Rose Crescent, looking towards Trinity Street. Snapped as I was walking back after buying an outrageously expensive light-meter battery at the Leica dealer.
Cambridge by night – 2
The Mitre in Bridge Street, earlier this evening.
A grim anniversary
Timely reminder from BBC Online.
The 20th anniversary of the first PC virus falls this month.
It was during the opening weeks of 1986 that the first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild.
Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users.
Now 20 years after they first appeared there are more than 150,000 malicious programs in existence.
That’s why my colleagues and I created our online course, Vandalism in Cyberspace: understanding and combatting malicious software.
Quote of the day
“About two thousand kilometres.”
Lieut-General Dan Halutz, Israel’s Chief of Staff, on being asked how far Israel would go to stop Iran’s nuclear programme.
Source: Economist, 21 January, 2006, page 53.
Intel inside, but where next?
This morning’s Observer column about the implications of Apple’s new processor. Excerpt:
More troubling for Apple is the prospect that its operating system and applications software can now run natively on (much cheaper) PC hardware. The company is set against this, but already programmers have hacked it and it is difficult to see how Apple could stop the practice. If it catches on, Apple might see sales of its computers decline as those who admire Apple software but dislike its hardware prices get the best of both worlds.
If Apple is ambivalent about the future, you should see Intel’s smouldering fury as the implications of the launch dawned on it. Not only did Jobs decline to go along with the ‘Intel inside’ mantra embossed on most Windows machines, he authorised a television ad that left the company’s executives speechless.
‘The Intel chip’, it burbles. ‘For years, it’s been trapped inside PCs, inside dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks, when it could have been doing so much more. Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free and get to live life inside a Mac. Imagine the possibilities.’
How do you spell ‘chutzpah’ again?
Is Google a Good Thing?
Thoughtful piece by John Lanchester in the current edition of the London Review of Books.
Fairtrade Gods
The Guardian on Saturdays has a nice section (called “Ouch!”) which prints embarrassing misprints and typos. How about this?
The Parochial Church Councils of Risley and Stanton-by-Dale with Dale Abbey have both said that we are Fairtrade Churches. This means we do all in our power to use only fairly traded gods in our churches and activities.
Or this ‘For Sale’ notice?
UNISEX mounting bike universal black & yellow with helmet.
Blackmailers target $1m home page
BBC News Online report…
The site of a UK student who had the idea of selling pixels as advertising space has been hit by a web attack.
Alex Tew, 21, hit the headlines at the start of the year when he revealed his Million Dollar Homepage had made him a million dollars in four months.
But the publicity brought the unwanted attention of extortionists who knocked the site over with a massive denial-of-service attack.
Following a week of downtime, the website is now back online.
Sometimes one wonders…
… about the sanity of one’s fellow beings. The owner of this expensive computing set-up published the photograph on Flickr — and yet displays his postal address on his website. Clearly, the ability to do joined-up thinking is not evenly distributed across the globe.
The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook
Alors! Ici!
Tuna Casserole
Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish
Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.
While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustated. [sic]