The alleged subway wanker whose victim captured him on cameraphone and posted it to Flickr is on the cover of today's New York Daily News.
Cover Link, Story Link
(Thanks, B-!)
Can you imagine the coronaries that Cable company operators here in the United States would have if producers of programming said they were going to allow their programs to be viewed online at exactly the same time they are being played through traditional means.
I can predict a day in the near future where cable and satellite providers will no longer control our television programming. My wife can already watch a handful of popular Japanese TV shows that are aired only in Japan for free on our media center, versus paying our cable company $19.95 per month for 5 channels of Japanese programming that is garbage.
I think this is a huge move by the BBC and should make some people sit up and take notice. [BBC]
John Jordan connects the dots:
Everyone is watching Microsoft, which is preparing to launch a new operating system next year. Last month merely changing the name from code (Longhorn) to product (Vista) devoured a lot of attention, and more recently a stripped-down version of the product shipped to beta testers. The product has been a long time in coming, and the scope has been managed downward in several respects. Nevertheless, both Microsoft and the industry more generally see Vista as a potential jump-start very much in the same category as Windows 95 ten years ago. Because Vista represents the first opportunity in over ten years to begin with a "clean sheet of paper," unlike Windows 3.1, 98, ME, and 2000/XP, Bill Gates has repeatedly linked the two products in public.
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Here's another way of thinking about the comparison. In 1995, Microsoft turned the telephone network into an extension of the computer, or vice versa: between them AOL and Windows 95 made the Internet a household utility. In 2006, no parallel leap into an adjoining domain - think of home entertainment, specifically the television - will be supported. Bill Gates longstanding prediction about widespread adoption of a voice and speech interface to the PC will be addressed with Vista support, but even given a powerful standard processor configuration at its disposal, Vista still won't make masses of people retire their keyboards.
Vista looks like a solid product for corporate purchasers, but the lack of "gee-whiz" and "I've always wanted to be able to do that" desirability will prevent end-user excitement from reappearing the way it did ten years ago. An industry in search of the next big thing will probably have to keep looking.
The New York Times has finally discovered MySpace.com. “I’d say, as far as a cultural phenomenon, MySpace is as important, if not more important, than MTV.” Oh didn’t Robert Young say that, like a month ago? Still a pretty interesting look at how MySpace has changed lives of people, who above everything else simply love music.
Napster, the first easy-to-share P2P file sharing network, was all the rage in the late 1990s before the record industry cracked down and drove it into bankruptcy. While the morality of Napster system is still topic of big debate, it role in the proliferation of broadband cannot be denied. Consumer, tired of downloading files switched en masse to arguably faster cable and DSL connections. Thank you, Shawn Fanning, for helping the carriers come out of their financial doldrums. Napster, legal issues aside, was the first application that showed the consumers what was possible with broadband.
Napster’s legacy will be that it taught AOLers how to consume digital media. That it was okay to download music (and eventually video) instead of going to record stores or renting movies at local Blockbuster. The illegality of the service put an end to the business, but not the habit of digital consumption. Since then quite a few variants have come to market - Kazaa, Audio Galaxy, Earth Station, Bit Torrent - and they all have only reinforced the message. I had a chance to catch up Andrew Parker, chief technology officer of Cambridge, UK-based CacheLogic. The company studies traffic patterns on the Internet, and has often come-up with interesting data.
Parker was in town promoting his report on the state of P2P nation, and a new service called Streamsight monitoring network, that would be an array of CacheLogic appliances spread worldwide, that will collect information on the type of network traffic, which will then be available to carriers worldwide to get a better idea about what’s flowing on their pipes. Parker, a reserved Englishman on best of days was sluggish because of a pesky wisdom tooth that has been taking its time coming out of hiding. Despite the pain, we got into a spirited discussion, and came to a not-so-pleasant conclusion: P2P is driving consumer broadband demand….. and broadband is driving P2P uptake.
