Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 227 05/06/2013
I've finally bitten the bullet and published my own Kindle book. I'd been thinking about it for several years, cutting out PC Pro features about how to convert into Amazon's MOBI format, but somehow never getting around to actually doing it. Editing Kevin Partner's Real World column "Online Business" over the last few months - where he describes setting up his own experimental Kindle publishing business - is what finally decided me it was something I must try, that wouldn't cost a lot of money.
I already had my content in the shape of a short book I've written called "Sampling Reality" which attempts to stitch together recent results in information theory, affective neuroscience (that is, the physiological basis of emotions) and cognitive psychology. As you can probably imagine, it's not a title likely to trouble the best-sellers list overmuch, and so far I'd only made it available via Scribd and my own website in PDF form. That meant that I already had it in a more-or-less publishable format: paginated, with chapter headings and subheads, a table of contents and a properly formatted bibliography. I'd done all that easily enough in Microsoft Word, using just two fonts - Times Roman for body and Arial for headings since you ask (I'm conservative that way, no hipster Futura or Helvetica). It looked quite nice and is quite easy to use, with working links from the contents page to chapters.
Book covers are one of Kevin's strongest recommendations: with so much stuff on Kindle you have just a fraction of a second to catch a browsing eye, so make it noticeable. I knocked up something I'm quite happy with using a montage of my own Flickr photos, and stretched it to fit in Word without needing to resort to any more sophisticated design software. Now I had a PDF with a full-colour cover, and that's what I expected to turn into a Kindle MOBI file.
I already knew, from Kevin and many other sources, that there's only one game in town for doing this conversion, a free program called Calibre written by Kovid Goyal. Calibre is hard-core multi-platform open source which you can compile yourself from github if you're that way inclined - I'm not and just downloaded a Windows version. It's far more than a file format converter, a complete content management system for your e-book collection. Its multi-platform roots show in a colourful GUI that conforms neither to Windows nor Mac guidelines, so the way it works will have you scratching your head at first. I'd already been through that hoop back in 2009 though when I discovered Calibre for converting public-domain PDF books to read on my Sony PRS-505 Reader.
Converting my PDF produced a total dog's breakfast: pagination well screwed with chapter headings halfway down pages; subheads indistinguishable from main text; contents page spread out with one-chapter-per-page, and its links didn't work. Most intriguingly of all, every single apostrophe in the book had been replaced by a little empty box. Apart from that it was fine. I hadn't understood before that MOBI only supports one font family per document, although it does permit bold, italic and various sizes. Bye-bye to my sans headings. I generated new PDFs with altered settings to no effect, then decided to dump PDF.
Calibre can't convert DOCX files directly so I tried outputting HTML: that paginated better, but contents still didn't work and my apos were still atrophied. Tried ODT, not so good. Finally I tried good old RTF and, phew, it all looked good with subheads even in bold and a working contents list, but still *those bloody apostrophies*. I hit the forums and found one tip, from Kovid himself, which said this happens when a Kindle doesn't have a font to display a particular character. I wasn't using a real Kindle but the Kindle client running on my PC. Kovid's tip suggests setting "transliterate unicode to ascii" in one of Calibre's many config files. That didn't work but it provoked me into getting medieval on the document's ass. I search-and-replaced every single goddamned apostrophe from Unicode character 0027 to 02B9 (a slightly smarter apostrophe), which made the unicode to ascii conversion work and I finally had a publishable file that passed Kindle's vetting stage without criticism and was up on Amazon within a day. Check out the result at http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B001HPO2E2. One annoying thing about the way Kindle works is that if you want to edit an already published book, you have to delete and resubmit, with the accompanying 12-hour delay: there's no interactive editing. So when I noticed that the word "Contents" now occupies page 2 all on its own, I couldn't face fixing it. I will one day, soon, and that's a promise.
Sunday 15 December 2013
Saturday 2 November 2013
BEST OF BRITISH
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 226/05/05/2013
A wave of nostalgia for the British home computer industry is upon us. It's mostly driven by games players who were schoolkids during that brief "golden half-decade" between 1980 and 1985, which is hardly that surprising given that so few of those UK-designed microcomputers were much use for anything else. Tony Smith has been running a highly entertaining series of memoirs about the Sinclair Spectrum, Lynx, Oric, Dragon, Jupiter Ace and more weird and wonderful devices at The Register website. Also emulators are available, written by selfless enthusiasts, to run all your old Spectrum games on a modern PC.
I'm an in-betweener, a crucial decade older than this Spectrum Kid demographic, so my own retro-spectacles are tinted rather less than rosy (indeed, closer to pale blue). To be sure I must thank the home computer boom for my present career, having entered the magazine business on the crest of it, but the machine I actually took home was a Sharp MZ80B running CP/M 3.4, on which I wrote my first book and learned Pascal, Forth and Lisp. To me computers were already serious tools rather than toys. In *my* schooldays I'd helped build an analog computer out of ex-RAF radar parts, and as a biochemistry student in the '60s I'd used London University's solitary Atlas mainframe to process my scintillation counter readings.
A month or so ago I had tea with Andy Hopper, Cambridge Professor of Computer Technology, President of the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) and for many years head of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. We talked about Britain's role in the history of computing, and after our chat Professor Hopper sent me a copy of a lavishly illustrated new book celebrating the first 75 years of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I found myself quite transfixed by it, because although I sort-of-knew many of the facts it contains, I'd assembled the complete story of UK computing in my mind before, and the evocative B&W photos of the principal actors helped too.
The story of course starts in the 1840s with Charles Babbage's ill-fated attempts to build his mechanical Difference Engine - which now has a happy ending thanks to the superb working version now on display at the Science Museum. It carries on with Alan Turing, Bletchley Park, Colossus versus Enigma, a story now sufficiently familiar to make it onto TV and Hollywood movies. But there's another, less known story running in parallel with these landmarks. What's the working material that all modern computers manipulate? Electrons, as discovered by J.J. Thompson at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1897. In 1926, also at the Cavendish, brilliant radio engineer Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams invented a "scale-of-two" counter for an early radiation detector, which was the prototype of all digital devices.
The concept of the digital computer itself comes from Turing's 1936 paper on Computable Numbers. After WWII, with the triumphs of Bletchley still top-secret, British computer scientists found themselves in a neck-and-neck race with their US equivalents. Though Eckert and Mauchly's 1946 ENIAC is credited as the first working stored-program digital computer, the first practical one was EDSAC, built at the Cambridge computer lab by Maurice Wilkes's team in 1949. Made available to other university departments, its calculations contributed to several Nobel prizes including Richard Stone's for economics, John Kendrew's for the structure of myoglobin, and Martin Ryle's for radio astronomy. EDSAC's design also pioneered a bunch of crucial innovations still in use, including the subroutine, microcoded instructions and bit-sliced processor architectures.
But we lost the race because British scientists just don't have the Yanks' business acumen, right? Er, no. Wilkes was approached very early, in 1949, by the catering company J Lyons (of the Lyons Corner House cafe chain) to licence EDSAC as a model for the world's first commercially-useful business computer called LEO. Wilkes was quite adept at technology transfer and used Lyons' money to build EDSAC 2, while Lyons sold a range of three successive LEO models successfully until 1963, when taken over by English Electric (and later merged into ICL).
This story continues through the 1970s Cambridge Ring pioneering network project, which eventually lost out to Ethernet; to Acorn Computers and the BBC Micro; culminating with the formation of ARM Ltd as a joint venture with Apple (for the Newton PDA) which eventually saw ARM-designed CPUs driving the iPhone, iPad and most of the world's mobiles. We're often lectured nowadays that Britain's poor overall industrial performance is due to too much public and not enough private enterprise, but what this story says is that what our computing successes share with Silicon Valley's is that they're all started by scientists and engineers who understand the product (think Gordon Moore) rather than money men who don't.
A wave of nostalgia for the British home computer industry is upon us. It's mostly driven by games players who were schoolkids during that brief "golden half-decade" between 1980 and 1985, which is hardly that surprising given that so few of those UK-designed microcomputers were much use for anything else. Tony Smith has been running a highly entertaining series of memoirs about the Sinclair Spectrum, Lynx, Oric, Dragon, Jupiter Ace and more weird and wonderful devices at The Register website. Also emulators are available, written by selfless enthusiasts, to run all your old Spectrum games on a modern PC.
I'm an in-betweener, a crucial decade older than this Spectrum Kid demographic, so my own retro-spectacles are tinted rather less than rosy (indeed, closer to pale blue). To be sure I must thank the home computer boom for my present career, having entered the magazine business on the crest of it, but the machine I actually took home was a Sharp MZ80B running CP/M 3.4, on which I wrote my first book and learned Pascal, Forth and Lisp. To me computers were already serious tools rather than toys. In *my* schooldays I'd helped build an analog computer out of ex-RAF radar parts, and as a biochemistry student in the '60s I'd used London University's solitary Atlas mainframe to process my scintillation counter readings.
A month or so ago I had tea with Andy Hopper, Cambridge Professor of Computer Technology, President of the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) and for many years head of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. We talked about Britain's role in the history of computing, and after our chat Professor Hopper sent me a copy of a lavishly illustrated new book celebrating the first 75 years of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I found myself quite transfixed by it, because although I sort-of-knew many of the facts it contains, I'd assembled the complete story of UK computing in my mind before, and the evocative B&W photos of the principal actors helped too.
The story of course starts in the 1840s with Charles Babbage's ill-fated attempts to build his mechanical Difference Engine - which now has a happy ending thanks to the superb working version now on display at the Science Museum. It carries on with Alan Turing, Bletchley Park, Colossus versus Enigma, a story now sufficiently familiar to make it onto TV and Hollywood movies. But there's another, less known story running in parallel with these landmarks. What's the working material that all modern computers manipulate? Electrons, as discovered by J.J. Thompson at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1897. In 1926, also at the Cavendish, brilliant radio engineer Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams invented a "scale-of-two" counter for an early radiation detector, which was the prototype of all digital devices.
The concept of the digital computer itself comes from Turing's 1936 paper on Computable Numbers. After WWII, with the triumphs of Bletchley still top-secret, British computer scientists found themselves in a neck-and-neck race with their US equivalents. Though Eckert and Mauchly's 1946 ENIAC is credited as the first working stored-program digital computer, the first practical one was EDSAC, built at the Cambridge computer lab by Maurice Wilkes's team in 1949. Made available to other university departments, its calculations contributed to several Nobel prizes including Richard Stone's for economics, John Kendrew's for the structure of myoglobin, and Martin Ryle's for radio astronomy. EDSAC's design also pioneered a bunch of crucial innovations still in use, including the subroutine, microcoded instructions and bit-sliced processor architectures.
But we lost the race because British scientists just don't have the Yanks' business acumen, right? Er, no. Wilkes was approached very early, in 1949, by the catering company J Lyons (of the Lyons Corner House cafe chain) to licence EDSAC as a model for the world's first commercially-useful business computer called LEO. Wilkes was quite adept at technology transfer and used Lyons' money to build EDSAC 2, while Lyons sold a range of three successive LEO models successfully until 1963, when taken over by English Electric (and later merged into ICL).
This story continues through the 1970s Cambridge Ring pioneering network project, which eventually lost out to Ethernet; to Acorn Computers and the BBC Micro; culminating with the formation of ARM Ltd as a joint venture with Apple (for the Newton PDA) which eventually saw ARM-designed CPUs driving the iPhone, iPad and most of the world's mobiles. We're often lectured nowadays that Britain's poor overall industrial performance is due to too much public and not enough private enterprise, but what this story says is that what our computing successes share with Silicon Valley's is that they're all started by scientists and engineers who understand the product (think Gordon Moore) rather than money men who don't.
