Aaron Schwartz at Stanford

Aaron Schwartz is one of my favourite Bloggers. He’s just gone to Stanford as an undergraduate, and he’s blogging the experience. His account makes a riveting read, not least because it demonstrates vividly how stupid the customs and rituals of soi disant great universities can be — and how idiotic their attempts to build student solidarity are. Stuff that kids raw from school accept with a kind of timid acquiescence looks totally bizarre when viewed through the lens of a mature intelligence. This is brave and interesting material, not least because the administration at Stanford will be as mad as hell when it discovers what their sainted institution looks like when viewed with a detached and sceptical eye.

DIY PowerBook repairs and upgrades

Wonderful set of online DIY Guides for intrepid souls who won’t entrust their precious PowerBooks to anyone else. I’ve just looked at the Guide for upgrading the hard disk, and it’s thoughtfully structured and beautifully laid out. Even explains what a spudger is. Link via Slashdot.

Gadget wars, contd.

It has taken Quentin quite a while to recover from my acquisition of a Toyota Prius, but he doesn’t give up easily. Now he’s got a Gmail account. Bah! I know it’s not, strictly speaking, a gadget, but still…

Update:This posting went up at 09:37. A compassionate soul read it, and by 11:10 I had an invitation to set up a Gmail account. No wonder I love the Net. I’ve been using Gmail this afternoon, and it’s extremely slick and nicely designed. Up to now, using webmail has always been like wading through treacle. No longer.

Richard Avedon is dead…

… from a brain haemorrhage while working on a New Yorker assignment in Texas. I never really cared for his fashion photography — though many people in the business regarded it as seminal. But I loved his merciless portraiture using uncropped Hasselblad negatives. This lovely self-portrait comes from AP.

The latest attack on Linux — apparently it’s used to pirate Windows!

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Forrester Research, a consultancy, has decided that the reason PCs with pre-installed Linux are selling so widely is that people want to wipe their disks and install bootleg copies of Windows. Here’s the summary from Good Morning Silicon Valley:

Forty percent of PCs shipped with Linux in the U.S. and Western Europe are subsequently scrubbed clean and outfitted with a pirated copy of Windows. In emerging markets, that fate awaits a full 80 percent of Linux pre-installs. This according to research outfit Gartner, which notes in a report aptly titled: “Linux Has a Fight on Its Hands in Emerging PC Markets,” that by 2008, Linux will account for 7.5 percent of desktops shipped, but only 2.6 percent of the installed base. Just as the high price of legitimate copies of Windows is driving vendors in countries like China and Russia to ship Linux on many of their machines, the low price of pirated copies of the OS — which will set you back $1 in most cities in Asia and Eastern Europe — is driving many new PC owners to swap Linux for Windows. Writes Gartner analyst Annette Jump: “The widespread availability of pirated versions of Windows at a fraction of the cost of a legal copy stimulates the growth of Linux on PCs in emerging markets,”

Hmmm… having recently tried to persuade a Windows XP box to stay connected to a wireless network, my feeling is that XP is overpriced at $1.

The truth about P2P traffic

Amid all the bluster by the RIAA and others about the supposed ‘decline’ in file-sharing as a result of legal threats etc., there has been very little empirical data about P2P traffic — until now. A UK start-up called Cachelogic has come up with technology which enables ISPs to get a detailed analysis of network traffic through the use of a deep packet inspection device which enables them to identify traffic at port level and by application signature.

Over the last six months, Cachelogic has used this technology in collaboration with a range of big ISPs, and from this have derived what it claims is the first detailed empirical analysis of contemporary Internet traffic.

If accurate, the findings are fascinating. No — more than that: they are SENSATIONAL. They include:

* P2P is the largest single generator of traffic on the Net
* P2P traffic “significantly outweighs” Web traffic
* P2P traffic continues to grow.

