Mike Pinkerton of Google talks about the Mac web browser Camino. It also includes some interesting history of the Mozilla and Gecko projects.
Category: General
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Mac GPRS Modem scripts
Ross Barkman’s site has scripts for using mobile phones as modems with Mac OS X.
This post is mainly so I remember where it is if I ever need it and don’t have access to my bookmarks.
Also the tutorial/setup instructions
It is surprising how often I seem to need to use my mobile to access the internet from my desktop machine. 🙁
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Keynote in Lego!
A site called PodBrix offers customized Apple themed lego sets. You too can have Steve Jobs at a keynote or the famous Apple 1984 advert recreated in Lego.
(via reddit)
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Insanely transparent …
You can just see Steve Jobs stroking a white cat and telling engineers to make products “insanely transparentâ€, can’t you?
[link]
(It’s actually an article about keyboards, but worth reading anyway)
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New Bujold book
The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold [Amazon] is coming out this week hopefully. (My order’s already in with Amazon)
The good news is that there are now some sample chapters up.
Bujold of course is better known for the Vorkosigan series of booksand the Chalion series.
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Cocaine Production
Interesting video that I found via [Magistrate’s Blog] showing cocaine processing in Columbia.
The quantity of different (mostly toxic) chemicals going into the product was the most interesting thing, although I was also interested by the running chemistry lesson from the people doing the processing.
It would probably be worth showing this as a anti-drug film in schools, it would probably do more to discourage people than many other strategies. 🙂
[How Cocaine is Made (YouTube)]
[Edit:to add the actual link I was talking about]
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Weighing electronics at airports?
I was looking at a BBC news article about the recent security alerts at airports when a thought occurred to me. One of the big challenges with electronic items is to ensure that they have not been modified to contain explosives. My thought is that explosives must add weight to a unit. If a list of known weights for particular devices could be published then equipment presented at airports could be weighed and the weight matched against a list provided by manufacturers.
If the weight didn’t match a known weight (within some margin of error) the device could be selected for further screening. Proof that the unit was operational would also be required obviously to prevent hollowing out the insides and replacing with explosives. However assuming a device worked and the weight hadn’t increased noticably above the standard set, then it would go some way to suggesting the item wasn’t harmful.
There are obviously some issues that this doesn’t cover, but it might be a useful and simple tool as part of a security screening procedure.
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Abolish the “Three Rs”
Why is it that whenever anyone seems to talk about education they always seem to use the phrase “Three Rs”. This particuarly stupid phrase seems to appear in every article about basic education.
I think the very stupidity of this phrase affects education as a whole. If commentary and discussion on the topic of literacy is illiterate, what hope do those trying to achieve literacy have?
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Sony Batteries
It looks like at least 4 million Dell notebook batteries are being recalled, all of which appear to be made by Sony. Worse news though, Sony also supply batteries to other companies thought to include Apple, Lenovo and HP.
If all of these batteries end up being recalled too, then the cost to Sony would be enormous, their reputation for batteries might never recover. More seriously could this affect Sony as a company? Given the increasing development costs of the PS3, probably a long fight for dominance in the Blue Ray Vs HD-DVD mess and problems in other areas, how much more can Sony as a company take?
I don’t think a financial collapse is very likely, the company is, after all, huge and has substantial revenues from its different divisions. Instead think about a loss of confidence in the company as a single unit. Normally companies should form a grouping that is most financially efficient, this holds as long as investors are confident of the efficiency of the structure of the company. If they loose confidence or people start crunching numbers and find that the parts are worth more than the whole, then questions start getting asked. I think Sony is getting to that point, there seem to be increasing problems with internal disagreements and communication seems to be an issue. This suggests that the company may be too large and too diverse. If it had not been a Japanese company I would have expected a de-merger long since, but Japanese investors behave in different ways so this cannot be certain to happen.
However the advantages are clear. For example, there appears to be substantial tension between the media side of the company (Sony Pictures, Sony BMG) and the electronics side. On the one hand offering devices to play and share music, on the other selling music but discouraging this sharing. This tension is probably one of the reasons that Apple was able to win in the portable music player market. There were other reasons too of course, but the fact that you could easily copy music to the ipod and it was really hard with the Sony device cannot have helped Sony to sell players. In this case it appears that the supposed advantages of integration are actually disadvantages.
Markets reward efficiently run enterprises, in this case it appears that the company is less than efficient, so I expect something will happen. What form this takes is difficult to say, but I intend to watch carefully; It will be interesting to see what happens.