Funny to think that it was an episode of Lost that led to the rediscovery of Flann O’Brien.
Barring accidents
Flickr version here.
Why Dave Winer switched to Mac in 2005
Salutary blog post by Dave W.
I switched because I was Mired In Malware.
I got a new EeePC 1000HE last week, and after just a few hours of use, it’s infected with a rootkit virus of some kind. Really clever. Spent three hours last night trying to eradicate it, but in the last three or four years, the malware guys have gotten a lot more clever.
Contemplating switching to the Hackintosh flavor of netbook.
Ran Ad-Aware, getting ready to run Spybot. Downloaded Combofix. I’m going to try to resurrect this baby. Also considering doing a fresh install of Windows but that sounds like more work that Leopard. And then you’re still using Windows.
Yep. I switched to Mac in 1999. Never had any trouble since. Touch wood.
JUST IN: This via Glyn Moody:
Appointments for cancer patients had to be rescheduled after a computer virus infected the networking systems at two Scottish hospitals last week.
The infection of laboratory PCs at the Stobhill and Gartnavel General hospitals meant the bookings of 12 patients attending the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Care Centre in Glasgow were postponed, The Glasgow Herald reports. Systems were taken offline for two days to allow computer technicians to clean up the mess…
Now, I wonder which OS they were running.
Professionalism
“I grew up at ground zero during an age of terror. Just 10 miles upwind of my elementary school in Omaha, Nebraska sat Strategic Air Command headquarters, its proud motto posted outside the security gates: ‘Peace Is Our Profession.’ A group of radical nuns had once spray-painted ‘War Is Just a Hobby’ on the sign before being dragged away in cuffs.”
John Nagl, writing in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
Kindle 2 Usability Review
Jakob Nielsen likes the new Kindle.
The new version of Kindle, Amazon.com’s dedicated e-book device, recently shipped with an improved display and various other upgrades. It now provides good usability for reading linear fiction (mainly novels), though it’s less usable for other reading tasks.
As an experiment, I bought two copies of the same book: a trade paperback and a Kindle download. Alternating for each chapter, I read half the book in print and half on the Kindle screen. My reading speed was exactly the same (less than 0.5% difference), measured in words per minute.
Of course, one person reading one book is not a proper measurement study. So I can’t say for sure that Kindle has finally reached the nirvana of equal readability for screens and paper. But it did feel that way.
When I was carrying Kindle through the house, I felt like a Star Trek character with a datapad. But when I actually sat down to read the novel, I became so engrossed in the story that I forgot I was reading from an electronic device. This fact alone is high praise for the device designers…
What the broadcasters tried next
From BBC NEWS.
Project Canvas will bring together content from some of the UK’s biggest channels, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Viewers will be able to watch on-demand content through their television via a special set top box, expected to cost between £100-£200.
It is being described as Freeview Mark 2. The BBC’s director general Mark Thompson called it “potentially the holy grail of future public service broadcasting provision in the UK”.
The service will run in addition to existing on-demand efforts such as BBC iPlayer and 4oD, and content on Canvas will require no extra subscription – just an existing broadband connection.
The Last Two Journalists in America
Lovely WashPost column by John Kelly.
The last two journalists in America sat at a card table in the middle of their empty newsroom. They faced each other, about to flip a coin.
The coin was to decide which one would be the second-to-last journalist in America and which one would be the last journalist in America.
The last two journalists in America were dressed oddly; not poorly, as journalists usually dressed, but in what appeared to be costumes. The woman looked as if she’d stepped out of a black-and-white movie. She wore a tight-waisted woolen [sic] dress with angular shoulders. There was a seam up the back of her stockings. Two pencils stuck out of a bun of tightly-gathered hair at the back of her head. The man had on flared pants, a loud, collared shirt and a necktie as wide as a dinner napkin.
She was from "His Girl Friday." He was from ‘All the President’s Men.’
“Call it,” the man said, flipping the coin in the air.
They’d known this day was coming — had spent the past 10 years watching it get closer — but even so it was a bit of a shock to see it arrive. The newsroom that had thrummed for so long was vacant. The computers and phones were gone. The desks had been sold for scrap. Their contents — spiral-bound notebooks, computer printouts, government documents, letters from inmates, soy sauce packets, Freedom of Information Act requests, paper-clip chains, journalism awards, eraserless pencils — had been push-broomed into huge drifts that dotted the cavernous room like termite mounds on the savanna.
“Heads,” the woman said…
Tweetdeck
I like and value Twitter, but find it impossible to keep track of everything that’s going on. In particular I’m always missing direct messages. So in the end I took the plunge and installed Tweetdeck. Looks good. Who knows, maybe one day my contacts will realise that I’m not intentionally rude.
Young listeners deaf to iPod’s limitations
Fascinating piece in The Times about the impact that MP3 compression has had on music fans.
Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.
The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.
He suggests that iPods may have changed our perception of music, and that as young people become increasingly familiar with the sound of digital tracks the more they grow to like it.
He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. “Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”
Music producers complain that the “compression” of some digital music means that the sound quality is poorer than with CDs and other types of recording. Professor Berger says that the digitising process leaves music with a “sizzle” or a metallic sound…
Worth reading in full.
Hey, you there in B14!
From The Inquirer.
MOVIE INDUSTRY BOFFINS have come up with another weapon in the war against toe-rags who sneak video cameras into cinemas and make crappy copies of blockbuster movies to sell at car boot sales.
Video watermarking has been around for a while now but this technology can only reveal in which cinema a recording was made. The latest invention goes one step further and can tell investigators exactly which seat the cammer was sitting in to an accuracy of 44cm.