. For example, you can type in a few lyrics of a song to find it, which is something I know many of us have been doing with Google for years (get with the programme iTunes!). Thanks to partnerships with MySpace, Rhapsody, Pandora and iLike , you can now listen to previews, and (this is the one record companies will love,) it will suggest various ways of purchasing the music. Unfortunately, this service is currently only available in the US.

We all knew Windows 7 was coming, but I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Google waited for this week to announce their two new services. Google Maps Navigation software will eventually become available for other phones, including the iPhone, but we’ve been here before with Microsoft. When a company develops an OS and a crucial piece of software (such as Microsoft Windows and Office), guess which OS gets preferential treatment? Great GPS software on a phone could be a dealbreaker for many users, and no-one is better placed than Google to do Sat Nav well, and you can bet the best experience of Google Maps Navigation will be on Google’s own OS. On the music side, an open system (as opposed to something closed like iTunes) will definitely attract users and creators alike. Google plans to make this service feel more like using Limewire than iTunes.

Meanwhile, Apple have reached a zenith of sorts: iPod penetration has reached a type of saturation point; their latest OS is basically a minor upgrade; and the initial euphoria of the iPhone is being replaced by a sort of “so what?” feeling, as other phone makers catch up.

Think about it: Apple’s ad campaigns (“I’m a Mac/I’m a PC”, “There’s an app for that”, and “10,000 songs”) will soon start to sound a bit lame against strong rival phone and handheld operating systems, and the might of Google’s search applied to music.

Of course, the great white hope for Apple is this mysterious “Tablet”. The Tablet may be Apple’s game-changer, revolutionising the world of publishing the way the iPod changed music forever. But now there’s no doubt that Apple needs to change the game, and soon.

It read:

“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable.

The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road, which will eventually lead to communism.”.

Intriguing, yes? So I grabbed a little text and typed it into Google. Oh yeah, with the word “Fake” in front. Here is the resulting list from Google.

The internet is great, but it’s full of lies too. Thing is, the lies sometimes get a lot further than the truth.

On the minus side, the camera remains the same with a pithy 2 megapixels and no flash, the bluetooth is still a bit weedily implemented, and there’s still no to-do list in the apps! Mind you, thanks to the new “App Store” and a host of developers clamouring to develop new apps, I suspect there will be a plethora of task related doodahs to choose from very soon.

The Irish situation remains a little rubbish though, as there is still no sign of support for the voicemail feature, O2 will be placing 1Gb download limits on the prices plans (what planet are they on, seriously) and the prices will remain high relative to anywhere else.

So, anyone got a V2 jailbreak yet?

Of course, the upshot of all of this is an often smug Irish retail sector, who don’t stock anything, and if they do, expect big prices for small service. I heard a guy on the radio the other day (Newstalk) giving out because they are making hurleys and sliotars cheaper in China, and his hurley making business is suffering! What does he expect? A decree from the Pope declaring all non-Irish hurleys unholy?

But Irish companies can’t hide from the outside anymore. And that includes Apple Ireland, who are currently not doing the brand any favours. Euro prices for Apple products are currently crippling when compared with the dollar and the pound. The iPhone price in Ireland is surely a joke (though this may have more to do with O2 than Apple). The upshot of this is that people are paying for their holiday in New York with the saving they’ll make on the new MacBook Pro they buy while they are out there.

Of course, this is, quite literally, a false economy, as eventually, the effect of everyone retailing outside the country will result in lower sales here, meaning lost jobs, and feeding a recession which has all but hit us.

So what do we do? Be stubborn and buy Irish? Or take the easy road and shop abroad? I’ll leave that up to you…

Jeez, I am sick of Facebook.

• It’s the endless “hug me” or “bite him/her” requests

• It’s the virtual teddy bears (I don’t even like real teddy bears) and beers (has anyone here actually ever bought me a real beer? If not, sod off with the virtual ones).

• It’s the Walls vs Superwalls vs Funwalls vs Graffiti vs Notes bull so you don’t know where anyone’s messages are ‘cos it’s all so muddled.

