Hyper-inflation: Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion note »
Zimbabwe, grappling with a record 2.2 million per cent inflation, has introduced a new $Z100 billion ($5.50) bank note to tackle cash shortages.
Multicolr Search Lab »
Explore Flickr photos by colour content:
We extracted the colours from 3 million “interesting” Flickr images. Using our visual similarity technology you can navigate the collection by colour.
Oddball “DRM” on MISaustralia.com
Have a look at this article on MISaustralia. The first sign that something’s awry is their use of a monospace font for body copy.
Now try selecting some of the body text: only every second letter gets highlighted.
Take a look at the HTML source and you see this is deliberate: they are using JavaScript to overlay and interweave two streams of text with alternating missing letters into one block of contiguous text.
This oddball “DRM” might prevent casual readers from copying and pasting the text, but it also makes the content inaccessible to sight-impaired readers, and to search engines. The use of the monospace font also makes the text less legible.
NSW Department of Education going to Gmail »
The NSW Department of Education is migrating its email system for 1.5 million students from Exchange to Gmail.
They’re going from a $33M contract that gave users 65 megabytes of storage, to a $9.5M contract that gives at least 6 gigabytes.
Microsoft releases pre-07 Office file specs »
Microsoft has released the specifications to the file formats in the pre-2007 Office suite.
The Microsoft Office binary file formats documentation provides detailed technical specifications for the .doc, .ppt .xls, and .xlsb file formats as created by the following Microsoft Office applications:
- .doc: Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2007
- .ppt: Microsoft PowerPoint 97, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
- .xls: Microsoft Excel 97, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007
- .xlsb: Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Submarine cable map »
TeleGeography’s Submarine cable map, showing the 120+ submarine cable systems that make up the internet, voice networks, and private networks.
Available as free desktop wallpaper, or a printed map.
Review: On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore
On the Edge, by Brian Bagnell, tells the history of Commodore, from their entry into and development of the personal computer industry, to their massive collapse just 15 years later.
Told mostly through new interviews with company engineer, this is a fascinating story of the good and bad management (mostly bad), internal politics, technology design, and short-sighted business practises that built Commodore up into a massive industry force, and yet led to its ultimate demise.
The book also describes how Commodore engineers created the new computers. Commodore was in the unusual position of owning a chip manufacturing company: “vertical integration” is how then CEO Jack Tramiel put it. This allowed the engineers to rapidly prototype new chip and board designs, which meant their product cycles were extremely low: entirely new systems were being created in 3 or 4 months before being demoed at CES conferences. Unfortunately, this rapid development would bake in bad architectural decisions, which following product teams would struggle with.
In some ways this is a very inspirational story. The development teams at Commodore were tiny: five or six core engineers would work on a system, and create entirely new chips, boards, enclosures, and peripherals — like the famous SID sound chip of the Commodore 64. And they would do it in extremely short time frames.
These small teams created the PET, the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, and the Amiga.
The book makes extensive use of interviews with Commodore employees; many chapters are almost entirely quotes. This, and the relatively light touch by the author, makes for an engaging and fast read. But it’s not great literature by any means.
The author does a good job of showing the differing accounts and memories of his subjects, and it is very interesting to see how differently people remember the same series of events.
The book makes a point of showing that Commodore, and not Apple, should be considered the creator of the personal computer. The case presented is good, but comes across somewhat too fervently, and makes the author seem a bit nutty at times.
This is a great read, and one that made me nostalgic for my old C-128D. Recommended.
Shops track customers via mobile phone »
This system from Path Intelligence tracks people in a shopping mall by triangulating on their mobile phone. It can uniquely (but anonymously) identify people by the IMEI (a unique serial number) of their phone.
It would be a fascinating source of data to mine: paths through malls, shopping habits, how people behave differently on their own or when in a group; all kinds of things. But it does seem quite invasive; I think I would feel quite uncomfortable being under such close a gaze. Perhaps if they dropped the IMEI identification and only looked and aggregated trends.
Seems to be quite excitingly priced at around £20,000 a month to rent.
Truckload of concrete dumped into sewer »
This is weird: some bozo dumped 13 tonnes of concrete into the sewer that runs under the Sydney Football Stadium, the Sydney Cricket Ground, and the Hordern Pavilion, causing a blockage that runs 140 metres.
Sydney Water have installed a temporary bypass and have spent the past 10 weeks trying to unblock it, but they may have to run a new permanent line. The blockage very nearly caused the Mardi Gras party at the Hordern to be abandoned (18,000 people produce a lot of material for a sewer, one assumes).
It would have cost only $2,275 to be dumped legally.
Hordern hard rock on nose, Sydney Morning Herald