Category Archives: Technology

Wikipedia, you are the strongest link

Posted on by

That’s the headline some clever Observer sub-editor put on this morning’s column…

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who think Wikipedia is amazing, wonderful, or inspiring; and those who simply cannot understand how a reference work compiled by thousands of ‘amateurs’ (and capable of being edited by any Tom, Dick or Harry) should be taken seriously. Brisk, vigorous and enjoyable arguments rage between these two camps, and provide useful diversion on long winter evenings.

What’s more interesting is the way Wikipedia entries have risen in Google’s page-ranking system so that the results of many searches now include a Wikipedia page in the first few hits…

The box that changed the world

Posted on by

Nice piece by Oliver Burkeman, musing on the container ship that lies beached off the Devon coast…

The fate of the MSC Napoli, still beached off the coast of Devon, serves as another reminder of a fact that dock workers and crew members accept with stoicism, even a bit of pride: ordinary people usually never think about shipping containers except when things go wrong. The Napoli has provoked an environmental crisis (200 tonnes of oil have leaked into surrounding waters), and some unsettling realisations about the eagerness of Britons to help themselves to other people’s belongings. But in disgorging such a variety of cargo – shampoo and steering wheels, wine and shoes, carpets and motorbikes and bibles and nappies – it also offers an inadvertent glimpse into a world we all rely on, yet barely consider. It is no exaggeration to say that the shipping container may have transformed the world, and our daily lives, as fundamentally as any of the other more glamorous or complex inventions of the last 100 years, the internet included…

MySpace’s growing pains

Posted on by

Fascinating article on the difficulties MySpace engineers have had in coping with exponential growth. A long piece, but worth reading…

The “network effect,” in which the mass of users inviting other users to join MySpace led to exponential growth, began about eight months after the launch “and never really stopped,” Chau says.

News Corp., the media empire that includes the Fox television networks and 20th Century Fox movie studio, saw this rapid growth as a way to multiply its share of the audience of Internet users, and bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Now, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch apparently thinks MySpace should be valued like a major Web portal, recently telling a group of investors he could get $6 billion—more than 10 times the price he paid in 2005—if he turned around and sold it today. That’s a bold claim, considering the Web site’s total revenue was an estimated $200 million in the fiscal year ended June 2006. News Corp. says it expects Fox Interactive as a whole to have revenue of $500 million in 2007, with about $400 million coming from MySpace.

But MySpace continues to grow. In December, it had 140 million member accounts, compared with 40 million in November 2005. Granted, that doesn’t quite equate to the number of individual users, since one person can have multiple accounts, and a profile can also represent a band, a fictional character like Borat, or a brand icon like the Burger King.

Still, MySpace has tens of millions of people posting messages and comments or tweaking their profiles on a regular basis—some of them visiting repeatedly throughout the day. That makes the technical requirements for supporting MySpace much different than, say, for a news Web site, where most content is created by a relatively small team of editors and passively consumed by Web site visitors. In that case, the content management database can be optimized for read-only requests, since additions and updates to the database content are relatively rare. A news site might allow reader comments, but on MySpace user-contributed content is the primary content. As a result, it has a higher percentage of database interactions that are recording or updating information rather than just retrieving it.

Every profile page view on MySpace has to be created dynamically—that is, stitched together from database lookups. In fact, because each profile page includes links to those of the user’s friends, the Web site software has to pull together information from multiple tables in multiple databases on multiple servers. The database workload can be mitigated somewhat by caching data in memory, but this scheme has to account for constant changes to the underlying data.

The Web site architecture went through five major revisions—each coming after MySpace had reached certain user account milestones—and dozens of smaller tweaks, Benedetto says. “We didn’t just come up with it; we redesigned, and redesigned, and redesigned until we got where we are today,” he points out…

Where HDTV may be too, er, sharp

Posted on by

Well, well. A solemn piece in the New York Times reveals all:

The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes.

Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.

They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.

Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies.

Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.

“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

Ms. Daniels is also a skeptic. “I’m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD,” she said.

The technology’s advocates counter that high definition, by making things clearer and crisper, lets viewers feel as close to the action as possible.

“It puts you in the room,” said the director known as Robby D., whose films include “Sexual Freak.”

Eh? Razor burn???

Doodling with a purpose

Posted on by

Here’s a really good idea — Doodle: a site that makes it easier to schedule meetings involving several people.

How does it work?
1. Create a new poll with a title, description, your name, and possible dates and times.

2. You get a link to your new poll. Send this link to all participants.

3. The participants use the link to visit the poll and select suitable dates.

4. You use the same link to watch the poll’s progress and the result.

And it’s free!

Jams tomorrow

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

Coincidentally, in another part of the forest, entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the guys who founded Kazaa and later Skype (which they sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn) announced their particular variation on IPTV. The service is to be called Joost and combines aspects of file-sharing software and regular broadcast television. Like Skype, Joost requires users to download and install a free ‘client’ program which enables them to browse the internet for channels and clips they’re interested in.

The Joost website is deliciously opaque, riddled with PR-speak about how the new service is, apparently, ‘powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators’.

In the ordinary course of events, one would be inclined to dismiss this as hype, were it not for the fact that Zennstrom and Friis have a track record of unleashing not one but two disruptive innovations on an unsuspecting world. So let’s suppose for a moment that Joost is for real. What then?