“Traffic analysis conducted as part of a European Tier 1 Service Provider field trial has shown that P2P traffic volumes are at least double that of http [i.e. Web] traffic during the peak evening periods and as much as tenfold at other times”.

There’s lots more. For example:

* Kazaa et al have peaked.
* BitTorrent is the New Thing — and is already a big deal.
* P2P is being used as an increasingly popular way for companies and developers to distribute software (e.g. RedHat is now using it). And content providers like the BBC are examining P2P as a way of discributing their products. [Note: all non-infringing uses.]

And so on, and so on.

These findings support what some of us have suspected since 1999 — that the emergence of P2P was the most significant innovation in Internet history since the invention of the Web. And we’re only at the beginning of the shift — which is why it’s vital that the copyright thugs aren’t allowed to choke it off because some aspects of it allegedly threaten their obsolete business models. Imagine how we would have felt if Disney, Time-Warner, Elsevier & Co had been allowed to shut down the Web shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released it in 1991 on the grounds that it made publication too easy for non-corporates.

The Nigerian 419 email scam — as a video!

Wonderful movie by Zefrank. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Windows vs Linux in a library environment: a cost comparison

From a study by a US library.

“Excluding administrative costs, the 15-year cost of 25 Linux systems in a lab environment is estimated to be $41,359 versus a 15-year cost of $100,000 to $155,000 for Windows PCs serving the same function. Although these estimates are based on rough cost estimates, the overall cost of hardware and software deployment, coupled with the shorter overall time spent on administrative tasks, yields significant cost savings over long-term deployment cycles in our work environment.”

Bertrand Russell on the US Presidential Election

With a month to go, Dubya is still ahead in the polls. Most of my US friends gloomily predict that he will win. How the American people could re-elect him and his regime is beyond me. And then I remembered something that Bertrand Russell once said. “A distinct logical merit of a democracy”, he observed, is that “no elected official can be more stupid than his constituents, for the more stupid he is the more stupid they were for having elected him”.

What the Bubble got right

As far as technology is concerned, Paul Graham is one of the most perceptive essayists around. His Hackers and Painters book is lovely. Now he’s written an intriguing essay challenging the irrational pessimism that replaced the irrational exhuberance that fuelled the last technology boom. For those who are too busy to read even such seminal stuff, here’s the Doc Searls digest:

…investing in concepts isn’t stupid; it’s what VCs do, and the best of them are far from stupid.

I think the Internet will have great effects, and that what we’ve seen so far is nothing compared to what’s coming. But most of the winners will only indirectly be Internet companies; for every Google there will be ten JetBlues.

Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth that you’re the best, but how do you survive to that point? And it is in this crucial stage that the Internet has the most effect. First, the Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come. Make something great and put it online. That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the past century.   increasingly the founders of the company are the real powers, and the grey-headed man installed by the VCs more like a music group’s manager than a general.   Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.   I found myself talking recently to someone from Hollywood who was planning a show about nerds. I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. What I came up with was: someone who doesn’t expend any effort on marketing himself.

The fact that a few crooks during the Bubble robbed their companies by granting themselves options doesn’t mean options are a bad idea.

What you want is to increase the actual value of the company, not its market cap. Over time the two inevitably meet, but not always as quickly as options vest.   The press, ever eager to exaggerate small trends, now gives one the impression that Silicon Valley is a ghost town. Not at all. When I drive down 101 from the airport, I still feel a buzz of energy, as if there were a giant transformer nearby.

Silicon Valley may not be the next Paris or London, but it is at least the next Chicago. For the next fifty years, that’s where new wealth will come from.

Technology is a lever. It doesn’t add; it multiplies. If the present range of productivity is 0 to 100, introducing a multiple of 10 increases the range from 0 to 1000.

What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? If you tried this experiment, I think you’d be surprised at how far you could get.

…in the coming century, good ideas will count for more. That 26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections. That doing good work will matter more than dressing up– or advertising, which is the same thing for companies. That people will be rewarded a bit more in proportion to the value of what they create.