Why this? Only that I liked the site name — Get Rich Slowly. Beats getpoorquickly anyway. Reminds me of Die Broke, a tome which advises that “the last cheque you write should be to the undertaker — and it should bounce”!
Oh — by the way: the domain getpoorquickly.com is available! Form an orderly queue…
A text box spotted by an unimpressed James Miller in a gushing BBC report on the bright, shiny new Wembley stadium. I particularly like the helpful data on the volume of milk required to fill the stadium. Semi-skimmed, naturally.
Further to my reflections on getting movies from digital still cameras, here’s an example of the way the boundaries between devices is blurring. My Canon IXUS, like many compact digital cameras, has a movie mode. If you use it to record movie clips, then iPhoto neatly collects them and keeps them in its library, where they’re stored as .avi files. Double-click on a movie clip and OS X launches QuickTime player, enabling one to view the clip.
So far so good. But if you launch iMovieHD then you can drag .avi clips from the iPhoto library onto the editing timeline. The software converts them to DV on the fly. (In the old days, you had to open them in QuickTime Pro and convert them to DV files, but now it all seems to be built into iMovieHD.)
I’ve just tested this by making a complete little film from movie clips and images taken using the IXUS in Provence last year. It was as easy as pie. I’d post it to YouTube were it not for the fact that the soundtrack is from a Leo Kottke album and therefore not my property.
I’m sure you can do all this using Windows, but I’ll bet the tools aren’t as integrated as they are on OS X.
I should also add that it was Quentin who, unwittingly, started me off on this line of thought. He too has an IXUS.
Hooray! Stephen Joyce, the maniacal enforcer of the James Joyce estate, has finally met his match. His nemesis: one Lawrence Lessig. Here’s the report from Stanford Law.
Last June we sued the Estate of James Joyce to establish the right of Stanford Professor Carol Shloss to use copyrighted materials in connection with her scholarly biography of Lucia Joyce. Shloss suffered more than ten years of threats and intimidation by Stephen James Joyce, who purported to prohibit her from quoting from anything that James or Lucia Joyce ever wrote for any purpose. As a result of these threats, significant portions of source material were deleted from Shloss’s book, Lucia Joyce: To Dance In The Wake.
In the lawsuits we filed against the Estate and against Stephen Joyce individually, we asked the Court to remove the threat of liability by declaring Shloss’s right to publish those deleted materials on a website designed to supplement the book. After the trying to have the case dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, the Estate gave up the fight. Joyce and the Estate have now entered into a settlement agreement enforceable by the Court that prohibits them from enforcing any of their copyrights against Shloss in connection with the publication of the supplement, whether in electronic or printed form. (The Settlement Agreement is posted here.)
This is a remarkable victory given the Estate’s past aggression. But more are needed in order to make clear and concrete the protections that Fair Use is intended to protect in theory. We hope this is the first in a string of many cases that vindicate the rights of not only scholars and academics, but creators of all manner.
Official press release here.
From MercuryNews.com…
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Bill Gates is finally getting his Harvard degree — 32 years after he walked away from the university on the path to becoming the world’s wealthiest person.
Gates, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft Corp., philanthropist and college dropout, will receive an honorary degree June 7 when he delivers Harvard University’s 356th commencement address.“His contributions to the world of business and technology, and the great example he has set through his far-reaching philanthropy, will rightfully put him on center stage in Harvard Yard,” Harvard Alumni Association President Paul Finnegan said in a statement.
Hmmm… From an Apple QuickTime marketing message:
The pocket-sized, innovative Casio EXILIM HI-ZOOM EX-V7 is currently the world’s slimmest digital camera with a 7X optical zoom lens. More than just a still camera, it also records widescreen, next-generation, high-quality H.264 movies — at remarkably small file sizes — with movie stabilizer technology that minimizes the effects of hand movement while filming. You can record up to three hours of video using a 2GB memory card.
If true, why bother carrying a camcorder? Current price: £279 from here.
The folks working on the One Laptop Per Child project have decided that they need to rethink the user interface to take into account the needs of the kids who are its target users. “The desktop metaphor is so entrenched in personal computer users’ collective consciousness”, they write,
that it is easy to forget what a bold and radical innovation the GUI was and how it helped free the computer from the “professionals” who were appalled at the idea of computing for everyone.
OLPC is about to shake up things once more.
Beginning with Papert’s simple observation that children are knowledge workers like any adult, only more so, we decided they needed a user-interface tailored to their specific type of knowledge work: learning. So, working together with teams from Pentagram and Red Hat, we created SUGAR, a “zoom” interface that graphically captures their world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing the connections within the community, among people, and their activities.
Looking at the design principles underpinning the new interface it’s clear that the team are indeed embarking on a radical re-think. Michael got SUGAR running on Ndiyo terminals (see picture)…
… and although we can’t obviously replicate the mesh-networking facility that’s built into the OLPC laptop, we’ve been able to play with the software. It’s fascinating to be forced to unlearn the desktop metaphor that we’ve all absorbed since the Xerox days.
My colleague Michael’s new motorbike has arrived. I’m torn between anxiety about Critical Employee Insurance and pleasure at the name of the model — Ulysses. Yes, yes, yes! — as Molly Bloom would have observed — though of course she might have preferred a recumbent model.
Here’s a fascinating — and (for anyone interested in journalism) salutary — tale from James Cridland’s blog.
It all started – on the internet, at least – with an interesting story in the Daily Record, on 26 February 2007 – 5 million listeners – and radio boss Ryan is only 15. A heartwarming story, penned by Rod Mills, of a young boy making it big in the radio business, and teaching the big boys a thing or two. After two years, Ryan is employing 40 people and running an internet radio station; and the headline, while confusing ‘hits’ with ‘listeners’, is a great good-news story.
And it was quickly picked up by other media: keen to bring some good news to their readers, listeners, or viewers. After a few fluffy appearances on BBC Scotland and Scottish television company STV, national newspapers were next: Teen tycoon hits paydirt with shed radio station appeared in The Sunday Times on the 4th March 2007.
The Sunday Times article contains a lot of information about this station’s success: all the more remarkable since it broadcasts from this grey-roofed shed in a well-to-do suburb of Ayr. We learn that his employees are actually volunteers, paid in gig tickets. We learn…
A 15-YEAR-OLD schoolboy has grown an internet radio station run from his father’s garden shed into a company that claims 250,000 listeners and has 40 people working for it. […] The peak slot is drive-time between 4pm and 7pm, which Dunlop says averages 80,000 listeners. He is projecting turnover of more than £1m in his first year of trading, most of which will be profit.
These are serious numbers, so many congratulations should go to this young chap. who we discover from a later interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, thinks his station has the potential of bringing in £25m a year. All in all, this is a great story. Ryan is clearly a businessman with great talent….
The only problem: it was all hooey. James asks:
why did journalists swallow this false story? Two minutes of Google searching produced a substantial and inescapable realisation that the story was false; just one call to any radio expert would have blown the whistle. Why didn’t they check their facts? The people who should be ashamed in this episode are the journalists in the newspapers and the television, who went to air with a false story.
He’s right.
Cyclist Rich Lesnik spotted this when biking through California. Why can’t the Cambridge City Council display this kind of wit?