From Jon Crowcroft…
Recently I noticed from some friends that their Facebook pages had inaccurate birthday dates — this turns out to be deliberate on their part (a mechanism to mitigate identity theft).
Later: Tony Hirst has had the excellent idea of emulating the Queen, who has two birthdays — one real and one official. He proposes that we all have web birthdays.
The FT’s John Gapper has been following up on the Eliot Spitzer story.
The Emperors Club VIP was clearly at the top end of prostitution enterprises. It operated across borders – in Paris and London as well as in US cities – and it was very expensive. Clients had to pay between $1,000 and $5,500 per hour for its services.
Like other service businesses, it had a loyalty club for the most elite clients who paid even more than $5,500 per hour, known as the Icon Club. It allowed some clients to “buy out” their favourite prostitutes, permitting the men direct access to the women without going through the Emperors Club.
The 47-page complaint shows the Emperors Club also faced many operating challenges. The federal wiretaps of conversations show the organisers facing problems such as having too few prostitutes for the demand from clients in one city and having to hassle clients to pay their bills.
One problem was to get the prostitutes to get correct imprints of the clients’ American Express cards. The complaint states that one of the organisers asked another:
“To ask the prostitutes to fax the imprints, or if that did not work, to scan them and email the imprints and then send the originals in the event of a dispute with the clients about the charge, or if American Express inquired.”
Wonder how many corporate wives will now look askance at their husband’s Amex accounts?
Bill Thompson in lyrical mode…
I didn’t see the crowd start to get restless and heckle Zuckerberg about the deeply-unpopular Beacon advertising system, or get a chance to grab the microphone and ask questions when Lacy threw the conversation open to the floor.
And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.
I was there because I was plugged into Twitter, the instant messaging service that lets users send short text messages to anyone who cares to tune in, online or on their mobile phone.
As I sat at my desk a constant stream of ‘tweets’, as they are called, was being supplied by many of the people in the room and I was able to reply directly and feel that I too was participating…
Net neutrality — which, in crude terms, is the principle that the Internet ought to treat every packet equally and not privilege some at the expense of others — is one of those interesting cases where righteousness may be the enemy of rationality. At the root of it is a visceral belief that the end-to-end architecture of the Net is something very precious (and the key to understanding why the network has sparked such a tidal wave of innovation); those of us who share that belief tend to be paranoid about the lobbying of large corporations who would like to violate the principle for what we see as narrow commercial ends.
But the truth is that net neutrality is a very complicated issue — as real experts like Jon Crowcroft often point out. It may be, for example, that righteous adherence to neutrality may blind us to the fact that, in some circumstances, it may not yield optimal results. Which is why I was interested to read this thoughtful piece in MIT’s Technology Review this morning.
At the end of February, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held a public hearing at Harvard University, investigating claims that the cable giant Comcast had been stifling traffic sent over its network using the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent. Comcast argued that it acted only during periods of severe network congestion, slowing bandwidth-hogging traffic sent by computers that probably didn’t have anyone sitting at them, anyway. But critics countered that Comcast had violated the Internet’s prevailing principle of “Net neutrality,” the idea that network operators should treat all the data packets that travel over their networks the same way.
So far, the FCC has been reluctant to adopt hard and fast rules mandating Net neutrality; at the same time, it has shown itself willing to punish clear violations of the principle. But however it rules in this case, there are some Internet experts who feel that Net neutrality is an idea that may have outlived its usefulness…
The article goes on to cite the views of Mung Chiang, a Princeton computer scientist, who specialises in nonlinear optimization of communication systems. He argues that,
in the name of Net neutrality, network operators and content distributors maintain a mutual ignorance that makes the Internet less efficient. Measures that one group takes to speed data transfers, he explains, may unintentionally impede measures taken by the other. In a peer-to-peer network, “the properties based on which peers are selected are influenced to a large degree by how the network does its traffic management,” Chiang says. But the peer selection process “will have impact in turn on the traffic management.” The result, he says, can be a feedback loop in which one counterproductive procedure spawns another.
Programs using BitTorrent, for instance, download files from a number of different peers at once. But if a particular peer isn’t sending data quickly enough, Chiang says, the others might drop it in favor of one that’s more reliable. Activity patterns among BitTorrent users can thus change very quickly. Network operators, too, try to maximize efficiency; if they notice a bandwidth bottleneck, they route around it. But according to Chiang, they operate on a much different timescale. A bottleneck caused by BitTorrent file transfers may have moved elsewhere by the time the network operator responds to it. Traffic could end up being rerouted around a vanished bottleneck and down a newly congested pipe.
