Intriguing video exchange about Obama’s character between Jacob Weisberg of Slate and David Frum of the National Review. Frum’s opinion is that Obama is “either going to be Lincoln or he’s going to be a disaster”. He also thinks Obama is the most inward-looking candidate since Richard Nixon!
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Hubris, Chinese style
Interesting piece by Mark WIlliams in Technology Review…
To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, the city’s branch of the national Weather Modification Office–itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration–has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.
First, Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will track the region’s weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.
Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city’s weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.
Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird’s Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won’t fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing’s Weather Modification Office, explains, “We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced.” August is part of Northeast Asia’s rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven’t always been successful, Qian claims that “the results with light rain have been satisfactory.”
Remind me again — what follows hubris…?
Cat nabbing
Intriguing column by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times
The unsettling thing about living in a surveillance society isn’t just that you’re being watched. It’s that you have no idea.
That’s what struck me about a story told last week by a border agent at a meeting of 200 San Juan Islanders. He was there to explain why the federal government is doing citizenship checks on domestic ferry runs.But near the end, while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of “Dr. Strangelove.”
It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear “dirty bombs.” They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.
“Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour,” Giuliano told the crowd. “Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car].”
The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.
Did he find a nuke?
“Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier,” Giuliano said.
He added: “That’s the type of technology we have that’s going on in the background. You don’t see it. If I hadn’t told you about it, you’d never know it was there.”
MacBook Air: first impressions
I’ve been using an Air for four days, so these are first impressions.
Other people’s reactions
These three are almost universal:
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“Wow! It’s really thin!”
“It’s amazingly light!”
(With puzzled expression) “It feels quite robust.”
All correct. Quentin thinks that the robustness comes from the way the edges are curved.
Geeky disdain
The Air has come in for a fair amount of geeky disdain because the design compromises needed to fit it into such a slender package are perceived as having crippled it for serious use. Thus: it can only take 2GB of RAM; the hard drive is ‘only’ 80GB; it’s slow; it doesn’t have a Firewire port; there’s no audio-in port; it doesn’t have an Ethernet port (you have to buy an optional USB-to-Ethernet adapter); it doesn’t have an optical drive; the battery can only be replaced by a dealer; etc. There’s a whiff of the ‘real men don’t eat quiche’ about all this, but really I think that these criticisms — though broadly accurate (except for the comment about speed) — are beside the point. They’re criticising the Air for not being what it was never intended to be.
For the record…
Pluses: The Air is not slow — in fact it’s very responsive and nippy. It’s very quick to wake from sleep — almost instant on. The keyboard is lovely — nicer than either the MacBook Pro’s or the Macbook’s. The screen is very like that of the Macbook’s. Battery life is good. It doesn’t run hot — unlike the MacBookPro which can char-grill an average thigh in half an hour. It’s quiet. And wonderfully light. In fact, it’s a pleasure to use.
Annoyances: It comes with Leopard, about which I am still ambivalent. Well, actually, the main reason I’m irritated by it is because it won’t run PhotoShop CS. (But Aperture runs fine on it.) And Leopard does have Screen Sharing (of which more below.)
So who is it for, then?
My hunch is that it has two target user-groups. The first is people who are highly mobile and use a computer mainly for email, web-browsing, word-processing, presentations and music. For these users, the diminutive heft of the Air is very attractive, and its processing power and storage are perfectly adequate. The other target category is comprised of heavy audio-visual users, programmers, editors etc. who really need a desktop machine with sophisticated i/o, big screens etc. but who are finding that lugging even a MacBookPro around is an awkward (and backbreaking) chore.
Although I’m not a programmer, I fall into the second category (see pic).
My MacBook Pro has become, effectively, a desktop machine. It’s comfortably anchored in a setup with a big screen, high-end audio and video connections, auxiliary hard drives and other clutter, such that disentangling it every morning and reconnecting it at night was becoming really tedious. So for me, the Air is really just a highly-portable, lightweight component of a wider system. They key issues then become:
- What is the minimal set of applications that are absolutely necessary?
- What kinds of data shall I carry around?
- How will I keep the various components of the overall system in sync with one another?
1. It’s very instructive to have to think hard about which applications are absolutely necessary and which are just nice-to-have. My MacBookPro is stuffed full of the latter (a by-product of the amazing software ecosystem that has evolved around OS X). But most of them I use only occasionally — though they seem really essential when the need arises. So none of them goes on the Air.
2. My ‘desktop’ machine holds colossal amounts of audio, video and photographs. I’ve decided that there’s no need to carry music on the Air (what else is an iPod for, after all?), and it will be used only as a working store for audio recordings, photographs and video — all of which will be uploaded to the desktop when I’ve finished working on them. As a result, that 80GB drive suddenly looks big enough. (Famous last words?)
