Daily Archives: April 2, 2006

Google PageRank Checker

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Hmmm… Here’s a site that claims to be able to estimate the Google PageRank of any web-page. Memex comes out at 6/10. Statusq gets 5/10. BBC Online gets 9/10 — higher than Amazon.co.uk (8/10) but dead-level with cnn.com (9/10) and BoingBoing.net (9/10). Google.com, needless to say, has a PageRank of 10/10.

I’m not sure I believe these results, because I can’t see how they’re calculated. And since the site is independent of Google and the details of the PageRank algorithm (as distinct from the general principles embodied in it) are secret, it’s difficult to see how one could check the computation.

The Ennerdale Webcam

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Here’s something interesting — a webcam showing one of the more remote parts of the Lake District — Ennerdale. It’s run by a partnership between BBCi Cumbria and the YHA [Youth Hostel Association] and is located in the Common Room of the Ennerdale Hostel at Gillerthwaite about 3.5 miles up the valley from Bowness Knott. The camera shows the view from the common room looking up the valley with Pillar and Pillar rock in the background. The image is currently updated every 2 hours from 8am until 4 pm.

Why the slow refresh? Well, because there’s no broadband in Ennerdale — the webcam is “probably one of the most remote webcams in England” — it’s 18km from the nearest telephone exchange.

But that’s not the really interesting thing about it. The Ennerdale cam is the only one I know of that gets its electricity supply from water. The hostel has had its own hydroelectric generator since 2003. In its first year of operation, the back-up diesel generator was only needed for two days.

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link.

What’s wrong with Microsoft?

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This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. (I raised it tangentially in today’s Observer column.) It’s sparked by clear signs of stress in Redmond, with serious managerial restructuring and the announcement that Vista is going to be late — again. A few days ago, Steve Lohr and John Markoff asked the question in an article in the New York Times.

The company’s marathon effort to come up with the a new version of its desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, has repeatedly stalled. Last week, in the latest setback, Microsoft conceded that Vista would not be ready for consumers until January, missing the holiday sales season, to the chagrin of personal computer makers and electronics retailers — and those computer users eager to move up from Windows XP, a five-year-old product.

In those five years, Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system, beating Microsoft to market with features that will be in Vista, like desktop search, advanced 3-D graphics and “widgets,” an array of small, single-purpose programs like news tickers, traffic reports and weather maps.

So what’s wrong with Microsoft? There is, after all, no shortage of smart software engineers working at the corporate campus in Redmond, Wash. The problem, it seems, is largely that Microsoft’s past success and its bundling strategy have become a weakness.

Lohr and Markoff say that the explanation is that Microsoft is hamstrung by its past success as a monopolist — that it has to make sure that its new operating system is “backwards compatible” with older versions of Microsoft software running on millions and millions of PCs.

I’m sure there’s something in this. But it’s not entirely convincing. After all, Apple has some of the same problems (albeit with a smaller consumer base and a more uniform hardware platform). So it was interesting to read Eric Raymond’s comment on the NYT article. He says that the authors have described only symptoms, not the underlying problem.

Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.

Microsoft hit this wall six years ago, arguably longer; it’s why they’ve had to cancel several strategic projects in favor of superficial patches on the same old codebase. But it’s not a Microsoft-specific problem, just one that’s hitting them the worst because they’re the largest closed-source developer in existence. Management changes won’t address it any more than reshuffling the deck chairs could have kept the Titanic from sinking.

Apple has been able to ship four new versions in the last five years because its OS core is open-source code. Linux, entirely open-source, has bucketed along even faster. Open source evades the scaling limit by decentralizing development, replacing top-heavy monoliths with loosely-coupled peer networks at both the level of the code itself and the organizations that produce it.

You finger backward compatibility as a millstone around Microsoft’s neck, but experience with Linux and other open-source operating systems suggests this is not the real problem. Over the same six-year period Linux has maintained backwards binary compatibility as good as (arguably better than) that of Windows without bloating.

