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.
Why TV Lost
To nobody’s surprise except its own, ITV is in deep, deep trouble. Paul Graham has been musing about how broadcast TV lost the war. “About twenty years ago”, he writes, “people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word ‘convergence’ we were giving TV too much credit. This won’t be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call “TV shows”, but they’ll watch them mostly on computers.”
Graham identifies four factors which cooked broadcast’s goose.
1. The Internet as an open platform. “Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.”
2. Moore’s Law, “which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth”.
3. Piracy. “Users prefer it not just because it’s free, but because it’s more convenient. Bittorrent and YouTube have already trained a new generation of viewers that the place to watch shows is on a computer screen.”
4. Social applications. “The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution was the telephone. Now it’s social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. The way you reach them all is through a computer. Which means every teenage kid (a) wants a computer with an Internet connection, (b) has an incentive to figure out how to use it, and (c) spends countless hours in front of it.”
This last, Graham argues, “was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that’s what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers.”
“After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience”, TV people thought they’d be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.
So, in a nutshell, “Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words.”
Networked science
Caroline Wagner has published an interesting book entitled The New Invisible College: Science for Development.
According to the blurb it
offers new tools for governing science in the twenty-first century. Based on exciting advances in complexity and network theories, this book reveals the dynamics and structure of knowledge creation in science. Dr. Wagner urges policymakers to move beyond national policy models and towards networked models of science. This will expand opportunities to translate science into useful technology and social welfare, especially for poor countries.
The coming thing: Google-subsidised Linuxbooks
From The Register.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hinted that his company – or at least its partners – will one day subsidize the purchase of extra-low-cost Linux netbooks in an effort to promote the use of its myriad cloud online services.
“What’s particularly interesting about netbooks is the price point,” Google’s Willy Wonka told a room full of financial types this afternoon at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in downtown San Francisco. “Eventually, it will make sense for operators and so forth to subsidize the use of netbooks so they can make services revenue and advertising revenue on the consumption. That’s another new model that’s coming.”
Schmidt called netbooks the “next generation” of the low-cost machines produced by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. “Products today are not completely done. Things are missing. It’s perfectly possible that operating systems that are Linux-based will become a significant player in that space, whereas they have historically not been a significant player in the PC space.”
In other words, Schmidt believes the US is going back to the future. The subsidized-PC model famously failed in the late 90s and early aughts, with outfits like PeoplePC and emachines. In the UK, mobile operators are already offering free laptops with wireless contracts.
It’s obvious, really. The only thing that current Netbooks lack is inbuilt 3G. Retrofitting them with dongles is, in my experience, a pain.
UPDATE: I should have known — Vodafone is already offering such a product. Thanks to Keren for alerting me.
Venture Capital: optional, not essential
I love Paul Graham’s essays. Just been reading one in which he’s pondering what the impact of the recession will be on venture capital. He thinks that it will probably dry up somewhat during the present downturn, like it usually does in bad times. But this time, he says, the result may be different. This time the number of new startups may not decrease. And that, he thinks, could be dangerous for VCs.
When VC funding dried up after the Internet Bubble, startups dried up too. There were not a lot of new startups being founded in 2003. But startups aren’t tied to VC the way they were 10 years ago. It’s now possible for VCs and startups to diverge. And if they do, they may not reconverge once the economy gets better.
The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore’s law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise. In a lot of startups — probaby most startups funded by Y Combinator [Graham’s incubator] — the biggest expense is simply the founders’ living expenses. We’ve had startups that were profitable on revenues of $3000 a month.
$3000 is insignificant as revenues go. Why should anyone care about a startup making $3000 a month? Because, although insignificant as revenue, this amount of money can change a startup’s funding situation completely.
Someone running a startup is always calculating in the back of their mind how much ‘runway’ they have—how long they have till the money in the bank runs out and they either have to be profitable, raise more money, or go out of business. Once you cross the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite. It’s a qualitative change, like the stars turning into lines and disappearing when the Enterprise accelerates to warp speed. Once you’re profitable you don’t need investors’ money. And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of profitability can be trivially low. Which means many Internet startups don’t need VC-scale investments anymore. For many startups, VC funding has, in the language of VCs, gone from a must-have to a nice-to-have.
That rings a lot of bells for me at the moment.