GAME OF PHONES
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 225 09/04/2013
When we look back at the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century we tend to focus on the steam engine and the railway, and when 22nd-century historians look back at the Digital Revolution that began in the late 20th it won't be the personal computer they single out but the microprocessor, the internet and the mobile telephone. Microprocessors supply processing power to increasingly intelligent devices, and the PC will be seen as a quite brief but crucial phase in the evolution of the microprocessor until it got small enough to fit inside a smartphone or tablet. The rise of the PC was spectacular enough, 1.5 billion over 30 years, but the mobile phone reached 6 billion in around 20.
The reason four times as many people use mobiles as PCs isn't hard to fathom. Most people have little need for calculation per se in their daily lives, but communicating with other people, locating and consuming information are absolutely central. And while both PC and smartphone can do that, a smartphone can do it from your pocket and in the middle of a field. There'll always be professionals who need spreadsheets and word processors, but almost everyone has a use for email, SMS, social networks and Google Maps. What's more mobile phone masts can be erected even in parts of the world that will never get a wired internet and phone network. From Mongolia to the Maasai Mara, farmers and herders deal direct by mobile and cut out parasitic middlemen, cab drivers find their destination without years of study, engineers no longer need carry bulky manuals.
Control of the mobile internet is set to become the hottest of all political issues, in a way that control over the PC never quite was. To be sure there was a period at the very end of the Cold War when the US government tried to deny the Soviet Union access to the latest microprocessors via CoCom, but that apart it's been market forces all the way. And since CoCom ceased around 1994 the world has become a very different place. A handful of giant internet corporations - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter and the rest - now have annual revenues comparable to those of sovereign states, plus direct access to the hearts and minds of vast swathes of the population that governments can only dream of.
It's no coincidence that every week now brings a new rumour that some corporation, like Facebook or Amazon, is developing its own mobile phone. Everyone seems to be thinking about owning the phone or tablet and "forking" Android to run it in their own special way. Most users are not techies and don't want to be techies, so if you can sell them a branded phone with your logo and your UI-veneer on it, that's all they'll ever see. (Rooting and tweaking are strictly for a tiny, nerdy minority). There's great power to be had there, and great revenues too because unlike the silly old Web, mobile networks remembered to build-in a payment mechanism! Actually an outfit the size of Facebook is so ubiquitous it doesn't need to own the phone hardware: getting its app onto everyone's phone (of whatever brand) would be enough if it offered Skype-style voice-over-IP calls and messaging, which would start to eat the lunch of the mobile operators themselves as well as competiing social networks.
Katherine Losse was a pioneer Facebook employee who used to ghost-write posts for Mark Zuckerberg himself, and in her recent book "The Boy Kings" she offers a disturbing picture of his thinking. The main points of his credo include youthfulness, openness, sharing power and "companies over countries". Asked what he meant by the latter he told her "it means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world." So the model for a new world is the Californian youth-oriented corporation, untramelled by pesky laws and regulations, by messy old-world stuff like pensions and having to win elections. The Nation State is just plain out-of-date, it still practices stupid stuff like secrecy and taxation, it doesn't get the New Digital Narcissism where everyone can be an (unpaid) star of their own channel. All rather reminiscent the 1960s counterculture mixed with a dash of Orwell's Oceania, Eurasia, EastAsia. But actually it starts to look rather like a new variation on feudalism where you'll only get fed if you become a retainer of one of these mega-corporations, as the boring old centralised state and its services wither away.
When we look back at the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century we tend to focus on the steam engine and the railway, and when 22nd-century historians look back at the Digital Revolution that began in the late 20th it won't be the personal computer they single out but the microprocessor, the internet and the mobile telephone. Microprocessors supply processing power to increasingly intelligent devices, and the PC will be seen as a quite brief but crucial phase in the evolution of the microprocessor until it got small enough to fit inside a smartphone or tablet. The rise of the PC was spectacular enough, 1.5 billion over 30 years, but the mobile phone reached 6 billion in around 20.
The reason four times as many people use mobiles as PCs isn't hard to fathom. Most people have little need for calculation per se in their daily lives, but communicating with other people, locating and consuming information are absolutely central. And while both PC and smartphone can do that, a smartphone can do it from your pocket and in the middle of a field. There'll always be professionals who need spreadsheets and word processors, but almost everyone has a use for email, SMS, social networks and Google Maps. What's more mobile phone masts can be erected even in parts of the world that will never get a wired internet and phone network. From Mongolia to the Maasai Mara, farmers and herders deal direct by mobile and cut out parasitic middlemen, cab drivers find their destination without years of study, engineers no longer need carry bulky manuals.
Control of the mobile internet is set to become the hottest of all political issues, in a way that control over the PC never quite was. To be sure there was a period at the very end of the Cold War when the US government tried to deny the Soviet Union access to the latest microprocessors via CoCom, but that apart it's been market forces all the way. And since CoCom ceased around 1994 the world has become a very different place. A handful of giant internet corporations - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter and the rest - now have annual revenues comparable to those of sovereign states, plus direct access to the hearts and minds of vast swathes of the population that governments can only dream of.
It's no coincidence that every week now brings a new rumour that some corporation, like Facebook or Amazon, is developing its own mobile phone. Everyone seems to be thinking about owning the phone or tablet and "forking" Android to run it in their own special way. Most users are not techies and don't want to be techies, so if you can sell them a branded phone with your logo and your UI-veneer on it, that's all they'll ever see. (Rooting and tweaking are strictly for a tiny, nerdy minority). There's great power to be had there, and great revenues too because unlike the silly old Web, mobile networks remembered to build-in a payment mechanism! Actually an outfit the size of Facebook is so ubiquitous it doesn't need to own the phone hardware: getting its app onto everyone's phone (of whatever brand) would be enough if it offered Skype-style voice-over-IP calls and messaging, which would start to eat the lunch of the mobile operators themselves as well as competiing social networks.
Katherine Losse was a pioneer Facebook employee who used to ghost-write posts for Mark Zuckerberg himself, and in her recent book "The Boy Kings" she offers a disturbing picture of his thinking. The main points of his credo include youthfulness, openness, sharing power and "companies over countries". Asked what he meant by the latter he told her "it means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world." So the model for a new world is the Californian youth-oriented corporation, untramelled by pesky laws and regulations, by messy old-world stuff like pensions and having to win elections. The Nation State is just plain out-of-date, it still practices stupid stuff like secrecy and taxation, it doesn't get the New Digital Narcissism where everyone can be an (unpaid) star of their own channel. All rather reminiscent the 1960s counterculture mixed with a dash of Orwell's Oceania, Eurasia, EastAsia. But actually it starts to look rather like a new variation on feudalism where you'll only get fed if you become a retainer of one of these mega-corporations, as the boring old centralised state and its services wither away.
THE COMPANY STORE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 224 06/03/2013
I recently reviewed a interesting book, "Carbon Democracy" by Timothy Mitchell (Verso 2011), which analyses the effect of different energy sources on politics. Very brutally condensed, Mitchell argues that our political institutions are profoundly shaped by the types of *energy flow* we employ. A coal-based economy spawned the industrial revolution and the rise of mass democracies, while the displacement of coal by oil is tending to erode those democracies. Early humans consumed energy that came almost directly from the sun: photosynthesis provided plants for food and wood for dwellings and fire, and both hunter-gatherers and early cultivators consumed plants and animals close to where they lived, with no need for extensive transport networks. Coal changed all that by providing both the means to create, and the need for, a network of factories connected by railways, and the new social disciplines this enforced are those we still more or less live by.
Unlike coal, oil almost mines itself. It spouts to the surface under its own pressure, and although advanced technology is required to discover deposits and drill wells, the highly-skilled workers are few compared to coal miners, and remain above ground where they're easier to supervise and enjoy less autonomy. As a liquid, oil can be sent over vast distances via pipeline and tanker using little human labour, and its global distribution ensures that supplies can be diverted by a single phone call to neutralise a strike at one location. Hence the switch from coal to oil reduces the ability of labour to disrupt energy flows and hands that power instead to large oil companies, granting them the ability to threaten governments and dictate foreign policy (the post-WWII Marshall Plan was in part designed to switch Europe from coal to oil and introduce US-style industrial relations). I'm impressed by Mitchell's approach, which makes sense of a lot of stuff happening today, but I'm sure he wouldn't disagree if I say that it's just one layer of an explanation, and that adding a similar approach to *information flows* (means of communication) would be a valuable complement.
There have been shelf-loads of starry-eyed books about what the internet is going to mean for the future of human societies. Many imagine small rural communities of Hobbit houses, buried deep in the woods, living on home-baked spelt bread and organic beetroot soup while swapping kitten pictures with kindred spirits the world over on Facebook. There are a few grumpy dissenters from this fluffy view, notably Jonathon Meades who in "Isle of Rust" describes something structurally similar, but the real village on Lewis and Harris he visits is littered with rusting car chassis and its inhabitants dwell on the net as a way of completely ignoring their immediate environment. He imagines humans in 2113 revering the detritus as sacred objects from a distant pre-apocalyptic era when we still had oil and electricity.
And so to Microsoft's (and Adobe's, and Apple's) software licensing policies (which you might think rather a long leap). The more positive future models assume that, as a response to climate change, these Net-Hobbit communities in the woods will be fuelled by distributed renewable sources of energy and ruled by equally distributed libertarian social structures, a sort of cyber-anarchism. But what they're not? Mitchell's methodology suggests something more like a net-mediated feudalism, ruled over by a handful of giant corporations. Why? Because Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon are rushing toward a vision of *renting* rather than *selling* their services. You won't be able to own their software outright but will have to pay for it over again every month, as you do for electricity and gas, and perhaps music and other entertainment. A step backward to an economy where people earn money simply by owning stuff, rather than by investing and employing other people. Fail to pay and you'll get kicked out of the global village.
I recently had an email chat with our Online Business columnist Kevin Partner about the way Adobe will soon be wanting £50 a month for the graphics tools he relies on (he plans to buy some alternative before it's too late). This is not a new economic model, but rather one with a long and disreputable history. It's how Mississippi share croppers and Kentucky coal-miners used to live, owing more money to the company store for groceries than they ever earned, which ensured their continuing servitude. To salute this brave new vision I've taken the liberty of writing an updated lyric for Merle Travis's famous 1946 song "Sixteen Tons":
"You upload sixteen gigs and what do you get,
Another day older and deeper in debt,
St Peter don't you call me 'cos I can't go,
I owe my soul to the virtual store..."
I recently reviewed a interesting book, "Carbon Democracy" by Timothy Mitchell (Verso 2011), which analyses the effect of different energy sources on politics. Very brutally condensed, Mitchell argues that our political institutions are profoundly shaped by the types of *energy flow* we employ. A coal-based economy spawned the industrial revolution and the rise of mass democracies, while the displacement of coal by oil is tending to erode those democracies. Early humans consumed energy that came almost directly from the sun: photosynthesis provided plants for food and wood for dwellings and fire, and both hunter-gatherers and early cultivators consumed plants and animals close to where they lived, with no need for extensive transport networks. Coal changed all that by providing both the means to create, and the need for, a network of factories connected by railways, and the new social disciplines this enforced are those we still more or less live by.
Unlike coal, oil almost mines itself. It spouts to the surface under its own pressure, and although advanced technology is required to discover deposits and drill wells, the highly-skilled workers are few compared to coal miners, and remain above ground where they're easier to supervise and enjoy less autonomy. As a liquid, oil can be sent over vast distances via pipeline and tanker using little human labour, and its global distribution ensures that supplies can be diverted by a single phone call to neutralise a strike at one location. Hence the switch from coal to oil reduces the ability of labour to disrupt energy flows and hands that power instead to large oil companies, granting them the ability to threaten governments and dictate foreign policy (the post-WWII Marshall Plan was in part designed to switch Europe from coal to oil and introduce US-style industrial relations). I'm impressed by Mitchell's approach, which makes sense of a lot of stuff happening today, but I'm sure he wouldn't disagree if I say that it's just one layer of an explanation, and that adding a similar approach to *information flows* (means of communication) would be a valuable complement.
There have been shelf-loads of starry-eyed books about what the internet is going to mean for the future of human societies. Many imagine small rural communities of Hobbit houses, buried deep in the woods, living on home-baked spelt bread and organic beetroot soup while swapping kitten pictures with kindred spirits the world over on Facebook. There are a few grumpy dissenters from this fluffy view, notably Jonathon Meades who in "Isle of Rust" describes something structurally similar, but the real village on Lewis and Harris he visits is littered with rusting car chassis and its inhabitants dwell on the net as a way of completely ignoring their immediate environment. He imagines humans in 2113 revering the detritus as sacred objects from a distant pre-apocalyptic era when we still had oil and electricity.
And so to Microsoft's (and Adobe's, and Apple's) software licensing policies (which you might think rather a long leap). The more positive future models assume that, as a response to climate change, these Net-Hobbit communities in the woods will be fuelled by distributed renewable sources of energy and ruled by equally distributed libertarian social structures, a sort of cyber-anarchism. But what they're not? Mitchell's methodology suggests something more like a net-mediated feudalism, ruled over by a handful of giant corporations. Why? Because Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon are rushing toward a vision of *renting* rather than *selling* their services. You won't be able to own their software outright but will have to pay for it over again every month, as you do for electricity and gas, and perhaps music and other entertainment. A step backward to an economy where people earn money simply by owning stuff, rather than by investing and employing other people. Fail to pay and you'll get kicked out of the global village.
I recently had an email chat with our Online Business columnist Kevin Partner about the way Adobe will soon be wanting £50 a month for the graphics tools he relies on (he plans to buy some alternative before it's too late). This is not a new economic model, but rather one with a long and disreputable history. It's how Mississippi share croppers and Kentucky coal-miners used to live, owing more money to the company store for groceries than they ever earned, which ensured their continuing servitude. To salute this brave new vision I've taken the liberty of writing an updated lyric for Merle Travis's famous 1946 song "Sixteen Tons":
"You upload sixteen gigs and what do you get,
Another day older and deeper in debt,
St Peter don't you call me 'cos I can't go,
I owe my soul to the virtual store..."
Friday 30 August 2013
TWO ALANS
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/(Idealog 223 - 06/02/2013)
Atari just filed for bankruptcy, which lead me toward a string of rather odd associations. I never was an Atari owner but the firm's demise jogged me into remembering that Alan Kay - that least-heralded inspirer of the personal computer revolution - worked for the firm immediately after leaving his epoch-making stint at Xerox PARC. While at PARC Kay's team pioneered just about everything we now take for granted including object-oriented programs, windowed graphical user interfaces and local area networks, although Xerox notoriously failed to capitalise on this work (as did Atari). It wasn't until Steven Jobs' equally notorious PARC visit that Apple picked up the baton, prompting Kay to move there straight from Atari and remain as a Research Fellow for the next 13 years.
My other Alan-named hero, "father of computing" Alan Turing may soon have a Hollywood film made of his life (as Steve Jobs has). Indeed, after being ignored in embarrassed silence for over 50 years, Turing now has three films: two for British TV, "Breaking the Code" with Derek Jacobi playing him and the rather better "Codebreaker" with Ed Stoppard, while the forthcoming Hollywood biopic "The Imitation Game" may star either Leonardo di Caprio or Benedict Cumberbatch. Alan Kay on the other hand is still alive, nowadays running his own non-profit institute that studies new ideas in educational computing, and what he'll eventually be remembered for (perhaps even with a biopic) is his dream of the Dynabook.
Conceived around 1968, this was to be a revolutionary keyboardless, wireless tablet computer permanently connected to an online library containing all the world's accumulated knowledge, and he wanted every child in the world to have access to one. Kay of course could never actually build a Dynabook because at the time PARC was developing graphical UIs there weren't even any microprocessors, let alone an internet. (His Xerox Star "personal" workstation was a fridge-sized minicomputer built with discrete logic chips). But the fact is that everything required hardwarewise to implement his idea now exists.
In fact my little Nexus 7 already comes pretty close to Kay's ideal, delivering information through Google search and Wikipedia, music and movies via Spotify, YouTube and other places. What it lacks is universality, and that's no longer a technical but a commercial problem, over ownership of both conduit and content and how much we're prepared to pay for them. A Dynabook was supposed to operate wirelessly from anywhere at all, which rules out my Nexus because it's Wi-Fi only - but even were I to buy a 3G tablet and SIM the cost of the data-plan might inhibit me from using it as freely as I do at home. Running a tablet off my home broadband is one thing, but I can't justify an extra account just for outside use. It's the same story with content: I already pay £10 per month to Spotify, justified because music is my main amusement, but similar subscriptions to Netflix or LoveFilm don't tempt me because they don't deal in films I want. If YouTube started charging (as it recently threatened) £5 a month for access I'd probably give that up too. For Kay's dream to finally come true we desperately need to rationalise both conduit and content licensing to make ubiquitous data access affordable.
Even here, all the necessary hardware and software tricks are already well known. Mobile phone companies have invested mega-billions to cover much of the globe with masts, supporting networks which, unlike the internet, already have an ability to charge for traffic built right in. A global system that mimiced those hierarchical storage systems already employed in enterprise-level computing could be assembled, using the internet as the trunk of a global tree, switching down onto mobile networks for its branches and finally onto village/street level Wi-Fi for its twigs. The problems aren't technically insuperable but colossal efforts of business diplomacy would be required to negotiate equitable distribution of revenues to the owners of these various "wires". In fact the problem facing the ITU would resemble the problem the UN faces in trying to broker world peace, but we're talking dreams here and my point is that the obstacle is no longer hardware.
The same would be true for collecting royalties on content, though Spotify, Netflix and the rest show that this can be done (with difficulty). In fact there's a strong case for heavily subsidising the conduits and charging mostly for the content, along the same historical lines followed by roads and railways. I believe that both of my Alan heroes would agree that a species which can't provide affordable information to educate its offspring, while loudly fantasising about colonising Mars and mining diamonds from asteroids, has pretty weird priorities.
Atari just filed for bankruptcy, which lead me toward a string of rather odd associations. I never was an Atari owner but the firm's demise jogged me into remembering that Alan Kay - that least-heralded inspirer of the personal computer revolution - worked for the firm immediately after leaving his epoch-making stint at Xerox PARC. While at PARC Kay's team pioneered just about everything we now take for granted including object-oriented programs, windowed graphical user interfaces and local area networks, although Xerox notoriously failed to capitalise on this work (as did Atari). It wasn't until Steven Jobs' equally notorious PARC visit that Apple picked up the baton, prompting Kay to move there straight from Atari and remain as a Research Fellow for the next 13 years.
My other Alan-named hero, "father of computing" Alan Turing may soon have a Hollywood film made of his life (as Steve Jobs has). Indeed, after being ignored in embarrassed silence for over 50 years, Turing now has three films: two for British TV, "Breaking the Code" with Derek Jacobi playing him and the rather better "Codebreaker" with Ed Stoppard, while the forthcoming Hollywood biopic "The Imitation Game" may star either Leonardo di Caprio or Benedict Cumberbatch. Alan Kay on the other hand is still alive, nowadays running his own non-profit institute that studies new ideas in educational computing, and what he'll eventually be remembered for (perhaps even with a biopic) is his dream of the Dynabook.
Conceived around 1968, this was to be a revolutionary keyboardless, wireless tablet computer permanently connected to an online library containing all the world's accumulated knowledge, and he wanted every child in the world to have access to one. Kay of course could never actually build a Dynabook because at the time PARC was developing graphical UIs there weren't even any microprocessors, let alone an internet. (His Xerox Star "personal" workstation was a fridge-sized minicomputer built with discrete logic chips). But the fact is that everything required hardwarewise to implement his idea now exists.
In fact my little Nexus 7 already comes pretty close to Kay's ideal, delivering information through Google search and Wikipedia, music and movies via Spotify, YouTube and other places. What it lacks is universality, and that's no longer a technical but a commercial problem, over ownership of both conduit and content and how much we're prepared to pay for them. A Dynabook was supposed to operate wirelessly from anywhere at all, which rules out my Nexus because it's Wi-Fi only - but even were I to buy a 3G tablet and SIM the cost of the data-plan might inhibit me from using it as freely as I do at home. Running a tablet off my home broadband is one thing, but I can't justify an extra account just for outside use. It's the same story with content: I already pay £10 per month to Spotify, justified because music is my main amusement, but similar subscriptions to Netflix or LoveFilm don't tempt me because they don't deal in films I want. If YouTube started charging (as it recently threatened) £5 a month for access I'd probably give that up too. For Kay's dream to finally come true we desperately need to rationalise both conduit and content licensing to make ubiquitous data access affordable.
Even here, all the necessary hardware and software tricks are already well known. Mobile phone companies have invested mega-billions to cover much of the globe with masts, supporting networks which, unlike the internet, already have an ability to charge for traffic built right in. A global system that mimiced those hierarchical storage systems already employed in enterprise-level computing could be assembled, using the internet as the trunk of a global tree, switching down onto mobile networks for its branches and finally onto village/street level Wi-Fi for its twigs. The problems aren't technically insuperable but colossal efforts of business diplomacy would be required to negotiate equitable distribution of revenues to the owners of these various "wires". In fact the problem facing the ITU would resemble the problem the UN faces in trying to broker world peace, but we're talking dreams here and my point is that the obstacle is no longer hardware.
The same would be true for collecting royalties on content, though Spotify, Netflix and the rest show that this can be done (with difficulty). In fact there's a strong case for heavily subsidising the conduits and charging mostly for the content, along the same historical lines followed by roads and railways. I believe that both of my Alan heroes would agree that a species which can't provide affordable information to educate its offspring, while loudly fantasising about colonising Mars and mining diamonds from asteroids, has pretty weird priorities.
Thursday 4 July 2013
IDEALOG NOW AVAILABLE IN KINDLE FORMAT!
For truly dedicated fans of this column who find this scrolling blog format inconvenient, I've now made the first 200 columns available on Amazon as Kindle books. Two volumes of 100 columns each are available here for a very reasonable £5/$7 each:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DNI90KC/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DP1P75Y/
USA:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DNI90KC/
http://www.amazon.com/The-Compleat-Idealog-ebook/dp/B00DP1P75Y/
(I decided on two volumes because a single one made an unwieldy 1000+ pages, and set a price to match)
RIP PC?
Dick Pountain - Idealog 222:
Jan 11th 2013
I'm currently conducting an
experiment whose outcome will profoundly affect the way I work in future: I'm
writing this column for the very first time on my Nexus 7 tablet rather than on my laptop, and I've
actually typed these first few sentences on its tiny on-screen keyboard using
Jelly Bean 4.2's 'gesture typing' feature, with which I've become rather
proficient over the last few weeks. (I'll tell you further down whether I stuck
with this resolution or chickened-out and fetched my Bluetooth keyboard). The
location of my experiment is our beloved chairman's glorious house on Mustique:
sure it's a tough assignment but someone has to do it, and I'm here toiling away
in the Caribbean sun so that you don't have to. I deliberately left London
without my laptop to see whether I could cope, and so far haven't missed it at
all. The Nexus has provided all my Spotify tunes, my YouTube movies, email
correspondence, and now text creation (in Word format) in faultless fashion.
Prophesying 'The Death of the
PC' is liable to embroil me in a raging troll-fest nowadays, but I can't help
it if the phrase just won't leave my head. Over the last couple of weeks I've been
reading several insightful analyses of the future prospects for both Intel and
Microsoft that leave me in no doubt that both firms are going to have to get
used to reduced rations rather soon.
Intel has unquestionably
missed the boat in the low-power processor sector: its strategic error in
believing the x86 architecture to be invulnerable looks increasingly like a
catastrophe that has granted ARM the same sort of six-year lead in the mobile
arena that Intel itself enjoyed all those years ago when IBM adopted the 8086
for its first PC. Intel is finally taking low-power seriously with new Atom
chipsets, but the sheer volume of Google's ARM-based Android may have shut that
door. Ironically enough, Intel actually owned a viable ARM-architecture range
in the shape of the xScale devices it inherited by the purchase of DEC, but it
never took them seriously - thanks to big-corporation inertia and hubris - and
its recently-departed CEO Paul Otellini sold them off to Marvell back in 2005
as one of his first acts.
Microsoft too has floundered in
trying to come to terms with mobileworld. It's not that it hasn't tried hard
enough: on top of various versions of Windows Mobile/Phone over the years it's
tried Ultra-Mobile PCs and even half-decent touch-screen Windows 'slates' like
those by Samsung, but none of them ever really took off (and the omens are not
good for the Surface to do any better). The reason is fundamentally the same as
for Intel: massive success imposes an absolute demand for compatibility which
stifles certain vital synergies.
Apple on the other hand has
always been ruthlessly pragmatic about
changing CPU vendors, first deserting Motorola for PowerPC, then moving
on to Intel and lately ARM whenever the time was right. And it had the courage
to innovate boldly in its user-interface design with iOS. Google meanwhile has
combined an open-source software model with agnosticism about hardware, and
none of the whingeing about Android fragmentation can diminish its big numbers.
The mobile market has become
a dinosaur trap financially too because profit margins on both hardware and
software sales are far, far shorter than the Wintel twins are used to, and
need. The cost of building fabs for ever smaller feature sizes becomes
prohibitive just as margins are shrinking, and Moore's Law is being revealed as
an increasingly tired marketing strategy rather than a science, now most users
demand more battery life rather than speed.
The ultimate demise of the PC
won't be in favour of Apple or any other hardware standard but rather in favour
of cloud vendors like Amazon, Google, eBay and the like, whose products and
services can be reached from *anyone's* mobile device. It would be wise for me
to cover my arse by pointing out there will always be a few PC niches left, but
I'm not sure I actually believe it. The vast grazing herds will be of thin mobile
clients, and generations will arise that never knew a mouse or keyboard - even
for business, even for accounts receivable.
And no, in the end I didn't
need to deploy my Bluetooth keyboard at all for this column. As any writer will
tell you, thinking up the next word takes far longer than to type it, so
absolute typing speed is not the critical step. (I'll confess that decades of
scribbling Graffiti have honed my sliding skills way beyond the average
though).
THE GOLDEN GEESE OF ALPHAVILLE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 221 04/12/2012
Once upon a time I used to travel to Las Vegas, Taipei, Hannover or Tel Aviv in pursuit of new technology, but these days I don't go to many press events at all. As befits my status as a non-decorated veteran of the OS, Browser and CPU wars, I prefer now to recline in a bath of warm asses' milk, nibbling bon-bons and trying to maximise my views-per-photo on Flickr. Nevertheless the other day I was tempted out to an event in the real world, to whit the finals of "Discovering Start-Ups 2012", held in the City. This was a competition - a sort of MasterChef for new tech ventures - organised by Cambridge Wireless and Silicon South West, and attended by high-powered potential backers from Google, RIM, Vodafone, Orange, Broadcom, Qualcomm and numerous venture caps.
The last time I'd been to a start-up presentation was a one-to-one meeting with engineers on the science park in Cambridge, but this was a quite different sort of affair. For a start there was the venue. I hopped off a 46 bus at Shoe Lane, walked down a small inconspicuous alley and emerged into Alphaville. I don't visit the City much but I was vaguely aware there's been a lot of building - the Gherkin, the Shard and so on - but this still gave me quite a shock. What once was a small Dickensian square was now bounded on all four sides by glittering, high-rise, all-glass offices, adorned below with swanky wine-bars and purveyors of fancy coffees, chocolates and superior sandwiches, but the narrowness of the adjoining streets more or less hid it from Shoe Lane. I managed to locate the competition despite it being in the only block *without* a 10-foot-high sans serif street number.
I got to see around half the twenty finalists' presentations and there were some pretty impressive ideas on show: personal devices for monitoring everything from carbon footprints to skin cancers; low-power tracking devices, smart 4G antennas; ebook streaming and shared shopping services; even one that measures your emotional state in real time and tells your therapist via your smartphone. The winners included Anvil Semiconductors (www.anvil-semi.co.uk) who've made silicon carbide power semiconductors as cheap as silicon that can improve the fuel efficiency of hybrid cars by 10%, and D-RisQ (www.drisq.com) from Malvern who employ formal software validation techniques to reduce development costs of complex systems by up to 80%, as successfully used on the Eurofighter control computer. But what struck me most forcibly was how far the world has changed since my heyday.
I'm pretty used to talking to engineers with eccentric hair-styles, woolly upper garments and a slight hint of Asperger's Syndrome (as we're no longer allowed to call it), and I used to enjoy the experience as they plunged deep into technical explanations, eyes burning with enthusiasm. Not of any more. This was wall-to-wall white shirts and shiny suits, with few technical explanations pitched any more difficult than a BBC Four documentary. The really deep discussion was instead about patents, Intellectual Property and exit strategies. Today's start-ups are nobody's patsies and go in with eyes wide open, the enthusiasm visible in their eyes being for a buy-out by Google, Qualcomm or whoever within five years, for a eight or nine-figure sum. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and my nostalgia for those dodgy haircuts is strictly limited. For years we've been moaning about the way British inventors failed to exploit their discoveries - little stuff like the jet engine and television - and left it to the Americans to cash in, but that isn't going to happen any more. I've written here before about how it was ARM Ltd that really broke that bad habit, and this competition was, if you like, part of a search for the next few ARMs.
What does worry me is that this emphasis on moving fast and getting out rich might eventually erode the innovative impulse itself, and if you think that's misplaced, just check out the ridiculous Patent Troll wars currently raging between the world's mobile corporations. The Register recently ran an article by Matt Asay called "Apple's patent insanity infects Silicon Valley", which reprinted a mind-boggling chart of who's suing who for patent violations (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/patent_trolls/). It looks a bit like a poster of the Krebs Cycle that used to hang on our lab wall, only more complicated. Microsoft, RIM, Google, Samsung, Kodak, Oracle, LG, Huawei, HTC, ZTE and several more are all suing each other, and they're all suing and being sued by Apple. Even Business Week now proclaims that the start-ups' creed must be "patent first, prototype later". The idea is that you should fully exploit all the golden eggs you have in the fridge, but there's a danger that you may in so doing forget to feed the goose...
Once upon a time I used to travel to Las Vegas, Taipei, Hannover or Tel Aviv in pursuit of new technology, but these days I don't go to many press events at all. As befits my status as a non-decorated veteran of the OS, Browser and CPU wars, I prefer now to recline in a bath of warm asses' milk, nibbling bon-bons and trying to maximise my views-per-photo on Flickr. Nevertheless the other day I was tempted out to an event in the real world, to whit the finals of "Discovering Start-Ups 2012", held in the City. This was a competition - a sort of MasterChef for new tech ventures - organised by Cambridge Wireless and Silicon South West, and attended by high-powered potential backers from Google, RIM, Vodafone, Orange, Broadcom, Qualcomm and numerous venture caps.
The last time I'd been to a start-up presentation was a one-to-one meeting with engineers on the science park in Cambridge, but this was a quite different sort of affair. For a start there was the venue. I hopped off a 46 bus at Shoe Lane, walked down a small inconspicuous alley and emerged into Alphaville. I don't visit the City much but I was vaguely aware there's been a lot of building - the Gherkin, the Shard and so on - but this still gave me quite a shock. What once was a small Dickensian square was now bounded on all four sides by glittering, high-rise, all-glass offices, adorned below with swanky wine-bars and purveyors of fancy coffees, chocolates and superior sandwiches, but the narrowness of the adjoining streets more or less hid it from Shoe Lane. I managed to locate the competition despite it being in the only block *without* a 10-foot-high sans serif street number.
I got to see around half the twenty finalists' presentations and there were some pretty impressive ideas on show: personal devices for monitoring everything from carbon footprints to skin cancers; low-power tracking devices, smart 4G antennas; ebook streaming and shared shopping services; even one that measures your emotional state in real time and tells your therapist via your smartphone. The winners included Anvil Semiconductors (www.anvil-semi.co.uk) who've made silicon carbide power semiconductors as cheap as silicon that can improve the fuel efficiency of hybrid cars by 10%, and D-RisQ (www.drisq.com) from Malvern who employ formal software validation techniques to reduce development costs of complex systems by up to 80%, as successfully used on the Eurofighter control computer. But what struck me most forcibly was how far the world has changed since my heyday.
I'm pretty used to talking to engineers with eccentric hair-styles, woolly upper garments and a slight hint of Asperger's Syndrome (as we're no longer allowed to call it), and I used to enjoy the experience as they plunged deep into technical explanations, eyes burning with enthusiasm. Not of any more. This was wall-to-wall white shirts and shiny suits, with few technical explanations pitched any more difficult than a BBC Four documentary. The really deep discussion was instead about patents, Intellectual Property and exit strategies. Today's start-ups are nobody's patsies and go in with eyes wide open, the enthusiasm visible in their eyes being for a buy-out by Google, Qualcomm or whoever within five years, for a eight or nine-figure sum. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and my nostalgia for those dodgy haircuts is strictly limited. For years we've been moaning about the way British inventors failed to exploit their discoveries - little stuff like the jet engine and television - and left it to the Americans to cash in, but that isn't going to happen any more. I've written here before about how it was ARM Ltd that really broke that bad habit, and this competition was, if you like, part of a search for the next few ARMs.
What does worry me is that this emphasis on moving fast and getting out rich might eventually erode the innovative impulse itself, and if you think that's misplaced, just check out the ridiculous Patent Troll wars currently raging between the world's mobile corporations. The Register recently ran an article by Matt Asay called "Apple's patent insanity infects Silicon Valley", which reprinted a mind-boggling chart of who's suing who for patent violations (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/patent_trolls/). It looks a bit like a poster of the Krebs Cycle that used to hang on our lab wall, only more complicated. Microsoft, RIM, Google, Samsung, Kodak, Oracle, LG, Huawei, HTC, ZTE and several more are all suing each other, and they're all suing and being sued by Apple. Even Business Week now proclaims that the start-ups' creed must be "patent first, prototype later". The idea is that you should fully exploit all the golden eggs you have in the fridge, but there's a danger that you may in so doing forget to feed the goose...
