Internet Explorer’s market share continues to slip

OneStat.com, an Amsterdam-based company which monitors real-time web usage is reporting that Microsoft’s share of the browser market continues to slide — down 5 percent from May to 88.90 percent. Mozilla’s browsers have a total global usage share of 7.35 percent. The new Mozilla’s Firefox has a total usage share of 4.58 — up from effectively zero a year ago. The total usage share of the main Mozilla browser was 2.1 percent at the end of May. Nobody who uses Firefox will be surprised.

Wonder what Microsoft will do. (I’ve discussed the company’s strategic dilemma with IE before.) The thing about Firefox, you see, is that it’s open source software, so there’s no possibility of destroying it the way MS destroyed the (closed source) Netscape operation. Watch this space.

iPhotos to go!

I was given one of the new iPods as a present by some outrageously generous friends.

It’s really nice to be able to carry a whole library of digital photos around in one’s pocket. But the nicest thing of all is the special cable which enables one to hook it up to a TV and show them to other people. The appalling resolution of conventional television screens, however, reminds one of how primitive TV technology is compared to a PowerBook (or, for that matter, a Sony Vaio).

And the gadget wars continue. Not only does Quentin have a new iPod, but he’s gone out and bought a Griffin iTalk for it — which turns it into a really nifty digital recorder. So he’s ahead again. That’s the trouble with arms races — in the end they bankrupt both parties. Sigh.

Science fiction — yes, really

Various folks are getting excited by reports that a computer has been caught writing fiction. Here, for example, is a breathless piece in the New York Times:

“With little fanfare and (so far) no appearances at Barnes & Noble, computers have started writing without us scribes. They are perfectly capable of nonfiction prose, and while the reputation of Henry James is not yet threatened, computers can even generate brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out.”

Oh yeah? Well, let’s see what this machine turns out. Ah, here’s the beginning of a short story dealing with the theme of betrayal:

“Dave Striver loved the university – its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one’s dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.”

You’re right — it sounds suspiciously like the work of Jeffrey Archer. But it’s claimed to be the output of ‘Brutus.1’, a program written by Selmer Bringsjord of Rensselaer’s Department of Cognitive Science and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M. Bringsjord’s web page tells us that “Brutus.1 represents the first step in engineering an artificial agent that ‘appears’ to be genuinely creative. We have attempted to do that by, among other things, mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures, and then vesting Brutus.1 with these concepts. The result, Brutus.1, is the world’s most advanced story generator. We use Brutus.1 in support of our philosophy of Weak Artificial Intelligence — basically, the view that computers will never be genuinely conscious, but computers can be cleverly programmed to ‘appear’ to be, in this case, literarily creative.”

Well, if a klutz like Archer can mime creativity, then I suppose some computer code could too. But isn’t that notion of “mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures” just cute?

The Cam in winter

Bill took us out on his new boat on Saturday. It was freezing cold in the fens, but eerily still and beautiful. We saw two herons, plus innumerable coots and moorhen.

Copyright thugs mug US Congress — again

The so-called “Intellectual Property Protection Act” (IPPA) now before Congress beggars belief. It’s a ragbag of different measures all of which have the general intent of restricting what you can do with your PC or digital recording device. In its current form, the Bill makes it a criminal offence to fast-forward through ads on a recorded TV show. Yes, you read that correctly. One of the eight bills shepherded into the catch-all IPPA was originally called ‘The Family Movie Act’ (formerly H.R. 4586): This was originally intended to protect consumers’ rights to use technology to skip over and mute parts of a movie that they found objectionable. But lobbyists working for the broadcasting industry and Hollywood studios added a section to take away consumers’ rights to skip over ads in DVDs and recorded broadcasts with a TiVo like device.

There’s more. For example a provision that would criminalize the currently legal act of using the sharing capacity of Apple’s iTunes; the legislation equates that act with the indiscriminate file sharing that goes on via peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Currently, with iTunes, you can opt to share a playlist with up to three computers on your network. But the IPPA doesn’t differentiate between this innocuous — and Apple-approved — practice and the unrestrained sharing of music files with millions of strangers via Kazaa or Grokster.

VHS is dead. Long live DVD!

UK High Street retailer Dixons has announced that it is to stop selling video recorders. According to the BBC report, Dixons will phase out VCRs due to the boom in DVD players, sales of which have grown seven-fold in five years.

“It ends a 26-year love affair with a gadget which changed viewing habits by allowing people to leave home without missing their favourite programmes. Dixons expects to sell its remaining stock of VCRs by Christmas.”

Sigh. End of an era. I was a TV critic for 13 years, and ran two video recorders for most of that period. But nobody who has spooled backwards and forwards through as much tape as I did would ever decline a TiVO — or even a DVD recorder.

Potty Prince Charlie

One hesitates to intrude on private grief. As an Irish citizen happily resident in the UK, the English Royal family are not my problem, but it was hard to stifle a cheer when Education Secretary Charles Clarke finally broke the ministerial taboo which prevents public criticism of the Royal Family and made it clear (in a BBC Radio 4 interview) that he thought Prince Charles’s recent leaked thoughts on education, were, well, balderdash, In a leaked memo, Charlie had apparently ranted about a “child-centred system which admits no failure”. Today’s “learning culture”, opined Britain’s future monarch, “gave people hope beyond their capabilities”.

Well, well. This from a guy who has £7 million a year in unearned income (and a net worth of £300m), who despite the best education money could buy barely scraped a couple of A-levels, was admitted to Cambridge with them while hundreds of students with four straight As were rejected, and even then could barely manage a 2.2 in his degree. This from a guy who works about one and a half days a week, employs three butlers and four valets, has 2,000 hand-made suits (@ about £2,000 a throw) and requires that his liveried footmen bow before addressing him. And yet this pompous toff — who would have a tough job holding down a job as manager of a bottle bank — seems to have no qualms about aspiring to Britain’s top sinecure? Who gave him this “hope beyond his capabilities”? Er, the hereditary principle which ensures that, no matter how idle or dimwitted one is, the plum job eventually falls into one’s lap.

Repetitive Failure Syndrome

Topic of today’s Observer column.

Bill’s inbox

According to today’s Guardian, Bill Gates gets four million emails a day. None from me, I’m glad to say. Thanks to David Livesey for the link.

God’s Own Country

Forget the Bahamas; Ireland’s the place to live. Here’s the Independent‘s take on it anyway:

“For generations, hundreds of thousands left the Emerald Isle fleeing war and famine – all clinging to the belief life would be better elsewhere. Now, after two decades of a meteoric rise that has staggered financial gurus, Ireland has topped a poll as the best place to live in the world.

In a report published by The Economist magazine, the Republic won over Switzerland, Australia and Italy. In the process, Ireland trounced the main destinations of its traditional emigration. The US ranked 13th with the UK coming in at a miserable 29th position – the lowest of any EU pre-expansion members. Of the countries surveyed, the worst place to live in the world is Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe which came bottom at 111th.”

Here’s what this paradise de nos jours looked like the other day on my way back from the HEAnet conference. That gap in the mountains is the Gap of Dunloe, near Killarney.