Microsoft’s problems cannot be fixed — indeed, they are doomed to get progressively worse — as long as they’re stuck to a development model premised on centralization, hierarchical control, and secrecy. Open-source operating systems will continue to gain at their expense for many of the same reasons free markets outcompeted centrally-planned economies.

The interesting question is whether we will ever see a Microsoft equivalent of glasnost and perestroika.

Leviathan and the ID Card

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In all the stuff that’s been written about the Blair government’s ID card project, the best single piece was this Guardian column by an Oxford academic, Karma Nabulsi.

She begins by highlighting the extent to which the government’s approach to security in the post-9/11 world derives from Hobbes.

Hobbes portrays a dangerous world filled with unknown enemies perpetually striving to murder one’s family and destroy one’s property, a nation filled with untrustworthy neighbours, isolated individuals who live in fear of each other, and only the power of the state to protect society from the evils inherent in human nature. How much of your liberty do you yield to your protector? As much as he says he needs to provide you with protection.

This grim bargain is on offer today, and can be measured in every aspect of public life in Britain. If the primary purpose of the state is to provide the individual with security, this gives the state exclusive power to define the gravity of the security threat. At that point, enter the security and terrorism experts. It also allows the state to define civil and individual liberties, since these must be surrendered according to an assessment made behind closed doors. More fundamentally, political liberty is possessed entirely by the state, for in such a framework the state determines what liberties to grant to individuals. The source of sovereignty resides entirely in the state, not the individual.

This conception of the social contract, Nabulsi argues, is a totally undemocratic one. And it runs completely counter to an equally venerable (and mostly British) tradition.

The theory of the democratic state describes the nature of a social contract in the opposite way to Hobbes. Defined by British writers such as John Stuart Mill, RH Tawney and GDH Cole, among others (and continental Europeans such as Rousseau and Kant), the purpose of the contract is to protect a citizen’s liberty. Its preservation – especially the preservation of political liberty – is the supreme good. In this version of the social contract, the sovereign citizen does not surrender sovereignty, but only specific powers and functions to the state. As political sovereignty is not transferred to the state, not only are civil rights inalienable but so are political liberties, above all the right to determine and to deliberate laws. It is not simply participating in these decisions, it is actually making them.

Nabulsi points out that Hobbes made his argument to answer a specific problem of exceptional insecurity. But, she says, the trade-off he suggested is flawed.

This formula will never provide us with the security we need; instead it increases our need for it. By restoring the purpose of government as one that serves its people through preserving freedom as the supreme good, one restores citizens to their role in deliberating these decisions and cedes the public space back to its owners.

This is a very good essay because it goes right to the heart of the problem. The trouble is, it also highlights the depth of the malaise. Our democracies have been flawed for a long time by this underlying Hobbesian contract, but it took Osama bin Laden to peel back the camouflage and display in its naked illiberality. I used to think that it was partly a weakness of the British (unwritten) constitution, with its implicit embodiement of the state as the ‘Crown Prerogative’ — and that republics would be relatively freer of the disease. But the behaviour of the US in recent decades suggests otherwise. The Bush regime is Hobbesian to the core of its being.

The Tories say that, if elected to power, they will scrap the ID Card, and so they might. But I can’t see them abandoning the Hobbesian contract, for all David Cameron’s spouting about liberty and freedom. We’re screwed, basically.

The changing media landscape

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This morning’s Observer column…

The Miglia and the Slingbox illustrate how our media ecosystem is changing. They provide early glimpses of the future. Or at least of how the position of TV is changing. Bill Thompson, BBC Online’s resident blogger, has a nice way of putting this. He says that today’s kids will never buy a TV set in the course of their lives. That doesn’t mean they won’t watch TV or video; just that they will access it via a plethora of devices, of which computers and mobile phones are just two examples.

This is why the BBC was lucky to get one final instalment of licence fee income. At the end of the current Charter period, the media landscape will be unrecognisable…