Caesar Sengupta reaches into his hip pocket and pulls out a PC. About the size of a cigar, it’s a tiny PC. But it’s a PC. If you plug it into an LCD display or a TV, you can run the sort of software you typically run on a personal computer, from word processors and spreadsheets and email to online video.
This is the Asus Chromebit, and according to Sengupta, it will reach the market this summer, priced at less than a hundred dollars. Sengupta is the Google vice president who helps oversee the distribution of Chrome OS, the Google operating system that runs the Chromebit. The device is a bit like the Google Chromecast—the digital stick that plugs into your television and streams video from the internet—but it does more. Google pitches it as something that lets you walk up to any LCD display and instantly transform it into viable computer, whether it’s sitting on a desk in a classroom, mounted on the wall in an office conference room, or hanging above the checkout counter in a retail store or fast food joint. “Think about an internet cafe,” Sengupta says during a gathering at Google’s San Francisco offices. “Think about a school lab.”
IMAGE — This notable two and one-half story brick mansion on a high brick basement was built by J. Thomas Hamlin White, a Christ Church Parish planter about 1854, replacing a two and one-half story wooden house. He left the then existing kitchen building, constructed c. 1812 by the McAlpin family. Tradition says White had the bricks made in Mount Pleasant, where he was half owner of a kiln. During the Civil War, the house was a Confederate hospital. After the war it was headquarters of the notorious Maj. Gen. Daniel Edgar (Dan) Sickles, commander of the Department of the Carolinas during the Federal occupation of the South. Sickles was a member of the Tammany Hall Gang, a New York Congressman, friend of five presidents, and minister to Spain, where he was the rumoured lover of Queen lsabella. The house formerly had a hidden passage with a ladder, from the top floor to the basement. Distinctive architectural features of the house include the Corinthian order, pedimented entrance surround, approached by a high flight of steps and set in a pedimented, projecting pavilion. (Thomas, DYKYC, Jan 12 , 1970.; Stoney, This is Charleston , 25. )
Having all of human knowledge readily available on the internet has convinced people that they know a lot more than they actually do, according to a recent Yale study. For their recently published report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, a pair of psychologists conducted multiple 1000-participant experiments. They found that participants who used the internet to research a subject were more likely to think that they also knew about a second, unrelated topic. Basically, if you look up subject A with the internet, you’re more likely than offline researchers to think you also know about subject B — even if you haven’t actually looked anything up. In general, internet users believed themselves to be brighter and more clever than the other participants in the study.
The federal government’s watchdog agency released a critical report Tuesday on the Library of Congress’s long-standing failures to manage the complex computer systems that are vital to its mission.
The result of a year-long investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the report reveals a work environment lacking central oversight and faults Librarian of Congress James H. Billington for ignoring repeated calls to hire a chief information officer, as required by law.
At the risk of extreme arrogance, I would put the first season of Lost alongside any accomplishment in television drama, including those of the idols who made me want to work in the medium.
Even though I quit the show after its second season — never to watch it again until the series finale — I have never ceased to be fiercely proud, and defensive, of our accomplishments as a writing staff, and those of the show’s creators.
If you are reading this, it might be because you asked me how it all began and I sent you here. Or it might be because — as still happens with depressing regularity — one of the show’s detractors, be that a critic, or, more vexingly, someone who has just created a show and wants to make sure the media realizes that they are above making the mistakes we made (all the while cribbing our best moves) has come out purporting yet again to have some sort “proof” that “the writers of Lost did not know what they were doing.”
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