From a recent edition of that well-known authority on energy conservation, the Sun. Odd, isn’t it, that it doesn’t mention “Don’t drive an SUV”?
Flash Gordon
Andrew Rawnsley reflects on the findings of a 5000-sample poll published in today’s Observer.
What will especially frighten his advisers is the utter failure of the attempt to mount a fightback since the May Day massacre. In the wake of Labour’s slaughter in the local elections, the Prime Minister has toured TV’s soft sofas in an bid to claw back some public affection. Attempting to do human, he has told voters that he ‘feels your pain’. The public are not responding with empathy for his plight, but with an even bigger urge to inflict pain on their Prime Minister. His personal ratings have actually turned for the worse since he attempted the relaunch of his premiership.
It is not just the depth of this collapse that is stunning. It is the sheer width of it, the comprehensive shattering of his reputation in all the areas that matter to the public. On every leadership quality that is important, the Prime Minister is now regarded less favourably than David Cameron. Even when Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was in terminal decay, his personal ratings were still higher than those of Margaret Thatcher. Mr Brown, a figure who has been dominant in British government for more than a decade, is now seen as less fit to be Prime Minister than his Tory rival, a man whose only job in government has been as a bag carrier to Norman Lamont…
Full Marx
Lovely column by Simon Caulkin, who has been looking at the current crisis of capitalism in the light of re-reading an elegant introduction to Das Kapital.
It takes a reading of Francis Wheen’s concise and lucid Marx’s Das Kapital – a biography (Atlantic) for the penny to drop. The cantankerous ghost hovering over the global turmoil and glorying in the discomfiture of its chief agents is that of Highgate Cemetery’s most eminent denizen and the UK’s great revolutionary. The sense of the grinding of the gears of history, the shifting of the political and economic plates, comes straight from Karl Marx (although some might also want to add an element of Groucho). When the governor of the Bank of England talks of protecting people from the banks, and plaintively recommends that graduates should consider a career in industry as well as the City, shimmering eerily through his remarks is the Gothic vision of alienation and auto-destruction that Marx outlined 150 years ago…
Another interesting perspective on capitalism is that of systems engineering. The basic problem is that the system is intrinsically unstable. It can be maintained in a semi-stable state for periods of time by regulation, but in the end its latent instability breaks through. Oscillations between boom and bust are a feature, not (as its apologists maintain) a bug.
Two machines are better than one
This morning’s Observer column…
If you’ve signed up for a new web service recently, you may have noticed that a final stage of the enrolment process presents you with an indistinct image of a number of letters and numbers, often in a wavy line, and sometimes displayed against a confusing background. You are asked to identify the sequence and type it accurately into a text box. You have just encountered a Captcha…
Work in progress
Seen in a Cambridge graveyard today.
How powerful is the iPhone?
The real significance of the iPhone is that it’s a powerful Unix box that sits in your hand. But exactly how powerful is it? John Gruber approached the problem by asking: “which Mac does it most closely resemble in terms of specification?. Here’s his answer, which is based on some clever digging by Craig Hockenberry:
So, my answer to the question: the original “Pismo” G3 PowerBook. The numbers match up pretty closely: 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64 MB of RAM. (The higher-end Pismo had a 500 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM.) Even storage sizes are similar: hard drive options for the Pismo were 6, 12, or 18 GB. Another possible answer: the original blue-and-white Power Mac G3 — again, 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64-128 MB of RAM, and 6-12 GB hard drives. Think about that — in just nine years, the specs that then described Apple’s top-of-the-line desktop computer now describe their phone.
So — it took about eight years to get a G3 PowerBook into a phone. That means that in eight years’ time we’ll get a MacBook Pro into a phone.
