Cycling through town this afternoon, I passed a mother and her 8/9-year-old daughter on their way home from the daughter’s prissy, expensive private school. As I came level with them the girl said,
“Well, if you can’t be bothered to cook, I shan’t eat anything”.
Scott Grieder, Ask.com Group Product Manager, was taking notes on an important conference call when his (free) Google Pen ran out of ink without warning. The lapse in this fundamental Google product/service forced him to switch pens at a critical moment, resulting in considerable inconvenience and loss of data.
“I should have known better than to use a free Google product for business purposes.” Scott told us in a recent interview. “Google Pen is fine for home use, but not when my company’s productivity is on the line. I had to switch pens in the middle of taking notes. There’s no telling how much data I lost.”
But then he received a nice handwritten letter from a Google person. “We note your suboptimal experience with our Google pens”, it said, “and are pleased to send you — at no charge — a replacement set. Fortunately our pen architecture is based on Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Drafting Stuff [warning: embedded geek joke] . If any component fails, a quick recovery is ensured”.
Thanks to James Cridland for spotting it.
This appeared on the front page of today’s New York Times.
Ho, ho! From today’s New York Times…
SEATTLE, March 5 (Reuters) — The Microsoft Corporation, the software giant, has prepared a blistering attack on rival Google, arguing that the Web search leader takes a cavalier approach to copyright protection.
In remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday to the Association of American Publishers, the associate general counsel of Microsoft, Thomas Rubin, argues that Google’s move into new media markets has come at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.
Mr. Rubin’s comments echo arguments at the heart of a 16-month-old copyright lawsuit against Google brought by five book publishers and organized by the Association of American Publishers, an industry trade group.
“Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and I.P.O.s,” said Mr. Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade-secret law.
“Google takes the position that everything may be freely copied unless the copyright owner notifies Google and tells it to stop,” Mr.Rubin said. Microsoft, he said, asks the copyright’s owner for permission first…
Danny Sullivan has posted a nice dissection of Microsoft’s high-minded cant.
From today’s Guardian…
Last year enough digital information – from emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, photos and TV signals – was generated to fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from the earth to the sun, according to research published today.
The proliferation of digital cameras and mobile phones that can take pictures, coupled with the popularity of online video services such as YouTube and BitTorrent, has caused an explosion of images. This pushed the world’s total digital content last year to 161bn gigabytes. That is the equivalent of 161bn iPod Shuffles or 161 of so-called exabytes.
The sheer amount of data that has been created by the digital age becomes clear when comparing it with the spoken word. Experts estimate that all human language since the dawn of time would take up about 5 exabytes if stored in digital form. In comparison, last year’s email traffic accounted for 6 exabytes.
The survey, conducted by the technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by the IT firm EMC, shows that growth in the digital universe is being driven by the switch to digital imagery; the move from traditional phone calls to digital telephony such as mobile and voice over the internet calls, and the rise of digital TV.
Roughly a quarter of the digital universe is original – such as pictures or emails or even phone calls – while the other three-quarters is replicated material including forwarded emails, movies on DVD and pirated music.
Much of this digital information is being produced by individuals. YouTube, for instance, hosts about 100m daily video streams, while more than a billion songs are shared over the internet every day.
IDC estimates that by 2010, more than 70% of all the digital information in the world will have been created by consumers…
More… From GMSV:
From the Department of Unreproducible Results comes word that we are in a new space race and we are losing. Tech research firm IDC took a whack at calculating how much digital information the world is generating and came up with a figure of 161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — for last year, factoring in the multiple copies of files like songs and videos. To put that in perspective — well, I don’t know … does saying that would fill 2 billion top-line iPods help at all? Luckily, says IDC, total available storage last year was 185 exabytes, leaving room for a big swap file. But the trend looks threatening. IDC figures we’ll have about 601 exabytes of storage available in 2010, but we’ll be producing 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) of new information, creating an overflow situation that will result in headlines like “Toddler swept away in raging data stream.”