The symbiotic relationship between the two is reflected in this accompanying network traffic pattern graphic. It leads me to a few conclusions
The service providers have a little or no reason to block P2P traffic in the near terms, because it drives growth. And since most service providers are in growth mode, well, you know…. ehm!
In the long term, however P2P traffic if not managed properly is going to become a big problem.
The explosion in P2P traffic is going to have an impact on the people who don’t use the P2P services as well.
Due to P2P’s symmetrical nature on average 80% of upstream capacity is consumed by P2P
Parker told me that many television and old line television companies are experimenting with P2P technologies for video distribution. BBC and Sky are the most public about their plans, but there are others who are looking to use P2P to get more viewers for their content. I think on a more longer term, this is an interesting situation and brings up some niggling questions about Silicon Valley’s concept of the moment: The Long Tail. I guess, as niche content finds it footing, one has to wonder who is really footing the bill for the distribution.
I mean be it P2P or iTunes or Rhapsody, we are simply shifting to cost of distribution over to the “pipe owners” who are (whether they like it or not,) being reduced to “mere conduits,” or utilities. For instance the distribution costs of a record used to be printing the CDs, and getting them into the stores, which the record label paid for. Now, if you take a song, put it on a server, and start selling it, the distribution cost is really the “IP transit,” which someone has to pay for.
And as the debate continues, one thing which is becoming increasingly certain: P2P has become the driver of broadband, and for now there is nothing which can even come close.
We have been covering in this blog about the downside of opensource questioning its maturity, lack of business model, some some perspectives and Reality Check.Forbes writes about VA Software - claiming to be “at the center of the open source technology revolution” operating SourceForge.net, a site where developers collaborate on open source projects and it also runs Web sites, like Slashdot and NewsForge, where the anti-Microsoft crowd rails against the evils of proprietary, closed source software. Forbes says that it turns out VA Software's main product, SourceForge Enterprise Edition, is as closed-source and non-free. Customers cannot view or modify the program's source code or basic underlying instructions (a hallmark of open source software), and they definitely can't share the code with others. Officials at VA Software say they can't release SourceForge Enterprise Edition as an open source program, because, if they did, copycats could create knockoffs of the program, and that would hurt sales.
This is the latest twist in the evolution of the free and open source (FOSS) movement.What began as a revolution has now become just another marketing slogan. Startups are latching onto the hype around “open source” to gain interest from venture capitalists and earn street credibility with the FOSS community, but then proceed with a business model predicated on making money by selling closed source code. Enterprises like EnterpriseDB, Gluecode, call themselves “open source” companies, but actually use a “hybrid” business model that involves selling closed source programs that run on top of some open source code. Richard Stallman says that VA Software should not be shipping programs that are not “free”-by which he means programs with code that cannot be viewed, modified and freely shared with others. Stallman differentiates between his “free-software” movement and the “open source software” movement.
While open source proponents simply believe closed source development is less effective than open source development, free software proponents say “non-free” software is unethical, “because it keeps users divided and helpless, prohibiting cooperation,” Stallman explains. Bodell at VA Software asks, “If people are performing work, what is the model for compensation?” Well this is what the whole world is asking!!
Category :Open Source
(Via IHT) In Japan, Yahoo has already made 50 percent of its PC content available on Yahoo Mobileincluding news, finance, shopping and travel services. The need for mobile readiness is particularly acute for certain services like auctions. About 10 percent of bidding at Yahoo Japan is already conducted via mobile phone. The phone screen and the Internet content underneath is almost always controlled by the mobile carrier. Yahoo and the other major Japanese portals, like Excite Japan, MSN and Goo, see that barrier breaking down, and they are investing heavily in their mobile phone content. The number of Web sites designed for viewing on cellphones is starting to catch up with the number of pages designed for PCs. There are 400 million to 500 million searchable Japanese-language Web pages, compared with 60 million mobile Web pages. Including carriers' pages, the cellphone total goes up to an estimated 100 million. The proliferation of cellphone Web pages is likely to surge again with the advent of "number portability," which allows subscribers to hold on to their phone numbers when switching service providers, and is likely to be introduced next year. When that happens, competition among carriers will increase and subscribers will gravitate to content from portals like Yahoo, which users can get irrespective of their carriers.