Wednesday 8 May 2013
GRAND COMPLICATION
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 220 08/11/2012
Last night I watched the latest addition to the dismal genre of populist TV science programming (from which I exclude Horizon as it does attempt to get serious). A not-all-that funny Irish comedian/gameshow host and a young journalist with a striking Bollywood coiffure were baiting one of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Sir John Sulston, because the human genome project has not yet delivered cures for cancer and the common cold, despite spending so much of "our taxpayers' money". Sir John grinned weakly and bore it, even admitting that scientists sometimes play on the ignorance of politicians to get funding, but his main rebuttal was that the way genes work is far, far more complicated than either the public or even geneticists yet understand. This "backlash" thinking - reminiscent of the way pop stars get built up and knocked down again - arises because we perhaps imagined the genome as a recipe book, where all you have to do is read off a recipe and cook it.
Our bodies contain several separate but cooperating information processing systems - the nervous (including the brain), immune, muscular, metabolic and skeletal systems, plus the DNA itself - which form a complex heterogeneous network, talking to each other via nerves, hormones and other chemical signals. Recently the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of Dna Elements) project has spotlighted just *how* complex: the sequence of base pairs in DNA encodes only a small fraction of the information required to run our bodies, and the huge stretches of what used to be called "junk DNA" are actually switches that modify the "run-time" course of the computations. We are mostly built of proteins and protein-based enzymes control almost all of our cellular chemistry. Genes are templates from which these proteins get fabricated, and though every cell in your body contains a full copy of your genome, most of its genes are turned off: otherwise every cell would be churning out every possible protein all of the time and you'd be a large (and very short-lived) sticky blob. Selectively turning genes on and off controls the activities of individual cells, which in turn determines how our bodies grow, survive and act upon the world.
The decade-long ENCODE project (funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute) identified the regions of the human genome where such controls operate, and in September 2012 published 30 seminal papers that assign functions to 80% of the genome. As this is a PC mag not a biochemistry journal I won't dwell on their details, beyond saying that control gets exerted mostly through big proteins called histones sticking to DNA sequences to mask them from being expressed, or by methyl groups being added as stoppers to certain bases. (The journal Nature has a brilliant interactive widget at http://www.nature.com/encode/#/threads/ if you do want to know more). The result is that genetics just became orders of magnitude more complex, which makes our impatience with the rate of medical spin-offs tragically misplaced.
We might once have pictured the genome as a computer program, which somehow "executed" its genes to build our bodies and make us do stuff. Now we know better: it's more like a database of blueprints for computer components, rather than program instructions. So where are the executable instructions? Well, they're proteins operating within particular cellular environments. But those proteins are still made by DNA? Yes they are, and where and when they get made depends on all those gene switches that ENCODE describes. Some of these instructions in turn control the way the DNA gets transcribed, so it's a dynamic, recursive, self-modifying program whose behaviour is generated on-the-fly rather than recorded in the DNA sequence (which is mostly static data, except occasionally when a mutation occurs or a virus inserts its own code).
Anyone who's written computer programs in anger will know that self-modifying programs are best avoided. Sure, when you're a cocky newbie it feels clever to write self-modifying code (for one thing it can be a tremendous memory saver) but you'll discover that it soon becomes impossible to debug or understand. Reading the source code of the program no longer tells you what it does, only executing it can do that. Microsoft once flirted with self-modifying code in early versions of Windows, for selecting different hardware options, but it now deprecates the practice and options are set by reading in external config files. So how does nature manage the dynamic, self-modifying computation system that is a living organism? The unsatisfying answer is same as always, through 3.5 billion years of evolution rather than studying algorithms. Snipping and inserting genes to cure some disease is not at all like editing program code - we've already seen one genetic medicine project halted because it gave the test subjects leukemia. When debugging a genetic program, execution can literally mean execution.
Last night I watched the latest addition to the dismal genre of populist TV science programming (from which I exclude Horizon as it does attempt to get serious). A not-all-that funny Irish comedian/gameshow host and a young journalist with a striking Bollywood coiffure were baiting one of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Sir John Sulston, because the human genome project has not yet delivered cures for cancer and the common cold, despite spending so much of "our taxpayers' money". Sir John grinned weakly and bore it, even admitting that scientists sometimes play on the ignorance of politicians to get funding, but his main rebuttal was that the way genes work is far, far more complicated than either the public or even geneticists yet understand. This "backlash" thinking - reminiscent of the way pop stars get built up and knocked down again - arises because we perhaps imagined the genome as a recipe book, where all you have to do is read off a recipe and cook it.
Our bodies contain several separate but cooperating information processing systems - the nervous (including the brain), immune, muscular, metabolic and skeletal systems, plus the DNA itself - which form a complex heterogeneous network, talking to each other via nerves, hormones and other chemical signals. Recently the ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of Dna Elements) project has spotlighted just *how* complex: the sequence of base pairs in DNA encodes only a small fraction of the information required to run our bodies, and the huge stretches of what used to be called "junk DNA" are actually switches that modify the "run-time" course of the computations. We are mostly built of proteins and protein-based enzymes control almost all of our cellular chemistry. Genes are templates from which these proteins get fabricated, and though every cell in your body contains a full copy of your genome, most of its genes are turned off: otherwise every cell would be churning out every possible protein all of the time and you'd be a large (and very short-lived) sticky blob. Selectively turning genes on and off controls the activities of individual cells, which in turn determines how our bodies grow, survive and act upon the world.
The decade-long ENCODE project (funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute) identified the regions of the human genome where such controls operate, and in September 2012 published 30 seminal papers that assign functions to 80% of the genome. As this is a PC mag not a biochemistry journal I won't dwell on their details, beyond saying that control gets exerted mostly through big proteins called histones sticking to DNA sequences to mask them from being expressed, or by methyl groups being added as stoppers to certain bases. (The journal Nature has a brilliant interactive widget at http://www.nature.com/encode/#/threads/ if you do want to know more). The result is that genetics just became orders of magnitude more complex, which makes our impatience with the rate of medical spin-offs tragically misplaced.
We might once have pictured the genome as a computer program, which somehow "executed" its genes to build our bodies and make us do stuff. Now we know better: it's more like a database of blueprints for computer components, rather than program instructions. So where are the executable instructions? Well, they're proteins operating within particular cellular environments. But those proteins are still made by DNA? Yes they are, and where and when they get made depends on all those gene switches that ENCODE describes. Some of these instructions in turn control the way the DNA gets transcribed, so it's a dynamic, recursive, self-modifying program whose behaviour is generated on-the-fly rather than recorded in the DNA sequence (which is mostly static data, except occasionally when a mutation occurs or a virus inserts its own code).
Anyone who's written computer programs in anger will know that self-modifying programs are best avoided. Sure, when you're a cocky newbie it feels clever to write self-modifying code (for one thing it can be a tremendous memory saver) but you'll discover that it soon becomes impossible to debug or understand. Reading the source code of the program no longer tells you what it does, only executing it can do that. Microsoft once flirted with self-modifying code in early versions of Windows, for selecting different hardware options, but it now deprecates the practice and options are set by reading in external config files. So how does nature manage the dynamic, self-modifying computation system that is a living organism? The unsatisfying answer is same as always, through 3.5 billion years of evolution rather than studying algorithms. Snipping and inserting genes to cure some disease is not at all like editing program code - we've already seen one genetic medicine project halted because it gave the test subjects leukemia. When debugging a genetic program, execution can literally mean execution.
Thursday 11 April 2013
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 219 07/10/2012
A wave of nostalgia about old-school personal computing is going around the Web, with people restoring, emulating or reminiscing about Sinclair Spectrums, Jupiter Aces, Dragons, Orics and many more, wherever you look. I'm not too proud to jump on a passing bandwagon, so here's my own reminiscence. I bought my first "computer" - a Casio fx-201P, one of the very first programmable calculators - around 1977. It had a 10-digit green fluorescent display and 127 steps of program memory (no editor: make a mistake, enter them all again). I programmed it to check printers' invoices for magazines with varying numbers of pages, sections and amounts of colour, which impressed the printers who had no such assistance themselves, and when in 1979 Dennis Publishing acquired Personal Computer World, it earned me a column called "Calculator Corner" of which this column could be seen as a direct descendant.
That Casio was a fairly chunky beast at 7 x 4 x 1.5 inches and it weighed 13oz, which hardly mattered since it remained on my desk. By the oddest of coincidences my latest "computer", a Google Nexus 7, is around the same size at 7.8 x 4.7 x 0.4 inches and weighs 12oz, though it contains around 128 million times more memory and runs over 100,000 times faster. Oh, and instead of 10 green glowing digits its display shows streaming movies and TV. Had cars advanced at a similar rate then just one could carry the whole population of England to the moon in under two minutes. The German philosopher Hegel famously claimed that sufficient quantitative change leads eventually to qualitative change, and that's what I'm feeling right now about my Nexus, that tablet computers are poised to change the game.
During these years between the Casio and the Nexus I've spent a lot of energy pursuing a particular idea of computing, deeply influenced by Alan Kay's notion of the "Dynabook", his universal portable information store. I've tried and abandoned several drawers-ful of pocketable computing devices, looking for one that would sync transparently to a desktop computer. I've rejected a desktop altogether in favour of a powerful laptop. I'd reached the point, as described in last month's column, where I can use my Android smartphone to share files with my laptop via Dropbox, but it was all still a bit fiddly with data entry via the phone too slow and a screen rather too small for viewing complex websites. Of course I expected a tablet to improve things in both those respects, but I didn't anticipate by quite how much.
Being an Android device the Nexus immediately grabbed all my contacts, calendar and mail from Google's cloud with no effort, and I soon had all my preferred apps (in latest their Jelly Bean versions) installed. On installing File Manager HD I noticed a new menu option called LAN Connection, and despite my acute networkophobia I tapped the Scan icon to see what would happen. After an agonising delay it came back with a connection to "USER-PC", my laptop! It took me a further afternoon of wading through Microsoft's grim network model - what is a Homegroup and how is it different from a Workgroup? - but eventually I got everything I wanted shared. No need to duplicate any music, videos, documents to the tablet, just access them over Wi-Fi.
You have to understand that I work at home where I'm either sitting at my desk upstairs in front of my laptop, or on the sofa downstairs reading books and making notes - now I may have to adopt some vigorous exercise regime to replace all the stair-climbing I no longer need do. I rarely work away from home so the Nexus's lack of 3G isn't critical, and in any case I wouldn't want to pay for another SIM, but then I discovered that the "Tethering & Portable Hotspot" setting of my phone actually works. BT Fon already gives me free Wi-Fi throughout much of London, but where it doesn't I can Google and Wikipede via my phone's Wi-Fi.
So far I've never been even slightly tempted by any of the Home Server or Media PC offerings, but now I'm beginning to see the possibility of a different sort of animal: a tiny Linux box containing a 1TB disk and a Wi-Fi router, with no display or keyboard. All it does is locally store data from PCs, tablets and phones over Wi-Fi, while continually backing itself up to Dropbox or some other cloud service. No shared media streaming, do all that at the client ends (I have Spotify even on my phone). And I've started to feel wallet palpitations of almost Honeyballian intensity whenever I see ads for the Asus Transformer...
A wave of nostalgia about old-school personal computing is going around the Web, with people restoring, emulating or reminiscing about Sinclair Spectrums, Jupiter Aces, Dragons, Orics and many more, wherever you look. I'm not too proud to jump on a passing bandwagon, so here's my own reminiscence. I bought my first "computer" - a Casio fx-201P, one of the very first programmable calculators - around 1977. It had a 10-digit green fluorescent display and 127 steps of program memory (no editor: make a mistake, enter them all again). I programmed it to check printers' invoices for magazines with varying numbers of pages, sections and amounts of colour, which impressed the printers who had no such assistance themselves, and when in 1979 Dennis Publishing acquired Personal Computer World, it earned me a column called "Calculator Corner" of which this column could be seen as a direct descendant.
