A contest for fuel-efficient small airplanes has a winner: a modified VariEze that gets 45 mpg at over 200 MPH with two people aboard, and nearly 100 mpg at a lower "maximum range" speed.
Details from Wired here, Tree Hugger here, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association last year here. Just as I've always said: to get America moving again, including on the fuel-efficiency front, we've got to get more people up in the air. (Thanks to Michael Ham.)
November 2, 2009
All-in-one, nearing the finale
Three more views -- previously here, here, and here. Again the question is: are we going to keep carrying around a grab-bag of devices, each optimized for its own purpose? Or will convenience, technical improvement, etc mean more and more functions in fewer and fewer gizmos.
From a tech-industry reader:
"I think you're wrong; the vast majority of the device market in these kinds of segments will eventually go to all-in-one, "good enough" devices. Sure, people will still buy digital cameras, portable reading devices, etc., but the specialty devices will be for the 10% of uses or 10% of consumers who want special higher quality or particular features--for most people, the simple functionality in a lowest-common-denominator single device will be sufficient.
"An anecdote: circa 1998, I was working on cryptography for mobile devices (my career also includes Apple, and I'm currently an engineer at [famous internet company]. I had a meeting with a number of very senior engineers at Motorola, and this convergence question came up. One engineer pooh-poohed the idea of convergence, and when I asked him explicitly, he asserted that yes, people would carry a cell phone, a pager, and a PDA to solve those specific problems (I envisioned Batman's utility belt).
"You can't even buy a PDA anymore, as far as I know--it's a feature integrated into phones. Pagers are rare and for particular on-call specialties. I now know a number of people who carry a Blackberry for email and a cell phone for calls, but I'm certain that bifurcation is also doomed. I regularly now check my email from my phone, rather than bother to open my laptop, even if it's in the same room."
Another reader in New York writes:
"I agree with you (mostly, as I think that some convergence is inevitable) that no device can be everything to everybody. But here is another counterexample I'm not sure you mentioned - phones and GPS devices: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/technology/companies/29gps.html
"I'm not a big GPS user (I don't even have a car here in NYC), and I am a big Google maps fan, but here I do have to wonder. If the Google Maps for Mobile is going to depend on a good data connection, then I don't really see how it can match a dedicated GPS device which only needs "sightlines" to satellites (assuming of course that there is no brownout... hey, convergence of two of your tech threads!). When we were camping in Acadia National Park this summer, my wife's Google phone had no phone signal, never mind 3G....
"I think Maps for Mobiles is great in densely populated areas, but if I were planning a long trip with lots of detours in rural areas, I don't see how this could be a dedicated GPS with the maps data downloaded previously to the device."
_______ After the jump, one more very long but detailed and interesting pro-convergent case.
A reader sends in a link to this recent post by law professor Orin Kerr, on a ruling about how 4th Amendment protections against "unreasonable search and seizure" apply to email. The central question is whether the government needs to inform individual email users when their messages are seized and read -- or whether it is sufficient to notify their internet service provider or mail service, like Google or Yahoo. According to the logic of the ruling, by the sheer act of sending email, a user has transferred custody of the messages to a third party. Thus notifying the third party -- Google, Yahoo, et al -- is enough, with the sender left in the dark.
As that post describes, the legal comparison-drawing goes in many directions. Is "giving" an email to Yahoo like putting a package in a public storage locker? Is it like putting an envelope in a regular mailbox? Does it matter if the message is encrypted? Etc. But the reader's point is less about the ins and outs of this ruling than about the broader legal/privacy implications of storing information "in the cloud." When you're working in Google Docs, as opposed to using a spreadsheet or document that lives on your computer, have you essentially surrendered custody and control of that information? What if you rely on online "cloud" systems -- Carbonite, SugarSync -- to back up or sync your files? Have you given up custody of those files too? The reader writes:
"Based, in part, on your fondness ["your" referring to me, JF] for storing your documents in "the cloud" via third-party services like Sugarsync, Google Docs, etc., I thought you would this link interesting. [It concerns an opinion] concluding that email messages - even if they are entitled to 4th Amendment protection - can be retrieved by federal law enforcement authorities WITHOUT NOTICE TO THE SUBSCRIBER. The court's rationale - that the ISP is a "third party" rather than a file cabinet inside the target's "home" - would seem to apply perfectly well to documents stored in the cloud.
"My concern about such matters is one big reason I do not rely much on "cloud" services of which you are so fond. It's not that I have much about myself that is all that interesting to third parties. It's that, as a lawyer, I have an ethical obligation to protect client confidences. And - if [this] reasoning prevails nationwide - this becomes impossible to do if I were to receive no "notice" from the ISP that they had received a search (or already complied with) a warrant for my clients' personal stuff.
"To be clear, my clients are mostly indigent disabled people rather than individuals accused of criminal conduct, but - still - these sort of "big picture" issues are what a lawyer thinks about when he or she is deciding whether to make a wholesale migration to Sugarsync or Google Docs. And, for what it's worth, it is why I think Google and Sugarsync would be well served in joining together to lobby FOR a federal statute imposing strict privacy protection on documents stored in the cloud.
"There is no way I'm putting my business docs permanently online until this issue is clearly settled in favor of privacy. It would, in fact, be unethical for me to do so.... While having copies of all your stuff stored in the cloud may be vastly more convenient than having it in your home-office file cabinet - it is a vastly less safe "place" from a privacy standpoint."
I am not equipped to say more about the legal aspects here. But as a matter of politics and policy, I think the reader's recommendation is exactly right. All parties with a stake in developing cloud-based computing -- Google and Microsoft, IBM and Apple, Yahoo and anyone else you can name -- should push for clearer policy statements about keeping things private even in the cloud. People simply are going to store and share more information this way. That shouldn't mean a further, big, automatic, unintended surrender of privacy, and it would be better to set up rules to that effect before there's a big scandal or problem.
October 31, 2009
All-in-one post on all-in-one devices
Below and after the jump, highlights from many interesting dispatches on the "all in one" question: whether cameras, computers, e-readers, etc will naturally converge into one multi-purpose super-device -- or whether people will continue to carry separate cameras, laptops, e-readers, and so on. This is long but is meant as a wrap-up survey of views. (Update: in fact, there are a few more items for one more installment soon.) Thanks to many readers for their thoughts.
From a reader in Vietnam:
"If your all in one device crashes, then all your devices have crashed. If your cell phone crashes, only your cell phone has crashed. If your all in one is picked out of your pocket by a thief, they are all gone..."
From a reader in the US:
"In a sense, the all-in-one debate began with the laptop. The laptop bundles processor, hard drive, screen, keyboard, mouse, microphone, speakers, and webcam, all of which are inferior to their desktop relatives. Yet, laptops are extremely popular, certainly not eliminating desktop computers, yet replacing them much more than had been expected.
"One of the significant factors in that evolution is that the limited laptop is happy to be extended into greater desktop fullness. Some of the most elaborate and delicious desktop systems out there are extensions of laptops, such that, when the room full of hardware becomes an immobilizing anchor, the user can walk away with the all-in-one that everything plugs into. That kind of extensibility is the real next step in smart phones, one that we're only getting hints at, now. Yes, we will use specialized devices to take pictures, write books, watch full large screen movies, etc., but those devices will more and more be extenders of the all-in-one devices that will always be in our pockets, allowing us to do the full range of functions in small form when their extensions, for whatever the reason are not handy."
From a reader in the US on the Kindle-v-Nook point (yes, off topic, but on point):
"The main reason I have chosen not to buy the Kindle is Amazon. I view
Amazon as a threat to something I value almost as much as books.
"If I have to choose between Amazon's device or B&N's, I will choose
the latter. I want to support a company that maintains
brick-and-mortar bookstores. These kinds of business help to make
neighborhoods lively and livable. Moreover, only in real bookstores do
I discover so many books that I never would have thought to look for.
"Whereas Amazon's business model diminishes communities, Barnes and Noble makes a neighborhood better."
Below and after the jump, an extremely detailed Kindle/Nook compare and contrast from a well-informed reader, in response to this previous comment by someone on the Nook team. This is presented in the public interest for those interested in the future of e-reading. More on the "all in one device" front later today.
"1. Google Books linkup. It might be worth clarifying for your readers
that, like the Nook, the Kindle also can be used to read many
(increasingly most) books that are available in "Full" (as distinct
from Snippet or Preview) on Google Books. The only limitation is that
Google Books aren't accessible through the Amazon wireless link or
stored in the Amazon cloud -- and I haven't been able to figure out
from the Nook publicity whether that's going to be substantially
different for the Nook.
A person who was involved in Barnes & Noble's launch of the Nook sends this info about its positioning relative to the Kindle and other potential competitors. This person naturally has a bias in favor of the Nook, but this is interesting as a view onto B&N's thinking.
"Nook advantages "- More open with ePub, Android OS, and lending "- My guess is Amazon will copy lending "- In store WiFi. Users can go in stores and access lots of content from entire books to free publications. Len Riggio, founder and CEO of B&N fought to have comfortable seating in the stores and has prevailed against naysayers thought it would waste valuable space. I think you'll see even more space allotted to this. There's lots of space devoted to music that will be replaced with nook areas. "- The color touch display really brings the ease of use to ebooks much as Apple did with iPhones. "- Much larger bookstore that includes Google books "- Holding. Easier to grip with a contoured and soft touch back. Works equally well for right and left handed."
Again, this comes from an interested party, but it's worth bearing in mind as the product hits the market.
October 28, 2009
More on the "all in one device" debate
Below and after the jump, voice of the reading public on whether various electronic devices (camera, phone, e-reader, computer, what have you) will eventually converge in one super-duper device. I say No. The readers I quote here agree! And they have facts, tech specs, and so on to back up their/my case...
From a reader outside the US, on whether the coming pixel improvement in camera phones will be the magic moment when you no longer need a "real" camera:
"You probably know this, but they can cram 30 megapixels into a digital phone and it won't improve the picture quality much beyond 6 or 7MP. The hard-to-surmount-with-technology issue with tiny cameras is the width of the lens (how much light can come in). Other problems are focal length (hard to build a tiny zoom lens, although my old EX-V7 did a decent job of it) and the fact that a cellphone camera is bound to have a puny flash if any. Beyond a fairly low (well below the promised 10) threshold, adding megapixels is just a sales gimmick."
From a reader in the Midwest, on the general problem of all-in-one-ism:
"The are some obvious problems with the idea that there will eventually
be one device that is "good enough" to replace separate phones,
cameras, computers, etc.
"One is that the separate versions of these devices will continue to
improve. The pictures made with pocket cameras for example do indeed
rival the best film cameras of a few years ago. And they will get
better (and cheaper). A dedicated camera will always have more space
for a larger sensor (sensor size, not megapixels is the critical issue)
and as pocket cameras improve to the point where they can also take 720
or 1080p, 30fps video, they will maintain the performance advantages
they have over phones. And if today's consumers prefer separates, why
should they stop doing so when the performance of pocket cameras moves
from good to superb while the cost comes down?
After my gripe yesterday that Amazon and Visa should work out a kink in their billing plans, I heard from a lot of readers who'd had the same problem. (Gist: Amazon charges 15 or 30 cents for Kindle-related fees; Visa flags these micro-charges as likely fraud and freezes your card.) Here's a sample reply, which also includes a sensible fix:
"The charges are doubly surprising, because for that small rate I suspect Amazon pays more in Visa fees than it gets in money.
"I'm surprised they aren't doing what Apple does in the iTunes store. For a $0.99 purchase, Apple pre-authorizes your card for something like $10 and then, once your purchases accrue to a reasonable level, they actually run the larger charge on the accumulated purchases. The only way they will end up running a 99-cent charge is if you buy a track and then don't buy anything more until the pre-authorization is about to expire." _____
After my claim a few days ago that we were still a long way from the day of the "all in one" electronic device -- camera plus phone plus e-reader plus netbook plus personal groomer etc -- Derek Thompson elaborates on his views, and a reader writes in, to similar effect:
"It's a debatable point, for sure, but I think your time horizon is a little short and have missed some recognition of how much the era has already arrived.
"Only a few years ago, no digital camera could match a 'real' camera, and we're already at a point that consumer point-and- shoots rival film cameras from 5 years ago, aside from the lens flexibility that most people don't need. Give it a few more years and you'll see 10 megapixel cameras in cell phones. And while you probably will never want to put a cellphone photo of mom hanging over the mantle, we've already reached the point where cellphones are rivaling dedicated cameras and camcorders for the *volume* of photos and videos taken.
Packing for an airline trip. My wife online booking the next family trip. Keeps trying to confirm and pay for the tickets -- cheap advance purchase deal! System keeps rejecting the Visa card number she feeds it. Hmmmm. Am I going to have trouble using the card on the upcoming trip?
I continue to pack. She holds on the phone with Visa. Suddenly the answer is there: card has been frozen because of suspicious tiny transactions. One for thirty cents, one for forty-five. Just the kind of "probing" charge that credit card thieves attempt to see if a card number is good -- and that, for the same reasons, credit card companies block.
But wait a minute. These charges -- shown below -- were for the fifteen-cent conversion fees that Amazon charges when you mail it a .PDF or .DOC file to be sent to your Kindle. I was sending several files so I could read them on the plane. (The $1.25 charge is for my monthly Kindle version of the world's finest magazine -- better on paper, but this is a nice backup.) You can get files converted for the Kindle for free, but it means manually transferring them via your computer. I thought it was worth the seventy-five cents to skip that phase.
I can't be the first person to use a credit card for tiny Kindle charges. Maybe a little coordination to be worked out here, guys? Another opportunity for the Nook?
October 24, 2009
Nook, Kindle, Raz, NPR
On today's All Things Considered a hands-on comparison of Nook vs Kindle -- something I have not been able to do myself. (More from the interviewee, Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan, here.) I am agnostic about which is better -- or whether something by Apple or somebody else will ultimately be "the" right electronic reader. The one certainty is that the appearance of a new, attractive product from a strong competitor is good for everyone. Even, in an enlightened self-interest sense, for Amazon/Kindle itself, since real competition is likely to make this whole market larger and more viable.
Two more points on which I'm not agnostic are: Is this good for publishing? And, will we get used to reading this way? The answers are Yes, and Yes. Anything that makes it easier to spend money on books, as the Kindle undeniably does, has to be good in the long run for publishing and writers, despite some in-the-meantime disruptions. And I already find it as natural to read on the Kindle's screen as from a paperback. I still like the heft and feel of real books in the right circumstances, and magazines are night-and-day preferable to read in print. But these devices are clearly a step forward overall.
(PS: I disagree with the interesting post by the Atlantic Business Channel's Derek Thompson, who looks at the new e-readers and says that we're headed for a Swiss Army Knife-style combination of many different functions in a few all-purpose electronic gizmos. I'm skeptical because of the dozen previous times through the computer era in which that prediction has not panned out. "Real" cameras are still much better than in-phone cameras; the right device to carry in your pocket, as a phone or PDA, will always be worse to read on than a device with a bigger screen, which in turn is too big to fit in your pocket; keyboards are simply better than little thumbpads for entering more than a few words, and any device with a real keyboard has to be a certain size. So, sure, some things will be combined, but the all in one era is not at hand, and won't be.)
I was also on today's show in a "news analysis" spot, as I've done several times in recent weeks with the host, Guy Raz, this time talking about errant airplanes, Fox News, Baby Einstein, etc. I very much like the savvy and cultural mix of the show, and happily serve in the "someone has to dish up the liver and vegetables" capacity.
October 23, 2009
Win 7, Nook, and other tech follow ups
Windows 7: My wife will get it for the HP laptop she bought when we returned from China, since that qualifies for a free upgrade. Don't think I will myself. My original-Vista-blighted ThinkPad T60 is having so many other problems that I am keeping it alive purely for organ-farm purposes, serving as an extra hard disk on the home network. My three Macs (early 2008-vintage Air and Mini, new MacBook Pro) are all running WinXP in the Windows half of their brains, under VMware Fusion. Since installing Win7 on an XP machine involves backing up and removing all data, installing the OS from scratch, and then reinstalling all programs (the real stopper -- where are those install CDs?), making the switch does not seem worth it. Net result of three years of terrible experience with early Vista+ Lenovo-era ThinkPad: putting me onto a path that may keep me from ever seeing what's good with Win7. That's not quite true. Some day I'll get around to creating a Win7 "virtual machine" under Fusion and give it a try.
The advance reviews are all positive, eg this from Wired. (It must be said: Vista was supposed to be good too.) Most interesting Win7 review I've seen is this one from Philip Elmer-DeWitt.
Nook and Kindle: Via Chinese manufacturing- world contacts, I have known this was coming for a while. Looks nice (left), and even if it looked bad it would be a huge plus for the industry, the reading public, and the publishing world to have competition for Amazon and its Kindle. I say that as a member of a two-Kindle household who has spent a lot on e-books. I'll see if I can rationalize a "need" for the Nook at some point.
All e-readers apparently need to have somewhat weird names that include a "K." I suggest "Kewpie" for whichever one comes next. Or maybe "Amok." Keokuk? (Which has a charming little airport where I have landed.)
On the social-benefit potential of e-readers in general, David Rothman, who has been on this case since long before the Kindle was invented, has a new argument here.
October 22, 2009
Bad news, good news on the air-traffic beat
Bad news: further evidence that the worldwide GPS system, which is run by the US government and on which everything from airline navigation to iPhone mapping apps relies, is at risk of "browning out." Earlier mention of the problem, back in May, here, based on this government report. Update this month, from Avionics magazine, here. Talk about your deteriorating critical infrastructure! Headline below gives you the gist.
"Fixing GPS
"Almost half of the current
constellation of GPS satellites are at or approaching 'single thread'
operation, where a critical system failure could render a satellite
inoperative. What are the options for replacing GPS satellites?"
Now, the better news. Assuming that the GPS network gets tuned up in time, Scott McCartney, of the WSJ, explains some of the potential for better, more efficient, and safer airline navigation -- including over the vast oceanic "big blue data void" into which Air France 447 disappeared. The "NextGen" navigation systems McCartney describes have their strong supporters and critics, when it comes to specific configurations and timetables for the program. But a shift to some version of the new system is as inevitable, and McCartney explains clearly what the benefits can be.
Thanks to many tech-world friends for the lead. Eventually I'll make a separate "security theater" category for this site. For the moment, some previous entries here.
October 2, 2009
More about visualizing words
I mentioned two days ago the very nice tool for mapping word-use in presidential inaugural addresses, created by Jonathan Feinberg of IBM.
I should have mentioned the underlying open-ended tool Wordle, also by Feinberg, which allows you to create "word clouds" from any arbitrary piece of text (or web feed etc). You can find it here, and I've used it just now to create clouds from two recent Atlantic web posts. This is how one recent post about obesity-and-class looks when word frequency is converted to graphics (most of the contents here comes from readers' letters; click for larger):
And here is how my post from a few hours ago about David Petraeus's comments looks with a slightly different layout scheme:
No cosmic point here, but interesting. Try it out -- an email from the boss, company vision statement, etc.
September 21, 2009
I keep waiting for SECDEF Gates to do something really stupid ...
... and I'm sure his time will come. (Most likely occasion of error: Afghanistan.)
But for the moment, he keeps offering surprises in the opposite direction. Including last week, with this speech to the Air Force Association convention, the ending of which is exemplary in two ways.
For one thing, it ends with what used to be known in speechwriting land as an "ending," rather than the boilerplate that has become standard in presidential addresses. The ending is nothing special, but at least he tried. (And he didn't take a shortcut with "God bless the Air Force.")
More important is this peroration, which starts with an appreciation of Billy Mitchell and goes on to say:
"It strikes me that the
significance of Mitchell and his travails was not that he was always
right. It's that he had the vision and insight to see that the world
and technology had changed, understood the implications of that change,
and then pressed ahead in the face of fierce institutional resistance.
" The transformative figures of American air power - from Mitchell
to Arnold, LeMay to Boyd - had this quality in varying degrees. It is
one I look for in the next generation of Air Force leaders, junior and
mid-level officers, and NCOs who have experienced the grim reality of
war and the demands of persistent conflict. These are men and women we
need to retain and empower to shape the service to which they have
given so much."
Whoa! To have John Boyd -- fighter pilot, theorist of combat, unbelievably persistent thorn in the Air Force establishment's side from the late 1960s through his death a dozen years ago -- become part of an offhand, last-name-only allusion to the "transformative figures of American air power" is something like the moment when establishment economics began including "Keynes" in their list of major figures.* Gates had done homage to Boyd before, for instance as discussed here. But this is a further, interesting, and deserved step. The Gates-misstep watch perforce continues. ______ * For as much more as you would like to know about John Boyd, you can follow the links in this previous item, or of course read Robert Coram's wonderful biography Boyd. On the Keynes comparison, I don't mean that Boyd ideas have affected as many people in as many countries through as many decades as Keynes's have; but the vindication of ideas previously considered total heresy is comparable.
September 16, 2009
Discussion with John Podesta at Gov 2.0 conference
Last week Tim O'Reilly held his debut "Gov 2.0" conference in Washington. All the parts I saw were interesting and provocative. For a list of clips, podcasts, and so on, go here. For the record, here is a clip of a session I did with John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff and now head of the Center for American Progress. We decided to do it as a split-shift Q-and-A: first, improbably, he asked me questions, and then I asked him some. We ran out of time before I could get many details on something I really wanted to know about: what it was like to spend time with Kim Jong Il, when Podesta accompanied Bill Clinton to North Korea this summer.
September 13, 2009
Right of fair reply: Apple, Adobe, Broomfield
Several days ago, in the finale to a nerds-only discussion that began with a discussion of whether Apple's new "Snow Leopard" used "huge pages" and 64-bit code, I quoted several readers who didn't want their names used. They were objecting to previous comments by someone who had used his name, Ken Broomfield. He reasonably asks for the chance to defend his views. Below and after the jump, his reply, which fundamentally has to do with what he considers lapdog coverage of Apple in the press:
"The bigger point that animates me (and which only applies a little to
the Ars article) is that coverage of Apple and a lot of the popular
tech press in general is pretty fawning or fluffy. (Have you seen the
David Pogue kerfuffle?) It's a bit like the debate over healthcare
reform: the details are complicated and the history poorly understood,
so people often fall back on tribal affiliations (especially in the
Church of Appleology).
"The full story on 64-bit apps is even less complimentary to Apple.
Flu: Over the months, I have frequently remarked on the difference between the Chinese government's approach to H1N1/swine flu and that of many other countries. Difference in brief: the Chinese government has applied sweeping quarantine measures to try to keep the disease out of the country and then to limit its spread; many other countries have viewed the spread as more or less unavoidable and have tried to cope with the consequences.
(Photo from this previous post, about visiting Americans quarantined in Shanghai.) In all countries the emerging view seems to be: the flu has not been that dangerous so far, during this atypical, spring time emergence (in the Northern Hemisphere). But it might be a more serious problem when it comes back in new form during the regular flu season, as the weather gets cold.
A reader who has recently been in Beijing writes to make a point I have heard from a number of health professionals too:
"I'm not an immunologist or anything remotely close. But I wonder if China is actually hurting themselves by so aggressively stopping the spread of H1N1. The current incarnation of H1N1 seems to be less lethal than the variants that we normally deal with. Wouldn't it be better to let this variety of H1N1 spread so that people build up immunity to this mild version of H1N1 and then if H1N1 becomes more lethal they will already have some immunity?
"By the way, while I was at university this summer in Beijing, a student living on the sixth floor of a dorm became ill with H1N1 and the police came with buses and removed about 60 people from that floor."
The argument from the Chinese authorities is that in a big, poor country with a shaky public health network, they have no choice but to fight a new disease with everything they've got. Memories of the under-reaction to SARS in 2003 also have a Hurricane Katrina-style "let's not make that mistake again" effect. Given the inconvenience many people, Chinese and foreign, have already suffered in the name of flu control, I hope the hyper-aggressive early response to the flu doesn't backfire.
64-bit code: Last week, I declared a moratorium on discussion of "huge pages" in Apple's operating systems. (Hey, it was interesting at the time.) The reply below, for nerds only, qualifies in the spirit of fair-response. A reader writes:
"I have nothing to add to the "huge pages" discussion. I promise.
"But I would like address Mr. [Ken] Broomfield's closing statement which, I believe, is misleading:
Holiday festival of updates #3A: Back to Snow Leopard and "huge pages"
I declare this the last posting in this venue on whether Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system does or does not support the use of "huge pages" in memory addressing, as laid out previously in Holiday Update #3 here. But for completeness, I offer this report from the other side of the operating system divide:
"I'm a Software Engineer at Microsoft. Apple's smart enough to see how little use 4MB pages are and I doubt they will ever implement support any time soon.
"Huge pages hurt when the other factors at play are accounted for like memory fragmentation, additional memory used, cost of reading in 4 MB at a time from the disk. I think this has been tested on IA64 servers with huge amount of ram and it hurt not helped."
Let's add this to the list of "how big is the universe"-style endlessly debatable questions.
So many more updates, so few remaining holiday weekend hours.
September 5, 2009
Festival of updates #3: Snow Leopard and "huge pages"!
Nerds only. I mentioned yesterday that the elegant 23-page Ars Technica review of the new Mac Snow Leopard OS should give as much tech detail as "anyone" would want. Au contraire! (Someday I will learn to avoid saying "anyone," "everyone," "no one," etc.) After the jump, a remaining question apparently left unanswered even by Ars Technica -- namely, whether the latest Mac OS supports "huge pages." An explanation of what this is and why it matters, via reader and software guy Ken Broomfield, follows. This goes into the "there are always more details" category, and is offered as a public service.
Ken Broomfield writes:
"ArsTechnica deserves
a lot of credit for doing in-depth stuff like this that's becoming hard
to find anywhere except in dry, poorly-written journal articles (though
Ars has done less of this lately). But they lost me with this part,
about the desirability of a 64-bit OS X kernel:
>"Tracking 96GB of RAM requires 1.5GB of
kernel address space. Using more than a third of the kernel's address
space just to track memory is a pretty uncomfortable situation."<
More than you probably want to know about Snow Leopard
I expect to have a Mac OS X 10.6 / Snow Leopard install disk on hand for amusement over the Labor Day weekend. Between that and getting TV service re-connected -- after a month, we finally gave in -- it should be a full and satisfying few days.* What is this program they talk about, called "The Daily Show"?** And this man "Conan"?
On expository as much as purely technical grounds, I have to say something complimentary about the new 23-page-longreview of Snow Leopard by John Siracusa at ArsTechnica. It has technical analysis that should satisfy anyone so inclined. Eg, this diagram and accompanying discussion of Snow Leopard's use of the LLVM approach (Low Level Virtual Machine) and more generally the explanation of how the operating system is designed to do "more with more," that is, making use of the vastly-increased processing power of modern computers.
But the review also includes much more accessible discussion of the difference this system will make to ordinary users. The Go/No-go advice, which comes on page 23 of the review, is that for most users of Intel-based Macs it's an obvious Go, even though there will certainly be some bugs in this initial release. My main point for the moment is not to give advice one way or another about software upgrades but to note an impressive piece of technical writing.
UPDATE: Install disk was there when I got home; applied to one computer, MacBook Pro; finished in about 40 minutes with no problems or complications and appears to have freed up many Gigs of disk space.
UPDATE 2: After repeated attempts, the new OS has not installed on the MacBook Air, after easy handling of the MacBook Pro. This is no doubt due to the fundamental design compromise built into the MBA. To make the system unbelievably light and elegant, a lot of "basic" features were left out, like its own DVD/CD slot. So it installs programs or plays music only from "remote" discs, namely those on other machines in the same local network. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. I'll try tomorrow with hard-wired rather than Wifi connections.
UPDATE 3: Well, it looks like the failed-install to the MacBook Air had a silver lining. Have tried out all my normal programs and utilities on the Pro; all seem to work without problem on the new OS. Except, I just now learn, the beloved "K4" -- the Adobe-based production software we use to edit, lay out, and put together every article in the magazine. Hmmmm. Maybe I'll pretend I did get Snow Leopard installed on all my computers, so I have an excuse to miss the next few deadlines. Or not bother to install it on the MBA, and stick with that for actual work. _____
*For the record, Snow Leopard will go on the household's three Macs, which are also running Windows XP under VMware Fusion; the poor ThinkPad T60 that was blighted with the original, unworkable version of Vista will be left in tech hospice to sputter out its last days; and my wife's new HP laptop, replacing one that died on our very last day in China, not only has the much-less-objectionable latest release version of Vista but also an upgrade certificate for Windows 7, which will be applied in due course.
** Just a little joke. I know it's on summer hiatus; even in China I could see it on computer, though boy does the Great Firewall slow down video feeds.
September 1, 2009
Gmail down -- and now back up!
This is broadly known in the tech world, but for the purposes of the Atlantic's site this will be the official announcement that: for at least the last hour, Gmail has been inaccessible through most of the normal means-of-access. OTOH, I am still getting Gmail messages on my Blackberry, since I have Gmail set up to bounce a copy of all incoming info there. So some of the lower-brainstem functions of Gmail are still intact. Depending on how long this takes to clear up -- next few minutes, another hour or two -- will no doubt set off various speculation about the vulnerability of cloud computing, about whether there are some aspects of scale too vast even for the unimaginably vast collection of Google servers, whether Twitter (now ablaze with reports) could be brought down in collateral damage, and so on. All of that in due course. Right now, it's like living through real-time tech history!
5:14 pm EDT: It's back! At least for the moment. Will be interesting to hear this sleuthed out.
My new software favorite: Personal Brain (updated)
What is my purpose on Earth? Raising my children? Being as good and supportive a husband to my wife as (the movie version of) Paul Child was to Julia in the new film? Working for world peace and sustainable environmental development and a more humane society? Helping keep my magazine afloat?
Yeah yeah yeah.
I often think that my real purpose, apart from dreaming about getting back into aviation and tennis (and, gulp, finishing the next book), is to tinker with every piece of "interesting" software that anyone can cook up. I've written about dozens of them over the years, and still have many of them at close reach on my computer. Lotus Agenda -- the "spreadsheet for words" that was invented in the early 1990s, then cruelly orphaned by Lotus, but is still handy now. BrainStorm -- an outlining and list- based program. It is ultra-minimalist, text only, straight from the DOS age -- but after Symantec's also-tragic orphaning of the best-loved-ever outliner, GrandView, BrainStorm is often the place I turn. (Part of that bittersweet outliner history, from Dave Winer, here.) And of course Zoot, which I have used since the early 1990s and wrote about in the Atlantic 12 years ago. For all its info-organizing power, Zoot has in the past few years begun showing its age. Like BrainStorm, it is text-only and has no way even to underline or highlight important text. Also, it is too Web-friendly. But its lone-genius creator, Tom Davis of Delray Beach, FL, has been working on an all new, web-connected version, which is now in beta testing and which I'll sign up for as soon as it's released.
But for the moment: Personal Brain, from TheBrain software in Marina del Rey, California. I'm in that familiar and always-enjoyable phase of feeling: this program is really interesting, and let's see how it fits the way I think and work.
The idea of the program is to connect any item -- a call you want to make, a web site you want to quote, a PDF file you want to read, or even an entire project you're beginning -- with any other, in a flexible variety of relationships. FWIW, the program calls its items "thoughts." Here's an idea of how some of the connections look, in a view that shows many projects for which I'm collecting info or am working on.
As I've mentioned many times (start here and follow links), SugarSync has become one of those tools I rely on 24/7. Over the past year, I've used it as a kind of personal-scale "cloud" letting the three Macs and two PC/laptops in our household share and sync the same files. I work on a Word or Excel file* on a desktop machine in my office. When I'm done, I save the file on that machine. Then I use any of my other machines, anyplace else, and I can open up the current version of that same file, without ever manually transferring anything. (The computers do need a network connection to sync up, but they don't have to be connected at the same time.)
For the last few months, this has worked with the BlackBerry too. I revise an article in the evening. The next morning, on the street, I can look at the current version of it on the BlackBerry. I've never actually done that, but in theory I could. And I have actually come to take for granted that all my machines will always have the latest version of the work I've done on any of them. Many times I have edited my own files from someone else's computer or a public computer at a net cafe, connecting to my own little cloud. There are other services that can do some comparable things, but this is the easiest one I'm aware of.
Late last month, SugarSync announced that the system would work on Android devices. (Android = Google's free operating system for phones and other mobile devices.) For example, if you had photos on your office computer and wanted to show them to someone when you were traveling, you could see them via the phone, in either small or large versions. That's what the photo to the left, from the SugarSync site, shows. Or you could check the actual content of many kinds of files from your phone.
I mention this news for three reasons. First, on karmic principles. Products that work deserve not just to be taken for granted but also to be recognized. Second, the Android market is itself potentially interesting. As "netbooks" -- cheap, simple computers designed to work in the cloud rather than storing much data themselves -- become more popular, the significance of free operating systems will grow. If a "normal" computer costs around $1000, another $50 or so for the operating system (ie, Windows) is not that big a deal -- a 5% add-on. For a $300 netbook, it's a much bigger hit. So whether netbooks really catch on, and what OS the manufacturers put on them, will matter a lot to Microsoft and everyone else.
Third, the all-fronts onrush of the "cloud computing" age, illustrated by the very existence of products like SugarSync and Android, highlights the one big exception to that movement. This is also the one big reason why I, at least, still have to spend time thinking about what parts of my data are on what machines.
That exception is Microsoft Outlook, and the enormous .PST files it generates. PST files amass all email, appointments, contents, and tasks you are dealing with in Outlook. The correspondence I have in my Gmail accounts and the appointments in Google Calendar exist separately from whatever machine I am using. The same is now true of .DOC and .PDF files -- and in fact everything, except for PSTs, which are hard to keep anyplace except on your own machine. Their scale is one factor: very quickly they reach into the tens or hundreds of MB size. More important is that every time you use Outlook, all of the .PST files you have open are all marked as being "changed," even if you have altered a single byte. It is as if every time you loaded Word, every .DOC file was marked as being changed and had to be newly backed up.
The combination of huge file size, and constantly re-written status, means that virtually no "cloud" system can really handle .PSTs. It would be stuck in an endless loop of re-backing up and syncing them. So what I do is keep track of which .PSTs I have actually changed in any given session (usually the active one, and a main archive file), and copy only those from machine when I have to travel. Yes, I know very well that there are utilities that would let me convert all my archived .PSTs from the past dozen years into Gmail or something else that could live in the cloud. Some day I will do that and leave Outlook altogether, now that Gmail has a works-most-of-the-time Offline feature. But on any given day, it hasn't seemed worth the bother.
Why do I mention this? I don't think it's an intended part of Outlook's design, which was conceived long before the cloud era. But whatever the intention, at the moment it's a powerful lock-in / sea-anchor factor resisting the movement to operations purely in the cloud. ___
* or one from Personal Brain, or Scrivener, or Zoot, or DevonThink, or any of the other programs I actually use 24/7 to do my work. For another time: more about how they work separately and together.
August 12, 2009
Apropos of nothing: new Joe Henry album available on NPR
In a feature I hadn't paid attention to while overseas, NPR has over the past year offered "Exclusive First Listens" to entire new albums on line. Today: an hour's worth of Blood From Stars by the wonderful bluesy guitarist-singer Joe Henry.
The trick is that the full-length streaming audio is turned off once the album officially goes on sale. Thus the past-events listing includes full-length sessions from Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Moby, etc -- but none of the music is still there. (The oldest still-available entry is from one week ago.) If you click on the older sessions, you're taken to an Amazon or iTunes purchase site. Fair enough: this is one more interesting twist in the vast, varied, and necessary series of experiments now underway to see how "content," from music to movies to news articles, can be "monetized" in the age when so much of it can be copied or used for free.
I mention it for that reason -- and also because anyone who, like me, hadn't known of the feature might find it worthwhile. Certainly this Joe Henry music is great. Check it out while it is there.
July 31, 2009
My new favorite gadget: Livescribe Pulse pen
Where was this thing when I got started in journalism many eons ago??? Yes, yes, I know, the electric typewriter was the frontier of writerly technology back then; and being able to use this device as of 2009 is a lot better than never having found it at all. But if you're in any line of work that involves recording what you're hearing or seeing around you, give this serious consideration.
Here's how it works: The somewhat plump looking, cigar-sized item, propped on a pack of special notebooks above and below, is both a ballpoint pen -- and a very sensitive, high-quality, high-capacity tape recorder. I find it better than the digital recorders I've previously used in picking up voices in real-life circumstances, including interviews in crowded restaurants, auditoriums, airport tarmacs, etc. The pen I have holds up to 2GB worth of recordings -- many many many hours' worth.
But in addition to recording sound, the pen also includes a very small camera at its tip, which many times per second takes pictures of whatever you are writing in the special notebooks. You don't have to use the notebooks or write anything at all, and can just treat the system as a normal recorder. But if you do write something in the notebook, the pen registers exactly what sound you were hearing at exactly the moment you are writing a certain word, letter, or doodle. Then when you want to hear the recording, you can point the pen to that word and hear what was being said at the time. More on how it works here.
What does this mean in practice? Suppose you're having an hour-long interview, in my case -- or listening to an hour-long lecture as a student, or sitting through an hour-long business meeting. When something comes up that you want to remember, you can write a note at just that point ("Interesting point about Poland") and later go back to get just that part of the conversation. You do so by touching the pen's tip to the relevant phrase in the notebook, or moving your cursor to it on a stored online image of the page. No searching through the whole hour's recording; no need to make sure you write down every detail in real time. I have used this often enough over the past two months to know that it really works, and to rely on it.
I shouldn't say too much about another aspect of the system, but still: people who see you using the pen will know that it looks a little funny, compared with normal pens. But they might not know that it's a functioning tape recorder. Unless you tell them, as I have been careful always to do. So far.
Seriously, check it out. Windows and Mac; archives your recordings on your computer and/or in the cloud. My 2GB version retails for $199; models and prices here.
Tech explanation, if you're interested: pages of the special notebooks, which cost $5 and up in various configurations, are covered with virtually-invisible microdots. The pen's camera maps the exact dot it is over with the corresponding exact moment of sound recording. Later when you point at that word -- with the pen in your notebook, or with a mouse on a stored online image -- it immediately comes up with the associated part of the recording. For the record and because this often needs to be pointed out in the world of tech journalism: I paid for the system. Also: the pen I originally had developed tech problems and would unexpectedly stop recording partway through a session. The company said it had never heard of such failures before, fwiw. In any case they replaced it with a new one, which has worked faultlessly.
July 29, 2009
Tech notes: Bing v Google
SInce its debut a few weeks ago, Microsoft's search engine Bing has received a lot of respectful press attention, from sources that range from David Pogue of the NYT to Derek Thompson of our own Atlantic Business Channel.
I agree about the attractive potential of many Bing UI features. But in the last while I've tried using it as a tool for actual work, and have found one consistent result: It doesn't cover as much data, or comparably fresh data, as Google does. An illustration that came up just now:
For reasons I won't get into, I wanted to track some recent comments by one-time NY Lt. Governor Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey about the Obama Administration's health care proposals. Ms. McCaughey has had three big moments in the spotlight in talking about medical care. One happened in the early Clinton years, when she was a prominent (and, as I argue here, completely misinformed and destructive) voice opposing "Hillarycare." Another was early this year, when she again launched a willfully misinformed attack, this time on "Obamacare." The third is just this month, when she has come up with another wild assertion about provisions of Obama's plan.
I wanted to track what she'd been saying recently, so I went to both Bing and Google and entered "Betsy McCaughey Obama health care proposal." The side-by-side results are below, from the very useful Bing-vs-Google site. Click for legible full-screen version:
What you'd see if you could read these listings -- and what you'll probably see if you run the same search for yourself -- is that on Google all of the first screen and most of the next few are about McCaughey's recent comments. The top hit was 8 minutes old when I ran the search. But the lead items on Bing and most of the first screens are about her comments back in February. The first item there is from February 9, and there isn't much at all about what she's said this summer. (If you run the search again now, Bing might have caught up.)
I have found this in other searches too. Bing's approach is interesting and can be useful. But it just doesn't seem to cover as much stuff. I'm always skeptical of the significance of "total results found" in any search engine. But the different you can see on the screenshot above -- 24,700 for Bing, versus 426,000 for Google -- feels about right as a gauge of the difference in the two systems' scope.
Yes, yes, too much information can be as bad as too little. Yes, Bing is presenting itself as a "decision" tool rather than a pure search engine. But most of what I do is outright searching, and for that it does not yet seem a real contender.
(Offsetting disclosures: I once worked at Microsoft; I have good friends both there and at Google.)
July 28, 2009
Speaking of industrial glamor
Or at least technological glamor, there may be new hope for Microsoft among the hip.
Thirty seconds in is the part that makes it all worthwhile to me. No, not any frogs involved, but the nextbest thing. Thanks to Dave Proffer.
July 26, 2009
Climate pushback #2 (of 2)
After the jump, excerpts from a few more readers with thoughts to add, in response to this and this, about the notorious famed "hockey stick" chart and the general state of the climate-change debate.
I'll let these speak for themselves -- and also let them wrap up the discussion in this space for the time being.
But a note about a point that could use re-assertion What attracted me to Richard Muller's book "Physics for Future Presidents" and still does, despite varied complaints about parts of its argument, is that it tries to do something that too few experts and specialists bother with. It attempts to explain the way scientists approach complex issues of public policy. How they weigh evidence. What they're skeptical of and convinced by. How they think about data that never perfectly fits -- and how they try to discern general trends even when particular details are messy. I was using this in contrast to a George Will column breezily asserting that a decade of flat temperatures (a claim that itself is disputed, to put it mildly) said something significant about longer-term climactic trends.
How many other experts even try to do this? Explaining their manner of thinking -- which is more valuable than their judgment on any particular point? Rather than simply asserting that they are right on the basis of their expertise. Historians Richard Neustadt and Ernest May -- both unfortunately now dead, both men I admired greatly when taking their classes -- notably did so in their book Thinking in Time, which tried to explain how historical analogies could inform -- mislead. I have not yet read Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think, but the title is certainly promising in this sense. I have read The Art and Science of Politics, by Harold Varmus, and it's a fine example of this approach. Atul Gawande's justly celebrated New Yorker report (on why medical costs were so much higher in one Texas city than another) was great because he applied his knowledge as a physician to explain how other doctors did their work. The Galbraiths -- John Kenneth, and now his son James, especially with Predator State -- earned the suspicion (and envy) of many fellow economists by trying to explain what was right and wrong about economic reasoning to lay readers. To avoid the risk of offending by omission, I'll stop here (rather than talking about lawyers, engineers, biologists, teachers, etc.
The entire purpose of Richard Muller's book was to convey how people trained in the hard sciences make their way through the contradictory signals from the real political world. That is worth noting, no matter what you think about his view on the "hockey stick."
Climate pushback #1, from Al Gore's office and others
I will try to do this in two omnibus posts, rather than opening up a running weeks-long discourse. After all, that treatment is reserved for frogs, the China Daily, "starchitecture," and similar topics, of which there is more in the pipeline.
But in response to two recent items, here and here, on how to think about climate change, I have received a ton of email, all in one mode: ie, telling me I am wrong.
The original reason I raised the topic was that I'd seen the latest entry in George Will's ongoing series on why global warming is a myth. In response, I mentioned a book by a UC Berkeley physicist about how to assess the evidence on climate change, and why the problem was indeed worth worrying about, if not for the reasons most often discussed.
My correspondents barely bothered to deal with Will. They were instead upset about the physicist, Richard Muller, and by extension me for being too complacent about climate-change evidence -- and too critical of those (including Al Gore) who had warned about it most prominently.
Below and after the jump, representative samples of this view. Later tonight, I'll put up a few more messages, and the appropriate meta-thoughts on my part. Unless I hear from Muller, or something else occurs, that will be it for now -- simply because I am well aware that detailed argument over studies, policies, and implications already occupies many sites full time. (For instance, this and this, with different perspectives.)
First up, Joseph Romm, of the Climate Progress site and the book Hell and High Water, whom I have known for years. Because he wrote me privately, I won't go into his views of my judgment or Muller's. But here are the references he thinks people should instead read:
-Romm has written two critiques of Muller's book, here and here.
-According to Romm, "The 'hockey stick,' was essentially vindicated by the National Academy of
Sciences, and it is almost certainly correct." Cite here.
- "Gore's essential argument is correct and other than a very few technical
quibbling with word choice, pretty every one on his major carefully crafted
statements is accurate. His Nobel Prize will, sadly, be vindicated by
history." [Note from JF: 'An Inconvenient Truth' also included a particularly egregious display of boiled-frog madness, which maybe we will assign to the realm of "technical quibbling with word choice." Ie, if he had said, "if you remove a frog's brain and put him in a top of tepid water, then gradually raise the temperature..." he'd be square with the scientists.]
The point of the previous item about how scientists think about public policy, which referred to Richard Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents, was that many scientific issues are too complex to be resolved in op-ed columns. Or even Atlantic website posts!
But several people have asked for elaboration of this sentence I quoted from Muller:
"An example of distortion is the melting of the Antarctic ice --
something that actually contradicts the global warming model but is
presented as if it verifies them."
What's the logic there? My main answer is, read the book! But to be more responsive, here's the reasoning in a nutshell (my paraphrase, alongside USGS map of Antarctica):
Higher temperatures (ie, "global warming") would mean more evaporation from the oceans. That would mean more clouds, which over Antarctica would mean more snow. (The air over Antarctica would be warmer, but on average still well below freezing.) More snow would mean more Antarctic ice, not less. Yet the Antarctic ice cover is decreasing, not increasing.
"Does the decrease in ice mean that the model is wrong -- that global warming is not taking place?" Muller asks. "No, not at all. It simply shows the inadequacies of the model. Even with global warming, local weather (even for a whole continent) can cause behavior that deviates from the computer calculation. One result is certain: the melting of Antarctica provides no evidence whatsoever in favor of global-warming predictions." He then goes on to discuss other evidence that does support the predictions. To be 100% clear about it: Muller is not at all a "denialist" about climate change. Eg: "Global warming is real. It is very likely caused by humans. By the end of the twenty-first century it will (if caused by humans) grow enough to be disruptive." He is just urging readers and policy makers to be precise about what the evidence shows and doesn't show.
You know where to go for more.
UPDATE: this site, from NASA, allows you to create your own maps showing how much the average temperature in different parts of the world has risen over any interval you choose since 1880. For instance, this map, below, shows surface temperature differences in June, 2009 versus a 1951-1980 average baseline:
More here from Michael Goodfellow of Free the Memes.
July 23, 2009
Compare-and-contrast reading on climate change
This morning George Will offered another in his series of reassuring columns about the "overstated" threat of climate change. Today's version:
"When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called
upon 'young Americans' to 'get a million people on the Washington Mall
calling for a price on carbon,' another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: 'If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult
life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global
warming since you entered first grade.'
"Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful
clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S.
government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the
sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a
closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was
dying."
Will presented the lack of youthful clamor as a sign of wholesome common sense. If you would like another way to think about the evidence, this one provided not by a columnist but by a physicist at UC Berkeley who has won a MacArthur grant, I recommend Richard A. Muller's book Physics for Future Presidents. I happened to read most of it on a long plane flight yesterday, so I was all set for Will's column today. So you can be ready before his next one appears, I recommend ordering the book now.
Muller is not at all in the most-alarmist group of climate scientists; indeed, he spends a lot of time explaining why he thinks Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth exaggerated the threat in several ways. You can see the beginning of his dissection of Gore's famous "hockey stick" chart of rising temperatures, which begins on page 292 of Muller's book, through a Google book-search excerpt here. (The hockey stick, below)
Muller says that the evidence behind the hockey-stick chart is wrong. (Read it yourself to see why.) "In fact, much of what the public 'knows' about global warming is based on distortion, exaggeration, or cherry picking," he says, adding:
"An example of distortion is the melting of the Antarctic ice -- something that actually contradicts the global warming model but is presented as if it verifies them. Exaggeration includes the attribution of Hurricane Katrina to global warming, even though there is no scientific evidence that they are related. Cherry picking is the process of selecting data that verify the global-warming hypothesis but ignoring data that contradict it."
The real purpose of his book is to set out as clearly as possible the way scientists approach the inevitably-conflicting evidence on big public policy issues like climate change (or the real risks of terrorism, or dealing with nuclear waste). Before the Iraq war, it would have been useful for intelligence officials to set out the way they balance their version of inevitably-conflicting and always-incomplete facts. Muller sets out the way climate scientists weigh the evidence pro and con concerning climate change and the probabilities for each explanation.
By the end of the process he has forcefully re-established the principle that real scientists view propositions as most convincing when all the doubts, caveats, and contrary bits of evidence are admitted -- whereas politicians and the public want to hear an all-or-nothing verdict with no hems or haws. Consistent with this approach, it is all the more powerful when Muller concludes that there really are reasons to worry about man-made climate change. He also provides guidelines about sensible and fanciful ways to deal with the problem. I am not equipped to judge this argument on purely scientific grounds; but the book is addressed to lay readers and is convincing in what it says about the process of scientific reasoning. If this latest George Will opus serves to drive readers to Muller's book, it will have done some good.
July 21, 2009
Raptor down (budgetarily)
I emerge from the land of no internet or email to hear about today's crucial Senate vote to delete funding for additional F-22 "Raptor" fighter planes. For why this was an even-more-crucial-than-it-seems sign of whether the new Administration was serious about SecDef Robert Gates' impressive speeches about bringing rationality to defense spending, see here, here, here, and here, for starters. For much more about the F-22 from the Project on Government Oversight, here, and from the Center for Defense Information here. For a summary of why the vote matters, consider this statement from retired Army General Paul Eaton, of Iraq fame, from the National Security Network:
"In stripping $1.75 billion in funds to build seven more F-22 Raptors from the Defense Authorization bill, the Senate has brought our military spending one step closer to matching America's military priorities for the 21st century. The Cold War relic was a symbol of the outdated, unnecessary, and expensive weapon systems that have burdened our defense budgets for far too long....Misplaced defense budget priorities such as additional funding for the F-22 both constrained America's military from adequately addressing the threats we face today and took money away from more essential strategic imperatives."
This issue isn't over -- the House still has to act, and there is the conference etc. And we are nowhere close to having a defense budget that is "rational" in some larger sense. But on both merits and symbolism, this is a significant moment. And as matter of political anthropology, it seems as if President Obama's atypically hard-line promise to veto the entire spending bill if it included more money for the Raptor had its effect.
July 12, 2009
Atlantic interview with Eric Schmidt
As part of the series of shortish interviews of big shots by Atlantic staffers at the Aspen Ideas Festival, our they-never-sleep web team has posted this Q-and-A between me and Eric Schmidt of Google:
Good. Pilot of a Cirrus SR-22 gets into trouble while flying over North Carolina but has an option. As the Mount Airy News reports, the pilot
"...was at 6,000 feet when he declared an emergency, pulled the
parachute his plane was equipped with, let go of the control panel and
floated to the ground about one and a half miles into the woods off
Still Water Lane. "[He] was able to walk away from the site
and place a call to 911 to inform them he was searching for emergency
personnel and thought he had spotted some of them looking for him."
There are other recent developments involving Cirrus. (Positive: increasing production rate and recalling workers as worldwide sales pick up. Negative: found partly liable by a Minnesota jury for millions in damages after a crash in which a non-instrument rated pilot took off before dawn in bad weather and was killed, along with his passenger. The NTSB traced the probable cause of the accident to the "pilot's improper decision" to attempt the flight at all. More on these another time.)
Not so good. Beautiful and elegant Beaver float plane crashes while attempting takeoff near Anchorage last week. (Via Eric Redman.) Not-so-bad aspects: No one apparently hurt, and remarkable minute-long YouTube video shot by unbelievably gutsy young cameraman.
Constructive: In response to an airline pilot's observation, here, that he typically has less up-to-date weather info available in the cockpit than pilots of modern small planes like the CIrrus do, former FAA and DOT official Andrew Steinberg writes to say:
"What strikes me on reading this discussion is that
the slow pace of implementation of the NextGen air traffic system -- here
and in Europe -- means that we don't prevent these preventable accidents
(if it turns out that weather caused the demise of this [Air France 447] flight).
As you may remember, providing integrated weather displays to pilots, as
well as controllers, is a key part of the Next Gen effort. It's absurd
that commercial pilots don't have these tools. An article describing
how the weather product fits into Next Gen is attached."
The article in question is here. As for the difference this might or might not have made to the Air France flight itself, which got in trouble over the open sea, another correspondent says:
"You know what we (meteorologists) call the oceanic regions? "The big blue data void. "It is hard to explain that to people who only look at CONUS." [Continental US, which has radar stations and other monitoring tools wherever you look.]
And another airline pilot writes in to say:
Your point on higher-tech and more real-time weather information being available for GA ["general aviation," small private plane] pilots versus airline pilots is well taken, but disregards an important advantage us 121 [airline] pilots have over aircraft with these XM weather uplinks....