 ITN | German scientists cut bird-flu test time to hours Expatica, Netherlands - ... scientists said Friday they have developed a laboratory test for bird flu that reduces from days to hours the amount of time needed to detect the H5N1 virus in ... Flu facts and concerns Infection getting out of control World slow to face bird flu threat |
I thank the folks at Ticket Assassin for helping me beat this ticket. I paid $25 for the TicketAssassin Shareware, "an arsenal of forms, examples and guidelines assembled to help you fight your ticket via Trial By Written Declaration, a process you can do entirely by mail. This collection includes specific court documents needed to contest your case, dozens of examples, and comprehensive, easy-to-follow directions and guidelines for their proper use."
The TicketAssassin folks also answered my emailed questions about the specifics of the ticket.
And it worked! The ticket was dismissed and the check I sent for $190 is being returned.
Trial By Written Declaration is the best way to fight a ticket. I am thrilled with TicketAssassin!
For the past week, about 5,000 employees of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) have been locked out due to a labour dispute. Now, the Canadian Media Guild says it plans to launch an internet-based media service produced by locked-out CBC employees. In a statement on their website, the group said " [j]ust because the Corporation won't let us go to work doesn't mean we can't do the work we love to do!", adding that "[v]arious ad-hoc groups have been meeting in Toronto and around the country to develop the idea. The CMG leadership has now approved the project and, since we are without a collective agreement, there are no conflict issues to prevent us from providing quality content to our audiences.". . . software engineer era ending
There are tens of millions of programmers entering the world's job markets annually. Paradoxically, this global expansion of the geek population means the end of the era of the software engineer/coder as the most important profession in Silicon Valley - and in other centers of innovation.
Why? Because it is a common commodity. Software, servers and algorithms are cheap and are going to get cheaper. That's why Internet 2.0, this next phase of the internet (lower-case "i" please) will become the era of the "media engineer" - tech-savvy content producers, including journalists.
There are very few of them and the global pool grows slowly. [It's easier teaching geek to creative people than the other way around.]
It's all about the content
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San Francisco announces TechConnect citywide wireless plan: Didn't I ask that news be kept to a minimum while I was on vacation? And SF chose this moment to release its plan. The city will offer up its network for bid to nonprofits and private enterprise. The initial proposal is a request for information and comment, but the bid will apparently be awarded based on a response, and deployment would start a few months after the deadline of Sept. 28.
Given that we're on the cusp of fixed WiMax deployment, this proposal seems just months ahead of the curve. The San Francisco Chronicle's account of the announcement has Mayor Gavin Newsom stating that taxpayers will probably pay nothing. This seems awfully pie in the sky for the other objective: substantially lower cost than other broadband alternatives. (The article includes a properly attributed comment from an SBC-funded thinktank: it's appropriate that the quote is included and it's appropriate that the funding behind the analyst is also noted.)
However, the key metric here is 1 Mbps connections, not the 3 to 6 Mbps that cable and DSL now offer routinely in major metro areas (but not to every home in those areas), and the 10 to 20 Mpbs that's coming soon over copper and much higher speeds in certain effectively redlined areas.
Pasadena won't spend public dollars on Wi-Fi: The council says it would cost millions and only aid those with laptops. Vendors obviously didn't sell it well: Wi-Fi bridges are being used widely to bring municipal Wi-Fi from the outside to residential desktop users. Ah, well. The city will keep spending to put free Wi-Fi in libraries and elsewhere. They're looking to find a private vendor for a municipal network to bear the fiscal risk.
Philadelphia has narrowed candidates for building the citywide Wi-Fi network: EarthLink and HP consortiums are two remaining.
