Computers Archives
October 21, 2006
Computing in a (really big) box
Sun's big black shipping container is the most exciting thing to happen in computer hardware since they stopped shipping them with casters..
I remember sitting around rapping with my friends (my less fashionable friends, obviously) ten years ago about how, one day, you'd be able to rent computing power like you rent a skip or a generator or a portakabin or some other very basic unit of business capacity. I seem to remember wondering if it might come on a flatbed truck in a sort of anonymous-looking box and that you might just have to plug the thing in, attach it to the Internet and forget about it.
We speculated that the thing would probably 'virtualise' its capacity so that it appeared on your network as a single (huge) block of CPU and storage, no matter what was actually in the box.
Of course it didn't occur to us that this thing might help with the kind of capacity crunch that hits a Web 2.0 business when its trendy site goes viral or gets onto the Yahoo home page. Nor did we really worry for a minute about the disastrous environmental impact of the vast datacentres serving YouTube and Google and MySpace (it didn't occur to me that it might need its own water supply, either, I suppose).
What I like about The Black Box Project is that it's evidence of Sun's continued creativity and defiance of the apocalyptic commoditisation of their core business. Sun ought to have gone bust three or four years ago: fast, flexible CPU is now cheap as chips, the UNIX workstation is no more. Not one of Sun's unassailable differentiators turned out to be defensible. Sun is proof that brains can reverse the ugly trend towards zero in the hardware business. Well done to Sun. I'm going to be looking out for Black Boxes round the back of all the big businesses I visit.
Thanks to Eastern Waste Disposal for the picture of a skip.
April 10, 2006
The survivor...
In May 2002 I wrote this piece for The Guardian. In it I celebrated the unlikely survival of the big, dumb, general-purpose PC – over-determined, over-specced and over here. Four years on... Gordon Bennet. Would you credit it... it's still here... Not so big, slightly less dumb but even more general-purpose.
As before, though, there's no rational reason for the survival of the PC as a product category. All of its functions should by now have migrated into a cloud of special-purpose intelligent chaff floating around your home and your person. But no, it's still here, and treasured by its fans more than ever – the PC looks likely to be around for a while yet...
February 02, 2005
Spend your money here
Mind blowing sale at Christies: 'The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking & Telecommunications'. Over 200 important documents from the history of computing, mathematics and calculation – some over 400 years old and valued at up to $70,000.
July 02, 2004
Tivo for experiences
Finally, a gadget that allows you to rewind life. A tiny video camera (the manufacturers expect you to clip it to your glasses – but if you got used to that Bluetooth headset this should be easy enough) that records continuously and retains a 30-second buffer. Pressing record writes the last 30 seconds to disk – in principle, you need never miss anything again. In practice, of course, you'll find yourself needing a larger and larger buffer. I think I'd need about thirty-five years...
The wholesale Tivo-isation of life is under way. There'll soon be no need to actually experience anything – you can just wait til you get home and replay the whole thing on the big screen in your living room. Once we're all time-shifting life, the disconcerting feeling that your companion is experiencing things a couple of minutes behind you (because they put life on pause while they went for a smoke) will become commonplace...
November 24, 2003
More about Creo's Tokens
I've been thinking about Creo's interesting attempt to improve on P2P file distribution – a product called Tokens (I blogged it here the other day). If you want to try a Tokens transfer yourself, email me and I'll send you a token. You'll need to download the free Tokens Redeemer but, once you've done so, you'll be able to snaffle a set (or should I say a 'limited edition') of three photographs taken by me at the wonderful Carters Steam Fair when it came to St Albans in August 2003.
The photographs were all taken on 35mm Kodachrome film and scanned at 6MPixels so you're getting a total of about 7MB of high resolution JPEGs (you can click the small pics above for larger previews to see if you like them).
I've published the photographs under a Creative Commons License that allows you to do pretty much what you want with them except modify them or make money from them (like you'll bother).
Wouldn't it be interesting if Creo integrated a Creative Commons licence creator with Tokens? That way, creating (or deciding not to create) your CC licence would be part of the Token Creation process and, if Tokens catches on, it could become an automatic step in the distribution of creative works in this machine-to-machine way. Tokens could become the default application for distributing files with embedded rights (but not for 'DRM' which is a totally different animal).
November 21, 2003
Solution seeks problem, finds problem...
Things change at different rates. Bandwidth, for instance, is all over the place. At the net's core – in the trenches between ISPs and data centres – aggregate bandwidth in the last decade has multiplied by... ooh... a million? Up the path to your house, though, it's barely doubled. What have you got, right now? 56K? Pathetic. Even ADSL gives you barely twenty times what you got from Demon in 1993. Meanwhile, your hard drive is filling up with bigger and bigger files – 3MB for a 6MPixel JPEG, 50MB per album for MP3s, 4GB for a DVD movie, 60GB for an hour of DV – but the tools we use for moving these enormous files around are as old as the hills and either inadequate (email) or inaccessible (ftp). We need new tools.
So I'm testing Creo's Tokens – a tool for moving huge files around machine-to-machine without having to set up ftp accounts or worry about email attachment quotas and other annoyances. It works on the Adobe Acrobat model – if you want to create and send big files you buy a product called Token Creator (analagous to the Acrobat authoring tools).
You drag-and-drop your files onto the Creator app which makes a pair of new files: a 'bundle' which contains the original data (compressed and mashed into a single file) and a 'token' which is a tiny pointer designed to be sent in email. Recipients need to download a free app called Token Redeemer (analagous to the Acrobat Reader but with a slightly more religious name). Once you've got the Redeemer installed, double-clicking on a token starts a direct transfer from the Creator's machine. Bingo. Creators can time-limit their tokens so that storage-eating bundles disappear automatically after a few days or weeks.
There's a server app for people who intend to distribute lots of files and if a firewall gets in the way of a smooth transfer Creo's own server cuts in and relays the file via http (a service Creators pay for).
I like the product and I certainly have a use for it (mostly swapping Laurel & Hardy MP3s with my friend Paul). I can also imagine lots of cool new uses once it becomes more widespread. I'm worried about the business model, though. Creators pay $49 to play which doesn't seem unreasonable until you examine the product's likely uses. If it's strictly a business product then charging to create is fine, but if, as I suspect, there's a ready audience among consumers swapping those big media files it's hard to imagine it taking off.
The model already has three tiers: Redeemer (free), Creator ($49) and Server ($395). Adding a free Creator (perhaps limited to n transfers per month or with the relay service switched off) would jump start the creation of tokens and that might be enough to get the product onto the web adoption curve properly. With creation choked off, though, getting to critical mass is going to be take a long time and cost a lot of money.
November 12, 2003
Endless deferral
Voodoo Pad is one of those applications that promises to get me organised. Of course, I long ago resigned myself to never actually getting organised – in fact, downloading and trying organisers like this one is my substitute for actually getting organised. My Powerbook's hard drive is a graveyard for PIMs, contact trackers, unstructured databases, brainstorming tools, outliners and freeform doodlers – going all the way back, while I'm being honest, to Hypercard in about 1985. Each carried with it the tantalising promise of actually getting organised. None delivered.
The latest crop look like they might be going in the right direction, though (but I've said that before). 'Unstructured' seems to be the keyword these days. Simson Garfinkel's groovy NeXT-derived SBook (if it did Bluetooth I'd dump Apple's Address Book), Casady & Greene's evergreen iData Pro, the classic data shoebox for the Mac (used to be called InfoGenie for you old Macheads – and the admirable C&G just went bust, by the way), Creo's Six Degrees (now available in an IMAP version that'll turn your Mail.app mailboxes into a fast filing system) and now Voodoopad (all resident on my hard drive right now): they all promise to get out of my way and not try to impose any kind of nasty structure on my information.
