The $130 laptop

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From ZDNet.com…

Nicholas Negroponte showed off the latest prototypes of the fabled $100 PC. It’s not longer a $100 PC, however. The ruggedized, two pound Linux desktop (Fedora) system, with mesh networking will sell for about $130 to $140 (san shipping) to governments starting in April 2007.  Negroponte expects to reach the $100 price point by the end of 2008. The colorful system can turn into a tablet, and Negroponte said that  it “will run like a bat out of hell.”  Pricing depends on how much RAM, but key is the display, he added. “It has to be sunlight readable.

That won’t be done until August/September.” Then there will be a beauty contest among three systems and go into manufacturing for shipping, he said. Current seven countries are evaluating the system. The most enthusiastic are Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand and Argentina. In addition, China, India and Egypt have shown interest, as well as Russia, Mexico and Indonesia. Negroponte said that manufacturing has to reach 5 to 6 million to get scale pricing…

It gets worse

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From GMSV…

Now comes word that the Justice Department has told Google, Microsoft and other major Net companies that it wants them to keep records of every Web page their users visit for two years, a polite request now, maybe a law later. Search sites, portals and ISPs are sweating, not wanting to side with the pedophiles and terrorists but not wanting to appear to bend over so readily that their customers scream. “Child pornography is disgusting and illegal,” said Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google. But he said any proposals related to users’ data “require careful review and must balance the legitimate interests of individual users, law enforcement agencies and Internet companies.”

Current regulations require companies to preserve data that is the subject of specific criminal investigations for up to 180 days while law enforcement collects evidence that could support a warrant or subpoena. “This is a radical departure from current practices,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Mercury News. “We’ve opposed it because we think it creates an unnecessary risk to privacy and security of Internet users.” And that risk is only one of the problems. Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said requiring companies to keep such data could end up costing billions of dollars, raising the price of Net access. “The Department of Justice has yet to tell us what they want us to store.”‘ McClure said. “If they decide they want us to store everything, there isn’t a storage facility in the U.S. large enough to store that.”

Dorneywood: a correction

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Just realised that I was wrong to claim that Dorneywood was intended as a country residence for the Foreign Secretary. It has in fact generally been regarded as a perk for either the Chancellor or the Home Secretary — as Simon Jenkins points out this morning. Chevening is the Foreign Secretary’s country residence.

Jenkins is also good on what motivated rich people to donate these grand houses to the government.

Dorneywood is one of a set of houses round London donated in the last century as a snare for naive Labour ministers. They were supposedly for the relaxation of those without “places” of their own. Both Chequers (1917) and Dorneywood (1942) were given during the tribulations of war and with socialism looming. Lord Stanhope gave the spectacular Chevening in 1967, obscurely for use by the Prince of Wales, the prime minister or another cabinet minister. Since 1980 this has tended to mean the foreign secretary.

The gifts had a mixed reception. Lord Haldane considered Chequers “a dangerous distraction” for those “unaccustomed to the charms of a country house”. Ministers would lose touch with government business and go native. Arthur Lee, Tory donor of Chequers, regarded this as precisely the point. A fine old house was architectural psychotherapy, to subvert whatever revolutionary instincts its occupant might harbour. The trust deed stated: “It is not possible to foresee or foretell from what classes or conditions of life the future wielders of power will be drawn … To the revolutionary statesman, the antique and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history.” Maurice Hankey put it more succinctly: “Chequers should have a marvellous effect on these Labour people.”

Cooking the book

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TH Huxley described science as “the slaughter of a beautiful theory by ugly facts”. The same might be said of biography. It turns out that the famous Mrs Beeton (she of the eponymous cookbook) couldn’t cook and didn’t write it.

If Mrs Beeton had been alive today she would be in trouble for plagiarism on a shocking scale, the Guardian Hay festival heard yesterday.

The image of the original domestic goddess and author of the definitive book on cookery and household management has been tainted. The real Mrs Beeton was in fact a strip of a girl who could not cook.

The historian Kathryn Hughes has written the definitive biography of a woman born in 1836 who became a template for hardworking housewives.

Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead.

How did she come to write the seminal book? “The answer is she copied everything,” Hughes said. It took Hughes five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.

But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. “Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.” Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for…

Beginnings of wisdom?

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From today’s New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 31 — After 27 years in which the United States has refused substantive talks with Iran, President Bush reversed course on Wednesday because it was made clear to him — by his allies, by the Russians, by the Chinese, and eventually by some of his advisers — that he no longer had a choice…

Bet Cheney is spitting feathers. And as for Rumsfeld, well… And then there are all those far-right ‘think’ tanks. And Rush Limbaugh. Delicious!

Open Source XP

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This is an illustration from today’s New York Times showing how Chris diBona, Google’s Manager of Open Source Programs, uses a fancy little micro-PC when he’s on the road. Er, just one problem: the cool little gizmo — according to the picture caption — runs Windows XP. What kind of Open Source advocacy is that?

Finally, a real use for the Segway

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From Technology Review…

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thieves used to break into as many as five cars a week in the parking garage at Los Angeles’ Union Station. Then the Metropolitan Transportation Authority came up with a simple solution: They put a security officer on a Segway Human Transporter. ”The first day that one of the security officers was on the device was pretty much the last day there was a break-in,” said Robin Blair, a transportation planning manager for the MTA, which owns about 19 Segways.

Although the electric, self-balancing Segway scooter never quite caught on with commuters the way its backers had predicted five years ago, the gizmo has found a growing market among law-enforcement agencies, with more than 100 departments around the world now signed on as customers and many others testing the device. The niche market, coupled with a burst of interest from Europeans struggling with gas prices much higher than in the U.S., have breathed new life into the Segway…

Recipe for disaster

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As an experiment, Steve Knopper bought a Dell computer and left it unprotected — and clicked on every dubious link he could find. He kept a diary. Here are the last few days.

Day 10: I download Kazaa, search for .xxx, .gif, .rar, .pif, and .exe files, and open everything. My desktop is soon stuffed with pornography, MP3s in Arabic, and pirated copies of Tomb Raider. Within minutes, Explorer has a grand mal seizure – 95 pop-ups and innumerable error messages. Hah!

Day 11: Incredibly, the Dell boots up. I’ve gotten some strange attachments that Yahoo, Outlook, and Eudora won’t let me open. I try copying some from my regular computer to the Dell using an external drive. Nothing.

Day 12: Upon firing up the computer, I get six Internet Explorer pop-ups, one WhenUWin Sweepstakes, and one “The Best Offers.” McAfee VirusScan says I have 25 potentially unwanted files, including W32/Netsky.q@MM!zip and two other viruses. SaferScan finds 1,002 porn files on my hard drive, and my Yahoo Mail inbox has 200 brand-new messages with subject lines like “Tired of dating games?”

Day 18: I take the Dell to Best Buy’s Geek Squad and tell a technician that I’m having a bit of trouble with it. Less than four hours later I get a call back from Carla. She declares it a total loss and advises wiping the hard drive and restoring it with system disks. “The tech ran a couple of virus scans,” she says. “One kept beeping so much that he had to just turn it off.” Ah, that’s the stuff.

It was a Windows machine, you understand.

Neocon mistakes

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Andrew Sullivan writing in TIME Magazine…

Fukuyama’s sharpest insight here is how the miraculously peaceful end of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

The second error was narcissism. America’s power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. Those resentments are often as deep among our global friends as among our enemies–and make alliances as hard as they are important. That is not to say we should never act unilaterally. Sometimes the right thing to do will spawn backlash, and we should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that when we do go out on a limb, we get things right. In those instances, we need to make our margin of error as small as humanly possible. Too many in the Bush Administration, alas, did the opposite. They sent far too few troops, were reckless in postinvasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from within their own ranks. Their abdication of the moral high ground, by allowing the abuse and torture of military detainees, is repellent. Their incompetence and misjudgments might be forgiven. Their arrogance and obstinacy remain inexcusable.

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism’s skepticism of government’s ability to change culture at home and its naiveté when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad…

Yep to all three.