Get ready for a bonkers-ly small Linux machine, called Linutop, as it comes on sale.
For us the cool features of the Linutop are its silent operation, small size (9.3 x 2.7 x 15 cm) and low energy consumption – less than 6 watts.
Linutop comes with xubuntu, a shrunk-down version of the hugely popular Ubuntu Linux, including Firefox providing Web access and Gaim for instant messaging in its build.
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When I travel, I always look for ways to try and reduce the bulk of what I have to carry.
My Apple Mac iBook laptop has a bug where the track pad randomly freezes when it’s plugged into the mains (despite digging I’ve never found an answer as to why, including from Apple), so I’m forced to carry a mouse.
Currently I use a mini optical mouse that I’ve been pretty happy with to date, but that could change having seen the Slim G4 optical mouse that KJ Global is stocking.
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Vint Cerf is well known as being one of the founders of The Internet.
One of his roles (besides being Google’s ‘Internet evangelist’) is as chairman of ICANN.
ICANN performs a number of central roles in the inner workings of the Internet (explained), but is best known for handling and controlling domain names.
Well, this years he’s stepping down and is taking the intervening period to try and encourage many other people to get involved with ICANN.
Vint has issued a video giving an overview of ICANN and the sort of people he’s looking for to join. He calls it “a grand experiment”, and underlines its need to co-ordinate standards as, “in the absence of interoperability, we don’t have an Internet.”
There’s nine places becoming available within ICANN this year, including three at board level. Those hoping to jump from their jobs and join the ICANN payroll will be frustrated as the roles are “uncompensated effort,” although the travel arrangements look pretty good (see vid below).
We found it interesting that Vint referred to ‘Internets’, in the plural, a few times in his video (about 3:10 in), where most people rarely think of it as more than a blob called ‘The Internet’.
If you’ve got a bit of downtime, take a watch, or listen to Vint, may be you’ll be inspired, but act quickly because you have to get your application in by 16 May.
I’ve been on committees of this sort before, so here’s some personal advice – Getting change to happen through them can sometimes be like walking through thick mud, so make sure you’ve got a whole heap of patience.
Netlog, who claim to be “the first truly pan-European social networking site,” have had a couple of changes recently.
Firstly they’ve rebranded themselves from FaceBox (perhaps the fear of legal action from FaceBook or confusion between the two might have been behind it), to a more relevant Netlog.
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All change on the look and feel of Digital-Lifestyles today.
Gone is the red-underlined template of the past four months or so, and in comes a new logo and cleaner layout.
As before, you’ll notice some changes as we intermittently make updates to the template in an effort to try and give you the best experience.
First time you use a comment form, you’ll have to enter a code at the bottom of the form. If you’re stuck for what it says, click the speaker icon to its right to have it read to you.
What do you think? An improvement? Any further suggestions? Feedback appreciated.
In this decimal-obsessed society that we live in, there is a general amazement when someone reaches 100 years old.
Mr Alec Holden from Epsom, Surrey clearly understood this when he placed a £10 bet ten years ago with UK bookie William Hill that he would survive a century.
Today he’s celebrating his 100th birthday, a letter from the Queen and his £25,000 winnings.
His view on the recipe for success? Porridge for breakfast, don’t worry about anything, do as little work as possible and keep breathing!
Alec keeps his mind active by playing chess against his computer everyday and also runs a chess club.
Listening to him on Today on Radio 4 this morning he sounded bright and sprightly taking a very positive view of his age saying that he’s looking forward to “starting off again at 100.”
Although William Hill is down £25,000, they’ll be making saving all of the advertising that they’ll be getting from this story.
Interesting to hear from them that they are no longer take bets of getting to 100, but are pushing out the year out to 110.
Wired have a slightly gushing piece about a new niche video site in the YouTube mold – FunnyOrDie.
The central premise – take ‘celebrities’, add user generated content and a large dollop of VC funding from Sequoia Capital – mix up and hope to get a huge money-making success on your hands.
So far, the runaway success, in terms of video views, is a piece called The Landlord, (warning – spoiler follows) where the landlord is two years old and the tenant is US comedian, Will Ferrell. The joke is two fold – a child is the landlord and it swears.
Many of the commentors obviously find it funny, but many do not. We’re in the second category.
Once you’ve got the idea, for us it failed to make us laugh. Have a watch and tell us what you think (probably NWS) …
We would have used the video on FunnyOrDie, but they don’t honour the AutoStart=false flag and it would have played as soon as you opened this Web page – which is most tedious.
It obviously works in the US as it is supposed to have had 7 million views in the first 24 hours of release and is now sitting on over 12.5 million views.
Watching some of the other videos on the site proves one thing to us – comedy writing and the results it produces are rarely international.
Plenty of the videos featured just weren’t funny to us as UK viewers – they didn’t even raise a titter. One reaction was even more strident “I never want to see that site again.”
What will this lead to? We think a further fragmentation of comedy video sites along geographic lines? Or, as we suspect, the rise of sites that will gather country-focused comedy and point to videos on the myriad of video hosting sites that are springing up on a near-daily basis.
The sites making the advertising money will be the meta-referring sites, and the people paying the bills will be the hosting sites
FunnyOrDie – the latter.
Following the anticipation of the Beta launch of MySpace News, we thought we’d pop over and have a look at what the service is like and how well it’s doing.
It’s obviously early days, but wow is it quiet over there … you can almost hear the tumble-weed running through it.
It may pickup at the weekend when MySpace fans/fanatics spend their whole weekend bashing messages to their ‘friends’, or then again they may be mixing with real people and getting their bodies into the sun.
Maybe we’re on to something that the MySpace crowd just isn’t interested in news.
It is perfectly logical that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp that owns MySpace would use it to trial new features and services that will be of use across their vast empire of media companies.
To this end, MySpace will be launching MySpace News, expected to launch into Beta later today.
They will be scraping news site across the world and presenting them in the same way that Google News does so successfully.
Once the stories are presented to the MySpace users, they’ll be able vote on the quality and content of the stories, in much the same way as Digg users currently do.
So it looks like they’ve taken Google News and Digg and glued the two together.
We’re not sure if Rupe has this one right, as it’s widely known that the younger end of the population doesn’t really care that much about news.
Time will tell if they choose to spend their leisure time (as that’s what MySpace is) reading news stories and voting on them.
Myspace News (still currently private)
There’s a common thought that Moore’s Law in relation to processing power has now become irrelevant, due to the now-attained high processing speeds. In it’s place is a form of Moore’s Law for storage and how important it’s rapid growth is.
In proof of this new Law, Hitachi have released the first 1Tb (1,000 Gb) hard drive named the DeskStar 7K1000. Tom’s Hardware have been running tests on the new drive and have recently reported on it.
There’s 9 pages of the review which reach the conclusion that in terms of the cost per gigabyte it’s not the best value hitting around £230 / €330, which clearly doesn’t compare well with £100 / €150 that 500Gb drives now give.
The reviewers, Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos, feel that having a single 1Gb drive will be easier to handle, but as a data drive rather than one to run the operating system from.
Their view is to hold on for a little while until other manufacturers get their 1Gb drives out, such as Seagate, which will come with a five year warranty, that is lacking in the Hitachi.