The whole category plays to the very human desire (a real Freudian fantasy) to get a grip, be in control, impose structure on the increasingly dense and fugitive world of information and, as such, they really rely on the final impossibility of actually getting organised (it's the entropy, stupid). So, since satisfaction is, by definition, impossible, the category has unlimited potential, and Voodoopad's elegance and trendy Wiki structure will win it lots of Geek fans but I'm pretty sure it's just another stop on my endlessly delayed journey towards actually getting organised. Thanks to Azeem for showing me Voodoopad (he reckons he's actually getting organised).
September 17, 2003
Good books
Some really good books from O'Reilly have arrived lately. The Hacks series is going to some really interesting places, taking in Google, Amazon, TiVo and now eBay (I reviewed the Google book in The Guardian a few months ago). David Pogue's Missing Manuals series is also getting more and more useful. Standing permanently next to the Near Legendary Kitchen Cube (it's a Cube and we keep it in the kitchen) are the latest on iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto plus the essential iPod text and two little handbooks – one on Digital Video and one on Google.
July 08, 2003
OS X wisdom
I've been using Macs since 1985 (I make that 18 years) so I've felt at home there for a long time but OS X is a fascinating and foreign place for me, even a couple of years into the experience. So now I've got a copy of O'Reilly's excellent Mac OS X Hints next to the bed. So far I've learnt how to speed up iPhoto on our very old kitchen Cube (turn off the drop shadow), how to cd by dragging a file into Terminal (is that cool or what?) and how to speed up iMovie rendering (hide the app). This is a useful book.
March 31, 2003
Hacking networked reality
I think Google Hacks is an important book. It's important because our lives are increasingly dependent on the Internet and because the fabric of our networked lives – from the web to wi-fi to mobile phones – is getting richer, more meaningful and more tightly woven. Content, applications and communities are more interconnected than ever and a new layer of interconnection is emerging on top of the infrastructure we've taken for granted for most of a decade.
As the usefulness and accessibility of the network climbs, its value to us all is necessarily always at risk – from growing complexity, from the opacity produced by proprietary dead ends and from old-fashioned corporate and political short-sightedness. Google Hacks is a tool. It reminds me of The Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy resource book subtitled 'Access to Tools' and inspired by the legendary Buckminster Fuller. The Catalog, first published in 1968 (and edited by Stewart Brand), was all about taking control, making interventions – hacking real life. It was stuffed with the most practical of tools, from composting toilets to the early personal computers; from personal aeroplanes in kit form to really useful pen knives you could build a house with. Google Hacks is a tool for hacking the new, networked reality.
The book contains 100 specific, clearly worked examples of ways to take advantage of Google's openness (the Google API) to achieve concrete results – some projects are useful, some intriguing and some just playful. I'm no techie (You'll certainly find better technical reviews elsewhere) and most of these hacks are entirely beyond me but the book has loads of insights into the way Google works for non-techies and plenty of low-tech projects I could try for myself.
Since I can't pretend to be reviewing this book properly and since you'll be reading about it everywhere, here's O'Reilly's press release for some background information (click 'more...')
Continue reading "Hacking networked reality"
March 29, 2003
Making homes smart
Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and top researcher at Intel, was star turn at a fascinating seminar run by the iSociety research group at the Work Foundation. The topic was 'the smart home'. Bell's current project is aimed at understanding the use of technology in homes across Asia. She understands how deep-rooted religious, social and cultural practices influence the reception of technology in homes.
If there was any conclusion it was that attempts to add intelligence to our homes had better be respectful of the needs and beliefs of their inhabitants, otherwise they'll just join the long line of forgotten household gadgets – egg slicers, the thing with the plunger that makes cream. The whole thing reminded me of Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, a book about the way humans adapt their habitations and continually turn them to new uses, usually despite the architects and planners. If we're to augment our homes in the ways advanced by the technology vendors the kit will need to fit properly into the lifecycle of a home.
It should be cheap, reliable, modular, interoperable and easily replaced or upgraded. Homes exist on timescales measured in centuries, a family will occupy a home for decades and make continual, incremental changes. Wi-fi hubs, entertainment systems and central heating controllers can't aspire to this kind of longevity but should aim to fit into these cycles unobtrusively, helpfully, without expecting families to bend to new ways of living.