I fly for a Northwest, now Delta, regional and we have access to the same ACARS delivered weather updates as the big boys. [ACARS is an automated data-collection service that shares info among planes in the air.] Granted they are delivered in text and require manual plotting, but once done they are very accurate and enormously effective. Base and/or composite reflectivity radar maps can be very deceiving to a pilot flying at FL370, since a lot of the weather depicted on those maps is very low. ACARS coordinates and altitude of cell tops is often much better information, especially when considering whether to pick your way through a line at night or take a long detour. In addition the dispatchers themselves [airline employees who monitor the flights from the ground], being another human in the loop with even more information, can be invaluable in saving your bacon. Between myself, my FO [first officer], and my dispatcher, I've got three eyes on the problem- which I'd take over any Nexrad/XM maps any day of the week.
Now I admit I'm spoiled flying as I do mostly over the continental US. Transoceanic would be somewhat trickier given, as you say, the dearth of other traffic over the same route serving as guinea pigs. That said, given what I know about the resources available to the Air France pilots, I am at a loss for why they found themselves on the midst of such a violent storm.
Also constructive: Carl Malamud, the inveterate crusader for making "public" information truly available to the public, has put online a variety of Federal videos related to aviation, here. This is part of his larger FedFlix effort to digitize films and videos produced by the government, and his even larger PublicResource.org campaign for opening up public data.
About the internet, the Atlantic, and Iran
In coverage of Iran over the past week and especially in these last few days, Andrew Sullivan has on his site illustrated the way the internet and related technologies have permanently changed journalism for the better. So have a number of other people at other sites, which have made themselves clearinghouses for information coming out of Iran in emails, blog posts, camera-phone and ad hoc video transmissions, and other forms including, yes, Twitter feeds. Collectively they've let the outside world know more about what is happening in a would-be sealed-off country, and given people inside that country a place to share and compare news as they could not possibly have done even a few years ago.
This fact is worth noting its own right, as a moment when we see that something truly new and positive has occurred. It's also worth observing in light of the many seemingly-permanent changes for the worse in journalism that have coincided with the internet era, whether or not they've been caused by it.
If I'm not mentioning anything about Iran at the moment, it's not because I think the news unimportant but rather because I have no contacts in the country and nothing to add to the discussion. As we follow developments there it's worth recognizing the different era in communications that has begun.
Coincidence? Paranoia? Virus?
Perhaps this is a statistically improbable, but sometimes-it-happens, no-reason-for-it anomaly. But for the record:
Within a two-hour period this evening, as we pack to head to the airport tomorrow, (1) my wife's HP laptop, running WinXP, suddenly froze while she was using it, and since then has been entirely unresponsive on repeated attempts to boot up; and then (2) exactly the same thing happened to my ThinkPad T60, running (sigh) Win Vista, which I have used for the past year strictly as a storage and backup machine, for photos and similar high-volume stuff. Identical symptoms: failure to boot, black screen on startup, not even any hard disk sound. (Exasperation with Vista, and with the craplets Lenovo has added to my long-beloved ThinkPad line, made me switch my working platform to Mac + VMWare Fusion running WinXP early last year.)
Could be that both of them are flat worn out after three years here. And collapsing with the end hours away. Just like, ahem, us. Could be. But if it turns out that some new Windows- based virus is making its way around the world, H1N1-like, you can consider this Patient Zero. Would be strange if it affected two different releases of Windows on two different kinds of machines. But pure coincidence would be strange too. Both had AVG Avast! anti-virus up and running, and both using VPNs at time they were struck down.
FWIW, MacMini and MacBook Air still chugging along. (This is not a product point, simply describing the situation.) And THANK HEAVEN for SugarSync, which has full backups of all four of our computers nestled safely in the Cloud. Time to finish that last bottle of Yanjing beer, Beijing's answer to REEB, and get ready for tomorrow's flight.
June 9, 2009
An Airbus captain on getting into bad weather
Regarding one of the puzzles of the Air France 447 crash -- how a professional air crew ended up in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm -- an airline pilot writes:
As a point of reference I'm an A-320 Captain for NWA (soon to be Delta but happy to be getting a paycheck) with over 12,000 hours. While I agree that it's entirely possible and perhaps even likely that the Air France 447 crew did indeed proceed into an area that they shouldn't have I can say that if his radar isn't up to snuff or if they misinterpreted the presentation there are no other resources for them in that situation. At least over the continental US we have other aircraft reports and ground controllers who can make suggestions.
Most civilians (non aviators would I guess be a better term) are quite surprised to find that they have better access to up to date weather resources while sitting at home on the computer than I do. Once I'm airborne it's just the radar and who I can talk to on the radio (ATC, other aircraft, my dispatcher). While I'm told that modern business jets have satellite links to provide views and weather from various vantage points we who carry the most people do not. At main stations I can pull up numerous local and regional radar presentations which are very helpful. However when operating out of small stations this isn't always possible and once I get into my aircraft I'm blind except for the radar in the nose of the jet. It works well but it isn't foolproof, if I could see the same things airborne that I can while at a computer terminal we, my aircraft and passengers, would all benefit.
If any good can come of this accident I hope it will lead to a discussion and implementation of better weather resources for the airline industry. I'm proud of what we do and our overall safety record but this is one area where we could make great advances.
This is an important area where, strangely, small airplanes are actually better equipped for safety than most airliners. (Airliners are safer in just about every other way, from crew training to redundant backup systems, and despite the recent disasters are amazingly safe overall.) Starting in the early 2000s, handheld or tablet-sized displays capable of showing near-real-time Nexrad weather came onto the aviation market. They got the data via satellite services like XM/Sirius and could display info about storms, winds, and airport conditions that was only a few minutes old. Here's how a popular recent tablet model, the Garmin 696, looks. Its display screen is 7" diagonally, large enough to be very useful.
It can match the airplane's path to nearly-current radar information
(as with the storms shown in central Florida, above). Everyone
emphasizes that such displays are for "strategic" rather than "tactical" guidance
-- giving you a general idea of places to avoid, rather than tempting you to try to slalom your way around the worst parts of a storm.
Other
displays are mounted right on the panel and show how the plane's path
matches the surrounding terrain and any other planes in the vicinity,
along with the weather. This is a Cirrus cockpit, a fancier and more modern version of the kind of small plane I used to fly, with the weather (plus route, traffic, terrain, etc) displayed on the right-hand screen.
I don't know how much good these displays would do over the open ocean -- where, after all, there are no ground-based radar stations to support Nexrad-style displays. But more info, and more recent info, is always better -- and the captain is right about this literal blind spot for most airliners, which should be corrected.
May 26, 2009
Herdict: now, in Arabic and Chinese!
Several months ago I mentioned a new web site from Harvard's Berkman Center called "Herdict," which allows people around the world to pool information about web sites being blocked.
For instance: late last year, I suddenly found that I couldn't reach the New York Times web site from my apartment in Beijing without using a VPN, and I heard from a friend in Shanghai that she was having trouble too. We didn't know if it was a problem on the Times's end, coincidental problems with our local connections, some other unknown issue -- or a conscious crackdown in China. As it emerged, Chinese officials had imposed a nationwide blackout on the NYT site. But it took a while to determine what was going on.
Herdict is meant to be a quick, crowdsourced way of reporting such developments -- and it has recently come out with Chinese and Arabic language versions of its site. It looks as if it's getting more traffic than the last time I checked a few months ago, but it could use more participants to produce finer-grained reports. Even now it's a quick way for people in, say, China to figure out that if they're having problems reaching YouTube, Blogger, China Digital Times, or Huffington Post, the fault lies not with them but with the Great Firewall. A useful tool.
May 23, 2009
Wrapup on papers, Craigslist, etc
Thanks for numerous responses to yesterday's message from my Google friend about how newspapers could, and presumably still might, take advantage of the shift to web-based advertising. Short version: the need to have the business (as opposed to purely journalistic) swagger of predecessors like William Randolph Hearst:
Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
This is a very thoroughly discussed issue, so only a few reactions -- then back to queued-up reactions on Chinese education!
First, from a reader in Australia, about what brought on the crash and a hoped-for solution:
My wife owns a boutique real estate agency in Sydney, Australia. Every Thursday she'd have to submit the ads for her properties to the Sydney Morning Herald who had a monopoly on real estate advertising -- pre internet. The likelihood of the desired ad appearing in print, in the desired location, on the desired day was about 60%. (Imagine her customers looking through the ads for their house and not finding it!) The service was arrogant as well as unreliable and my wife wouldn't mind seeing the SMH go up in flames. On the news side, the SMH is now about splashing electronic ads right in the middle of a story I might be reading: equally arrogant! This feels very much like a fat monopoly that will be overtaken by something better.
I used to be a print subscriber to the SMH; when their internet site caught up and I upgraded to a decent LCD monitor, it was easier to read online without having to consume and recycle a broadsheet containing 90% unconsumed waste. I am a news junkie and I seriously worry about losing access to good journalism. However, I am willing to pay a few cents per story per day and I am sure that somehow, someday, someone will find a way to aggregate my pennies with everyone else's to give good journalists a good living.
After the jump, another reader's suggestion of a potential opportunity. It begins:
It seems to me there is a huge advertising hole that newspapers could
fill when they are ready to move past the blame game and start thinking
more creatively.
More on Google, Craigslist, and who's killing newspapers
A few hours ago I mentioned that a friend from Google had tipped me to a new Pew study showing how big a hole Craigslist (and similar services) had blown in the classified-ad portion of newspaper revenue. I signed off by saying that the distinction -- Google's not killing the news business, Craigslist is! -- was "worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting."
My friend, who was up in the middle of the night in California, immediately wrote back to say that I'd misunderstood the point. With his stipulation that he is speaking for himself and not the company, and with my clarification that he is not one of the household names at Google who by definition are always speaking for the company, here is his note:
It's not at all about blame-casting. It's about proper diagnosis for
treatment and recovery. If papers are critically ill from classified
revenue woes (Craigslist, eBay, informal email, ...) but they falsely
self-diagnose as being sick from over exposure in Google News, then
they'll end up closing their borders by withdrawing from news
aggregation sites at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and elsewhere. That won't hurt
Internet companies [like Google] at all, but it will leave publishers with fewer new
visitors, less online monetization opportunities, and still obliviously
infected with disappearing classified revenues. They will get sick
faster, and journalism as democracy's conscience will weaken. That will
hurt every other company, every citizen, and nearly every country.
The only blame belongs to the publishers.
Craigslist, like all startups, was originally funded with pennies on the dollar
compared with what media empires spend. It still is! Craigslist has not
been bought/co-opted/copied by any of the major publishers even though
doing so would have been a natural idea. Readers are moving online but
publishers act as though they will go there only if dragged rather than
racing to their only life saving destination. News is valuable, but you
can no longer get it in printed form as it is hours old by the time you
get your paper -- CNN and online news sites had it hours ago! Analysis
is worth waiting for, but that is what magazines like The Atlantic are
all about. Newspapers will never be about selling your old BBQ again.
Ads at random, scattered between unrelated stories, are not part of the
future of shopping.
These are the issues for papers to agonize about;
to wring their hands about; and maybe even to beg money to solve.
Unfortunately, they've been copying the ideas and technologies invented
and introduced by William Randolph Hearst for so long that they forgot
his example of how to innovate for the modern day. Hearst, were he
living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now,
would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited
legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the
tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought
cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in
his.
Extra thought on my end: if this is what someone not in the writing biz can crank out at 4:40am his time, while up with eye problems and a splitting headache, maybe the publishing industry has even more to worry about from web-based competition than we thought!
Who exactly is killing the press
A friend who works at Google wanted to be sure I'd seen a new study from the Pew Internet Center* about what exactly is cutting the heart out of advertising revenues for the newspaper business. The headline on a CNET story about the study gets right to the point:
The Pew study also contains this "story of an industry's decline in one chart" graphic, showing how classified ad revenue for papers has fallen from around $20 billion a year to under $10 billion during the era of Craigslist. (And, yes, the study argues that there's a causal connection here, not just a coincidence of timing.) A ten billion dollar revenue hole says a lot about why all papers -- well run, poorly run, concentrating on local issues, concentrating on national and world affairs, up market, down market -- are in trouble, all at the same time.
To Google, it makes a difference whether the shorthand slogan in people's minds is "Craigslist is killing off newspapers" rather than "Google is doing them in." For the papers themselves, it's a fine distinction -- sort of like dinosaurs spending their last moments arguing whether it was a giant meteor strike or a bunch of volcanoes that was wiping them out. Still, a distinction worth bearing in mind for precision in blame-casting. ___ * Which is run by another friend, Lee Rainie; my wife has done Pew Internet studies too.
May 12, 2009
Design aspects of software: maps as "thinking tools"
I don't talk about it as often as, say, small-plane aviation or, recently, Chinese education, or my doomed quest in Asia for good beer. But for many many years I have been fascinated by the relationship between "pure" acts of thinking - logic, memory, argument, expression, the process of making connections and finding distinctions; all of which rely fundamentally on words - and the various tools, cues, shortcuts, and stimuli other than words that can play an important part in what we think of as thought.
I'm not talking about entirely separate realms of expression - like music, which obviously conveys meaning beyond words, or the emotional or imaginative power of artwork, photography, illustrations, and other visual representations. Rather I mean systems specifically designed to help the plain old reasoning parts of the brain do their job better, by shoring up common weak spots or by giving more or better material for the "real" brain to work on. For an Atlantic article on this topic from 2007, go here. Things have changed since then, mainly for the better, in ways I'll go into in coming days.
Today's design theme: the potential of argument maps. These are something like sentence diagrams, without the drudge-work overtone. I was introduced to them through two programs from the Austhink company of Melbourne, Australia: bCisive, whose name is I think a pun on "decisive" and is a tool for decision-making, and Rationale, which is supposed to help students improve the logic of their presentations. Tim van Gelder, who teaches philosophy at the U of Melbourne and founded Austhink, weighed in here yesterday on the Chinese education, defending the proposition that critical thinking can be taught.
Here's one illustration of an argument map, a small portion of a complex map prepared by Austhink director Paul Monk (an author and former intelligence officer) to weigh arguments about who "really" killed JFK. Different kinds of maps, and reading about them, after the jump. (His argument map on the proposition "The war on Iraq was illegal" is here.)
If you're looking for something new to worry about...[IMPROVED!!]
... how about the prospect that the GPS system will be the next part of America's neglected infrastructure to be in trouble, with ripple effects on modern commercial life?
It is impossible to overstate the importance of GPS to the worldwide modern economy. Trivial recent example: the other night in Beijing, my wife and I were lost getting to an address. Didn't see street signs around, although streets in big Chinese cities are usually very well marked. We pulled up the Google Map function on my Blackberry, and it showed us (via the "my location" function) that the street we were looking for was the one we just passed rather than the one still ahead. [This cut is an important improvement to the post! On the reasons for this improvement, see below*] Multiply this a million-fold each day in operations of the world's navigation and transportation functions, and you see how economic life is being built on GPS almost in the way it has been built on electricity over the last hundred years. The world's airlines, to choose one obvious case, would be in huge trouble without reliable GPS.
And so it is with heavy heart that we learn about a new Government Accountability Office study (here in PDF), via Michael Cooney's story in NetworkWorld, saying that the U.S. Air Force, which runs the GPS satellites, has not managed to get new "IIF"-model satellites ready in time to replace the ones that are wearing out.
For years, other countries have said they needed their own alternative to the GPS system, precisely because it was run by the U.S. military and, in times of crisis, could be used as a strategic tool. Simplest version of the fear: that in an emergency the US could block or encode signals so that only its own receivers could interpret them, meaning the American military would know where it was going and no one else would. You can get the idea from the illustration below, included in the GAO report, showing sample "aviation" and "ground navigation" uses for GPS.
There's a long history on this score, mainly involving the European
Galileo project, plus Russian and Chinese efforts; plus the Pentagon's
gradual willingness to make high-precision signals available to the
world generally, rather than deliberately fuzzing the open-use civilian version. All for
another time; I invite you to look it up for yourself.
But the nightmare scenario no one thought to
worry about was that the US-run system would start to crumble and wear
out. Arrrgghh! _____ * IMPROVEMENT!!!: Let me quickly shift from Arrrggghh to OOOOOPSSS! Let's entirely forget that struck-out part above, in light of this item from TelecomAsia.net that a technically sophisticated friend just sent me.
Ummm, I don't know what I could have been thinking. Of course my Blackberry couldn't do anything like that....
May 8, 2009
Sugar Sync
I've mentioned several times before (like here and here) that SugarSync has become one of the programs I would hate to do without. Others, for reasons explained in those previous posts: VMWare Fusion and Google's Calendar Sync tools for Outlook and Blackberry.
SugarSync has just come out with a free edition (with limited storage), and an easier-to-use graphic interface, with example below:
The "what it's for" description of the program is: it lets you work on files on a variety of computers and never have to worry about copying them from one to another when you travel or work someplace else. Like your own personal "cloud" computing. Easily crosses the Mac/PC membrane. In the process, keeps an online up-to-date backup of your files. Only thing it really is stumped by: Outlook .PST files.
Similarly on the tech theme: I've been using the latest Firefox beta, 3.5b4, in both Mac and PC versions over the last week, without a single hang or crash. If you're having instability problems (as I did) with the latest release version, 3.0.10, consider the beta. It is here.
May 6, 2009
New meta-theme: design!
The chart below, from David Wolf's Silicon Hutong site, is not meant to be taken in 100% straight-faced earnest -- I think. It's a flow chart for deciding whether to buy a book as a new hard cover, a used hard cover, or a Kindle-style ebook, including the complication that Wolf is based Beijing and can find only so much in the local shops. (I say: choose whatever form you want, but just buy the damned book!!!)
It's connected to a more earnest but quite interesting discussion by Wolf of the role of physical books in a personal library, even when ebooks are available. And I'll use it as an intro to the next running meta-theme here: various aspects of design.