That Casio was a fairly chunky beast at 7 x 4 x 1.5 inches and it weighed 13oz, which hardly mattered since it remained on my desk. By the oddest of coincidences my latest "computer", a Google Nexus 7, is around the same size at 7.8 x 4.7 x 0.4 inches and weighs 12oz, though it contains around 128 million times more memory and runs over 100,000 times faster. Oh, and instead of 10 green glowing digits its display shows streaming movies and TV. Had cars advanced at a similar rate then just one could carry the whole population of England to the moon in under two minutes. The German philosopher Hegel famously claimed that sufficient quantitative change leads eventually to qualitative change, and that's what I'm feeling right now about my Nexus, that tablet computers are poised to change the game.
During these years between the Casio and the Nexus I've spent a lot of energy pursuing a particular idea of computing, deeply influenced by Alan Kay's notion of the "Dynabook", his universal portable information store. I've tried and abandoned several drawers-ful of pocketable computing devices, looking for one that would sync transparently to a desktop computer. I've rejected a desktop altogether in favour of a powerful laptop. I'd reached the point, as described in last month's column, where I can use my Android smartphone to share files with my laptop via Dropbox, but it was all still a bit fiddly with data entry via the phone too slow and a screen rather too small for viewing complex websites. Of course I expected a tablet to improve things in both those respects, but I didn't anticipate by quite how much.
Being an Android device the Nexus immediately grabbed all my contacts, calendar and mail from Google's cloud with no effort, and I soon had all my preferred apps (in latest their Jelly Bean versions) installed. On installing File Manager HD I noticed a new menu option called LAN Connection, and despite my acute networkophobia I tapped the Scan icon to see what would happen. After an agonising delay it came back with a connection to "USER-PC", my laptop! It took me a further afternoon of wading through Microsoft's grim network model - what is a Homegroup and how is it different from a Workgroup? - but eventually I got everything I wanted shared. No need to duplicate any music, videos, documents to the tablet, just access them over Wi-Fi.
You have to understand that I work at home where I'm either sitting at my desk upstairs in front of my laptop, or on the sofa downstairs reading books and making notes - now I may have to adopt some vigorous exercise regime to replace all the stair-climbing I no longer need do. I rarely work away from home so the Nexus's lack of 3G isn't critical, and in any case I wouldn't want to pay for another SIM, but then I discovered that the "Tethering & Portable Hotspot" setting of my phone actually works. BT Fon already gives me free Wi-Fi throughout much of London, but where it doesn't I can Google and Wikipede via my phone's Wi-Fi.
So far I've never been even slightly tempted by any of the Home Server or Media PC offerings, but now I'm beginning to see the possibility of a different sort of animal: a tiny Linux box containing a 1TB disk and a Wi-Fi router, with no display or keyboard. All it does is locally store data from PCs, tablets and phones over Wi-Fi, while continually backing itself up to Dropbox or some other cloud service. No shared media streaming, do all that at the client ends (I have Spotify even on my phone). And I've started to feel wallet palpitations of almost Honeyballian intensity whenever I see ads for the Asus Transformer...
Wednesday 10 April 2013
NOTA BENE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 218 06/09/2012
It sometimes feels as though I've been taking notes all my life. Certainly I was already doing it in school, and in university lectures, when in combination with my photographic memory it was a great advantage in exams: I could just conjure up the page of my notebook where an answer lay. (That memory is now fading, but luckily for me computers are improving at more or less the same rate). Right from the start personal computing for me meant trying to find some practical way to take notes on the damned things. Of course for a writer finding a decent writing tool was the first priority, but that proved nowhere near so hard to fullfil. For each successive OS since CP/M 2.2, I quickly discovered a word-processor or editor that would serve me well for years - Wordstar, PC-Write, TextPad, Microsoft Word - but for each OS I also wasted hours trying and rejecting inadequate candidates for the role of note-taker. The top drawer of my grey filing cabinet testifies to my failure, because it's half full of spiral-bound reporter's pads containing 20-years-worth of pencil scribblings.
It wasn't until the first Palm Pilot came out in 1996 that things looked up a bit. A crucial attribute of any note-taking system is portability, because ideas pop into my head at all times and places, even in bed at night, and having to plod to a desktop computer to record them is a total no-no. Palm got me to a point where I could be sitting anywhere, perhaps reading a book, with a Pilot at my elbow to scribble notes using Graffiti handwriting, and have them transfer to my desktop PC whenever I synced. Soon I discovered Natara's Bonsai, a neat outliner that ran on both PC and Palm, and no less than 125 of these Idealog columns were planned in that program. That Bonsai lasted me ten-years proves it was workable, but it still wasn't ideal: it couldn't handle pictures or diagrams, and folding editors actually aren't, contrary to what you might expect, that much help on a tiny handheld screen. And Palm's syncing worked, but only so long as you remembered to do it...
After Palm went under I moved over to an Android phone, which opened up whole new cloudy vistas. Bonsai never made the leap and stuck with Windows Mobile, but there are dozens of Android outliner apps and I've tried most of them. Many of the free ones work well but have neither a Windows sync client nor cloud storage. Then there are big beasts like Zotero, Evernote and SimpleNote that offer both cloud service and PC sync. I decided to try the free version of Evernote and was very excited for a while. It's a whole ecosystem, with add-ons for drawing sketches and clipping web pages, and it has an attractive user interface. Notes handwritten on my phone (using the marvellous Graffiti Pro app) just appear on my laptop without effort. Until one day the Evernote Windows client just vanished from my PC, without a trace. I hasten to add that no notes were lost - they're all still there in my account on Evernote's website - but it disconcerted me when the same happened again weeks after I reinstalled it. The cloud is mighty powerful, and this ability to remove things from my PC without asking has quite blunted my enthusiasm for the product.
It was around then PC Pro adopted DropBox to deliver Real World Computing copy, and the penny dropped that I can now roll my own cloudy note-taking solution using the excellent DropBox client for Android. Just create a directory tree called Notes in the Dropbox folder and bung all text, pictures, spreadsheets, whatever, relating to a project into the same subdirectory. Stick to a few file formats like text, JPG, docx and xlsx (I have Documents To Go on my phone). And TextPad lets me drag web URLs straight from Firefox into a note and access them by right-clicking. Sorted.
And what, I hear you mutter, about Microsoft's OneNote? Well, whenever Simon Jones has demonstrated it to me on his rarer-than-hens-teeth Samsung Slate PC I've been bowled over by its unique, industry-beating capabilities. But there's the rub: like almost everyone else I never bought a Windows Tablet or Slate PC, and Microsoft never provided me a copy with any version of Office I've had. In fact, so effectively have they've kept this killer app away from the public that they ought to be put in charge of Hantavirus quarantine. Now Redmond is betting the farm on Windows 8 and my advice would be, make your Surfaces (or whatever they're called this week) into dynamite OnceNote engines, and let them communicate easily with your competitors' devices: the iPad currently has nothing to touch it for note-taking.
It sometimes feels as though I've been taking notes all my life. Certainly I was already doing it in school, and in university lectures, when in combination with my photographic memory it was a great advantage in exams: I could just conjure up the page of my notebook where an answer lay. (That memory is now fading, but luckily for me computers are improving at more or less the same rate). Right from the start personal computing for me meant trying to find some practical way to take notes on the damned things. Of course for a writer finding a decent writing tool was the first priority, but that proved nowhere near so hard to fullfil. For each successive OS since CP/M 2.2, I quickly discovered a word-processor or editor that would serve me well for years - Wordstar, PC-Write, TextPad, Microsoft Word - but for each OS I also wasted hours trying and rejecting inadequate candidates for the role of note-taker. The top drawer of my grey filing cabinet testifies to my failure, because it's half full of spiral-bound reporter's pads containing 20-years-worth of pencil scribblings.
It wasn't until the first Palm Pilot came out in 1996 that things looked up a bit. A crucial attribute of any note-taking system is portability, because ideas pop into my head at all times and places, even in bed at night, and having to plod to a desktop computer to record them is a total no-no. Palm got me to a point where I could be sitting anywhere, perhaps reading a book, with a Pilot at my elbow to scribble notes using Graffiti handwriting, and have them transfer to my desktop PC whenever I synced. Soon I discovered Natara's Bonsai, a neat outliner that ran on both PC and Palm, and no less than 125 of these Idealog columns were planned in that program. That Bonsai lasted me ten-years proves it was workable, but it still wasn't ideal: it couldn't handle pictures or diagrams, and folding editors actually aren't, contrary to what you might expect, that much help on a tiny handheld screen. And Palm's syncing worked, but only so long as you remembered to do it...
After Palm went under I moved over to an Android phone, which opened up whole new cloudy vistas. Bonsai never made the leap and stuck with Windows Mobile, but there are dozens of Android outliner apps and I've tried most of them. Many of the free ones work well but have neither a Windows sync client nor cloud storage. Then there are big beasts like Zotero, Evernote and SimpleNote that offer both cloud service and PC sync. I decided to try the free version of Evernote and was very excited for a while. It's a whole ecosystem, with add-ons for drawing sketches and clipping web pages, and it has an attractive user interface. Notes handwritten on my phone (using the marvellous Graffiti Pro app) just appear on my laptop without effort. Until one day the Evernote Windows client just vanished from my PC, without a trace. I hasten to add that no notes were lost - they're all still there in my account on Evernote's website - but it disconcerted me when the same happened again weeks after I reinstalled it. The cloud is mighty powerful, and this ability to remove things from my PC without asking has quite blunted my enthusiasm for the product.
It was around then PC Pro adopted DropBox to deliver Real World Computing copy, and the penny dropped that I can now roll my own cloudy note-taking solution using the excellent DropBox client for Android. Just create a directory tree called Notes in the Dropbox folder and bung all text, pictures, spreadsheets, whatever, relating to a project into the same subdirectory. Stick to a few file formats like text, JPG, docx and xlsx (I have Documents To Go on my phone). And TextPad lets me drag web URLs straight from Firefox into a note and access them by right-clicking. Sorted.
And what, I hear you mutter, about Microsoft's OneNote? Well, whenever Simon Jones has demonstrated it to me on his rarer-than-hens-teeth Samsung Slate PC I've been bowled over by its unique, industry-beating capabilities. But there's the rub: like almost everyone else I never bought a Windows Tablet or Slate PC, and Microsoft never provided me a copy with any version of Office I've had. In fact, so effectively have they've kept this killer app away from the public that they ought to be put in charge of Hantavirus quarantine. Now Redmond is betting the farm on Windows 8 and my advice would be, make your Surfaces (or whatever they're called this week) into dynamite OnceNote engines, and let them communicate easily with your competitors' devices: the iPad currently has nothing to touch it for note-taking.
Tuesday 26 February 2013
SMART SABOTAGE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 217 10/08/2012
Turning information into money has become a most pressing problem. Much of our information torrent still arrives free of charge, but its owners are desperate to find ways to get us to pay for it. This desperation manifests itself in many ways, some of which don't appear connected with information at all. For example those vicious legal spats between Apple and Samsung over patents are ultimately about the ownership of information, Apple's claimed ownership of the idea of touch-based tablet computers, expressed in the form of patents on various specific features.
