Decaflon

No problem, Griffith. Glad to be of service. ;-)

Griffith: I'm on the Kelvin server, and I'm perfectly fine. I'm praying that the noobs won't turn up and crash it.

I've tried it out and I didn't really like the interface. Why can't they use contextual menus, instead of forcing people to type? I thought command line prompts were so 1997 (ehheh, and I wasn't even using computers then).

But ... nifty idea the way they integrate so many services onto one platform. Will be waiting to see what this morphs into.

I'm a guy, so I don't really care if it's man-made or real. But I must wonder about the economic side of this - what does it mean now that good diamonds can be made? I'd expect the value of diamonds overall to drop.

That ... would be weird. Imagine saying 'cash/iPhones/crystals are a woman's best friend'.

Is it true that this is no longer US only? Because that would be ... oh God that will be crazy.

I've had MT 4 (the open source one) installed a couple of months back. I played with it but I'm not particularly happy about the wait times every time I publish a post. I do suppose I can get used to it - and the templating system seems simple enough, but like Tyme said I don't see any use for it in the near future. I either blog, or I do sites. No multi user blogs for me.

Nobody here's got experience with Symphony? =(

I wonder how they do that with straight faces. I'd be cracking up by now.

Thanks for the link Alan, I'm checking it out now. Anybody else has insights into Wordpress's failings at a CMS?

Have you heard of Mint, Gnorb? Might be handy.

Which would be sad, really, because if that happens then Twitter will be the next Friendster - a textbook failure studied in Universities.

But I can say this isn't limited only to business. Anybody heard of 'pride comes before a fall'? You can see this kind of 'reach the top, become complacent, fall' kind of pattern happen almost everywhere - particularly in sports. It takes a very mature, special athlete (or administration) to keep regarding every new competition as a newbie and to fight to regain the crown. Only the very great do that - most are one hit wonders.

Headline aggregator, perhaps?

It's funny that this discussion's turned up - I've been planning to launch a site soon with a couple of Novelr's community members and people've been telling me just how damned awesome Wordpress is for any thing text-related I'd like to do.

I was swayed by them ... until I read this.

Is Wordpress really that horrible for site (and not blog) creation? If it really sucks that hard, what other CMS should I use? I know Tyme's probably going to say EE, but I was thinking Symphony.

Netvibes. And I know it's cheating, considering how all the feeds of the blogs I read and Chawlk are in there ... but yeah. Netvibes.

One last thing, Scrivs. Is it possible to have an easy way to head back to Chawlk from each of the sites? Say a link above the fold. Coz I only subscribe to a few sites, and I head back to Chawlk constantly to jump to another one.

I sometimes wonder why intelligent people go there.

Okay, after reading Gnorb's reply ... I need an 80gig iPod classic. *winks*

I need at least a 4 gig for my next iPod. I download music by the album, and my iTunes is starting to seriously overflow ...

I agree with Cooper. With phones you have no choice but to ignore, because you're literally always available for a chat, or a checkup, or a reminder to wash you underwear! by a parent. I turn my phone off when I'm doing important stuff - to me that's like withdrawing from a corridor where anyone can grab you and chat you up. It isn't rude - it's necessary for my sanity.

Tyme, the article does bring up a lot more than just parent-kid interaction, though. I for one feel the pinch when I SMS a significant other and she doesn't reply ... you expect a reply, so the phone becomes like a black hole on your table - you want it to beep, but it doesn't, you want it to beep, but it doesn't, you want it to ...

You get the idea.

I own a first gen Shuffle, bought back when my computer was a Pentium 2 and had a max of 4 gigs of space. (sad, yeah I know).

Four years on, I think a nano is due. Or perhaps a touch. Hrmm ....

Wow. Sweet rig, Oli. Sweeter still with that Guinness cup placed alongside.

@publicenergy: do you have a review of the Ricoh? It looks very interesting, and if it's half as fun as you say it is I'm all up for it.

My iPod. It's brilliant when I'm doing the laundry or on a long road trip - nothing like a dose of my favorite music to whittle away the hours.

