The only surprise is how long it took. Apple has announced a software utility that will allow owners of the new Intel-powered Macs to install Windows XP and choose which operating system to use at boot-up time. This add-on will be built into the next release of OS X.
Big deal. It’s a bit like digging your garden with a teaspoon: it can be done; but why would anyone want to do it?
Salon challenged its readers to translate Windows error messages into Haikus. Winners here. My favourite is this entry by Peter Rothman:
Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
Thanks to Spencer Goodman for the link.
Hmmm… There’s a book called Writing with Power written by someone named Peter Elbow. Why is this funny? Only because we have a saying in Ireland: “More power to your elbow”, which is a vague exhortation to people about to embark on a worthy but futile task.
The funniest title I’ve come on recently though is Yoga for people who can’t bothered to do it by Geoff Dyer.
There’s an amusing site called Overheard in New York: The Voice of the City, which publishes verbal exchanges overheard in the city. Here’s one:
Hobo: You have a quarter for a cup of coffee?
Suit: Excuse me, can’t you see I’m on the phone?
Hobo: I don’t have time for games!–42nd & 7th
RTE — the national Irish radio station — has a wonderful extended interview with John McGahern, broadcast on the day Memoir was published. (Needs RealAudio player.)
Delicious Martin Rowson cartoon in the Guardian. I love the punchline: “Coming soon! Weekend breaks for two in TEHRAN!”
Thanks to Pete for the link.
How about this (from an aside on Good Morning Silicon Valley)?
As I write, it’s Tuesday April 4, 19:55 GMT. In a few hours, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Well, it will be if you use US date format. Just thought you’d like to know.
From this morning’s New York Times…
WASHINGTON, April 3 — Representative Tom DeLay, the relentless Texan who helped lead House Republicans to power but became ensnared in a corruption scandal, has decided to leave Congress, House officials said Monday night.
Mr. DeLay, who abandoned his efforts to hold onto his position as majority leader earlier this year after the indictment of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a former ally, was seeking re-election as vindication. But he told selected colleagues that, facing the possibility of defeat, he had decided not to try to hold on to his House seat.
“He just decided that the numbers and the whole political climate were against him and that it was time to step aside,” said one Congressional official with knowledge of Mr. DeLay’s plans. The official did not want to be identified because Mr. DeLay’s formal announcement was scheduled for Tuesday in Houston.
On Monday night, Richard Cullen, DeLay’s defense lawyer, said that his client had been pondering a withdrawal from the race for some time and that “it had nothing to do with any criminal investigation.”
“The decision had absolutely nothing to do with the investigation,” Mr. Cullen said.
Of course.
Fascinating post by Bruno Giussani about the hidden underbelly of Skype. Excerpt:
Skype’s design is based on peer-to-peer, distributed networking principles. This means that the core functions of the system are decentralized, as is the database of Skype users (the tool that lets you look up other Sykpers and tells the system where to forward a call). The calls are set up and passed on among users, flowing through a chain of computers around the world without traversing any central infrastructure.
That’s good for robustness and scalability — and for Skype, which can avoid massive investments and add new users at near-zero marginal cost. For the system to work, however, some users have to take over its vital functions: routing traffic and holding portions of the database. In Skypeville, these tasks are farmed out to those users with the most powerful computers and the biggest bandwidth, such as CERN. Skype turns them into supernodes.
Only a fraction of users are elevated to this function–currently some 20,000, according to research presented at a recent conference in the Netherlands by Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux of EADS. And only a small portion of their bandwidth is supposed to be shared. Skype CEO Niklas Zennström explained it to me in an interview last year: “When you become a supernode you share some of your resources and a little bit of bandwidth, but very little; you won’t notice.”
But some do notice. San Diego-based venture capitalist and TV host Paul Kedrosky, for example, complained on his blog in January that while he was traveling his computer “was sending out enormous amounts of traffic.” The IT people at his firm discovered that the machine was routing Skype traffic as a supernode. Computerworld magazine found that “in supernode mode, Skype is reputedly able to saturate 100 Mbit/second connections.” In layman’s terms, those are fast connections. The average Skype user’s PC is much less taxed than this, obviously. The possibility of becoming a supernode is written into Skype’s end-user license agreement, but not explicitly: The word “supernode” is never used. The license speaks of “permission to utilize the processor and bandwidth of your computer for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between Skype Software users.”
This brings up two considerations. First: Skype is using some people’s computer power and bandwidth at an amazing rate. Sure, they agreed to it when they installed the software. But since most people pay for their bandwidth, some of them may come to the idea of ask Skype to share the cost. Second: In the interview, Mr. Zennström–while acknowledging scaling issues–said Skype could basically grow indefinitely without the need for a central infrastructure. But as traffic grows, and should the current scattered grumbling by supernode users turn into more vocal complaints, Skype may have to start deploying its own supernodes. That would completely transform its business model.
Nicholas Carr adds some pithy comments of his own to this:
It’s a very nice set-up for Skype. By building its network on users’ machines and pipes, it’s able to “avoid massive investments and add new users at near-zero marginal cost,” Giussani writes. And in the past, its free-riding business model didn’t meet with much resistance. As a renegade operation – the Kazaa of telephony – Skype had an emotional connection with users that turned them into willing collaborators. But now that it’s an arm of a multi-billion-dollar profit-making company, eBay, one wonders if users will continue to happily make charitable contributions of processing power and bandwidth. Already, corporations are banning Skype from their networks.
This is complicated but Ed Felten’s post is worth the effort. It’s about the content industries’ submission to the US Copyright Office (which is currently pondering the question of what should be exempted from the DMCA). You really need to read the entire post, but here’s the nub of it:
In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.
I’ve always thought that the arrogance and stupidity of the copyright thugs was extraordinary, but this really takes the biscuit.