Charles on… anything that comes along

It was something about the languid tone in which this was announced (by Kim Sengupta, former Daily Mirror hack, now on The Independent) that made it candidate for quote of the day.

When I have a bit longer, I might even retell the story.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The tin ears of vox pops (10 March 2005; score: 56.3%)
• Why I don't travel to the US these days (27 August 2005; score: 41.94%)
• Michael Dell re Blu-Ray, and disable those iPod nano scratches! (4 October 2005; score: 36.73%)

Interesting to read Dave Hyatt (the chief developer of Apple’s Safari browser talking about the extensions being made to HTML in order to make the new Dashboard feature in Tiger, aka OSX 10.4, work.

He’s at pains to emphasise that it’s not just being done within Apple, and that the plan is to share:
I wanted to emphasize that we are working with other browser vendors such as Opera and Mozilla to ensure that these extensions are implementable in those browsers and that these extensions can be standardized. We are not simply off “doing our own thing.”.

Their worry being that Longhorn is going, by virtue of extending the web page onto the desktop, so completely non-standard that it will otherwise make life impossible for the rival browsers. But if they can have neat widgets on web pages, where you’ll have to view them with something *other than IE* to work, you’ll have an incentive to switch. And remember, Microsoft isn’t developing IE as a separate product any more, so it probably wouldn’t come out with a stopgap version before Longhorn.

You can argue that the widget-enabled web pages would take ages to appear, but so will web pages that use Longhorn’s extensions, because the takeup of that will stretch well past 2010 before it reaches 50%. Look at Google’s stats for who’s using which OS. WinXP has only 50%, despite being released in 2001.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Get it while it's late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing) (2 May 2005; score: 88.73%)
• My Tiger report: Spotlight and Dashboard are amazingly sloooooooow (31 May 2005; score: 73.9%)
• How not to write an operating system review: Paul Thurrott shows you (16 April 2005; score: 69.04%)

Thanks to Doc and Chris for their kind notes. It’s interesting to be here. At which one realises that the currency of the blogosphere is pointers: I point to you, I give your blog more visibility. Interestingly it’s one of those digital currencies, because the pointing-to blog doesn’t lose any of its value by doing that pointing.

The other currency, of course, is timing: it’s important to be first, or failing that to be the most visible one who’s first. This is certainly the case in newspapers - examples abound of stories that have appeared in one paper or another but are massaged back to life by the application of spin and made to seem like they’re brand new and shiny.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Saucer of milk for Neil McIntosh please.. (1 May 2007; score: 37.44%)
• Let the bug-ironing begin! Plus, does teaching Java dumb would-be programmers down? (2 January 2006; score: 32.06%)
• The three blogs you should read? Try three hundred (14 November 2007; score: 30.1%)

Put a frog in hot water and it jumps out; put it in warm water and heat it up and it cooks, as the tale goes. (I don’t think we need to test this empirically, though. Let’s just accept it as metaphor.) Peat bog gases ‘accelerate global warming’ reports on some work by Chris Freeman of the Uni of Wales at Bangor, which found a positive feedback loop between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the extent to which carbon trapped in those bogs gets released. And there’s a huge amount of carbon in those bogs - more than all the fossil fuels we burn.

I spoke to him ahead of the publication in Nature. He was pretty clear: if you don’t want it to get a lot worse, you need nuclear power.

In this he joins a growing list along with James Lovelock (as in Gaia), Peter Cochrane (formerly BT’s head of R+D), and, in a hint, Tony Blair (easily missed in his grilling by MPs earlier this week; I’ll find the relevant Hansard later.) OK, Tony, so there are no WMDs; what about some Weapons of Mass Construction instead?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Dreadful, truly dreadful: New Scientist on nuclear power (25 April 2006; score: 63.05%)
• Environmentalists will embrace nuclear power and GMOs, and other contrary thinking (18 April 2005; score: 54%)
• At the Guardian: nuclear power!, Phorm's bad publicity, tiny speakers and another podcast (7 March 2008; score: 53.78%)