When was the last time anyone gave you a telex number? (Does anyone still use telex?) From a manhole cover spotted today.
More: Wikipedia claims that “Telex is still in use for certain applications such as shipping, news, weather reporting and military command.”
… this is ridiculous.
Regular readers will know that I always photograph this display at Cambridge station when it’s showing a blue screen of death. But this morning there wasn’t even a screen, blue or otherwise. What can it mean?
June 28, 2004
In a few days, Iraq will radiate with stability and security.
Iyad Allawi, newly sworn-in Prime Minister of Iraq.
26 June, 2005
The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on for five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.
Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense
The US Supreme Court has ruled against Streamcast et al. I’ve just downloaded the Judgment for a closer look. At first sight, it seems to hinge on intent — i.e. whether a technology was created with an intent to copy or distribute protected material. If that’s what the Judgment really says, then the decision needn’t have the chilling effect on innovation that so many of us feared. But these are deep waters, Holmes, and I’m submerged just now.
Can you imagine the discussion-fest there will be on Blogs tonight? I want to know first what Ed Felten and Larry Lessig think. Neither has said anything substantive yet (17:30 UK time). It will be a long night.
Update: Interesting discussion going on at SCOTUSblog.
My attempt to be artistically enigmatic. Er, in reality it’s a belt which happened to be lying on a duvet cover. Must take a course in pretentiousness sometime and get myself a New York agent.
Note: “when”, not “if”. This morning’s Observer column. Excerpt:
Until recently, hard drive failure was a catastrophe only for really heavy users of computing, or for those running network servers – which is why both those categories of user have always been paranoid about backing up their data. But most ordinary users didn’t keep that much stuff, and in general much of what they did keep consisted of documents that could easily be backed up onto removable disks or filed in paper form.
But about three years ago, millions of such ‘ordinary’ users began buying digital still- and video-cameras and MP3 players. And all of a sudden, their hard drives began filling up with images, movies and music that really mattered to their owners because they documented their lives.
Well, well. From BBC online…
Microsoft’s next version of its browser, Internet Explorer 7, will make it easier for people to keep automatically aware of website updates.
IE7 will have an orange button on the toolbar which will light up when it detects a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed on a site.
Users can click on a “plus” button to subscribe to the site’s feed, as they would with a bookmark.
What’s funny about this? Nothing. It’s just that I’m using Safari (the browser that comes with Mac OS X) and it has exactly this feature built in. Now.
.
Still, full marks for effort to Redmond.
Mark Shuttleworth came to see us at Ndiyo yesterday. He was like a breath of fresh air — smart, informed, insightful and (unusual in very rich people) a very good listener. He gave a terrific lecture the previous evening at the Judge Institute. We were keen to talk to him about some of the stuff funded by his Foundation — including the Ubuntu Linux distribution we’re using for Ndiyo, and the amazing tuxLab project. I came away with several good ideas arising from our conversation. And we never even got around to discussing his third career as an astronaut! The photograph shows him talking to Quentin (on the right) over an Ndiyo ‘Internet cafe in a box’ we had set up in the Ndiyo house as a demo.
Debris of an evening spent sitting in the garden, talking. One upside of global warming.