Houses will get smarter in much the same way they acquired their current intelligence – looms of copper wire, electric light, telecoms, wireless and television, modern additions like insulation and heating, older ones like plumbing and drainage – piecemeal and over a long period of time. The best the smart home business can hope for is to get their kit onto the makeover shopping list, to become must-have lifestyle items and to slot into the cycle of home fashion... like decking and rag rolling, really.
March 17, 2003
Cheer up, it might never happen...
Dave Birch, who should know, on the coming collision of wireless networks, GPS and RFID tags in The Guardian. Dave's pretty level headed about the implications but I'm sure that this has the potential for a major technology panic.
As I've pointed out here a dozen times before, though, every new technology is born into a complex human context that almost invariably diverts it from its manifest destiny – in this case to close off individual freedom once and for all.
This is why, for instance, we're still here after 60 years of nuclear proliferation, why the record industry is still here five years after people started swapping MP3s and why we'll never be replaced by a race of robotic clones. Despite our fears to the contrary and the occasional nihilistic counter-example (Stalin, say), human beings universally and collectively tend to neutralise apocalyptic change before it can do too much damage. I predict that most RFID implementations will ship with only a fraction of the Big Brother features they're capable of.
February 27, 2003
Forget Moore's Law
Michael Malone, top tech journo, says in The Herring that we should forget Moore's law. The thesis is that, as the universe of chips expands, more buyers are sticking with older, lower-powered devices because they don't need the extra power. The industry's legacy chips – almost all of which are still being manufactured somewhere – are going to undermine the latest stuff and make it impossible for the chip makers to continue to make 67% annual improvements. He quotes Google's Eric Schmidt: "We aren't interested in getting maximum power for a high price. What we're looking for is maximum functionality and that's a whole different thing." We should unwind our dependence on Moore's law now before it's too late. Difficult to see how we actually could, though, since it's wired into the economy itself, determining investors' expectations as much as techies'.
February 25, 2003
Micropayments and probability
I could have been kinder to the big brains at Peppercoin I'm sure but someone had to say it. This week's Guardian column is about the latest brilliant but doomed micropayments scheme to hit the net – based on an exotic and genuinely innovative probabilistic approach to settlement that promises to make tiny transactions profitable for merchants by... chucking most of them away. The proposition to merchants is (literally): "trust us. You'll probably get your money in the end". I don't think they're going to like it – it has the entire history of innumeracy against it.
Some more links on this story:
Pretty good overview from The Boston Globe (via Werblog)
Clay Shirky on why micropayments won't work
Very good slashdot thread on the topic.
February 23, 2003
invisible architecture
Should I tell the architects of BBC News Online's far-reaching redesign that, far from being confused, put off or even pleased by the redesign, I didn't notice it at all until it was pointed out to me? I suspect that might actually be a tribute to the designers. Well done!
February 14, 2003
Azhar on 3G
Good piece by Azeem Azhar in The Guardian about the mobile operators' perilous leap into 3G.
February 11, 2003
Evolution
My latest Guardian column is up today. It's about the creeping reabsorption of the net by mainstream society and the end of our fantasies of living in a parallel world by our own rules.
February 01, 2003
Air-heads?
Azeem alerts me to Tony Perkins' latest project. Perkins is an interesting figure: a glamorous member of a Sand Hill Road tech VC dynasty, founder of the Silicon Valley bible The Red Herring (and certainly the most prominent supporter of Steve Forbes for President that I can think of). Always On is in trendy blog format and apparently intends to combine useful tech investment analysis with air-headed nostra like:
“The Semantic WebThe next generation web will be programmable and will search, process and transact for individuals and businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. People will benefit by this increased network efficiency, but it will mean consolidating your personal and business life on to the Web.”What are they on about? Still, if The Herring in its heyday is anything to go by, we should probably give these guys the benefit of the doubt.