This, as Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher notes, raises some interesting questions — like how does all that extra 2010 data get “produced” if there’s no place to store it. But don’t spend too much time worrying about it. This sort of extrapolation is usually rendered moot by real-world developments. Now that it’s been noted, go ahead and delete.
From SaveNetRadio.org…
On Friday March 2nd 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board announced new royalty rates for Internet Radio stations. The rates are retroactive to January of 2006.
The new rates are far higher than any industry experts expected. In fact, if they remain unchanged, bankruptcy looms for many online radio stations.
The new rates essentially levy a tax of $0.0011 per performance. Now, that doesn’t sound bad does it. But consider this. Each hour, the average radio station plays 16 songs. So that’s about 1.76c per hour, per listener. A station with 500 listener average would be hit with fees of $211 per day, $6,336 a month or $76,000 a year.
This amount of money is beyond the resources of all but the very wealthiest of corporations. Many of the internet radio stations are run by enthusiasts and hobbyists. These small stations are the ones bringing new music, and old favorites to you every day. Music you can’t hear on corporate-owned terrestrial stations.
Could this be the day the music died?
Thanks to Rex Hughes for the link.
… in 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. Full text here.
Il Duce on one of his better days. (Photograph from Wikipedia.)
One of the hazards of ‘tidying up’ in a household as chaotic as ours is that one chances upon interesting articles that were overlooked when the newspaper or periodical first arrived. This morning, for example, I happened upon this article by Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books of February 23, 2006 which was sitting atop a duvet box in my bedroom. It’s a review of Sergio Luzzatto’s book The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s corpse and the Fortunes of Italy and the full text, alas, resides behind the NYRB’s paywall. Needless to say, I began to read…
Eleven days before the end of the war, Mussolini (motto: “If I advance, follow me; if I withdraw, kill me”), disguised in a German military overcoat and a helmet that covered most of his face, was caught by Italian partisans. He had left his wife and kids to face the music and was en route to Switzerland with his mistress and booty valued at $2 billion in today’s money. The partisan commander, Walter Audisio, obviously took Il Duce’s motto seriously and shot him — and his mistress, Claretta Petacci — dead outside a villa on Lake Como. This is what happened next:
On the following morning, Audisio’s men took the bodies to Milan, which had just been liberated, and threw them on the Piazzale Loreto. The choice of place was deliberate. A few days before, on this same piazza, the Nazis had dealt similarly with the bodies of partisans they had killed. The bodies of Mussolini and Pettaci were trampled, mutilated, and urinated upon by men and women. Some were armed and fired into the corpses. A woman tried to shatter the Duce’s skull with a hammer. Then Mussolini and Pettaci were hung head down from the roof of a gas station, their hands spread out in a gesture of total surrender, giving the bodies the appearance of inverted crucifixes. [Photograph here, if you’re interested.] During the ensuing autopsy, the morgue door was left open, allowing all comers to walk past and watch nurses play ball with Mussolini’s liver. This horrific episode was satisfying to many at the time and shocking to others. Edmund Wilson, arriving in Milan a few weeks later, wrote in his diary that over the entire city hung the stink of this defilement: “Italians would stop you in the bars and show you photographs they had taken of it.”
Luzzatto’s book chronicles what later happened to Mussolini’s body and reveals that his grave in Predappio (where his remains were eventually interred) still attracts 100,000 visitors a year, many of them reverential.
Hmmm… Something like this would have happened to our old friend, Saddam Hussein, if the Americans had not kept him in custody.
This morning’s Observer column…
Of late, however, Dell has hit a bad patch. Senior executives have been fired, opted to spend more time with their families or departed to take up promising new careers in the fast-food industry. Michael Dell, the company’s flamboyant founder, has returned to take command of the listing ship. And as part of his attempts to revitalise the company, Mr Dell and his team had a Big Idea: why not ask customers for their ideas about what should be done?
Thus was born IdeaStorm, Dell’s effort to harness the collective intelligence of its actual and potential customers. It was launched on 16 February and has turned out to be very popular. Hordes of people signed up to volunteer their ideas. And that, of course, is where the trouble started…
Photographed at 21:57:52 this evening.
