Well, according to the Daily Telegraph scientists have decided dogs are more intelligent than cats because their brains have grown faster through evolution. The theory is dogs have to be clever to cope with the complex interactions that come from being a sociable animal. Cats being solitary creatures don't need so much brain power.
On this basis, presumably, the bloke who spends his time in the pub being sociable has a bigger brain than the anti-social scientist whose life is spent in the lab or library doing research...
Private Alpha Invites Going Out Today
23 November 2010
Hello Everyone,
Today we’re releasing the first set of invites for the Diaspora alpha at joindiaspora.com. Every week, we’ll invite more people, starting with our Kickstarter backers, and then moving through our mailing list. By taking these baby steps, we’ll be able to quickly identify performance problems and iterate on features as quickly as possible.
We are proud of where Diaspora is right now. In less than five months, we’ve gone from nothing to a great starting point from which the community can keep working. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how people can share in a private way, and still do all the things people love to do on social networks. We hope you’ll find it fun to use and a great way to keep in touch with all the people in your life.
Diaspora lets you create “aspects,” which are personal lists that let you group people according to the roles they play in your life. We think that aspects are a simple, straightforward, lightweight way to make it really clear who is receiving your posts and who you are receiving posts from. It isn’t perfect, but the best way to improve is to get it into your hands and listen closely to your response.
We know some things could be better. To name a few:
Continuing to focus on security.
When we released our initial code, we got some great feedback on better ways to do Rails security. Luckily, it was easy for us to take this feedback and quickly secure the application. We look forward to more such feedback with this release.More extensibility and third-party client APIs.
Third-party clients are a vital part of the social media landscape. We have initial support for connections with some services, but there’s more to do. It’s important for users to be able to use a wide variety of clients and platforms to share on Diaspora.Better documentation.
Our community has made great strides in creating documentation to make it easy for anyone to get started with Diaspora. As in most open-source projects, though, there is a lot more to do.Easier upgrade path.
Diaspora has been in constant flux since we did our first code release, and we salute those who have been trying to keep their servers up-to-date. We hope to make this easier going forward.Cleaner code.
Our number one goal has been releasing something that works. Sometimes that means making a bit of a mess. Now that we have working features, we can double down on making the code more concise and straightforward, and improving our test suite.If you haven’t yet signed up to get an invite, head over to joindiaspora.com and do so! If you remember giving us your email sometime in the past, you can be sure that you will receive an invite soon.
Our work is nowhere close to done. To us, that is the best part. There are always more things to improve, more tricks to learn, and more awesome features to add.
See you on Diaspora,
Maxwell, Raphael, Daniel and Ilya
If you are a Ruby or JavaScript hacker, Diaspora wants you. We are building a passionate community of developers to keep making Diaspora more awesome. If you enjoy building and breaking the next generation of social tools, we’d love your contributions. http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
If you’d like to set up a Diaspora server (“pod”) of your own, you can see instructions at our wiki.
Google moves into fashion Unlikely but true. Also in this week's Technofile I look at Facebook Messages; pirated software in the CIA drones being used in Pakistan and Afghanistan; two new tablet computers, one cleverly designed from Dell the other a bargain from Dixons; a lecturer with a camera in the back of his head and, finally, my addiction to an online cricket game.
Click the link under the picture to read the full article in the Caledonian Mercury
According to this article from Cnet (click on the link under the picture for the full article) Dell will introduce its hybrid tablet computer Duo as early as November 23. It certainly looks as if it's a very neat piece of design work flipping from touch screen slate to keyboard-driven netbook.
It'll probably be better for work than an iPad, running Windows 7 and all its business apps as well as Flash. Whether it'll be as good for entertainment as the iPad remains to be seen. PC software is slow in comparison to Apple's iOS.
Perhaps the ideal will be something along the lines of this Dell, but running a faster Linux-based operating system such as Jolicloud [http://www.jolicloud.com/ ] which is due to be at the heart of some very fast new devices coming soon.
This is the first of what I hope will be a weekly column for the Caledonian Mercury online newspaper. It looks at the corporate data fight between Google and Facebook, the latest high-speed search function, the imminent launch of “cloudbooks”, a new social browser, why companies are watching your Facebook status, how using the wrong browser could make buying a car more expensive and the tyranny of autocorrect.
I'm not quite sure how this would work in practice, but it's an amazing concept - replace street lights with trees that glow in the dark. "A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow," says the inhabitat article. I'm not sure how you "place" nanoparticles in leaves, but where there's a will there's a way.
Click on the picture or the inhabitat link to read the story
At the moment if you live outside the UK you have to employ tricks of dubious legality to watch the Beeb's on-demand iPlayer service. According to this story on Engadget soon you won't have to. If you click on the link above you'll see the full story, but apparently the BBC hasn't decided whether you'll have to pay or watch ads in order to use the service. Remember, you'd have to pay a licence fee for the privilege of doing this in Britain.
Meanwhile, if you can't wait to use iPlayer, 4oD or any of the other British services that allow you to catch up with your favourite programmes you could try clicking this link: http://bit.ly/bZQ6ys . It'll take you to Expat Shield, a free service that makes it appear you are accessing the internet from the UK.
So you want to buy an iPad for Christmas. But is there something better and cheaper on the horizon. Click on the Caledonian Mercury link above to see what I think...