January 28, 2003
The Economist keeps the faith
The last time The Economist ran a big survey of the Internet (1996?) I bought dozens of copies and sent them to all my clients and suppliers with a stern letter insisting that they read it cover to cover. The latest is not quite as exciting but strikingly keeps the faith. Many of the scenarios outlined are hardly rosey (privacy meltdown, big brother states, copyright overkill) and the 'Internet Society' described is hardly a paradise on earth but it will still change everything. You may need to subscribe to see the survey but, if you do, it's well worth a read.
January 22, 2003
Massive sense of proportion failure
Is it just me or is it completely inappropriate to send a boy whose main crime seems to be a chronic case of adolescent alienation to jail for two years for the undoubtedly mischievous creation of a computer virus?
January 19, 2003
Improving on Shannon
Kevin Werbach directs me to this article from the NY Times about a fascinating extension of Claude Shannon's basic research to bust historic radio capacity limits.
January 18, 2003
The Manolo Blahnik of computers
How does Apple sustain a business – a business that even makes a profit occasionally – on a market share of less than 3% (so low, in fact, that it just fell off the bottom of the list of the top five suppliers)? I've been thinking about this for ages. Consumer brands (and Apple is a consumer brand) with market share below, say, 20%, are irrelevant, invariably destined for oblivion – and the smaller the percentage, the quicker the death – vicious circles and all that.
So how does Apple do it? Well it's obvious when you think about it: Apple is a consumer brand all right, but it's a luxury consumer brand. Hold on, I hear you say, even luxury brands with 3% market share are doomed, aren't they? Yes, you're right. Anyone with an 'O' level in business studies will tell you that 3% is never enough. But Apple is not doomed. And the reason is that there is no luxury computer category. if there were, Apple would own at least 90% of it and, finally, its market share would match its extraordinary mind share. Apple is the Manolo Blahnik of computers.
January 07, 2003
Memex lives!
Gordon Bell, engineer and innovator responsible for – among other things – the DEC VAX computer, has entered "nearly everything possible from his entire life" into his computer as part of a Microsoft research project. He hopes to create a free-form database for organising your whole life. I need one of those. Thanks to Jack Schofield for the link
January 06, 2003
Anti-singularists
Singularities and other tech-determinist fantasies are shown the door in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information. This is the sanest, most humane book I've read on information technology. Seely Brown ran Xerox's PARC and Duguid is an academic working at both PARC and UCB.
December 20, 2002
How do they do that?
This £9.95 toy records twenty second sound clips and incorporates them into its programme of lights and sirens and racing around. Oliver, aged four, takes this entirely for granted, of course. This morning, the car raced up to me in the kitchen and announced "Daddy, you are under arrest".
November 25, 2002
A new library of Alexandria
In the future, there will be statues of Brewster Kahle. I never cease to be humbled by his ambition.
“Technologists have promised the digital library for decades. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who was technology adviser to several US presidents, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine outlining how computers might one day augment libraries. Then in 1960, a young graduate called Ted Nelson got sidetracked from his masters degree in sociology at Harvard into writing text–retrieval software. He published his ideas, and coined the term "hypertext" in 1965. So in many ways the digital library is long overdue.”He's preserving the web – all of it – in parallel libraries of hard disks, one of which is in Alexandria. This is an unconditionally noble project, on a truly grand scale. Any arguments?
By the way, why is it New Scientist that carries interviews like this and not to the Internet press? Come to think of it, is there an Internet press?
November 16, 2002
Making of the Macintosh
I've used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they're pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of nasty, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase is like me: old gits with hair growing out of their ears. We're stuck in our ways and we can't change now so that's that. The nice people at Stanford University Library are attempting a proper history of the machine's early days (as part of a larger project documenting Silicon Valley itself). There's some genuinely fascinating material here – memos, early sketches, engineering drawings, first person recollections. Thanks to LinkMachineGo for linking to The Making of Macintosh. Incidentally, I learn that, over the years, I've owned five of the Ten Worst Macs Ever. I'm selling two of them: an ugly all-in-one Performa 5320 and a lamentably underpowered IIvx.
November 07, 2002
Break up BT?
