For the last two years, I’ve been working with a group of colleagues in Cambridge on a project which has the modest aim of changing the world. It’s called the Ndiyo Project. (‘Ndiyo’ is the Swahili for ‘yes’.) Our aim was to rethink computer networking to make it much more affordable, environmentally sustainable and supportable than conventional PC-based networking. Why? Because the way we currently do networking is so wasteful and expensive that poor people will never be able to afford it. Yesterday, we presented a paper on our work at a big conference sponsored by (nice irony this!) Microsoft Research in Cambridge. BBC Online picked up the story and have reported it today. Our email inbox is already creaking at the seams. Stay tuned.
Quote of the day
Jonathan Freedland, writing in today’s Guardian on the implications of the leaked document giving the Attorney-General’s advice about the legality of going to war against Iraq.
The result was a surreal circularity, whereby the attorney ruled that war would be legal if Downing Street was sure Saddam was not complying. Downing Street said it was sure and so the attorney was satisfied. The war was legal – because Tony Blair said it was legal.
Sky High
Quote of the day
Absolutely not.
Bill Gates, responding to a question about whether his new friendship with U2 singer Bono would entice him to buy one Apple’s black-and-red U2 edition iPods.
The Cult of the Mac
Lovely essay by the BBC’s North American Business Correspondent, on the Apple religion. He even brings up Umberto Eco’s insightful religious metaphor for the Mac/PC schism:
The Italian philosopher, Umberto Eco, once wrote, tongue only partly in cheek, that Macintosh is Catholic while Microsoft computers are Protestant.
Macs, Umberto Eco opined, were “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory,” traits he associated with Catholicism. More to the point, though, their way of operating was different from Microsoft’s, giving more guidance to users.
Macs would, as Umberto Eco put it, “tell the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed”.
He saw that as like Catholicism, in contrast to the Protestant faith which he thought, like Microsoft computers, would “allow free interpretation of scripture, demand difficult personal decisions… And take for granted that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself”.
On this day…
… in 1916, a group of Republican dreamers and rebels led by Patrick Pearse launched the Easter Rising in Dublin, seizing control of the GPO and declaring a Republic. The revolt was not widely supported and was easily crushed by the British, who then — with exquisite incompetence — turned victory into defeat by the way they treated the insurgents, thereby engendering a 180-degree turn in public support for the nationalist project. Yeats wrote a wonderful poem — Easter 1916 — about it, and lodged the phrase “a terrible beauty” in our consciousness.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The BBC’s Creative Archive
My Observer column on the significance of the Creative Archive is here. The Open University, for which I work, is one of the Creative Archive partners, and is currently mulling over how it should contribute to it. In the meantime, one of my colleagues, Ray Corrigan, has released the materials for his course on Law, the Internet and Society under a Creative Commons licence. The course started life as part of my Relevant Knowledge programme, but was dropped when it came to the end of its designated life. It seemed crazy just to bury something that could be useful and interesting to many people simply because the university didn’t have space for it in its curriculum. So now it has a new lease of life, courtesy of the open content movement.
Google Maps
Quentin’s right — Google Maps is terrific. Just type in your postcode and see what happens. Bad news for all those online services like StreetMapUk etc. The verb ‘to Google’ has just taken on a more sinister meaning: to have your business model undermined overnight!
Political photoshopping — audio
Google share price finally exceeds average employee IQ
Neat headline, eh? Not mine, alas, but from Good Morning Silicon Valley, reporting on Google’s extraordinary last quarter.
So what if 98 percent of Google’s business comes from advertising. So what if it has a limited track record and can’t be bothered to explain the dynamics of its business. The company is spitting out money like a runaway slot machine. After the market closed Thursday, Google reported first quarter sales and earnings that blew the doors off even the most optimistic of Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The company reported a nearly six-fold increase in profit on revenue that nearly doubled from the comparable period a year ago. Net income for the quarter totaled $369 million, or $1.29 a share, compared with $64 million, or 24 cents a share, for the same period a year ago. Revenue for the quarter was $1.26 billion, a 93 percent increase from the previous year. Wow. The profit results in particular were well beyond The Street’s expectations, and giddy investors eagerly bid up Google shares in after-hours trading. By late Thursday Google’s shares had reached $223.97 — well more than twice the $85-a-share valuation of the company’s initial public offering only last August. “They basically made a mockery of our numbers and Street expectations,” Derek Brown, a senior analyst at Pacific Growth Equities, told the L.A. Times. “It was an extraordinary quarter.”