The Holy Grail
This morning’s Observer column.
The quest for the Holy Grail is generally regarded as a preoccupation of those of a religious or mystical bent. But in fact the community which suffers most from Holy Grail Syndrome is made up of geeks and early adopters who would never be seen within a mile of an altar.
For Christians, the Grail is the cup, plate or dish supposedly used by Jesus at the last Supper. For the computing community it is the Tablet, a slim, lightweight device which combines significant computing power with the convenience of a paper notebook. And sightings – or rumours – of the mythical device provoke the kind of delicious excitement so masterfully exploited by the novelist Dan Brown.
We had such a sighting last week…
How Twitter works in theory
Very insightful post by Kevin Marks about why Twitter works.
It is said that an economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders whether it works in theory. Twitter clearly works in practice – and if you want practical advice, watch Laura Fitton's Tech talk at Google, or read her Twitter for Dummies. I've learned a lot from talking to her and others about this phenomenon, and I wanted to write about some theories that help me understand it…
Worth reading in full.
Post-Medium Publishing
Paul Graham, who is a terrific essayist as well as a successful entrepreneur, has a new piece on Post-Medium Publishing which has some very perceptive things to say about what print publishers are getting wrong. He concludes it thus:
I don’t know exactly what the future will look like, but I’m not too worried about it. This sort of change tends to create as many good things as it kills. Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.
The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.
Yep. That’s why Napster took off: people wanted tracks but the record industry would only sell them albums, because the economics of shipping plastic disks made that mandatory. Napster enabled users to get tracks, and boy did they like it. Of course it helped that the tracks were free. But if they had been reasonably priced from the outset, illicit file-sharing would have been containable.
Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the link.
The UN farce
I can’t figure out which is more nauseating: the pathetic British obsession with the supposed “special relationship”; or the way the UN General Assembly provides despots with a platform for grandstanding. Witness Gadafi’s demented rant yesterday and Iran’s I’m-a-dinner-jacket today. Regarding the latter, there was a good piece by Simon Schama in the FT. Sample:
Not the least repellent aspect of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s reiteration, on the eve of the Rosh Hashanah Jewish holiday, that the Holocaust was a lie, was the muffled response to it by western media and governments. Statements were duly forthcoming in Berlin deploring the Iranian president’s speech, while in Washington it was left to Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, to do the official tut-tutting.
But it was as though the moral atrocity of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s speech was barely worthy of comment being, in the first place, nothing new, and in the second place, incidental to the practical dilemma of how to “engage” with him during his visit to the United Nations this week. Well, one way would be to send Mr Ahmadi-Nejad copies of the 2005 General Assembly resolution repudiating Holocaust deniers and instituting a day of remembrance on January 26 encouraging all member nations to educate their people in the genocide so that future acts of comparable barbarity might not recur.
But then the mere facts of the matter are unlikely to make much impression on a man and a regime lost in paranoid derangement. The pressing issue is how to contain the consequences of anti-Semitic fantasy and recover the moral credentials of a General Assembly that will have listened to someone in such flagrant contradiction of its own resolution…
Greener cloud computing? I wonder
Energy consumption from data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005–from 0.5 percent to 1 percent of world total electricity consumption. That figure, which currently stands at around 1.5 percent, is expected to rise further. According to a study published in 2008 by the Uptime Institute, a datacenter consultancy based in Santa Fe, NM, it could quadruple by 2020.
“Having energy consumption go from one to three percent in five to ten years, if that goes on, we are in big trouble,” says Kenneth Brill, Uptime Institute executive director. Unless this growth is checked, greenhouse gas emissions will rise, and “the profitability of corporations will deteriorate dramatically,” he adds.
Hmmm… Not sure about the profitability angle, but the environmental issue is a real one. According to this report, Yahoo is now taking it seriously.
At any rate, its new datacentre near Buffalo, NY, includes buildings oriented to take advantage of the breeze coming off Lake Erie, with cupolas to vent hot air from racks of servers. Operators only have to switch on air-conditioning when outside temperature rises above 27 degrees.
Google’s inference engine
A friend sent me an email about the Renault Formula One ‘crash’ scandal. I read it in Gmail, and then noticed the ads that Google had selected to display based on its reading of the content of the message. Still, better than “Live Crash Experiences” or ads for the David Cronenberg film.
EN PASSANT: All the documents relating to the FIA Hearing on the incident are here (as PDFs). They make interesting reading. There’s also an audio recording of the Official statement.
On this day…
… in 1952, Tricky Dick bet the ranch on this ludicrous TV broadcast. And got away with it.
Does Scotland deserve a second chance?
No, not the country, which seems fine, but the Attorney General of the same name. As the saga of her employment of a housekeeper whose visa had expired unfolded, I fell to muttering about there being one law for politicians and one for the rest of us. As indeed did most of the country. But Michael White, the Guardian‘s Political Editor, has an interesting take on it in this morning’s paper.
As I noted here the other day, of the two couples in this tale, three of the four people – Scotland, her barrister husband and Tapui’s British solicitor husband – are all lawyers who ought to have been more careful to secure her residential status, a relatively easy thing to do for someone with a British spouse.
So only the non-lawyer in the case has lost her job. But should Scotland, who helped pass the relevant legislation as a Home Office minister and is the cabinet’s legal adviser, lose hers, too?
Phone-ins and chatrooms have been crowded since this morning’s announcement of the administrative (not criminal) penalty, with people complaining that it’s one law for the rich, another for the poor. Is that true in this case? I doubt it.
The laws against employing illegal immigrants are designed to deter people who do it systemically – either in business or their own homes – to gain cheap, malleable workers who can’t complain much.
I don’t think that motive will have applied to either party here, do you?
So what it’s really about is whipping up negative feeling about immigrants, legal or not, and the jobs they do in our economy, often because we won’t do them ourselves (or at least not for the money on offer).
Quote of the day
“If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity or subservience to dictatorship.”
From the Preface to Richard Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich