Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

The Whole Earth Review, a completely wonderful magazine that's been one of my biggest influences, is running low on cash, and needs to raise funds to publish issue 111 - a special issue on the Singularity. And it contains articles by people we all know - including autopope, Cory Doctorow and Vernor Vinge.

As a sampler for why you should help fund this issue - read this PDF of Cory's excellent piece...

[Pass this message around - but do check the site first to make sure that they haven't raised the money already. Of course, they're a worthy place to give money anyway!]

One of the perils of a big conference is the amount of paperwork that you end up with. Not just the usual piles of presentation printouts and press releases, but also the vast amount of advertising bumpf you're handed as you walk around the exhibition stands.

TechEd 2003 was a little different. There was one piece of advertising that stood out, head and shoulders above the competition. It wasn't a big piece, and it wasn't something that should have appealed to more than a small number of mobile application developers: a flyer for Microsoft's Windows Powered Smartphone Developer Kit.

Cut to look like a picture of the Compal device that MS uses as a test device in the kit, it was a largish piece of paper that opened up to tell developers where they could order the kit, and what marketing support would be offered for their applications:



However, turn it over, and you'd see a disclaimer:



Now, that was funny...

(Or else we'd just seen too many advertising flyers already...)