Last night I spoke at the launch of Demos' latest report 'The Politics of Broadband'. The authors have been bold in their conclusions (and perhaps incautious in their choice of sponsor) but we should expect that of a Think Tank whose average age seems to be about 19 (I make this observation because I am old and bitter). They've absorbed all the latest thinking from the US – Lessig, Open Spectrum, the 'Innovation Commons' and they want Government to get on and break up BT to dissolve the innovation log jam and get broadband roll-out moving. From the platform, Stephen Timms was nicer about this idea than I'd expected of the ecommerce minister (but it's still a 'no') and Graham Wallace, who runs Cable & Wireless (the incautiously chosen sponsor), made a good case for the break-up (but then he would, wouldn't he). From the floor, Clare Spottiswoode, who, in an earlier life, split up Gas supply for the last Tory Government, couldn't understand why it would be any more complicated to split up BT than British Gas and pointed to the wave of innovation and price cuts that followed that break-up. Wallace went further and argued that it would be 'easy' to split up the giant incumbent because of the elaborate system of interconnect agreements already in place at the telephone exchanges. There was no consensus, though. Robin Mansell, Professor of New Media & The Internet at the LSE, was against – too complicated and disruptive by far. The most cogent argument against came from Claire Enders: the capital markets will have the casting vote, since they'll have to fund the break-up, and they're still on strike so we might as well forget it. I think it's unwise to bet on apocalyptic infrastructural change to help us get Broadband Britain rolling while the tech and comms economy is still deep frozen. We're going to need to be more tactical and less scornful of 'incremental change'.
November 02, 2002
Digital divide – approx. 3000 miles wide
One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan's wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the one that runs roughly North-South down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What would a similar map of London, Paris or Berlin look like? Sparse, I'll bet. The distribution of nodes within Manhattan also speaks volumes of the divide at ground level, though. If I remember rightly, the big, empty zone at top right is dominated by social housing likely to be light on Wi-Fi. The graphic recalls Booth's extraordinary 1889 map of London, visualising Victorian urban poverty for the first time in startling, block-by-block detail. (got this wrong yesterday and credited the maps to Mayhew who wrote about the London poor. Luckily nobody visits this weblog so I think I got away with it).
October 30, 2002
Another unicorn!
Yoz has done the donkey work on legendary software engineer Mitch Kapor's latest product, a PIM code-named Chandler. A useful analysis, lots of links and even some retro executables. The man should get a medal. I've tried a lot of PIMs, brainstormers, outliners, contact managers – structured and freeform, integrated and standalone. They're intellectually interesting – I'm always looking for the perfect organiser. I'm quite old now so I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist – my pathology makes me unreformable, unorganisable. I suspect the whole category is doomed. Only restless, neurotic people and organisations with a pathological need for order will adopt the next hot organiser and the people who could make best use of them are productive without them. Is that a bit of a downer?
Distressed geeks
Some scratched and mangled black & white photos I took at Dave & Danny's 'Village Fete for the Twenty First Century' back in the Summer showed up in the post months late. Some frames were lost all together - including all the ones of Dave & Danny themselves. The rest, including this one of Matt "Warchalking" Jones, are spooky. They should offer this as a service.
click here to see pics of Yoz, Matt, Paul, Adam, paper folders, my kids, Juliet... and Freeman Dyson!
October 28, 2002
Sublime Audio
Here's a piece I've just written for The Guardian about music.
For ordinary human beings, music is the closest we come to the sublime. The history of recorded music is the history of better and better access to the sublime.
We have the recording industry to thank for this. In little more than a hundred years, the stable musical universe of Church and hearth has been blown apart. Music is everywhere and anyone in any reasonably developed place can be exposed to hours of new and varied music daily.
Much of the music we listen to now would not even have been possible without the recording industry. Music and recording technologies have worked together.
As a result, the contribution of the recording industry to the fund of human happiness cannot be underestimated. Which other business can claim 'bliss' as a day-to-day value? There can be few better examples of the role technology can play in social and cultural change. Music, and our lives, have been immeasurably improved by the efforts of the music business. So it's doubly disappointing to watch the recording industry missing an epic opportunity, perhaps on the scale of the recorded music revolution itself.
