See this exquisite piece of design.
Thanks to Brian for spotting it.
Google having doubts about China?
Hmmm… From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
Has Google begun recalibrating its Evil Scale? If it hasn’t yet, it certainly seems to be considering it. Addressing reporters in Washington yesterday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that the company has compromised its principles by acceding to Chinese censorship demands and hinted that Google could adjust its stance in the country in the future. “We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference,” Brin said. “Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense. It’s perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, ‘Look, we’re going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there.’ That’s an alternate path. It’s not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing.”
Quite a change, as GMSV observes, from CEO Schmidt’s confident tone when the original capitulation was announced. “We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one,” he said at the time. “From our perspective, we must comply with the local law, and indeed, we have all made commitments to the government that we will absolutely follow Chinese law.”
The long tail in action
From today’s New York Times…
a nice illustration of a brainteaser I have been giving my friends since I visited Netflix in Silicon Valley last month. Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix’s inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day? The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?
Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That’s right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. “Americans’ tastes are really broad,” says Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process…
More IP madness
From David Pogue’s Blog…
Today, a cheery/hilarious/frightening story from reader Jeanine Weekes Schroer that really rings the bell on the Ridiculous meter:
“I just had an extremely frustrating experience with the Yahoo/Target photo service, where you upload pictures on Yahoo to pick up prints at Target (in an hour, if you’d like).
“I had uploaded ten pictures (random stuff); I asked for a mix of 8 by 10s, 5 by 7s, and 4 by 6s. One was of my husband’s boat, because he loves it, and another was of my husband fishing near our home, because I love him.
“I showed up at Target’s Photo Center in my small town. The very sweet young girl found my envelope, but it had a note attached to it. The note said, ‘Ask for Copyright release for the 2 pictures lying on the dryer rack.’
“She called for assistance, because she was unsure what to do. The person who answered her call ALSO called for assistance, because she also did not know what to do. A third woman arrived.
“She told me that because of copyright concerns, Target reserves the right not to sell any picture that appears to be professional. She said, ‘Anyone can just download any picture they want, and we’d be liable. I’m sorry, we will not sell you the prints.’
“I proceeded to explain to her, as I had to the sweet teenager and the assistant, that one is a picture of my husband, and the other has ME IN IT with a camera! Surely that doesn’t appear to be professional staging. The manager reiterated, ‘I’m sorry.’
“I asked her if there was any paperwork I could fill out, swearing authorship of the pictures. She reiterated, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she wandered off.
“They made lame intimations that they could do it if I had the original prints or film (but it was a digital camera, so no such monster), or if I could bring digital media with the pictures on it. I explained that the pictures were both more than a year old and no longer maintained on any memory card.
“It seems to me that they have not worked out a system for best serving the consumer, protecting copyright interests, and fending off lawsuits. I was furious and vowed in a letter never to use their photo system again–and never to go to Target again…
Political realities — US style
From the latest Pew Research Center Report…
More than two-thirds of Americans (69%) said in May that they were following news about the high price of gasoline these days very closely, as high as in the months following Hurricane Katrina last fall. A recent survey by the Pew Center for the People & the Press found that the issue of immigration (44%) and the situation in Iraq (42%) also attracted close attention from a sizeable minority. Attention to news from Iraq has remained relatively steady for over a year now (dipping significantly below 40% only in the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina). Just (16%) say they have been tracking news about ethnic violence in the Darfur region of Sudan very closely, while 33% say they have not followed this issue closely at all…
That Ken Loach film…
… already has Britain’s reactionary newspaper columnists (including Michael Gove, one of Dave Cameron’s friends and relations) in a frenzy of indignation (though it seems that none of them has actually, er, seen the film). Their basic line is the hoary old one — that ‘our’ boys would never do anything nasty to people, like shooting them in the back, or clubbing them to death. (Try telling that to the relatives of the people who were shot dead by the Paras in the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry all those years ago.)
There’s a nice column in today’s Guardian by George Monbiot, in which he ingeniously draws a parallel between the Black and Tans who inadvertently persuaded my countrymen to support a war of independence, and what we are now finding out about the behaviour of the Americans in Iraq. And the moral? If you’re occupying someone else’s country, brutality comes with the territory.
My paternal grandfather was not a political animal. He believed in keeping his head down. But his views about the British were irrevocably shaped when he and his brother were dragged off a donkey cart in Connemara by a passing detachment of Tans who gave them a casual beating before going on their merry way. I expect that many ‘non-political’ Iraqis feel the same about the Yanks — and, who knows? — maybe about the Brits too.
Useless infobyte no. 354
Er, today’s date is 06.06.06. I bet that all over the planet there are chaps writing long screeds about this in green ink.
Google takes logical next step
John Markoff’s had the nod…
SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — Stepping up its attack on Microsoft’s core business, Google plans to make available on Tuesday a test version of a Web-based spreadsheet program that is intended to make it simple to edit and share lists and data online.
The company said that the free program, called Google Spreadsheets, would be able to read and create files in the format used by Excel, the Microsoft spreadsheet software that is installed on millions of personal computers. The spreadsheet service is another step in Google’s steady march toward creating its own computing universe that is an alternative to desktop PC software now dominated by Microsoft. It comes just months after Google bought a small Silicon Valley company called Upstartle, creators of a Web-based word-processing program called Writely…
What took them so long?
Later…There’s lots of commentary in the Blogosphere today about what this signifies. The obvious interpretation is that Google is really attacking Microsoft. If it is, then it’s doing so in a really smart way, because it’s refusing to fight on Microsoft’s territory — which is the platform, i.e. the PC. Google has declined to compete in that space and is providing services on the Web which offer a severely limited amount of the functionality that Microsoft provides in its PC software. Nicholas Carr has an interesting post to this effect. Extract:
So why would Google put out a product that makes its arch-rival’s product more valuable? Because Google doesn’t want to compete with Office. It sees Office as part of the existing landscape, and it wants to build a new layer of functionality on top of that landscape. No one is going to stop buying Office because Google Spreadsheets exists. But what people may well do is use Spreadsheets for sharing Excel and other data online – rather than just emailing Excel files around, as they used to. If Google Spreadsheets competes with a Microsoft product, it competes with a Microsoft product that doesn’t yet exist: Excel Live, Microsoft’s own web interface for Excel data.
Gardener’s window
Leica – a la carte
Well, this takes the biscuit!…
To give this quality an unmistakable, personal touch, Leica is now offering you an ambitious unique modular system. The Leica à la carte principle lets you configure your own Leica M camera, which will then be produced just for you. You choose all of the individual details that perfectly suit your functional, esthetic and practical preferences, starting with the color of the camera top and type of leather finish, following with different viewfinder frames and ending with personal engravings such as signatures and markings which clearly prove that your Leica is a unique item. Of course, this is only possible because each Leica is made by hand in the traditional way practised in the factory in Solms.
Er, no mention of anything as vulgar as price. I’m sticking with my (black) M6.