What is Mac OS X?

Remarkable, detailed, informative answer to that question by an IBM programmer, Amit Singh. Thanks to Gerard de Vries for the link.

The Waste Land

This is just one of an astonishing (and sobering) set of pictures taken by a Russian biker and photographer who likes travelling round the Chernobyl area. Her English is delightfully wacky (though less so than my Russian), but the pictures speak for themselves.

The computer and the motor car: another intriguing similarity

My Observer colleague Simon Caulkin has a fascinating column today on the parallels between the US-dominated automobile industry in the 1960s and the US-dominated software industry in the 2000s. What’s the parallel? Well, in the 1960s, the automobile manufacturers were ‘relaxed’ about quality whereas the upstart Japanese were not. We all know what happened. In the 2000s, the software companies are, er, relaxed about quality (not to mention security) and — guess what? — the Indians are not. This is the really interesting aspect of the ‘offshoring’ debate. And the funniest thing of all is that Bill Gates drives a Lexus.

That SCO memo is authentic

When I posted that piece about how Microsoft was bankrolling, er investing in, SCO, the authenticity of the leaked memo hadn’t been established. Now, it has.

What everyone should know about Free Software

“The goal of the Free Software Movement is to enable people to understand, to learn from, to improve, to adapt, and to share the technology that increasingly runs every human life.” From Eben Moglen’s terrific lecture at Harvard.

Meet the opposite of the couch potato — the Internet user

From the latest survey of the Pew Internet and American Life project — the most comprehensive ongoing study of how Americans use the Net:

“44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files

In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation[base ‘]s adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites. 17% have posted written material on Web sites. 13% maintain their own Web sites. 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files. 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses. 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups. 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings. 6% have posted artwork on Web sites. 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites. 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families. 3% have contributed video files to Web sites. 2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.”

This is hard evidence supporting what most of us have known for a long time — but which has not yet dawned on the traditional media industries — namely that the era of the passive consumer of media content is coming to an end. There will always be couch potatoes, no doubt, but they will look increasingly eccentric in a networked future. Humans are social, communicative animals. Given the right media, they will seek to express themselves. The Net is providing the medium — and they are expressing themselves. QED.

Yahoo starts to charge for inclusion in its search rankings

Surprise, surprise… NYT story reads in part:

“March 2, 2004: Yahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.

The practice, called “paid inclusion,” has long been a part of many search engines including Microsoft’s MSN search function and Ask Jeeves. But Google, which last year surged ahead of Yahoo to become the No. 1 site for searching on the Internet, disdains the practice as misleading.

Last month, Yahoo replaced Google, which had operated Yahoo’s search engine, with its own technology to index billions of Web pages. Yahoo says it hopes to include every site on the Internet it can find in that index at no charge. But sites that pay for Yahoo’s new program can guarantee that they are included in the index.

Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month. And Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites and will help those sites improve their listings.”

Hmmm… The day will come when Internet users will pay a fee to use a ‘clean’ search engine.

The Bush re-election theme: don’t blame me

As intuited by Josh Marshall:

“If you look at the TV ads the president just unveiled today, you quickly see a main — probably the main — theme of his reelection campaign: it’s not my fault.

Yes there are all sort of bad things going on. The economy’s been rough. The deficit is deepening. Job growth is barely registering. There’s all sorts of chaos on the international stage. But it’s not my fault. When I got here there was a recession already, which I didn’t have anything to do with. That was Clinton’s fault. And the same with all the corporate scandals. And then Osama bin Laden got involved and that wasn’t my fault either. And that Iraq thing didn’t completely work out. But that’s the CIA’s fault. So if there’s anything that’s bad now it’s not because of anything I did. It’s because of 9/11. And if it’s not because of 9/11 then it was already broken when I got here. So don’t blame me.”

Oh, and while we’re at it, here’s Bush Yoga.

Cannibals Descend on MP3 Players

Lovely headline, don’t you think? Not mine, alas, but the header on a Wired story about digital photography. Quote:

“Digital photographers have found a source of cheap microdrives for their cameras: Creative Technology’s MuVo2 digital music player.

Like Apple Computer’s iPod mini, the MuVo2 is based on a 4-GB microdrive from Hitachi. But while the Hitachi microdrive retails for about $500 when sold as a storage device for digital cameras, the MuVo2 costs about $200.

As someone put it on a website forum, you get the microdrive for more than 50 percent off, and a free pair of headphones.

“The price was right,” said Norman Yee, a professional photographer who bought a MuVo2 so he could use its hard drive in his Canon EOS 10D digital camera. Yee then took the 1-GB CompactFlash card he was using in the camera and put it in the MuVo2. Both work perfectly, he said. The Hitachi microdrive is the same size as a standard CompactFlash, or CF, card, a popular storage medium for digital cameras. In fact, the drive is designed to be interchangeable with CF cards. The drive can simply be inserted into the camera and formatted to store pictures. The drive can also be read with most CF card readers.”

Worried about your house being flooded? Click here to find out

From a BBC Online report:

“One of the UK’s largest insurers has unveiled technology that will enable it to pinpoint whether individual homes are at risk from flood. At present insurers assess risk through checking if the postcode of the property is in a flood plain.

Nearly five million people live in a flood plain, which makes it hard for them to get cover. Norwich Union has digitally mapped the UK and can now calculate the risk of flood to within a few metres. The insurer will be able to set premiums for home contents insurance based on a particular address rather than just a postcode band, for both residential and commercial properties.”