Record companies continue in their quest to keep pleasure and convenience out of the hands of music-lovers. <sigh>
A nice story about cracking voicemail systems to make free long-distance calls — and the use of a "Turning test" (nothing of the sort, in fact) to combat the villains.
I'm still trying to work out whether or not I like Echo. The aim is to rationalise and consolidate the various blogging APIs and versions of RSS.
Some people clearly like the idea. And other people clearly don't.
It apparently won't use the RDF data model but will retain some compatibility with RDF (whatever that means in practice).
It's still very early days but at the moment I find myself tending to favour the opposition. RSS (in all its variety of forms) is out there in a lot of places and works pretty well as it is. While the aims are laudable, I think the most likely outcomes from Echo are (i) a serious amount of concern and confusion over what it will produce and (ii) yet another bloody version of RSS. ;-)
Cringely is right that, if anything, the bandwidth situation is getting worse, not better. Despite predictions to the contrary, bandwidth doesn't look like becoming free anytime soon. Our capacity to soak it up is much greater than our ability to make use of ever-faster processors or even those gargantuan hard disks. And yet the telcos don't seem to have a serious long-term solution. Cringely promises to reveal one next week...
This seems to me like a sensible ruling – why should any company be forced to distribute another company's product? But it also demonstrates why splitting Microsoft into separate OS and applications companies would have been in the public interest.
It looks like Microsoft intends to go head-to-head with Google. That'll be an interesting fight:
Not that I'm gunning for one side or the other, you understand. ;-)
Derrick Story from the Apple WWDC:
Oh, and next time someone says, "Well, I think Mac OS X is a cool operating system, but I don't really want to pay a premium price for the hardware to run it," pull this out of your back pocket.You can buy a 2 GHz dual processor G5 that can hold up to 8 GB of memory with a Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card, 4X SuperDrive, high performance I/O, serial ATA hard drives, 133 MHz PCI slots, and full SMP to take advantage of those dual processors for $1,000 less than the equivalent Dell machine that doesn't fare as well in some of the benchmark tests.
Nature has published a commentary arguing that we should be taking more care to archive our old emails in print form. Personally, I archive mine electronically after 12-18 months and have hardly ever had to go looking for an old message, so I think they worry too much. But perhaps my emails just aren't as important as other people's.
New Scientist has a description of technology that could help get rid of those noisy TV ads. At last!
The Observer reports on Europe, spearheaded by Germany, as the world's leader in use of open source software.
I've got this theory that there's an inverse relationship between the frequency with which a blogger blogs and the interest (to me, at least) of what they write. Examples offered in evidence:
OK, I started to exaggerate a bit towards the end there, but hopefully you get my point.
One key reason, I think is that there are too many people (on my blogroll, at least) for whom blogging itself is just about all there is to talk about. So they sit there blogging and reading blogs and writing blog-related software without giving the impression that they have any interest in other things that are going on in the world.
Blogging has reached its inflection point and its rise has suddenly become news, but that won't last long. And when it fades from the popular headlines, I fear those people with not much to post except for self-referential blogs about blogs won't be left with much of interest to say. On which point, I'd better stop indulging in the very practice I'm complaining about – bye!
A Japanese friend of mine has been indulging in what seems to be the latest online lifestyle craze, lifeslicing. You hang a digital camera around your neck, then set it take photos automatically every few minutes and post the results online. Here is the journey he made recently with his wife from Tokyo to Hawaii. It's as fascinating as watching paint dry. This makes it considerably more interesting than several famous blogs, which presumably means it'll catch on. ;-)
The ever-excellent Mark Lawson has stayed up all night to review the new Potter book. His verdict: quite good, if predictable. He also has some good things to say about JK Rowling:
Mutter about media hype all you want - hiss that Philip Pullman or 100 neglected children's authors are better writers - it doesn't matter. The fact is that - against all historical predictions - this woman has made the antiquated dead-tree reading device called a book a must-have accessory for the young in an otherwise relentlessly electronic age. There is talk of making her a Dame; they should probably make her a saint.
And some less-good things to say about how the book was launched:
Writers and publishers may say that no book should be reviewed like this. Well, yes. But no book should be published like this. Rowling and Bloomsbury have turned literature into news, with all the embargos and immediacy that entails. To adopt a tone appropriate to a book about schoolchildren: they started it.
OK, when I suggested that Beckham tours are among the strangest things that the Japanese do in relation to this man, I was lying.
I must admit to having some sympathy for this view. If it wasn't for stress, I'd never get out of bed in the mornings.
In report presumably based on this or similar blogs, Wired reports that Orrin Hatch is commiting copyright offences on his website. In case you missed it, this is the irony.
Senator Orrin Hatch thinks we should be remotely destroying the computers of copyright infringers. Also coming soon: ejector seats for speeding motorists, roads that eat jaywalkers and exploding dollar bills for politicians who can be bought.
Yes, David is in Japan, probably the only country where he's more popular than in Britain. These people even organise Beckham tours to the UK to see his old school and stuff. And they could see my old school for half the price.
Following the publication of a report by the UK Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the BBC reports:
House prices in England and Wales have fallen for the fourth consecutive month, according to a new industry survey. Yet again London and the South East led the slide.
And also that:
The south continues to experience declining prices but despite this we are seeing confidence from London spreading out across the southern region.
So take from that what you will. Things really haven't got any less confusing than before.
The Economist is, as usual, a bit more coherent. Pam Woodall, their (excellent) economics editor, is in no doubt that we're seeing a real house price bubble (not only in the UK but also elsewhere) and reckons that we'll see a fall of 30% in real terms over the next few years.
As a homeowner, I'd welcome that. Rising house prices are good only for people cashing in on their homes, either by moving downmarket (I'm still trying to climb the property ladder) or borrowing money against their house (I don't need anyt more debt, thanks, especially with general inflation this low).
The McKinsey Quarterly's interview with Tesco deputy chairman David Reid is particularly interesting given the recent news of their purchase of a convenience store chain in Japan. Speaking (presumably) before this information became public, he admitted:
Wal-Mart's decision to buy into an existing retailer would, I think, be our model. Opening hypermarkets from scratch in Japan, as Carrefour has bravely done, puts a huge strain on any P&L account.
He also has some really interesting things to say about their (profitable and popular) foray into online retailing:
Since demand was low, albeit rising, the decision not to invest millions of pounds in building new warehouses but to use existing stores and get staff to pick orders from the shelves turned out to be excellent. It's satisfying to prove all the experts wrong! We restricted capital to the minimum. Instead of spending lots of it, we put a lot of effort into getting the system and processes right: how to manage vehicle loading, for example. You can't be sending out half-empty vehicles if you want any financial returns. But this is exactly what some supermarkets ended up doing - and taking hours to make trips to and from the warehouse. Most of them have had to stop. The degree to which we came under attack for choosing this model rather than the classic warehouse one was incredible. The criticism from some analysts was almost vitriolic. They couldn't understand how we could be so stupid.
And about data mining:
It's very easy to malign loyalty cards. People are always rubbishing them because of the expense. But if you took our loyalty cards away from us, it would be like flying blind... One of the criticisms of loyalty cards is that you get all this data, but you don't know what to do with it all and end up drowning in it. Initially we weren't sure what to do with it. So as with other things, we had to learn. The skill is to know what you want to get out of the system. What you can't have is barrel loads of paper every day saying, "This is every transaction of every customer." We value data-mining skills so strongly that the company we engaged to do the analytical work is now a subsidiary of Tesco.
A recent paper in the McKinsey Quarterly concludes:
Channel change is scary. But with the right insights about customers, competitive conditions, and economics, manufacturers can successfully redirect their channel strategies and improve their performance.
Can someone send a copy to the RIAA?
It seems that Microsoft can't compete in the application space with a software rival that owns the operating system. Well there's a turn up.
They're right to say that Safari is now the natural choice for Mac owners, which makes it a great shame that some sites still don't work in that browser.
A nice piece in Wired about Sun's problems. It's not all bad news: they have more than $5bn in the bank, a strong history of technical development and some talented people. But the Lintel threat to Sun is a classic case of being undermined by a Christensenesque disruptive technology and I don't see any public sign that they have a credible way out.
I hope they do, though. They're one of the few big computer companies who genuinely innovate as opposed to just talking about it.
Not content with adopting its browser, AOL is also following Microsoft's approach to R&D: copy Apple.
Much more interesting than the already stale debate about whether or not Britain should join the Euro is the question of whether Germany should leave.
Over the last few months, my dad, Ian Hannay, has sailed his boat from England to the US via Spain, Portugal, Senegal and various Caribbean islands. Now he's arrived in Annapolis and has started to keep a blog of the continuing journey.
So you can teach an old sea dog new tricks.
Bon voyage!
The Economist has a nice piece (subscribers only, I fear) about unemployed wireless yuppies in the US hanging out in coffee shops and working on the next Big Thing.
I've been steadily building up my blogroll over the last few weeks. It's now up to around 50 blogs, so I've been looking for an opportunity to do some pruning. And thanks to this rant by Scoble, I've now been able to reduce my list by one.
I don't know who Robert Scoble is but some other bloggers spoke quite highly of him, so I thought I'd give him a go. After a few weeks, I've had enough. He blogs a lot but it all seems to come straight from the Microsoft PR department. And his latest defence of them as a worthy organisation (which seems to amount to the fact that they pay him a lot of money) is the final straw for me.
Judge for yourself, but I'll put him right on one point: Word wasn't better than WordPerfect at the time the latter got buried. I would galdly have stayed with WordPerfect but was forced to switch to Word because I had to be able to produce documents in it's proprietary format in order to exchange them with other people. And they all had Word because it had been dumped bundled with Windows.
Now – all these years and billions of dollars later – Word is still "a steaming pile". Why?
So apparently all that stuff about the widespread theft of priceless artefacts from Iraqi museums was "bollocks".
Both these pieces are by journalists from The Guardian, the first one stationed in Baghdad. So can someone tell me what's going on here? Who are we supposed to believe? And since at least one of these views must be untrue, how and why did the media fall for it so completely?
Yeah! Thanks to myRSS for making this feed of one of my regular haunts.
Robert Fulford on why the paperless office is getting further away, not nearer, and why he believes most futurologists to be learned wankers.
Business Week has a five-point plan for biotech:
The Onion really is a much better read than the Journal of Negative Results.
"The Bible code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax"
Though this quote sounds like it might come from a cynical scientific type, it actually comes from The Bible Code II itself. Careful numerological analysis of the text by US physicist David E. Thomas revealed the hidden message. At last this approach yields something worth knowing!
See this wonderful little snippet from Scientific American for more, including how Herman Melville predicted JFK's assasination.
Bill Bryson (of tongue-in-cheek Brit-baiting fame) has a new book out, this time about science. He spoke with New Scientist about what he's learned writing it.
On the work of my editorial colleagues:
I was quite delighted with how accessible most of the writing in Nature is.
On scientists' failure to communicate:
If there is a failure in science it is the way scientists neglect to tell people how amazing their work is. I was constantly struck as I was learning by the thought that this is really interesting, why has nobody ever told me about it?
On science as a spiritual experience:
One thing that did strike me is that if you dip into science at any point and follow any line of enquiry back to its origin, you come to a point where God becomes as valid an explanation as anything else - if you go back to the big bang and start asking what caused that or what was going on before that, or what caused life to arise when it did. I don't necessarily mean the God you go to church to worship, but you eventually arrive at some point where it is completely humbling.
Did you know that Microsoft ships GNU software and charges money for it?
Tim O'Reilly has a nice piece on Apple as innovator:
[W]hat Apple does so well is to realize the potential in a technology, and to frame it in such a way that people discover that they need it. In a way, they are cultural innovators more than they are tech innovators.
Microsoft products are like Japanese danchi (functional, ubiquitous, soulless and ultimately quite depressing). Apple products are like the Guggenheim in Bilbao (breathtaking, beautiful, artistic and just a little bit impractical). Just as the pyramids, not mud huts, are seen today as defining ancient Egyptian culture, so in 3,000 years time Apple products will be seen as the shining examples of our early 21st Century digital lifestyle.
