Not That They're Desperate or Anything

In what may be an unprecedented decision, Microsoft said Thursday that it plans to lower the retail prices for several flavors of Windows Vista.

For those in the U.S., Microsoft is cutting prices only on the higher-end versions of Vista, and only for the upgrade version used to move from an earlier copy of Vista. The suggested price for Vista Ultimate drops to $219 from $299, while Home Premium falls to $129, from $159.

A dog is still a dog, even it costs less.

All A-twitter about Twitter

Like many, I've been following Twitter with interest, if a certain bemusement: just what is the attraction of knowing that your mates are drinking a cup of coffee or taking the dog for a walk?

This post provides perhaps the best explanations so far as to why Twitter is important:

You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz’s point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs. But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload. I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.

But will I use it? Not yet, although at some point I may dip a cyber-toe, as I have with LinkedIn: not because I need it, but because these social networks are indisputably an interesting trend.

It's a Dog's Life

One of the fascinating things that I learned when I was writing Digital Code of Life is that many diseases - such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, certain kinds of cancers and neurodegenerative disorders - are not commonly found in the great apes. As I put it then:

In a sense, the human genome has evolved certain advantageous characteristics so quickly that it has not been debugged properly. The major diseases afflicting humans are the outstanding faulty modules in genomic software that Nature was unable to fix in the time since humans evolved as a species.

Another extraordinary fact is that dogs are even more susceptible to these same diseases than humans are, and for the same reason: the domestic breeds have arisen so recently, and from limited populations through inbreeding. But if dogs are like us, only more so, then they also hold out the hope that by investigating the root causes of their afflictions we might be able to understand our own better.

I see that further steps in this direction are now being taken:

Melbourne researchers are examining the DNA of dogs in a research project aiming at determining the genetic causes of common pet diseases – and to provide a model for combating diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis in humans.