From the CNN.com article:
The global “war on terror” can’t be won if people are living in “desperate” conditions, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told CNN.
Read the full article here.
Archive
Two days ago, Steve Jobs unveiled updates to the entire iPod line, including the brand-new iPod Touch. Other changes include iPod Shuffle with different color choices, iPod Nano with a more squat form factor and video capabilities, and the iPod Classic, formerly called just iPod, with a new metal face and larger capacities.
iPod Classic? Do I smell New Coke? Why not just leave it with its old name of ‘iPod’? Oh, that’s right — the new device is the iPod now. Isn’t it? No, the new device is ‘iPod Touch.’
Why is it that no device gets the one-word name? It’s because no device can stand alone as the elite option. The iPod Touch is close. But 16GB of storage just isn’t enough. Doubling its capacity to 32GB would do the trick. After all, it was only three days ago that the more popular capacity choice of the flagship model was 30GB. 32GB would be enough for most consumers. (It’d be enough for my 25GB music collection.)
Apple knows that 16GB is not enough storage for a flagship device. That’s why the fifth generation iPod lives on today as the iPod Classic. More than keeping it alive, Apple has updated the capacity of the Classic. The base model has gone from 30GB to 80GB, and the upper model has jumped from 80GB to a massive 160GB.
One hundred and sixty gigabytes. That’s a lot. I’d guess that’s more than enough space to hold the entire music collection of all but a fringe group of consumers. So what to do with the remaining space? Use it as an external hard drive? Not likely. The answer? Fill it with video. But the Touch has that big, beautiful screen! In other words, one device has a holds-my-music-collection-twice-plus-several-seasons-of-tv-shows capacity, cursed to be played back on a two-year-old, small-by-Wednesday’s-new-standard screen; and one device has a big, beautiful, reorients-the-content-when-I-rotate-the-device-ninety-degrees screen with a maximum of won’t-hold-my-music-collection, don’t-even-talk-about-multiple-full-length-movies capacity.
There’s no flagship device.
In six months, Apple might release a 32GB flash-based iPod Touch. At the same time, Apple might provide video content on the iTunes WiFi Store. But who wants to wait at a hot spot while At World’s End downloads?
Caught this article over at News.com: William Gibson: ‘Cyber’ is going away. Why post about it? Because I wrote a post pleading for the world to drop the prefix back in January, 2005.
I disagree with Gibson that the term ‘digital’ is also on its way out. I like digital.
FYI, since I moved everything over to 1&1, all user accounts were deleted. Old comments are still there along with the author’s username. Feel free to register with your old username. Or a new one.
If you’re reading this, then my site was served to you by my new (old) hosting provider. The original DanPremo.com was hosted by 1&1. A few years in, Lewis turned me on to WordPress, which requires PHP and MySQL. At the time, my price slot had an option for PHP (by way of Linux), but I would have had to pay roughly twice as much to get a MySQL database.
For a smaller increase in price (about 50% less), I moved my hosting over to PowWeb, while keeping my registrar services at 1&1. I always felt that this was a compromise because PowWeb lacks the support, performance, and professionalism of 1&1. At some point in the recent past, I discovered that 1&1 had added features to its lowest price slots, including MySQL databases. For less than what PowWeb charges, I could get the features that forced my move in the first place.
But I was busy. It’s probably been more than a year since 1&1 improved its feature set, and now I’m finally switching. Back. It’s been easy because I’ve continued on as a customer these few years, so I was able to upgrade my package entirely though 1&1’s website. (Who wants to talk to a person?)
Every once in a while I (try to) submit an article to Digg. Every time, I:
- click the Submit a New Story link
- paste the URL
- hit the Continue button
- paste in a title
- paste in a description
- choose a topic
- prove I’m human
- click the Submit Story button
And then I get the dupe message. Eight steps. EIGHT STEPS! This could easily — and obviously — be reduced to three steps. Do the damn duplicate check after step 3. It makes about a million times more sense!
So I’m reading an article I find via Digg. The article’s on the New York Times website. While reading, I run across a word I am not familiar with.
Automatically, I want to put this word into Google. Firefox (and I suppose IE) allows users to highlight text, right click, and choose “Search Google for” the selected text. If Wikipedia is the currently selected search engine in the toolbar search box, the right click allows the user to “Search Wikipedia for” and so on.
Of course, the easiest way to highlight a single word is by double-clicking on it. So that’s what I do. I double click on “abstemious.”
Suddenly a new window appears. While it’s loading, I think I must have done something wrong. Then the page loads. It’s a New York Times.com-powered dictionary lookup of “abstemious.” This is like the coolest thing ever. Well, maybe not ever.
Examining the URL of the newly opened window, we see a few things (with some line breaks to reduce ugliness).
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?
srchst=ref&
query=more%20valuable%20to%20abstemious%20Martins%20than%20to&
fw=3
The query string includes, from the article, three words before the highlighted term and three words after the highlighted term. The field fw (focus word?) at the end of the query string indicates which word to pass to the dictionary, using a zero-based array. (I tried double-clicking other words in the article and changing the value of fw to test this.) I can only imagine that including surrounding words might provide context to generate an even more accurate definition. Why the target word is variable, however, eludes me.
Oh, and srchhst=ref sounds like search history = reference. Whatever that means.
Please, test this feature out for yourself. Head over to the New York Times site, click on any story, then double click on any word. (The feature doesn’t appear to work from the front page.) Awesome!
I suppose I’m surprised he didn’t just pardon him. He’ll probably do that on January 20, 2009.
Just keep pullin’ down your poll numbers, brother.
I got a Honda Accord. I picked it up yesterday. It’s a 2007 Coupe V6. Black exterior, black interior. I took some pictures today and posted them on Flickr. The Jetta is gone, but I posted the ‘new Jetta’ pics on Flickr, too.
I just ran across this: Breezecard.com. Soon MARTA will no longer accept tokens. The site after the link says, “The Breeze card is the best option for all customers”. I just ordered one.