If you like OS X but don’t want to lug round a heavy (and expensive) MacBook, well why not run the OS on an Asus 901? Here’s how.
Thanks to Stephen Heppell for the link.
Vermont, Old England
The view from our driveway, early Thursday morning. Could have been Vermont.
Winter scene with country house
From this afternoon’s walk. Flickr version here.
Snow dropping
In our garden, this afternoon. Plucky little flower. Flickr version here.
‘Digital Britain’ filleted for commenting
Here’s a terrific idea — a version of ‘Lord’ Carter’s Digital Britain Interim Report chunked in such a way as to make commenting easy. Find it here.
Warning: before reading some paragraphs of the Interim Report’s text (esp the stuff about IP protection) it might be wise to have a sick-bag handy. What you have to remember that this is a document composed mainly by guys who have been conditioned in the old push-media world. And who think that calling for universal 2mbps broadband coverage is an enlightened forward-looking vision.
(Interesting also that the image used on the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s website announcing the Interim Report — reproduced above — is a gif. Clearly IP madness runs deep.)
A presentation about ‘community’ — by a community
Neil Perkin had an interesting idea. Asked to give a presentation about online communities he created one by asking people to contribute a slide each. Then he assembled the slides into a presentation — and put it on SlideShare. Great idea, nicely implemented. And genuinely thought-provoking.
Flickr now has over 100 million geotagged photos
From the Code: Flickr Developer Blog.
Over the weekend we broke the Hundred Million geotagged photos, actually 100,868,302 at last count, mark. If we remember that we passed the 3 billion photos recently and round the figure down a little that means does calculations on fingers that around 3.333% of photos have geo data, or one in every 30 photos that get uploaded.
In the last two and a half years there have been roughly as many geotagged photos as the total photos upload to Flickr in its first two years of existence.
Thanks to Brian for the link.
Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters
Brisk NYT column by Maureen Dowd.
How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?
(Now I get why a $400 payment I recently sent to pay off my Citibank Visa was mistakenly applied to my sister-in-law’s Citibank Mastercard account.)
The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.
The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours. Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.
Prodded by an appalled Senator Carl Levin, Tim Geithner — even as he was being confirmed as Treasury secretary — directed Treasury officials to call the Citiboobs and tell them the new jet would not fly.
“They woke up pretty quickly,” says a Treasury official, adding that they protested for a bit. “Six months ago, they would have kept the plane and flown it to Washington.”
Strange things grow…
… in brandy glasses.
Cambridge University – the Unauthorised History
Cambridge University is celebrating its 800th Anniversary this year. There are various ways of viewing its contributions to society. You could see it — as the university’s leading security expert Ross Anderson does — as 800 years of creative destruction.
If you want physical objects destroyed, the army can do that. As for badly-run companies, they get trashed when the economy goes into recession; the economist Joseph Schumpeter taught us that this ‘creative destruction’ is vital for progress as it clears away the deadwood and creates space in which new businesses can grow. And it’s just the same in ecosystems: from 1911, the USA put a lot of effort into stopping forest fires, but then discovered that although they saved individual plants and animals they were destroying the environment. A forest with a fire brigade is a sad old forest; a lot of plants from sequoias to proteas reproduce only in the aftermath of a fire.
Just as fire regenerates the forest, so a great university regenerates human culture – our view of the world and our understanding of it. We incinerate the rubbish. And Cambridge has long been the hottest flamethrower; we’re the most creatively destructive institution in all of human history. And big new things come from that. The ground we cleared made us the cradle of evangelical Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth, of atheism in the nineteenth, and of all sorts of cool new stuff since – including the emerging sciences of life and information…
Read on.