From Nicholas Carr’s blog…
I’ve received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week. One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I’ve heard, will be an aggressive acceleration of the company’s investment in its data center network. The construction program will be “totally over the top,” said a person briefed on the plan. The first phase of the buildout, said the source, will include the construction of about two dozen data centers around the world, each covering about 500,000 square feet or more. The timing of the construction is unclear…
… in 1985, Konstantin Chernenko, who had been Soviet leader for just 13 months, died at age 73. His death was announced on March 11th. Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen to succeed him. I had completely airbrushed ol’ Chernenko from my memory — which is perhaps understandable when you see his official portrait (above), which makes him look like a triumph of the embalmer’s art.
Slight Economist article on the energy demands of cloud computing…
AS ONE industry falls, another rises. The banks of the Columbia River in Oregon used to be lined with aluminium smelters. Now they are starting to house what might, for want of a better phrase, be called data smelters. The largest has been installed by Google in a city called The Dalles. Microsoft and Yahoo! are not far behind. Google’s plant consumes as much power as a town of 200,000 people. And that is why it is there in the first place. The cheap hydroelectricity provided by the Columbia River, which once split apart aluminium oxide in order to supply the world with soft-drinks cans and milk-bottle tops, is now being used to shuffle and store masses of information. Computing is an energy-intensive industry. And the world’s biggest internet companies are huge energy consumers—so big that they are contemplating some serious re-engineering in order to curb their demand…
Strangely, it makes no mention of virtualisation.
Here’s a very good example of a helpful review. I’ve always been wary of zoom lenses, because of the optical compromises implicit in them, but I’d heard good things about the Nikkor 18-200mm DX. So I went to dpreview.com and found a detached and informative assessment. Here’s the overall verdict:
Just occasionally, the old cliches are still the best, and with the 18-200mm VR the phrase ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ springs immediately to mind. It’s a lens which delivers somewhat flawed results over its entire zoom range; where it’s sharp, it has heavy distortion, and when that distortion comes under control at the long end, it loses sharpness. Its close-up performance is reasonable, but not spectacular, and overall it will likely be outperformed optically by a cheaper combination of standard and telephoto zooms. So for a certain type of photographer interested mainly in absolute image quality, this may well cause it to be regarded as nothing more than an expensive snapshot lens.
But to dismiss the 18-200mm VR based purely on its optical quality is to miss the point quite fundamentally. The whole idea of such a lens is to allow the photographer to travel light and never miss a shot while changing lenses, or indeed not to have to risk water or dust entering the camera in adverse conditions. So what you do get for your money is a hugely flexible zoom range which can handle the vast majority of photographic opportunities, coupled with excellent autofocus and vibration reduction systems. And all of this is wrapped up in a relatively compact package, with build quality which feels solid without being excessively heavy. It really is a lens you can leave on your camera all day long and scarcely miss a shot, and it has to be said, this makes it a lot of fun to use.
So when all is said and done, we have to understand that superzooms are essentially about making some optical compromises to provide the broadest possible range in a single lens, and it’s up to each individual to decide whether those compromises are acceptable. I wouldn’t recommend the 18-200mm to someone whose primary interests were either architecture or wildlife, for example, but for the photographer who wants to shoot a little bit of everything and not have to change lenses, it’s more than fit for purpose. Ultimately this is probably as good a superzoom as money can buy, so as long as its limitations are recognised and understood, it has to be recommended.
Insightful Simon Caulkin column…
We live in strange times. In the private sector, market rules are so degraded that it has become the role of companies in the real economy, some built up over decades, to act as chips tossed around by high rollers in the City supercasino. Meanwhile, the public sector is in the grip of a central planning regime of a rigidity and incompetence not seen since Gosplan wrote Stalin’s Five-Year Plans…
He goes on to draw on Jane Jacobs’s seminal Systems of Survival (which is subtitled: “a dialogue on the moral foundations of commerce and politics”) to suggest that the root of our problems is the way the ‘moral syndromes’ that characterise our two basic modes of governance — ‘conquest’ and ‘commerce’ — have become inextricably mixed.
Wonderful New York Times piece by Randall Stross.
Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an “upgrade”?
Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.
Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”
Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.
Here’s the punchline: ‘Mike’ is Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. ‘Jon’ is Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And ‘Steven’ is Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows. Mr Stross garnered the quotes from a cache of internal Microsoft emails unsealed by the judge who is hearing the Vista Class Action suit.