I realize that many of the leads and items I am interested in discussing and thinking about -- once the art course is over and the flu has passed and I'm caught up with, ahem, my "real" work -- really concern design in several aspects.
Design of cities, including the ones springing up all over China, as hinted at in this introductory Beijing-vs-Shanghai post several weeks back.
Design of "tools for thinking," which generally includes software and which I find particularly provocative and rich in the emerging (for me) intersection of straight text and graphics. I don't mean photo illustrations; I mean "mapping" and "visualization" programs of several sorts that I, as a pure-text guy from way back, find increasingly useful.
Design of hardware for thinking and learning, not excluding the familiar Kindle and the even more familiar PC and Mac.
Design of the working environment, the reduce the threat posed by the Number One Killer of Modern-day Thought, non-stop distraction.
More on all of that later. This is fair warning. Now, real work again for a while.
May 4, 2009
More on the F-22, the F-35, and big expensive airplanes
The Atlantic has been your one-stop site for all aspects of the "F-22 question" -- the decision on whether to buy more copies of the Air Force's latest fighter plane. Mark Bowden's article in the magazine here; various perspective from me here, here, and here; SecDef Robert Gates's rationale in calling off purchases discussed here and here.
Apart from the F-22, the other fighter in gestation over the past decade has been the "Joint Strike Fighter," known as the F-35, shown here in vertical take-off mode for use by the Marine Corps. (Photo via Discovery channel). It is also designed to take off and land "normally," from a runway, for the Air Force version, and a from an aircraft carrier deck for the Navy's.
The case for this airplane (discussed at length in this article back in 2002) was that it would avoid the cost and complexity problems that plagued the F-22. The case against it, as presented in a recent document by the legendary military analyst and designer Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler of America's Defense Meltdown, is that it too has turned into an example of those very same disorders. Their article about the two airplanes, "What 'Sweeping Reforms' in DOD?", takes a skeptical view of Sec. Gates's current procurement reforms and is available here. Worth reading not just about these aircraft but for the overall approach to defense spending.
May 1, 2009
Browser update
Reports keep trickling in of people having crashes with the latest official release of Firefox, as first mentioned here. I have no way of knowing whether this is signal or noise -- an actual trend, or merely random blips among FF's millions of users.
I do know that the latest Firefox beta, 3.5b4, has been running smoothly around the clock, at least for me. Available here. And as previously indicated, I will indeed try Opera when I get some "spare" time.
FWIW, this sociology of browsers from Marty Manley:
Am testing a site these days, so I keep 3 browsers open: IE,
FF 3.0.1 and Chrome. In two days, I have had four hard FF crashes -- unheard
of. FF also lost track of all saved passwords, although it recovered (maybe
thanks to Xmarks).
BTW, Chrome seems ever stronger. If this were college, IE would be the entitled
rich kid who acts smart, but isn't, Firefox the impressive high achiever who is
actually a bit lazy and dilettantish, and Chrome the kid who works nights to
pay bills, is rock solid, and is steadily getting stronger and stronger.
Or, if you prefer, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. As to Opera --
the garden variety A student of sound quality but without a compelling or
differentiating architecture -- I think she makes a fine Secretary of State.
April 30, 2009
More on Firefox 3.0.10
After mentioning recently my own frequent-crash experience with the latest release of Firefox, these results:
- Reports from a few readers who'd had similar problems, and a larger number who hadn't;
- Recommendations from several readers, most enthusiastically Parker Donham, to instead give the Opera browser a try, which no doubt in tinkering spirit I'll eventually do;
- Recommendations from friends at Mozilla to try out the beta 4 release of Firefox 3.5, which has a variety of new privacy features -- plus requests for debugging details of my crashes with 3.0.10.
The living nightmare that was my experience with Windows Vista, starting with a Vista beta back in 2006, has made me wary of trying any beta version of anything ever again. (Not that the official release version was that big an improvement. For later, after I finish some pressing "real" work: a summing up of the way that Vista + Lenovo's tweaks to the trusty ThinkPad changed 20 years of buying loyalty and put me on the Mac path.) But I did download that FF 3.5 beta and have been using it with no problems lo these past two days. FWIW.
April 28, 2009
Stability problems with Firefox 3.0.10?
The latest release of Firefox offered itself for installation today, with this announcement of its new features:
Since then, the Mac version of Firefox has crashed constantly for me, on a MacMini under OS X 10.5.6 (including after a reboot). A local problem here in the Beijing HQ? Maybe a "major stability issue" not entirely nailed down in this latest release? I don't know yet. It's the first serious stability problem I've had in years of using Firefox. Not looking for reports from far and wide about where it's working and not. Just offering this report, as part of the crowdsourcing process, of a possible glitch. And if you haven't installed 3.0.10 yet, what's the rush?
April 14, 2009
The new Nigeria
What is it with the Russians? Below, from a recent trip through the spam filter on my Atlantic email account. My Gmail spam filter doesn't show any of this -- I imagine because they have already worked out more sophisticated multi-language anti-spam tools. (Click on the image for more detailed view. And here for earlier Russian spam.):
Now, if only they'd be considerate enough to send the spam in Chinese, so I could read the subject lines. No larger point here, but it is odd.
April 11, 2009
"It could have been the Kindle..."
My wife's consoling comment the other day -- that I had lost all my credit cards and cash, but at least I still had my own Electronic Reading Device -- brings up two relevant updates. One is about the evolution of the device; the other, about the ergonomics of reading.
First, Kindle 1 versus Kindle 2. Below, a compare and contrast from the Kindle labs here at the Beijing HQ. On the right, in brown, the original, time-tested Kindle Classic, with an add-on leather cover from M-Edge. On the left, in black, the updated Kindle 2, in the standard-issue Amazon-logo'd leatherlike cover (though it doesn't come standard with the Kindle -- you have to buy it separately. I now have an even fancier add-on cover):
Same two items, in opened-and-readable view. Each shows the screen saver that comes on if you haven't been turning pages for a few minutes. Old on the bottom, new at the top, ever-handy Chinese-English dictionary in the upper left just for a color highlight:
What's the difference between old and new? Screen slightly brighter on new version, but old is plenty clear. Battery life also somewhat better, but plenty long in original version -- days and days. New has easier navigation; NextPage/PreviousPage keys better designed to avoid accidental pressing of keys; and a much svelter look and feel (below):
All in all the new Kindle seemed the ideal machine for ... my wife!, who initially scoffed but now is a devotee. Plus, sticking with the doughty Kindle Classic shores up my credentials as an outstanding husband. It's probably worth noting that the K1/K2 contrast is of purely antiquarian interest, since the original models are no longer sold.
Next, future of books. My friend Jacob Weisberg, of Slate, has rashly ignored my advice on how to avoid becoming a Kindle bore and published his paean to the device several weeks ago, here. I'll solidify my non-bore status by mildly dissenting from his view. Jacob tells us that:
The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and
printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.
On my tombstone it will say, "He dealt with Clippy." Ten years ago, during an (enjoyable!) six-month stint at Microsoft, I was supposed to be providing a "writer's perspective" on editing features being added to what became Word XP. These mainly involved the track-changes functions, plus embryonic hopes for what is now OneNote. In my spare time, I was inveighing against the maddening feature generally called Clippy -- or TFC* to insiders -- that would pop up and say "You seem to be writing a letter!" whenever you typed out "Dear Mr. ..."
Soon Clippy was turned Off by default (rather than On), and then it was completely deep-sixed. We all leave a mark on the world.
I am therefore particular delighted to see the homage to the original Clippy provided by this mildly subversive new program. You install it on a "friend's" computer -- and until he or she figures out how to turn it off, it pops up every 60 seconds with Clippy-worthy tips like these:
Download site here; info, including how to turn it off, here. I loaded this onto a backup computer and was able (I think!) to stop and completely remove it when the hilarity was done. But why take a chance? Put it on someone else's computer, not your own. Thanks to R. Manzetti. ___ * TFC = The F... Clown
April 3, 2009
I admit that this creeps me out a little (Lou Pai + search engine dept)
In several previous items (here and here, with other links), I mentioned a half-mocking quest for the current whereabouts of Lou Pai, the Enron official who got out of the company just before the deluge with more money than anyone else. Various newspaper stories and official documents periodically appear to mark his on-the-record activities: the $31.5 million fee and settlement with the SEC, his purchase and eventual sale of a Colorado mountain, etc.
Recently a reader sent me links to a set of candid, casual pictures of a family that appears to be Pai's. He, his wife, and a daughter (or so it appears) are happily engaged in recreational and charitable activities, in depictions from a community web site. Here, as evidence, is a thumbnail of Pai himself which I have cropped from a larger picture with his wife, their child, and a pet.
I'm not including any more clues or info about where this was found, and I don't think it was the reader's intention that I should. The creepy part is not about Pai himself -- this all started with my idle curiosity about why he was so much less well known than Skilling, Fastow, et al when he'd done so much better out of Enron. Instead it is the reminder of how many intimate views are available, through the simplest search tools, even about people who've gone to considerable lengths to shield themselves from public view. If you come across the family details I'm talking about, you'll see what I mean. And reflect about the traces we're all leaving behind.
Good tech news: SugarSync for BlackBerry
The Sharpcast company of San Mateo, Ca., maker of the invaluable SugarSync backup-and-sync utility, has recently announced that its system will work on BlackBerrys, in addition to today's coverage of Macs, PCs, and some mobile devices. Here's why I think this is great news.
I mentioned recently that I have come to rely completely on Google's calendar sync tools because of their "never have to worry about it" effect. When I want to add, delete, or change an appointment, I never have to worry about whether I'm entering the info into my Outlook calendar, Google's online calendar, or my BlackBerry. The sync tools make sure that info entered any one place shows up in the other two -- so far, unerringly.
As I thought about it, I realized that there are three other utilities I esteem because of the same "never have to worry about it" quality:
- The PC indexer X1. I never have to worry about where I've stored a file or piece of email, because I know that X1 will be able to find it. (As mentioned before, the program sometimes hangs but has never lost data.)
- VMWare's Fusion program. I never have to worry about whether a program I like is for Macs or PCs, because I know that with Fusion I can run either kind (plus Linux etc) on an Intel-based Mac. Sometimes Windows programs can slow down when run with Fusion on the underpowered (though elegant!) MacBook Air. But overall Fusion works so well that I simply never have to think about the Mac/Windows difference.
- And SugarSync (earlier mentions here and here). I never have to worry about copying files from desktop to laptop before I take a trip or or wonder where I've stashed the latest version of something I'm working on. I know that when I change a file on one computer, SugarSync will copy it to the others. There are a few files that can stump it (namely Outlook .PSTs, a subject for another day), and some friends have reported glitches with certain other file types. But I have come to rely on it entirely -- and on the fact that it's simultaneously backing up all my files, in the "cloud". And now, with the BlackBerry? According to the announcement:
The BlackBerry application is very advanced and it brings capabilities not present before in the SugarSync offering... allowing users to access and share remotely all the SugarSync data available in all of their computers. ...From the road you can easily review documents, send them to colleagues, and collaborate with them and see in real time the changes they may have made to files present in a given shared folder.
But that is not all. The BlackBerry client allows users to open and EDIT files ON the Blackberry while traveling and makes those updates quickly available for others.
Emphasis in the original -- and the implication, of course, is that from your BlackBerry you could dig out the file you'd left at home, change part of it, and pass it on by email to someone else -- all with your poor little thumbs. Here's the company's illustration of what the file directory of your home computer looks like when accessed from the road
As I've tried this just now, mine looks the same. I see a listing for the files on my MacMini desktop in Beijing, and on my two laptops, a ThinkPad and a MB Air. In general I try to avoid doing anything more on a BlackBerry than seeing if something urgent has arrived -- I feel like a chimp clicking out messages with my thumbs, which get sore anyway. But I can imagine how this could be handy, and it's an occasion for another mention of how valuable I've found SugarSync as a whole.
March 30, 2009
Xobni's side of the story
In response to this report
of problems that my colleague Corby Kummer encountered when installing
the Outlook-indexing program Xobni, the CEO of Xobni, Jeff Bonforte,
sent me a note. I post it here with his permission.
Thank
you for your posts about Xobni. We were disappointed to read about
Corby Kummer's bad experience with our product. We take performance and
stability of our software very seriously and have spent over 5 months
working out bugs and optimizing speed prior to releasing the product
from beta. After 2M+ downloads, we are unaware of any user that has
experienced Corby's issue.
We have reached out to Corby directly, but in the meantime we
have begun researching the issue. At this point we don't believe that
Xobni itself caused his issue. Instead, we believe when he installed
Xobni (any software in this case), it triggered a rare Windows bug or
registry corruption. Of course, we don't rule out the issue is with
Xobni, but it seems likely it is a Windows bug similar to this Window's
RSL (registry size limit) issue
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189119).
Regardless, it is a bad issue, and even if Xobni is
uninstalled, we want to make sure it is fully resolved. We will
coordinate with Microsoft support. Though Corby had a bad experience, I
hope you will give the new Xobni a try, like thousands of new users
each day.
You are welcome to reach out to us, even on Twitter (@Xobni),
to tell us about your experiences. We have had incredibly positive
feedback so far like that from your colleague Barry Simon. If any of
your readers encounter a dramatic issue, please feel free to have them
contact Xobni support or me directly.
Thanks again,
Jeff Bonforte
jeff at xobni dot com
CEO, Xobni
PS: You can also tell Barry we are working on some more advanced search options that should please him.
While waiting for Corby and the Xobni people to get to the bottom of this issue, I have to say that the prompt, helpful, and, in the circumstances, very good natured response by a CEO is impressive. (And is the opposite of the blustering defensiveness I often marvel at in China.) When I'm able to download the program, I'll know more about how it works for me.
Last summer, Mr. Sane Thinking About All Things Security Related, Bruce Schneier, offered this perspective on electronic attacks originating in China. His view rings completely true to what I have seen of Chinese tech culture. Highlights:
These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don't seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.
The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living. The fame and glory comes from their nationalistic goals. Some of these hackers are heroes in China....And the money comes from several sources. The groups sell owned computers, malware services, and data they steal on the black market. They sell hacker tools and videos to others wanting to play. They even sell T-shirts, hats and other merchandise on their Web sites.
Schneier points out that the probably non-governmental origin of this threat should moderate fear of a concentrated Chinese military plot -- but doesn't make the objective situation any better:
If anything, the fact that these groups aren't being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they're likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.
Schneier also has an update on the current controversy at his main site. For the strongest albeit circumstantial argument that the government or military might have been involved, see this post on Ars Technica. Its main point is that the list of sites known to have been attacked seems more selective and strategically chosen than one would suspect from a bunch of hackers. That's possible. But for now, the evidence still seems to me to support the hacker hypothesis. (Also: this site from the US Air Force's Air University has a number of useful links about US and foreign approaches to electronic info-warfare.)
What should we make of this Chinese cyber-spy story?
Yesterday's story in the New York Times about "GhostNet," the Chinese-based computer spying network that has apparently penetrated some 1,295 computers in more than 100 countries around the world, obviously raises this big question: Was the Chinese government behind it, or not? Three of the four servers that hosted GhostNet were apparently inside China (the fourth was in California), and many of the targets were involved one way or another in Free-Tibet activities or other causes opposed by the Chinese government. Wouldn't it have to have been the ChiComs?
Maybe, maybe not. I've now read (thanks to a stop-by at free WiFi site masquerading as a McDonald's) the 53-page report from the University of Toronto team that used clever reverse-engineering tools to penetrate "GhostNet" and monitor it from within. The report, in the Scribd format that deserves discussion itself some other time, is available here.
The U Toronto researchers are, in my view, properly agnostic about who is ultimately responsible for this malware operation. On the one hand, they point out that "China is actively developing an operational capacity in cyberspace.... Chinese cyber warfare doctrine is well developed, and significant resources have been invested by the People's Liberation Army and security services in developing defensive and offensive capabilities." But on the other hand,
"Attributing all Chinese malware to deliberate or targeted intelligence gathering operations by the Chinese state is wrong and misleading... The most significant actors in cyberspace are not states.... In China, the authorities most likely perceive individual attackers [ie, teenagers in internet cafes] as convenient instruments of national power."
For anyone technically inclined, the report is full of fascinating crime-procedural type details about the way the investigation unfolded and what the GhostNet system revealed once the moles from Toronto had made their way inside.
My guess is that the "convenient instruments" hypothesis will eventually prove to be true (versus the "centrally controlled plot" scenario), if the "truth" of the case is ever fully determined. For reasons the Toronto report lays out, the episode looks more like the effort of groups of clever young hackers than a concentrated project of the People Liberation Army cyberwar division. But no one knows for certain, and further information about the case is definitely worth following. As are this new report on "The Snooping Dragon" by computer scientists at the Cambridge University in England and the University of Illinois, and this very good Wired blog item. One more thing to worry about be interested in.
March 29, 2009
Xobni: the magazine titans speak!
Yesterday I mentioned that Xobni, an Outlook add-on that I'd tried and abandoned last year, was out in a new and reportedly much much faster version. Quickly I heard from two magazine-world big shots about their varying experiences with the program.
Below, a reaction from Barry Simon, who has reviewed software for years in PC Magazine and is author of several volumes in the "Mother of all Windows Books" series. Then, and continued after the jump, a highly cautionary tale from my Atlantic colleague Corby Kummer, known to the world as director of the Atlantic's new Food Channel (and perennial favorite for the James Beard Award) and to me as my editor and fellow software enthusiast.
Read; judge for yourself; see my "what it all means" comments at the end.
Barry Simon:
For whatever it is worth, I only started using Xobni in November, 2008. I have 1.6 GB main .pst and a total of 5 GBs of pst in my main outlook directory (going back to 2002). Xobni has indexed them all even the ones not loaded into Outlook and I've had no performance issues with it.
