2005/06/30

Ombudsman - language study in action


The linguistically insightful Red Chip Monk makes me just itch for the next Pub Trivia competion!!
James Governor's MonkChips: "Word History: The word ombudsman has one familiar element, man, but it is difficult to think of what ombuds could mean. Ombudsman is from Swedish, a Germanic language in the same family as English, and man in Swedish corresponds to our word man. Ombud means “commissioner, agent,” coming from Old Norse umbodh, “charge, commission, administration by a delegacy,” umbodh being made up of um, “regarding,” and bodh, “command.” In Old Norse an umbodhsmadhr was a “trusty manager, commissary.” In Swedish an ombudsman was a deputy who looked after the interests and legal affairs of a group such as a trade union or business. In 1809 the office of riksdagens justitieombudsman was created to act as an agent of justice, that is, to see after the interests of justice in affairs between the government and its citizens. This office of ombudsman and the word ombudsman have been adopted elsewhere, as in individual states in the United States. The term has also been expanded in sense to include people who perform the same function for business corporations or newspapers."

(Sense of humo[u]r test category)

2005/06/25




RSS in Longhorn?

Spotted in Making it stick.




This violates all sense of design. Is this their latest attempt to make a "new OS" compelling? What would a sensible developer think about "putting RSS into Linux"? What could that possibly mean that was advantageous to *anyone*???


2005/06/24

Death of the Republic, part n+1


CNN.com - High court OKs personal property seizures - Jun 23, 2005: "'Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,' O'Connor wrote. 'The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.'"

2005/06/23

2005/06/22




Spotted in Planet Lisp




Nice discussion about Peter Gabriel's talk from the previous day, which I had missed.


I didn't know Peter Gabriel did LISP and music :-)

2005/06/18

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | EU's 'Waterloo' summit angers press: "The fact is that many EU citizens do not want closer co-operation than the 25 countries have today. This is where the EU's top politicians distance themselves from large parts of their populations, who feel they have had enough EU. They don't want to break 25 eggs to make the great European omelette. It would be sensible to use the pause for a fundamental debate about what economic and political fields the fantastic European project should actually cover. And what the EU should stay out of.

Denmark's Ekstra Bladet"
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | EU's 'Waterloo' summit angers press: "Tony Blair is right to say that the budget talks should not just be about who puts how much money into the EU's coffers and who gets how much out of them... Do we want to continue spending a substantial section of the budget on structures of the past - in other words, subsidising the agricultural sector?... In light of their stagnating economies, it seems strange for Schroeder and Chirac to believe they know exactly what's best for Europe. Blair has at any rate proved in Britain that he knows more about economics than his opponents.

Germany's Der Tagesspiegel"

This is the sort of thing which is getting the EU in to trouble



President pays to woo pro-British members - World - Times Online: "JEAN-CLAUDE JUNCKER dangled budgetary carrots before Britain’s allies last night in his attempt to push through a deal by isolating Tony Blair.

The Prime Minister of Luxembourg, who is the current EU President, concentrated his fire on Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch Prime Minister, whose countrymen, at €180 per head, are the largest individual contributors to the EU’s annual €100 billion budget."

Lack of principle?

Common Agricultural Policy? Third world farmers ? ......... Many suffer, a few gain a benefit whichstaves off the inevitable.




Saving this one for later

Spotted in Scripting News




Rogers often has a good idea, and this time was no exception. He suggested building a connection between OPML and del.icio.us. That was already in the back of my mind.


Who mentioned it first?

2005/06/17

Let them eat cake!


Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online: "UNIONS and former Rover workers sharply criticised Margaret Hodge, the Works and Pensions Minister, yesterday after she said that those who had lost their jobs could go to work at Tesco."

2005/06/13

Stop going on about it?


Scripting News: 6/11/2005: "The Wikipedia history of podcasting has been carefully rewritten to eliminate any mention of my work"

One way to prevent this particular defacing might be to stop complaining ! Seriously, I bet someone did this as a form of protest about the continual complaining about attribution. I wonder how many more time Adam Curry will mention Dave W in his interviews (even if they don't amke the actual article)

Via James Robertson who raises the more important point about the wonders of Wikpedia's "self-healing".




Spotted in The Register




We can only assume that this will soon be modified to read "to enable people in lucrative new markets around the world to realize the potential deemed appropriate by their governing regime."


2005/06/10

Engadget - www.engadget.com: "Boris Petrov says that IBM wasn’t making very much money selling PowerPC chips to Apple and had been wanting to get out of making chips for personal computers in order to focus its efforts on its new chips which are being used in both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3."
Preston L. Bannister { random memes }: "Losing Apple as a customer has got to count as one of the bigger blunders in IBM’s history.

Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006

My guess is that this marks the start of a slow and painful end to the PowerPC architecture. "

How about game consoles? Gotta be a much bigger market in units - probably revenue and profit too.

Thoughts on Ruby on Rails: "I've looked a little at Rails. It's not super special. Well, it is compared to things like Java"

2005/06/07

Borland Unveils JBuilder Roadmap; Signposts Include Eclipse- ADTmag.com: "'Eclipse creates an opportunity for vendors to stop competing on low-value, multiply implemented, ever-commoditized features and creates an opportunity for higher value solutions,' "



Spotted in Planet Lisp




"I'm sure the first thought on everybody's minds is: so what does this mean for open source Common Lisp on OS X?"





Effective vs. fleecing



Spotted in The Register


Ofcom needs to find the right balance between protecting consumers and allowing businesses to operate effectively


2005/06/06


Spotted in Ted Leung on the air


Mathematica did their port in 2 hours with one person



Jarrett House North :: "Every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for Intel for the past 5 years."