Coffee-table booking

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

The most interesting event at the conference was the appearance of the two great metaphor snatchers on the same platform. So far as I know, this is the first time that Jobs and Gates have ever appeared live together in public. And it happened, wrote one commentator, ‘despite scientists’ worries that the density of their combined egos could open a rift in the space-time continuum’.

Fortunately, no such singularity occurred. The pair were interviewed, if that is the correct term for emollient ego-stroking, by Mr Mossberg and his sidekick, Kara Swisher. It was fascinating to observe the differences between them. Jobs gets more distinguished-looking as he gets older. He now looks like a Marine corps general from the Vietnam war. Gates is still a nerd trapped inside an expanding waistline. Jobs is suave, charming, articulate, manipulative and dangerous. Gates struggles to get his thoughts out via the relatively impoverished medium of English. As I watched him I was reminded of George Steiner’s description of the music of Bach: ‘Intense force channelled through a narrow aperture.’ But why not see the whole show for yourself. Just go to tinyurl.com/2b95cr – and keep that garlic handy.

User-generated porn

Posted on by

Wow! This New York Times report is interesting.

The Internet was supposed to be a tremendous boon for the pornography industry, creating a global market of images and videos accessible from the privacy of a home computer. For a time it worked, with wider distribution and social acceptance driving a steady increase in sales.

But now the established pornography business is in decline — and the Internet is being held responsible.

The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers.

And unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones, or a well-lighted movie set for a ratty couch at an amateur videographer’s house.

After years of essentially steady increases, sales and rentals of pornographic videos were $3.62 billion in 2006, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, according to estimates by AVN, an industry trade publication. If the situation does not change, the overall $13 billion sex-related entertainment market may shrink this year, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, the magazine’s publisher. The industry’s online revenue is substantial but is not growing quickly enough to make up for the drop in video income.

Older companies in the industry are responding with better production values and more sophisticated Web offerings. But to their chagrin, making and distributing pornography have become a lot easier.

“People are making movies in their houses and dragging and dropping them” onto free Web sites, said Harvey Kaplan, a former maker of pornographic movies and now chief executive of GoGoBill.com, which processes payments for pornographic Web sites. “It’s killing the marketplace.”

Aw shucks! The poor dears. Porn industry leaders should get together with record company executives for joint therapy sessions. Primal scream therapy, perhaps?

The podcaster’s friend

Posted on by

I’ve been looking out for ages for an acceptable way of recording MP3 audio — without going in for the kind of obsessive pre-amp sophistication that audiophiles insist is mandatory. I think I’ve found the answer — the Zoom H4. I’ve been testing it out and it produces audio that is, in Roger Needham’s timeless phrase, “good enough for government work”. Not that I do any of that, of course.

The H4 records onto an SD card in Wav or MP3 format and has two modes: stereo and 4-track. Plug it into the USB port of my Mac and it looks like an external drive. Useful review here which says that the 4-track operation is a bit lightweight. But that doesn’t bother me: all I wanted was ol’-fashioned stereo.

I got it from here. £220 inc. VAT.

It was Dan Bricklin who put me onto it, btw.

Jobs’s blind spot?

Posted on by

Brent Schendler wrote a snooty piece in Fortune About Apple TV, which he doesn’t think much of. He explains further in his blog…

He wrote the column, he says,

to point out that even Apple can bungle a product from time to time. Another thing I probably should have said in the column was that in a broader sense, flubbing is actually a good thing, because it shows that Apple is genuinely trying to raise the state of the art of consumer electronics. As the old Silicon Valley saying goes: “If you don’t launch a dud now and then, it means you aren’t trying hard enough.” Finally, I also wanted to show how even Apple can sometimes make the same kinds of mistakes that Microsoft does.

Mainly, however, with the launch of the much ballyhooed iPhone looming in June, I thought it was important to point out how Apple TV demonstrates that Steve Jobs, the ultimate control freak, is not in total control of all the production values of his new consumer electronics products; at least not as much as has been the case in the past with his computers and the first few generations of the iPod and iTunes. That’s not his fault, but instead is because Apple, as it ventures further afield, no longer “builds the whole widget” to the extent that it has in the past. It must rely on capricious movie studios and TV networks and record companies for content of course, and it increasingly will depend on stubborn telecom carriers for cellular and broadband connectivity and for marketing help.

