...more recent posts
Looks like Rys McCusker will be leaving the Chandler project. Sounds like everyone is on good terms. Unclear what this will mean for the project. Hopefully, for Rys, it will mean more time to blog.
Mark's new page of news clips pertaining to the U.S. / Syria situation is really well done. If you have an account you can add it to your front page here.
I hope this style becomes a trend. It seems important that we try to remember what these people actually say leading up to an event, because afterwards there is so much spin it is very easy to become confused. WMD? Regime change? Liberation? Why did we start this war again?
This same style would be great for the coming election season. I wish I had one with all the juicy GWB quotes made during the last campaign. The distance his policies (especially foreign) have come since then is amazing. Or disturbing. Maybe this type of exhaustive record keeping could help hold people to account.
And I also have to mention Bruno's weblog ruminatrix. This is my new first stop on the daily round of global political analysis pages. It's really great to have him writing.
Of course Dave and Tom (despite sporadic attempts to actually run an art page ;-) are still going strong, but you already knew that...
David Reed is worried about the Total Information Awarness program. And he has some advice for building arguments against it.
In fact, the privacy and liberty folks, by expressing concern in the form of risks to "privacy" tend to reinforce the belief that there is any real investigatory information that can be extracted by inference from a very noisy and randomly selected pile of information.This is interesting, and strikes me as being true. Probably it is better to argue that there is no useful information to be had from Poindexter's method, rather than arguing that the cost to privacy of extracting the information is too high. I believe the math is on Reed's side, but he has to unpack his thoughts a bit more if he wants someone like me to really get what he's saying.
Waxy.org says that loading this page will cause your CD drive to eject if you are using IE on Windows. Is it true?
Really interesting Paul Graham article on designing a programming language of the future. I love stuff like this. (via HTP)
Apple in talks to buy Universal Music Group. Wow.
Unconfirmed report:
Up to now, all PowerPC 970 processors manufactured have been prototypes, made for testing purposes. The 970 is now considered completely bug-free and ready for production. Yesterday, Peter Sandon - father of the 970 - gave the green light.This will be Apple's new high end chip. You don't know how much effort I've had to expend to restrain myself from posting any 970 related info before this bit. It's almost a year now that I've been watching this story. Now it finally seems like it is near. And not a moment too soon. It's do or die time at 1 Infinite Loop (that's Apple headquarters street address. I swear.)
As of April 15, the 970 will be manufactured in quantity in IBM factories. Starting the end of June, the chips will be integrated in IBM Blade servers and in Apple systems.
More 1 megapixel + digital camera phones coming (in Japan.) This is my latest fetish. I cannot wait for these to hit here in the U.S.
Here's what I'd do about the bandwidth problem. First, the phone has to have a lot of memory. At least a gigabyte. And no SD or memorystick please. Either give us a real hard drive (a la the iPod) or a CF type II slot (for a microdrive, or a just a big CF card.)
Store the pictures locally at highest resolution. At the same time, scale down a copy to a user preset pixel size / resolution (I'd set my camera to scale pictures down to 500 pixels wide at around 70% jpeg quality) and send the reduced photo wireless to either a user specified server, or to a teleco server. Use open standards for these transactions (FTP I guess. Or Webdav?) Possibly have a second size/resolution preset at an even greater reduction for use when sending to someone else's phone.
The phone should also have bluetooth so that the full resolution pictures will be synced with your main computer whenever you are within range (which could be almost all the time if you have a laptop.)
With your help, Dan Gilmore is writing a book.
Dear Readers:This is one of those ideas that sounds cool, but in the wrong hands could turn into something more like a marketing gimmick than a valid strategy for book writing. But I think Dan is the man for this job, and I'm very curious to see what comes of this close to my heart topic.
I'm working on a book, and invite you to be part of it.
The book will explore the intersection of technology and journalism. The working title is "Making the News" -- reflecting a central point of this project, namely that today's (and tomorrow's) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person's grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage.
I'm doing the typical research: reading, interviewing, thinking, organizing, etc. I think I know a lot already about this subject. Naturally, I also am aware that I could know a lot more. So let's practice what I preach.
To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline below. My publisher, O'Reilly & Associates, agreed that this was a good idea.
The Phaistos Disk. "It's beautiful, it's a mystery, and it's very old; what's not to like?"