Friday, October 21, 2005

Pell-mell to Hell

I just checked Google News before heading to bed and was confronted with this:

Cutting the rainforest to build computers

It reminded me of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail by Jared Diamond.

Will we destroy the biosphere to the point where it can't sustain us before we learn to appreciate the consequences of our actions?

I fear we will.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Macintosh: Apple and O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf team up

Well, Apple has teamed with the O'Reilly folks to offer a Safari-style subscription service for searching and reading 1000 Mac-related books online.

Brad Shuler told me about nine months ago he thought such 'online bookshelves' were the wave of the future. I mostly dismissed the idea at the time, probably because I like reading a physical book and find I absorb the material better that way. I think I was wrong. Given the high cost of printing and the speed at which the software market is changing, I think this is the wave of the future, even if I don't want it to be.