Palakkode, India, models computer centers linked wirelessly: The goal is to unwire 600,000 villages in two years, which is remarked as unlikely in the article. But potentially over 200,000 villages will receive a combination of non- and for-profit systems. Because the post is so unreliable, the article alleges, among other benefits to citizens are Internet-based bill presentment: you can't reliably pay your electrical bill through the mail in rural villages.
Kutztown, Penn., builds state's only municipal network: The town will build and operate the network municipally without a private partner, making it what the town believes is the first and only--due to legislation--municipal wireless network in the state. The town already has full fiber-optic coverage; the wireless will be just another layer. It's just 1.6 square miles in area.
From time to time advertisers pop up over at Boing Boing who want to do nothing but buy a hard coded text link. The advertisers are not in any way interested in conversing with BB readers, all they want is to grab some Googlejuice by having a link on a high PageRank site. We always say no, as the intent is so evident. But here is an interesting case (at publisher O'Reilly, which is a partner of mine in Web 2) where a more sophisticated approach - via Google ads - to basically the same idea was not caught, at least initially. BB and SEW have good overviews.
From Tim's post:
So there's the heart of the question: is it appropriate for a site to monetize its page rank as well as its page impressions?
It's pretty clear that the practice of "cloaking" -- that is, hiding links so that you're selling only the page rank -- is illegitimate. But what if someone pays you for a real ad, even if you know that they are paying you primarily because of your page rank rather than your targeted audience? As long as there's no deception as to the nature of the sponsored link, and a legitimate opportunity for click through, isn't this still an ad?
ds to a whole nest of hard questions: Where are the boundaries between legitimate "search engine optimization" to help people find stuff that they will appreciate, and "search engine gaming", to inflate the rank of sites that are less useful? Whose responsibility is it to solve this problem? Should web sites turn away advertisers just because they are performing arbitrage on Google and other search engines? Or is it the search engine's responsibility to adjust their heuristics to counteract any attempts to game the system? Or both? Is it legitimate for a site to improve its own user experience by hosting small, well-paid and relatively inobtrusive text ads rather than the large banners and popups demanded by many advertisers if those ads lead to a worse user experience on search engines?
Long term, I'm pretty sure that supporting people who game search engines is not a good thing.
After having inflicted Big Brother on the world, Dutch television producer John de Mol is launching a reality show in which a woman chooses a sperm donor.
The show, titled I Want Your Child... and Nothing Else!, is scheduled to air tonight.
The 30-year-old woman, Yessica explains: "The plan is that we visit potential donors and - of course on camera - decide which man is most suitable. Afterwards, there will be artificial insemination."
Dutch MPs have spoken out against "The Sperm Show", a pilot that will vie with four other reality programmes. One will follow the fortunes of five former prostitutes who start up a cafe. The show that gets the most votes from viewers on Saturday, after all five have been broadcast, will be commissioned for a full series.
With the advent of Skype opening up their SkypeNet and SkypeWeb APIs to developers, Presence is now another step closer to becoming the multi-billion dollar industry that I believe it will be one day. At the moment presence is a concept many people in the IP Communications industry get, but very few consumers or Enterprise users really understand. I believe that Skype has the opportunity to both educate people what presence means and provide a platform for presence to become commercialized.
With Skype opening up their platforms, they are in fact empowering their developer community with the ability to create both horizontal and vertical applications and the opportunity to apply the concept of presence in applications which would not otherwise be considered communication apps.
Back in the mid-80s when Lotus 1-2-3 published their 1-2-3 Toolkit they enabled third-party developers like myself to add @functions to Lotus 1-2-3. At that time, other developers took advantage of the availability of the developer tools and created vertical and horizontal spreadsheet applications for industries which at that moment, Lotus Development Corp. never considered had a need for their products.
I expect that over time we will see a similar, albeit different symmetry with the way the growing and innovative Skype developer community takes advantage of their available tools and apply them. It will be real interesting to see how some of the more creative Skype developers start to commercialize the opportunities presented and how that ecosystem evolves.
