Online video ‘eroding TV viewing’

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Another canary in the mine — a BBC report saying that:

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests.

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

And online and mobile viewing is rising – three quarters of users said they now watched more than they did a year ago.

But online video viewers are still in the minority, with just 9% of the population saying they do it regularly.

Another 13% said they watched occasionally, while a further 10% said they expected to start in the coming year.

Of course this is all minority stuff — for now…

The problem with programming

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Interesting Technology Review interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, the guy who dreamed up C++. Excerpt:

Technology Review: Why is most software so bad?
Bjarne Stroustrup: Some software is actually pretty good by any standards. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. That’s quality software! Fifteen years ago, most people, and especially most experts, would have said each of those examples was impossible. Our technological civilization depends on software, so if software had been as bad as its worst reputation, most of us would have been dead by now.

On the other hand, looking at “average” pieces of code can make me cry. The structure is appalling, and the programmers clearly didn’t think deeply about correctness, algorithms, data structures, or maintainability. Most people don’t actually read code; they just see Internet Explorer or Windows “freeze,” have their cell phone drop a call, read the latest newspaper story about viruses, and they shudder.

I think the real problem is that “we” (that is, we software developers) are in a permanent state of emergency, grasping at straws to get our work done. We perform many minor miracles through trial and error, excessive use of brute force, and lots and lots of testing, but–so often–it’s not enough.

Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it: a system just “sort of evolved” into something minimally acceptable. Personally, I prefer to know when a system will work, and why it will.

TR: How can we fix the mess we are in?
BS: In theory, the answer is simple: educate our software developers better, use more-appropriate design methods, and design for flexibility and for the long haul. Reward correct, solid, and safe systems. Punish sloppiness.

In reality, that’s impossible. People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That’s because people want fancy new gadgets now. They don’t want inconvenience, don’t want to learn new ways of interacting with their computers, don’t want delays in delivery, and don’t want to pay extra for quality (unless it’s obvious up front–and often not even then). And without real changes in user behavior, software suppliers are unlikely to change.

We can’t just stop the world for a decade while we reprogram everything from our coffee machines to our financial systems. On the other hand, just muddling along is expensive, dangerous, and depressing. Significant improvements are needed, and they can only come gradually. They must come on a broad front; no single change is sufficient…

It’s a good interview, worth reading in full. There’s a lovely exchange towards the end:

TR: How do you account for the fact that C++ is both widely criticized and resented by many programmers but at the same time very broadly used? Why is it so successful?
BS: The glib answer is, There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.

ITV makes the Grade

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Michael Grade is leaving the BBC to join ITV.

Michael Grade has resigned as BBC chairman and is to join ITV, the corporation’s main terrestrial rival.

ITV, which has been struggling with falling advertising and ratings, said the appointment was a “real coup”.

Well, it is for ITV. I’m not sure it’s the smartest career move for Grade (who I know slightly and have always liked a lot; among other things, he’s a serious cigar smoker). He’s been offered huge amounts of money — a pay package which could hit £2 million a year, compared to the £140,000 he earns now as Chairman of the Beeb. But when he took the BBC job, I had assumed that he had made enough money not to have to worry about it for the rest of his life. Maybe I was naive.

His departure is a terrible blow to the BBC, but he has done great things in a short time. He was appointed in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry, when the Corporation was bruised and demoralised by Hutton’s ludicrous whitewash of the government, and for many people his appointment signified that the BBC would survive and bounce back. And it has.

“Being the Chairman of the BBC was the most unexpected job I have ever had”, he writes in his farewell letter.

The welcome you gave me on my arrival is embedded deep within my emotional dna. At that moment I realised what was at stake for me, for the BBC.

So much has been accomplished in the last two and a half years that I feel comfortable that I have achieved what I set out to achieve – namely restore the equilibrium of the this great institution, to lead the process to appoint a new DG [director general], to secure a new ten year Charter and to reform the governance of the Corporation.

With the help of my fellow governors and the new Governance Unit, the future is secure, the independence of the BBC is safeguarded and, most important of all, our programmes across all media are maintaining the overwhelming support of the licence fee payers.

All of that’s broadly true. He claims in his letter that the real reason he’s going is that he hates not being involved in (TV) programming. (As BBC Chairman, he has to take a hands-off attitude and leave it all to the management.) I can believe that: he comes from a showbiz family. One of his uncles (Lew) was a great ITV entrepreneur; another was a theatrical agent. Grade has entertainment in his blood. As Executive Chairman of ITV, he will be able to get stuck into scheduling and commissioning and luring talent and all the stuff he loves doing.

But… The problem is that Grade is a wizard at popular broadcasting — the few-to-many stuff that was the basis of the old media-ecosystem. But that world is eroding fast. ITV’s chronic problems are partly to do with the abysmal management it has had for nearly a decade. But it’s also due to the fact that its glory days are over — because broadcast is in inexorable decline. Michael Grade was a wizard in the old system. My conjecture is that he’s about to start playing Canute in the new.

This email address will self-destruct in ten minutes…

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Here’s a neat idea for dealing with sites which won’t let you use them unless you provide a valid email address that they can then use to spam you. — 10 Minute Mail. Blurb reads:

Welcome to 10 Minute Mail. By clicking on the link below, you will be given a temporary e-mail address. Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page. You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them. The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes. Why would you use this? Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you don’t want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam lists. This is nice and disposable. And it’s free.

