Status-Q

[Original Link] “Hollywood is winning, folks. You are losing. And you’d better start caring.”

Another from Quotes of the Day:
Isabel Colegate.

“It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one’s thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.”

The great thing about weblogging is that it’s a pure meritocracy. Other people can ignore your ideas if they find them worthless.

Anatole Broyard:

“There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.”

[Quotes of the Day]

[Original Link] This is another of those good ideas that I also thought of but never got around to implementing. There are lots of these. I’m better at the inspiration than the perspiration, which means, in Edison’s terms, that I’m 1% of a genius where Russell is 100%.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to do this was because it would have been another excuse to buy an iPod. Imagine an audio news aggregator, which would dump the audioblogs you’d subscribed to onto your iPod whenever you synched it. You could then peruse them using the nice iPod interface. A build-your-own radio station. And yes, it would be even better if real radio stations incorporated RSS-type subscription mechanisms. They should be less concerned about syndication than other online publications, because they would still be able to embed advertisments and jingles in the audio.

I’ll get around to it one day. The same goes for that wheel thing I invented a while back…

[thanks to John for the link]

[Original Link] “The free software that found its way into the big league” and “Microsoft Threatened by Alternative Ways”.

“Bill [Gates] isn’t afraid of taking long-term chances. He also understands that you have to try everything, because the real secret to innovation is failing fast.” - Gary Starkweather quoted in a Fortune article by Brent Schendler. Good point.

Rose has just noticed that one of the cardboard boxes we used when moving house recently has a label on the side:
“Made from at least 100% recycled paper. Fully recyclable.”
At least?

[Original Link] “A new study compares Mac-using Web surfers with their PC-wielding counterparts. If you’re reading this on Windows, feel free to take your time on the big words.” [from CNET News.com]

[Original Link] Clay Shirky has written a splendid article, discussing this well-known maxim, which teaches us something about statistics, something about catchphrases, and quite a bit about telecoms.
[Found on Michael Gilbert's excellent Nonprofit Online News.]

[Original Link] Doc Searls quotes Vint Cerf: “The history of the Net is the history of its protocols”.

And then in this Linux Journal article he emphasises

…that the real virtue of Linux and other forms of infrastructural software…is not only that it’s open and free, but that it’s transparent. It is see-thru infrastructure. In fact, what makes it infrastructural is the fact that you can see through it. You can trust it because it has no secrets.

…Bill [Gates] says, “Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony.” We should note that all those services are pure infrastructure whose workings are mostly transparent.

[Original Link] I’m a bit concerned about my weight and my cholesterol level, both of which are rather higher than they should be. I also enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. This combination makes me interested in this well-written New York Times article in which Gary Taubes asks whether the dramatic rise in obesity recently has come about because of, rather than in spite of, the received wisdom on how to tackle it. Could the Atkins diet live again?