Bubble wisdom

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Lovely, lovely essay by Tim Worstall, which starts out with the usual speculation about Facebook valuations and winds up in a really interesting place, summarised thus:

And that’s the little secret about infrastructure that is so little understood. It is not true that having infrastructure makes us or the society richer. It is rather that using it does. And we usually don’t know how to use it until someone has gone and built a lot of it, people do that curious shaved monkey thing of experimenting with it and then we all find out. This is true of most inventions: it has been said that the biggest social change that the Model T brought was that women were less likely to be virgins at marriage. People worked out what to use the back seats for pretty quickly. The bicycle has been called the greatest contribution to the health of the working classes ever: it allowed courting outside the home village for the first time (amazing how inventions and sex seem to go together, eh? The first social network, Friends Reunited, is said to have caused a bubble in the divorce rate) to the benefit of the next generations’ genes.

So these bubbles, they’re not all bad. They provide an excess of whatever it is, which we then play with until we’ve worked out what to do with it. What we do with it is what allows the advance in wealth, even if those who built it for us have gone bust.

Chromebook: Pogue’s verdict

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Good review of the Chromebook by David Pogue. His conclusion:

Maybe the Chromebook concept would fly if it cost $180 instead of $500. Maybe it makes more sense if you rent it (students and corporations can lease Chromebooks for $20 to $30 a month). Maybe it will fly once this country gets free coast-to-coast 4G cellular Internet, which should be just after hell freezes over.

For now, though, you should praise Google for its noble experiment. You should thrill to the possibilities of the online future. You should exult that somebody’s trying to shake up the operating system wars.

But unless you’re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn, you probably shouldn’t buy a Chromebook.

His main complaint is that the assumption of ubiquitous Internet connectivity on which the Chromebook depends simply doesn’t correspond with everyday reality. Sad but true.

On the other hand, some of his criticisms of the device in its first-release state could also have been levelled at Apple’s iPad when it first appeared (and indeed were levelled by me). But the avalanche of useful Apps that subsequently arrived had the effect of offsetting many of the device’s original limitations. This will also happen with the Chromebook.

Bloomsday!

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It’s Bloomsday, a day which for some of us is far, far more important than Midsummer.

Meanwhile, for light relief (and for Beckett fans, who get a raw deal at this time of year), try this. (Warning: rude words ahead).

Quote of the day

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“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion …”

Andreas Schleicher.

Reminds me of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s remark that “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts”.

The Blogosphere at its best — contd.

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Last month I wrote about a discussion which showed what a useful part of the public sphere the blogosphere has become. Now comes another example — in this case a calm explication by my colleague Doug Clow of the background to Britain’s Bloomsbury-based New College of the Humanities. The initiative has attracted an extraordinary amount of hostility and ridicule in the newspapers, which leads Doug to observe, mildly, that he is “shocked, shocked to discover that the accounts presented in the mainstream media are not perfectly in accord with the situation as I understand it.”

That’s putting it mildly. Doug then goes on usefully to clarify a number of important points: that NCH is in reality just another organisation preparing students for degrees awarded by the University of London International Programmes; that it isn’t a ‘university’ or even a ‘university college’ because in the UK university status can only be bestowed by the Privy Council (though I guess that that would be forthcoming if the government decided to award it); and that it’s a for-profit company with a charitable arm.

The OpEd firestorm that A.C. Grayling and his fellow-adventurers have generated is interesting because, among other things, it shows how resistant some establishments are to change. The truth is that NCH is not the end of civilisation as we know it, but the first appearance on British shores of a phenomenon that’s an established feature of the US scene, namely an expensive Liberal Arts school mainly aimed at the offspring of the wealthy. I wouldn’t want my own kids to go to it (and not just because of the fees), but there are plenty of parents in London who spend more than £18k a year on lunch, and to whom Grayling College will look like an excellent finishing school for their offspring.

T.S. Eliot, the iPad and me

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This morning’s Observer column.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was first published in 1922, is one of the most important poems of the 20th century. And in case you’re wondering what a technology columnist is doing making pronouncements like that, I should explain that I’m just quoting Andrew Motion, who used to be poet laureate and knows about these things. But for mere mortals, or at any rate engineers like me, the complexity of the poem has always put it out of reach. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to read it before concluding that it would have to be added to my list of futile aspirations.

Until now.

What has changed is that last week Touch Press, an innovative publishing outfit founded by Max Whitby, Theodore Gray and Stephen Wolfram, in partnership with the olde-worlde publisher Faber & Faber, launched a digital edition of the poem for the Apple iPad…

LATER: Interesting blog post by one of the App’s designers.

The Dutch do the right thing

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Hurrah! The Netherlands has become the first European country to enshrine Net Neutrality in law. This from The Register.

The Dutch Parliament yesterday agreed to make the Netherlands the first nation in Europe to officially put net neutrality principles into law. The law will force ISPs and telecom operators to ensure access to all types of content, services or applications available on the network.

The new telecom law has won a near unanimous vote, despite fierce opposition from telecom operators, who had been planning to charge for over-the-top services, such as Skype or WhatsApp Messenger, which bypass traditional cellular communications. Vodafone Netherlands is currently still blocking the use of Skype on its 3G mobile network.

Facing sharp criticism, the largest Dutch political party – the liberal VVD – withdrew an amendment which would still allow carriers and ISPs to charge extra for services. The proposal came from Afke Schaart, who until last year was Director of Public Affairs for KPN, the biggest telecom operator in the Netherlands.

In recent months, Dutch telecom operators have complained that the volume of text messaging is slowing sharply because of cross-platform mobile messaging apps which allow users to exchange messages without having to pay for SMSes.