Bill Thompson makes an insightful comment about Yahoo Pipes.
This isn’t user-generated content, it’s user-controlled content. And unlike personalised pages or simple feed subscriptions it really does put control into the hands of the user.
Monthly Archives: February 2007
User-generated content
This is a screen-grab from BBC coverage of tonight’s West Coast rail accident. From very early on the BBC was giving details of how to send pictures via mobile email and SMS. The photograph in the right-hand frame is from a passenger on the train.
Later… James Cridland has some interesting thoughts about this. He points out the irony that the photographer in this case was the BBC’s Chief Operating Officer, who happened to be on the train! So technically this is power-user-generated-content!
Pavement art
This, believe it or not, is a two-dimensional pavement drawing. Julian Beever specialises in astonishing anamorphic illusions drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of three dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint. Lots more examples (many equally hard to believe) on his site.
Do not try this while driving down the M1
Leading-edge Uselessness Department. Playing Xbox Live over Google WiFi While Driving.
Uncut pleasure
I’m reading a lovely book — Vol. 1 of The Paris Review Interviews. What’s lovely about it isn’t just the content (though some of the interviews are terrific), but also the feel of the volume: it’s a softback printed on matt paper with uncut edges — just like the Gallimard books of my adolescence.
It’s amazing how much tactile pleasure a nicely-made book gives. This one is, as the saying goes, hard to put down. Don Norman is right: attractive things work better.
Quote of the Day
“There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”.
Dorothy Parker, The Paris Review Interview.
Why less can be more
One of the funnier aspects of digital photography is listening to retail sales personnel explaining megapixels to customers. Basically the line seems to be that the more megapixels you have, the better. How come then that my Nikon D70, with its 6.1 megapixel sensor, produces consistently better images than my Leica D-Lux 3 compact, which boasts 10 megapixels?
The answer, crudely, boils down to two factors: a larger sensor and better lenses. When I was talking about this with a colleague, Dave Phillips (also a D70 user), he pointed me to this useful tutorial by Sean T. McHugh, whose site also includes some terrific photographs of Cambridge.
MP3 patents return to haunt Microsoft
Wow! Interesting New York Times report…
Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury yesterday to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 format, the technology at the heart of the digital music boom. If upheld on appeal, it would be the largest patent judgment on record.
The ruling, in Federal District Court in San Diego, was a victory for Alcatel-Lucent, the big networking equipment company. Its forebears include Bell Laboratories, which was involved in the development of MP3 almost two decades ago.
At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet. If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel.
Microsoft and others have licensed MP3 — not from Alcatel-Lucent, but from a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute, a large German research organization that was involved, along with the French electronics company Thomson and Bell Labs, in the format’s development.
The current case turns on two patents that Alcatel claims were developed by Bell Labs before it joined with Fraunhofer to develop MP3…
I had always assumed that Fraunhofer owned all the relevant rights.
Suddenly Ogg Vorbis looks more interesting.
What Google is really up to
Bob Cringely has been asking himself why Google controls more network fibre than any other organisation. And why it’s building thousands of data centres all over the place.
Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, … By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station.
Of course this doesn’t answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don’t. I’ll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That’s perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?
The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.
Bob’s theory is that demand for network bandwidth is about to increase very rapidly, as more of us become accustomed to getting video over the Net.
More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY — a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.
Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won’t know if we’re accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won’t matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won’t be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined — about $1 trillion in all — which places today’s $500 Google share price about eight times too low.
And we thought Microsoft was dangerous. Discuss.
Aside… BTW, Google has gained control of all that fibre by long-term leasing deals, not corporate acquisitions. Why? Because if it started buying up bandwidth providers it would quickly attract the attention of the anti-trust lawyers in the DoJ.
Jobs: baloney watch continues
I’m sure Steve Jobs is some kind of genius. He’s also potty in the same way that Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are potty. Hot on the heels of the WSJ account of his dealings with Cingular comes another account of the Jobs nonsense engine in full exhaust mode.
Steve Jobs makes a lot of sense when he’s talking about music and copyright protection, but when the topic is schools, he seems to be on a different planet.
The teachers’ unions, Jobs believes, are ruining America’s schools because they prevent bad teachers from being fired.
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” the Apple CEO told a school-reform conference in Texas on Saturday. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
Jobs knows a lot about schools; he’s been selling computers to them for more than 30 years. But don’t you love it when a billionaire who sends his own kids to private school applies half-baked business platitudes to complex problems like schools? I’m surprised Jobs didn’t suggest we outsource education to the same nonunion Chinese factories that build his iPods.
As someone who sends his kids to a struggling San Francisco public school (where 60 percent of the students are eligible for free lunches), I know for a fact that Jobs’ ideas about unions are absurd, he’s-on-a-different-planet bullshit.
The solution, Jobs believes, is to treat schools like businesses: Empower the principal to fire bad teachers like a CEO.
“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he said.
The issues are many and complex, and yes, there is a problem with firing incompetent or indifferent teachers, but it is not the No. 1 reason schools are failing. It’s not even in the top 10.
In California, the most pressing problems are schools that are too big, too bureaucratic and chronically under-funded. Teachers are criminally low paid and under-trained. Education — and school funding — has become solely about test scores.
[…]
[Firing poor performers] may work for Jobs, who runs his autocratic business fiefdom like Mussolini, but it’s patently simplistic to think that schools can be run like this, with performance measures and goals and metrics and other such nonsense. There are too many variables involved.