Intriguing, thought-provoking video about the world for which our kids are (not being) educated.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.
Category Archives: Technology
The Web’s Weakest Link
From Om Malik’s blog…
Yesterday afternoon, I left my apartment, which also doubles as my part time office, in a mad rush, late for a meeting. As the elevator descended, the lights suddenly went out, and for a minute or two (it seemed like an eternity) I was suspended in a dark metal box. And then survival skills took over, as I pressed the emergency button.
And while on the phone, the lights came back on, and the elevator descended, and I rushed to my meeting, silently cursing the building owners for having shoddy infrastructure. It was only later in the day, I learned of massive power outages caused by snafus with at PG&E, our local power company. This resulted in a transformer blowing up, and causing even more disruptions, especially at 365 Main, one of the large co-lo/data center facilities situated in the SOMA area of San Francisco.
This resulted in massive outages at some of Web 2.0’s brand name companies – Six Apart, Facebook, Technorati and Yelp – knocking out their systems and web services out flat. Whatever the reasons behind the failure might be, yesterday was a rude reminder of how fragile our digital lives are.
The seemingly invincible web services (not to mention the notional wealth they signify) vanish within a blink of the eye. It was also a reminder, that all the hoopla around web services is just noise – for in the end the hardware, the plumbing, the pipes and more importantly, the power grid is the real show…
Citizen Media: A Progress Report
Dan Gillmor, reflecting on the first year of his project…
We’ve come a long way. There’s a growing recognition and appreciation of why citizen journalism matters. Investments, from media organizations and others, are fueling experiments of various kinds. Revenue models are taking early shape. And, most important, there’s a flood of great ideas.
But we have a long, long way to go. We nee much more experimentation in journalism and community information projects. The business models are, at best, uncertain — and some notable failures are discouraging. Dealing with the issues of trust, credibility and ethics is essential; as are more tools and training, including a dramatically updated notion of media literacy.
I offered 10 major points in my talk, as follows…
Thoughtful. Worth reading.
Ndiyo! – Hubster
Hooray! The new Samsung monitors with the DisplayLink chip in the back have arrived! Quentin and Michael have already been doing interesting things with them. And Chris Nuttall wrote a nice piece in the Financial Times about DisplayLink.
(Footnote: DisplayLink is the company spun out by Ndiyo to develop the thin-client technology we deem necessary to change the world — or at any rate the way we do networking.)
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be
The Web in 1994
This is just wonderful — a DEC promo video from 1994 about this amazing world wide web thingy. How things change. DEC (the acronynm stood for Digital Equipment Corporation) was once a powerful minicomputer company whose founder, Ken Olsen, was contemptuous of personal computers. (“There is no reason”, he said, “for any individual to have a computer in his home.”)
You can guess what happened. DEC faltered, then began to fail as the bottom dropped out of the minicomputer market, and was gobbled up by Compaq, which in turn was taken over by HP. And now the only people who remember the mighty Digital Equipment Corporation are ageing hippies like me!
The DEC VAX range of computers was the mainstay of most university computing and engineering schools, and BSD Unix was developed on them. When my department finally decommissioned ours, the SysAdmin put in in the foyer with a sign saying: “Excellent, fast games machine: free to a good home. Comes with £35,000 annual maintenance contract.”
Although most university VAXes ran under Unix, DEC’s commercial customers generally ran the company’s own proprietary operating system, VMS. When Microsoft decided to try and create an industry-strength version on Windows, they hired Dave Cutler and many of his colleagues on the team that wrote VMS. The result of their labours was Windows NT.
China’s Online Population Explosion
The Pew Project has a new report out. It’s written by Deborah Fallows. summary reads…
There are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China’s internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.
The influx of tens of millions of new online participants each year can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the Chinese population, for China itself and for the larger world. At the very least, the internet will offer ever greater numbers of Chinese a much more sophisticated information and communications world than the one they currently inhabit. And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country’s widely dispersed citizenry. An expanding internet population might also increase domestic tensions that could spill over into China’s relations with the U.S. and other countries while the difference between Chinese and Western approaches to the internet could create additional sore points over human rights and problems with restrictions on non-Chinese companies.
Full report (pdf) here.
You’ve got mail – all you need is a way to get rid of it
This morning’s Observer column…
‘You can’, my mother used to say, ‘have too much of a good thing’. Since she was generally not in favour of good things (which she equated with self-indulgence), I habitually disregarded this advice. But I am now beginning to wonder if she may have been right after all. This thought is sparked by an inspection of my email system. I have 852 messages in my ‘office’ inbox. Correction, make that 854: two more came in while I was typing that last sentence. My personal inbox has 1,304 messages. My spam-blocking service tells me that, in the past 30 days, I received no fewer than 3,920 invitations to: enhance my, er, physique; invest in dodgy shares; send money to the deserving widows of Nigerian dictators; and purchase Viagra. I am – literally – drowning in email.
And I am not alone…
Spell with flickr
The Six Stages of E-Mail
I love Nora Ephron. Well, to be precise, I love her writing. Someone kindly sent me a link to this from the New York Times. It opens thus:
I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!
You can guess how it goes on. (Hint: it corroborates my view that email has become dysfunctional — at least in large organisations.)