Newsbites

The Donald Blog

DONALD TRUMP is blogging, and although it may appear that many of his musings fill no more than two sentences, he's actually filling the frame with some thoughtful ideas. Will the day come for the A-List of Irish business to enhance the realm of Irishblogs? And if they jump into the space, will they entertain comments and trackbacks? For the moment, the top celeb among Irish bloggers is senior civil servant Brendan Tuohy. But his blog is more a Wicklow travelogue than a discussion of tough topics. And the updates stopped in mid-June.

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Brendan Tuohy's blog is at http://spaces.msn.com/members/SliabhLuachra/

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Counting sheep

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Prada suit, Gucci shoes, Dior sunglasses and D+G tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?"

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: "Sure. Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulae.

He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturised HP LaserJet printer, turns to the shepherd and says: "You have exactly 1,586 sheep".

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep," says the shepherd.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man:

"Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says: "Okay, why not?".

"You're a consultant," says the shepherd.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie. "But how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required," answers the shepherd. "You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked, and you know f**k-all about my business.

"Now give me back my dog."

[Thanks Ian and Christina]

Father of internet gone nano

Vint Cerf, considered to be the "father of the internet" has "been thinking about reprogramming (his wife) Sigrid's speech processor so that it can take in VOIP [voice over IP], which would come in as electronic signals transduced into neural signals, bypassing the audio component (of her cochlear implant) entirely." Cerf think the future lies in nanotechnology. "I'm excited about the potential of quantum computing as well. We know that a small bit of brain tissue does a lot of processing in parallel, and it doesn't need transistors. But sometimes you don't need to emulate nature: planes don't flap their wings, though the shape is taken from nature."

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via IEEE Spectrum
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What makes an A-Lister

One of the INBITE presentations will mention the "A List" of news feeds. This list includes people who are normally cited for their expertise by leading publications. They enjoy their status in this elusive "A-List" partly because they occupt a transdiscursive position. They initiate discursive practices. They don't merely write about what has appeared in some other electronic space.You would expect an A-List blogger to produce business inteligence that helps a smal business compete effectively on a global scale.