Category Archives: Technology

Why the steam media still don’t ‘get’ Wikipedia

Posted on by

Insightful essay by David Weinberger. Excerpt:

The media literally can’t hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media — amplifying our general cultural assumptions — have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance : If you claim to know X, then you’ve also been claiming that you’re right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree). The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures.

Nikon plans to abandon film cameras

Posted on by

Sign of the times. According to today’s New York Times,

The Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, said Thursday that it would stop making most of its film cameras and lenses in order to focus on digital cameras.

The company, based in Tokyo, is the latest to join an industrywide shift toward digital photography, which has exploded in popularity. Rivals like Kodak and Canon have already shifted most of their camera production into digital products.

Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models “one by one,” though it refused to specify when.

A company spokesman said Nikon made the decision because sales of film cameras have plunged. In the most recent fiscal year ended March 2005, Nikon said that film camera bodies accounted for 3 percent of the 180 billion yen ($1.5 billion) in sales at the company’s camera and imaging division. That is down from 16 percent the previous year.

By contrast, sales of digital cameras have soared, the company said, jumping to 75 percent of total sales in the year ended March 2005, from 47 percent three years earlier. Scanners and other products account for the remainder of the division’s sales.

“The market for film cameras has been shrinking dramatically,” the company spokesman, Akira Abe, said. “Digital cameras have become the norm.”

So my lovely old Nikon F3 is destined to become a valuable antique? Maybe, maybe not. From another part of the CES forest, David Pogue (also of the NYT) reports:

In one CES panel, an analyst from InfoTrends noted that cameraphones now outnumber non-cameraphones. She also noted that 78% of under-18-year-olds take a cameraphone picture at least once a week.

Another InfoTrends analyst reported, surprisingly, that digital camera sales have actually peaked, and has [sic] declined since last year. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are feeling the pain: Konica Minolta has exited the Canadian market, Sony and Olympus have cut camera production and workforces, and the Kyocera/Yashica/Contax corporation has exited the digital camera market entirely.

Quote of the day

Posted on by

We think the internet isn’t a web page or a destination for your PC any more. It’s an infrastructure and a delivery vehicle for communications and experiences in entertainment. It’s about ease of use and open platforms that connect the internet to any device that you will be manufacturing.

Terry Semel, Yahoo Chairman, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, January 5, 2006. (Reported in Financial Times January 7 2005.)

Holes in the Net?

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

Here’s a thought to ponder on a cold January morning: the internet is broken. Not in the sense that emails are not getting through or web pages are refusing to load, but that the system’s architecture is no longer adequate for the pressures to which it is now being subjected…

IPTV

Posted on by

John Markoff, reporting from CES for the New York Times…

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 6 – What would a world with television coming through the Internet be like?

Instead of tuning into programs preset and determined by the broadcast network or cable or satellite TV provider, viewers would be able to search the Internet and choose from hundreds of thousands of programs sent to them from high-speed connections.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show here this week, a future dominated by Internet Protocol TV, or IPTV, seemed possible, maybe even inevitable.

Giants like Yahoo and Google turned their attentions to offering new Internet programming. Hardware companies like Intel introduced chips and platforms that can push videos sent via an Internet connection to living room screens. And Microsoft looked for alliances that would allow its software to dominate living rooms as well as the home office.

“At one level it’s clear that the dam has broken,” said Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel. “There’s an inevitable move to use the Internet as a distribution medium, and that’s not going to stop.”

The rapid emergence of the consumer electronics and computer companies as Internet video providers is certain to challenge the control of the cable, telephone and satellite companies, which seek to dominate the distribution of digital content to the home. Competition has intensified as more consumers have upgraded to digital televisions.
Indeed, the easy availability of on-demand content over the Internet is certain to accelerate consumer expectations that they will have more control over digital video content, both to watch programs when they want as well as to move video programs to different types of displays in different rooms of the home.

“Appointment-based television is dead,” said William Randolph Hearst III, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “The cable industry is really in danger of becoming commoditized.”

A neat trick

Posted on by

If you highlight a word in Text Edit or Microsoft Word running on a Mac and then drag-and-drop it onto the Safari icon in the dock, a new browser window will open with the results of a Google search on the word. Neat.

Thanks to Pete for the hint.

CCD inventors get recognition — finally

Posted on by

The US National Academy of Engineering has awarded the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, described by the New York Times as “the engineering equivalent of a Nobel award” to two former Bell Laboratories researchers who invented the imaging microchip or Charge Coupled Device — the chip at the heart of digital cameras and camcorders. The device converts light particles, or photons, into packets of electrical charges that are shifted in rows to the edge of the chip for scanning. Willard Boyle, 81, and George Smith, 75, invented the CCD in 1969 in an hour’s brainstorming session in the good old days when Bell Labs was one of the intellectual powerhouses of the world.

What is it with the Wikipedia?

Posted on by

Quentin had a link to some thoughtful musing by Bill Thompson about the current Wikipedia controversies. His conclusion:

I use the Wikipedia a lot. It’s a good starting point for serious research, but I’d never accept something that I read there without checking. If the fuss over Siegenthaler, Stoltenberg and Curry means that other readers do the same then it will have been worthwhile. We shouldn’t dismiss the Wikipedia, but we shouldn’t venerate it either.

Totally Random

Posted on by

Here’s something to cheer you up — the transcript of a Fox News interview with the Leader of the Free World on the subject of his iPod. The interview begins with Brit Hume asking the Prez what’s on his device now:

Bush : Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson, Alejandro, Alison Krauss, the Angels, the Archies, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Dan McLean. Remember him?
Hume: Don McLean.
Bush: I mean, Don McLean.
Hume: Does “American Pie,” right?
Bush: Great song.
Hume: Yes, yes, great song.
Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play?
Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I’ve got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.
Hume: Shuffle.
Bush: It looks like.
Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.
Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.
Hume: Called the Shuffle.
Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.
Hume: So you — it plays . . .
Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on.
Hume: So it plays them in a random order.
Bush: Yes.
Hume: So you don’t know what you’re going to going to get.
Bush: No.
Hume: But you know —
Bush: And if you don’t like it, you have got your little advance button. It’s pretty high-tech stuff.
Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn’t it?
Bush: Oh?
Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that’s in your head — gone.
Bush: . . . it’s a bad day, just say, get out of here.
Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . .
Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter )
Hume: Yes, right.

Footnote: American Pie is the song containing the line “Drove the Chevvy to the levee but the levee was dry”? Who said irony was dead.