3. Syncing applications like ChronoSync and ExpanDrive have suddenly become key pieces of software. So too has VNC and the terrific Screen Sharing app built into Leopard.
So, the story so far…
The Air has been a delight to use, so far. One of the reasons I got it was that I had dinner a few weeks ago with a thoughtful senior engineer from Apple’s Cupertino HQ. Half-jokingly, I asked him if I should think about getting one. He replied by asking me to describe what I used computers for, and what my work patterns were like. Having heard me out, he said that I would find the Air a useful and productive working tool, but if I’d been a software developer he would have advised against it. Looks like he was spot on.
The smoke of battle
Andrew Orlowski has a vintage rant in the Register…
I’ve been to some strange events … in my time reporting for El Reg. But yesterday at the London School of Economics I saw one of the most disturbing of all. If you thought people don’t behave in real life like they do online, think again. Here were all the most unpleasant aspects of online behaviour – ignorance, rudeness, groupthink, and a general sneering moral superiority – but made flesh. By the end, it had degenerated into farce. So what was it all about?
It was a symposium on “Music, fans and online copyright”, hosted by LSE and the Oxford Internet Institute.
Music and copyright are subjects that everyone has a stake in. But the speakers had been hand-picked by a fanatical anti-copyright Jacobin, Ian Brown. Brown drew from a narrow, ideologically homogenous group of friends. That didn’t make for an enlightening debate, but it made for a good lynching party – and the afternoon would culminate in a ritual lynching, with Mr John Kennedy of IFPI lined up for the noose…
Orlowski then goes on to to do a spot of literary garotting all by himself.
Arms and the man
The NYT reports that the US arm of Toyota has come up with an engagingly daft idea for marketing their Scion model (only available in the US): owners can go online to design their own coats of arms. Somehow, I can’t see Prius owners falling for this.
Technological eras
Douglas Coupland has been writing elegantly about the relationship between time and gadgets,
because there is a relationship between the two, and it’s not just about the 18-month tech cycle or the decomposition-proof materials that will allow my swaggy new Casio Module 3070 wristwatch to be around when the sun goes supernova. Any gadget we use invariably morphs our perception of time’s passing.
These shifting perceptions of time are what give eras in human history their specific textures. I was in Austin, Texas last spring and bumped into a friend from my stint at Wired magazine in the mid-90s. The encounter went along the lines of, “John – I haven’t seen you since… eBay! I haven’t seen you since… Google! I haven’t seen you since… BlackBerrys!” The point was that the use of decades and calendar years to mark eras is over. Time is measured in tech waves, and not only do these tech waves demarcate eras, they also define them.
I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we’re all assholes. We’re assholes at the supermarket’s meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we’re assholes driving in traffic; and we’re assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy…
Survival
Steve Lohr has an interesting piece about the survival of the mainframe.
IN 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of industry trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Last month, I.B.M. introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient warhorse of computing.
Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. But with the mainframe facing extinction, I.B.M. retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy. A result is that mainframe technology — hardware, software and services — remains a large and lucrative business for I.B.M., and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the world’s financial markets and much of global commerce.
The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets…
E-vote early, e-vote often…
This morning’s Observer column (about voting machines)…
It’s not just the accuracy of the machines that is questionable, it’s also their security. Several projects have demonstrated how voting machines from all the major makers can be hacked into with comparative ease. This is not an argument for not using machines: who would want to replicate the ‘hanging chads’ fiasco of the 2000 election? But before a society entrusts its central democratic process to machines, it ought to take reasonable steps to instil public confidence in the technology.
This requires only two very basic provisions…
Bill Bragg on ‘the Royalty Scam’
Songwriter Bill Bragg was struck by the news that Bebo co-founder Michael Birch has walked away with $600 million after the site was bought by AOL. Bragg has some ideas about what Birch should do with the money:
I heard the news with a particular piquancy, as Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Bebo’s attitude toward artists. He got in touch two years ago after I took MySpace to task over its proprietary rights clause. I was concerned that the site was harvesting residual rights from original songs posted there by unsigned musicians. As a result of my complaints, MySpace changed its terms and conditions to state clearly that all rights to material appearing on the site remain with the originator.
A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.
In our discussions, we largely ignored the elephant in the room: the issue of whether he ought to consider paying some kind of royalties to the artists. After all, wasn’t he using their music to draw members — and advertising — to his business? Social-networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute — their value is their membership. Well, last week Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I’m sure he’ll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped him achieve this success. Perhaps he should also consider the contribution of his artists.
The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend…