And all done in 97 images on Flickr!
Thanks to Pete for the link.
You are what you eat
This is a truly lovely idea: a series of portraits of people along with photographs of what they have for breakfast.
Thanks to Pete for spotting it.
The future of computing (contd.)
As Quentin says, who would have thought ten years ago that Unix machines would look like this? The most interesting thing about the iPod Touch is not that it’s a music player, but that it’s the best portable browsing machine we have yet seen. Its capacity to render web pages and make them readable is simply astounding. The touch interface plus the software’s rendering ability also suggests that the newspaper industry has been looking in the wrong place all the time. It always supposed that its electronic salvation lay in display hardware — in the form of ‘e-paper’, i.e. lightweight foldable, flexible, high-resolution displays. The effectiveness of the iPod Touch suggests that the combination of clever software and even a small high-res display can do the trick.
Social graph-iti
The Economist isn’t impressed by the huge valuations currently being placed on Facebook. Neither am I.
Update: In the end, Microsoft valued Facebook at $15 billion.
Microsoft has paid $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook that values the hugely popular social networking site at $15bn.
Facebook spurned an offer from Microsoft’s rival Google, which was also keen to invest the site.
Microsoft will also sell internet ads for Facebook outside the United States as part of the deal that took several weeks of negotiating.
What’s surprising is how small the Microsoft stake is. This has to be about advertising rather than investment.
Apple now bigger than IBM
Hmmm… From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
Ask people these days who Big Brother symbolized in Apple’s classic “1984″ commercial, and a goodly number of folks are liable to say Microsoft. But 23 years ago, the target of Apple’s hammer-wielding freedom fighter was IBM, the PC market leader at the time. So it must have been with an exhilarating sense of satisfaction that Steve Jobs and the Apple brass watched another dazzling set of quarterly financials push the company’s stock price up to around $187 a share today, vaulting Apple’s market cap past IBM’s by about $6 billion.
And while Google-watchers go gaga over its soaring share price (see “A six-letter word for bubble? Try gasbag“), note that an investor who bought Apple on the same day Google stock debuted in 2004 would have, as of the close of market yesterday, made 40 percent more than if the same money had been put into the search sovereign’s shares.
Warning to abusive bloggers
Some interesting cases were decided last week.
Disgruntled fans of Sheffield Wednesday who vented their dissatisfaction with the football club’s bigwigs in anonymous internet postings may face expensive libel claims after the chairman, chief executive and five directors won a high-court ruling last week forcing the owner of a website to reveal their identity.
The case, featuring the website owlstalk.co.uk, is the second within days to highlight the danger of assuming that the apparent cloak of anonymity gives users of internet forums and chatrooms carte blanche to say whatever they like.
In another high court case last week, John Finn, owner of the Sunderland property firm Pallion Housing, admitted just before he was due to be cross-examined that he was responsible for a website hosting a scurrilous internet campaign about a rival housing organisation, Gentoo Group, its employees and owner, Peter Walls.
Exposing the identity of those who post damaging lies in cyberspace is a growth area for libel lawyers.
Dan Tench, of Olswang, the law firm representing Gentoo, said: “This case illustrates an increasingly important legal issue: proving who is responsible for the publication of anonymous material on the internet. This is likely to be a significant issue in defamation cases in the future.”
The website Dadsplace, set up to campaign against perceived injustices in the family courts, had a forum where anonymous postings made various accusations against Gentoo, Mr Walls and his staff.
Those posting the comments went to considerable lengths to hide their identity, and Gentoo’s lawyers ran up a bill estimated to be about £300,000 – which Mr Finn will now have to pick up, along with any damages awarded – taking the case to court and amassing circumstantial evidence that he was behind the website…
Another lucrative line of business for m’learned friends. And a salutary reminder to utopian libertarians that the law has a longer arm than we once supposed.
Polish democracy grows up
The best news we’ve had in months came from the Polish electorate, which comprehensively rejected the crew who have been ruining the country for the last few years. As the Guardian leader-writer puts it…
Polish democracy grew up on Sunday, when the country’s voters rejected the strident, xenophobic nationalism of Jaroslav Kaczynski. The election mattered not just because it was the first time a generation born after 1989 could vote. Nor because the liberal conservative winner Donald Tusk won the strongest mandate of any prime minister in the post-communist era. It was important because it saw a new generation of voters express its impatience with a leadership that saw the rise of Poland exclusively through the prism of 20th-century invasion and occupation. Though Mr Kaczynski’s twin brother Lech still holds the presidency, Poland has turned a corner.
