One of my sister’s dogs, after a swim.
Me no Leica*
A new (tacky) tack in Leica’s attempts to counteract the threat of digital photography. Seen in the Financial Times‘s absurd How to Spent It supplement. That whirring sound you hear is made by Oskar Barnack whirring in his grave.
*And yes I do know that this was the headline on Dorothy Parker’s famous review of Christopher Isherwood’s I am a Camera.
Oh yeah?
Cold steel
Or is it aluminium? Shot in a cafe in Woburn Place, London.
The HP bugging saga: contd.
From today’s New York Times…
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 7 — The California attorney general’s investigation into the purloining of private phone records by agents of Hewlett-Packard has revealed that the monitoring effort began earlier than previously indicated and included journalists as targets.
The targets included nine journalists who have covered Hewlett-Packard, including one from The New York Times [John Markoff — JN], the company said. The company said this week that its board had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press and that those investigators had posed as board members — a technique known as pretexting — to gain access to their personal phone records.
In acknowledging Thursday that journalists’ records had also been obtained, the company said it was apologizing to each one. “H.P. is dismayed that the phone records of journalists were accessed without their knowledge,” a company spokesman, Michael Moeller, said.
Hang on, let’s deconstruct that last sentence. “H.P. is dismayed”: legally, “H.P” is the Board of the company. But the company said earlier that that same Board “had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press”. So the Board is “dismayed” by what the Board did? And that same Board has done nothing yet about sacking its CEO.
Goor Morning Silicon Valley reports…
“Colossally stupid.” That’s how California Attorney General Bill Lockyer described Hewlett-Packard’s ill-conceived investigation of boardroom leaks to the press …. On Wednesday afternoon Lockyer’s office subpoenaed some of HP’s officials after the company, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (PDF), acknowledged that a controversial data-gathering technique known as “pretexting” had been used in the investigation. “I have no settled view as to whether or not the chairwoman’s acts were illegal, but I do think they were colossally stupid,” Lockyer told the Mercury News. “We’ll have to wait until the investigation concludes to determine whether they were felony stupid or not.”
Dubya the hedgehog
Interesting Whiskey Bar meditation on George Bush (aka Shrub in this context)…
When [Isaiah] Berlin divided writers and thinkers (which leaves Shrub out) and human beings in general (I suppose we have to include him) into two categories — the hedgehogs and the foxes — he didn’t mean for either label to be taken pejoratively. After all, his list of hedgehogs included Dante, Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Erasmus were among his foxes.
What Berlin meant, I think, is that hedgehogs try to integrate all of their experiences and thoughts into a single, overarching concept of life and their place in it, while foxes, as he put it, have ideas about the world “without . . . seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
At this point, I would say Shrub is acting like a hedgehog on hallucinogens. His one big integrative idea — exporting American-style “democracy” to Iraq at the point of a gun — has proven fatally, disasterously wrong, but he can’t let go of it, because it’s the only idea he’s got. He’s fully vested in it, like a ’90s e-trader who decided to throw caution to the wind, empty his retirement account and bet it all on pets.com.
I think if Shrub were ever forced to let go of his vision, his one big idea, it would not only crush his fragile ego, it would leave him completely incapable of making any sense at all out of his presidency, out of America’s role in the Middle East, out of the universe.
So now he’s imitating the hedgehog as literally as any human being can — he’s rolled himself up into a defensive ball, spines out. He has nothing useful to say and absolutely no strategy beyond hunkering down and passively defying reality. Which leaves the generals and the troops no choice but to hunker down with him.
The next two and a half years are going to be very long ones…
Gartner: Microsoft must turn to virtualization technology
From an interesting InformationWeek piece
Microsoft’s mistakes in Vista’s development have been well-chronicled, and the company’s leaders recognize that another five-year gap between major updates of their money maker could be disastrous. In July, chief executive Steve Ballmer told financial analysts “we will never repeat our experience with Windows Vista, we will never have a five-year gap between major releases of flagship products.”