Skype's opening up of their Skype Net and Skype Web API to the web is yet another major step in their on-going contribution and commitment to the IP Communications revolution.
Filed under: Digital Broadcasting
Clear Channel Radio really seems to be upping it's Internet Radio initiative. Last year they hired Evan Harrison, formally vice president and general manager of America Online Music and AOL Radio Network, as exective vice president to head up its Internet radio division. With their embracing of podcasting and streaming online radio, it looks like their bracing for impact as WIFI/WIMAX really begins take off and online radio increases in adoption.| Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments |
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Filed under: Podcasting, Tunes
The PodSafe Music Network has done the unthinkable and has actually emerged out of beta, marking it's official launch. The PodSafe Music Network was created and supported by PodShow Inc (who recently received an amazing $8.5 Million), and is designed to meet the need for podcasters to be able to easily access music that can be used without restriction on their programs.| Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments |
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Necessity is the mother of invention, and the USPTO’s delay in using RSS has led the guys at the Rethink(ip) Blog (Doug, Matt and me) to create RSS feeds of the USPTO’s News and Notices page. We’ve created an Official Gazette feed, a Trademark feed, a Patent feed, a “General News” feed, and a mega feed that includes all of the above. Details can be found here: Rethink(ip) makes United States Patent and Trademark Office News and Notices available by RSS
Please let us know if it is useful (and any other feedback you have).
If it was from any other company it wouldn’t really matter, but Google’s Desktop Sidebar is important, not because it’s particularly new, but because it undermines the primacy of the browser.
Loose Wire ‘s WSJ.com column in June looked at desktop widgets like Konfabulator and Klips before, as well as existing sidebars like the Desktop Sidebar, put together in his spare time by software engineer Damian Kedzierski, 34, who lives in Katowice in southern Poland. Or the SpyderBar from New Orleans-based TGT Soft. In the longer term, Microsoft has indicated that it plans to incorporate a very similar approach in its next version of Windows. Yahoo!, of course, have already bought Konfabulator and I would be very surprised if someone doesn’t snap up Serence, the folk behind Klips, pretty soon.
That’s probably where the battle is going to be: the space on top of the browser. Google can find a way past Microsoft only if it’s able to supplant, or bypass, the browser as the main tool for not merely looking for information (like the search toolbar) but also how the information is displayed once it’s retrieved. That’s where the Sidebar comes in.
While I don’t think Google have done a particularly good job with the Sidebar. The weather widget, for example, only shows U.S. cities. There’s nothing new in there to surprise anyone who has used Damian’s Desktop Sidebar. But the power is not there, it’s in the fact that it channels all existing Google products — search, Gmail, presumably Google Earth etc later — straight to your desktop without going anywhere else first. The heat, finally, is on.
I notice that in most cases Technorati cosmos search does not work at all. I can say with reasonable definiteness that Technorati tag does not work at all – atleast in my case. There’s no use in claiming coverage of additional millions of blogs every quarter, when the existing coverage quality can not be maintained. Om Malik has a detailed note on the deficiencies of the tagging system in Technorati. Noting said about technorati excites me anymore.
Jason Kottke echoes similar views when he writes, No more Technorati. He points out that the results are often unavailable for queries with large result sets (i.e. this is only going to become a bigger problem as time goes on), and most of the rest of the time it's slow as molasses. When it does return results in a timely fashion for links, the results often include old links seen before in the results set, sometimes from months ago. And that's to say nothing of the links Technorati doesn't even display. Results compared with comparable results shows that Technorati is seriously deficient.
