Status-Q

[Original Link] Another gem from John Naughton’s weblog.

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LinkedIn is a service designed to help you find contacts, recruits etc. You can invite people you know to be part of your ‘network’ of referrers, and you can then search for people based on particular criteria. It’ll tell you how many degrees of separation there are between you. You can only actually make contact with the people if those in the chain between you agree to forward your request. When the system gets past beta, you may need to make a small payment to LinkedIn as well.

This has been an obvious potential use of the Net ever since the whole ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ thing – see the Columbia SmallWorld project, for example, but this is an intriguing commercial implementation of the concept.

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To follow on from my post of a few days ago, I’ve now written a fairly substantial document using NeoOffice/J on my Mac, and it’s been completely stable, certainly more so than Microsoft Word, which has taken to crashing rather regularly for me. Maybe Word is just sulking?

Printing under NeoOffice seems to be phenomenally slow sometimes, but otherwise I’m very happy with it. I’ve realised that, these days, documents I’ve written become PDFs to be emailed more often than they become pieces of paper.

[Original Link] Is this the Swiss Army Knife for solid-state digital media?

[Original Link] I’ve just seen an advertisement for a colour screen with a 95×95 pixel resolution.
Can’t see the point of that? Nor could I. But then, I didn’t know that Nokia made jewellery either.

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Well, I have to say, I’m very encouraged. I had given up hope that running OpenOffice on my Mac would be a viable option in the near future. Yes, you can run it under X11, and it’s reliable, but it’s ugly, it’s a version behind everybody else and it doesn’t integrate well with the rest of the Mac system. Plans for a version that runs natively under the Mac’s Aqua graphics system have been shelved until OpenOffice 2.0 comes out, meaning it’ll be at least a year and a half away. All of which is a pity, because I’ve come to really rather like OpenOffice.

So what’s cheered me up? A project called NeoOffice/J, which is using the graphics facilities of Java in place of those provided by X11. If you look at the web site you are greeted with all sorts of warnings about how this is a prototype and not for regular daily use, which may be the case, but I have successfully opened both OpenOffice and Microsoft documents, edited them, print-previewed and printed them without any problems. What’s more, the on-screen appearance is lovely. The font handling is much better than OO under X11 or, indeed, Microsoft Word on my machine.

Best of all is the fact that, despite all the disclaimers, there seems to be ongoing development. A new version was released three days ago, and I’m downloading it now. A big round of applause for those involved, particularly Edward Peterlin and Patrick Luby. This is great work.

[Original Link] Neil McIntosh quotes from the Economist’s leader about the problems with Microsoft:

“Isn’t this simply a matter of Microsoft competing vigorously? The strange thing is that its products invariably succeed in PC-based markets where the dominance of Windows provides an advantage… in other markets that have nothing to do with PCs, such as mobile phones, set-top boxes and games consoles, the company is far less successful. Odd, that.”

[Original Link] A nice spoof…

[Original Link] Pilgrim Beart has a fascinating page about what it’s like to be colour-blind. As I read it, I was thinking that even that page doesn’t look the same to the author…

[Original Link] From Dan Gillmor’s blog:

Wikipedia Shows Power of Cooperation
Sometime in the next few days or weeks, one of the world’s most comprehensive online reference sites will publish its 200,000th article….
Wikipedia, an encyclopedia created and operated by volunteers, is one of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age. In just over three years of existence, it has become a valuable resource and an example of how the grass roots in today’s interconnected world can do extraordinary things.

I agree. I’m a great fan of Wikipedia and have often found answers to questions there.

A 1 GB microdrive costs around £300. Apple’s new iPod Mini, which contains a 4 GB microdrive, costs around £140. There are rumours of people buying iPods, taking the microdrive and dumping the rest. Can’t be true, can it?