The dictatorship of the presentation layer

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Bill Thompson is eloquently sceptical about Web 2.0. (I prefer the term techBubble 2.0 btw.) Here’s a sample of his Register blast:

If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question, and we must not be fooled by the cool sites and apparently open APIs. Most of the effort is – literally – window dressing, designed to attract venture capitalists to poorly-considered startups and get hold of enough first-round funding to build either a respectable user base or enough barely runnable alpha code to provide Google or Yahoo! with yet another tasty snack. We need to take a wider view of what is going on.

Back in the 1870s Karl Marx outlined the steps through which he believed a capitalist society needed to pass before it could reach socialism. After the revolution came the dictatorship of the proletariat, a painful but necessary stage of oppression and correction, during which the organs of the state would whither away as humanity achieved its true potential and coercion became unnecessary.

Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.

Ajax is touted as the answer for developers who want to offer users a richer client experience without having to go the trouble of writing a real application, but if the long term goal is to turn the network from a series of tubes connecting clients and servers into a distributed computing environment then we cannot rely on Javascript and XML since they do not offer the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need.

There is a massive difference between rewriting Web pages on the fly with Javascript and reengineering the network to support message passing between distributed objects, a difference that too many Web 2.0 advocates seem willing to ignore. It may have been twenty years since Sun Microsystems trademarked the phrase ‘the network is the computer’ but we’re still a decade off delivering, and if we stick with Ajax there is a real danger that we will never get there…M/blockquote>

Owen’s goals

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Owen Barder is returning from his sojourn in Berkeley to resume life as a senior civil servant. He’s published My goals as a manager on his Blog. They’re admirable, and sensible. Wonder if HMG will allow him to achieve them. I particularly like Number 9: “I will not take myself too seriously”. Tut, tut. If the lad goes on like this he will blow his chance of a knighthood.

Apple: keep taking the tablet

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Hmmm… It’s that time of year again — open season for speculation on what Apple will get up to next. Australian tech guide Smarthouse is claiming that,

Apple researchers have built a full working prototype of a Mac tablet PC and three Companies in Taiwan are now costing a product for a potential launch in mid 2007.

Sources in Taiwan have said that the focus has been more on the home and the education environment than the enterprise marketplace. Several months ago I was told that Apple was exploring a neat new device that is basically a touch screen that links to various source devices including a brand new media centre that Apple is planning to launch next year.The Mac tablet has been designed to handle third party applications such as home automation software that will allow users to control lighting, audio, entertainment devices and security feeds. It also acts as a full blown PC has wireless linking for a new generation of Wireless Hi Fi speakers that are currently being tested by Apple….

The Rise of Freeconomics

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Lovely post by Chris Anderson (he of Long Tail fame)…

It’s a big day for Moore’s Law. I’m not sure anyone else has noticed this, but by my calculations we have in the past few months reached the penny-per-MIPS* milestone. Intel’s Core Duo running at 2.13 GHz now costs around $200 at retail (it’s around $180 at volume), but can do about 20,000 MIPS. I remember my first 6 MHz 286 PC in 1982 that did 0.9 MIPS. I have no idea what the CPU cost then, but the PC it came in cost nearly $3,000 so it couldn’t have been cheap. Say it was around $1,000/MIPS back then. Now it’s $0.01/MIPS. I know I shouldn’t be astounded by Moore’s Law anymore, but that really is something.

Good Morning Silicon Valley picked up on this and added an interesting quote from Alec Saunders, who added some extra historical perspective:

  • In 1977, Digital Equipment’s Vax 11/780 was a 1 MIPS minicomputer, and the Cray-1 supercomputer delivered blindingly fast execution at 150 MIPS.
  • By 1982, 5 years later, a 6 Mhz 286 had about the same equivalent processing power as the Vax.
  • Sometime in the mid 1990’s, Cray’s benchmark was finally passed on PowerPC processors, as PowerMac’s emerged benchmarked at 150 to 300 MIPS.
  • A 1999 era Pentium III/500 delivered 800 MIPS of processing power.
  • A year later, in 2000, the Playstation 2 pumped out an astounding 6000 MIPS.
  • My 2002 vintage Athlon XP clocks in at 4200 MIPS.
  • And today, for about $200, you can buy a 20,000 MIPS processor.

    • *Note for non-geeks: MIPS stands for “million instructions per second”, a standard measure of CPU power.

    Flickr: camera stats

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    Flickr has released released some interesting statistics about the most popular cameras used by uploaders. This graph shows the most popular ‘serious’ cameras. The graph below shows the most popular point-and-shoot cameras.

    If these stats are accurate, Canon seems to have the business sewn up.

    Flickr comments:

    These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.

    The graphs are “normalized”, which is a fancy way of saying that they automatically correct for the fact that more people join Flickr each day: the graph moving up or down indicates a change in the camera’s popularity relative to all other cameras used by Flickr members.

    The graphs are only accurate to the extent that we can automatically detect the camera used to take the photo (about 2/3rds of the time). That is not usually possible with cameraphone photos and cameraphones are therefore under-represented.