Infotech

[31 Dec 02] This news of 3D monitors that don't require glasses is just too cool for school. Never mind the entertainment possibilities: imagine what they'll do to the desktop metaphor. Using a next-generation operating system could be like playing Myst or Mario.

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DAB Hand

[10 Dec 02] Various newspapers noted last week that the BBC is spending 30 million pounds a year on digital radio at a time when only an estimated 70,000 receivers have been sold across the UK. That's over four hundred quid per receiver; more than I've spent on CDs all year. Now that prices have come down (to about £130-150 for the cheaper DAB separates, and £100 for an Evoke portable) the industry expects total sales to reach 300,000 by the end of 2003; but that will still mean that the equivalent of the entire licence fee of those 300,000 owners is being spent on... well, radio. Even at a hundred quid, the receivers aren't exactly cheap; and now, it transpires, the BBC is squeezing so many channels into each digital signal that their overall sound quality is inferior to FM. It's enough to make anyone keep cranking the Freeplay. Or wait until they get a digital TV.

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Kill, Crush, Destroy

[21 Nov 02] I've alluded to Bayesian spam filters before—now there's a way for Mac OS X users (including those using Eudora, like me) to try them out. Even keeping the potential problems in mind, it's got to be worth a try.

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Bleep On

[26 Oct 02] Went along this afternoon to the Royal Museum of Scotland's new exhibition Game On, with over a hundred playable video games from Pong to Halo. A nostalgia trip for anyone who's grown up in the past thirty years, and it left me wanting to race out to buy a PS2 and a copy of Grand Theft Auto III. Oh, and a TV.

One of the more intriguing exhibits wasn't video, though, but audio: a bunch of listening posts featuring music from various eras of gaming. A listen to various 1980s Commodore 64 themes was a potent reminder of the roots of '90s dance music. To hear for yourself, download a SID music file player for Mac OS Classic or Windows, search the High Voltage SID Collection for 'Arkanoid' by Martin Galway, follow it up with an mp3 remix from C64audio.com, and bleep the night away.

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Stream of Unconsciousness

[30 Sep 02] Hi there. This is my test entry on my new Alphasmart 3000. Pretty cool, eh? Now I can type away anywhere, anytime, type to my heart's content, type until my brain melts out of my ears, type until the cows come home, type until my fingers bleed, type until bleeding-fingered cows come home with brains melting out of their ears. Typetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetype.

Doobedy-doobedy-doo.

Ooo, very cool. The files are preserved even when you take out the batteries, and saving is completely automatic for each and every letter. I think I'm going to like this a lot.

Hmm, it's a bit slow to send the text over USB. Like watching an old teletype. But when it's hooked up it works like a regular keyboard.

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A Simple Plan

[26 Sep 02] Re-reading an old piece of mine on web filtering, it occurs to me that the techniques described in Paul Graham's A Plan for Spam and being used in the newer breed of e-mail clients could also be adopted by filtering-software companies. A statistical analysis of porn pages, code and all, would almost certainly provide more reliable filtering than crude lists of keywords. Of course, there'd have to be some way of letting the software know whether the sample pages that it's analysing are porn or not, just as Graham's spam filter needs someone to tell it, at first, which emails are spam and which aren't.

So, you'd end up with filters (if you must have them, as many companies and schools require) that are far better at recognising porn pages, and, importantly, far less likely to block non-porn.

But only if filtering-software companies hire armies of surfers to sift through random webpages to identify which ones are actually pornographic.

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What Price a Bit?

[21 Aug 02] Say that your hard drive has four gigs of mp3s on it. And say you run a peer-to-peer client that shares every mp3 on your hard drive with the world. Say hello to the Department of Justice. Spurred on by the RIAA, the US government is using a 1997 law to threaten prosecution of anyone sharing more than a thousand dollars' worth of copyrighted material over the internet. [More at MeFi.]