Steve Jobs loves music, and the much celebrated iPod clearly was not the product of someone with a tin ear. “Elegant” really is the appropriate adjective to use to describe it, because every little nuance seemed right. But Apple TV makes you wonder if Jobs paid any attention at all during the birthing process. Or maybe it betrays how his well-known disdain for broadcast television might have left him with a blind spot when it comes to TV-related products. Or perhaps this is just what happens to a company when it develops the makings of a high-tech monopoly that it wants to preserve and extend, in this case the market for digital downloads. Speaking as a long-time Apple fan, I sure hope not.

The Microsoft coffee-table computer (contd)

Posted on by

David Pogue is underwhelmed…

This new “surface computer,” as Microsoft calls it, has a multi-touch screen. You can use two fingers or even more — for example, you can drag two corners of a photograph outward to zoom in on it. Here’s an article in yesterday’s Times about it.

If this is all sounding creepily familiar, it is probably because so far, all of this is exactly what NYU researcher Jeff Han has been demonstrating for a year and a half now. I’ve written about it several times on my Pogue’s Posts blog…

And he callously destroys my illusions about the device. (I loved the way the table sucked images out of a Canon IXUS.)

Microsoft’s version of the multi-touch computer adds one very cool, though impractical, twist: interaction with other electronics.

For example, in Microsoft’s demonstration, you can take some pictures. When you set the camera down on the table top, the fresh photos come pouring out of it into a virtual puddle on the screen — a slick, visual way to indicate that you’ve just downloaded them.

Next, you can set a cellphone down on the table — and copy photos into it just by dragging them into the cellphone’s zone.

Then you can buy songs from a virtual music store and drag them directly into a Zune music player that you’ve placed on the glass.

How cool is all of this? Very. Unfortunately, at this point, it’s the Microsoft version of a concept car; you can ogle it, but you can’t have it. These stunts require concept cameras, concept cellphones and concept music players that have been rigged to interact with the surface computer.

Wonder if that’s accurate. I’m sure there are compact digital cameras that are wi-fi enabled.

Hmmm… Just checking…

Yep. Nikon do one. And Canon do a Digital IXUS Wireless model. So the demonstration could have been done with a bog-standard IXUS.

Hah! I was right — see this admiring video from Popular Mechanics:

Catalogue of Geoffrey Vickers’s papers is online

Posted on by

Hooray! The OU Library has published its catalogue of the Geoffrey Vickers papers.

Sir (Charles) Geoffrey Vickers (1894-1982) had a varied life as a lawyer, a soldier, an economic intelligence officer and legal advisor. In the later years of his life he became a prolific writer and speaker on the subject of social systems analysis and the complex patterns of social organisation. The collection includes materials created in this latter stage of his life.

The Geoffrey Vickers Collection at the Open University largely consists of draft material and correspondence relating to his published works, articles and speeches.

I knew him only towards the end of his long life. He was one of the wisest men I’ve ever met. And I guess he was the only winner of the Victoria Cross to write insightfully about complex systems and organisations.


(Image submitted to Wikipedia by Martin Hornby.)

The Wikipedia entry describes how Vickers won his VC:

On 14 October 1915 at the Hohenzollern Redoubt, France, when nearly all his men had been either killed or wounded and there were only two men available to hand him bombs, Captain Vickers held a barrier across a trench for some hours against heavy German bomb attacks (the ‘bombs’ of the citation were early grenades). Regardless of the fact that his own retreat would be cut off, he ordered a second barrier to be built behind him in order to secure the safety of the trench. Finally he was severely wounded, but not before his courage and determination had enabled the second barrier to be completed.

Not exactly your typical academic, then. He was also an astonishingly successful City lawyer, specialising in mergers and acquisitions at Slaughter and May. When Clement Atlee, the great post-war Labour Prime Minister, wanted to nationalise the coal industry, he brought in Vickers to handle the legal side of the process.

One of his sayings has remained with me ever since I first encountered it. “The hardest thing in life”, he said once, “is knowing what to want”. He was right: it is.