In the garden, early evening, after watering.
Flickr version here.
Cornflowers
From a casual, handheld shot in our garden this evening. Amazing how good the Leica Vario-Elmar is — as you can see from the Flickr version.
So what is Google TV, exactly?
Engadget’s answer.
Google TV isn't a single product — it's a platform that will eventually run on many products, from TVs to Blu-ray players to set-top boxes. The platform is based on Android, but instead of the Android browser it runs Google's Chrome browser as well as a full version of Flash Player 10.1. That means Google TV devices can browse to almost any site on the web and play video — Hulu included, provided it doesn't get blocked. It also means that Google TV devices can run almost all Android apps that don't require phone hardware. You'll still need to keep your existing cable or satellite box, however — most Google TV devices won't actually have any facility for tuning TV at launch, instead relying on your existing gear plugged in over HDMI to do the job. There's a lot of potential for clunkiness with that kind of setup, so we'll have to see how it works in person.
Yep. Judging from my experience with the (deeply flawed) T-mobile Pulse Android phone, we certainly will. Here’s my prediction: common platform, lots of different hardware, nobody taking responsibility for ensuring that the thing works as a whole, millions of pissed-off customers.
How (and why) Facebook is sharing people’s secrets with the world
This morning’s Observer column.
If you think that privacy is an abstract concern of EU bureaucrats and libertarians with too much time on their hands, then might I suggest that you consult youropenbook.org. This is an ingenious site which allows you to type in a search phrase. It then ransacks the publicly available Facebook “status updates” and displays what it finds.
A search for “I cheated”, for example, brings up all kinds of intriguing stuff. A nice young woman from Baltimore posted “dam right i cheated i coulnt get it from u wen i needed it”. There’s also the odd potentially embarrassing reference to cheating in exams. A search for “I lied” brings up updates like “I’m sorry, I lied before when I said I used to make lots of bets. My therapist tells me I should try lying a lot to help get through my… gambling problem”. Another writes “im not gonna bother anymore…theres no point hiding the truth…..iv lost too much and all because i lied to the one i love…im such a fukin dick head, i fucked up the best girl i’ve ever had”.
I could go on but you will get the point. All of these people are instantly identifiable. Millions of Facebook users are posting embarrassing or damaging messages which can be read by the entire internet…
Linguistic pollution
One of the (many) things that infuriated me during the election campaign was all the cant about politicians needing to have the “courage” to make “tough” choices and “painful” decisions. Er, excuse me, but who’s going to feel this much-heralded “pain”? Isn’t it the people who jobs will be terminated, students whose life-chances will be diminished, workers who will have to make do on lower pensions, teachers who will have to handle bigger classes, patients who will have to wait longer for operations, soldiers who will have to do without wearable body-armour? And besides, since when did it require courage to inflict pain on others?
And then there’s the alleged uniqueness of our new Con-Dem administration which is, we are told, the first non-wartime coalition for x hundred years. Er, are we not at “war” in Afghanistan at the moment? And what about the “war on terror”?
Yuck.
Artificial life created by Cabinet Office in secret experiments
“A man-made genome, Mycoplasma liberaloides, is transplanted into a related bacterium, Mycoplasma conservacolum. This ‘reboots’ the cell, transforming it into another, coalesced, species. Ethically troubling and frighteningly risky.”
Lovely cartoon by Peter Brookes.
Onanism and the National Security State
One of the reasons I was pleased (and not surprised) by Labour’s defeat in the general election is that I hold Blair, Brown, the infant Milibands and their mates responsible for a frightening growth in the authoritarian intrusiveness of the state over which they exercised such untramelled control. Even so, this piece by Paul Lewis shocked me.
A story lost amid the election coverage was that of David Hoffman, a photographer who had placed a poster of David Cameron containing the word "wanker" in his window on polling day. Hoffman, 63, was visited by police, who handcuffed him in his living room, threatened him with arrest and forcibly removed the poster, which they had deemed offensive.
The poster, which Hoffman considers an act of legitimate protest, has since returned to the window in Bow, east London. But the offending word has been replaced with “onanist”, derived from a biblical character in Genesis 38:9 whose seed was "spilled on the ground”.
As it turns out, Hoffman is no stranger to the policing of dissent, having spent the last three decades chronicling it. He photographed the miners’ strikes, the Wapping disturbances and the poll tax riots, but believes the policing of protest is today at its most repressive. (At last year’s G20 protest, he lost three teeth.)
The Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition has promised to change all that, and made “restoration of rights to non-violent protest” a central plank of its drive to reinstate civil liberties. That ambition was repeated this week by deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who will oversee the reforms.
I will start to take this coalition seriously if Clegg & Co deliver on the rolling back of the national security state. But I’m not holding my breath.
What Google did next (and how it knew what you were going to do before you did)
Wow! Google Prediction API. Announced this week:
The Prediction API enables access to Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications. The Prediction API implements supervised learning algorithms as a RESTful web service to let you leverage patterns in your data, providing more relevant information to your users. Run your predictions on Google's infrastructure and scale effortlessly as your data grows in size and complexity.
Thanks to my colleague Tony Hirst for his skilled distillation of what Google announced.
End of the road for H.264?
This clipping from GMSV’s coverage of the Google Developers’ conference is interesting.
The announcement with the biggest implications down the road was the unveiling of WebM, an open-source, royalty-free video codec based on VP8. It’s being positioned as the standard for video in HTML5 rather than the proprietary H.264 or the royalty-free but problematic Theora. Yep, you with the glazing eyes: Adoption of H.264 could mean fees imposed on content distributors and providers, though so far the license holders have waived collection. Those license holders include Microsoft and Apple — and Apple is the notable abstainer in the chorus of support for VP8. Could get interesting.
Yep. And the most interesting thing about it is that it’s open source.
My old Carolina Home
Cue Randy Newman. For those of us d’un certain age, this is a poignant moment.
This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago.
On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.
Working with a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, they came up with a simple program to exchange messages and files between computers at Duke and UNC using telephone modems.
The “Users Network,” Usenet for short, grew into an international electronic discussion forum with more than 120,000 newsgroups dedicated to various topics, from local dining to computer programming languages. Each group had a distinctive name such as soc.history or sci.math.
Usenet also played an integral role in the growth of the popularity of the Internet, said Dietolf Ramm, professor emeritus of computer science. At the time, a connection to the Internet was not only expensive but required a research contract with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“ARPA had funded a few schools to begin the early stages of Internet, but most schools didn’t have that,” said Ramm, who worked with the students who developed Usenet. “Usenet was a pioneering effort because it allowed anybody to connect and participate in communications.”
When I was writing A Brief History…, Usenet archives provided a wonderful treasure-trove. They also provided a picture of the Net as it was before the arrival of AOL’s redneck hordes. When the groups alt.sex and alt.drugs were started (after a hoohah) on April 3, 1988, for example, it was immediately felt necessary to start alt.rock-n-roll. One has to be consistent in these matters. Those were the days.
Thanks to Rex Hughes for spotting the announcement.