“There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”.
Dorothy Parker, The Paris Review Interview.
Why less can be more
One of the funnier aspects of digital photography is listening to retail sales personnel explaining megapixels to customers. Basically the line seems to be that the more megapixels you have, the better. How come then that my Nikon D70, with its 6.1 megapixel sensor, produces consistently better images than my Leica D-Lux 3 compact, which boasts 10 megapixels?
The answer, crudely, boils down to two factors: a larger sensor and better lenses. When I was talking about this with a colleague, Dave Phillips (also a D70 user), he pointed me to this useful tutorial by Sean T. McHugh, whose site also includes some terrific photographs of Cambridge.
MP3 patents return to haunt Microsoft
Wow! Interesting New York Times report…
Microsoft was ordered by a federal jury yesterday to pay $1.52 billion in a patent dispute over the MP3 format, the technology at the heart of the digital music boom. If upheld on appeal, it would be the largest patent judgment on record.
The ruling, in Federal District Court in San Diego, was a victory for Alcatel-Lucent, the big networking equipment company. Its forebears include Bell Laboratories, which was involved in the development of MP3 almost two decades ago.
At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet. If the ruling stands, Apple and hundreds of other companies that make products that play MP3 files, including portable players, computers and software, could also face demands to pay royalties to Alcatel.
Microsoft and others have licensed MP3 — not from Alcatel-Lucent, but from a consortium led by the Fraunhofer Institute, a large German research organization that was involved, along with the French electronics company Thomson and Bell Labs, in the format’s development.
The current case turns on two patents that Alcatel claims were developed by Bell Labs before it joined with Fraunhofer to develop MP3…
I had always assumed that Fraunhofer owned all the relevant rights.
Suddenly Ogg Vorbis looks more interesting.
What Google is really up to
Bob Cringely has been asking himself why Google controls more network fibre than any other organisation. And why it’s building thousands of data centres all over the place.
Google is building a LOT of data centers. The company appears to be as attracted to cheap and reliable electric power as it is to population proximity. In Goose Creek they bought those 520 acres from the local state-owned electric utility, … By buying out all the remaining building sites in an industrial park owned by an electric utility, Google guarantees itself a vast and uninterruptible supply of power, much as it has done in Oregon by building a data center next to a hydroelectric dam or back here again in Columbia by building near a nuclear power station.
Of course this doesn’t answer the question why Google needs so much capacity in the first place, but I have a theory on that. I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don’t. I’ll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That’s perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?
The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.
Bob’s theory is that demand for network bandwidth is about to increase very rapidly, as more of us become accustomed to getting video over the Net.
More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY — a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.
Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won’t know if we’re accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won’t matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won’t be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined — about $1 trillion in all — which places today’s $500 Google share price about eight times too low.
And we thought Microsoft was dangerous. Discuss.
Aside… BTW, Google has gained control of all that fibre by long-term leasing deals, not corporate acquisitions. Why? Because if it started buying up bandwidth providers it would quickly attract the attention of the anti-trust lawyers in the DoJ.
Jobs: baloney watch continues
I’m sure Steve Jobs is some kind of genius. He’s also potty in the same way that Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are potty. Hot on the heels of the WSJ account of his dealings with Cingular comes another account of the Jobs nonsense engine in full exhaust mode.
Steve Jobs makes a lot of sense when he’s talking about music and copyright protection, but when the topic is schools, he seems to be on a different planet.
The teachers’ unions, Jobs believes, are ruining America’s schools because they prevent bad teachers from being fired.
“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” the Apple CEO told a school-reform conference in Texas on Saturday. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”
Jobs knows a lot about schools; he’s been selling computers to them for more than 30 years. But don’t you love it when a billionaire who sends his own kids to private school applies half-baked business platitudes to complex problems like schools? I’m surprised Jobs didn’t suggest we outsource education to the same nonunion Chinese factories that build his iPods.
As someone who sends his kids to a struggling San Francisco public school (where 60 percent of the students are eligible for free lunches), I know for a fact that Jobs’ ideas about unions are absurd, he’s-on-a-different-planet bullshit.
The solution, Jobs believes, is to treat schools like businesses: Empower the principal to fire bad teachers like a CEO.
“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he said.
The issues are many and complex, and yes, there is a problem with firing incompetent or indifferent teachers, but it is not the No. 1 reason schools are failing. It’s not even in the top 10.
In California, the most pressing problems are schools that are too big, too bureaucratic and chronically under-funded. Teachers are criminally low paid and under-trained. Education — and school funding — has become solely about test scores.
[…]
[Firing poor performers] may work for Jobs, who runs his autocratic business fiefdom like Mussolini, but it’s patently simplistic to think that schools can be run like this, with performance measures and goals and metrics and other such nonsense. There are too many variables involved.
