… in 1934, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Louisiana.
Just thought you’d like to know.
Category Archives: Asides
Google: your, er, trusted advisor
From today’s FT.com
Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Now why am I not reassured by this prospect?
The article goes on to discuss the implications of Google’s personalised search offerings. It also reports that
Autonomy, the UK-based search company is also developing technology for “transaction hijacking”, which monitors when internet surfers are about to make a purchase online, and can suggest cheaper alternatives.
One of the non-exec directors of Autonomy is Richard Perle, aka the Prince of Darkness.
Microsoft invents fat (finger) controller
From Technology Review…
Retrieving the stylus for a personal digital assistant takes time. But for detailed work, a stylus is usually better than a finger. Microsoft researchers believe that they’ve found a better way to activate tiny targets, such as a name on a contact list or a street on a map.
Microsoft’s solution, called Shift, allows users to employ their fingertips to select pixels in a new way. First, the user presses a finger on the screen over the area of interest. Holding down her finger activates the Shift software. A detailed view of the area of interest appears nearby on the screen, in a pop-up window on top of the original image. With slight movements of her finger, the user can guide a pair of crosshairs over her desired target within the pop-up window and then make her selection by lifting her finger off the screen…
Bushed Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph site was completely unavailable for most of this (Monday) afternoon. Bit flaky for an organisation that is betting the ranch on the Web.
iRack: the strategy
Steve jobs does Operation Enduring Freedom.
Hogwash
BBC News reports that
Gordon Brown says he is “truly humbled” by the scale of the backing given to him by Labour MPs as their choice to succeed Tony Blair as prime minister.
Aw shucks. I prefer Simon Hoggart’s observation that “Gordon Brown does humility like he does ballet lessons”.
Numbers: the movie
Sean French pointed me to this:
Like him, I’m baffled by how anyone could have such an encyclopedic knowledge of film. This is not the kind of stuff you find by Googling.
More… Quentin (like Sean, a movie buff) writes: ” I wonder if somebody had access to the close-caption text transcripts for a large movie library – you could search that…”
Life’s little necessities
From Quentin’s blog. Seen in an Antipodean airport.
School and creativity
I often wish I could afford the $6,000 conference fee for the TED conferences.
Here’s why — a riveting talk by Ken Robinson on how School stifles creativity.
Thomas Friedman
Sitting next to Michael at dinner tonight we talked about Thomas Friedman, the celebrated NYT columnist. I argued that one of the reasons for F’s publishing successes (both The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat have been best-sellers) is that they contain just the right number of half-truths. (This is also the secret to successful business books btw.)
Then I came home and found this on Dave Winer’s Blog. It skewers Friedman very economically.
“I did a good job of stifling while listening to NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman”, Dave writes, “although at times I did gasp out loud at his arrogance and disregard for us, the audience…Friedman told an old story about how the Internet out of control would turn everyone into a public figure, like Friedman, who suffers from slander and exposure”.
Friedman told the story of an Indonesian woman who thought Al Gore is Jewish, something she heard on the Internet, which Friedman says is untrustworthy. But we remember when Friedman warned of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, who explained to us in his audience why we had to go to war. If I had time to ask a question, I might have asked him what regrets he has about the mistakes he’s made, the lies he told that caused more death than the lies the Indonesian woman who thought Gore is a Jew. The mistake we make is when we blindly trust any source, including the NY Times.
Spot on!