While the impracticality of sending millions of teenagers to jail makes the strategy seem doomed from the outset, a wholesale crack-down probably isn't necessary to achieve the RIAA's goal. Given that most of the tracks available on Napster used to be provided by a small minority of users, it could be quite possible to cripple a Napster-like service with a few key prosecutions designed to discourage anyone from actually sharing files, as opposed to downloading them.

Advocates have trumpeted the robustness of peer-to-peer systems, their imperviousness to technical attack and to attempts to route around them, but have forgotten their Achilles heel: the all-too-human fears of the people using them. All the Department has to do is play on that fear of getting caught, and all that needs is a few high-profile busts: a heavy file-trader goes down, word gets around, and pretty soon no-one considers it safe to keep more than a few mp3s on their hard-drive at any one time. That stops p2p networks from building up to critical mass on the backs of a few big file-sharers, and with less to download, people will have less reason to use them, there'll be less people sharing files, less to download, and so on. The upwards trend that saw the explosion of peer-to-peer under Napster would turn into a downward trend and its implosion. Or so the RIAA and Department of Justice hope.

The political impact is low—most regular users won't get prosecuted, so the outcry is kept to a minimum—but suddenly the supply dries up. File-trading goes back to what it was pre-Napster: ad hoc sharing of dribs and drabs here and there on a one-to-one basis. Still technically illegal, but no real threat to the RIAA, who go back to big business as usual.

There's just one problem. To quote a Justice Department employee:

Most parents would be horrified if they walked into a child's room and found a hundred stolen CDs... However, these same parents think nothing of having their children spend time online downloading hundreds of songs without paying a dime.

Translation: there is a severe disjunction between the concept and value of intellectual property as represented in law and most people's conception and valuation of intellectual property as demonstrated in practice. (Solution: lock 'em all up!)

Internet users have demonstrated en masse what they instinctively think of the tightening grip of intellectual property law, in one of the most widespread civil disobedience movements in years—even though most of them haven't given those instincts much thought, and their civil disobedience hasn't been organised and directed from above. Any democratic government that sees that as a reason to redouble its punishments rather than rethink its laws is on an information superhighway to oblivion.

I grew up in what was once the British Empire's harshest place of punishment, with prisons that still draw shudders from tourists today. The British joke about convicts as if all Australians are descended from murderers, but Van Diemen's Land wasn't a place for murderers; murderers saw nothing but the end of a long rope. It was settled by Englishmen who stole handkerchiefs and Irishmen who worked against English rule. People guilty of trivialities and thoughtcrime.

Those who would lock teenagers up for having a hard-drive full of zeroes and ones just to 'send a message' might reflect on that. Sending convicts to Port Arthur 'sent a message', too. Yet people still steal handkerchiefs—and most of Ireland is independent.

[Actually, this subsequent comment is more what I wanted to say.]

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Friggan Oath

[16 Aug 02] One of Apple's switch ads stars a programmer who practices Asatru, the worship of Norse gods. "Like, PCs, they don't have alternate character sets built right into the OS, right into it, man, so web pages display right first time. But Macs do. Which is really neat when I want to check out sites written in runes."*

[Via Jerry Kindall and my compulsion to leave cheesy gags in his comments box.]

*Not a real quote. But it should be, by Thor.

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[12 Jun 02] Want a digital camera, but can't afford one? Try building a megapixel digital camera out of a flatbed scanner. Or if that sounds like too much trouble, head outside with your laptop and start scanning the ground.

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Picture It

[23 May 02] The acronym 'IT' first abbreviated its way into my head in late 1996. I remember my new boss using the term, and remember wondering how long it had been around—it had been a while since I'd paid much attention to tech jargon. A few months later, it was everywhere.

