Winter punting

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Winter punting, originally uploaded by jjn1.

The Cam this afternoon, with smoke signals from King’s.

It’s strange how calming photography can be. I had a frantic work day, with one large economy-sized crisis and missed deadlines whooshing by. The crisis necessitated a meeting in the centre of town at 4pm, so I decided to walk rather than cycle in from College and — on a whim — took a camera. The air was still and the late-afternoon light entrancing. As I crossed Clare bridge I noticed — to my astonishment — that there were people on the river. So I stopped, contemplated the scene — and took some photographs, of which this is one. And then I walked on, suddenly peaceful and relaxed.

The tyranny of Power Laws

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This morning’s Observer column.

Everywhere you look on the internet, you find power laws – yes, even in the Guardian’s online comment forums, where 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper’s monthly online audience. And, while there are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership. Various sinister explanations have been canvassed for this, but really it’s just an illustration of the power of power law distributions. As Clay Shirky once put it: “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution”.

This is where the mathematical and political interpretations of “power” fuse into one…

Microsoft’s Google obsession: a symptom of a deeper problem

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ReadWrite has an interesting piece triggered by the announcement that Google has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission which avoids the full-on anti-trust suit for which Microsoft (and some others) had been lobbying.

Microsoft had a pretty lousy year in 2012, putting out a string of big products – Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the Surface tablet – that all turned out to be be disappointing.

But those pale in comparison to what may be the biggest disappointment in Microsoft’s history — its failure to convince antitrust regulators to take action against Google.

After a 19-month investigation and despite much prodding from Microsoft, the Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement with Google that basically amounts to a slap on the wrist.This is a crushing blow to Microsoft, which has spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and phony grassroots groups over the past several years hoping to land Google in hot water.

Indeed, Microsoft’s obsession with Google doesn’t just border on crazy. It is crazy, and not just a little tiny bit crazy but full-blown, bunny-boiling, Ahab-versus-the-whale nutso.

Yep. One way of interpreting this obsession is that it’s a way of avoiding Microsoft’s central problem — that it isn’t really innovating. (Some people say that it’s never really been an innovator, in the sense that it simply bought innovative companies and incorporated their creations into its own product portfolio.) What’s certainly true is that Microsoft has spent the past 10 years missing out on many of the important trends in the industry (cloud computing, social networking, smartphones, multimedia). In search and mapping its efforts have been respectable but haven’t gained much traction. Only in the XBox3 gaming area has it really looked like an industrial leader. And in its core area — operating systems — it managed one Olympic-class screw-up: Vista.

The intriguing question is how can a rich company stuffed with clever people drop so many balls? One explanation is that it’s just a case of the bureaucratic sclerosis that afflicts all large organisations. An alternative explanation puts it down to lack of technical leadership. Whatever one thinks of Bill Gates, he was a formidable techie who had the respect of many of the geeks who worked for Microsoft in its glory days. But Steve Ballmer, his successor as CEO, is not that kind of guy. He can, perhaps, earn the respect of sales and marketing folks, because, in the end, he’s their kind of guy. To geeks, though, he just looks like another suit — a noisy and belligerent suit, perhaps, but ultimately still an embodiment of The Man.

Advice for professionals in an age of digital abundance

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From Seth Godin:

When everyone has access to the same tools
…then having a tool isn’t much of an advantage.

The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn’t own.

Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I’m betting it’s your attitude.

Sums up the challenge for e.g. professional photographers in the age of Flickr and high-end cameras.

Farwell then, netbooks: it was nice knowing you

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Nice piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian on the rise and fall of something that was once the New New Thing. Conclusion:

Netbooks had a short but interesting life – going from the one-time saviour of the PC industry, to just another mispriced attempt to push some low-powered Intel chips and garner more money for Microsoft.

But the squeeze on pricing, plus the fact that Windows licences aren’t free, meant that they got pushed into a tiny niche: worse specifications than slightly pricier laptops, no margin for the manufacturers, and worse battery life and portability than the burgeoning number of tablets with custom apps.

The questions that do remain is what’s going to happen to the various government contracts in countries such as Greece and Malaysia to equip schools with netbooks – or whether those contracts have finished, or been discontinued.

What, too, about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project? Essentially, it’s trying to get netbook-like devices to classrooms in developing countries. There hasn’t been much news of huge wins this year, though, going by its end-of-year blogpost. Perhaps it will function independently of the death of consumer netbooks.

So farewell, netbooks. It was nice knowing you, but ultimately, you were just another PC.

One of the most marked differences between the technology and old-media industries is the speed with which product categories come and go. The Netbook is a classic case-study of this.

One big question: Google still seems to be pushing its Chromebook.

Delhi gang-rape: the mote in Western eyes

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Terrific Guardian piece by Emer O’Toole about the subliminal racism of much Western comment about the horrific death of an Indian rape-victim. Male violence against women is depressingly common in most societies — including our own. So, as O’Toole points out, there’s “a misplaced sense of cultural superiority” underpinning much Western media coverage of the Indian atrocity:

For example, this BBC article states, as if shocking, the statistic that a woman is raped in Delhi every 14 hours. That equates to 625 a year. Yet in England and Wales, which has a population about 3.5 times that of Delhi, we find a figure for recorded rapes of women that is proportionately four times larger: 9,509. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal decries the fact that in India just over a quarter of alleged rapists are convicted; in the US only 24% of alleged rapes even result in an arrest, never mind a conviction. This is the strange kind of reportage you tend to get on the issue.

Thirty years on

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The Internet — in the sense of the network based on the TCP/IP family of protocols — is 30 years old today. Google asked Vint Cerf, who with Robert Kahn was co-designer of the system, to mark the anniversary with a blog post explaining how it came about.

TCP/IP was tested across the three types of networks developed by DARPA, and eventually was anointed as their new standard. In 1981, Jon Postel published a transition plan to migrate the 400 hosts of the ARPANET from the older NCP protocol to TCP/IP, including a deadline of January 1, 1983, after which point all hosts not switched would be cut off.

When the day came, it’s fair to say the main emotion was relief, especially amongst those system administrators racing against the clock. There were no grand celebrations—I can’t even find a photograph. The only visible mementos were the “I survived the TCP/IP switchover” pins proudly worn by those who went through the ordeal!

It’s typical of Vint that he should downplay the brilliance of the TCP idea, not to mention his own role in it. A fuller version of the story is told in my book on the history of the Net. As a taster, here’s the text of the relevant chapter.

Why a desktop OS doesn’t work on a tablet

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Perceptive piece by Scott Gilbertson in The Register. Sample:

So far, despite Microsoft’s best efforts, the tablet world is still very much orbiting the twin stars of iOS and Android.

Having used a Samsung Windows 8 tablet for a few months, I have a theory as to why: you think you want a full desktop computer on your tablet – I certainly did — but you don’t. It simply doesn’t work.

In the case of Windows 8 you can blame some of the “not working” on the buggy, incomplete software that is Windows 8, but not all of the problems can be attributed to a shortcoming of touch APIs.

Much of what makes a full desktop interface terrible on a touch screen tablet is simply the whole desktop paradigm was never designed to be used on a tablet and it shows. The Metro interface for Windows 8 is excellent; different, but in my experience really well done.

Where Windows 8 on a tablet falls apart is when you try to bring the software keyboard to the traditional desktop interface on a tablet. The software keyboard takes up half the screen, which makes even simple tasks difficult. How to you rename a file and move it? First you tap it to select it, then you tap the button to bring up the keyboard, then you type, then you touch away the keyboard, then you touch the file again. It isn’t just awkward and slow; it’s downright antagonizing.

Yep.