The reaction in European capitals to the departure of the intellectually dominant Kaczynski twin is not the best way to gauge the result of a snap election. But it does show how many countries the twins alienated in their brief but incident-packed reign. There was Germany, which found that the country they had sponsored for entry into the EU was now using membership as a way of settling old scores. There was Russia, whose relationship with the EU was embittered by Poland, retaliating to a Russian ban on Polish meat. There was the EU itself, whose reform treaty was nearly scuppered in the summer by Polish demands for more votes. The election was as much about Poland’s image abroad as it was about the need for more tolerance and liberty at home. If Mr Kaczynski’s model for Poland was a combative, xenophobic country surrounded by perceived enemies, and committed only to a relationship with a dwindling band of US neoconservatives, that model was rejected by the thousands of Poles living in Britain and Ireland who had a calmer, less hysterical view Poland’s place in Europe…
Italian bloggers to be officially registered?
Hmmm… This is one of those cases wehre the cock-up theory of history probably provides the best explanation. But here’s The Register’s take on the story so far:
Italian bloggers may be required to register with a national database, unless an ambiguously-worded new law is amended before it comes into force.
Widespread outrage among bloggers and IT-savvy journalists has reached the mainstream press, and the government now appears to be keen to revise a draft law which has led politician Francesco Caruso to remark: “This is Italy, not Burma.”
The law got its initial approval from Mr Prodi’s Cabinet of Ministers in mid-October, as part of a package attempting to tidy up Italy’s publishing-related regulations, and requires further approvals before coming into force.
According to many legal experts, the murky text of the law (pdf) can be construed to include non-professional, not-for-profit blogs and websites among “editorial products”, giving them the same duties and liabilities as magazines and newspapers.
This would require even the lowliest Italian blogger or MySpace account holder to go through the hassle of filing personal details with the national registry of “communication operators” currently reserved for professionals of the publishing sector.
And The Register’s conclusion?
The chances of this law becoming effective in its current form are exceedingly slim, so there is no immediate cause for concern. The blog brouhaha may turn out to be another storm in a teacup, but it has certainly shown Italian netizens once again that their government is remarkably out of touch with the realities of the internet age.
In praise of binge drinking — by toffs
Curious column by Andrew O’Hagen in the Torygraph. He opens with a meditation on the England rugby team’s piss-up in Paris, which was apparently attended by Princes William and Harry:
Prince Harry – a lager-lout if ever there was one – could talk the hind legs off a donkey and he doesn’t hesitate when some bladdered oaf hands him the vodka bottle.
We know this because we’ve all now seen the pictures from the post-defeat bacchanal that followed the Rugby World Cup final.
There’s Prince William hugging his mates to tell them he loves them; there’s Jonny Wilkinson, drink in hand, with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, diving headlong into temporary oblivion. Some other bloke has lost his top and Prince Harry, ever the scarlet-faced chieftain of the stag party, is ready for a song.
This is called “drowning your sorrows”. It’s called “letting off steam”. It’s called “cheering up the lads”.
But then,
Let us put aside the fact that the same behaviour in Newcastle quickly gets you bundled into the back of a police van, and concentrate instead on the occasional value of binge drinking.
Funny how the spectacle of upper-class vandalism still makes the new modern Torygraph go all dewy-eyed.
The Telco Soviets
Lovely WSJ column by Walt Mossberg…
Suppose you own a Dell computer, and you decide to replace it with a Sony. You don’t have to get the permission of your Internet service provider to do so, or even tell the provider about it. You can just pack up the old machine and set up the new one.
Now, suppose your new computer came with a particular Web browser or online music service, but you’d prefer a different one. You can just download and install the new software, and uninstall the old one. You can sign up for a new music service and cancel the old one. And, once again, you don’t need to even notify your Internet provider, let alone seek its permission.
Oh, and the developers of such computers, software and services can offer you their products directly, without going through the Internet provider, without getting the provider’s approval, and without giving the provider a penny. The Internet provider gets paid simply for its contribution to the mix: providing your Internet connection. But, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t control what is connected to the network, or carried over the network.
This is, he says “the way digital capitalism should work”, and he’s right. But there’s one area in digital technology where it doesn’t apply — the mobile phone industry.
A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.
Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it’s hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes. While power in other technology sectors flows to consumers and nimble entrepreneurs, in the cellphone arena it remains squarely in the hands of the giant carriers.
The Soviet Ministry Model
That’s why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.”
It goes on, and gets even better. This is a great op-ed piece.