“The clue to surviving that party,” Ruth said, “is never drink anything they can top up. Stick to the Guinness, or some obscure spirit, because you have to make a conscious decision to go back to the bar each time.”
Historian Ruth Dudley Edwards on the Irish Embassy’s pre-Christmas party, quoted by Simon Hoggart.
She’s right. I’ve been to parties in that establishment.
Every Christmas there is a Must-Have gadget. It’s the thing that kids put on their Santa lists and has always sold out just before their addled parents get to the stores.
This year’s gadget is the Nintendo Wii — which (I can personally testify) is a fascinating device. Its USP is a controller fitted with accelerometers that you wave about — like so:
And therein lies a tale…
Today’s NYT is reporting that,
Nintendo said Friday that it was taking steps to keep energetic users of its new Wii video game console from breaking their televisions and ceiling fans.
[…] The trouble is that some players have grown so enthusiastic that the controller has slipped from their hands and taken brief flight. Players are supposed to use wrist straps attached to the controllers, but in some cases these have snapped.
Nintendo said it had begun a voluntary replacement program for the wrist straps. Thicker straps should mean fewer flying controllers, said Beth Llewelyn, a spokeswoman for Nintendo of America.
The new straps are free, Ms. Llewelyn said, but the company is not committing to replacing other household items — like the handful of televisions that have reportedly been smashed by unleashed controllers…
Bill Thompson has been doing some calculations…
According to research carried out by office equipment supplier Canon, based on figures from the National Energy Foundation and Infosource, more than six million PCs will be left on over Christmas, consuming nearly forty million kilowatt hours of electricity.
Together with the printers and other hardware they will waste enough electricity to microwave 268 million mince pies, pumping 19,000 unnecessary tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at a cost of around £8.6m…
He goes on to finger some unexpected power-wasting culprits:
As well as the computers in our homes and offices, it is also important to think about the energy we are using – and the carbon we are producing – by creating and maintaining a presence online.
The virtual server that hosts my weblog is on all the time, even when nobody is viewing my pages, and although its energy use is negligible, multiply that by 55 million or more blogs or 100 million MySpace profiles and you get some significant numbers.
It gets even worse with avatars. At the moment Linden Labs, who host the popular Second Life virtual world, has around 4,000 servers. Although they have two million signed up users, at any one time only around 15,000 people are logged on.
Blogger and technology writer Nicholas Carr did some rough calculations, based on the power consumption of each server being 200 watts and the power consumption of the logged-on user’s own PC being 120 watts, and reckons that each avatar uses 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity – or about the same amount as an average person living in Brazil.
This works out at 1.17 tons of carbon dioxide per year, per avatar, or the same as driving a large car 2,300 miles.
Well, that’s decided it. No avatar for me, then!
And of course, all of this adds to the case for doing networking the Ndiyo way
From BBC NEWS
The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.
The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.
Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.
Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.
He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on…
The Attorney-General’s Statement reads:
“It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.”
TRANSLATION: The rule of law is of course very important, except when it’s inconvenient for the government. In the past few years we have found it increasingly inconvenient btw.
“No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”
TRANSLATION: All those reports about Labour MPs being up in arms because of threatened job-losses in their constituencies if the arms deal with Saudi Arabia doesn’t go through are just media speculation. And even if they are true we paid absolutely no attention to them. What do you think we are — politicians???
“The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.”
TRANSLATION: The Saud regime may be the most despotic, corrupt, tyrannical and bigoted in the Middle East (now that the Taliban have been temporarily deposed), but we need to have those bastards inside our tent because they loathe and fear Al-Qaeda even more than we do. Also we need to keep them on-side as we try to slither out of Iraq.
Sometimes, one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Yesterday, a Labour Prime Minister was interviewed by detectives investigating a corruption scandal engulfing his administration — and it was judged a triumph by his staff that he wasn’t cautioned. This meant he was ‘just’ a witness, and not a suspect in the inquiry. And at the same time, his government’s chief law officer halts an inquiry that was on the brink of revealing illegal payments of perhaps £1 billion to a posse of Saudi princelings and their hangers-on because they were (as the BBC’s Security correspondent intimated this morning) livid at the prospect of having their ‘privacy’ invaded.
