“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.”
George Tenet, former Director of the CIA, in his forthcoming memoirs, as described by the New York Times
Interesting uses for an Amazon.co.uk box, no. 357
It makes a perfectly serviceable residence (though tails have to remain outside in the cold).
Sophie development under threat
At the ENTER_ conference in Cambridge yesterday, Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book gave a terrific demonstration of Sophie — an open source multimedia authoring tool — which he and his colleagues have been developing for some years. It looks like sensational software, but is currently only available as a fairly flaky an alpha version*. When I asked Bob about dates for likely availability, he shrugged gloomily. The project runs out of money next Monday — two days from now.
*Correction: I’ve downloaded the alpha version and although it’s got rough edges, it’s very impressive. Think of it as DTP software for creating multimedia objects. There must be lots of universities and other teaching institutions which could find many uses for this. Surely there’s a basis for finding the necessary funding support for the small team working on the code. One model could be the way my own institution (the Open University) decided to use Moodle as the basis for its Virtual Learning Environment and is now providing significant support to the Moodle developer community. I normally hate (and am suspicious of) the term “win-win”, but these kinds of arrangements seem to me to qualify for it.
Still life with water bottles
Now, where’s that bee?
‘$100 laptop’ now costs $175 & will run Windows
Hmmm… GMSV report…
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.
Apparently, Microsoft is planning to dump XP on the world’s poor for $3 a copy. And the OLPC folks are in discussion with Redmond.
Windows XP eh? Haven’t the poor kids at which the laptop is aimed suffered enough? Or, as GMSV puts it, “that’s $176 for the laptop, $3 for Windows and $500 for the remote tech support”. And who’s going to pay for the anti-virus subscription?
Quote of the day
If your business has any kind of online service, you should prepare your Google contingency plan, and pray that you never have to use it!
Quoted on Good Morning Silicon Valley
In the round
Downing College, Cambridge, April 26, 2000.
Worse by design
This is the power supply that came with my Apple MacBook Pro. It’s got the fancy magnetic connector at the other end, but the transformer unit itself is surprisingly large. In fact, it’s very carefully designed to make it impossible to plug it into any mains socket in any British institutional building, where the sockets are invariably in the wainscoting — as, for example, here (Downing College, Cambridge):
It fell to James Cridland to suggest the obvious workaround — to remove the three-pin plug and use a standard mains lead (the kind one uses to charge the batteries of many digital devices).
Obvious when you think about it — or rather when he suggested it. But it means lugging around another piece of wire. Sigh.