The G: drive

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Another juicy morsel from the briefing for analysts — spotted by Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data

With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).  … As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache.

An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.

Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be accessed across applications.

Translation: Google is planning a remote hard drive for everyone. If your PC hard drive is C: then the Google drive will be G: And after a while you’ll stop worrying about whether stuff is on C: or on G: — until Alberto Gonzales comes data-fishing, that is…

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts it: “We want to be able to store everybody’s information all the time.” He means it.

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for pointing out that it is Alberto Gonzales, not John Ashcroft, who is now Attorney-General of the US. (I’d got it wrong in the first version of this post.)

Why rich companies are happier

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Two slides from Google’s PowerPoint presentation to analysts caught my attention. In a section about how the company goes about things, Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP for Product Development, first put up this picture of how conventional companies work:

The next slide showed the Google Way:

Ah, the delights of hubris.

The very first Web browser

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Screenshot of Tim Berners-Lee’s Next workstation screen from, I would guess, early 1990.

Update: Hmmm… James Cridland did some digging and came up with a directory listing which assigns the date 7 June 1994 to the image. This doesn’t necessarily date the screenshot, though. But if it does, then the image certainly isn’t “the very first Web browser”, as the headline on this post suggested, because Mosaic was released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in the spring of 1993 and there were certainly browsers running on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in CERN way before that.

In any event, the first browser was a text-browser like Lynx rather than a graphics-based one like that shown in the screenshot.

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Innocent as charged

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Following up on Andrew Brown’s scarifying tale of being stopped and searched on exiting from a London Tube station, I came on David Mery’s web site on which he keeps a wonderfully detailed account of what happened to him — and of the aftermath.

Like Andrew, David was stopped and searched for preposterous reasons (e.g. his jacket was “too warm for the season” and he was checking his mobile phone for messages); unlike Andrew, he was arrested, had his laptop and possessions confiscated and his flat was searched. With the aid of a solicitor, he gradually extracted retractions from the Met but the scary bit is that the fact that he was (wrongly) arrested cannot be expunged. This means, for example, that he is likely to have difficulties getting a visa to travel to the US (which could affect his career prospects), because you are required to disclose any arrests when applying for a visa. The more one thinks about this, the worse it gets. Bin Laden has won, hands down.

An ecological analysis of the Cole case

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Ashley Cole, a well-known footballer, is sueing the News of the World, a rag, for libel, even though the paper hasn’t actually named him in a story alleging that a leading footballer is gay. Here’s the Observer‘s report:

The News of the World ran its first, heavily trailed, story about Premiership footballers on 12 February under the headline ‘Gay as you go’. The paper claimed to have seen pictures of two Premiership football stars, and a well-known male music industry figure, engaged in some bizarre sex acts with a mobile phone.

Although it didn’t name the men (and still hasn’t), it gave clues about their identity, and its sister paper the Sun ran a photo of Cole a few days later, implying (albeit jokingly) that he may have been involved. A second News of the World story a fortnight ago contained more allegations, and provided readers with further titillating clues about their identities. So far, so harmless, perhaps. But in the meantime, furious speculation about the incident had ended up on several websites, several of which named Cole as one of the men involved. A doctored photo of two of those involved, published in the NoW but blurred to hide their identities, was printed, uncensored, on the internet.

Why is this interesting? Well, if you take an ecological view of the media, you start to look for symbiotic relationships. It’s been obvious for a long time that certains kinds of blogs are, to a large extent, parasitic feeders on mainstream media (as the Trent Lott case demonstrated). But now we have an example of parasitism the other way round — mainstream media feeding off the Net. The News of the World didn’t dare to print the photograph it claimed supported its story, so it blurred the image and then left it to Internet speculation to de-Photoshop it, as it were.

The new media ecology

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Today’s (extended) Observer article…

It’s amazing how quickly we take things for granted. Think back to 1993. John Major was Prime Minister, Tony Blair still looked like Bambi and Bill Clinton had just become President of the US. Only grown-ups had mobile phones, no one outside of academic and research labs had an email address, and a URL – now that was something exotic! Amazon was a river, a googol was the technical term for an enormous number (one followed by 100 zeros), eBay and iPod were typos, and there were quaint little shops on the high street called ‘travel agents’…

This was adapted, at the editor’s request, from a lecture I gave last week in the Science Museum.

Common sense on l’affaire Jowell

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Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian…

I am more interested in a larger issue, which is whether left and liberal politics in this country can learn to be more honest, more modern and more consistent about the balance between individual and collective wealth in the kind of society we are all likely to live in for the foreseeable future. The elephant in the room in the Jowell affair is not really Silvio Berlusconi. It is the fact that a Labour minister is married to someone who moves with assurance, and makes a very large amount of money, in a world that is alien (though not necessarily unacceptable) to most Labour voters.

With his network of directorships, off-shore investments, tax avoidance schemes and hedge funds, Mills (and thus Jowell) appear to many to inhabit a world in which it can sometimes seem that taxes are for the little people, greed is good, and there are no proper limits to how much an individual can earn or possess. Many in the Labour party take the traditional roundhead view of such cavaliers, expressing outrage that any Labour person should have anything to do with them. For them, Jowell is literally sleeping with the enemy.

This is, though, a world to which very many people aspire in some way, including Labour voters.

Thanks to Pete for the link.

The persistence of music

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Today was a beautifully, crisp, sunny day in Cambridge. As I turned the car towards town and music lessons this morning, I sang the first line of “Oh what a beautiful morning” from Oklahoma. Without blinking, the kids (aged 12 and 14) joined in and sang the entire thing, word- and pitch-perfect. And the strange thing is that 1950s musicals are not part of their culture — they’re into Coldplay and U2 and James Blunt and Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. So how does a popular song from an old musical get embedded in the collective unconscious? Deep waters, Holmes.

Thanks to AA for pointing out embarrassing spelling error!

Google grapples with Wall Street

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After the share price drop, Google discovered that Wall Street has to massaged after all. Here’s an interesting transcript of the conference that senior Googlers had with analysts last week. The aim was clearly to reassure them that things are OK, honest. Confirms me in my belief that I’d rather eat flies than run a public company. Imagine having to be nice to these creeps.

Microsoft Re-Designs the Ipod Packaging

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Amusing spoof movie imagining how Microsoft would reconfigure the iPod packaging. Then, in a neat case of life copying art, someone got hold of a leaked promotional video for Microsoft’s coming mysterious portable product, Origami, that in some ways resembles the packaging parody.

Thanks to AA for the original link.

Oh, and while we’re at it, see movie of Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, in hysterical form.