Category Archives: Technology

Wolfram Alpha vs Google

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At last, some data. David Talbot got a login id from Wolfram and ran some comparative tests. For example:

SEARCH TERM: 10 pounds kilograms

WOLFRAM ALPHA: The site informed me that it interpreted my search term as an effort to multiply "10 pounds" by "1 kilogram" and gave me this result: 4.536 kg2 (kilograms squared) or 22.05 lb2 (pounds squared).

GOOGLE: Google gave me links to various metric conversion sites.

Tentative conclusion: the semantic web is still a long way off. The problem of search is only about 5% solved. Google accounts for 3% of that. Mr Talbot’s experiments suggest that Wolfram isn’t going to move it much beyond 6%. Still, it’s progress. And Google could do with some competition,

Wolfram Alpha hype machine gathers speed

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Well, well. “An invention that could change the internet for ever” is how the guy in the Indie describes it.

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

All based on second-hand ‘shock and awe’ quotes, I note. It’s conceivable, of course, that there’s something in it. For one thing, Jonathan Zittrain (who is no fool) seems to take it seriously — see his respectful introduction to Dr Wolfram’s lecture at Harvard Law.

Encarta RIP — the NYT’s belated obit

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This is odd — weeks after Microsoft announced that it was abandoning Encarta, the NYT publishes a piece by Randall Stross.

IN 1985, when Microsoft was turned down by Britannica, the conventional wisdom in the encyclopedia business held that a sales force that knocked on doors was indispensable, that encyclopedias were “sold, not bought.” Encarta showed that with a low-enough price — it was selling for $99 when Britannica introduced its own CD-ROM encyclopedia in 1994 for $995 — it could become the best-selling encyclopedia.

But the triumph was short-lived. Microsoft soon learned that the public would no longer pay for information once it was available free. Other information businesses, of course, are now confronting the same fact, but without the Windows and Office franchises to fall back upon.

Randall Stross is a good reporter, so my hunch is that this is a piece that’s been lying on the shelf for a while until a quiet news day arrived.

How Google does it

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If you came on US Patent #7508978 you might stifle a yawn. Certainly you’d never suspect that it might be a design for radically changing our communications environment. Here’s what the Abstract says:

Detection of grooves in scanned images

A system and method locate a central groove in a document such as a book, magazine, or catalog. In one implementation, scores are generated for points in a three-dimensional image that defines a surface of the document. The scores quantify a likelihood that a particular point is in the groove. The groove is then detected based on the scores. For example, lines may be fitted through the points and a value calculated for the lines based on the scores. The line corresponding to the highest calculated value may be selected as the line that defines the groove.

Eh? And yet it turns out that this is the basis for Google’s amazingly efficient book-scanning technology.
In a lovely blog post, Maureen Clements explains how:

Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitize books en masse. For all those who’ve pondered “How’d They Do That?” you finally have an answer.

LATER: How the Internet Archive scans books. As you can see from the movie, it’s pretty labour-intensive, despite the robotics.

40 years on

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Today, the Open University has added a new album to its iTunesU site to mark the fact that the packet-switched network, like the OU itself, is 40 years old this year. The album is a compilation of interviews we’ve done over the years with various Internet pioneers like Vint Cerf, Don Davies and Ray Tomlinson (the inventor of email). The whole shebang is headed by an overview interview with me. Sufferers from insomnia can find it here.

Coming soon — an Android NetBook?

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From Technology Review.

Skytone, a Chinese manufacturer, has started showing off the first netbook to run Android, an operating system developed by Google that currently runs on just a single device, the G1mobile phone. Using Android makes sense for Skytone because its netbook is minimal (even by netbook standards): it supports 128 megabits of RAM and only up to 4 gigabytes of storage on a flash-based, solid-state disk. And importantly, its central processing unit is an ARM11 chip–the same model found inside the iPhone.

The Web vs the Cloud

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Interesting thought.