I think what's significant this time around is that we realize what's going on. We can do things to change what's happening, however, I don't think we can fix it. Maybe slow down the climate change or at least make it not as bad as it could be.

The scary thing is that by slowing it down we might actually speed something else up. Or freeze some other vital environmental cycle. Or wipe out all the butterflies in Australia. Or something along that lines. I've just realize this can be a really fascinating line of work. Very exciting, because you don't know what's going to happen next.

Why don't we experiment with climate change on mars before we screw up our own house?

I can just imagine the headlines, Ozone: Rabbit Overpopulation Threatens Climate On Mars.

Hey, even Time launched a 'Global Warming' issue not too long ago. It's very easy to vilify deniers - all the conventional wisdom in the world points towards the big, bad threat of climate change.

The problem I have with global warming studies is that they never tell us enough. It's like exploring the globe, blind folded, on a lawn mower. And this study is no different: count the number of 'probably's and see 'think they know the answer'. The simple underlying counter-argument to global warming is that we just don't know. We are simply not able to pinpoint the causality of a climate phenomenon because there are too many factors involved. It might be part of a cycle. It might not be part of a cycle. The scary thing is stopping said cycle, and then starting another, more violent one.

Mother nature is quite the fickle beast.

Urgh.

Same with Scrivs. I closed the login page the instant it appeared. =(

I was actually thinking of a probability formula like 12P2, but then you up and solved it. You should be sleeping, Scrivs. ;P

Dig Killer?

Yep. Maybe not for everyone, but definitely for me. I'm in love (thankyewNils).

After reading a ton of things about this, I personally don't believe "global warming" and "climate change," things that have come and gone since the dawn of time, are a problem

@Lelia: I, too, do not believe in Global Warming. At the moment there are two conflicting pools of evidence in the scientific community: and I have to go with the one against - there just doesn't seem to enough evidence to support the Global Warming theory. Like you, I did not want to raise that issue in this note.

But I have to say here that I think the idea is a good one. It raises awareness about saving the environment: and that doesn't mean just Global Warming, it means pollution and saving life and wildlife conservation. As a message I think Global Hour works. It makes people uncomfortable, and therefore it makes them think.

@lelia: great find. I was thinking of a few other arguments against Earth Hour while reading the website - like the time without electricity can be put to better use to help the environment, but in the end I decided making arguments like this wasn't teaching people anything. I suppose the surest way to get a message across is to make people uncomfortable, and boy can we get uncomfortable without electricity.

@lasha:

being green, saving energy, and feeling good while doing it.

I doubt some residents of Sydney felt good about doing it. No electricity means no a lot of things. I can't imagine one earth hour happening in my country - the outcry will be united and deafening, and I can already imagine people whipping out laptops to while away the time.

What a thought!

I haven't been in notes for a bit, so I apologize for not seeing this thread.

It's a remarkable idea. I admit the act of switching off lights for an hour isn't very practical in saving energy, but as a message it works.

The organizers must be applauded for their creativity. I salute them.

TheNextFailure.inc

It will never work. With such huge differences in corporate structure and culture they'll be having a hell of a time trying to get everything working together. By the time they do that Google will be even further ahead.

I remember reading a story about Michael Dell during the HP-Compaq merger. Everyone was pressuring him to do a merger like HP, but he stayed fast and no. For a few months HP-Compaq beat Dell, but then the merging started taking its toll, and Dell soared ahead.

Dell is still ahead, last I checked. Michael laughed all the way to the bank.

Who benefits here? Sergey-Brin-Larry-Page-Jobs.

And you go through all this fuss because the ultimate aim from a standards aspect is to remove all formatting-related garbage from mark-up, using meaningful (semantic) tags so that any user-agent can understand the full meaning/weighting of the text and can decide how to interpret that; be that rendering to screen, synthesising it to speech or spidering into a search-engine's database.

Got it. Points to you, Oli.

By using the "strong" tag you can then use CSS to declare exactly how you want it to look.

But ... I can use CSS to define the bold tag too, right?!