From CNET News.com…

The notebook I’m testing — a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung — hasn’t emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don’t require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises.

Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla…zweeee.

The lack of a mechanical hard drive also means lower power consumption and less heat. In turn that means the fan rarely, if ever, needs to kick into action. As I type, for instance, the notebook is running eight video streams– two from CNN, two from CNET, two from MSN, a video on new bands on Crackle, and a pirated Led Zeppelin video on YouTube — and the fan won’t trip over. The computer is running on battery power and the videos, with a few minor gulps, are all running smoothly…

I know just what he means — I’m writing this on my little ASUS EeePC, which has no moving parts at all.

New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham has a lovely visual essay based on people-watching during ready-to-wear Fashion Week in Paris. It’s a hoot.

Well, well. Who says social networking doesn’t pay?

As her instant celebrity status continues to climb in the wake of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, Ashley Alexandra Dupre has now received a $1 million offer to bare it all.

A rep for Hustler Magazine has confirmed exclusively to Access Hollywood a seven-figure offer will be made to the call girl.

“Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine will be offering $1 Million to Ashley Dupre to pose for Hustler Magazine,” the rep told Access. “We want this to happen as soon as possible.”

But the folks at Hustler aren’t the only ones willing to pony up for the rights to feature Ashley in the buff.

“We would love to see Ashley appear on our Web site. We would be thrilled. We are definitely reaching out to her,” Penthouse executive Marc Bell told Access. “Her fifteen minutes of fame are now and Penthouse could mean a unique and enormous opportunity for her.”

From guardian.co.uk…

Gordon Brown tonight sounded the death knell for Peter Mandelson’s European career as he ruled out the prospect of a second term for the EU trade commissioner.

In a devastating blow to the ambitions of his former New Labour rival, the prime minister said that Mandelson had signalled that he had no intention of standing for a second term when his current one comes to an end in October next year.

“Peter Mandelson has said he doesn’t want to become the next commissioner,” Brown said, “that he wants to do only one term. But Peter Mandelson has done a great job as commissioner. He is leading the European negotiations to get a trade agreement and I will be talking to him very soon about how we can move that forward.

“I think it’s important to say that Peter Mandelson has done a great job as commissioner and, of course, it’s his wish to do something else.”

Brown’s intervention came just hours after Mandelson said he was happy with the discussion he had had with the prime minister on the subject of a second term and that the two knew “each other’s mind”.

Something fishy here, somewhere.

Characteristically lucid review in the LRB by John Lanchester of Nick Davies’s book, Flat Earth News.

‘Important’ is a cant word in book reviewing: it usually means something like ‘slightly above average’, or ‘I was at university with her,’ or ‘I couldn’t be bothered to read it so I’m giving a quote instead.’ Very occasionally it might be stretched to mean ‘a book likely to be referred to in the future by other people who write about the same subject’. Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News, however, is a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry. Davies’s book explains something easy to notice and complain about but hard to understand: the sense of the increasing thinness and attenuation of the British press. It’s not literal thinness: the papers, physically, are bigger than ever. There just seems to be less in them than there once was: less news, less thought (as opposed to opinion), less density of engagement, less time spent finding things out. Davies looks into all those questions, confirms that the impression of thinness is correct, explains how this came about, and offers no hope that things will improve…