This is what servers look like in the Revolution 60 universe. I was very pleased with how these static meshes ended up. They allow good air flow around the servers, and easy access for maintenance. It was pointed out to me that they are not perfectly space efficient, but that’s the price of beauty.
A warm welcome to Brianna, who took the quite opposite step from people leaving Tumblr for Wordpress or whatever other blogging platform, and created her new blog yesterday here. Tasteful as always, and much in the vein of the Revolution60 style.
Want to see more of her work? Follow her tumblr blog, head to Revolution60 website… or have a look at that post which she happily and enthusiastically illustrated (I still love this one - great piece, great art).
I awoke aboard a boat, just before daybreak, which was weird. The last thing I remembered was being in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, wrapping up a four-hour Google I/O keynote liveblogging session. My last recollection was of Google CEO Larry Page taking questions from the audience and promoting a vision of a utopia where society could be free to innovate and experiment, unencumbered by government regulations or social norms.
Yes, talking about creepy…
“We absolutely will be tweaking our privacy policy to adapt it to the ever changing needs of Google. Starting July 4th, 2013 we will be editing the privacy policy of Google to simply reflect our motto: ‘Don’t be evil’. This will make Google’s privacy policy the shortest of any tech company and the most open”
Ben, impersonating Larry Page, takes the creepy line. Must read for everyone.
Love it. It rings true. The irony of Microsoft, of all companies, pushing this campaign is not list on me. If feels a bit like Belzebuth complaining to Satan’s about Lucifer’s ascension and him taking now a bigger part of the cake at the Sunday lunch. I like this image as well.
On Saturday, Iceland held national parliamentary elections and the newly-formed Pirate Party of Iceland won 5.1 percent of the vote. This earned the party three seats in parliament, making the new Píratar the most successful Pirate Party in any national legislative body around the globe.
Iceland’s unicameral parliament, known in Icelandic as the Alþing (“All-thing”), has just 63 members to represent the country’s 320,000 people.
Iceland has a really interesting recent political history, including complete financial upheaval, unsuccessful efforts at a crowdsourced constitution, and Reykjavik’s mayor, Jon Gnarr, a comedian running on a comedy platform who has managed to stay in power longer than seven of his predecessors. Gnarr actually ran for parliament as part of the upstart Bright Future party, and the party that actually did pretty well in yesterday’s elections, winning six seats. However, the center-right Independence Party, which was behind the financial implosion, won the election Saturday, gaining 26.7 percent of the vote. But the Pirate Party’s appearance on the national stage couldn’t have come at a better time—The Pirate Bay, perhaps the purest representation of the party’s ideals, just moved to Iceland.
But maybe you don’t care about all that and just want to see pretty pictures.
Seems some have a chance to push forward necessary changes. Iceland is an interesting place: they let their banks fail, pacifically removed their government and commons, got out of recession through innovation. Quite amazing what the people can do when the system doesn’t stop them from trying, right?
On a side note, I am wondering
- how many people are seeing this news item? I followed the whole story when Iceland toppled its government, commons and constitution: it was really hard. Little was reported, the main sources were blogs.
- how many of these people consciously or unconsciously equate “pirate party” with freedom of thought and freedom of expression?
Righting the wrongs is fine, trespassing others property is not. There is a fine line between the two. Copyright needs a good overall in the age of information highways. By the way, highways have tolls in most countries. Where they don’t they are supported by taxes and/or a yearly subscription. I believe that the Internet hasn’t found its business model, it’s been stuck in corporate past for too long. The fault is on us all. If we had elected representatives that represent us, we would have one paying, curated gateway for all, as in all-you-can-eat with shared revenue between the content providers, and a free uncurated side. That’s where things are headed trough Google and other entry points, except that they eat the lunch of others without compensation.
(via brandef)
He it goes. The text of the press release is… quite unusual.
By the way, I’m linking to iMore on this one because it appears they’re the only news outlet who know that Yahoo! Is written with the exclamation mark at the end. Would the editors of all these great news outlet be “just” offshore students?
Kidding aside, neither Google nor Facebook got hold of that one. I have enormous respect for Marissa Mayer1 and what she’s trying to achieve, so I’ll stick here a bit longer. Tomorrow is another day.
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great acquisition by the way… Really, don’t screw it up. ↩
Yes, yes, yes and yes. /via John Gordon.
Tumblr Being Acquired by Yahoo!?
The news just hit the WSJ, which displays one simple banner: the Yahoo! board has approved the purchase - in cash - of Tumblr for $1.1B. I’m sure we will know more tomorrow during the press conference of Marissa Mayer, but for now:
- in your face, Facebook!
- Marissa Mayer seems to be completely turning around the company, which was sorely needed
- for a billion, I’d rather purchase Tumblr than Instagram
- what did Yahoo! acquire for $1.1B? All our blogs? The audience?
- I took some steps a while ago to backup this blog to DropBox… and have been holding on for the migration. The main reason is the ease of posting to Tumblr, and I’ve never had the time to put in for an alternate solution. Guess I’m going to have to deal with this now… unless Yahoo! delivers and does not change the service. Nor inserts ads everywhere.
- I still can’t stand Wordpress. Tried that again this weekend, I’ll never get down to it.
- Wondering if the new management at Yahoo! will avoid the past mistakes that led to abandoning some of their purchases… time will tell.
- Seriously considering putting the hours in to get my blog on app.net. After all, I’m a paying customer there, the terms are clear, the content is mine and mine only. For those wondering, #adn is not only a micro-blogging site, it’s a full platform with a very nice API. Food for thoughts at the moment.
Our 2-months old kitten. He’s taken the habit to climb up my legs to request food. When he doesn’t stop there and decides to continue on the shirt it is… painful. But cute.
A well chosen extract from John Gruber’s Daringfireball, the last sentence from the piece: “There they were, a handful of people wearing Google Glass, now standing next to me at their own urinals, peering their head from side to side, blinking or winking, as they relieved themselves.” got me giggling. A look at the comments was even better.
I don’t think I have discussed Glass here, the main reason being that I really despise the company, the tech, and what they try to achieve there. A couple of pointers though:
- as it stands I don’t think it an enter the French market. See, the French have a law “Informatique et libertés” that takes care of confirming our rights to privacy and our rights to consult every bit of data anyone owns on us. It was nicely written in the 80s, and is hard to apply, but I have no doubt some civil rights advocate will be able to stick it to Google for a long enough time if need be.
- If I see someone snapping pictures of me without my consent, particularly in a place where I should have my intimacy, the glasses will be found next by a proctologist. I’m willing to go all Less Grossman on anyone wearing them in my presence
- of course there’s no way anything like this enters my classroom. If those are correction glasses you’d better have a second (normal) pair in your pocket.
One last point: how come everyone and their grandma copies Apple products and no one copies Google? Tech too advanced? I think not. That tech has been around for years. Put that on the creepy factor instead, and the fact it’s a product no one in his rightful mind would ever want. If this one succeeds, I am quite pessimistic for the future of our society. I may actually retire in a fishermen village in Indonesia. There is still hope there.