It is a tool I rely on heavily although its limitations drive me crazy.
The biggest limitation is the inability to do any kind of real Boolean search. You can search for single words or phrases across all mail and can search mail to/from one person for subjects but I've yet to find a way to search for given words in the body of all messages to/from person x.
Corby Kummer:
I downloaded and installed [Xobni], and waited for it to index everything, during which it slowed everything to molasses. I assumed it was the initial indexing that was making everything so slow...
Recently I mentioned the near-universal modern Chinese belief that a mobile phone, when ringing, should take precedence over anything else that might be going on -- in particular, the person you are talking or dining with at that moment. From a reader, the cross-cultural angle:
The mobile phone versus face-to-face thing is the norm in India as well, and again, is not considered rude or even unusual by the locals. I attended a family wedding in New Delhi a couple of years ago, and the priest took several calls during the ceremony. Taking our cue from the bride's parents, everybody paused while he took each call, and then resumed as if [nothing had happened]. Apparently another priest had failed to show up at a wedding across town, and that family were ringing round all the possibles...
This is one of the few India-China similarities I have come across.
March 22, 2009
Things everyone in China knows, but...
... that few people outside have really taken in. Here I'm talking strictly about the communications-and-internet front. They were neatly summarized by Andrew Lih, in a recent SXSW panel that was in turn reported on CNReviews.com. His principles, with my marginalia [in brackets like this] below:
No one uses voicemail. When some one calls you on your mobile phone, you generally pick it up. Mobile calls take precedence over face-to-face conversation, which is generally interrupted by a call. [Too many times to count, I have seen people take mobile-phone calls while giving a speech or presiding at a meeting. It's the norm, not something rude.]
China uses SMS more intensively. SMS may have become entrenched because of the low cost of sending text messages. The first thing Chinese do in the morning is check their IM first, not their email. [Though, this assumes they turned off the phone at night!]
Instant messaging, combined with SMS, is a hugely popular means of communication. China's leading IM platform, QQ (Company: Tencent (HK:0700)), has 350 mm users-over 50 times the audience of Twitter! [Two days ago on the Beijing subway, I counted 25 people in the same car as me all typing out or reading text messages and only two actually talking on the phone. Also, you're never out of mobile-phone coverage in China -- on subways, in elevators, wherever. Discussion of reasons some other time.]
Only 56% of all Chinese internet users have email addresses. [If you want to reach a busy American, you send email to the Blackberry. That gets you nowhere here.]
Ownership of PCs is much lower, especially in 2nd and 3rd tier cities, where heavy PC usage is at Internet cafes.
Unlike the West, where e-commerce was Web 1.0 and social media is Web 2.0, China's internet usage started as a social phenomenon first and is just now moving to more utilitarian purposes.
Lih is a friend in Beijing; was a major guide/informant for the Atlantic piece I wrote about the Great Firewall; and is author of a much-anticipated book The Wikipedia Revolution, which I have ordered and look forward to reading.
March 20, 2009
On Google sync tools
I keep meaning to write a full wrap-up on this topic, but that will never happen. So this summary judgment for now:
Google's Calendar sync utilities are, in my experience, amazingly robust and dependable. There are three different places in which I enter or change calendar info, and on which I want to view it: In Outlook's calendar; online with the Google calendar; and on my Blackberry. Two Google sync apps -- this one for Outlook <-> Google Calendar, and this one for Blackberry <-> Google Calendar -- have been, for me, bulletproof. I enter, change, or delete appointments in any of the three locations, and the results show up correctly on the other two. This is a huge plus. Apparently there's a similar iPhone sync app, but I don't know how well it works.
Offline Gmail is, in my experience, far from bulletproof but still useful in a "better than nothing" way. Without this utility, if you weren't online you couldn't do anything whatsoever with the messages and info in your Gmail account. Now, if things go right, you can search and read messages while offline, like on an airplane -- and can write replies or new messages that will be sent the next time you log on. In its early version, offline Gmail seems to get confused easily about whether it's off- or on-line and to have other small glitches. For now I've disabled it except when I know I have a long airplane ride ahead. But that it works at all is something.
Bonus Gmail point: A new "panic-button" app, just released, which allows you to un-send a message within five seconds, if you have an instant case of sender's-remorse. I can think of times when this would have been useful.
March 12, 2009
Technology as friend of tradition! (Chinese language dept.)
People inside China already know about this, and people outside may not care. But because there are points of general intellectual interest involved, a word about discussions within China about possibly changing its system for writing Chinese characters.
No, not getting rid of them altogether and instead using an alphabet -- a pipedream for reformers from time to time, and something with too many complex implications to get into right now.
Rather, undoing one of the big "reforms" rammed through under Chairman Mao: the replacement of many hundreds of characters with streamlined, "simplified" forms. Joel Martinsen of Danwei.org has an excellent primer on the whole subject here. (Other Wikipedia history here and here.) To illustrate what the difference looks like, here is the simple word "telephone" (dianhua in Mandarin) as written first in "traditional" and then in "simplified" forms. In each case it is written with the character for "electricity" followed by the one for "talk," so a telephone is "electric talk," as a computer is "electric brain" (diannao).
Here is "telephone" as written in traditional characters -- which are still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and some other parts of the Chinese-speaking world outside of the mainland:
And here is the same word, with the "same" characters, in the simplified form used on the mainlaind:
The argument for simplified writing is analogous to various crusades to "rationalize" English spelling -- so u can rite in a kwik and e-z way The simplified versions are obviously simpler to write, with fewer strokes. But there are many objections, enumerated at astonishing length here, which boil down to:
1) The new characters violate tradition. Written English had been in very great flux until the standardization of printing about two centuries ago. (We can barely read Chaucer, and students require glosses for Shakespeare.) Written, traditional Chinese characters had been the great element of continuity for a much longer time -- at least for the people who could read them. Now they've been upturned -- although partisans of simplified characters claim that they're based on a time-honored hand-written form.
2) The new characters are graceless and ugly. The characters below mean the same thing, guangchang, or "Square," as in People's Square, Tomorrow Square, or Tiananmen Square -- a name I dare use because it's on the street maps in Beijng. Those on left are traditional. On the right, streamlined and simplified. It's like the difference between "through" and "thru." (old to the left, new to the right)
3) The new characters are easier to write but harder to understand. A nonobvious point but an important one. Consider the English word pronounced "for." When spoken, it could be ambiguous. When written, it's immediately obvious whether we mean for, four, or fore. Same with "right" -- potentially confusing when heard, immediately obvious when read as right, write, wright, or rite. And -- strangely -- characters have a counterpart to this problem, made worse by simplification. (This is not even getting into the related but different topic of words pronounced the same and distinguishable mainly by their characters-- as if the for/four/fore problem came up all the time.)
The two characters below, which mean "east" on the left and "happy" or "enjoyment" on the right, are very easy to tell apart in traditional form (ignore the little dots on the side; part of my home-made effort to illustrate the characters.) :
Here is how much more similar the two of them look when simplified -- again "east" on the left and "happy" on the right:
The "extra information" in the traditional characters is what made them more cumbersome to write, but also easier to tell apart. (Again, think right/write/rite/wright: suppose they were all spelled rite!) Now, here is the interesting part:
Increasingly, Chinese people don't actually have to write (rite? right?) out these characters by hand. More and more, they key them in with mobile phones or at computers. And when they do that, it's just as easy to "write" a traditional-style, complex, information-dense character as a streamlined new one. (Reason: you key in clues about the character, either its pronunciation or its root form, and then click to choose the one you want.) So -- according to current arguments -- the technology of computers and mobile phones could actually revive an important, quasi-antique style of writing.
Much more on the debate here and here. In practical terms, my bet is that nothing will change. But if you're interested in language or the relationship between technology and styles of thought, it has to be interesting. Or so I contend.
March 11, 2009
Kids and Kindle
My wife is only days away from receiving her exciting new new-to-her Kindle, which is to say that I expect soon to get my hands on a Kindle 2. Meanwhile this note from a good friend about the machine's effect in his household:
An (unreported?) Kindle phenomenon: 11-year old girl, drove parents crazy by not reading books because totally addicted to electronics, has now transferred total addiction to Kindle 2 - and now does nothing, ever, but read books, one after another. In bed, in the car, while eating - while crossing streets!
[My wife] says, "Let's buy Amazon stock. In six months, the world will have discovered this particular phenomenon." (She is the one who had the sudden insight that this might work for [our daughter].)
Ah, this explains the trajectory of my financial life. On hearing the story, my first instinct was not, "Hey, let's act on the potential market-moving nature of this news" but rather "Hey, maybe this is a new answer to all those old laments about American kids refusing to read." Either way, good news for Amazon, good news for the family in question -- and not even bad news for those who have most reason to fear the coming of Kindle, book-store owners, since it sounds as if this new enthusiast was not spending that much time in book stores anyway.
February 23, 2009
F-22 fiesta
A few days ago I said that I greatly enjoyed my colleague Mark Bowden's article about fighter aces but disagreed with his implication that the F-22 was the way to go for the Air Force or the country.
I have heard from many readers since then -- a few supporting the F-22, most against it. I'll start here with one representative "pro" comment. After the jump, a number of the meatier anti-F-22 arguments.
To be clear about a potentially awkward intramural point: although I disagree with Mark's conclusion, I am, as I said the first time, grateful for his engrossing article itself and for the opportunity it's created to air a range of opinion about a very important upcoming choice. He also has been extremely (and typically) mensch-like about the debate that his piece has inspired. ____
Pro comment -- rather, anti-anti -- from someone whose email address identifies him as an employee of a major defense contractor:
Excuse me, but you seem to be caught up in the propaganda of the F-15 mafia. The F-15 mafia and others have successfully reduced the numbers of F-22 production to the point where economies of scale are no longer possible.* Unfortunately, those who really know the issues and the data, are not going to engage in a debate, because the result is to trash our country and our capability. Because of freedom of speech, you are allowed too participate in a debate that has not helped our country. No complex aircraft is without problems, but maintainers have never had an aircraft which provided so much capability on day one...
The per unit cost isn't even the whole picture, the total life cycle cost is. And cost is relative. Do you have the numbers for all alternatives? Anyway, you don't have the numbers, no one in the unclassifed media does.
* A major "anti" argument, as originally laid out by Chuck Spinney in 1991, was of course that economies of scale would never have been possible for this airplane, because the cost estimates used for the initial "buy-in" were implausibly low.
Two tech followups: Real Alternative, HerdictWeb (updated)
Working through the lists of things I've meant to get to for a while:
1) Last month I mentioned
a BBC interview with my friend Liam Casey, "Mr China" from Shenzhen,
which unfortunately could be heard only with Real Player. That is
unfortunate because the installation routine for Real Player is so
aggressive that it can easily load your computer with
ads and all kinds of other junk you don't want.
Many people wrote in to ask why I wasn't instead using Real Alternative, a free browser plug-in that plays files that have standard Real Audio formats. (.ra, .rpm, and others -- details and download links here). The reason I wasn't using it is that I didn't know about it. Now I use it and like it. According to the site-meter, Real Alternative has been downloaded more than 21 million times, so if there were some major problem we presumably would have heard. I'm sorry that Real Player has become so obnoxious to use, but this is a great... alternative. Another download site here.
2) Two months ago, I suddenly found that I couldn't reach the main New York Times web site from my apartment in Beijing. Was it some problem with my computer or router? With the ever-shaky local ISP? Some transitory problem in Beijing? With the Times site itself? Part of the genius of Chinese internet control, as I have pointed out countless times starting with this article, is its haziness. You don't run into notices saying "The site has been censored." Connections just time out, and you're never sure why.
In that case, I asked readers in mainland China if they too were having trouble getting to the NYT. Enough people wrote in from enough corners of the country to suggest it was affecting people from Xinjiang to Guangdong (like "from Seattle to Miami") all at the same time. A few days later, the problem cleared up everywhere in China all at once.
Now a group from Harvard's Berkman Center has put together an ingenious and systematic way to collect real-time info on where and how web sites are being blocked around the world. The tool is called HerdictWeb, an (unattractive-sounding, IMHO) compound of "Herd" and "Verdict." Via a main web site or a browser plug-in, it allows users around the world to send in quick, easy reports of any web site they can't reach. Then, if it works as planned, it will agglomerate those into a "crowdsourced" dashboard of web accessibility worldwide. Here's how the (groan) "herdometer" looks now:
The site has gone up only recently and few people are using it. As far as I can tell, no one but only one person other than me has yet weighed in from China. (Hint: I'm not the one reporting the blockage of sex.com) But if it becomes popular and can handle large-scale traffic, this could be interesting and useful. _____
UPDATE: I finally realized why the name "Herdict" bothers me. Two reasons. First, no one really likes to be thought of as part of a "herd." A crowd, maybe (as in "crowdsourcing.") Even a throng or a mob. But a herd? Second, the logo for the site includes pictures of sheep but none of cows. Cows make a herd; a group of sheep is a flock. FWIW.
February 20, 2009
More on China-US climate issues, more on F-22
- About China and the US cooperating on environmental/climate issues:
Yesterday I mentioned this detailed and valuable report from the Asia Society and Pew. It turns out that Brookings has just done something similar. Summary here, with links to PDF versions in both English and Chinese. Transcript of event unveiling the report here. I haven't studied the report carefully, but anything in this vein has to be a plus.
- About Mark Bowden and the F-22:
Yesterday I said that I enjoyed Mark Bowden's current article but disagreed with its implied endorsement of the F-22 fighter plane. It turns out that Sam Roggeveen, of the Lowy Institute's "The Interpreter" site in Sydney, has already taken up this topic and gotten a reply from Mark. Roggeveen's initial critique here; Mark Bowden's response here. I should note that, like Roggeveen, I did a double-take at the sentence in the original article saying that at least five other countries were now flying planes that matched or bettered the F-15. For context on that point, it's worth looking here. Also, this Reuters story from three months ago talks about the real-world difficulties in maintaining the "stealth" systems for radar-evasion that are supposed to be one of the F-22's main virtues.
February 19, 2009
The US, China, and saving the world
Anyone who has looked seriously into China's environmental and energy-use emergencies ends up thinking, saying, or merely hoping that the US and China will work together urgently on these fronts. That would be good for China because it needs all the help it can get to avoid poisoning its own people. It would be good for America and everyone else because China's approach to carbon-emissions control will largely determine whether the world has any chance of dealing with climate problems.
Or to put things in a cheerier way, precisely because so many Chinese farms, factories, power plants, and buildings are now so inefficiently run*, there are more opportunities to make big environmental improvements here than practically anywhere else. (My contribution to this school of thought in this article.)
Everybody understands this point in the abstract. Now there's a useful new guide to what it might mean in very particular detail. For many months a scientific/technical task force run jointly by the Asia Society's Center on the US-China Relations and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change has worked on specific recommendations, which were unveiled last week. Press release is here; overview here; PDF of the report in English here; in Chinese here. Introductory video, with overview rather than specifics, below.
Promising Kremlinology note: the co-chair of the project was Steven Chu, who stepped down from that role only because he had been nominated (and now confirmed) as the new US Secretary of Energy. The report is very much worth checking out -- and, in my view, worth supporting and implementing.
___
* Chinese farms and factories "inefficient"? Yes, very much so -- as I explain at length in my Atlantic article. Their output is often inexpensive, mainly because Chinese labor rates have been so cheap. But, as is typical for developing countries, they tend to be wasteful in their use of energy and other inputs. Chinese office buildings take much more energy to heat and cool than Western ones, because the insulation is so poor. Farmers often use more water and chemicals per bushel of yield than in advanced countries. Out-of-date Chinese factories use more fuel and create more pollution per unit of output than in Europe, Japan, or the US. This profligacy helps explains why the air is so murky in China, but it also illustrates the opportunity for big, relatively easy gains through efficiency here.
February 10, 2009
Spam is making me smarter
From the company spam filter for my email account just now (click for larger):
Evidently spammers recognize that I am a man widely traveled and with broad linguistic skills.* I'll take respect wherever I can get it. ___ *Or maybe it shows only that spam filters are more mature for dealing with English-language influx than with this other stuff. No, I think it's a sign of respect.
February 8, 2009
I'm not so sure about the timing of this business concept....
From the e-mail inbox:
Hello,
You have been invited by Xxxxx Xxxxx to join
Affluence.org.
Affluence.org is an exclusive community of affluent people
dedicated to making life better for both themselves and others.
As a member of Affluence.org you will have the ability to
find and interact with other affluent people from around the world, evaluate
and contribute to your favorite charities, and gain access to exclusive
lifestyle guides to luxury living, travel and the latest trends.Within this
elite community you will be provided with access to a dedicated Affluence
Concierge, receive priority access to the world's most exclusive premieres,
nightclubs, parties, hotels, events and much more.
To accept the invitation to our exclusive network, please
follow the link below. XXXXXXXX.
Best Regards,
Affluence.org Administration
It appears to be a legit operation. Anyone who joins, let me know how it goes.
From Mark Supanich, this first-hand answer to the questions I was speculating about moments ago:
I just installed it on my account, and the downloaded Google Gears app informed me that "based on my email volume" it would be storing 3 months worth of emails on my local hard drive. It wasn't clear from the notation if it would be doing that for each browser I access gmail from. There was no option or information (even on the help page) to choose how far back it cached emails on my computer, nor any info on if it would constantly update to clean messages older than three months from the cache. It did note however, that any message in my Inbox, no matter how old would be cached, and that spam and items in the trash would not be cached.
OK, total of two minutes taken away from "real" work! Turning off email account for next 12 hours or so. Thanks for the clarification.
Big news on the personal tech front (assuming it works)
If this really works, it transforms the world of email -- and may be
the step that will finally liberate me from Outlook and its gigantic,
touchy PST files: offline access for Gmail. Report in the official Google Enterprise blog here. Early report from Network World that alerted me to the development here.
