From an ad in today’s New York Times.
I’ve been taking photographs for over 50 years, and have never yet pushed a shutter. Who writes this stuff?
Cloudprint
John Markoff reports a new initiative by HP in today’s New York Times
PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 18 — Hoping to alleviate a frustration of mobile computing, Hewlett-Packard has quietly introduced a free service designed to make it possible to print documents on any printer almost anywhere in the world. Cloudprint, which was developed over a period of several months by a small group of H.P. Labs researchers, makes it possible to share, store and print documents using a mobile phone.
The service emerged as the result of a conversation begun at the laboratory this year over how the computer and printing company might benefit from the introduction of the Apple iPhone, according to Patrick Scaglia, H.P.’s director for Internet and computing platforms technologies at the research lab.
“The world is going to flip,” Mr. Scaglia said. “We want to ride the wave of the Web.”
The underlying idea is to unhook physical documents from a user’s computer and printer and make it simple for travelers to take their documents with them and use them with no more than a cellphone and access to a local printer.
The service requires users to first “print” their documents to H.P. servers connected to the Internet. The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.
Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user’s cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user’s phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint Web site. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.
On this day…
… in 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the ”Prague Spring” liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek’s regime.
More dodgy dealing by Apple?
Hard on the heels of the discovery of what Apple has done to iMovie comes another interesting example of a company losing touch with its most devoted customers. While installing software updates on one of our machines, I found that Apple wanted to install a new version of QuickTime. And then I noticed this:
Important Notice to QuickTime Pro Users
QuickTime 7 will disable the QuickTime Pro functionality in prior versions of QuickTime, such as QuickTime 5 or QuickTime 6. If you proceed with this installation, you must purchase a new QuickTime 7 Pro key to regain QuickTime Pro functionality. After installation, visit www.apple.com/quicktime to purchase a QuickTime 7 Pro key.
This is the kind of thing one used to expect from Microsoft.
Later: Quentin emailed in more reasoned tones.
When you upgrade to iLife ’08 or iWork ’08, it doesn’t overwrite the old versions. So you can still happily use a previous version of iMovie if wanted.
On the QuickTime front, installation WILL overwrite previous codecs etc. I think it’s still the case, however, that if you rename the player before installing, that old player will retain Quicktime Pro functionality though the new one doesn’t.
The energy costs of traditional computing
Interesting BBC piece by Chris Long on the power consumption of PCs.
Only recently have they become numerous enough to make an energy difference to our world, and more recently still, their power consumption has rocketed.
“In the mid 90s when the original Pentium processor was introduced, the average computer system could work with a 130/140 watt power supply, which is much lower that it is today,” said Scott Richards of computer component manufacturer Antec.
“The processor was probably 15 watts of consumption and the graphics cards was about 10 watts of consumption. Then you had your hard drive and your floppy drive, so even given the 10 or 20 percent headroom you need to operate the computer you could easily do a 130/140 watt power supply.
“Today we are selling power supply units at 1,200 watts.”
My feeling is that the article exaggerates the power consumption of today’s PCs, but the general point remains true — that PC-based networking architecture is enormously wasteful in energy terms. I’m astonished that companies don’t pay more attention to the power consumption of their office networks. This is even more important in the developing world, where electricity is not only hard to get, but often incredibly expensive. It’s a major selling point for our Ndiyo networking architecture.
And then there’s the even thornier question of the power requirements of server farms…
Thanks to Sumptuous for the link.
Boot of the Beast, RIP
Bill Deedes, the wonderful old bird who was the model for William Boot, the hapless war correspondent in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, has passed away at the grand age of 94. There’s a nice obit in — not surprisingly — the Telegraph. Excerpt:
As editor of the Telegraph he would wear a cardigan with garish luminous socks, smoke from a cigarette holder and address the most insignificant sub-editor as “My lord” or “Shquire”.
His mangled metaphors were legendary: “You can’t make an omelette without frying eggs”; “one swallow doesn’t make an impression”; “we should nail our matchbox to the mast”; “the Tories should pull their trousers up”.
Once or twice a day he would be found enjoying a pint at the King and Keys, next door to the paper’s premises in Fleet Street. It would have been difficult to imagine anyone less afflicted by the strains, frustrations and insecurities which so often haunt the seats of power.
Evidently life had treated Bill Deedes very well, and he was perfectly willing to acknowledge the fact.
Indeed, with his shushing articulation and somewhat distrait manner, Bill Deedes might appear as hardly more than an amiable buffer – a distant cousin, perhaps, of Bertie Wooster, certainly an eminently suitable golf partner for Sir Denis Thatcher, Bt.
This image was reinforced by his caricature in Private Eye as Dear Bill, the recipient of Denis Thatcher’s fictitious epistolary confidences. Deedes played up to this gentle mockery.
When he wrote to Private Eye to correct them on some point, he relished the opportunity to use the formula which the magazine imputed to his editorial corrections: “shome mishtake shurely.”
Even amidst the troubles that enveloped his editorship he appeared to some to be benignly disengaged. “The snapshot I carry of Bill in my head,” noted the paper’s cartoonist Nicholas Garland, “is of him tilted back in his chair with one foot on his desk; smoke is curling from his cigarette; his tie is loosened, and he is grinning.”
But this supposed exponent of the easy option had won the Military Cross during the war. This seeming flaneur found his content in unremitting work.
