Category: General

Tom Foremski writes:

These days our culture is becoming more mobile because we have a vast torrent of mobile digital devices and the infrastructure to allow us to be more mobile, to become more nomadic.

We are no longer tied to the desktop PC, nor to the laptop; and we will soon have access to our digital lives from any device anywhere, anytime and anyplace. We are becoming digitally-enabled mobile/nomadic peoples.

We are also more mobile in our thinking, more able to spot the obstacles to progress that gender, ethnic, and economic divisions create.

But we live in an increasingly fractured world because we belong to distinct groups/tribes defined by our employer, our friends, our professional associations, our ethnicity, and our sexual preferences.
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The first human cultures emerged from the nomadic tribal communities where it was common to celebrate the qualities of an animal, its spirit, its qualities, its energies.

We seem to be going back to our roots and becoming nomadic peoples again–or rather “nomadig” people.

The Economist writes in a survey:

In information technology and telecoms in particular, the role of intellectual property has changed radically. What used to be the preserve of corporate lawyers and engineers in R&D labs has been speedily embraced by the boardroom. Intellectual-asset management now figures as a strategic business issue. In America alone, technology licensing revenue accounts for an estimated $45 billion annually; worldwide, the figure is around $100 billion and growing fast.

Technology firms are seeking more patents, expanding their scope, licensing more, litigating more and overhauling their business models around intellectual property. Yet paradoxically, as some companies batten down the hatches, other firms have found ways of making money by opening up their treasure-chest of innovation and sharing it with others. The rise of open-source software is just one example. And a new breed of companies has appeared on the periphery of today’s tech firms, acting as intellectual-property intermediaries and creating a market for ideas.

Bob Cringely does some calculations for all the free services on offer:

Let’s imagine some typical numbers. In the U.S. alone, according to Nielsen/Netratings, we have approximately 202 million Internet users, each of whom is eligible for a free Gmail account with two gigabytes of storage. Since my mother uses less than two gigs and I use more, let’s do our rule-of-thumb estimate with that number, making the potential Gmail storage obligation 404 million gigabytes or about 400 petabytes. That’s 400 times the current capacity of the Internet Archive, but it is also probably a tenth or less the total capacity of our PC and DVR hard drives today, so I think it is a very fair number to play with.
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Probably 80 percent of this capacity will be borne by the major players, with each of those taking a roughly equal share. That’s MSN, Yahoo and Google, assuming that AOL will be somehow distributed between them, with each having about 100 petabytes of storage.

How much storage IS that, really? Well, the biggest enterprise hard drives available today hold 400 gigabytes each, which means each of these companies is going to need AT LEAST 250,000 drives, making Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, and Western Digital all very happy. Though with volume discounts that’s really only about $25 million in disk drives — far less than Microsoft’s legal bills.

Now let’s build a data center using those 250,000 drives. A disk array can hold about 32 drives in a 3U space. In a typical cabinet you can store about 12 arrays or a total of 384 drives. That cabinet sits on a 2′ x 2′ floor tile, plus some aisle space, or about 10 square feet of floor space for planning purposes. 250,000/384=651 cabinets or about 6,500 square feet. Heck, that’s nothing when you read about all the hosting companies, with their 20,000 square foot data centers containing 20,000 servers each.
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The problem comes when you start to think about power consumption. It’s not that disk drives consume so much power or that they haven’t come down in consumption over the years, but each of those cabinets will require using modern drives about 3,300 watts to run while the full 100 petabytes will require 2.148 MEGAwatts. And all that heat has to go somewhere, so the building will typically use three to four times as much power for air conditioning as it does to run the drives, taking our total power consumption up to just under 10 megawatts, which at typical U.S. industrial power rates will cost about $5 million per year.

[via Jon Udell] The New York Times writes:

Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But [Gloria] Mark is a scientist of “human-computer interactions” who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we’ve all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

Shrikant Patil quotes Lowell Monke: “At the heart of a childs relationship with technology is a paradoxthat the more external power children have at their disposal, the more difficult it will be for them to develop the inner capacities to use that power wisely. Once educators, parents, and policymakers understand this phenomenon, perhaps education will begin to emphasize the development of human beings living in community, and not just technical virtuosity. I am convinced that this will necessarily involve unplugging the learning environment long enough to encourage children to discover who they are and what kind of world they must live in. That, in turn, will allow them to participate more wisely in using external tools to shape, and at times leave unshaped, the world in which we all must live.”

The New York Times writes about “a game console for the rest of us.”

n the coming weeks, Microsoft plans to introduce a marketing campaign to expand the appeal of the new Xbox 360 game console beyond the young men who are the Xbox’s biggest fans.
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Brochures going out to major retailers like Best Buy prominently describe the 360’s ability to double as a DVD player, play music from an MP3 player through a television’s speakers and even display digital photos on a TV. Its game functions, while impressive, are now only part of the message.

The point, said Bill Nielsen, who oversees marketing for the Xbox 360, is to help a game player convince the women in the family that “this is for you, too, not just for me to play Madden,’ ” referring to the John Madden football game.

Nivi writes:

Kids can spend $50 a month on ringtones because their ringtones are communication. Theyre a fashion statement just like the brand of jeans they wear. Their ringtones are real world avatars: a ringtone says this is what I am to their friends and the girls they like.

Consumption is communication (sometimes).

You invest your time writing your blog because the thoughts on your blog tell people who you are, what you stand for, and what you believe in.

Your blog entries communicate that you are smart, funny, charming, and well endowed.

Now imagine if someone followed you around with a megaphone and recited your blog entries to anyone within earshot. You would make damn sure you had a good blog. You would make sure your blog was up-to-date, well written, tasteful, and a reflection of who you are.

Thats what a ringtone is: a blog with a megaphone.

WSJ writes about Apple’s newest introduction:

Essentially making the same bet in video that it did with music, Apple is introducing hardware for playing digital entertainment that is tightly wedded to an online store that sells that content. The new version of the iPod, expected in stores next week, is designed to play home movies, short films, music videos and other content transferred to it from a computer.

Apple plans to sell two models of the device, priced at $299 and $399, with the capacity to store as much as 150 hours of video. The products will display the video on 2.5-inch color screens.

Under the relationship with Disney, new episodes of the five TV shows will be available the day after they are broadcast. Past episodes from the first seasons of “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” are available immediately. Apple also announced a deal with Pixar Animation Studios, which Mr. Jobs also leads, to distribute short animated features.

Wired profiles Tim O’Reilly, one of the originators of the Web 2.0 meme:

O’Reilly’s radar is legendary. It works on country roads and on the information sea. It told him there was a market for consumer-friendly computer manuals and that he could build a great business publishing them. It helped him understand the significance of the World Wide Web before there were browsers to surf it. And it led him to identify and proselytize technologies like peer-to-peer, syndication, and Wi-Fi before most people had even heard of them at all. As a result, “Tim O’Reilly’s radar” is kind of a catchphrase in the industry.

Yet O’Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing -company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million -computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow.

News.com writes:

If you found yourself needing an old biology textbook and couldn’t locate your battered copy from college, you’d have a few options.

You could go to a university bookstore and snag a used copy; you could drop a few dollars on a new one at Amazon.com; or you could track down some old college chums and ask for their copies.

But if Jimmy Wales and his colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation have anything to say about it, you could have another way to go–the Wikibooks project. It’s their attempt to create a comprehensive, kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free and freely distributable, based on an open-source development model.

Created in the same mold as the Wikipedia project–the open-source encyclopedia that lets anyone create or edit an article and that now has nearly 747,000 entries in English alone–Wikibooks is still in its earliest stages.