I
have, alas, enough real-world, late-on-deadline, day-job writing ahead
of me in the next 24 hours that I don't even have time to check this
out and see how it works. There will be much more to say later on about
what this means for "cloud computing," for desktop apps (like Outlook),
for Google's plans, and all the rest. And I certainly will try to get
it applied before my next long plane trip not long from now.
For the moment it is sufficient to say: Check this out!
Update:
An initial "wait a minute, how will this really work?" second thought.
For all of Gmail really to be available and searchable offline, the
entire cache of old messages would obviously have to be stored on your
own hard disk. That's now a maximum 7+ gigs per regular Gmail account.
More if you've bought extra storage. Do I really want to have all of
that on my laptop -- which is the main place where offline access
matters? From a couple of Gmail accounts? And Google's "Gears" system
of offline sync, already in use with Google Docs, seems to create a
separate cache for each browser you use it with. So you could wind up
with one 7GB cache for Firefox, and one for Chrome, and... Will there
be a way to choose how far back you'd like the sync to run?
Back to "real" work -- I'll worry about all this later.
January 27, 2009
One small step for transparency
I believe I was the first person in the "general" press -- and if not, then among the first two or three* -- to notice that the one part of greater Washington DC that was obscured from view in Google Earth was not the CIA headquarters or the Pentagon or the White House itself, but rather... Dick Cheney's house, or as it is more formally called, the Naval Observatory grounds. Here's how the Vice Presidential compound looked on Google Earth until very recently.
Now, as several sources (eg here) have noted, the Vice President's official house is being treated like other sensitive structures in DC -- or Beijing or Moscow or Paris or Tokyo or Baghdad. That is: as worthy of protection on the ground, but not of being airbrushed out of recognition in a fashion worthy of the old Soviet era (or of today's "security theater"). I noticed this last night when checking neighborhood maps in Google Earth. It is by a steady accumulation of these small changes that we'll appreciate how much there is to undo after the past eight years. ____ * Maureen Dowd did a widely-cited column on the blurring in December, 2005. Earlier that year, in tech columns for the NYT's business section in April and then again in May, I noted the odd blurriness of Cheney's house. I say this just for the record -- and have moved the mention to a footnote in keeping with footnote-scale significance.
January 26, 2009
Security theater: now in improved, online version (updated x2)
Yesterday I mentioned the toy industry's patriotic attempt to build proper security consciousness into the kiddies. (I also like the detail that this was no doubt made in some factory in southern China, by workers who had yet another reason to marvel at the consumer tastes of their foreign customers. UPDATE: Who wudda thunk!? It turns out that Playmobil toys are mostly made in Europe, with only a few from China. Sorry for mistaken assumption.) Here, again, is the Playmobil item as offered on Amazon:
Thanks to many correspondents I learn that this item has been around for several years and has attracted a lot of customer reviews and comments. If you start with this one you'll get the idea. BONUS UPDATE: The last word that need ever be said about the Playmobil TSA set appears to have been said several years ago! By Daniel Solove here.
Also, and even more patriotic and heartening, I learn that there is an online Airport Security game! You play the role of a TSA screener, pulling prohibited items out of purses and backpacks -- and trying to keep up with changing lists of what's allowed and what's taboo.
Someday they'll put this stuff in museums about our era. (Thanks to Allen Knutson and Carl Malamud.)
January 23, 2009
Trouble in the software business: this time, it's serious!
Via my friend Bruce Williams, an accomplished aviator, flight instructor, and technology guy, I hear that the first-ever, 5000-person cuts Microsoft has just announced in its work force include the team responsible for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Williams himself, who was a major figure on that team across six versions of the program over 15 years, presented the news on his website under the headline: The End of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Of course there are other flight simulators. I've always loved X-Plane, even before its creator, Austin Meyer, started flying a real-world Cirrus airplane (fancier version of the kind I used to own). Still, there was something magical about even the earliest versions of Flight Simulator, with the familiar opening shot of a little plane ready to take off from the sadly now defunct Meigs Field in Chicago. At this fascinating site you can see screen shots from those embryonic versions, which provide a startling reminder of how much imagination you needed to apply when using the earliest computer games:
(See if you can detect any change in graphics in the intervening years: below is a screen shot of Flight Sim X, via Tom Bukowski at Smugmug.com:)
for
I don't mean to make light of real pain and hardship caused by software layoffs and those in all other industries. But the end of the FS era is poignant enough on its own to deserve a mention.
January 13, 2009
If you write me from EarthLink, here's why I won't write back
I've got nothing at all against EarthLink, its managers, or its general business reputation. On the contrary: it seems an admirable company.
But
I've come to dread getting any email with an @earthlink.net return
address, and here's why: If I go to the bother of hitting Ctl-R (in
Outlook) and sending a response, I know that I'll then be put to
several rounds of further bother, because of EarthLink's annoying and
narcissistic (and optional) "challenge-response" anti-spam system.
I previously complained about this in the Atlantic.
The system works by keeping a "white list" of approved email senders. If
someone writes in from any non-white address, EarthLink's filter bounces back a note to the effect of, "Who the hell are you?" You then have to fill out forms or interpret cryptic characters to prove you're a real person, not an e-bot, so that your message may be granted a writ of certiorari for consideration by the recipient. After the jump, samples of two such
messages I have received in the last hour.
I get
a lot of mail from people who write in about articles in the magazine or
posts on this site. Mail comes in via the "Email" button you see to your
right on this screen. If I write back, I do so from one of my normal email accounts. Very rarely is that address already entered on an EarthLink sender's white list. So the resulting cycle is: you write me on EarthLink; I take the time to write back; then Earthlink sends me an annoying message and asks me to do more work (like decoding the text in the box below, taken from an actual Earthlink challenge screen) before it deigns to disturb the sanctity of your inbox.
Why do I consider this narcissistic? Because
it assumes that the other person's time and tranquility are more valuable than mine.
Yes, spam is an issue. Yes, my situation is different from some other
people's, in that a significant share of email is with "first-time" correspondents
who are writing in cold to the magazine, rather than an established group of
friends. Still: if someone writes to me without previous "white listing," I don't like having to petition for the privilege to respond.
So, I remain happy to
hear from EarthLink users, as from all others. But as a matter of
policy I will no longer reply to messages from that domain -- unless you tell me that you've disabled challenge-response! Samples
of what makes me crabby below. __________
With apologies in advance for the self-referential quality* of what I'm about to say, I recommend this recent entry by fellow Atlantic Monthly contributor Adam Minter on his ShanghaiScrap blog. He makes a point that is obvious once you think about it, but which I hadn't seen laid out quite this clearly anywhere else:
The point is that a nationwide firewall-block on the NYTimes.com site, if that is indeed what's happening, is not simply questionable as a PR strategy for the Chinese government. It also emphasizes how much the information ecology has changed.
The NYT is, in my view, indispensable as a source of reported news around the world. One of the big and really alarming trends of 2008 is the hugely-accelerating economic pressure on organizations like the NYT that support reporting rather than pure opinionizing. But as Minter details, blocking this flagship site means a lot less than it used to -- and a lot less than the censoring authorities may assume -- no matter how good a job the NYT's team is doing, because of the rise of reported blogs:
What's curious to me - in fact, what's astounding to me - is that the
Chinese authorities either haven't picked up on this phenomenon, or
they don't care. Instead, they are doing what Chinese officials always
do: focusing their attention on the entity with the most prestige.
Quite honestly, I think most Chinese officials would have a hard time
believing that the rather rag-tag unwashed mass of (for the most part)
young, male, poorly compensated bloggers could actually drive news
coverage.
* The self-referential part is that Adam Minter originally sent this as an email to me, which I encouraged him to spread more generally. I hope you agree that it's worth reading.
December 20, 2008
NYTimes.com in China: Sunday morning update
1) For me, back in Beijing, the main NYT site is fully blocked, if I'm using the plain Chinese internet without a VPN or other burnishment.
2) Anyone who really wants to can find what's on that site -- with a VPN, by going through the International Herald Tribune site, by trying mobile.nytimes.com from a hand-held device, or with one of the tech workarounds mentioned here yesterday.
3) Without the relatively fast, informal-but-informative polling made possible by the internet, it would have been harder to establish that this was happening all over the vast country all at once. So thanks for writing in.
INTELLECTUAL RIGOR BONUS POINT 3A) As a matter of logic, one cannot be absolutely certain that this is a purposeful, country-wide blackout. Conceivably there is some other technological or accidental explanation. I consider this extremely unlikely, given: that the same computer that won't load the pages while using a normal connection loads them instantly when a VPN is turned on; that the pattern is reported in every corner of the country, from Urumqi to Dalian to Zhuhai and points in between; and that it involves a site about which the government has complained before and that has recently carried some sensitive items. But logically, we cannot exclude the possibility that it's all an accident.
4) While the porous nature of the current NYT block is consistent with past Great Firewall practice, the motivation for this episode remains unclear at the tactical level and puzzling at the strategic. I won't review the tactical possibilities, some of which were mentioned earlier. The real question concerns the strategy.
As i argued last month in the Atlantic, China's official PR machinery often succeeds mainly in making the country seem far more closed-off, impenetrable, defensive, and difficult to deal with than it actually is most places most of the time. By that logic, what exactly will China gain through this episode? The vast majority of Chinese net users would never look at NYTimes.com anyway -- it's in the wrong language. Those who really want to see what's on there can find a way to do so, despite the block. And how confident, open-minded, rules-abiding, modern and so on will the episode make the Chinese government look in other countries' eyes? Governments everywhere are annoyed by the press, but a mark of being in the big leagues is viewing press criticism as a necessary annoyance. This just is strange.
December 19, 2008
Tech followups on NYTimes.com blockage in China (updated)
On December 19, the NYTimes.com site was apparently blocked all across China. For the sake of completeness, these followups.
1) Could the problem be related to a recent physical break in three of the four main internet cables connecting Asia to North America? (As reported here and elsewhere.) Maybe -- but at face value that wouldn't seem to explain why the NYTimes.com site loads at normal speeds when you're using a VPN but times-out when you try it through the plain, old, Great Firewall-screened Chinese internet. It also wouldn't explain why most other international sites seem to behave normally.
When the main undersea cable off Taiwan was cut in an earthquake nearly two years ago, you knew it immediately. Internet traffic in most parts of Asia was either interrupted altogether or brought to 300-baud dialup modem speeds. But maybe this recent break somehow contributes to the NYT problem?
2) After the jump, tech details on an important point I didn't mention: Consistent with hit-or-miss, far-from-airtight nature of Great Firewall censorship, even when the site www.nytimes.com is blocked, http://nytimes.com is not. Go figure. Also, various mobile web devices seem to be able to reach any site they want.
3) I mentioned yesterday that exactly one person, from Guangdong province, had written to say that he could reach the NYT site with no problem. I heard from him again just now. Today his connection is blocked. The change in my situation is the reverse. I started having NYT problems last night -- but at the moment, it's working fine, even with the VPN turned off. It's the mystery and miracle of Christmas. Tech details below.
UPDATE: From a friend who knows the nuances of high-level Communist Party maneuvering far better than I do, this hypothesis about what's going on:
I suspect that while the reason behind this blocking is not yet clear, the process--and thereby the motivation--might be a bit less obscure. That is, given that consensus drives policy decisions here, it is very likely that different parts of the bureaucracy weighed in and officials each had a gripe with the NYT coverage of some or another issue. Collectively, they were able to push through a directive to block it.
The people here overseeing foreign journalists also know that there will soon be a new contingent manning the desks of the NYT bureau here. Those officials want to send a clear signal that they expect more positive ("objective") coverage of China.
I suppose all will be revealed in due time. Or maybe never. _______
Poll results are: NYTimes.com is being blocked throughout China (updated)
There seems to be no question: the New York Times web site is being firewalled right now all across China.
Exactly one person wrote me, from Shunde in Guangdong province, to say that he had no problem getting to www.nytimes.com and following links from the main page.
A second person wrote, from Beijing, to say that his connection was also working - and then wrote back a few minutes later to say, sorry, he forget he had the VPN turned on. Without the VPN, the site was blocked.
All the other replies (of slightly over 100) reported either that the home page wouldn't load at all, or that it loaded but that all of the links were blocked. As explained earlier, both of these are typical of the way the Great Firewall operates.
I got "blocked-connection" reports from people in the far west, in Urumqi; in the south, from Zhuhai and Shenzhen and Dongguan and Guangzhou; from the north and northeast, in Shenyang and Dalian and Changchun; and from all the other big cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Wuhan, Chengdu, Xian, Qingdao, Nanjing, Changsha, Hangzhou, Suzhou) and a bunch of smaller ones like Baoding and Ya'an.
Hypotheses:
Is the site blocked because of this big story today by Jim Yardley, about the economic perils China faces after 30 years of growth? Maybe .... but I have heard far worse prospects routinely discussed here at conferences, on Chinese TV shows, and by Chinese government officials in recent weeks. So that doesn't seem to make sense.
Is it blocked because of this story, by Edward Wong, reporting on the death sentences issued for two Uighurs convicted of killing 17 people in an attack on a police/military station in the far nothwestern town of Kashgar just before the Olympics? This could well be the problem. The threat of separatism in the mainly-Muslim northwestern Xinjiang region is an extremely sensitive topic in China. As Wong points out, his story carries several details of the action that differ from official Chinese government accounts.
Or is it blocked because of this unbelievably fatuous passage in yesterday's column by David Brooks: "Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around
rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000 hours a
year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes industriousness." Yes, culture matters; and yes, the structure of Chinese education, family patterns, and still-dominant agricultural life makes a difference in how people behave (not to mention the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the years under Mao, the one-child policy, and so on). But to write something like that with a straight face suggests that one has never seen actual Chinese people at work (or ostentatiously not working) or thought about how many factors account for the wild variations in work ethic, purposefulness, scholastic aptitude, basic honesty, devotion to duty, etc among people who all supposedly share the rice paddy legacy. I would give some credit to the Chinese firewall minders if exasperation with this sort of talk were the reason for the shutdown. In fairness to Brooks, in the column he might have just been paraphrasing an argument by Malcolm Gladwell.
Or is it being blocked for some other reason?
I don't know. But this is a more heavy-handed step than I remember seeing in the past two and a half years.
Anyone who really wants to, can get around this barrier. Via proxy server or VPN; by going to the International Herald Tribune's site, which carries many of the same stories but is not blocked; through other news aggregators; by just waiting for the policy to change. But something is going on. (And, as also explained in the earlier Great Firewall article, the goal of interfering with the internet is not to make the barrier air-tight. It's simply to make finding unauthorized information enough of a nuisance that most Chinese people won't bother.)
I'm left with one other mystery: why my own connection in
Beijing has been working just fine, even when I don't use the VPN. Hmmmm. UPDATE: Mystery solved. As of midnight Friday China time, now I can't reach NYTimes.com without a VPN either. The home page loads but all the links time out. I am one with the masses!
Thanks to all who answered.
Another very impressive Obama pick
No, not Pastor Rick Warren; I'm with the multitude thinking this is one of Obama's rare clumsy steps.
Instead: John Holdren, who according to AAAS's Science Insider site will become the president's main science advisor, as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Unlike, say, the inspiredchoice of Eric Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, there is no fancy multi-level symbolism in the selection of Holdren. His nomination is more comparable to that of Steven Chu at the Department of Energy: he is a figure of unquestioned eminence in his field, with significant experience not just in hard science but also in the application of science to public policy.
And like Chu, much of his recent professional attention has been directed at energy and climate questions. Holdren has also worked extensively on nuclear nonproliferation, and seven years ago won the $250,000 Heinz award largely for that effort. Noting the wide range of disciplines and pursuits that have engaged him (he has also directed Woods Hole Research Center), Holdren said in his Heinz acceptance speech:
One might wonder from the array of interests of mine that have just
been mentioned, whether I simply have a short attention span, but I do
like to think that there is some method in this madness. I think that
many, if not most, of the great problems of the human predicament -
population, resources, environment, prosperity, security - are not
separate problems, but are intimately interconnected. And I believe if
they're not all addressed and solved together, they won't be solved at
all.
After the jump, some quotes from Holdren on energy and climate change from an Atlantic article by Mark Sagoff back in 1997.
Here's the only reason I can think of to worry about this pick: Knowing how bureaucratic politics works, but not myself knowing much about Holdren or Chu personally, I can imagine their shared roles as scientists-in-chief working very well, if they're a natural team, or not so well, if they are in the slightest degree turf-conscious or jealous. We'll see. _______
Poll among readers in China: is NYTimes.com now blocked?
Even without using my VPN, I've had no trouble reaching NYTimes.com or similar Western news sites in recent days from Shenzhen or Beijing. And that's from my same old apartment-house ISP in Beijing that is subject to all the standard Great Firewall strictures. (For chapter and verse on how the Great Firewall works, go here.)
But today I heard from one reader in Chengdu, another in a different part of Beijing, and another in Guangzhou that they were suddenly not able to reach the NYT site. Very few things in China happen in a consistent, everywhere-at-once way. But I am curious about whether something larger is underway.
If you're within Chinese territory could you try NYTimes.com without using a proxy or VPN and see whether you can get through? If you send me a note, via the "email me" feature on this site, and tell me what city you're in and whether you got through, I'll post the accumulated results when there are enough to show some pattern. All I'm looking for is: "Xian, YES" if you CAN get through, or "Shenyang, NO" if you can't. I won't reply to those messages but will tally them up and report later. Thanks!
UPDATE: I have already heard from several people that the main page of the NYT comes up but the links are disabled. (This is consistent with one of the patterns of GFW blocking I mentioned in an article on the topic.) So could you click a link, too, to see if it works? I have gotten a lot more "NO" replies, indicating problems, than YESes so far.
1) A great 57-minute TV interview with Chu, conducted in 2004 by Harry Kreisler of UC Berkeley as part of his generally-great "Conversations with History" series.