But exactly how will Microsoft do this? How can it handle the increasingly unwieldy amount of code in Windows, better secure the operating system, and maintain backward compatibility with the legions of legacy applications? Gartner’s Gammage and two colleagues, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith, believe they know.
“Microsoft will have to move toward virtualization at its core to change direction,” said Gammage. “We think this is what will happen. Microsoft, at the moment, disagrees with us.
“But we don’t see another way of doing this.”
In the scheme that Gammage sees playing out, Microsoft will be forced into adding a “hypervisor,” a layer of virtualization software that runs between the operating system and hardware, to Vista by no later than 2009. Virtualization-enabled processors and chipsets, such as the newer offerings from both Intel and AMD, allow hypervisors to run, which in turn let developers separate functions of an OS into chunks, then have those pieces run simultaneously in multiple virtual machine partitions.
“We expect this hypervisor to provide the key enabling technology for reversing the trend in functional integration,” wrote Gammage, Silver, and Smith in a research report they issued nearly two weeks ago.
“This is how Microsoft will be able to deal with 25 years of backward compatibility,” Gammage said. Virtualization, he said will allow a future Windows to run the legacy kernel — to support aged applications — alongside a new kernel, just as current virtual machine technologies let users run different operating systems side-by-side…
Anyone wondering why Xensource is going to be such a Big Deal need look no further. They’ve cracked the hypervisor problem. And the delicious irony is that their core technology is open source!
The Valley gets free Wi-Fi
From today’s New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 5 — A consortium of technology companies, including I.B.M. and Cisco Systems, announced plans Tuesday for a vast wireless network that would provide free Internet access to big portions of Silicon Valley and the surrounding region as early as next year.
The project is the largest of a new breed of wireless networks being built across the country. They are taking advantage of the falling cost of providing high-speed Internet access over radio waves as opposed to cable or telephone lines. The project will cover 1,500 square miles in 38 cities in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Santa Cruz Counties, an area of 2.4 million residents. Its builders, going by the name Silicon Valley Metro Connect, said the service would provide free basic wireless access at speeds up to 1 megabit a second — which is roughly comparable to broadband speeds by telephone — in outdoor areas. Special equipment, costing $80 to $120, will be needed to bolster the signal enough to bring it inside homes or offices.
The consortium will also offer a fee-based service, with higher speeds and technical support, and will allow other companies to sell premium services over the network as well.Diana Hage, director of wireless services at I.B.M., said she expected the project to cost $75 million to $270 million. She said the project was meant to be a public service and, by showing the potential for the technology, to develop and promote the companies’ commercial interests.
I.B.M. is providing project management, and Cisco is providing equipment. They are joined in the project by Azulstar Networks, which plans to handle network operations, and SeaKay, a nonprofit group that focuses on providing Internet access to low-income areas.
Realism dawning in the US?
Or perhaps a new isolationism? Interesting Pew Research Center report
Five years later, Americans’ views of the impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have changed little, but opinions about how best to protect against future attacks have shifted substantially. In particular, far more Americans say reducing America’s overseas military presence, rather than expanding it, will have a greater effect in reducing the threat of terrorism.
By a 45% to 32% margin, more Americans believe that the best way to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks on the U.S. is to decrease, not increase, America’s military presence overseas. This is a stark reversal from the public’s position on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the summer of 2002, before serious public discussion of removing Saddam Hussein from power had begun, nearly half (48%) said that the best way to reduce terrorism was to increase our military involvement overseas, while just 29% said less involvement would make us safer.
Similarly, in 2002 a 58% majority felt that military strikes against nations developing nuclear weapons were a very important way to reduce future terrorism. Today, just 43% express the same level of support for such action…
Overheard 2
From Overheard in New York | The Voice of the City…
Sassy flight attendant: In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will be released from the overhead above your seat. After the screaming subsides, please place the oxygen mask around your nose and mouth. If you are traveling with a child or an adult who is acting like a child, place your mask on first before attempting to help put theirs on. –Flight out of LaGuardia