A lovely trick — from Tim O’Reilly

From a Wired report. Quote:

O’Reilly said the old idea of stand-alone software — the unconnected word processor or spreadsheet — is becoming passé. Even the idea of making a distinction between software platforms — Mac, Windows and Linux — is starting to no longer make sense.

“The platform is no longer the box sitting at your desk,” O’Reilly said.

To illustrate his point, O’Reilly asked how many people in the audience of Mac OS X programmers were Linux users. Several raised their hands. But when O’Reilly asked how many used Google, there was a unanimous show of hands.

“Ah,” O’Reilly said, “you’re all Linux users.” Google is a Linux application running on the world’s largest Linux cluster, he explained.

What a wonderful rhetorical trick. Must use it sometime soon in a lecture.

Well, whaddya know — the US Army is switching to Linux

According to The Register, ‘the US Army has abandoned Windows and chosen Linux for a key component of its “Land Warrior” programme, according to a report in National Defense Magazine. The move, initially covering a personal computing and communications device termed the Commander’s Digital Assistant (CDA), follows the failure of the previous attempt at such a device in trials in February of this year, and is part of a move to make the device simpler and less breakable. According to program manager Lt Col Dave Gallop this is part of a broader move towards Linux by the US Army: “Evidence shows that Linux is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to Linux-based OS.”‘

Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and…

…and, er, red wine*

[Both pictures taken last Sunday at Nicci and Sean’s place in Suffolk.]

*But not, alas, from my own vineyard, as an eagle-eyed reader pointed out! Sigh! One cannot get away with anything on the Web.

Google sells out

Google is going public with a stock market flotation. It’s the beginning of the end for what was a great company and a terrific service. Or so says Vic Keegan.

Amazon’s Really Big Idea

A searchable archive of all its books — where you can search the text. And there’s a prototype already working. See this report. Quote:

“Amazon’s new archive is more densely populated than the early Web was, but it’s still far from complete. With its 120,000 titles, the archive has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new territory suddenly opens up.

The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I’ve recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York’s most famous pillager of public money. Manber types “Boss Tweed” into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.

From the Hamill reference, I link to a page in the afterword on which he cites books that influenced his portrait of Tweed. There, on the screen, is the cream of the research performed by a great metropolitan writer and editor. Some of the books Hamill recommends are out of print, but all are available either new or used on Amazon.

With persistence, serendipity and plenty of time in a library, I may have found these titles myself. The Amazon archive is dizzying not because it unearths books that would necessarily have languished in obscurity, but because it renders their contents instantly visible in response to a search. It allows quick query revisions, backtracking, and exploration. It provides a new form of map.”

Update: lovely piece by Steven Johnson on the implications of this.

RFID tags go to school

If you think John Ashcroft and David Blunkett are bad, just wait until Radio Frequency Identification tags go mainstream. RFIDs are the next-generation bar code. A tag is a low-cost microchip outfitted with a tiny antenna that broadcasts an ID number to a reader unit. The reader searches a database for the number and finds the related file, which contains the tagged item’s description. Unlike bar codes, which must be manually scanned, RFID-tagged items can be read when they are in proximity to a reader unit, essentially scanning themselves.

Wired is running an interesting story about a school in Buffalo which has already deployed the technology as a pupil-monitoring system. “Principal Stillman”, it reports, “has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology, which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to record the time of day students arrive in the morning. In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse’s office. Eventually he’d like to expand the system to track students’ punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class and to verify the time they get on and off school buses. ‘That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22,’ Stillman said. ‘All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids…. Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us.'”

And of course we can put RFID tags on banknotes just to make sure that nobody’s laundering money. And..well, the sky’s the limit.

This stuff is going to happen — and MUCH sooner than people think. Industry, commerce and government think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and are already tooling up for it. In the UK, Tesco put RFID tags on Gillette Mach3 razor blades (apparently because they are a regularly shoplifted item.) RFID technology will enable a nightmarish world of fine-grain, total surveillance. George Orwell, where are you when we need you?

Jonathan Zittrain on reforming copyright law

“It’s time for us to wise up and redraw copyright’s boundaries so that the law and reasonable public expectations fall into better alignment with one another. To be sure, this may require more, rather than less, subtlety.”

Lovely, thoughtful, sensible piece. [Full text.]

Concorde flies its last

Concorde flew for the last time today. I know it’s a politically incorrect thing to say, but I there was something about the gas-guzzling, environment-wrecking machine that I loved. One of my nicest memories is of flying the Atlantic in it in 1990. Here’s what I wrote at the time. I wouldn’t change a word today.

The cost of spam

A Pew Internet survey finds that spam is starting to hurt email and erode people’s trust in the Internet world. Press Release reads, in part:

“WASHINGTON (October 22, 2003) — The recent explosion of email spam is beginning to take its toll on the Internet world. A new nationwide survey shows that 25% of America’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.

Further, more than half of email users say that spam has made them less trusting of email in general. One of their fears is that legitimate emails might be turned away by filters designed to stop spam. Another is that they’ll simply miss incoming email from friends, family, or colleagues amid the clutter of spam in their inboxes.

“People just love email, and it really bothers them that spam is ruining such a good thing,” said Deborah Fallows, Senior Research Fellow at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and author of the report. “People resent spam’s intrusions; they are angered by its deceptions; and they are offended by much of the truly disgusting content.”

Here are some other key figures from a national phone survey of 1,380 Internet users conducted by the Pew Internet Project in June. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus three points:

* 75% of email users are bothered that they cant stop the flow of spam, no matter what they do
* 70% of email users say spam has made being online unpleasant or annoying.
* 55% of email users say they get so many unwanted email messages in their personal account that it’s hard to get to the ones they want
* 30% of email users are concerned that their filtering devices may block incoming email that is important to them.

Despite their dismay, most Internet users keep the issue of spam in perspective. For them, spam takes its place next to life’s other annoyances, like telemarketing calls. Further, many users believe they know how to behave in a spam-saturated environment. The most popular way of dealing with spam is to simply click “delete.” More than 2/3 have made a more aggressive move, clicking to “remove me” from future mailings, although many voice concern that doing so only leads to more spam.”

Good God! Amazon making profits!!!!

I always thought that Amazon was a work of genius (and indeed it has already parted me from a significant amount of my money), but somehow I never expected it to become like a normal company. Yet the NYT is saying that Amazon “yesterday reported its first profit outside of the fourth quarter, which includes the holiday season, as its strategy to reignite growth with lower prices continues to pay off. Amazon, which some investors wrote off as being on the brink of insolvency a few years ago, is now generating cash at a steady clip. Its low prices and increasing selection of goods from other merchants have accelerated its growth in North America. Its sales are still growing rapidly in Europe and Japan, but the pace of growth is slowing overseas, largely as a result of increased price-cutting and offers of free shipping in many countries.”