Interesting article on Technology Review
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Carnegie Mellon University researchers are relying on an old adage to develop anti-fraud software for Internet auction sites: It is not what you know, it is who you know.
At sites like eBay, users warn each other if they have a bad experience with a seller by rating their transactions. But the CMU researchers said savvy fraudsters get around that by conducting transactions with friends or even themselves, using alternate user names to give themselves high satisfaction ratings — so unsuspecting customers will still try to buy from them.
The CMU software looks for patterns of users who have repeated dealings with one another, and alerts other users that there is a higher probability of having a fraudulent transaction with them.”
There’s a lot of commonsense solutions out there, like being more careful about how you screen the sellers,” said Duen Horng ”Polo” Chau, the research associate who developed the software with computer science professor Christos Faloutsos and two other students. ”But because I’m an engineering student, I wanted to come up with a systematic approach” to identify those likely to commit fraud.
The researchers analyzed about 1 million transactions involving 66,000 eBay users to develop graphs — known in statistical circles as bipartite cores — that identify users interacting with unusual frequency. They plan to publish a paper on their findings early next year and, perhaps, market their software to eBay or otherwise make it available to people who shop online.Catherine England, an eBay spokeswoman, said the company was not aware of the research and would not comment on it. But England said protecting the company’s more than 200 million users from fraud was a top priority.
Well, well… The NYT reports today that…
Hewlett-Packard’s board has ended a crucial advisory relationship with Larry W. Sonsini, the powerful Silicon Valley lawyer, according to a person with close connections to the board.
The move is the latest repercussion from the company’s spying on directors and journalists, which has led to the criminal prosecution of its former chairwoman and a senior company lawyer by California authorities, several federal investigations, $14.5 million in civil fines as well as considerable embarrassment for a company that prided itself on ethical behavior.
After the year’s end, Mr. Sonsini and the firm he helped build, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, will no longer serve as outside counsel to the board. The law firm will still do legal work for Hewlett-Packard. A company spokesman said yesterday that “Wilson Sonsini will continue to have a relationship with H. P.”
Mr. Sonsini and his firm were not involved in the spying, which began after Patricia C. Dunn, the H. P. chairwoman, directed company lawyers and investigators to find the source of board leaks. But he was caught up in the events, and was criticized for failing to prevent the incident from damaging the H.P.
H.P.’s search for another lawyer to serve as outside counsel is expected to set off a scramble among Silicon Valley firms. “It’s not a big revenue item for a law firm, but being able to say to other clients that ‘I give advice to H.P.,’ is a prestige thing,” said a lawyer who did not want to be identified because he has done work for the company.
A spokeswoman for the Sonsini firm, Courtney Dorman, said, “There is a lot of ongoing work with H. P.” The firm handled the transactional work for H. P.’s recent $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive, a business software company.
Mr. Sonsini, who serves as chairman of the firm he joined in 1966, had no comment. Ms. Dorman also said that the firm’s chief executive, John V. Roos, had no comment.
… then sell weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Becky Hogge has published an interesting interview on openDemocracy.net with Andrew Gowers, who chaired the Treasury review of intellectual property. Sample:
“[The report is] not radical in the sense that it does not throw into question the fundaments of the IP system”, explains Gowers. “But it is kind of radical in the sense that it doesn’t take anything for granted. My view is that for far too long intellectual property has been a priesthood on the one hand and a lobbyists’ playground on the other. A priesthood in the sense that it is enacted by these quite funny men of a certain age in legal chambers, dusty files all around them and so forth. And a lobbyists’ playground in the sense that the people who are IP holders, the people who say more IP protection is good are well-organised and well-focussed, articulate and well-financed. And the people who actually pay for it, in terms of consumers, are diffuse. So up until now it’s been a one way argument.”
Now, here’s something that couldn’t have happened without the Web — MilBlogs, a webring of Blogs by serving and retired US military personnel.