• It’s the incessant chainmails with the “send this to 20 of your friends or something terrible will happen!” message.

• It’s the rubbish design: the tiny message area you have to type into; the lack of pimpability; the narrowness of the content (just in case you want to run Facebook on your 800×600 monitor from 1997).

• It’s the stupid games – “Dare John to run around the office with his boxers over his trousers!” And what have you.

• It’s the showoffy “Look how many countries I’ve been to” or “Look how much I know about music or movies and how high my IQ is” crap people insist on putting up.

• It’s the fact that, allegedly, I look like the drummer from Queen (bleaurgh!)

• It’s the fact that Facebook know more about me and you than I know about myself.

So I say, forget Facebook. If you wanna talk to me, call me. If you’re my friend, you’ll have my number. Or drop me an email. If you know my name, you can find it on the web.

If you agree with me, put this on your Superwall, send it to 20 of your friends along with a $1 teddybear, a Superpoke, and a vampire-bite, or else you’ll be dared to put your fly down all day and make like you prefer it that way if anyone points it out to you. Or some such nonsense.

Bye for now!

So four hundred thousand provisional licence holders (including myself) are now left in an impossible situation. You can’t get a test, and you can’t drive without another fully licensed person in the car. So I’ve got to bring my heavily pregnant wife with me to get anywhere? Is that what you are saying, Mr Dempsey? Let’s face it; the testing system is shambolic with huge waiting times and often bizarre anomalies in testing results across test centres; and while lack of experience of drivers may play a major part in road deaths in Ireland (though I’ve never seen figures to support this myself), what about speed? What about drink-driving? What about the condition of some of our roads? And what about the fact that some people have no choice for getting around because our public transport is a national disgrace, which leads to more traffic and therefore more danger on the roads?

Mr Dempsey insists this will make the roads safer. He is right of course, in much the same way as making people with registrations ending in an odd number only drive on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays would make the roads safer. There will clearly be less people on the road!

But it still does not change the fact that some of our fully licensed drivers never sat a test at all, thanks to the amnesties offered people in past years, whilst others, by their own admission, have batted their eyelids to a pass from an admiring tester!

Mr Dempsey compares the introduction of this law with the mobile phone in-car law and the child safety seat law. Now in those cases, one could go out and buy a child safety seat or a hands-free device, so clearly, there is no comparison, unless you can afford to have a chaffeur, or if one is provided for you by the state! Clearly, this is another example of a minister out of touch with the people he is supposed to represent. But hey, at least good ol’ Bertie can afford to pay a licensed driver to sit in his front seat while he gets his full license with the €38,000 pay rise he just got! Phew!

The Gardai will be completely compromised, the public are confused, and as usual, the real problem is not addressed. We need more testers, we need better roads, we need better public transport, and we need better enforcement of the laws that exist now. What we don’t need is this new law which will make a mockery of justice.

The final nail in the coffin for provisional drivers is the as-of-yet undisclosed “learner permit” speed limits, meaning provisional driving license holders must drive slower than anyone else on the road. Now the L tailback isn’t just an inconvenience – it’s the law!

I for one will be out in my car next Tuesday, and will continue to drive alone for the 6-8 months until I am invited for my test.

Kurzweil has this idea about the future of computers. He calls it the Technological Singularity. The idea is that as computers get faster and cleverer, as we feed more data into them, and as we create systems that allow them to intelligently manage and indeed interpret this information, they’ll become smarter and will become able to improve themselves without our input, and essentially, we’ll be out of the picture, so to speak. It’s not a dystopian Steven King-esque “Maximum Overdrive” vision of the future (for a reasonably credible version of that, see here), but rather a statement of fact as Kurzweil sees it, and that when it happens, he says, we will adapt and continue to live in this “singularity”. Kurzweil also believes these advances (along with advances in nanotechnology and other areas) will result in potential immortality for people in the future. In the meantime, he’s drinking a lot of green tea to keep himself young so he doesn’t miss the event when it happens!