Technorati sucks. For the sake of the growth of the blogosphere, it is better that technorati gets acquired by larger player with lot more resources and a better plan to scalability and maintaining search quality. For the sake of curiosity, am tagging this post as Technorati - to see how Technorati picks this up and shows in results
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The Google desktop with sidebar is seeing rave reviews and lot of views are coming out as to how Google may move into the center of the desktop. Jason Kottke has an excellent perspective about the evolving WebOS segment. Excerpts with edits and comments:
Google’s browser was expected to be a sophisticated local caching framework included, and Google will provide the reference apps (replying to emails on Gmail or posting messages to Google groups while on the plane). With GDS, Google finally had an application that installed on the desktop and, even better, it was a little Web server that could insert data from your local machine into pages you were browsing on google.com.WebOS may refer to three main parts to the system:
- The Web browser (along with other browser-ish applications like Konfabulator) becomes the primary application interface through which the user views content, performs services, and manages data on their local machine and on the Web, often without even knowing the difference. Something like Firefox, Safari, or IE...ideally browser agnostic.
- Web applications of the sort we're all familiar with: Gmail, Flickr, and Bloglines, as well as other applications that are making the Web an ever richer environment for getting stuff done. (And ideally all Ajaxed up to provide an experience closer to that of traditional desktop apps.)
- A local Web server to handle the data delivery and content display from the local machine to the browser. This local server will likely be highly optimized for its task, but would be capable of running locally installed Web applications (e.g. a local copy of Gmail and all its associated data).
Aside from the browser and the Web server, applications will be written for the WebOS and won't be specific to Windows, OS X, or Linux. Compared to "standalone" Web apps and desktop apps, applications developed for this hypothetical platform have some powerful advantages. As these run in a Web browser, these applications are cross platform (assuming that whoever develops such a system develops the local Web server part of it for Windows, OS X, Linux, your mobile phone, etc.), just like Web apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, and Salesforce.com. You don't need to be on a specific machine with a specific OS...you just need a browser + local Web server to access your favorite data and apps. This
would help the application developers to write just one appwith the WebOS. The user can run local applications and use them when offline as well. Eg could be Gmail, iTunes, Flickr etc. Anyone with XHTML/JavaScript/CSS skills can build these, but that depends on how open the platform is. And that depends on whose platform it is. Right now, there are five organizations moving in this direction – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla
. A truly different and exciting world is on the anvil.
By studying how colonies of sea anemone Anthopleura elegantissima conduct their battles, David J. Ayre from the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Rick Grosberg from UC Davis have found a fascinating self-organizing battle plan with distinct castes of scouts, warriors, and reproductive anemones.
via EurekaAlert
Flight404’s latest Magneto-Sphere (built in Processing) combines metaballs, gravity, and a self organizing network of magnetic nodes to create a tantalizing organic display of attraction and repulsion. [video]
One of the most venerated online communities, The Well, has been put up for sale by parent Salon Media, according to its latest 10-Q, picked out by News.com. "We're diluting both our management and our resources by focusing on two brands," Elizabeth Hambrecht, Salon's CEO said in this story.
We recently covered Yahoo's claim of increased index size.Based on the data created from sample searches, the study conducted at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign concludes that a user can expect, on average, to receive 166.9% more results using the Google search engine than the Yahoo! search engine. In fact, in the 10,012 test cases we ran, only in 3% of the cases (307) did Yahoo! return more results. In 96.6% of the cases (9676) Google returned more results. In less than 1% of the cases (29) both search engines returned the same number of results. It is the opinion of the study that Yahoo!'s claim to have a web index of over twice as many documents as Google's index is suspicious. Unless a large number of the documents Yahoo! has indexed are not yet available to its search engine, it is puzzling that Yahoo!'s search engine consistently returned fewer results than Google. This confirms what John Battelle reported as Google response to Yahoo’s claim of increase in index size. The whole index size thing development is increasingly becoming more and more curious
We strongly support the rescue of the Stanford Radio Telescope Dishes by the Friends of the Bracewell Observatory Association (FBOA) to open up the world of radio astronomy to Stanford's faculty, students, and community!
In light of the number of Stanford faculty and students who have already signed up to use the facility, FBOA's readiness to provide long-term funding and expert maintenance, and the fa