The Web was perfectly named. Every point connecting to other points, not always directly, but your requests and data would get there. And even if part of the web were to be destroyed or taken down in some way, then the remainder would exist. Cloud Computing will retain this aspect of the web design as its backbone form of communication. However, the Cloud Computing concept is also perfectly named.

Whereas with the Web we could, from any point on the web, see pretty much everything else, with the Cloud we will not be able to know what’s taking place in the system, just as we cannot see today what exists inside of clouds. They are murky, dense objects that reveal almost no depth at all. In fact, if you’ve ever seen airplanes fly in and out of clouds, you know that once they are a few feet on the inside they’re completely obscured. And it’s the same with Cloud Computing.

We will have access points to access these future Cloud Computing systems, the ones which from all outward appearances will seem like a regular website. However, the evolution of computing power over time has mandated (from a business perspective) that the available data be mined for usable information which can then, in some way, relate to profit — either through better services offered to users, or for marketing and sales revenues through more directly targeted campaigns.

While everything on the outside appears to be as it was before, what’s happening on the inside of the new cloud-computing systems will be completely different. And I have, as of yet, to see a comprehensive analysis of how our privacy, our data security and our online lives will be affected by such a system.

To me, Cloud Computing models offer the greatest possibility for data control–and the abuse of that control–that I’ve ever seen.

Cabinet Office’s IT pushes out 401 tonnes of CO2. No figure for the hot air

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Interesting story in The Register.

Tom Watson Civil Service Minister at the Cabinet Office outlined his department’s efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in a Commons answer yesterday. He said the department last year used “929 000 kWh of electricity at a cost of £61 000 for its IT Services”. This equated to 401 tonnes of CO2. Desktops accounted for 420 000 kWh, printing 195 000kWh and the rest was down to its datacentre. Asked what the department was doing to reduce greenhouse emissions, he reeled out a series of stock measures including reducing the number of printers and replacing them with greener multifunction devices, putting monitors into standby, shutting down PCs after hours using power management kit, offloading redundant kit and “starting to replace existing servers with storage area networking devices that implement storage virtualisation.”

Sounds like a beanfeast for government suppliers — except that at the same time he announced that “the lifecycle of all end user devices has been extended to five years” and “the number of PCs and laptops will be reduced to as close to one per person as possible”. At the same time “thin client technology will be used with low-power consumption CPUs server technology that complies with the recommendations in the Greening Government ICT Strategy.”

Actually, this Parliamentary Answer sets a helpful precedent. It’d be good to see companies as well as public bodies starting to account for their carbon footprints. And even if I were an accountant who’s entirely unmoved about climate change I’d be very interested in the fact that my organisation used nearly a million units of electricity in a year.

Amazon: power – and responsibility

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This morning’s Observer column.

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, his single strategic goal was to “get big quick”. His hunch was that, in online retailing, size and scale would be the ultimate determinants of success. And his vision was never limited to books – they were the obvious starting point, because they are goods that people could buy without having to handle them. But Bezos had much more ambitious plans. He wanted to sell everything that could be sold online. He saw Amazon as potentially the Wal-Mart of the web.

Last week we saw two very different illustrations of how close he has come to achieving his goal…

One tablet per geek

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Michael Arrington wants to build a Web tablet Here’s his mock-up pic.

And this is what he says about it.

I’m tired of waiting – I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.

If all you are doing is running Firefox and Skype, you don’t need a lot of hardware horsepower, which will keep the cost way down.

The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC.

It will also include a custom default home page with large buttons for bookmarked services – news, Meebo/Ebuddy for IM, Google Docs/Zoho for Office, Email, social networks, photo sites, YouTube, etc. Everything that you use every day.

We’re working with a supply chain management company that says the basic machine we’re looking to build can be created for just a few hundred dollars. They need us to write the software modifications to Linux and Firefox (more on that below) and spec the hardware. Then they run with it and can have a few prototypes built within a month…

I don’t have the skills to help him build it. But I’d buy one if it were available. It’s the logical next step on from the NetBook. The experience of the One Laptop Per Child project, however, suggests that designing and building hardware is much more expensive and difficult than people think. I hope I’m wrong.