The latest giant misstep involves a new CD format called 'Super Audio'. To understand why Super Audio is a misstep you need to understand how the listening habits of music fans are changing. And for this purpose I'm going to invite you into my kitchen. On the counter by the breadbin is a two year-old Macintosh computer with a flat screen – our 'Kitchen Cube'. On the Cube Apple's excellent iTunes MP3 application cleverly catalogues over 35Gbytes of recorded music – 23 days of continuous music, it tells me. Almost all of this music has come from the big stack of CDs now gathering dust in our sitting room. To call this Macintosh our jukebox is to hugely understate its meaning to us. To this machine my wife and I have entrusted 8,000 tracks by hundreds of artists - a vivid summary of our lives as influenced by music.
The kitchen is the social hub of our home. We spend most of our time there and since we've added music to the room we listen to more of it, from a greater variety of artists and sources than ever before and we listen to it in very different ways.
It takes a while for old musical habits to fade. In the early days, choosing something to listen to would be much like choosing a CD. Think of an artist, flick through the library for an album. Double click to play. With time, though, new ways of selecting sounds emerge. How about dialling up a mood or an ambience? Type 'happy' (65 tracks by 47 artists) or 'light' (37 tracks) or something more abstract like 'you're' (32) or 'red' (24) into iTunes and see what you get – a playlist linked across genres, periods and artists by a loose, often surpising, theme – creating unexpected connections. Tighten the theme for something more specific or just 'shuffle' the entire library for one surprise after another. Or play only the tunes you've listened to most in the last few weeks – or only the ones you've never listened to. This is a radically different way of encountering music and one that I don't need to tell you is not possible in any other format.
So we, like millions of others, are busy inventing a new relationship to music, weaving it more tightly into our lives. Remarkably, though, all of this has been done despite the recording industry - it might even be illegal. And Super Audio, the latest development in the ongoing drama of 'geeks vs. suits' is a particularly insidious twist. You see, Super Audio CDs won't play in a PC so I can't add the apparently pristine sound from these discs to my library. So, as the 'digital hub' takes hold and early adopters reorganise their musical lives around MP3s, the industry is planning to take us down a new technological dead end. Instead of adapting to new habits – coming up with a way to charge for file sharing, for instance – they have devoted millions to a spurious enhancement to quality inaudible to ordinary music fans and left the next generation of eager consumers out in the cold. Far from bringing us closer to the sublime, the record business is ready to close it down.
Big brains stay home
Esther Dyson's European Tech conference, High Tech Forum – the choice of big brains and moguls alike – has been cancelled for the second year running. Last year's event was cancelled because of the post 9/11 chill but this year's? Is the Euro tech recovery still on the back burner? Looks like it. This is particularly annoying for me since I was planning to join the big brains for this one (they have a special enclosure for the smaller brain). Meanwhile, Kevin Werbach, who used to edit Esther's Release 1.0, the cerebral IT newsletter, has moved on and keeps sending me 'personal' invitations to a new event he's calling Supernova. Many of the same big brains will be present. The theme for the first event is 'decentralisation'. It can't be a great time to be kicking off a new tech conference in Palo Alto, so I wish him luck.
October 24, 2002
I spoke too soon
Erm, I said the other day that Ellen Feiss' lease on fame had been cut short. Looks like I was wrong. From Wired News, I learn that 250 Mac-heads gathered last weekend in Holland to celebrate all things Mac and to stage an Ellen Look-alike competion.
October 23, 2002
ecommerce is rubbish
New data: 51.3% of ecommerce purchases are unnecessary, 16.9% rubbish, 13.9% embarrassing, 11.4% stupid, only 6.5% life enchancing. Poor Ellen Feiss was a celebrity for less than the regulation fifteen minutes. I got the mug anyway. Napster went bust ages ago. I got the t-shirt anyway (site seems to be finally down). Looking now for more faded or bust Internet phenomena to memorialise in trashy merch.