One implication is that if it spreads like Skype (putting on 150,000 new users a day), Joost could eventually strangle the net. Or, more realistically, it would provoke dramatic action from the world’s ISPs to fend off that outcome…

A shot across the bows

Posted on by

The way China destroyed a satellite with a missile on January 11 has put the cat among the chickens. “I imagine”, writes Alex Neill from the Royal United Services Institute,

there are some deep ruminations going on at the Pentagon. The crux of US defence capability is its command-and-control networks, which are reliant on satellite capabilities. This is a clear statement that China does not want to see [US] hegemony of what they call “the space arena”.

There were allegations late last summer that an American optical surveillance satellite had been illuminated by a Chinese laser system. This can be regarded as a symbolic gesture but, if true, it means they can track a satellite and potentially blind it as it passes over China. The Chinese have now demonstrated that they can track, target and destroy in space…

In my uninformed way, I’d been brooding about this for a while. One of the most obvious technological trends in the last three decades has been the increasing reliance — first in military applications and now in the civil arena too — on GPS and Satnav technology. What, I wondered, if this were vulnerable to attack? Is it the weakest link (to coin a phrase)? Looks like it might be.

Also, the decision by the EU to press ahead with its own GPS infrastructure doesn’t look so daft now. Wonder what happened to that project? (Googles busily.) Ah, here we are. It’s called the Galileo Project — and it’s behind schedule:

The European Commissioner in charge of transport, Jacques Barrot, has admitted that the Galileo satellite navigation project is behind schedule because negotiations with the eight private partners who will manage the system once completed have still not been completed.

Barrot said the year-end deadline to conclude the negotiations would again be missed. Original plans called for a deal to be concluded by late 2005.

The Commissioner also revealed that the start-up budget of Euros 1.5 billion is still about Euros 200 million short and that talks with national governments are continuing to finalize this budget…

Better get a move on guys. And keep in with the Chinese.

Sigh. So much for human rights.

Network impact of Skype TV

Posted on by

Very interesting ArsTechnica post:

Bandwidth usage, however, could prove to be a problem for the project. According to the project’s documentation seen by Ars Technica, watching an hour’s worth of TV consumes an average of 320MB downloaded and 105MB uploaded traffic, due to the service’s P2P architecture. US Government statistics suggest that Americans on average watch about 2.6 hours of TV a day, which in Venice Project terms would equate to 832MB downloaded and 273MB uploaded traffic. In a single month, that would tally to 25GB down, 8GB of uploaded traffic alone.

For users with broadband caps, the Venice Project could easily consume a month’s worth of bandwidth in short order. Even users without caps could be affected if they “trip” unpublished limits on so-called “unlimited” services and get a call from Mr. Friendly ISP. Still, high bandwidth usage is nothing new; we all know someone (maybe even ourselves) pulling down this kind of data every month. What’s different about the Venice Project is that it could explode into The Next Big Thing™, turning more of us into “heavy users.”

The question is: how will ISPs react? The Venice Project founders know a little something about this, because Skype has been through a bit of it. Skype is so threatening to some established players that it sometimes gets blocked at the network level. China Telecom attempted to ban the use of Skype in 2005, and some California universities sought to block the usage of Skype on their local networks for fear of security and bandwidth problems. These blocks didn’t last, in part because the criticism from users was intense. Will the arguments work when it’s TV at stake and not calling mom and dad?

In all reality, the bandwidth that Venice uses is not outrageous—it is on par with downloaded movies encoded in DivX format, which are about 600MB per 2 hour movie, and not too far from the likes of what Apple offers through the iTunes Store. However, as more and more types of video download services (such as iTunes videos or Xbox Live videos) become more popular, especially those using a P2P architecture, it is easy to see how the broadband infrastructure will feel the strain.

In this way, there’s a real chance that the Venice Project will be at the center of net-neutrality debates in the United States in the coming months. In our very limited experience with Venice, we can say that we’re quite impressed. If it really takes off, it’s going to make a number of impressions on the telecommunications companies. How will they react? There will certainly be envy, because everyone wants to build the next YouTube, and the Ed Whitacres of the world don’t want to see anyone gettin’ rich off of “their pipes” (which you pay for). There may also be a little anger involved, for if Venice usage soars, it will definitely consume a notable amount of bandwidth, leaving ISPs in the position of needing to tune their networks. To throttle or not to throttle—that may be the question that fuels another round in the net neutrality debates.

HP breaks Moore’s Law

Posted on by

From MercuryNews.com…

Today, HP scientists intend to announce they have created a new computer-chip design enabling an eightfold increase in the number of transistors on a chip, without making the transistors smaller.

The scientists said their advance would equal a leap of three generations of Moore’s Law, a prediction formulated in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that forecast chip makers could double the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years.

“This is three generations of Moore’s Law, without having to do all the research and development to shrink the transistors,” said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP in Palo Alto. “If in some sense we can leapfrog three generations, that is something like five years of R&D. That is the potential of this breakthrough.”

The scientists have published their work in the current issue of Nanotechnology, a publication of the British Institute of Physics. Nanotechnology is the study and engineering of materials so tiny they are measured at the level of atoms…

Who owns the company intranet?

Posted on by

Interesting findings from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox…

Intranets tend to have one of three homes in the organization. Of the 2005-2007 winners:

* 35% were in Corporate Communications
* 27% were in Information Technology or Information Systems (IT/IS)
* 19% were in Human Resources (HR)

The remaining 19% of award-winning intranets were based in a variety of other departments, including Web Marketing and Public Affairs.

If you had to select a single organizational placement for all the world’s intranets, statistics imply that Corporate Communications is the best place. But in reality, we won’t make that recommendation, since most great intranets are based elsewhere. The only recommendation we can make is to consider the history and culture of your own company and consider Corporate Communications, IT, and HR as the three most likely candidates.

Posted in Web