Something about IT always irritated me. Sure, IT's short; but whenever you use IT, IT looks like your caps key is broken. And IT's meaning of 'information technology' seems an unnecessary substitute for its predecessor, 'computers'. It's as if cars suddenly became 'transportation technology' or 'TT'. After all, not everything involved in the vehicular transportation of people from point A to point B is a car: there are other vehicles, like trucks and motorbikes; there are the integral parts of the cars themselves, like tyres and headlights and windscreen-wipers; and there are add-on extras, like tow-bars and fluffy dice. All, in their own way, examples of TT—yet people insist on talking about 'cars' and 'the car industry'. How confusing.

For those who didn't know their ASCII from their elbow, the switch to 'IT' did nothing to clarify matters—which was perhaps the intention. Computers were becoming commonplace by the mid-1990s, and losing their capacity to dazzle the average Joe; the mystical power of acronyms reclaimed that potential for wonder and awe. "What's that," Joe would ask, "a computer?", and the tech junkie would reply, "No, it's a Palm Pilot, an example of information technology or 'IT'", and the awed Joe would wonder, "What's the difference?", and the tech junkie would say, "This has a small LCD screen and a miniature keypad and somewhat less memory and a less-powerful chip", and Joe would say, "It has a screen and memory and a chip?", and tech junkie would say "Yes", and Joe would say "Like a computer?", and tech junkie would say "Er... look over there!", and would point dramatically at his life-size cardboard cut-out of Captain Picard, and run outside to his transportation technology device, and cut and paste himself onto the other side of town.

But I exaggerate. Except about the Picard cut-out. There was at least one good reason to replace 'computer' and 'computing' as the dominant labels for the technology and the industry, and that was the advent of the wondrous and awful Internet. The Net was where the computer industry met the phone industry, and rebranding is inevitable in any corporate merger. 'Information technology', despite its roots in the term 'information science', can suggest both computation and communication; and 'IT'—well, IT can mean anything, can't IT. The term echoed Al Gore's rhetoric about the Information Superhighway, and the acronym reduced the temptation to make troublesome distinctions between information, data, knowledge, and wisdom. IT was the way forward, and soon we all used IT.

Well, most of us. By 1999, at least in Australian bureaucratic circles, there were pretenders to IT's throne: 'communications and information technology' (C&IT); 'information and communications technology' (ICT); 'information technology and communications' (ITC or IT&C). All attempting to shoe-horn the term 'communications' into the very acronym that was created in response to it.

"Ah yes, but it doesn't include it. Talking about 'information' neglects the communications aspect."

"So, you communicate stuff that isn't information, do you? Meaningless drivel, perhaps?"

"Um..."

"Or you create information that isn't intended for communication? Like, say, government reports?"

"Er... look over there!" [Points to cardboard cut-out of Sir Humphrey Appleby, runs outside, etc.]

By 1999, no-one needed to be told—least of all by the Australian federal government—that information technology involved communications from time to time. The extra word was clearly redundant—so why was it being tacked onto the mercifully brief 'IT'? It surely wasn't to beef up the character count of government reports.

Three years later, surrounded by yet more papers and reports that use 'ICT', I can think of only one explanation. It's completely daft, but it's an explanation: IT sometimes gets autocorrected to 'It' by Microsoft Word. Imagine typing 'IT' hundreds of times in a long document and having to fix Microsoft's helpful autocorrection every time. This wouldn't concern anyone who actually works in IT, because most such people either refuse to use Microsoft products, know how to switch off autocorrecting, or write software and company reports, not papers about 'IT'. But academics, journalists and bureaucrats do use Microsoft Word, often have no idea how to switch off autocorrecting, and write about IT in general terms. And once they latch onto a new acronym they have the power to propagate it.

In fact, forget the autocorrect theory. I'm prepared to believe that the bureaucrats did it out of pure love of acronyms. Bureaucrats use letters like Lego, building teetering towers of red and yellow blocks on lumpy sheets of green. The more redundant letters, the better—after all, you can never have too many clear blocks. Just imagine the acronymic possibilities of ICT: PICTURE; FICTION; INFLICT; ICTHYOSAUR. Acronyms that paint a thousand words; acronyms with bite! What committee chair could resist finding a way to turn ICT into DICTIONARY?

