Young listeners deaf to iPod’s limitations

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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!

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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.

The drunk, the lamp-post and Amazon’s Kindle

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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.

The Founders got the copyright term just about right

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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.

On this day…

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… 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

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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

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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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