One reason for running Linux on an iPod…

I wondered the other day why anyone would want to do this. One reason, kindly suggested by Paul Downey, is to be able to circumvent Apple’s crippling of the iPod’s recording facility (which will only let one record at a measly 8kHz) and push it up to 96kHz. Just what one would need for recording, say, live music at reasonable audio quality!

There’s no money in hardware, folks. Ask IBM.

Bloomberg News report: I.B.M. said yesterday that the personal computer business it was selling to the Lenovo Group of China had not made a profit for three and a half years. I.B.M.’s personal computing division had a loss of $139 million in the six months ended June 30. It had losses of $258 million in 2003, $171 million in 2002 and $397 million in 2001, I.B.M. said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During that period, the PC division had sales of $34.1 billion.

Iraq: counting the cost

Interesting piece in The Atlantic pointing out that the numbers of American children bereaved by deaths of a parent in Iraq is unprecedently high. The reason? Past U.S. wars were mainly fought by single men, but 40 percent of the 1,256 GIs killed in Iraq as of November were married, and 459, including six women, had children. The defense analyst Anthony Cordesman forecasts that many more children will be bereaved if, as Donald Rumsfeld has indicated, U.S. forces stay in Iraq until 2008 or 2009. By then, Cordesman estimates, 5,038 U.S. troops will have died.

This is terrible, of course. But is anybody interested in compiling the corresponding estimates for Iraqis? Last Wednesday, for example, insurgents lured Iraqi policemen to a house in west Baghdad and set off a huge amount of explosives, killing at least 29 people, seven of them police. They had families and children too.

The Higher Thought

Susan Sontag has died at the age of 71. I was always slightly baffled by her. Lots of people whom I took seriously took her seriously, yet whenever I tackled something she had written I usually found it at best unsatisfactory and occasionally incomprehensible. I did, however, like her book On Photography, which I’ve just pulled out and have been re-reading. She’s had lots of appreciative obituaries, plus a predictably dyspeptic one by Roger Kimball, a doyen of the strand of American conservatism which is currently, er, triumphing in Iraq. Sontag would be delighted, I guess, by his piece. You can tell tell the quality of a woman by the enemies she makes.