The GSM Association announced this week that its members have agreed to settle on a single, standard charger design for all cellphones — MicroUSB — and will aim for January 1, 2012 as the deadline.
Hooray! But why not 2009?
Take my advice
Important notice. Seen in a locksmith’s today.
Automated shopping
Spotted outside my favourite hardware store yesterday.
A matter of timing
John McPhee had a nice piece about fact-checking in a recent issue of the New Yorker which included this anecdote:
The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Josh Hersh, “It really annoys them”. Sara [a retired New Yorker fact-checker] remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was the “late reader” in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed.
John McPhee, “Checkpoints”, New Yorker, Feb 9&16, 2009.
Later: Julian Barnes (who wrote the magazine’s ‘Letter from London’ for years) had a nice essay about the New Yorker’s fact-checkers in one of his books. Now where did I put it?
Obama’s antitrust nominee: “Microsoft is so last century”
From Microsoft’s local paper.
According to Bloomberg News, Christine Varney, who President Barack Obama has nominated to be the next antitrust chief, is not so concerned about Microsoft’s market position.
“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute in June, according to the Bloomberg report. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem — potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising,” she said.
“When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive solution,” Varney said, “you are going to see the same repeat of Microsoft.”
Varney’s view is clearly good news for Redmond, which already seemed to be in favor with the Bush Justice Department. Google and Yahoo abandoned their advertising deal last fall after the Department of Justice said it would file an antitrust lawsuit to block it. Microsoft had lobbied against the deal.
Thanks to Rex Hughes for spotting it.
Horizons
The view from Slieve League this afternoon. Subtlety of light difficult to capture. Sigh. Better (and bigger) version here.
Morning over the bay
The view from the cottage this morning. Larger version here.
Need to read between the lines? Try Microsoft Word
Today’s Observer column.
That left only Facebook as a focus for irrational exuberance. But how much was the preppy social-networking site ‘worth’? Arcane formulae were deployed by investment analysts to rationalise a range of fantastic valuations. Then Microsoft blew them out of the water by paying $240m for a 1.6% stake in the company. Here at last was a real number that people could latch on to. Even newspaper columnists could do the calculation: if 1.6% is worth $240m then 100% equals $15bn.
QED? Er, no. Even in those far-off days when a billion dollars was real money it was a preposterous valuation. But it entered the culture as a hard fact. After all (so the reasoning went) if those boys at Microsoft thought that 1.6% of Facebook was worth $240m, then it must be an exceedingly valuable company…
Authors’ Guild to Amazon: we’re watching you
Hmmm… The Author’s Guild isn’t exactly enamoured of Amazon’s new eBook reader.
February 12, 2009. On Monday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-book reading device at the Morgan Library in New York. Most of the changes from the first version of the Kindle are incremental improvements: the new Kindle is lighter and thinner, for example, and Amazon eliminated the scroll wheel. One update, however, is wholly new: Amazon has added a ‘Text to Speech’ function that reads the e-book aloud through the use of special software.
This presents a significant challenge to the publishing industry. Audiobooks surpassed $1 billion in sales in 2007; e-book sales are just a small fraction of that. While the audio quality of the Kindle 2, judging from Amazon’s promotional materials, is best described as serviceable, it’s far better than the text-to-speech audio of just a few years ago. We expect this software to improve rapidly.
We’re studying this matter closely and will report back to you.
Translation: we’re consulting our lawyers.
This is nuts. As Neil Gaiman (who has just won this year’s Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature) puts it:
“When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend, etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. … Any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.”
On this day…
… in 1929, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.
Footnote: Capone was eventually convicted not for his heinous crimes but for tax evasion. Could there be a precedent here for dealing with corrupt bankers?