In response to my comments on the CER EVD article there’s a new post on the CER IT blog and a corresponding one on Gareth’s personal site in which he defends the original post. Good for him. He also misinterprets what I wrote. In the spirit of a blogging conversation I respond below.

The IT News blog from the China Economic Review has an entry about EVD. The entry is (at best) poorly researched. I’d expect a little more quality control from CER.

Q: What’s the answer to life the universe and everything?
A: 42

More nuggets from Seth Godin

SGI has filed for chapter 11 Not unexpected. Surprising it took so long to take some action… Back in the days when I could get my hands on a SGI machine they were a joy to program. IRIX is a great OS - it was one of the few that actually met the POSIX specs for threads. Great APIs. I wish they would just sell or give away IRIX for the PC x86 platform. Lots of people with fond memories of SGI workstations from the past would glady install IRIX in favor of Linux I think. 

Guy Kawasaki’s latest top ten list is for engineers. Ouch! 

Lots of buzz and fuss on the net generated from this article by Barry Fox on Philips’ patent application to disable the TV remote control via flags in the broadcast stream. Good ol’ Bazza. If you’ve got a DVD player you’ve probably already experienced this. Try fast-forwarding through the copyright notice that plays when the DVD is inserted. On lots of discs you can’t. This is part of the DVD spec. - the disc tells the player to ignore the FFwd command. Of course, the player can ignore the request - just as some players ignore…

China Unicom is launching a mobile email service called Redberry. 

Dilbert on manufacturing overseas

Prospect has an article by Mark Kitto, founder of “that’s shanghai”, telling how he was squished by the powers that be.