Thursday, 17 January 2002

Though neither company will confirm that the iPod uses Toshiba's drive, representatives of both companies acknowledge Toshiba is the only one producing a 5GB drive small enough to fit in Apple's music player.

Gigabytes of storage would also allow handheld devices to contain video files, for example. While she can't name customers, Dalphy says Toshiba is working with a number of companies -- many of them startups -- on a variety of product ideas that could use Toshiba's tiny drives.

"If they do make it to market, they will change the way we do things," she says of the unannounced projects in development. Dalphy expects products should start appearing between the middle and the end of 2002, or possibly earlier.

Wednesday, 16 January 2002

Nick Park has set into production 12 exciting new Wallace and Gromit films all to be released later this year, free of charge with the help of the internet. Each film features one of Wallace's unique new inventions and runs for approximately 1 minute.

For the last year [Park] has been working on the script for a new Wallace and Gromit film, The Great Vegetable Plot, which is due to be released in a couple of years.

Tuesday, 15 January 2002

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Monday, 14 January 2002

Initially, Ive and his hand-picked team tried simply sticking the guts of the computer into the space behind the flat screen. But hard discs, CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs run slower when vertical than when horizontal. The processor-heat output demanded a fan, which would be noisy and, in a "flat PC", perhaps just inches from your face. And the screen would lose its mobility: no tilt and swivel for that one-piece.

[Jobs] told him to think again about the pieces he was trying to fit together. "Each should be true to itself," he said. That meant the disc drives being horizontal, and the flat screen retaining its mobility. "We had to liberate the display, explode it, disconnect it from the CPU," says Ive now.

The new shape emerged shortly afterwards: a dome is the only shape that lets the screen swivel without having "preferred" positions, maximises stability and offers lots of horizontal space.

Sunday, 13 January 2002

...in communities like Cos Cob ... the idea of the first job is changing. Dennis Tournas, who bought the franchise in 1983, prefers not to hire high school students anymore. Unlike in my day, when we teenagers were all paragons of dependability, kids these days hog the phone and cancel shifts at the last minute. But then, they aren't exactly begging to bag doughnuts, anyway. When the manager of the store, Jose Illescas, shows me a sheaf of applications, none are from local teenagers.

So who's making the coffee? Immigrants. Every single worker at the Cos Cob Dunkin' Donuts, from the owners, who were born in Greece, to the manager (Guatemala), to the most senior baker (Brazil) and the longest-serving counter help (Taiwan), is an immigrant.

In my first Dunkin' Donuts tour ... I learned that in the workplace, not wanting to do something -- say, frosting chocolate doughnuts -- just doesn't matter. You have to do it, so there's no use whining. I learned how much smoother the day goes when people act with civility; a shift filled with pleases and thank-yous is better than one lacking in such grace notes.

C.J.: Don't you have work to do?
Toby: I have a lot of work to do.
C.J.: And?
Toby: You can't rush these things.
-- "H.Con 172", The West Wing

With the rise of search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want [Google], the need for a highly specific domain name -- one that a casual Web user would be able to guess -- has practically disappeared.

What's happening here is the separation of the domain-name database from the real-world lookup. This is a Good Thing.