Patrick McGoohan died today. He’s best known for creating The Prisoner, possibly the only time a single person has been given carte blanche to write, direct, and star in a television program. It remains among the finest stories ever told. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out.
Category Archives: blurb
Twitter and TechCrunch, sittin’ in a tree
I’m not at all suprised at Michael‘s discovery that when TechCrunch Says Jump, Twitterers Say How High?
Who’s Number Two
I think I’ve finally figured out who Number Two is:
From a BBC 2 trailer in one of the the extras on Doctor Who and the Silurians (Amazon
P.S. If this makes no sense to you, you must not be a fan of 1970s British sci-fi. If not, we can still be friends.
All percentages might be created equal…
…but why you should support Mac OS X and Linux makes the case that some percentages are more valuable than others.
I think the reason is even simpler: Windows computers are far more likely than Macs to belong to people who just don’t want or need computers, and to sit largely disused in a corner. (And pretty much everyone running Linux is a power user to begin with.)
Electronic voting v.s. electronic gambling
This is a pretty telling comparison between electronic gambling and electronic voting machines.
From The Washington Post via Schneier on Security.
Ubuntu patch o’ the month
Worth it for the title alone: Patch: Ubuntu DRBD now can haz run after boot.
Computer architecture as business practice
David Dalrymple gives an amusing and thought-provoking critique of computer architecture over at Edge‘s World Question Center:
Imagine if your company or organization had one fellow [the CPU] who sat in an isolated office, and refused to talk with anyone except his two most trusted deputies [the Northbridge and Southbridge], through which all the actual work the company does must be funneled. Because this one man — let’s call him Bob — is so overloaded doing all the work of the entire company, he has several assistants [memory controllers] who remember everything for him. They do this through a complex system [virtual memory] of file cabinets of various sizes [physical memories], the organization over which they have strictly limited autonomy.
Hertzberg on choice
Hendrik Hertzberg with an astute analysis of some pro-life rhetoric:
What this demonstrates is that even in the minds of anti-abortion zealots, abortion is now implicitly viewed in the same light as divorce: an unfortunate choice, a reprehensible choice, a choice that may even contravene the will of God, but still a choice.
Fresh new t-shirts
Exposé this
Forgive them for the hyperbolic description and for constructing the phrase “real-world pixels” for a moment and check out Oblong Industries’ g-speak. They designed the gestural user-interface in Minority Report — and it’s for real. Makes Exposé look like a cheap trick. (via Ross)