27 September 2003

Russian, Chinese and Osmanian Say you're typing on your computer in English, or French or Spanish. You'll be confident that it will be able to deal with all the characters from your alphabet. But what about Russian, or Chinese, or Arabic?  Or worse, the Osmanian language of Somalia? This is a lovely N.Y. Times article about Michael Everson, a 40-year-old Irish typographer, who has played a crucial role in developing Unicode, which might be viewed as the computer age's Rosetta stone. 7:06:54 PM

18 September 2003

Supply Side Jesus Al Franken, has a book out Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, whose title kind of speaks for itself. You buy the book, you know what you're getting. Excerpted online, the Supply Side Jesus cartoon is a hilarious poke at the right in general and those who adhere to supply side economics in particular. (via Boing Boing) P.S. First post in almost exactly 18 months. Very exciting to be back.  ... well hell, for me anyway! 5:56:21 PM

17 September 2003

Climbing gingerly back into the saddle Attempted first post... 7:53:08 PM

28 March 2002

PDAs All Wireless? This ZDNet article ponders the future of PDA's and mobile phones, which are coming together into a new category of 'smart phone', like the Handspring Treo which I talked about a couple of days ago: "If you go one year ahead, it will be impossible to sell any PDA without network access" The article argues that Palm and Handspring will be crushed between the mobile phone companies and Microsoft (who are entering the cellphone category too): "the PDA market of around 10 million units a year is dwarfed by the mobile phone market, with sales of around 410 million units a year" 4:08:52 PM

27 March 2002

A Pom on Australia Guardian correspondent Patrick Barkam spent almost 2 years in Australia, and now that he's leaving reflects on the good and the bad in the country and the people: "Australians are the most welcoming and generous-spirited people I've ever met." but, "Australia is a country where newspapers openly incite racial hatred, where you can buy Coon Cheese in supermarkets, where part of a football stand is called The EJ "Nigger" Brown Stand (after the nickname of a white footballer) and where you meet Australians who have been through higher education and travelled the world but still feel comfortable talking about "wogs" and "Pakis"." 11:58:15 AM

26 March 2002

Copying in the USSR John Naughton in the Observer, puts the argument for sanity and against Hollywood sponsored crippling of our computers better than anyone I've read: "Many years ago your columnist spent a sabbatical year at a Dutch university. Among the other visiting research fellows was a prominent Russian scientist who was, at the time, a vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It is, perhaps, difficult to conceive of it now, but in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union this meant he was a very big cheese indeed - a member of the governing elite, the nomenklatura, with his own chauffeur-driven limo, permission to travel abroad, a good apartment and a dacha in the woods outside Moscow. You name it, this guy had it. Before he returned home, I invited him for a drink. 'What will you miss most from your time in Holland?' I asked. 'Oh, that's easy,' he replied. 'The photocopier.' 'Eh?' I said. 'You see,' he explained, 'back home I sometimes spend two or three days in the scientific periodicals library copying out articles from journals.' It transpired that access to photocopiers was one of the most tightly restricted privileges in Brezhnev's empire. The reason was obvious: a photocopier is a potential printing press, and a regime obsessed with controlling the dissemination of information must control print facilities." A must read (via the phenomenal Boing Boing) 5:37:39 PM

Enough is Enough In recent months I think a lot of us share a strong sense that issues relating to law and intellectual property are coming to a head, even perhaps to some kind of crisis.  Dan Gillmor writes this inspirational litany today: "But if you want to retain some fundamental rights over the information you use and create, please take a stand. Do it soon, because a great deal is at stake. The offenses against the public interest have been piling up, one after the other, but we've been acting like the proverbial frog that just sits there in a pot of water slowly brought to a boil. The frog gets cooked because it doesn't realize what's happening until too late." 11:53:06 AM

25 March 2002

Hollywood Lockdown Back in December last year, Mike Godwin wrote one of the definitive explanations of "Hollywood vs. the Internet" and the legislation they are trying to push through Congress: "As music-software designer and entrepreneur Selene Makarios puts it, this campaign represents "little less than an attempt to outlaw general-purpose computers." Internet security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier puts the matter a little differently: "If you think about it, the content industry does not want people to have computers; they're too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc."   5:14:00 PM