Today, the Cambridge Computer Lab will be honouring Maurice Wilkes with an afternoon of talks and reminiscences. I’m looking forward to it. He was such an amazing, practical man.
Here’s the programme:
Andy Hopper: Introduction
Martin Campbell-Kelly: Beginnings
David Barron: Pioneering
David Hartley: Service
Andrew Herbert: Research
Don Gaubatz: America
Andy Harter: Industry
Andy Hopper: Back to the Lab
Discussion
This morning’s Observer column.
At first sight, it seems magical. At a stroke, all those tiresome gatekeepers – those self-important agents, editors and publishers who stood between you and recognition – are abolished. Suddenly, the world can see your hitherto unrecognised talent in all its glory. Isn’t technology wonderful?
Er, up to a point. This ebook technology has proved so successful that Amazon now claims to be selling more electronic publications than conventional printed ones. The company is clearly surfing a wave. According to one industry expert, for example, nearly 2.8 million non-traditional books, including ebooks, were published in the United States in 2010, while just more than 316,000 traditional books came out. That compares with 1.33 million ebooks and 302,000 printed books in 2009.
Impressive, eh? It’s only when one peruses the cornucopia of literary productions available on the Kindle store that one detects the first scent of rodent…
Spotted in a friend’s rose garden this morning.
Breakfast seminar this morning for my Wolfson Press Fellows given by Bob Satchwell (centre right), Director of the Society of Editors.
We had a lively discussion about, among other things, super-injunctions, during which Bob reminded me of something that the eminent judge Lord Woolf once said (I think in a House of Lords debate). The context was an assertion (by me) that there was no ‘public interest’ defence for tabloid coverage of the sex lives of footballers, but Woolf said that there was also a wider public interest in having newspapers that were commercially successful. Given that the public apparently craves news of footballers’ sex lives, and that tabloids pander to that craving, perhaps the public interest issue is more complex than I had thought.
Discuss, as they say in philosophy exams.
Lined up awaiting guests to the launch party for Nicci and Sean’s new book.
29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.
I know you don’t need these tips, but just in case…
This morning’s Observer column.
A spokeswoman for the CSA explained the thinking behind the ban. “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars,” she asked, “when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition? This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box – other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘Why not us?’ ”
Quite. You can imagine the derisive reaction to this in the Anglo-American media, old and new. The broadcasting ruling was linked with President Sarkozy’s clueless remarks at the G8 summit about “civilising” the internet, and interpreted as a sign of cultural resentment at American dominance in cyberspace. “Poor old Frenchies,” was the general tenor of the commentary, “they just don’t get it.”
Actually, the joke's on us. As it happens, the French do ‘get’ it. To appreciate that, just do a simple thought-experiment. Suppose, for a moment, that BBC News started to use “Dyson” instead of “vacuum cleaner” in its reports of dust-mite infestations, or “Bollinger” instead of “champagne” in its coverage of the drinks industry. We'd be outraged. Yet that is effectively what we are thoughtlessly doing when it comes to dealing with phenomena like social networking: taking the dominant commercial brand and pretending that it’s generic…
Er, here it is:
My work explores the relationship between the tyranny of ageing and life as performance. With influences as diverse as Blake and Andy Warhol, new synergies are generated from both traditional and modern meanings. Ever since I was a teenager I have been fascinated by the traditional understanding of meaning. What starts out as hope soon becomes corroded into a dialectic of temptation, leaving only a sense of decadence and the possibility of a new beginning. As spatial phenomena become transformed through diligent and critical practice, the viewer is left with a statement of the possibilities of our world.
Impressive, isn’t it? Alas I didn’t compose it but simply clicked on the Arty Bollocks Generator.
Not quite burning yet. But emitting smoke. Sobering assessment of what RIM’s latest results tell us. Excerpt:
When reporting its fourth quarter in March, RIM had forecast revenues in the range of $5.2-$5.6bn and profits of between $770-812m.
Instead, they both came in lower. Now, you might look at that and say that revenues are up, and shipments are up – so what’s the worry?
First, it’s in the gap between those two – which led to the fall in profits. Basically, you can see clearly from those numbers that RIM must be getting less money per phone. Quite substantially less, if you take into account the average cost of a PlayBook (which is going to be a lot more than a BlackBerry).
We would have been able to tell you exactly how much it was getting per handset – but following its results last time, RIM said it would stop giving out both average selling prices (ASPs) for handsets and the total number of BlackBerry subscribers, which it had been doing since the beginning of 2002. And another financial point: the company is to buy back 5% of the outstanding shares. I won’t go into the mechanics of why share buybacks are bad (two quick reasons: the company should have better things to spend its cash on, such as R&D, and buybacks featherbed executive share options). But when a company circles the wagons by reducing the amount of data it gives out and does a buyback, something is wrong.
Here’s what’s wrong: RIM’s platform is burning. Except that this isn’t the fully-fledged conflagration that Stephen Elop perceived at Nokia. It’s more of a smouldering. But it’s happening nonetheless, and it’s been happening for a long time: RIM hasn’t released a major new phone since August 2010. (Yes, that’s nearly as long as Apple.) It sort-of showed off a new version of the Torch in May; that will actually be released in September. (Way to kill the sales, people.)
RIM’s management knows it has a problem, but doesn’t seem to be able to make the shift – the very difficult shift, it should be noted – from the old BlackBerry OS to the new QNX platform that is going to power forthcoming BlackBerrys (and already powers the PlayBook).
QNX-based phones have been much promised; RIM hasn’t however delivered.
That figures. I’ve noticed how almost all my corporate contacts — the people who once had BlackBerrys to a man or woman — now have iPhones.