Getting the message
Martin’s seen the light
I got a laptop from work last year with Windows Vista installed. I don’t use it much (I have a Vaio with XP which works fine), but it has become our media machine at home. Then yesterday it gave the message that the activation period had expired and this version of Windows was not valid. I tried entering the code on the sticker on the machine but no joy. I contacted tech guys at the ou who reckon I will need to plug it into the campus network for it to update. As I’m in Cardiff and in the US next week, this means it’s at least a couple of weeks before it will be usable again. I asked if they knew this would happen, and was told no. I wonder if other organizations know about this ‘feature’ of Vista? I’ve always been reasonably pragmatic about Windows as an OS, if everyone else uses it, then I’m happy to. But not being able to access a legitimate copy is rather stretching my agnosticism. So finally it may be a case of Linux, here I come.
On this day…
… in 1869, a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The spike was tapped into a prepared hole in a polished California laurel tie by Leland Stanford, one of the financiers of the railroad (and founder of Stanford University).
According to UnderstandingRace.org,
Chinese railroad workers present at the site were deliberately excluded from the photograph. Hired by the Central Pacific railroad, these Chinese workers operated under the most dangerous conditions, handling explosives used to blast through the Sierra Nevada mountains, resulting in higher fatalities than other workers.
Wonder what happened to the spike.
Later: Harry Metcalfe emailed:
When I was last there, in I think 1993, on the way by car from San Fran via Death Valley, the Apache Reservation in Utah, to Washington D.C. it was still there, but safely indoors, not still in the track.
According to Wikipedia (where else?) the spike and the special tie rail were replaced soon after the ceremony.
Still later: Found this (via Google Images):
Caption reads: “There were two golden spikes made for the ceremony joining the two halves of the Transcontinental Railroad… this one was the long-lost (but never used) twin of the spike that’s now at Stanford University. ”
The spike was donated by David Hewes, an entrepreneur who understood the importance of PR.
According to this source,
The spike is engraved on the top and on all four sides. On the head are the words, “The Last Spike”; on side one: “The Pacific Railroad ground broken Jany. 8th 1863, and complete May 8th 1869″(the ceremony was to take place on May 8th but was delayed by adverse weather and labor problems that held up the Union Pacific delegation); on side two: “Directors of the C.P.R.R. of Cal. Hon. Leland Stanford. C.P. Hunting. E.B. Crocker. Mark Hopkins. A.P. Stanford. E.H. Miller Jr.”; on side three: “Officer. Hon. Leland Stanford. Presdt. C.P. Huntington Vice Presdt. E.B. Crocker. Atty. Mark Hopkins. Tresr. Chas Crocker Ge. Supdt. E. H. Miller Jr. Secty. S. S. Montague. Chief Engr.”; and on side four: “May God continue the unity of our country, as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world. Presented by David Hewes San Francisco.”
Finally, Shawn Fanning gets a payday
From TechCrunch…
Shawn Fanning, best known for founding Napster, has a new job. He will be working at Electronic Arts, which is about to buy his social-network-gaming startup Rupture for $30 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. His co-founder Jon Baudanza will also join Electronic Arts. We first heard of a possible deal back in February, but did not know who was the buyer. Rupture’s first product was a social network for players of the online video game World of Warcraft, but it only came out with a beta version and kept delaying its public launch.
Electronic Arts is buying the company for its technology, since it doesn’t have a lot of users (it was only ever in beta) and never launched the second version of its service. Presumably, creating social networks around massively multiplayer video games is a key component of its online strategy. The company has not yet officially announced the acquisition, but it is expected to do so soon. [Update: The closing of the deal is imminent, but there are still some papers to sign].
I’m glad that he has finally hit pay dirt. He changed the world, IMHO for the better.
Gotcha CAPTCHA!
Nick Carr led me to the Washington Post which referred to this intriguing Websense report. Excerpt:
It is observed that at this stage bots (or bot-infected machines) are trying to sign up as many accounts as possible with Gmail mail services. One of the main concerns here is attacking CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, spammers seem to have success with it. The bot is signing up an account feeding all the prerequisites or input data that goes into the signup page and successfully creating a mail account.
Considering the normal / routine process involved in signing up a web mail account (Gmail), CAPTCHA authentication is a must for a successful signup. Since a bot is creating an account successfully, it is obvious that CAPTCHA is broken…