Matt Nicholson's Blog
March 25, 2023
Future Publishing: The Somerton Years
Matt Nicholson remembers the early days of Amstrad Action and the birth of PC PLUS First published in Issue 8, the Christmas Special 2022 edition of Pixel Addict magazine It was early 1986 and I’d been working at VNU Publishing in the centre of London for a few years as editor of What Micro, which […]
May 21, 2017
How secure is the cloud?
This is my editorial for the Spring 2017 issue of HardCopy magazine: Security and privacy are two aspects of an issue that has long bugged our society. On the one hand most of us consider that we have a right to a private life, and indeed Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly states […]
November 9, 2016
Out of our hands
This is my editorial for the Winter 2016 issue of HardCopy magazine: In February 2009, in an effort to demonstrate exactly how far we are willing to obey a seductive voice emanating from a plastic box, the driver of a 50-foot articulated lorry wedged his vehicle so thoroughly into a hair-pin bend in the tiny Cotswold village […]
June 7, 2016
How serious is Microsoft about its new strategy?
This is my editorial for the Summer 2016 issue of HardCopy magazine: In March 1995, some five years after Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server, Microsoft announced a new “design environment for online applications” codenamed ‘Blackbird’ which would allow developers to create content for the forthcoming Microsoft Network. MSN was promised to be “more […]
March 7, 2016
Unnecessary developments
This is my editorial for the Spring 2016 issue of HardCopy magazine: I recently attended a software conference. You know the sort of thing: a couple of keynotes in the morning, followed by breakout sessions running in parallel across a bunch of rooms through the afternoon. Normally I don’t have trouble with such things: I go onto […]
November 10, 2015
Selling your identity
This is my editorial for the Winter 2015 issue of HardCopy magazine: There are some things we’re happy to pay for, and some things we’re not, and in the digital world, there’s little rhyme or reason between the two. I am quite happy to pay the BBC nearly £150 a year for the privilege of watching a […]
June 3, 2015
The Internet of Things
This is my editorial for the Summer 2015 issue of HardCopy magazine: It seems inevitable that the next bandwagon coming our way has ‘Internet of Things’ written on it in very large letters, just as the previous one proclaimed ‘The Cloud’ as the universal solution, and the one before insisted that ‘Services’ were the answer to everything. […]
May 27, 2015
Intel and the Internet of Things
Matt Nicholson caught up with Intel’s James Reinders at the iStep 2015 conference, held mid-April in Seville. Matt: We’re hearing a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) these days. What do you consider to be its distinguishing features? James: First of all it’s an explosion of innovation in the devices that one can build, […]
April 5, 2015
How to upgrade your PC to a Solid State Drive
The most effective way you can enhance the performance of your PC is to replace its existing hard disk with a Solid State Drive (SSD). Many of the articles covering this subject make the process sound fairly daunting, however the more recent devices around come with utilities that make it much easier. With 250GB SSDs […]
March 9, 2015
We know what’s good for you
This is my editorial for the Spring 2015 issue of HardCopy magazine: Recently I powered up my Windows Phone to discover that it had downloaded and installed a new app – not something I’d chosen for myself, you understand, but something that Microsoft obviously thought I needed. I am talking about Cortana, which (I assume) has appeared […]
