I’m not into geotagging, but if I were this would be useful. The Nikon Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS unit which enables the coordinates of each image to be recorded. An Ethernet port built into the camera then lets you connect it to the web and log your picture locations on a Nikon image map service — and, eventually no doubt, on Wikipedia and Google Earth.
Forty years ago today, Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory gave the first public presentation of his idea for a packet-switched network. The strange thing is that he and Paul Baran of RAND independently came up with the concept. Baran got to it earlier but mothballed the idea because of AT&T’s hostility. So when Bob Taylor’s ARPA-funded researchers began working on the design of the ARPAnet they knew nothing about Baran’s earlier work, and only learned about it from Donald Davies. The full story, if you’re interested, is told in my book.
I was privileged to know Donald towards the end of his life — he was the External Assessor for the Open University course You, your computer and the Net which Martin Weller, Gary Alexander and I created in the late 1990s. He was exquisitely polite, modest, reserved and ferociously clever. In the last year of his life, just for amusement, he wrote a simulator (in Visual Basic, if you please) of the German Enigma machine which Bletchley Park cracked during World War 2.
Michael has found a timeline of memes. Hooray! Now, instead of having to embark on long explanations to sceptical interrogators, I can simply point them to it.
What’s a meme? Wikipedia says the term “denotes any learned feeling, thought or behavior. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a sociological ‘culture’ in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus”.
I prefer to say that a meme is an infectious idea.
Snapped by Quentin in Detroit airport. Now if they had one of our CODA systems…
Nobody really knows, but here is an interesting post on the Official Google Blog…
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer…
Answer: probably yes. I’ve long suspected that anyway. Now comes this interesting report from an Austrian online news site…
According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.
This has been confirmed to heise online by a number of the parties present at the meeting. Skype declined to give a detailed response to specific enquiries from heise online as to whether Skype contains a back door and whether specific clients allowing access to a system or a specific key for decrypting data streams exist. The response from the eBay subsidiary’s press spokesman was brief, “Skype does not comment on media speculation. Skype has no further comment at this time.” There have been rumours of the existence of a special listening device which Skype is reported to offer for sale to interested states.
There has long been speculation that Skype may contain a back door. Because the vendor has not revealed details of its proprietary Skype protocol or of how the client works, questions as to what else Skype is capable of and what risks are involved in deploying it in an enterprise environment remain open.
Last week, Austrian broadcaster ORF, citing minutes from the meeting, reported that the Austrian police are able to listen in on Skype connections. Interior ministry spokesman Rudolf Gollia declined to provide heise online with a comment on the matter. He did, however, offer general comments on the meeting, which were, however, contradicted by other attendees…
I use Skype quite a lot and find it very useful for family stuff etc. But I wouldn’t use it for anything that was commercially sensitive.
Skype would be able to charge quite a hefty fee to governments for this, er, feature.
Also, I wonder how this latest speculation squares with an earlier report that I logged claiming the German police were unable to crack Skype encryption. Perhaps the Germans weren’t willing to pay Skype the required fee for entry to the back door?
Charles Arthur has a nice post on the effect that Lotus Notes has on otherwise normal people.
I’ve just come across a new (to me) site: I Hate Lotus Notes which, um, does pretty much what it says on the tin.
What’s always interesting though is that pro-Notes people who will leap into these pits of hating and try, vainly, to tell people that the fact they’re hating Notes is because (1) they haven’t had enough training (2) it’s not an email program, it’s an application development platform (3) they’re using an old version – the latest version, v. [What you’re using 2] solves all those problems (4) it’s better than Outlook, anyway (5) all of the above.
I think it’s still telling that Notes 6.5.5, which dates from December 2005, still doesn’t support the scroll wheel on the mouse on OSX – which has done so from its start, a mere four and a half years earlier.
But you have to admire the determination of the pro-Notes brigade. They’re like people defending the right to smoke in crowded spaces: everyone else is wrong, it’s just them who can see the right way to run the world.
I’ve seen both sides recently. My university Faculty has merged with another one which long ago surrendered its IT to a team of Lotus Notes True Believers. To me, the product seems so dated and kludgy: it’s the epitome of 1980s, DOS-inspired software. And yet the True Believers are deeply attached to it in the way that Jehovah’s Witnesses are to the Watchtower. They are unfailingly courteous and willing as they patiently explain that Notes can be made to do virtually anything you want; but when one explains that a teaspoon can also be used to dig one’s garden they look blank: they don’t get it.
One of the comments on Charles’s post gets it right: Notes is “the marmite of the IT world”.
Er, don’t get me started on Marmite.
And so they should. The PC is being commoditized. This from today’s New York Times.
SAN FRANCISCO — The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news.
In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because their low price could threaten PC makers’ already thin profit margins.
The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as little as $300.
The companies that pioneered the category were small too, like Asus and Everex, both of Taiwan…
What’s strange is that anyone should be surprised by this. It’s been obvious for years that this is what would happen. Outside of the luxury markets, a technology is always commoditized if there’s sufficient demand for what it offers or provides.
Hmmm… I’d like to try one of these…
A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.
Viewers can explore a panorama in detail when it is displayed on a computer screen, clicking on any part of the image and then zooming in for crisp close-ups. You can move from an overall shot of the forest, for instance, to an image of one small moth resting on the side of a single tree trunk.
Examples here. They’re claiming a price under $500 for the production model. It’ll sell.
From Technology Review…
Last week, Kodak launched the first ever 50-megapixel camera sensor. While such high resolution goes beyond the needs of most consumers, for professional photographers the new sensor will enable photographs to be taken at an unprecedented level of detail.
For example, in a picture taken of a field one-and-a-half miles across, the sensor would make it possible for a viewer to detect an object measuring just one foot across.
This sort of resolution is only really essential for and targeted at high-end professional photography, in which high-quality images often need to be blown up large. But it could also be useful for some other applications, such as aerial photography as used for services like Google Earth. “The ability to have more pixels lets the plane fly higher, so you don’t need as many pictures,” says Mike DeLuca, marketing manager for Kodak’s Image Sensor Solutions, based in Rochester, NY.
The sensor, which produces an array of 8,176-by-6,132 pixels, further closes the gap between traditional film and digital photography. “We’re really close to how film was operated,” DeLuca says. “It’s very close.” Now, he says, it’s just a matter of the photographer’s personal preference.
I want one! But just think of the RAM, storage and processing power we’ll need downstream of such a sensor.
UPDATE: Richard Earney emailed to say that Phase One have released a 60 megapixel 645 back for medium-format cameras.
Wonder who’ll be first to 100 MP?