Whatever the reason, 'ICT' is now entrenched in bureaucratic and academic circles, at least here in the UK. It remains widely ignored by industry and the general public; but for how long? How long until the students of ICT users give IT the flick?

Well, not me. I'm drawing my line in the sand, right here next to my cardboard cut-out of George Orwell. Nicht bin ein ICT, as Herr Doktor would say. For every autocorrect function there's an all-caps search-and-replace.

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[ 8 May 02] Following up earlier posts on Microsoft's strange legal claims, the offending text in the Q&A section has finally been changed—to "The legal transfer of the operating system can go a long way to help an organization get that computer into use with minimal expended resources."

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[ 3 May 02] Adobe has won a patent suit against Macromedia. Macromedia has filed a countersuit charging that Photoshop and GoLive infringe two patents of its own. So should we grab that Photoshop 7.0 upgrade while we still can, or spurn it as the work of patent-enforcing killjoys? Oh, the dilemma.

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[ 3 May 02] If your email account is filling up with ghosts of mailing lists past, here's why [via WombatFile].

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Microsoft Undo 1.0

[ 2 May 02] Thankfully, the Microsoft page mentioned yesterday has been amended. What before read:

If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated PCs, make sure that the hardware donation includes the original operating system software. Keeping the operating system with the PC is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.

now reads:

If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated PCs, make sure you know the licensing guidelines. For instance, if the hardware donation is an original equipment manufacture machine, the pre-installed operating system license is only valid when used on the original machine for which it was first installed, so it's beneficial to leave it intact.

Lucky thing that keeping the original text with the webpage isn't a legal requirement.

But the 'Questions and Answers' table immediately below persists in its risible claim that "It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine." Does this mean that we can sue Microsoft if a spectacular system crash nukes our hard disk?

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Bloody Donors

[ 1 May 02] Ed points out the worst case of Microsoft FUD we've seen since, ohhhh, last Tuesday, probably (that's 'fear, uncertainty and doubt', for those who don't follow MS shenanigans—spread to scare people away from the opposition). The company is suggesting, against all common-sense, that it's a legal requirement that "pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine."

The wording of the Win2K licence agreement shows that the legal position is nothing like Microsoft is suggesting: "The SOFTWARE PRODUCT may only be used with the HARDWARE as set forth in this EULA" limits subsequent reuse of the software, not the hardware; 'may only' does not mean 'must always', and they couldn't say 'must' without undermining the entire foundation of international capitalism. A company can't restrict anyone's use of an item that the company itself did not manufacture or sell—otherwise what's to stop Microsoft concocting ridiculous claims that every object with a chip installed has to run its software on pain of torture?

What's next?

If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated battery rechargers, make sure that the donation includes the original batteries. Keeping the batteries with the recharger is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.

If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated car, make sure that the car includes the original gasoline. Keeping the gasoline with the car is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.

If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the donated money, make sure that the donation includes the original owner. Keeping the money with the original owner is not just a great benefit - it is a legal requirement.

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Cold Turkey

[10 Apr 02] This is it. X-Day. My work G4 and home iMac are now both staring back at me with the fuzzy gaze of Mac OS 10.1.3. Goodbye, 9.2.2, we shall not see your like again, except through the stained glass of Classic. I feel like Will stepping through a window into Cittàgazze. Hope there aren't too many Spectres about.

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[21 Mar 02] Allow me a moment of geek awe: a fully functional virtual keyboard that can be projected and touched on any surface [via plasticbag.org].