Or again, Facebook's ever-more-convoluted user interface is all aimed to extract more information about your likes and habits, so as to sell them to advertisers. The arena of telecommunications is a vast battlefield on which two information wars are raging simultaneously: the last war, not quite over yet, between the old land-line-based giant telcos and the new mobile phone operators for your voice-call traffic; and a new war, hotting up, between those mobile operators and IT companies like Apple and Google who seek to grab all their data traffic via paid-for smartphone and tablet apps. According to research outfit Ovum, SMS text traffic is worth around 150 *billion* dollars each year to the mobo operators, but over a third of iPhone users are already switching to IP-based messaging services like Pinger. Like the old telcos, the mobile ops risk being reduced to merely owning the pipes through which other people's profitable content flows.
Apple is currently having a rather good war, having ruthlessly preserved a proprietory grip over its own hardware ecosystem and exploited this to get users paying for apps and content through online stores. Its carpet bombing of Adobe's Flash - by excluding it from the iPad - is a tactical victory, damming off one whole stream of free content from the internet. However one battle isn't the whole war. In last month's column I described my experience of using an iPad on 3G in Italy, but what I didn't mention was that the deal we get for it is grossly inferior to that for my Windows laptop (€24 per month for 10GB as opposed to €19 per month unlimited). I grumbled to the chap in the TIM shop, but that's their only deal for iPads: they presumably analysed the traffic profile of iPad-owning users and decided that's the only way to profit from them.
Bandwidth is a valuable commodity and extracting maximum profit from such commodities is a science that involves some strange paradoxes. You might think the most profit could be obtained by producing the largest amount of a highly desirable commodity, but that's far from the truth. Pricing is everything, and often maximum profit is achieved by restricting supply to raise the price. The archetypical case is of course the De Beers family's rigid control over the world supply of diamonds, but the oil industry is a pretty good example too. For most of the 20th century there was always a large surplus of oil reserves, but oil companies wouldn't pump so much as to lower the price too far: Daniel Yergin's massive tome "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power" describes in entertaining detail the hoops they jumped through to prevent new fields being exploited by rivals. Contrary to much free-market dogma, companies don't enjoy price competition, and very large companies will go to great (sometimes too great) expense to avoid or subvert it.
The great theorist of such pricing policies was the eccentric Norwegian/American economist Thorstein Veblen, the man who gave us the term "conspicuous consumption". He delighted in provoking with mocking and ironic terminology, and the term he chose for this case was "sabotage". A partisan blowing up a railway line, a striking worker dropping a spanner in his machine, an ISP throttling your internet feed, they're all doing the same thing: deliberately reducing production to achieve certain ends. Veblen defined sabotage as "a conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" and did not regard it as a pejorative term: on the contrary "the common welfare in any community which is organized on the price system cannot be maintained without a salutary use of sabotage... such restriction of output as will maintain prices at a reasonably profitable level and so guard against business depression". Our current economic crisis is largely one of overproduction, for example of cheap mortgages. The alternative to sabotage then is to do away with prices and make everything free, but that invites massive overconsumption (the so-called "tragedy of the commons"). Eventually things would have to be rationed by other means, often not nice ones. That it's better to pay people enough to buy stuff ought to be obvious, but seems to escape politicians and employers alike.
Turning information into money has become a most pressing problem. Much of our information torrent still arrives free of charge, but its owners are desperate to find ways to get us to pay for it. This desperation manifests itself in many ways, some of which don't appear connected with information at all. For example those vicious legal spats between Apple and Samsung over patents are ultimately about the ownership of information, Apple's claimed ownership of the idea of touch-based tablet computers, expressed in the form of patents on various specific features.
Or again, Facebook's ever-more-convoluted user interface is all aimed to extract more information about your likes and habits, so as to sell them to advertisers. The arena of telecommunications is a vast battlefield on which two information wars are raging simultaneously: the last war, not quite over yet, between the old land-line-based giant telcos and the new mobile phone operators for your voice-call traffic; and a new war, hotting up, between those mobile operators and IT companies like Apple and Google who seek to grab all their data traffic via paid-for smartphone and tablet apps. According to research outfit Ovum, SMS text traffic is worth around 150 *billion* dollars each year to the mobo operators, but over a third of iPhone users are already switching to IP-based messaging services like Pinger. Like the old telcos, the mobile ops risk being reduced to merely owning the pipes through which other people's profitable content flows.
Apple is currently having a rather good war, having ruthlessly preserved a proprietory grip over its own hardware ecosystem and exploited this to get users paying for apps and content through online stores. Its carpet bombing of Adobe's Flash - by excluding it from the iPad - is a tactical victory, damming off one whole stream of free content from the internet. However one battle isn't the whole war. In last month's column I described my experience of using an iPad on 3G in Italy, but what I didn't mention was that the deal we get for it is grossly inferior to that for my Windows laptop (€24 per month for 10GB as opposed to €19 per month unlimited). I grumbled to the chap in the TIM shop, but that's their only deal for iPads: they presumably analysed the traffic profile of iPad-owning users and decided that's the only way to profit from them.
Bandwidth is a valuable commodity and extracting maximum profit from such commodities is a science that involves some strange paradoxes. You might think the most profit could be obtained by producing the largest amount of a highly desirable commodity, but that's far from the truth. Pricing is everything, and often maximum profit is achieved by restricting supply to raise the price. The archetypical case is of course the De Beers family's rigid control over the world supply of diamonds, but the oil industry is a pretty good example too. For most of the 20th century there was always a large surplus of oil reserves, but oil companies wouldn't pump so much as to lower the price too far: Daniel Yergin's massive tome "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power" describes in entertaining detail the hoops they jumped through to prevent new fields being exploited by rivals. Contrary to much free-market dogma, companies don't enjoy price competition, and very large companies will go to great (sometimes too great) expense to avoid or subvert it.
The great theorist of such pricing policies was the eccentric Norwegian/American economist Thorstein Veblen, the man who gave us the term "conspicuous consumption". He delighted in provoking with mocking and ironic terminology, and the term he chose for this case was "sabotage". A partisan blowing up a railway line, a striking worker dropping a spanner in his machine, an ISP throttling your internet feed, they're all doing the same thing: deliberately reducing production to achieve certain ends. Veblen defined sabotage as "a conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" and did not regard it as a pejorative term: on the contrary "the common welfare in any community which is organized on the price system cannot be maintained without a salutary use of sabotage... such restriction of output as will maintain prices at a reasonably profitable level and so guard against business depression". Our current economic crisis is largely one of overproduction, for example of cheap mortgages. The alternative to sabotage then is to do away with prices and make everything free, but that invites massive overconsumption (the so-called "tragedy of the commons"). Eventually things would have to be rationed by other means, often not nice ones. That it's better to pay people enough to buy stuff ought to be obvious, but seems to escape politicians and employers alike.
Thursday 31 January 2013
SMELLING THE COFFEE
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 216 09/07/2012
I'm writing this column at my desk in Italy, on a balmy evening, watching fireflies drift in and out among the vines. (I thought I'd see, as an experiment, whether I could type that sentence without smirking, but the reflection in my window pane says I've failed...) Seriously though, putting all climatological disparities aside, our existence here is a remarkable testament to advances in comms technology over the last few years. Communication with the rest of the world happens through a Telecom Italia Mobile mast on the mountain opposite, via which my laptop and my partner Marion's iPad are connected on pay-as-you-go mobile data plans. These are now fast enough to watch live streamed television, listen to music and radio, without recourse to the huge and expensive satellite dishes that were required just a couple of years ago. And my ALICE package gives me unlimited data for €19 per month.
Being here has given me the opportunity to get to grips with the iPad, and hence caused me to oscillate wildly between very impressed indeed and hair-tearing frustration. The latter state is almost always induced either by lack of documentation, or by Apple's smug assumption that everyone buys into its total ecosystem, which I most certainly do not. A most egregious example of the latter concerned Marion's contacts information, which it fell my duty to transfer from her netbook back in London into the iPad's Contacts. For purely historical reasons these have been kept for many years in Palm Desktop rather than Outlook (and she's quite happy with its facilities). When the iPad first arrived I realised there wasn't going to be any direct way to export addresses to it, because its Contacts Book appears to lack any menu for importing stuff. So I opened a Gmail account for her and successfully exported them all into that via a CSV file, believing job done. Fat chance. The Apple Contacts Book of course lacks any mechanism for importing from the enemy GMail either. After hours of footling around I gave up and suggested she log onto Gmail via Safari to see her contacts.
Months passed and a friend loaned us a book called "iPad 2: the missing manual" which solved many puzzles, like how to recover when you've accidentally locked the screen orientation into portrait. One chapter began with the soothing words "Putting a copy of your contacts file onto your iPad is easy" and suggested using either iCloud or iTunes. Like an idiot I decided iTunes would be easier since it was already installed there on the iPad's home screen. More head-scratching followed because iTunes would do nothing but offer to sell me David Guetta albums.
I'm embarassed to tell how many hours it took me to realise that iTunes has to be installed on another computer (assumed to be a Mac) rather than the iPad for this task. I flirted briefly with the idea of polluting my Viao with the Apple software, but fortunately took the precaution of Googling "uninstall iTunes from Windows 7" before committing: dozens of horror stories about how much junk it leaves behind cured me completely of that impulse. I Googled some more and then suddenly the scales were removed from my eyes by a sane and crystal-clear blog called "Apple iPad Tablet Help". The answer is use iCloud stupid!
It took about ten minutes once that penny dropped. Pull up GMail on my Viao; log out as me and log back in as Marion; export her GMail contacts to a vCard file on the Viao; go to www.icloud.com and log in with Marion's Apple ID; drag the downloaded .VCF file onto the Contacts icon in the iCloud window. During this whole procedure the iPad remained lying on a table in the other room and no cables were involved. I fetched the iPad and opened Contacts, where to my disappointment were just those three entries I'd added manually months before. But before I could even muster a curse, up popped another, then another and in they all streamed over the airwaves, all 1200+ of them, in less than a minute. The moral of the story for me is that The Cloud just works: feeble documentation, different OSes, squabbles between Apple and Google, smug assumptions that iPad owners have a Mac too, all just melted away in the universality of HTTP and the internet.
This was the same month we finally decided to adopt Dropbox in place of Dennis Publishing's own server to transport Real World copy, and so far it's proving more convenient and reliable for all concerned. The Cloud just works. (Of course being a cynic/paranoiac I download it all to archive on my local machine too). For extra cloudiness I've also recently built an archive of all my previous Idealog columns from 1994 to 2012 in Blogger, where you can read them on-screen in a nice convenient format. As I was uploading one from August 1996 its headline, Wake Me When It All Works, caught my eye. In it I complained: "Somewhere along the line everyone seems to have forgotten once again that simplifying means actually removing stuff, not just hiding it on the ninteenth tab of some dialog". I believe I can smell the coffee...
[Dick Pountain's back issues of this Idealog column are now readable on http://www.dickpountain-idealog.blogspot.it/]
I'm writing this column at my desk in Italy, on a balmy evening, watching fireflies drift in and out among the vines. (I thought I'd see, as an experiment, whether I could type that sentence without smirking, but the reflection in my window pane says I've failed...) Seriously though, putting all climatological disparities aside, our existence here is a remarkable testament to advances in comms technology over the last few years. Communication with the rest of the world happens through a Telecom Italia Mobile mast on the mountain opposite, via which my laptop and my partner Marion's iPad are connected on pay-as-you-go mobile data plans. These are now fast enough to watch live streamed television, listen to music and radio, without recourse to the huge and expensive satellite dishes that were required just a couple of years ago. And my ALICE package gives me unlimited data for €19 per month.