This apparent bumbler was one of the best journalists of his time, always eager for travel and adventure, fertile in shrewd perceptions, and blessed with the ability to convey them with a clarity and simplicity none but the best writers attain…
iMovie ’08
Looks as though Apple has boobed with the new version of iMovie (one of my favourite programs). Here’s an excerpt from David Pogue’s searing review in the New York Times:
Most people are used to a product cycle that goes like this: Release a new version every year or two, each more capable than the last. Ensure that it’s backward-compatible with your existing documents.
IMovie ’08, on the other hand, has been totally misnamed. It’s not iMovie at all. In fact, it’s nothing like its predecessor and contains none of the same code or design. It’s designed for an utterly different task, and a lot of people are screaming bloody murder.
The new iMovie was, as Apple admits, designed primarily for throwing together movies quickly. It lets you scan through a clip to see what’s in it, isolate the good parts, and rapidly drop them into a sequence.
But iMovie 6 was just as good at those tasks; you could scrub through, chop and drag its clips just as easily. Meanwhile, iMovie ’08 is incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old iMovie made so enjoyable. The old iMovie offered the essential tools of professional programs like Final Cut Pro without the cost or complexity.
The new iMovie, for example, is probably the only video-editing program on the market with no timeline-no horizontal, scrolling strip that displays your clips laid end to end, with their lengths representing their durations. You have no indication of how many minutes into your movie you are.
The new iMovie gets a D for audio editing. You can choose one piece of music to put behind the video, but that’s it. You can’t manually adjust audio levels during a scene (for example, to make the music quieter when someone is speaking). You can’t extract the audio from a clip. The program creates a fade-out at the end of an audio clip, but you can’t control its length or curve.
All the old audio effects are gone, too. No pitch changing, high-pass and low-pass filters, or reverb.
The new iMovie doesn’t accept plug-ins, either. For years, I’ve relied on GeeThree.com’s iMovie plug-ins to achieve effects like picture-in-picture, bluescreen and subtitles. That’s all over now.
You can’t add chapter markers for use in iDVD, which is supposed to be integrated with iMovie. Bookmarks are gone. “Themes” are gone. You can no longer export only part of a movie.
All visual effects are gone-even basic options like slow motion, reverse motion, fast motion, and black-and-white. And you can’t have more than one project open at a time.
Incredibly, the new iMovie can’t even convert older iMovie projects. All you can import is the clips themselves. None of your transitions, titles, credits, music, or special effects are preserved.
On top of all that, this more limited iMovie has steep horsepower requirements that rule out most computers older than about two years old…
Looks like the criticisms are having some impact in Cupertino. Pogue reports that Apple is offering a free download of the previous iMovie version to anyone who has iMovie ’08.
Hmm… I’ve ordered iLife ’08. Better check that it has a ‘custom install’ option.
How to give a good presentation
“”According to most studies”, says Jerry Seinfeld, “people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
Bearing this in mind, perhaps a guide to making great presentations would be useful?
All part of the service.
Virtualisation comes to Wall Street
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
VMware, a company recently known only to hard-core technologists, debuted as the darling of Wall Street on Tuesday, with an opening-day surge that exceeded even Google’s historic 2004 launch.
Stock of the Palo Alto maker of “virtualization” software soared 76 percent, eclipsing Google’s 18 percent first-day gain. VMware’s value at closing was $19.1 billion – ranking it as Silicon Valley’s third-largest home-grown software company after Oracle and Adobe Systems. It was the largest initial public offering since Google achieved a $27 billion valuation.
As if that wasn’t enough, Citrix announced that it was paying $500m for Xensource, a fascinating virtualisation outfit that emerged from the Cambridge Computer Lab.
The one-way bet
Nice polemical essay on the sub-prime crisis by Tony Curzon Price…
In a system-wide crisis, no one wants to trade. There is no price at which anyone can be convinced to hold a contract, because no one knows what its value is. In this circumstance, a fund manager is a helmsman in a storm: aware of every danger of his position but powerless as wind, then waves, batter him here, then there. But unlike the helmsman, the storm is made worse if another ship in the vicinity goes down. If a bank actually faces bankruptcy, all the contracts and obligations held by that institution will be bad, thus infecting trust in every part of the financial system.
The central banks bail out the funds in order to stop anyone seeing a ship go down, as a way of stemming contagion. That is the defence. This is why we, as citizens and voters the owners of the central banks, lend money in conditions in which no banker would lend. And the argument is strong: contagion and system-wide crisis will have a real impact that will cause hardship: when firms and households find borrowing is hard, demand drops, jobs go … recession. There is a real case here for us to bail the hedge-funds.
But the metaphor of the storm is misleading. Meteorology is not caused – at least not predictably – by the decisions of the helmsmen it affects. Financial crises are. It is because we can be counted on to be lenders of last resort that traders and managers can discount the risks of system-failure and therefore behave imprudently with increasing ease and frequency. The pattern is familiar from the libertarian critique of welfarism: while a safety-net for the deserving poor is good, the existence of the safety-net will create a class of idle, undeserving scroungers. It is hard to be good without encouraging others to be vicious.
Fund managers have been enjoying a one-way bet for six years or more. A credit-worthy institution could borrow very cheaply and lend on without any concern about becoming systematically over-stretched. In the extreme case, the Japanese central bank has been lending money almost for free. Those with access to free money could lend it on to those without such privilege and pocket not just the difference, but, through gambles, multiples of the difference…