Yahoo Photos shutting down

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From CNET News.com…

Yahoo will begin to close down Yahoo Photos, in favor of Flickr, the competing photo sharing site the company bought just over a year ago.

Yahoo Photos users will be given the opportunity to move their pictures over to Flickr. But Garlinghouse admits that Flickr isn’t the right sharing site for many users of Yahoo Photos, so users will be given the option to instead move pictures to Shutterfly or the Kodak Gallery.

This is an interesting move for Yahoo, a company geared towards serving the mass audience of online users. Flickr is a great service, but it’s the black sheep of popular photo sites — it’s got a different organizational system from most sites, it’s more open, and it attracts a more tech-adept user base.

Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.

Second Life: the grisly details

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From Technology Review…

The world of Second Life is divided into thousands of individual regions, or “sims,” each 65,536 square meters in area (about 16 acres). Linden Lab’s data facilities include more than 20,000 servers, each running one to four sims. The simulation software controls everything going on in its sim, from rendering the terrain and the 3-D models that make up the environment to animating members’ avatars, retrieving their inventories, performing searches, sending instant messages to members in other sims, and communicating with storage databases. If an avatar crosses from one sim into another, every bit of information about that avatar must be handed over to the new sim. The more sims Linden adds to accommodate new members, the more communication goes on between sims, and the greater the burden on each server and on the “backbone” lines connecting them.

“I don’t believe [this architecture] is scalable, at least not to the sizes I want to see it scale to,” said Zero Linden, a “studio director,” or software development manager, at Linden Lab, at a smaller meeting on May 2. (Linden Lab identifies most of its employees only by their in-world names, which always include the surname “Linden.”) But there are “major architectural changes underfoot,” he says, designed to reduce the need for constant connectivity between servers…

Unrest in Cyberspace

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Hmmm…. It’s not just Digg that’s been having trouble with restive users. It seems that Second Life is also having difficulties. Tech Review reports that:

The overseers of Second Life, a complex and booming virtual world hailed by many as the first step toward an immersive 3-D Internet, attempted yesterday to calm angry cyber-citizens who have petitioned for fixes to technical bugs recently plaguing the world.

The main problem, in members’ eyes: Second Life is growing so fast that it’s straining Linden Lab’s resources to the limit, including its developers’ ability to fix old bugs and roll out new software versions that don’t introduce new problems. In a town-hall meeting yesterday inside Second Life, the company appealed for patience.

“We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement,” said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the venture-funded San Francisco startup that launched Second Life in 2003. The town-hall meeting was hastily arranged in response to a damning open letter published by irritated Second Life residents on April 30. “At the same time, we are building the foundations for the next-gen architecture that will radically improve our ability to scale,” Ondrejka said.

Every day, some 25,000 computer owners, plus teams from dozens of major corporations, are rushing to join Second Life. But as these new members buy virtual land, set up house for their avatars, and start in-world businesses, the strain on the Second Life “grid” is increasing. Linden Lab is adding more than 120 new servers every week, according to Ondrejka, but users say that the company still isn’t keeping up. Complaints have piled up in Second Life forums and blogs from longtime users impatient over frequent slowdowns and crashes, property that goes missing, messages that aren’t delivered, search and friend-finder functions that don’t work, purchases that aren’t completed, and poor to nonexistent customer service and technical support.

The dissatisfaction culminated this week in the open letter, which demands that Linden Lab address the bugs “immediately,” before rolling out planned features such as voice chat. More than 3,000 Second Life users have signed the letter so far.

“People feel that Linden Lab is failing them because they are paying a great deal, in some cases, for a product that is failing to work acceptably, from a company that will no longer communicate with its customers,” says one signer, a United Kingdom-based IT manager known within Second Life as Inigo Chamerberlin…

OLPC machine won’t run Windows after all

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Phew! Contrary to those rumours last week, Ars Technica is is reporting that Nicholas Negroponte hasn’t done a deal to run Windows on his ‘$100’* laptop…

Late last week the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project had a media event in Cambridge, and while I couldn’t make the event, I did tape a video interview for the BBC on the project. During my preparation I kept coming across these claims that Microsoft and OLPC had partnered to put Windows XP Starter Edition on the OLPC, and according to one report, this was being done to get the XO laptop into US schools. None of this jibed with what I had been hearing from sources, so I decided to look into it further. As it turns out, a number of news outlets, including the AP, mischaracterized the situation.

According to Walter Bender, president of Software and Content at OLPC, there is no agreement in place between OLPC and Microsoft to offer XO laptops with any version of Windows. Bender also indicated that Microsoft has not contacted OLPC regarding its $3 software bundling program, nor have any governments requested that the XO be outfitted with Windows. In short, there is no existing collaboration between Microsoft and OLPC aimed at outfitting the XO laptop with Windows.

“We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO. MS doesn’t get any special treatment from OLPC,” Bender told Ars.

*$175 as of last week.

Windows piracy reduced

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Good news…

Microsoft UK says that since it launched its Keep IT Real campaign in February 2006, the Windows XP piracy rate has dropped from 16.7% to 12.9%, with 36m users validated.

I’m all in favour of stamping out piracy of Microsoft products — because it forces the world to realise how much proprietary software costs! And of course it helps Ndiyo.

The end of professional photography?

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Nice Guardian column by Andrew Brown…

Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites…

Later: Nick Carr has commented on Andrew’s piece. “It’s not that I have anything against amateur photographers (being one myself)”, he writes,

it’s that I think we’ll find – are finding already, in fact – that while amateur work may be an adequate economic substitute for professional work, there are things that pros can accomplish that amateurs cannot. We see in the decline of professional photojournalism how the Internet’s “abundance” can end up constricting our choices as well as expanding them.

Quote of the day

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“Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out…only being able to lash out…And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.”

The late David Halberstam, writing about Vietnam in The Best and the Brightest, 1972.