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:
Obama names the United States’s CTO
From NYTimes.com
Perhaps not surprisingly, President Obama has formed a close friendship with the District of Columbia’s young, Blackberry-addicted, problem-solving mayor, Adrian Fenty. Now, the president has raided Mr. Fenty’s staff to name a youthful, Indian-born techno-whiz as his first federal chief information officer.
The White House said Thursday that it had selected Vivek Kundra, 34, the chief technology officer for the District, to the federal position, where he will be expected to oversee a push to expand uses of cutting-edge technology. He will have wide powers over federal technology spending, over information sharing between agencies, over greater public access to government information and over questions of security and privacy.
But he will also – as Mr. Obama mentioned twice in the space of a six-line comment distributed by the White House – look for ways to “lower the cost of government operations” through technology.
Mr. Kundra’s background seems to suit him well for both aspects of the job. Born in India, he lived in Tanzania until the age of 11, when he moved to the Maryland suburb of Gaithersburg. One of his first memories there, according to a profile last month in The Washington Post, was of seeing a dog-food commercial on television. “I was shocked,” he said. “I was used to seeing people starve in Africa. It was mind-boggling to me that people could afford to feed their dogs!”
I like the sound of this guy. For example,
In just 19 months with the District, Mr. Kundra has moved to post city contracts on YouTube and to make Twitter use common in his office and others. He hopes to allow drivers to pay parking tickets or renew their driver’s licenses on Facebook.
His office’s Web site offers a “Digital Public Square” with links to information on everything from crime to parking to tourism. It provides a map of free wi-fi hot spots, a public library finder, leaf-collection schedules; even a widget to view live snow-plow progress.
Good Morning Silicon Valley gave some more detail:
In his D.C. job, Kundra attracted attention with his embrace of all things Web 2.0, moving the district’s 38,000 employees off of Microsoft’s Office software and into Google’s cloud-based applications, encouraging the use of social channels like YouTube and Twitter, and turning to crowdsourcing for development of apps of use to taxpayers (or as he calls them, “co-creators”). Based on brief remarks to reporters today, Kundra plans to take the same approach on the federal level, shunning expensive customized systems where possible in favor of off-the-shelf software and services. In Washington, “when I left my place and went to the local coffee shop, I had more computing power in my hands than the average teacher, the average police officer, and the average public works official,” he said. “The reason was because the public sector decided it was so special that there was no way it would adopt consumer technology. … You have Darwinian innovation in the consumer space, and that fundamentally lowered our operating costs.”
Kundra is also intent on giving citizens greater access to the vast reservoirs of data collected by the government on their behalf — a move also gaining momentum in the House — to allow third-parties to mine, analyze and mash up the information in ways not possible now. “There is a lot of data the federal government has and we need to make sure that all the data that is not private, or restricted for national security reasons, can be made public,” he said. Kundra plans a new site, Data.gov, to serve as a repository.
Ambitious aims, given the legendary intransigence of the federal bureaucracy, but a definite signal that the days of business as usual are ending. Says Tod Newcombe at Government Technology: “Kundra’s blend of public- and private-sector experience also bodes well. His ability to think outside the box, combined with his understanding of politics are two highly touted skills that a government CIO needs to move IT projects forward in the federal bureaucracy jungle. Finally, Kundra’s enthusiasm for technology as a powerful enabler and transformer, not just as plumbing to keep static government programs alive, marks a sea change in attitude regarding the business of government in the 21st century. Dare we say a paradigm shift?”
Now just imagine who John McCain would have chosen for the post. Probably the CEO of SCO.
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Wrecking America
If you’re wondering what motivates the Republicans in Congress who have opposed the Obama stimulus plan tooth and nail, then you aren’t alone. Mark Anderson is not only baffled; he’s furious.
The first inkling that, having literally destroyed America’s domestic and international well-being, the remaining GOP crowd were going to get even worse, came with the stimulus vote. It seems to have started with Rush Limbaugh, an embarrassing dinosaur on AM radio who seems now to be running the party, in lieu of anyone else raising their hand. “I hope he fails!” he shouted to his listeners the day of Obama’s inaguration.
Let’s look at that for a moment. Since then, Rush, a convicted drug addict and no sane person’s idea of a role model, has tried to back off of his statement, whining away that it was a defensive comment after all those bad things other people said about his boy, George Bush. Another lie, in a long series of lies. Why does he even bother? He said it, and he should be a man: stand by your word.
Today’s headline in the WSJ:
GOP Attacks Climate Plan as Too Costly
Let me say this clearly: since Reagan, by uniting the Christian Coalition with old-line Eisenhower Republicans in order to win the election, laid the seeds for the destruction of his own party, nothing really has changed. Bush Jr. forced the Christians to shut up during his opening convention, in return for getting lots of power later, and they went along: the convention did not mention abortion, there was no rancor on the floor, and the nation was split along abortion lines from then on.
Thanks, George.
What do Republicans stand for today? Well, in truth, they don’t have a clue. But some evil mind in their ranks is telling them that, in the midst of the greatest crisis perhaps ever faced by the nation, they should simply oppose whatever Obama and his party suggests.
Really?
Is that all you’ve got?
If that is all you’ve got, then what you are doing should be deemed illegal. You aren’t even trying to offer us a new path; you are just doing what you did for the last eight years: wrecking America.
Google is subsidising print publications!
From today’s NYTimes.
As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.
But first they must be found.
Since the copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online — given how many books are old or out of print — it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print.
So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages (googlebooksettlement.com/r/home) and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.