- Blog
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Belgium in the West
There’s an excellent profile of Kofi Annan by Philip Gourevitch in the March 3rd issue of The New Yorker but it’s not at the web site, which is annoying. In looking for it, though, I learn from Simon Schama’s article about the history of European anti-Americanism that Baudelaire called America “the Belgium of the West”,…
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McDecline
When McDonalds lost the disastrous McLibel case I used to say that it wouldn’t be the greens or the anti-globalisers that’d bring down the fast food giant but much more prosaic and unpredictable business problems – lifestyle changes, weird new competition (Frappuccino anyone?) and an exhausted brand. Hey! I was right. “In the past, owner-operators…
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Business Week on Linux
Business Week goes big on the Linux Uprising: “…and don’t be fooled by Linux’ harmless-looking penguin mascot, Tux: This stuff is shaking up the balance of power in the computer industry. It poses the biggest threat to Microsoft’s hegemony since the Netscape browser in 1995” Amazingly enough, the tone of the article is a throwback…
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Dead Herring
In 1993 and 94, when I was learning about the net and about how to run a business and all the scary money stuff, I discovered a weird American business magazine in the same imported magazine outlet I went to for Wired and Mondo 2000 and all those xeroxed geek zines. It was called The…
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Wraparound
Check out this collection of 360 panoramas from Hans Nyberg in Denmark. He gathers Quicktime VR panoramas from around the world, like this gorgeous wraparound view from the top of The Monument in the City of London and these excellent, immersive street level views of the London war protests. Hans is also a bit of…
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Butterfly encore
On Tuesday I took my son Oliver to see Richard Wilson’s Butterfly at the Wapping Project. Maybe I didn’t read the publicity properly but I really wasn’t expecting anything so exciting. We talked to the artist and pestered his crew as they coaxed a beautiful, shiny light aeroplane from an unrecognisable lump of crushed aluminium…
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New York decides
I don’t want to gush but I’m really thrilled for NYC (and for the rest of us emotional New Yorkers) that the City settled on Libeskind’s replacement for the Twin Towers. A perfectly measured memorial to the lost as well as a thrilling and contemporary reworking of the skyscraper myth for the 21st Century. Brilliant.…
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Don’t panic
Are you getting spam like this yet?
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Forget Moore’s Law
Michael Malone, top tech journo, says in The Herring that we should forget Moore’s law. The thesis is that, as the universe of chips expands, more buyers are sticking with older, lower-powered devices because they don’t need the extra power. The industry’s legacy chips – almost all of which are still being manufactured somewhere –…