The War, Ken Burns’s new series about the Second World War. Premiered on PBS tonight. Wonder how long it will take to get the DVD over here.
Dash it!
Hmmm… First it was the apostrophe. Now it’s the hyphen that is under threat…
The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog…
Thanks to James Miller, who notices these things.
Ad Blocking and the future
This morning’s Observer column…
I have seen the future, and it’s scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in – ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin…
Stephen Fry ‘s blog
I heard that Jeeves, er Stephen Fry, had a blog and tried to reach it the other day, only to find that its hosting server had been blown over by the demand. I forgot to go back until I read Martin Weller’s comments on it.
So I tried again and was transfixed by the first post, which is a startlingly erudite essay on a syndrome familiar to all geeks — the tendency to believe that sometime, somewhere someone will invent the Gadget that will help us sort out our lives. Stephen Fry is rich enough to buy anything the moment it appears on the market, and by God he has.
“I have”, he writes,
“over the past twenty years been passionately addicted to all manner of digital devices, Mac-friendly or not; I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-yous of all descriptions, but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIMs, call them what you will. My motto is:
I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought.”
He’s VERY knowledgeable about this stuff. In fact he reminds me of Douglas Adams, who was as excited about the Macintosh as I was when it appeared. I remember once visiting him in his house in — I think — Islington and being overcome with envy after being taken round a lovely airy attic room stuffed full of Apple gear. Stephen Fry’s place in Norfolk must be much the same.
Homage to Vint
This the annual Alumni Weekend in Cambridge. I gave one of the lectures — on “Dr Cerf’s Amazing Surprise-Generating Machine” (aka the Internet) — in the West Road Concert Hall. Quentin, bless him, rushed back from a nice celebratory lunch to be there, and to take some pictures.
McCartney iTunes ad
Lovely!
Google’s stock price hits new high
From SiliconValley.com
Shares of Google jumped to a new high today.
The surge comes on the heels of a few positive analyst reports and news Thursday that co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page landed on the top 10 list of Forbes’ richest Americans, tied at No. 5, each with a net worth of $18.5 billion, a value that keeps increasing as Google’s shares climb.
Google rose $7.16, or 1.30 percent, to a new high of $559.99. In July, its shares hit a high for the year of $555.00.
NBC unveils self-destructing, ad-addled anti-iTunes service
From The Register
Less than a month after its very public breakup with Apple iTunes, NBC Universal has announced its own rights-restricting video download service.
With the new NBC Direct, due for beta testing sometime in October, you’ll have the power to download shows like “The Office” and “Heroes” immediately after they’re broadcast on national television – without paying a penny. But don’t get too excited. You can’t view these videos on more than one Windows PC. They’re riddled with commercials you can’t skip. And they self-destruct after seven days.
In announcing the service, Vivi Zigler, executive vice president of NBC digital entertainment, decided to make no sense whatsoever. “With the creation of this new service, we are acknowledging that now, more than ever, viewers want to be in control of how, when and where they consumer their favorite entertainment,” he said. “Not only does this feature give them more control, but it also gives them a higher quality video experience.”
At the end of August, NBC informed Apple that it was not renewing its contract to sell “The Office,” “Heroes,” and other inane shows over iTunes. The contract wasn due to expire in December, but Apple threw a fit, saying it would pre-emptively axe NBC’s shows sometime this month.
Me Leica
Anthony Lane, who used to be the New Yorker‘s film critic, has written a graceful essay on the cult of the Leica. Sample:
These days, Leica makes digital compacts and a beefy S.L.R., or single-lens reflex, called the R9, but for more than fifty years the pride of the company has been the M series of 35-mm. range-finder cameras—durable, companionable, costly, and basically unchanging, like a spouse. There are three current models, one of which, the MP, will set you back a throat-drying four thousand dollars or so; having stood outside dustless factory rooms, in Solms, and watched women in white coats and protective hairnets carefully applying black paint, with a slender brush, to the rim of every lens, I can tell you exactly where your money goes. Mind you, for four grand you don’t even get a lens—just the MP body. It sits there like a gum without a tooth until you add a lens, the cheapest being available for just under a thousand dollars. (Five and a half thousand will buy you a 50-mm. f/1, the widest lens on the market; for anybody wanting to shoot pictures by candlelight, there’s your answer.)
I’m reminded of something one of his New Yorker predecessors, Dorothy Parker, said when reviewing Christopher Isherwood’s I Am A Camera. “Me no Leica” was the headline on her riposte!
Time for Apple to face the music?
Bill Thompson’s latest BBC column. No free iPhone for him, then!