I like and value Twitter, but find it impossible to keep track of everything that’s going on. In particular I’m always missing direct messages. So in the end I took the plunge and installed Tweetdeck. Looks good. Who knows, maybe one day my contacts will realise that I’m not intentionally rude.
Young listeners deaf to iPod’s limitations
Fascinating piece in The Times about the impact that MP3 compression has had on music fans.
Research has shown, however, that today’s iPod generation prefers the tinnier and flatter sound of digital music, just as previous generations preferred the grainier sounds of vinyl. Computers have made music so easy to obtain that the young no longer appreciate high fidelity, it seems.
The theory has been developed by Jonathan Berger, Professor of Music at Stanford University, California. For the past eight years his students have taken part in an experiment in which they listen to songs in a variety of different forms, including MP3s, a standard format for digital music. “I found not only that MP3s were not thought of as low quality, but over time there was a rise in preference for MP3s,” Professor Berger said.
He suggests that iPods may have changed our perception of music, and that as young people become increasingly familiar with the sound of digital tracks the more they grow to like it.
He compared the phenomenon to the continued preference of some people for music from vinyl records heard through a gramophone. “Some people prefer that needle noise — the noise of little dust particles that create noise in the grooves,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of warmth and comfort in that.”
Music producers complain that the “compression” of some digital music means that the sound quality is poorer than with CDs and other types of recording. Professor Berger says that the digitising process leaves music with a “sizzle” or a metallic sound…
Worth reading in full.
Hey, you there in B14!
From The Inquirer.
MOVIE INDUSTRY BOFFINS have come up with another weapon in the war against toe-rags who sneak video cameras into cinemas and make crappy copies of blockbuster movies to sell at car boot sales.
Video watermarking has been around for a while now but this technology can only reveal in which cinema a recording was made. The latest invention goes one step further and can tell investigators exactly which seat the cammer was sitting in to an accuracy of 44cm.
Eh?
Spotted in Tesco this afternoon.
The drunk, the lamp-post and Amazon’s Kindle
This morning’s Observer column.
Know the old joke about the drunk and the lost keys? A policeman finds a guy scrabbling under a lamp-post and asks him what he's doing. “Looking for my keys,” he replies. “Is this where you dropped them?” asks the cop. “No,” replies the drunk, “but at least I can see what I’m doing here.”
When it comes to technology futures, we’re all drunks, always looking in the wrong place…
LATER: Interesting stuff about the upcoming eReader from the Cambridge firm Plastic Logic.
STILL LATER: See Jakob Neilsen’s review of the new Kindle.
How to Search Twitter
Very useful primer by Chris Allison.
Thanks to Jack Schofield for spotting it.
The Founders got the copyright term just about right
Rufus Pollack, a Cambridge economist, has published an interesting paper in which he estimates the optimal length of copyright. Turns out it’s about fifteen years — pretty close to the fourteen favoured by the guys who wrote the US Constitution. The Abstract of the paper reads:
The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fifteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.
San Francisco: the bird’s-eye view
Lovely picture by Doc Searls.
On this day…
… in 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.
Giving Windows the (quick) boot
I’m a Mac and Linux user, but usually carry a MacBook Air when I’m in my various workplaces. When I go to meetings, most people turn up with laptops. There then follows an hilarious charade. The folks with Macs open up their laptops and are typing or browsing in about 30 seconds. The Wintel users open up their machines and then sit there for several minutes looking glum while Windows winds itself up, stretches, yawns, does some impenetrable calisthenics and performs a leisurely search to see if, by any chance, there happens to be a wireless network around.
Not surprisingly, then, this Technology Review post caught my eye.
Thousands of hours are wasted every year waiting for computers to boot up. A Windows machine can take a couple of minutes to get going and to shut down again. In extreme cases, the entire process can take as long as 30 minutes, according to people who’ve filed lawsuits claiming that their employers should pay for this boot-up and shut-down time.
Software called Presto could provide an alternative to waiting. Demonstrated this week at Demo, a tech conference held in Palm Desert, CA, it joins a handful of products that have emerged recently in an effort to get people working on their computers faster. These products, offered by companies including Intel, HP, and DeviceVM, generally allow a person to boot up in less than 30 seconds, and in some cases less than 10.
When a computer running Presto is first switched on, the user is given the option to load the Windows operating system or Presto. If she chooses Presto, then the system launches within a few seconds, providing a task bar and icons for several applications, including a Web browser, an instant-messaging application, and the Internet phone system Skype. If the user wants to switch to Windows, she needs to log out of Presto and start up the machine as usual.
Interesting, ne c’est pas? So where does it come from? And how does it work? Well, it’s produced by a software company called Xandros, which is located in New York, and it’s based on a slimmed-down version of Linux. (The Xandros distro is what powered the original ASUS EeePC, and it’s neat, minimalist and efficient.)
Presto will be out in beta on March 16 and as a product on April 13 for $19.95. Cheaper than buying a Mac. Could it be a cheap way for my Wintellized colleagues to curb their impatience?
UPDATE: Martin Barry emailed to point out that this stuff is built into some ASUS motherboards now. It’s called ExpressGate and powered by Splashtop from the DeviceVM company mentioned in the NYT piece: