There’s a case to made that James Surowecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is the most influential book of the decade – The Selfish Gene for the noughties. Both have something else in common: the title of each book is profoundly misleading. Crowds aren’t wise, nor can genes be selfish – as one critic famously wrote, … Read more
The idea of being able to play your music anywhere, on any device, has become a cliche without quite coming to pass. Viewed from a distance, this looks like one of technology’s greatest failures.
If you’re acquainted with Orb, Sling Media, or MP3Tunes – all of which fulfill that promise to some degree – you’ll know how close we are to this goal. But for every breakthrough, it seems, there’s yet another setback.
Look a little closer, and we see that for the most part it’s not the fault of the basic technology components. The networks are in place, the hard drives are big enough and the processors are fast enough for “audio everywhere”. And all are fairly affordable to a critical mass of the market, although the cost we bear is undoubtedly higher than it was in the analog era.
“If I can play it to myself, then I should be stream it to myself on any of my networked devices,” says Orb Networks’ EVP of product marketing, Ian McCartney.
Politics and greed are the problems.
This week Michael Robertson’s MP3Tunes service enabled subscribers to play their iTunes music collection on their TiVo. That’s no thanks to TiVo or Apple, though. It’s possible because subscribers first upload their iPods to the “cloud”, in this case MP3Tunes’ servers, which then performs transcoding if needed.
Orb does something similar, although with a different architecture. In its case the PC punches a hole out to the network, and via Orb’s servers – which also transcode if necessary – allow any device to access the media. Another approach, taken by Sling Media and a host of consumer electronics companies, is hardware based. Like Orb, the media files remain on your own devices, rather than being cached in the cloud. Sling concentrates on TV access, but the problems all three face in getting an end-to-end approach to work as expected are very similar.
Vista’s fate foretold… by Machiavelli. A prophetic quote. trust settlement, and quoted Machiavelli to support its case for an extension to the monitoring program. As of 1 February, over 700 issues remained outstanding out of over 1,000 submitted to the monitoring committee, which was set up to ensure Microsoft keeps to its word in the … Read more
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the mainstream press was barely acquainted with the genius and foresight of today’s technology leaders.
Fifteen years ago Bill Gates appeared on the BBC’s Wogan show – which the Beeb thought of as a nightly Johnny Carson, but which was really like watching Regis Philbin on cough syrup – to show off his WinPad PC. The wooden Gates made a joke about making his money disappear, with only a couple of clicks, using only a stylus. As Gates blinked, a nation which had never heard of Microsoft, and couldn’t quite figure out why the guy in glasses wasn’t singing or dancing, looked on in sympathetic embarrassment.
But Gates’s prime time TV appearance underscored one point, popular in the public prints at the time, which was that a nerdish, upstart technology was changing the very foundations of the world as we know it. Microsoft was simply smarter, more agile, more cunning, and far more darkly mysterious than the fusty incumbents, like IBM, could ever realize. To stand in the way of Microsoft was to stand in the way of youth, innovation and progress itself.
Now, it may puzzle you as much as it puzzles us that this idea ever gained popular currency – let’s save that discussion for another day. But it can’t have escaped your notice that this mythical struggle has been reprised by the inkies several times – in the mid-1990s with Netscape – and today with the phoney war between Microsoft and Google.
If you’re of the view that history repeats itself the second time round as farce, then the parallels are even more uncomfortable.
So-called “network neutrality” legislation hampers innovation and harms business and the public, Verizon’s chief spokesperson said this week. Tom Tauke, Verizon’s executive VP of public affairs, said in a speech that efforts to legislate against discrimination would hamper the take up of multi-tier network applications such as VPNs.
“The hospital that wants to provide home health monitoring for a heart patient is not going to rely on the internet,” he said.
Net neutrality advocates fear that the Bell telephone company – now reborn in the shape of Verizon and AT&T – will restrict the services that can be run on the open internet, and charge internet companies more for their bandwidth as they seek to compete with cable. The old Bells say that in order to deliver new services such as TV and movies on demand, they need to be able to discriminate between packets. With fiber offering the potential of 10x to 20x connections that today’s broadband, they add, there’s plenty of bandwidth to go round. We’ll come on to quite how much in a moment.
Tauke rebuffed the idea that Verizon would punish internet companies, saying it made as much sense for the telcos to cripple the net as it did for coffee shops to replace their premium bestseller with a cheap and nasty brand. They’d go out of business if they pulled that stunt, he said.
It’s the oddest of odd debates. On the one side former deregulation enthusiasts have been rushing to write new laws and regulations. On the other side, the Bell Heads, so often mocked by the Net Heads for their reactionary disdain to new technology, can justifiably claim that they’re investing in innovation.
To the average Joe, innovation looks like video on demand – or a faster internet connection. To the Net Heads, innovation means Vonage and Skype. The VoIP services are something the telcos would dearly like eliminate, as they introduce a wildcard into the pricing, but they know they can’t, so they’ll settle for the next best thing, control.
“The plain truth is that today’s access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect,” Tauke said. “Building out America’s internet and broadband infrastructure will require billions more in private capital investment.”
In that, he’s correct, of course. The passion behind “network neutrality” is largely based on a fear of price gouging, which given the Baby Bells track record, is entirely justifiable. AT&T boss Whitacre sees Google as freeloading on his network and has hinted he wants to charge the internet companies more.
What if they held a digital media revolution – and nobody came? The BBC is having trouble finding citizens to attend a conference devoted to the exciting new world of Citizens Media. It’s a Beeb-sponsored day about the “democratization of the media”, but despite a 50 quid bribe to attend – that’s more than you … Read more
European Court justice Cooke gave Microsoft’s lawyers a tonic yesterday, by raising concerns about the transfer of Microsoft’s intellectual property. But one shouldn’t read too much into his intervention – the judge was playing devil’s advocate. And the trouble for Microsoft is that it needs 12 more Cookes to spoil the European Commission’s broth.
Nevertheless, Cooke’s elevation of the intellectual property issue will trouble both proprietary rivals and free software advocates alike. Arguing the moral rights of a property holder is comfortable ground for Microsoft – it would rather be staked out here than be trumpeting its bold record of innovation, or its congenial and co-operative reputation in the technology business.
And the wholesale destruction of value caused by “volunteer” projects such as Craigslist, Wikipedia or “open source” software is certainly worthy of discussion, and should not be ducked. Craigslist is a business that poses as a non-profit, and by creaming off newspapers’ classified profits, is hurting communities and shifting power to the middle-class and PC-literate by destroying what may be a community’s only universally accessible media. Wikipedia is an ersatz “encyclopedia” that’s industrialized the process of propagating unreliable information, and its only commercial value seems to be spammers, who scrape its keyword-rich content for junk websites. Free software doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as these ventures. Not only is it a historical continuity of the way much of our software infrastructure has been developed, but it has encouraged commercial value to built through service models, or dual licensing.
It’s a pity that open source and free software advocates, many of whom find such comparisons odious, haven’t disowned them more strongly. For when an influential judge lumps free software in with hucksters and hooligans, he’s only citing what’s he’s reading in the New York Times, or our best and brightest think-tanks. This is the price we pay for having a witless and inattentive press – and a punditocracy too eager to grasp shiny new shapes or diagrams.
The plot thickens, however.
Especially when one considers the little-known fact that Microsoft has already offered to give away the source code to the protocols free software developers wish to work with, then we can see Microsoft’s true intentions rather more clearly. It’s an offer too good to refuse. What on the face of it looks like the moral high ground based on a defense of property rights, is really an artful strategy to isolate and punish free software. And on that basis, you can’t fault Microsoft for inconsistency – it’s a strategy that hasn’t changed since Bill Gates’ “Letter to hobbyists” in 1976.
We’ll explain.
It’s open season on Wikipedia these days. The project’s culture of hatred for experts and expertise has become the subject of widespread ridicule. Nick Carr christened it “the cult of the amateur”.
But what has professional academia done for us lately? Here’s a study from the University of Amsterdam to ponder.
New Scientist reports that researchers for Professor Maarten de Rijke at the Informatics Institute have been recording words used by bloggers, in an attempt to find interesting or unusual patterns. What revelations did the team’s MoodViews software unearth?
The team discovered that the LiveJournal label “drunk” becomes increasingly popular each weekend. And around Valentine’s Day, “there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels ‘loved’ or ‘flirty’, but also an increase in the number who report feeling ‘lonely’.”
It gets better.
The team also noticed that on the weekend of the publication of the most recent Harry Potter book, bloggers used “words like ‘Harry’, ‘Potter’, ‘shop’ and ‘book’,” PhD student Gilad Mishne reveals.
This work really should put the Nobel Prize Committee on Red Alert. Alongside the existing scientific prizes for Chemistry, Physics and Physiology and Medicine, the Laureate Committee should design a new category for the “Bleeding Obvious”, or the “Dying Ridiculous”.
More seriously, let’s look at what this episode teaches us.
Two things are immediately obvious: Mishne’s study was considered worthy of academic funding, and it was considered worthy of an article in a popular science magazine.
The study doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know before: unless you’re surprised by the revelation that people get more drunk at weekends, or people talk about Harry Potter books more when a new Harry Potter book goes on sale. The study is really considered funding-worthy and newsworthy because of what’s unsaid – the implication that the aggregation of internet chatter will reveal some new epistemological truth.
