Stuff to make your head swim. An old idea — Virtual Machines — is about to make a lot of waves. See, for example, how Quentin has been running Ubuntu Linux on his Mac — without any dual-booting nonsense. This has lots of interesting implications for the Ndiyo Project btw.
Daily Archives: April 9, 2006
Tut, tut
More tales from the Downing Street nursery…
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor are feuding so poisonously that attempts to stage shows of unity between the two only highlight how divided they are. It is a commentary on the state of the relationship that it is regarded as remarkable that they managed to share a car journey to the launch of their party’s local elections campaign last week.
More revealing about that tortured relationship is what actually happened when the two men were forced into each other’s company on the back seat of the limo. The Prime Minister tried to engage the Chancellor in conversation. I’m told that Mr Brown responded by taking out some papers and burying himself behind them, refusing to reply to every overture until Mr Blair finally gave up trying to make conversation. The journey passed in a bitter silence…
Well, according to Andrew Rawnsley anyway. A sceptical reader might ask: how does Rawnsley know this? There would have been four people in the limo — the PM, the Chancellor, a driver and a minder. So who told tales out of school? The driver? The Minder? Blair? Or Brown? I hate this kind of phoney know-all journalism.
Stand by…
… for a new spasm of demands from clueless politicians for the Internet to be banned/censored/controlled. The reason? Today’s Observer has a report about the 7/7/ London tube/bus bombings which claims that:
A Whitehall source said: ‘The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet’.
The funny thing is that no politician ever calls for the telephone network to be banned, despite the very good evidence that it is used for drug dealing, terrorism and many other nefarious activities…
Corporate blogging
This morning’s Observer column…
There was an interesting spat recently at Amazon HQ in Seattle that has been reverberating around cyberspace ever since. What happened was this: the authors of a fast-selling new book advocating business blogging were invited to give a talk to a lunch-time meeting of Amazon employees. Werner Vogels, the chief technology officer of Amazon, asked some direct – some say rude – questions, demanding empirical evidence that business blogging was a good investment rather than just a cool idea.
The visitors appeared to be miffed by his iconoclastic, sceptical tone. Up to that point on their book-promotion travels they had been listened to in reverential silence. So the meeting ended on a sour note and the participants went their separate ways – but the argument continued in, well, blogs…