Daily Archives: March 9, 2008

Data smelting

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Slight Economist article on the energy demands of cloud computing…

AS ONE industry falls, another rises. The banks of the Columbia River in Oregon used to be lined with aluminium smelters. Now they are starting to house what might, for want of a better phrase, be called data smelters. The largest has been installed by Google in a city called The Dalles. Microsoft and Yahoo! are not far behind. Google’s plant consumes as much power as a town of 200,000 people. And that is why it is there in the first place. The cheap hydroelectricity provided by the Columbia River, which once split apart aluminium oxide in order to supply the world with soft-drinks cans and milk-bottle tops, is now being used to shuffle and store masses of information. Computing is an energy-intensive industry. And the world’s biggest internet companies are huge energy consumers—so big that they are contemplating some serious re-engineering in order to curb their demand…

Strangely, it makes no mention of virtualisation.

The usefulness of reviews

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Here’s a very good example of a helpful review. I’ve always been wary of zoom lenses, because of the optical compromises implicit in them, but I’d heard good things about the Nikkor 18-200mm DX. So I went to dpreview.com and found a detached and informative assessment. Here’s the overall verdict:

Just occasionally, the old cliches are still the best, and with the 18-200mm VR the phrase ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ springs immediately to mind. It’s a lens which delivers somewhat flawed results over its entire zoom range; where it’s sharp, it has heavy distortion, and when that distortion comes under control at the long end, it loses sharpness. Its close-up performance is reasonable, but not spectacular, and overall it will likely be outperformed optically by a cheaper combination of standard and telephoto zooms. So for a certain type of photographer interested mainly in absolute image quality, this may well cause it to be regarded as nothing more than an expensive snapshot lens.

But to dismiss the 18-200mm VR based purely on its optical quality is to miss the point quite fundamentally. The whole idea of such a lens is to allow the photographer to travel light and never miss a shot while changing lenses, or indeed not to have to risk water or dust entering the camera in adverse conditions. So what you do get for your money is a hugely flexible zoom range which can handle the vast majority of photographic opportunities, coupled with excellent autofocus and vibration reduction systems. And all of this is wrapped up in a relatively compact package, with build quality which feels solid without being excessively heavy. It really is a lens you can leave on your camera all day long and scarcely miss a shot, and it has to be said, this makes it a lot of fun to use.

So when all is said and done, we have to understand that superzooms are essentially about making some optical compromises to provide the broadest possible range in a single lens, and it’s up to each individual to decide whether those compromises are acceptable. I wouldn’t recommend the 18-200mm to someone whose primary interests were either architecture or wildlife, for example, but for the photographer who wants to shoot a little bit of everything and not have to change lenses, it’s more than fit for purpose. Ultimately this is probably as good a superzoom as money can buy, so as long as its limitations are recognised and understood, it has to be recommended.

198 reasons why we’re in a mess

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Insightful Simon Caulkin column…

We live in strange times. In the private sector, market rules are so degraded that it has become the role of companies in the real economy, some built up over decades, to act as chips tossed around by high rollers in the City supercasino. Meanwhile, the public sector is in the grip of a central planning regime of a rigidity and incompetence not seen since Gosplan wrote Stalin’s Five-Year Plans…

He goes on to draw on Jane Jacobs’s seminal Systems of Survival (which is subtitled: “a dialogue on the moral foundations of commerce and politics”) to suggest that the root of our problems is the way the ‘moral syndromes’ that characterise our two basic modes of governance — ‘conquest’ and ‘commerce’ — have become inextricably mixed.

Knowledgeable Vista critics

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Wonderful New York Times piece by Randall Stross.

Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an “upgrade”?

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

Here’s the punchline: ‘Mike’ is Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. ‘Jon’ is Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And ‘Steven’ is Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows. Mr Stross garnered the quotes from a cache of internal Microsoft emails unsealed by the judge who is hearing the Vista Class Action suit.

Picture this

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This morning’s Observer column…

Flickr is a classic Web 2.0 story. In the first place, it was an unintended outcome of another project. Its co-founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, were designing Game Neverending, a massive multi-player online game, and realised that they would need a photo-sharing module. In the end, the photo-sharing took on a life of its own and the gaming project was quietly shelved. Secondly, it required no complex technical infrastructure, and could be marketed virally as users began to circulate Flickr links in email and instant messages.

Flickr’s designers also displayed a shrewd grasp of the essence of Web 2.0 thinking – namely that the big rewards come from making it easy for other developers to hook into your stuff. So they were quick to publish the application programming interface (API), the technical details other programmers needed to link into Flickr’s databases. This then made it easy for bloggers and users of social networking sites to create links to their Flickr ‘photostreams’. The results are clear for all to see. On 12 November last year, Flickr images passed the 2 billion mark. At present, between three and five million photographs are uploaded to the service every day…