Dealing with Mr Jobs
Fascinating WSJ.com piece…
During a visit to Las Vegas last December for a rodeo event, Cingular Wireless chief executive Stan Sigman received a welcome guest: Steve Jobs.
The Apple Inc. chief stopped by Mr. Sigman’s Four Seasons hotel suite to show off the iPhone, a sleek cellphone designed to surf the Web and double as an iPod music player.
The phone had been in development by Apple and Cingular for two years and was weeks away from being revealed to the world. And yet this was the first time Mr. Sigman got to see it. For three hours, Mr. Jobs played with the device, with its touch-screen that allows users to view contacts, dial numbers and flip through photos with the swipe of a finger. Mr. Sigman looked on in awe, according to a person familiar with the meeting.
Behind the scenes in the making of the iPhone, Apple bucked the rules of the cellphone industry by wresting control away from the normally powerful wireless carriers. These service providers usually hold enormous sway over how phones are developed and marketed — controlling every detail from processing power to the various features that come with the phone.
Not so with Apple and Cingular. Only three executives at the carrier, which is now the wireless unit of AT&T Inc., got to see the iPhone before it was announced. Cingular agreed to leave its brand off the body of the phone. Upsetting some Cingular insiders, it also abandoned its usual insistence that phone makers carry its software for Web surfing, ringtones and other services. The deal also calls for Cingular to share with Apple a portion of the monthly revenues from subscribers, a person familiar with the matter says.
In another break with standard practice, the iPhone will have an exclusive retail network: The partners are making it available only through Cingular and Apple stores, as well as both companies’ Web sites.
Mr. Jobs once referred to telecom operators as “orifices” that other companies, including phone makers, must go through to reach consumers. While meeting with Cingular and other wireless operators he often reminded them of his view, dismissing them as commodities and telling them that they would never understand the Web and entertainment industry the way Apple did, a person familiar with the talks says…
Wonderful!
The Conrad Black Appreciation Society
Well, well. Just fancy this…
This Web site is dedicated to the support of Conrad Moffat Black in his current battle with grandstanding U.S. prosecutors and a hostile left-wing press. More than that, it is our grateful and long overdue acknowledgement of His Lordship’s life’s struggle to confront, with unflagging courage, the Brobdingnagian forces of Canadian small-mindedness, parochialism, mediocrity and failure…
The cringing tone of this website suggests that it’s a spoof. For example:
From the outset, let us be clear about several matters concerning The Ad Hoc Committee for Conrad Black. First, none of us boasts the pleasure of knowing His Lordship personally, nor are we beholden to him in any manner, financial or otherwise. Several amongst us, however, have had the honour of an introduction to and a fleeting conversation with His Lordship in one social context or another.
No, we are not, strictly speaking, “friends of Conrad Black.” We are simply admirers of the man, beneficiaries in the broadest sense of his commitment to excellence, and–dare we say–fans of his indomitable style. Whatever transpires in the life of His Lordship over the next few months, he shall remain a blazing beacon of hope to those of us on this dull and dreary northern plain…
Nobody could write this sycophantic drivel with a straight face. So I wonder who is the joker behind it? Craig Brown?
Thanks to Pete for spotting it.
Escaping from Adobe’s clutches
Here’s something useful:
PDFescape is a new way to open PDF files. It allows you to open your PDF files right here on the web without downloading or installing any software.
With PDFescape, you can fill in PDF forms, add text and graphics, add links, and even add new form fields to a PDF file. Best of all, it’s Free!
Have just one PDF form to fill out, but don’t want to buy $299 Adobe Acrobat? PDFescape is for you!
Have a PDF form you want customers to fill out and email back to you? PDFescape is for you!
Another useful web service. Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link. Of course, users of Mac OS X don’t really need it, because the operating system does pdf out of the box. But we’re only — what is it? — 5% of the personal computer world!
Batman’s gizmo
From Technology Review…
It takes about six minutes for a firefighter with a full load of gear to reach the top of a 30-story building by running up the stairs–and when he gets there, he’s tired. A group of MIT students have designed a rope-climbing device that can carry 250 pounds at a top speed of 10 feet per second. They have a contract to make the climbing device for the U.S. Army for use in urban combat zones, and they hope to make it available to rescue workers.
The students founded a company, Atlas Devices, based in Cambridge, MA, to commercialize the device, which is about the size of a power drill.
It’s amazing: see the video on the Atlas site.
EU has plans for your privacy
From today’s New York Times…
PARIS, Feb. 19 — European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.
In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.
A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation….
Apart from anything else, it’s an idiotic concept because it wouldn’t apply to services based in the US. So people will continue to use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail etc. Unless, of course, the EU proposes to make it a crime for European citizens to have a Gmail account.