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[19 Feb 02] I've now actually read the Neal Stephenson article linked a couple of days ago, and it's worth more than a one-liner. Mother Earth Mother Board is a thoroughly engaging account of the race to lay high-capacity undersea and overland fibre-optic cables in the mid-1990s; if you've read Cryptonomicon, you'll know what to expect. The 'hacker tourist' Stephenson traverses Thailand, Hong Kong, Egypt and Cornwall in his investigations, and along the way tells us about Lord Kelvin, the original 'nerd-lord' and an unsung hero of the 19th century if ever there was one; his story makes a useful complement to Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet. The article also contains this unintentionally startling passage (unintentional because written five years ago):

Building the lighthouse [of Alexandria] with its magic lens was a way of enhancing the city's natural capability for looking to the north, which made it into a world capital for many centuries. It's when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain—sometimes illusory gain—that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse. ¶ The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over.

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For Whom the Dell Tolls

[24 Jan 02] I use a Mac. Have done for years; seventeen years, to be exact (oh my God, I'm twice the age I was in 1985; don't panic, don't panic). For a while in the mid-90s I thought they were doomed, that Win95 had overtaken the MacOS, and steeled myself to say goodbye to them for good. The iMac gave new hope, and OS X gave hope again, but it's getting hard to live on hope. In fact, things are starting to look grim.

How can I say that, when Apple have just released another typically elegant piece of hardware? (Which the iMac 2 is, despite those who say it looks like a lamp: what's more elegant, a lamp or a box?) Well, I say it by pointing to Stephen den Beste's technical but insightful dissection of the issues.

First, PowerPC chips are rapidly falling behind their PC counterparts, and the underlying reasons for this give little hope of a turnaround. Second, writing more efficient software to make up the lost ground just won't happen. And third, these factors combined with Apple's low market share will eventually see the Mac pass the point of no return.

I hate to contemplate the death of the Mac: like so many, I have a lot invested in it, not just financially, emotionally and aesthetically but in accumulated skills and knowledge. Because computers are knowledge machines, the demise of a major marque in the PC industry seems more like the demise of a culture or a language than of a manufacturer: with it goes a way of looking at the world, a particular way of navigating around information-space. Yes, there are other perfectly acceptable ways of doing that, just as British and American English are both acceptable ways of communicating. But loss of diversity is still a loss.

The trouble is—and this is why den Beste's analysis persuades me that the end is nigh—the Mac world is already facing a cultural revolution of its own making. OS X was an entirely necessary step for Apple to take, but it's still unclear whether every pre-X Mac user is willing to take it with them. Until this month all newly-sold Macs booted into OS 9.x by default, and many old and even new users will have left them there. By the time they're forced to switch over for good with the purchase of their next machine, the temptation to look elsewhere may be too strong.

Because den Beste is right: in the long run, clock-speed trumps all. Right now, we Mac users can feel that we're not doing too badly: a G4 seems blindingly fast for most of the tasks we demand of it, just as a new Athlon- or Pentium-based PC would. But imagine a time when Macs are only half as fast as PCs, and feel like it; and then imagine a processing-intensive task that PCs can handle quickly but Macs can't; and imagine that task being an essential aspect of the next big computing craze. Imagine if Macs couldn't decode MP3s in real-time, or play DVDs, or burn CDs, or burn DVDs, and extrapolate from there.

Unless Apple can jump the chip-speed hurdle, they're screwed, which means that we Mac users are also screwed. Maybe Apple will take the biggest gamble of all, and switch to Intel when the OS X user-base is big enough, giving us a life-raft if the company does sink. Hmm, and maybe Steve Jobs will be the first president of Mars.

It's depressing. But right now, in January 2002, I'm staring at the most beautiful piece of hardware I've ever had the privilege to use, and sitting at home is the second-most; it does everything I want of it, and could do far more; and the day of reckoning is some ways off yet. Personally, I reckon it's about time to make the final switch to OS X and enjoy a couple more years of playing with what an operating system can be, rather than what the mundane and pragmatic forces of the market say it must be. The alternatives will still be there at the end of it all.

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[23 Jan 02] How the Wayback Machine Works [via Jerry Kindall]: "This is the largest database ever built. It's larger than Walmart's, American Express', the IRS ... and it's built on commodity PCs."

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