Being here has given me the opportunity to get to grips with the iPad, and hence caused me to oscillate wildly between very impressed indeed and hair-tearing frustration. The latter state is almost always induced either by lack of documentation, or by Apple's smug assumption that everyone buys into its total ecosystem, which I most certainly do not. A most egregious example of the latter concerned Marion's contacts information, which it fell my duty to transfer from her netbook back in London into the iPad's Contacts. For purely historical reasons these have been kept for many years in Palm Desktop rather than Outlook (and she's quite happy with its facilities). When the iPad first arrived I realised there wasn't going to be any direct way to export addresses to it, because its Contacts Book appears to lack any menu for importing stuff. So I opened a Gmail account for her and successfully exported them all into that via a CSV file, believing job done. Fat chance. The Apple Contacts Book of course lacks any mechanism for importing from the enemy GMail either. After hours of footling around I gave up and suggested she log onto Gmail via Safari to see her contacts.
Months passed and a friend loaned us a book called "iPad 2: the missing manual" which solved many puzzles, like how to recover when you've accidentally locked the screen orientation into portrait. One chapter began with the soothing words "Putting a copy of your contacts file onto your iPad is easy" and suggested using either iCloud or iTunes. Like an idiot I decided iTunes would be easier since it was already installed there on the iPad's home screen. More head-scratching followed because iTunes would do nothing but offer to sell me David Guetta albums.
I'm embarassed to tell how many hours it took me to realise that iTunes has to be installed on another computer (assumed to be a Mac) rather than the iPad for this task. I flirted briefly with the idea of polluting my Viao with the Apple software, but fortunately took the precaution of Googling "uninstall iTunes from Windows 7" before committing: dozens of horror stories about how much junk it leaves behind cured me completely of that impulse. I Googled some more and then suddenly the scales were removed from my eyes by a sane and crystal-clear blog called "Apple iPad Tablet Help". The answer is use iCloud stupid!
It took about ten minutes once that penny dropped. Pull up GMail on my Viao; log out as me and log back in as Marion; export her GMail contacts to a vCard file on the Viao; go to www.icloud.com and log in with Marion's Apple ID; drag the downloaded .VCF file onto the Contacts icon in the iCloud window. During this whole procedure the iPad remained lying on a table in the other room and no cables were involved. I fetched the iPad and opened Contacts, where to my disappointment were just those three entries I'd added manually months before. But before I could even muster a curse, up popped another, then another and in they all streamed over the airwaves, all 1200+ of them, in less than a minute. The moral of the story for me is that The Cloud just works: feeble documentation, different OSes, squabbles between Apple and Google, smug assumptions that iPad owners have a Mac too, all just melted away in the universality of HTTP and the internet.
This was the same month we finally decided to adopt Dropbox in place of Dennis Publishing's own server to transport Real World copy, and so far it's proving more convenient and reliable for all concerned. The Cloud just works. (Of course being a cynic/paranoiac I download it all to archive on my local machine too). For extra cloudiness I've also recently built an archive of all my previous Idealog columns from 1994 to 2012 in Blogger, where you can read them on-screen in a nice convenient format. As I was uploading one from August 1996 its headline, Wake Me When It All Works, caught my eye. In it I complained: "Somewhere along the line everyone seems to have forgotten once again that simplifying means actually removing stuff, not just hiding it on the ninteenth tab of some dialog". I believe I can smell the coffee...
[Dick Pountain's back issues of this Idealog column are now readable on http://www.dickpountain-idealog.blogspot.it/]
LOOKIN' GOOD!
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 215 07/06/2012
I just upgraded my mobile phone from a ZTE San Francisco to a ZTE San Francisco 2 and it's a significant improvement. It has a faster processor, a far better camera with flash, and it runs a later version of Android. But most important of all, it doesn't have those two chrome strips down either side. "Er, is he going soft in the head"? you may be thinking. Well no, I don't actually give a damn about those chrome strips, but most of the online reviews of this phone I've read mentioned them in their first paragraph. It appears (geddit), that people are becoming as obsessed with the appearance of their gadgets as they already are with their haircuts, clothes, cars and sofas. And it's not only physical gadgets like phones but also software interfaces. I'd love to write a smug, judgmental column that argues everyone else is obsessed with appearances whereas I just don't care about such trivia, only the deepest essences of things. I'd love to, but in all honesty I can't, because I'm no better than anyone else in this respect. I don't give a damn about those particular chrome strips, but I'm fanatical about software user interfaces and have dumped many perfectly functional utilities because I couldn't stand the cut (or colour scheme) of their jib.
This phenomenon is not of course confined to the IT business. Reflect for a moment about the explosion of interest in all areas of design - from consumer goods to architecture and engineering - over the last three decades or so. Apple design guru Jonathon Ives was just knighted, while architects nowadays have the celebrity status of movie stars. This is a real social phenomenon, and it's of far more than just sociological interest because its economic consequences are profound. How many new car models failed because a consensus emerged that they looked awful (and I don't JUST mean the Sinclair C5, that's a lazy choice: there's also the BL Mini Metro, especially in that unique poo-brown paintjob). The plain fact is that everyone's a critic and aesthete nowadays, with major consequences for industries (both consumer and technical) that can hardly be overestimated. If you produce something that potential users find ugly you're in big trouble, and in areas like computer or phone operating systems, where development budgets run into the billions, that can matter a great deal. Which explains the almost comically paranoid behaviour of certain big IT companies, because some of the design decisions involved are now too big for mere mortals to make without going a little bit mad.
Two of these terrible quandaries are examined by RWC columnists in this very issue. Jon Honeyball writes about Microsoft's dithering over the look-and-feel of Windows 8, which is approaching Hamlet-like proportions. Redmond chickened-out from incorporating the final look into the Release Candidate build and Jon suspects this is because they're panicking, still trying out different tie-and-handkerchief combinations on secret focus groups. Locked in a death struggle with Apple's iPad, the stakes are too high to get it wrong, but the decision is too big for anyone's sanity. We do know that they've dumped the "Aero-glass" theme for window borders they so proudly introduced with Windows Vista, describing it as now "dated and cheesy" and certainly not "en vogue". (Interpreted, that means we're terrified that YOU think it's cheesy, and we want to get our capitulation in before your attack). Actually I like the Aero look, as indeed I like cheese, but there's a certain grim irony in this situation because it was Microsoft who started the whole trend 20-years ago, fussing over the look-and-feel of early Windows versions, being first to hire big-bucks graphic designers and useability teams.
Meanwhile in his column Simon Jones describes a user revolt among programmers over the colour-scheme in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Its designers decided to remove most colour from its user interface, substituting small indecipherable monochrome icons and menu options in ALL CAPITALS. I'm hardly surprised developers are on the warpath. Programming is the worst area (except perhaps for writing) to radically fiddle with user interfaces: those hypnotically repetitive loops of edit, compile, run, edit, compile, run are only made tolerable because you've totally internalised the position of every single button and option, so your fingers run on autopilot without conscious intervention. Upset that rhythm and productivity may be ruined for months until you've internalised the new set. The designers may have been right and that too much colour was distracting - doesn't matter when people are adapted to that distraction.
For similar reasons I personally loathe Facebook's imposition of the new Timeline, which depresses me because my profile is now 34 feet long and extends below the floorboards. I've always hated Facebook's interface anyway, but had just about achieved immunity. And the iPad's lack of a hardware back-button still makes me swear ten times a day, another design decision taken for the sake of elegance over utility. (I'll probably get challenged to a duel for saying that). Judging by appearance is here to stay and manufacturers know it, leaving them with only two choices: either get really good at giving us what we didn't know we wanted, like Ives, or else let us customise to our eyes content.
I just upgraded my mobile phone from a ZTE San Francisco to a ZTE San Francisco 2 and it's a significant improvement. It has a faster processor, a far better camera with flash, and it runs a later version of Android. But most important of all, it doesn't have those two chrome strips down either side. "Er, is he going soft in the head"? you may be thinking. Well no, I don't actually give a damn about those chrome strips, but most of the online reviews of this phone I've read mentioned them in their first paragraph. It appears (geddit), that people are becoming as obsessed with the appearance of their gadgets as they already are with their haircuts, clothes, cars and sofas. And it's not only physical gadgets like phones but also software interfaces. I'd love to write a smug, judgmental column that argues everyone else is obsessed with appearances whereas I just don't care about such trivia, only the deepest essences of things. I'd love to, but in all honesty I can't, because I'm no better than anyone else in this respect. I don't give a damn about those particular chrome strips, but I'm fanatical about software user interfaces and have dumped many perfectly functional utilities because I couldn't stand the cut (or colour scheme) of their jib.
This phenomenon is not of course confined to the IT business. Reflect for a moment about the explosion of interest in all areas of design - from consumer goods to architecture and engineering - over the last three decades or so. Apple design guru Jonathon Ives was just knighted, while architects nowadays have the celebrity status of movie stars. This is a real social phenomenon, and it's of far more than just sociological interest because its economic consequences are profound. How many new car models failed because a consensus emerged that they looked awful (and I don't JUST mean the Sinclair C5, that's a lazy choice: there's also the BL Mini Metro, especially in that unique poo-brown paintjob). The plain fact is that everyone's a critic and aesthete nowadays, with major consequences for industries (both consumer and technical) that can hardly be overestimated. If you produce something that potential users find ugly you're in big trouble, and in areas like computer or phone operating systems, where development budgets run into the billions, that can matter a great deal. Which explains the almost comically paranoid behaviour of certain big IT companies, because some of the design decisions involved are now too big for mere mortals to make without going a little bit mad.
Two of these terrible quandaries are examined by RWC columnists in this very issue. Jon Honeyball writes about Microsoft's dithering over the look-and-feel of Windows 8, which is approaching Hamlet-like proportions. Redmond chickened-out from incorporating the final look into the Release Candidate build and Jon suspects this is because they're panicking, still trying out different tie-and-handkerchief combinations on secret focus groups. Locked in a death struggle with Apple's iPad, the stakes are too high to get it wrong, but the decision is too big for anyone's sanity. We do know that they've dumped the "Aero-glass" theme for window borders they so proudly introduced with Windows Vista, describing it as now "dated and cheesy" and certainly not "en vogue". (Interpreted, that means we're terrified that YOU think it's cheesy, and we want to get our capitulation in before your attack). Actually I like the Aero look, as indeed I like cheese, but there's a certain grim irony in this situation because it was Microsoft who started the whole trend 20-years ago, fussing over the look-and-feel of early Windows versions, being first to hire big-bucks graphic designers and useability teams.
Meanwhile in his column Simon Jones describes a user revolt among programmers over the colour-scheme in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Its designers decided to remove most colour from its user interface, substituting small indecipherable monochrome icons and menu options in ALL CAPITALS. I'm hardly surprised developers are on the warpath. Programming is the worst area (except perhaps for writing) to radically fiddle with user interfaces: those hypnotically repetitive loops of edit, compile, run, edit, compile, run are only made tolerable because you've totally internalised the position of every single button and option, so your fingers run on autopilot without conscious intervention. Upset that rhythm and productivity may be ruined for months until you've internalised the new set. The designers may have been right and that too much colour was distracting - doesn't matter when people are adapted to that distraction.
For similar reasons I personally loathe Facebook's imposition of the new Timeline, which depresses me because my profile is now 34 feet long and extends below the floorboards. I've always hated Facebook's interface anyway, but had just about achieved immunity. And the iPad's lack of a hardware back-button still makes me swear ten times a day, another design decision taken for the sake of elegance over utility. (I'll probably get challenged to a duel for saying that). Judging by appearance is here to stay and manufacturers know it, leaving them with only two choices: either get really good at giving us what we didn't know we wanted, like Ives, or else let us customise to our eyes content.
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