Ever wondered why your bags take so long to come through the baggage claim at Heathrow? Well, now we know!
I took this a couple of days ago while waiting for mine. The screen proudly announced that this carousel came with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, that’s good to know.
Now come on, this must be a joke, surely? A high-frequency sound, audible only to teenagers, which keeps them away? It’s an attractive idea…
Presumably it’s audible to anybody younger than that as well, so if you’re wondering why your baby is crying in the supermarket, or why your dog seems particularly restless outside, here’s another possible reason!
Anyway, the teenagers are apparently getting their own back.
I think they’re probably both hoaxes…
Tim Berners-Lee warns of the dangers of a two-tier internet.
The telecoms companies don’t really have a leg to stand on here, I don’t think. I’ve heard them complain that companies like Google and Skype are making lots of money from customers on their networks, and they’re not getting a share of it. But they are, of course. The whole reason people want to buy their broadband services is that there are companies like Google and Skype out there.
And that’s not counting the fact that those companies are already paying for their bandwidth at the other end. A recent estimate put YouTube‘s connection costs at $1M/month. So if service provider X is concerned, for example, that they failed to win YouTube’s contract, but they’re handling lots of traffic to and from YouTube’s site, they should sort it out with the other service providers concerned, not simply try and aim at the people for whom they feel the most jealousy.
Hah! That’s nothing. See Giles Turnbull’s post on ‘Fast OS Switching’. “Until very recently, this sort of thing was just a daydream…”
I’ve also been doing some fun experiments with virtual machines.
What do you get if you take a 5-minute exposure of the space shuttle launch?
This.
You probably thought your monitor/TV was pretty cool. But I think you’ll agree that it was only because you hadn’t seen these…
I reserved an economy/compact car from Avis, but when I arrived at SFO yesterday, this was waiting for me:
I don’t know what it is. A Chevy of some sort. But it’s even bigger than it looks here – those are large wheels and large wing mirrors, so you don’t get the sense of scale from the photo. Parking it is a bit of a pain, and as I cruise down El Camino Real it proudly tells me that I’m averaging 18.1 MPG. OK, so that would be nearly 23 miles per British gallon, but still….
Not quite what one had in mind.
What’s this?
It’s the entrance to a shop. Seen from below. It’s part of an nice set of photos of Apple’s new retail outlet on 5th Avenue, taken by Neil Epstein.
I also went to a Mac store today, in Palo Alto, to have a look at the new MacBook.
Much to my surprise, I found myself definitely drawn towards the black version, though not, I think, enough that I would pay the extra $150 Apple charges for black. I heard Tom Standage comment a couple of days ago that only Apple could charge for the colour that everyone else was using anyway!
The case has a slightly matt finish, so it’s probably a different material designed not to show the scratches in the way that the black iPods did, and it may cost a bit more. Probably about $2 more.
But if the case is now matt, the screens are now glossy, in the style beloved of Sony and others. They make photos look very nice (unless you have fingerprints on your screen) but in general I’m not a fan because they reflect too much. Remember the old days of CRT screens when you had to position your computer so your back wasn’t towards a window?
Otherwise, I think this is a lovely design at a reasonable price and deserves to do well. Anyone who’s had to replace the hard disk inside one of Apple’s other recent laptops will also really appreciate how easy it is on these in comparison.
I saw a ‘stealth boat’ today for the first time.
If you’re a Bond villain and need to pinch one of these for your daily commute, this one can be found in San Diego harbour. If you look very carefully.
Don’t remember where I saw this…
A very rich man dies and arrives at the pearly gates with a large heavy bag on his back. St Peter asks him, “What’s in the sack?”
The man replies “I’ve given most of my riches to the poor, and I thought I could just bring a small amount with me to heaven”.
Peter says, “Mmm. I’ll have to ask God if you’re allowed to bring this in.”
After a while, St Peter comes back and says it’s probably fine, but he has to check the bag. He opens it and discovers it’s full of gold bars.
“Oh!”, he says, “That’s OK. You’ve brought paving stones.”
I saw my first 100 Mpixel display today, on a visit to Calit2 at UCSD.
It’s 55 standard displays, with a bank of Linux machines to drive them. So the pixels are the same size as on your normal display, but you need to walk around to examine the whole image. Very cool.
Click the picture for a couple more images.
Sol Trujillo, the CEO of Telstra, gave the opening talk at FiRe tonight. He made several interesting points, including a complaint about his newly-installed HDTV system and the 50-button remote that came with it, which he found completely bewildering. Somebody had installed it for him, and he knew that he had HDTV service, but when he arrived home, he couldn’t work out how to get to it. Why are so many consumer devices so hard to use? And that’s when you’re only using one of them at once. Just wait until you get your HDTV hooked up to your DVD and your Tivo and your XBox and your PC and….
My most poignant experience of this recently is the Motorola RAZR, perhaps the most beautiful cellphone hardware ever created, combined with the worst ever software user interface.
Whenever I talk about this in public, people who know Motorola phones laugh in agreement. Now, I can’t believe that everyone at Motorola is an idiot – far from it – so they must know that they’ve created a monstrosity – beauty on the outside, beast on the inside. I can therefore only deduce that they don’t care. Why not, and how can we, the users, make manufacturers care, so that they fix it?
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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