Billg at Comdex

If you want a REALLY good laugh to cheer you through these dark times, go to the transcript of Bill Gates’s appearance at Comdex. And put away that muesli. You may choke on it.

Primary colours

Yep. Red, green, blue.

Surrender yourself to amusement

Photographed yesterday at Cambridge’s latest temple to popular culture.

Tsunami tales

An email from one of my former Wolfson Press Fellows arrived this morning with this attachment and a very wide circulation list. The subject heading read simply: “Nobody knows who this boy belongs to!”

While I was contemplating it — and thinking about the tens of thousands of Thai, Sri Lankan and Indonesian children who are in the same situation but whose images are not circulating on the Web — my email system pinged and there was another message from my colleague saying “good news.just heard from singapore that they have found the next of kin of the child”.

So this particular story ends happily. But most of these stories won’t. And after tragedy, comes depravity. According to the BBC, “Swedish police are already in Thailand investigating reports that a 12-year-old Swedish survivor of the tsunami was kidnapped from a hospital in the chaotic aftermath”. And UNICEF is warning that child traffickers are also moving in on children orphaned by the disaster. Strange how these catastrophes bring out the best and the worst in humanity.

Interesting but Useless Information Dept.

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford introduced a minimum wage in his factories of $5 a day. [Source.]

Supercharging Firefox

Useful set of hacks for making Firefox go faster over broadband links. Just follow the instructions and whoosh! What? — you’re not using Firefox??? Shame on you!

Chicken!

He’s called Basil and has a low opinion of photographers. Can’t entirely blame him.

Beached!

We went to Norfolk today, just to walk on a beach.

Strolling along in the wind, we talked about the tsunami disaster, and reckoned that one of the reasons why it touches such a chord is that we all have memories of holidaying on beaches and asssociating them with pleasure and safety. We wondered how we would fare if a tsunami suddenly appeared on the horizon. In Brancaster (where this picture was taken), one would have to run a couple of miles at least to reach a safe elevation. I’m sure nobody on this beach would have made it.

One reason for running Linux on an iPod…

I wondered the other day why anyone would want to do this. One reason, kindly suggested by Paul Downey, is to be able to circumvent Apple’s crippling of the iPod’s recording facility (which will only let one record at a measly 8kHz) and push it up to 96kHz. Just what one would need for recording, say, live music at reasonable audio quality!

There’s no money in hardware, folks. Ask IBM.

Bloomberg News report: I.B.M. said yesterday that the personal computer business it was selling to the Lenovo Group of China had not made a profit for three and a half years. I.B.M.’s personal computing division had a loss of $139 million in the six months ended June 30. It had losses of $258 million in 2003, $171 million in 2002 and $397 million in 2001, I.B.M. said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During that period, the PC division had sales of $34.1 billion.