I’m not into geotagging, but if I were this would be useful. The Nikon Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS unit which enables the coordinates of each image to be recorded. An Ethernet port built into the camera then lets you connect it to the web and log your picture locations on a Nikon image map service — and, eventually no doubt, on Wikipedia and Google Earth.
From The Register…
Dell’s grip on a “cloud computing” trademark may not be as solid as it first seemed.
The US Patent Office has canceled its “notice of allowance” on the Round Rock computer vendor’s attempt to master the popular IT buzzword. Passing the “allowance” step in the trademark process had meant that opponents could no longer object to Dell’s claims. But Dell’s trademark application was updated yesterday to show the case has now “returned to examination.”
It would seem someone working for the USPTO was stuck by thunderbolt of rationality…
Not before time.
Jenni Russell, writing in the Guardian about what divides Britain’s two main political parties, now that the Cameroonians have staked a claim to the centre ground.
The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a more liberal one on the other. And Labour are on the wrong side of it. Many of their social and economic policies may have failed, but where they have succeeded is in developing a targeting, controlling, distrustful state. From the micromanagement of civil servants, teachers, doctors and the police, to ID cards, super databases and the growth of surveillance, the government’s answer to too many problems has been the removal of autonomy from individuals and more oversight from Whitehall.
The Conservative analysis is that this over-controlling state is not only disastrously unpopular, it is also one of the key reasons why Labour, despite all its spending, has failed to achieve its goals. Endless supervision has been an expensive distraction, and has sapped energy and morale out of public life.
The Tories say that the Labour approach reflects a deep pessimism about human nature, which they themselves don’t share. They argue that people will work best if they are trusted, given outcomes they are expected to achieve, and then left to decide how to get on with the job…
The number of crazies in the Democratic Unionist Party (now the lead party in the government of Northern Ireland) continues to amaze. After the First Minister’s wife’s outbursts against homosexuality, we now have this:
A SENIOR DUP Assemblyman has pressed for creationism to be taught alongside evolution in classrooms across the North.
Mervyn Storey, who chairs the Stormont education committee, said his “ideal” would be the removal of evolutionary teaching from the curriculum altogether.
“This is not about removing anything from the classroom, although that would probably be the ideal for me, but this is about us having equality of access to other views as to how the world came into existence and that I think is a very, very important issue for many parents in Northern Ireland.”
He also has a problem with geology, specifically the age of the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim.
Mr Storey, among others, has called for the proposed visitors’ centre to display not just accepted geological data, but also the creationist argument that the distinctive rock formation is only 6,000 years old. “The problem to date has been that we only have a narrow interpretation from an evolutionary point of view as to how these particular stones were formed,” he said last year.
I knew it: he’s an Irishman, deep down! The Irish Times says so.
BARACK OBAMA had a distant Irish cousin who went on to become provost of Trinity College and later bishop of Ossory, new research shows.
It has also been revealed that an Irish ancestor opposed political corruption in Dublin.
The Democratic nominee for the US presidential election is directly descended from the Kearneys of Shinrone and Moneygall, Co Offaly, the research has revealed. His ancestry had already been traced back to a shoemaker in Moneygall on the Offaly-Tipperary border. Further research shows a Tipperary connection…
Nice rant by Charles Arthur.
Apple’s top-down approach to design is a bust when it comes to its approach to the software for the iPhone. Developers for that are up in arms.
People are astonishingly angry at the fact that Apple first won’t let them talk about how to develop for the iPhone – because everything about programming for it remains under a non-disclosure agreement – and second, hasn’t let them get at its most useful application programming interfaces (APIs). Mike Ash, a programmer at the independent Mac developer Rogue Amoeba, has posted a long and annoyed rant about this in which he says that after a month using the new iPhone, with its new software: “I feel like I’ve gone back to the dark ages.” Multitasking is a thing of the past, and it’s impossible for third-party developers to design well, because Apple’s keeping the best parts of the API hidden. Apple can design something that will multitask but others can’t. The developers want in too.
Apple’s constant refrain is that it’s all about making sure the phone isn’t going to be destroyed by applications doing what they shouldn’t. It’s starting to wear thin, though. Palm opened its platform to outside developers, which helped it kill Psion. Apple’s disdain for badly designed outside software is hurting it more than it knows. The developers who were ready to be its friends are turning into its enemies.
From Pew Research Center
As he has since January, this week, Barack Obama enjoyed much more visibility as far as the public was concerned than did John McCain. By a margin of 76% to 11% respondents in Pew’s weekly News Interest Index survey named Obama over McCain as the candidate they have heard the most about in recent days. But the same poll also shows that the Democratic candidate’s media dominance may not be working in his favor. Close to half (48%) of Pew’s interviewees went on to say that they have been hearing too much about Obama lately. And by a slight, but statistically significant margin – 22% to 16% – people say that recently they have a less rather than more favorable view of the putative Democratic nominee…
Tom Lehrer said that satire died the day the Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, the attendance of ex-KGB thug Vladimir Putin at the funeral of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn runs it a close second.
Using Gmail to write to someone in Oxford today when AdSense flashed up a link to www.oxfordcollege.ac. Thinking that it must have missed the “.uk” off the end, I clicked on the link and got this:
It is in fact the website of what appears to be a private establishment offering A-level and GCSE courses. It is physically located in Oxford (on “Floor 231” of an address on the Banbury Road, to be precise), but the .ac domain is in fact that of Ascension Island. Ingenious use of a domain name, don’t you think, though not quite in the del.icio.us league. The photograph, incidentally, shows the Radcliffe Camera, which is a University building.
Nice come-back by Obama.