History’s curious way of repeating itself

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This is the illustration on a lovely post by Nick Bilton discussing the way what John Seely Brown called ‘endism’ keeps cropping up in discussions of media ecology.

Bilton ends by saying:

Accusations of people “never leaving their house again” or books and the written word “ceasing to exist” didn’t start with the telephone or the phonograph. These assumptions come with each new invention or technology. Printing presses, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, radios, moving images–are all born into a world where their antiquated predecessors are soon-to-be deceased forms of information delivery. They are the new, and the old will have no place in this novel world. That is, until the next thing comes along.

The way we tell stories and consume content inevitably changes with the birth of these new technologies. The voice of the predecessor doesn’t instantly die when a new form of communication arrives, it begins to morph and adapt to the changing climate, or as the current pundits aptly predict, it won’t survive. But take a 10,000 foot view–we’re just in the infancy of this wonderful melded form of journalism and media, where each form of broadcast borrows from the other as a method of storytelling. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find out that newspapers no longer exist. Yes, in the long run, a large contingent won’t survive, and the ones that do will tell stories very differently than they do today, carving out a new, ever-changing narrative. But this evolutionary process is going to take time. History tells us so.

He also includes a link to a splendid piece in Slate.

Yes Wii Can!

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Nintendo had to be tickled to learn that the new White House will include a Wii. President-elect Obama told the New York Times that his girls got one of the consoles for Christmas and that he himself was putting in some time at the virtual bowling alley, with considerably more success than he had at the real-world lanes.

But Obama’s flirtation with the Wii is nothing compared to his deep devotion to his BlackBerry, which his advisors want him to stop using because of legal and security concerns. “I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry,” Obama said Wednesday in an interview. “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.” What’s an endorsement like that worth if Research in Motion had to pay for it on the celebrity market? At least $25 million, maybe twice that, said agents asked by the New York Times. “You always want the celebrity to be a good fit with your brand, and is anybody considered a better communicator right now than Barack Obama, or a better networker?” said Fran Kelly, chief executive of the Arnold Worldwide ad agency. “It couldn’t have a better spokesperson.” This, of course, could all change if Obama can’t find the reset button for the economy.

Link.

OLPC downsizes

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ArsTechnica reports that

In an announcement posted to the OLPC wiki, Negroponte reveals that the organization will have to significantly scale back and cut costs in order to continue operating. The new budget constraints have necessitated major layoffs and pay cuts.

"Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources. Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people," he wrote. "While we are saddened by this development, we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries."

Another victim of OLPC budget cuts is the Sugar project, a Linux-based education software platform that OLPC developed for its laptops. This cut is unsurprising, because OLPC has gradually been moving away from Sugar and has increasingly sought to support Windows. It is still unclear whether OLPC will continue to encourage its large buyers to adopt Sugar, but Negroponte says unambiguously that the organization will be working on transitioning Sugar development entirely to the community.

The report goes on to describe the OLPC project’s “extreme dependence on economy of scale” as its Achilles heel.

The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology. The latest restructuring effort could help OLPC regain its focus, but the failure of its past attempts to do so don’t really provide much confidence.

Hmmm… I’m sorry that they’ve hit trouble, but my sympathy is tempered by irritation at the way the project seems to be re-focussing on running Windows.

Microsoft offers Vista replacement. Servers fall over.

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Microsoft surely anticipated a crowd when it announced this week that 2.5 million current users of Windows Vista SP1 would be allowed to download a free beta of the upcoming Windows 7 starting at noon Pacific today (see “Microsoft offers Vista users something beta“), but it apparently wasn’t ready for the Wal-Mart-on-Black-Friday kind of mob that gathered outside its virtual doors and collectively clicked its servers into whimpering submission. With the Web site faltering under the load, Microsoft called a timeout and said it needed to add “some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta.” No ETA was given, and prospective downloaders have been left to mill about aimlessly, checking their favorite tech news sites for a new go signal and talking among themselves about the benefits of BitTorrent.

There’s nothing wrong with Vista, of course. Nothing at all.

Amazing — a really neat application from Microsoft

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Microsoft Research has come up with an ingenious PC application called Songsmith.

Just open up Songsmith, choose from one of thirty different musical styles, and press record. Sing whatever you like – a birthday song for Mom, a love song for that special someone (they’ll be impressed that you wrote a song for them!), or maybe just try playing with your favorite pop songs. As soon as you press “stop”, Songsmith will generate musical accompaniment to match your voice, and play back your song for you. It’s that simple.

Robert Scoble was given a demo by the developers in his Vegas hotel room.

The economics of phishing

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Conventional wisdom is that phishing represents easy money. In this paper we examine the economics that underly the phenomenon, and find a very different picture. Phishing is a classic example of tragedy of the commons, where there is open access to a resource that has limited ability to regenerate. Since each phisher independently seeks to maximize his return, the resource is over-grazed and yields far less than it is capable of. The situation stabilizes only when the average phisher is making only as much as he gives up in opportunity cost.

From “A Profitless Endeavor: Phishing as Tragedy of the Commons” by Cormac Herley and Dinei Florencio of Microsoft Research.

Power lunching

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Dubya had a lunch party today at the White House. Guests were his Pa, President-elect Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Apparently it was Obama’s idea. It was the first time since 1981 that all living presidents have been together at the White House.

Photo here.

Moore’s Law in pictures

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Technology Review has an interesting photographic record of Moore’s Law. It opens with this image (from Texas Instruments).

The first working integrated circuit on germanium was demonstrated by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958. This prototype has a transistor (small left dot) attached to two gold wires and a capacitor (middle black dot). The germanium itself, secured on a glass slide, is divided into three resistors by the tabs at the bottom. By showing that all three types of components could work in the same slice of germanium, Kilby offered a way to improve the performance and lower the cost of electronic devices.