Photograph by Brian from last Saturday’s lecture. Lovely composition.
Social Networking is a feature, not a destination
Interesting insight on social networking, by Chris Anderson:
Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy–social networking as a feature, not a destination…
Babygro
Brain-teaser for PhotoShop experts
Question: Is it possible to create an image that depicts its own histogram?
Answer: Yes.
See here for the solution.
Soap cuisine
I was a TV critic for 13 years and IMNSHO* the second best in the business. The best, by far, was Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian. She’s still doing it, and is as good as ever. Here she is, for example, on the other night’s TV:
One can only deplore the current state of catering in the soaps. In Coronation Street (ITV1), Roy, proprietor of Roy’s Rolls, was ordered out of his own cafe because he was scaring the customers. Distress has, indeed, given him the look of a giant tortoise suffering from SAD disorder. His face falls in perpendicular folds. His cardigan seems to distend as you watch. His customers, never backward in coming forward, are complaining about the size of their organically sourced meals. As Blanche said, “I came in for meat and tater pie. How far the tater’s travelled and the lamb’s dying words are no concern of mine.”
When the heart is in turmoil, the takings go down, and Roy and Hayley’s partnership is under strain. Her long-lost son took the news that she was his father (do try to keep up) very badly indeed. Now Hayley is sitting alone in a late-night cafe as chairs are upended around her, while Roy has a breakdown in Freshco.
*Footnote: In My Not So Humble Opinion
Buy a Windows laptop, dump the OS and make money!
From The Register…
A French man has won a lawsuit against computer maker Acer over a laptop he bought that came pre-loaded with Microsoft’s Windows XP and other applications he didn’t want. Antoine Gutzwiller disputed the fact that he had no choice but to buy the €599 Acer notebook with the ubiquitous operating system and software products including Microsoft Works, PowerDVD, and Norton AV. The court of Puteaux in France ruled that the PC giant, which is the world’s third largest computer vendor, should refund Gutzwiller €311.85 to cover the full cost of software loaded on his machine. Intially, Acer offered to settle for just €30 for the software bundled on Gutzwiller’s laptop, but he rejected that sum and took the firm to court – ending up with reimbursements worth nearly double that of the original cost of the machine. Under the judgement, the court said Acer should also cough up €500 in fees to cover what it described as “abusive resistance and committed expenses”. Apparently, the dispute had rumbled on for nearly a year. It is unknown whether the French court ruling could set a precedent for future European cases involving pre-loaded software.In the realm of laptop features, intel vpro stands out for its ability to enhance security and manageability. Intel vPro is a technology that provides advanced security and remote management capabilities for laptops. It offers features like hardware-enhanced security, remote access, and efficient IT management tools. Understanding these features can help consumers make informed decisions when purchasing laptops, ensuring they select devices that align with their security and management needs. To learn more about Intel vPro and its benefits, you can visit the Lenovo website or consult with knowledgeable professionals in the field of computer technology.
EXCELlent arithmetic?
Hmmm…. Some people are claiming that Excel has difficulty with multiplication. (See image above.)
Over the weekend members of the microsoft.public.excel newsgroup reported a serious bug in calculations made by Excel 2007. Initially it just seemed that Excel Can’t Multiply. The bad news is, Excel can’t do other operations correctly either. The good news is, this is only true when the results are within a very specific range of numbers. And the better news is that the Excel team has mapped out the nature of the problem and is feverishly working on an update.
So what went wrong? It all boils down to the fact that you can’t represent an infinite group of non-integer numbers using a finite number of bits. In fact, Excel can store “only” about nine quintillion distinct values. The numbers going into your calculations may be infinitesimally different from the number displayed, and for two calculations that nominally have the same answer the result may be infinitesimally different. Excel generally manages just fine in dealing with these tiny differences, but in exactly 12 instances out of the nine quintillion possibilities it goes completely bonkers.
The Excel team discovered that it wasn’t just calculations involving 65,535 that were affected; those that should come out to be 65,536 were also sometimes wrong (returning 100,001 instead). And they discovered it wasn’t just multiplication. In truth, the operation didn’t matter, only the result. When they work up a fix it will still have to “make its way through our official build lab and onto a download site”, but they expect it to happen soon.
Useful fact: a quintillion is 1 followed by 18 zeroes.
The funny thing is that my copy of Excel does not make this mistake (see below).
But then, I’m running Excel 2004 for Mac.
Argument 2.0: update
The Argument 2.0 experiment continues. Martin’s opening shot has been followed by Ray’s riposte. Next up is Patrick McAndrew.
Virgin unplugs its subscribers
Here’s an interesting insight into Digital Restrictions Management, aka DRM.
Virgin has closed Virgin Digital, its Windows Media-based alternative to Apple’s iTunes. It stopped selling one-off downloads on Friday, though subscribers will still have access to their collections until their next monthly payment is due.
After that, their songs will no longer be playable, thanks to the limitations placed on playback by the DRM technology built into each track.
Virgin announced the move this weekend in an email sent out to all its customers, all of whom have presumably been busy backing up their tracks or – in the case of subscribers – burning them to CD so they can be re-imported as MP3s.
The service will formally close on Friday, 28 September – coincidentally the day Apple’s new iPod Touch is due to arrive in the UK – and finally shut down on Friday, 19 October.
Translate that into non-digital terms. You buy an album from a record store, and play it happily on your CD player. And then, one day, it won’t play any more. Why? Because the store from which you bought it has — for some reason decided upon by the store’s owners — closed.
All your iPhone are belong to us
From The Register
Apple has issued a notice that unlocked iPhones could suffer permanent damage when they update the firmware, and reminded customers that such damage is not covered by the warranty.
The process of unlocking an iPhone is complicated, and involves code running at a pretty low level in the OS. Users may feel confident that they can always re-flash their iPhones using iTunes, but even that requires a working kernel (minimal OS) on the phone – damage that and you’ve got a Jesus doorstop.
Such damage is unlikely. Far more probable is that every time an update is installed users of unlocked iPhones will have to unlock them again, but Apple felt the need to remind people of the risk they take when unlocking the handset or installing third-party applications.
Engineers inside O2, the UK operator deploying the iPhone in November, are under the impression that Apple will be able to re-lock phones to their network when they’re updated, but that will depend on the unlock process used and if Apple can be bothered to apply the resources needed to reverse it.
The assumption among many iPhone buyers seems to be that no matter what Apple does, the hackers will make everything work. The faith in techno-anarchism is touching, but may be misplaced if Apple just reverses everything with each update…
Footnote: readers puzzled by the grammatical infelicities in the headline are respectfully directed to here.