This Technological Singularity sounds a bit far-fetched. But than again, lots of Kurzweil’s ideas about the future sounded far fetched when he pitched them, He predicted the pervasiveness of wireless data transfer, peer-to-peer networking, remote controlled warfare, and flash-memory, before they became technologically possible. He did also predict that we’d be riding around in cars that drove themselves by the end of the decade, and that the main way we’d be interacting with computers would be by talking to them within 2 years. Neither of these things are likely to happen quite so soon. But they may not be that far off.

But what isn’t as far fetched is the related concept of what I guess you could call the Information Singularity, which is an idea hypthothesised by Jacques F. Vallée, one of the people responsible for the invention of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. The Information Singularity puts forward the idea that all information will eventually become available instantaneously everywhere, which is, perhaps quite a far-fetched concept too, but there’s no doubt that our ability to create, develop, combine and share information is improving “exponentially”; a term I use with a bit of trepidation, but you get the idea.

We all have a thirst for knowledge, and up until recently, that thirst could be hard to quench quickly. What’s the capital of Estonia? Who was the president of the US in 1925? What’s the exchange rate between £STG and CA$? What’s the weather like in Brussels today? These were questions that, ten or even five years ago might take anything from an ask around the office to a trip to a library or a long distance phone call to find out. Now we’ve got Google, Wikipedia, Ask.com, Weather.com etc. to answer these questions as soon as they come up. Widgets and gadgets on our desktop get the info to us before we even need it.

And they’re just facts. What about opinions? The war in Iraq? Chavez? Mugabe? You can find a million opinions about these things with a quick trip to Blogger or Wordpress. Indeed, you can become the informer well as the informed so easily, even I can do it!

We can exchange our opinions and expertise with people all over the world in a instant, and others can add to this expertise in another instant. We can collaborate like never before. The Open Source movement is an example of this collaboration. And the rate of change seems to get faster and faster, as Kurzweil and Vallée predicted.

The problem we all face now is managing all this information. How can I fit it all in my little brain? The answer is, I can’t. And in fact, we are getting to a stage where information is being updated and changed so often, and by so many people (as in the case of wikis, forums and blogs), that there’s no point keeping it in there anyway, as it’ll be out of date as soon as you’ve read it. So, basically, the next step is to get computers to manage the information as intelligently, efficiently, and hopefully usefully as possible. Systems like Google Earth, the rather brilliant StumbleUpon, the Music Genome Project and the amazing Photosynth system (recently acquired by Microsoft) are some of the next steps in this information management. We are starting to enable computers to put heretofore unconnected information together in new and exciting ways that we maybe didn’t even think of ourselves.

Basically, now that we have all the information in the world at our fingertips (ok, not quite, but we’re getting there), we are getting computers to intelligently sort it out for us. We are telling them what to think, by filling them with data which we are supplying.

These “singularities” are probably best taken with a pinch of salt. They take current trends and expand them into the future without supposing that these trends themselves may change. And trends do change. For example, while the population of the World is still growing, its rate of growth is, for the first time ever in human history, slowing down.

Still, in some ways, the Information Singularity is here right now, and I am starting to think that maybe Kurzweil is, in part at least, right about the Technological Singularity coming too.

The main reason for the move is because of the difficulty tracking and controlling blogs within iWeb. I am hoping I can upgrade to iWeb ’08 and perhaps find a way of bringing the RSS feed into my site the other way. I don’t know if that’s possible, but we’ll see!

NOTE: Update on 26th September, 2007
The Moan has been moved yet again, this time to http://moanincronin.optophonic.com, but it is, as always, available through http://www.moanincronin.com

The Spicers finally came to their senses and closed the poll, claiming Toronto as the winner. Of course, it sounds like Baghdad was the real winner of the Spice City, but the Girls are keeping shtum. We’ll never know how far up the list Guantanamo got, but, you know (cue violins) if just one person, just one, is affected by this, then it was all worthwhile.

Well, not really, it would probably take more than just one person, but, like three or four would be satisfactory.

Thanks to everyone who voted!