In my experience over decades of conducting interviews, the people who are truly the greatest masters of their own rarefied fields often have a gift for explaining complex problems to outsiders in vivid, non-condescending ways. Think years ago of Richard Feynman, of Caltech, plunging a rubbery "O-ring" into a glass of ice water to demonstrate how it might have become rigid and failed during the launch of the doomed space shuttle Challenger. Think of Bill Clinton illustrating any point with one of his home town analogies.
Chu comes across very much that way in this session. Modest, funny, and willing to explain the work of of a scientist in terms and images most people can understand. A scientific explainer-in-chief? It would be nice to have such a person once more on the public scene.
2) Let's analogize one more time to another great Obama cabinet pick, Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. "Identity politics" was not the most important element in Shinseki's selection. "Policy politics" was what mattered most: Shinseki's having been right about Iraq. But there was an additional grace note, noted in particular by many Japanese-Americans, that a military leader named Shinseki was given this honor on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day.
So too with Chu. Identity politics is a second- or third-order aspect of this nomination. Mainly his choice says something about the role of real science in public life, about America's commitment to retain its leadership as a research power, and about the redoubling of scientific/technical efforts to deal with energy and climate problems. But in karmic terms it doesn't hurt that Chu, who was born in St. Louis of Chinese parents, will head the very department that, under then-secretary Bill Richardson, was involved in the Wen Ho Lee imbroglio in the late 1990s. (In brief: Lee, who was born in Taiwan and who worked at Los Alamos, was accused of massive theft of U.S. nuclear secrets on China's behalf. The NY Times loudly trumpeted this story. Eventually nearly all the charges were dropped, and the presiding federal judge apologized to Lee for government excesses.) Again, this is not a reason to have chosen him, but it's worth noticing.
December 14, 2008
More on the case for Steven Chu at energy
When Eric Shinseki was nominated as the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs, I argued that this was an inspired pick, on its own merits and for its sublime symbolism. (The man whom the Bush administration had ridiculed for being right about Iraq now restored, with honor, to cope with, among other things, the consequences of the Bush policy).
When Steven Chu was nominated as the new Secretary of Energy, I said that this was an even better choice, in both symbolism (no-kidding scientist to head what has become the government's leading science agency) and substance (his post-Nobel prize work has largely involved pushing for fundamental research on energy). Fortunately my friend Steve Corneliussen has done the work of spelling out some of the support for that assertion. Corneliussen, who is a writer rather than a scientist, has worked with the American Institute of Physics and other professional organizations. After the jump, parts of his email reporting reaction among the scientists he has been talking with. ________
Three quick followups to yesterday's mention of an IBM research project that would involve all-hours recording of all circumstances in your life.
1) As many, many people have noted, yesterday's English version of Spiegel Online carried a story about a woman with this very capacity naturally built into her own brain, and she's not so crazy about it.
2) After the jump, an extended version of the IBM release on the topic, which has more details and hints at some of the promising but complicated implications of this kind of effort.
3) From reader Karen Weickert, an account of an earlier foray in the same direction, under the auspices of Paul Allen's paradoxically secretive-but-publicized, and now defunct, Interval Research Corporation. (Long and interesting 1999 Wired story on Interval here.)
In the 1990's, a research shop funded by Paul Allen worked on a number of the IBM projects described in their press release. Specifically, the "memory" idea was put into practice by a researcher who strapped a video and audio recorder to his body, and recorded his daily rounds for weeks. He attempted to capture 360 degree audio and video. The point was to never miss anything that happened in your day, such as important conversations, your child's first steps, etc.
What happened instead is that no one wanted to speak with him. We assume in conversation that what we say will not be recorded and played back directly (if we are not politicians, of course). If all social interaction was assumed recorded, as opposed to the opposite, our shared world becomes something very different. It was creepy.
There were a number of other projects toying with social connectedness and interaction -- virtual offices and researchers connected through "surround sound" for example. Again, something important about our assumptions of social interaction were broken. We assume all work happens when groups are connected, but of course, we are private beings as well.
Quasi-nerds only: interesting little compare and contrast
Two of America's tech powers -- IBM and Microsoft -- have given glimpses of what they consider the most exciting and promising research opportunities for the future. Their lists are fascinating in their own right but also in a comparative sense, for what they show about the two companies.
There will be more to say about specific items later on. For now, you can see IBM's list of "Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years" here, and a Network World report on 10 hot projects from Microsoft's research center here. I think much about both companies is revealed by the comparison -- not to mention the implications for all of us if these visions are fulfilled.*
Now, where's Google's list? _____ * This one from IBM has philosophical ramifications worth exploring in the longer run:
Forgetting will become a distant memory Information overload keeping you up at night? Forget about it. In the next five years, it will become much easier to remember what to buy at the grocery store, which errands need to be run, who you spoke with at a conference, where and when you agreed to meet a friend, or what product you saw advertised at the airport. That's because such details of everyday life will be recorded, stored, analyzed, and provided at the appropriate time and place by both portable and stationary smart appliances. To help make this possible, microphones and video cameras will record conversations and activities. The information collected will be automatically stored and analyzed on a personal computer. People can then be prompted to "remember" what discussions they had, for example, with their daughter or doctor by telephone. Based on such conversations, smart phones equipped with global-positioning technology might also remind them to pick up groceries or prescriptions if they pass a particular store at a particular time. It's not hard to imagine that TVs, remote controls, or even coffee table tops, can one day be the familiar mediums through which we tap into our digitally-stored information.
November 21, 2008
Somewhat encouraging environmental report
A real if inglorious fact about environmental and climate-change issues is that people can stand to read only so much depressing news. Especially when the rest of their life is depressing enough. The economy's falling apart, half the people I know are losing houses or jobs, so what do I feel like doing at 10pm: pick up a thriller / turn on a comedy, or read further details about how the polar bears are drowning and the forests are dying and we're all doomed anyway?
And imagine if the election results had gone the other way.
So it's worth highlighting every bit of information that gives a believable (not flat-earthish or denialist) reason to think that sensible actions, taken in time, can make a significant difference. This was one of the virtues of my friend Gregg Easterbrook's 1995 book A Moment on the Earth, feather-ruffling as it was at the time. This has also been a consistent strategy of Amory Lovins' work at the Rocky Mountain Institute.
In a similar vein, I highly recommend this new report from the American Physical Society, the professional organization for physicists in the United States, about the very specific hows, whats, wheres, and how-much's of practical ways to increase energy efficiency. A cover letter says (emphasis added by me):
Can lower energy consumption come about in the United States? It
already has. Per-capita energy use in California, about half the
national average, has stayed flat for the past 30 years, largely
through an ambitious program of appliance standards and other
innovations in building design....
The report points out that the enhanced funding need only match federal
energy research levels in place in 1980. Research around that time led
to a major improvement in efficiency standards. For instance, compact
fluorescent lights and refrigerators now use about one-fourth the
energy needed for comparable models of 30 years ago. Air conditioners
are twice as efficient as those in 1980. Such dramatic improvements in
energy use could be sustained, many experts argue, but only if a
concerted energy research program is put in place.
I assume the Relevant Government Officials are well aware of such data -- at least ones from the incoming administration -- but it doesn't hurt to have the general public know too. (Thanks to UCSB physicist / Cirrus pilot Roger Freedman.)
Why didn't I know this before? (Math dept: Benford's law)
One reason math is so satisfying is that it allows you to see order in what is otherwise the randomness of life. For instance, the famous Fibonacci sequence, which shows up in countless natural patterns like this:
Math is also satisfying when it helps you understand what parts of life truly are random or "chaotic," rather than adhering to patterns you haven't yet figured out. The most obvious example is the minute-by-minute movement of weather systems. The world's vast weather-forecasting computers can assess the layers and eddies of heat and moisture in the air and tell you where "convective activity" -- thunderstorms -- is more and less likely to occur. (An example from NOAA here. I spent hours looking at such stuff in my pre-China piloting days.) But a day before landfall, they can't really be sure whether a hurricane will hit New Orleans or someplace in the next state.
So I was grateful to discover, via Michael Ham's Later On blog, another mathematical tool with surprising usefulness in daily life -- and one that, to my chagrin, I had never heard of before. It is called Benford's law, and it has to do with the distribution of numbers we use to count many naturally-occurring phenomena.
Time and again I've praised (or eulogized) DayJet, the radically innovative but now out-of-business air taxi company based in Florida. And I've praisedVMware, the still-in-business California company that lets you run Windows and Mac software seamlessly side-by-side on a Mac.
Now it turns out that one of VMware's main backers is... preparing to invest in the software from DayJet!
In my Atlantic article on DayJet earlier this year, I emphasized that it was, in its founders' view, a software company that happened to operate airplanes. That is, its real strength lay in the sophisticated algorithms for matching airplanes, passengers, pilots, and destinations. The weakness was the real-world big-ticket cost of the airplanes, which brought the firm down when the credit crisis began.
Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran who is now CEO of VMware, is according to this TechFlash report, interested in DayJet Technologies, a spin-off company designed to apply the DayJet systems elsewhere As the TechFlash story said:
There are some interesting clues as to why Maritz and others in the technology industry are excited about DayJet.
Georgia Tech professor George Nemhauser, who helped develop DayJet's
technology, said via phone that the system could help airlines,
trucking firms and other transportation companies plan more-efficient
routes between locations. Or, he said, it could be used by government
agencies to plan evacuation routes during public emergencies. The
original promise of the DayJet airline, he said, was to allow travelers
to book flights when they wanted them rather than relying on an
airline's set schedule.
"The whole idea is disruption
technology," said Nemhauser. "You get a plan for something, and then a
disruption occurs -- weather or something else -- and you have to make
a new plan very quickly."
What's left for me to dream of, in the convergence department? Maybe news that a craft-beer company is investing in software that will make it easier for me to speak Chinese.
November 18, 2008
A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China
Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.
I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.
This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry. (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)
Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage below is especially important for Americans. First he describes the way info would flow when bloggers and net connections first became significant in China, around 2003:
1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).
2. The local government suppresses all information.
3. All media reports are censored. (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)
4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice. The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.
5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case. But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities. (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)
6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through. This creates an international scandal.
7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.
Then he describes what has changed in the past five years, in this 2008 update:
On the right, the brave little USB memory stick of yesteryear, now retired.
On the left, the new, metal-clad, password-protected, online-backed-up, run-over-it-with-a-truck-and-it-will laugh, RSA-encrypted, programmed-to-self-destruct-if-you-enter-the-wrong password-too-manytimes, IRONKEY that is replacing it, kindly sent by a friend. That's the actual metallic ironkey in the middle, sitting on top of its explanatory brochure.
The USB stick is heard to say, "But I was pretty strong too! For my size."
October 24, 2008
More on the lean times / VC / startup front
In three accounts over the last week and a half (here, here, and here), I've mentioned how the chaos of financial markets is spreading to the tech sector, and what that might mean for the timing, scale, and duration of damage to the "real" economy in which companies make products and create jobs.
Central to this discussion has been a grim report from Sequoia Capital, in California, arguing that startup companies had to strip themselves to bare bones if they hoped to survive they next few years. Of course the process of stripping, which involves laying off employees and cutting all costs, perfectly illustrates how economic damage cascades
Some people have written back to say that the report was prescient; others, that it was part of a perhaps too-alarmist swing by the VC community that, whether or not this was its intention, had the effect of terrifying startup companies into accepting much tougher terms from funders.
After the jump, a contrarian view from Alan Patricof, the managing director of the New York VC firm Greycroft Partners, taken from a message to associates this month. Eg, "This is not a time to panic, cut off all investment in the future, and burrow into a dark hole. Take a page from the packaged goods industry that the time to gain market share is during tough times when your competitors are weaker in responding." Because Patricof makes some political comments, it's relevant to note that he has been a leading backer of Hillary Clinton's senatorial and presidential campaigns.
I realize this is not a black/white, all-or-nothing question -- Sequoia was recommending very selective investment too. And I don't intend to run endless back-and-forths. Still, I thought this was a worthy equal-time complement to the preceding argument. And, as my friend Ted Schell of New York, a former associate of Patricof's, has noted, it may illustrate an East Coast / West Coast difference in outlook, with the Easterners atypically more optimistic: "Frankly I think the west coast VC community [including Sequoia] is
much more inclined to excesses than the east coast - excesses in valuations,
amounts invested, return expectations and reactions to floundering or under
performing companies." More below.
Sobering news dept: The Hobbesian world of startups
Twice in the last week (here and here) I've mentioned the presentation that a leading California VC firm, Sequoia Capital, gave to CEOs of the companies it had funded. The message was: severe turbulence ahead, strap yourselves in, and to survive you must throw every bit of surplus weight and cargo (ie, employees and expansion plans) off the craft.
My friend the business strategist Lawrence Wilkinson (who is involved in a company with one of my family members) recently posted a fascinating item on his "Scenarios and Strategy" site about the other side of this interaction: the ways some private equity firms are using tough times to get very tough on the companies they have backed.
The tension between funders and entrepreneurs is familiar and well-explored territory. Any interesting account of the tech economy presents it as a major theme. To take one example from many possibilities: Charles Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners, the tale of creating and selling his own tech company. Yes, this is the same Ferguson who last year produced the influential Iraq documentary No End in Sight. The basic tension of course arises from the fact that VCs want to use the scarce resource they control -- money -- to get more of the scarce resource that company founders control, namely shares of corporate ownership, including the cut of the rewards if a startup makes it big.
But Wilkinson, who has seen many rounds of this battle before, says it has taken on a newly nasty tone. According to him, many of VCs and other funders are now saying: bad times mean your company isn't growing as fast as we hoped. So, we will take more of "your" share:
I've been awash in reports, some in the press, some
from friends, of private equity investors leaning on the companies in
which they have stakes to reprice those stakes- to give the investors
more. The arguments from one case to the next are idiosyncratically
different in their details, but they all have the same general thrust:
"we made our investments expecting more growth than it now seems likely
the company will achieve, so you (the company) should give us a bigger
stake."...
The issue is in no way
misrepresentation... The
issue that called the question was.. the sudden
dramatic downturn in the economy: credit is tight; anxiety is high;
spending has dropped like a rock... a situation triggered- and to some
extent at least, abetted, if not indeed caused- by the excesses of the
very financial firms now doing the demanding.
I've been around long enough to have gone through several busts;
I've learned that many (if not most) investors understand opportunism
to be not just their right, but their obligation. (And indeed, I've
seen some forms of opportunism contribute powerfully to turn-arounds.)
But I've never seen opportunism practiced in such a rapacious way as
these recent days- nor, I'd suggest, so desperately nor short-sightedly
selfishly....
It's a situation all too
resonant with the first version of the Paulson Bail-out Plan: privatize
the upside; socialize the risk.
The whole thing is worth reading, and is another illustration of the ways in which the recent financial turmoil, serious enough on its own, is taking on a more destructive and longer-lasting form as it begins to burden the operations of the "real" economy.
I don't quite believe this, but... (USB finale+1)
This really is the last chapter in the saga of the brave little USB stick. (Multi-part background here.)
To helpful friends writing in to say that it is time to give the poor thing a rest, leave it on the shelf in its treasure box, don't risk shorting out the whole laptop, and for God's sake use some of the other USB memory devices sitting around the house, I say: Thanks! Got it! Already put this plan into effect!
But before it goes away for good, this final USB achievement to note. Yesterday, one day out of its WD-40 bath, the USB stick would properly store and list files, but apparently had something wrong enough with it that it could not pass the integrity test for Windows Vista's "Ready Boost" function.
Today, it passes that test. Proof in the Vista screen shot below. The ReadyBoost cache is the next to last file listed, 4GBs in size. I won't say "USB Stick, heal thyself!," but something happened.
And as soon as that shot was taken, the plucky device was "Safely Removed" from its slot and placed in its satin-lined box, where it watches over the rest of the tech establishment. Talk about going out on top.
October 20, 2008
USB: Finale
It is time to revisit our friend, the brave little USB.
As previous accounts have described, it has been a difficult couple of months for this blameless device. Two inadvertent trips through a Beijing washer and dryer, each followed by restorative dunks in WD-40; loss of protective carapace, rotted away by this same WD-40 or perhaps the local air; and most recently and alarmingly, a heart-stopping pop, spark, and instant shutdown when drops of Chinese beer "somehow" got on it the USB's naked circuitry while it was plugged in and operating.
Sigh.
This morning, after a weekend's thorough laving and drying, I plugged it in once again, expectations low. I powered up the computer, and -- see for yourself, this time on a Mac:
Different-angle live action shot:
In case it's not obvious, the red light in the middle shows that the USB is still working. For further proof, here's a screen shot of the files on USB stick, done just after I created a new file with today's date and saved it directly onto the USB. If I had a live-audio feature, you could confirm that I am now playing "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" from the MP3 file shown:
So, what have we learned from this heartbreaking, inspiring, and unavoidably embarrassing set of mishaps? Relevant questions and answers after the jump. ________
It was only four years ago that I wrote in the Atlantic about David Allen, the "productivity expert" and inventor of the influential Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to life. I say "only" four years because it feels as if Allen and his outlook have been with me for a much longer time.
It's hard to top the wonderful LifeHacker blog as a source for practical tips about gadgetry workplace tools, habits, and shortcuts, many in the GTD spirit. But for the last six months, David Allen's organization has been operating its own "official" blog, called GTD Times. I like it -- and as a sample, I direct your attention to this recent post, arguing that you really do become dumber and slower if you try to do too many things at the same time. This applies not only to that modern plague of texting-while-driving (or walking) but also to having a zillion IM and other popup windows on your screen while you work. For doubters, there is a sobering online test to demonstrate the point, taken from the book The Myth of Multitasking.
What other point was I going to make? I forget, I was thinking about something else...
Photos and case report when it comes out of the recovery room.
Phew.
October 17, 2008
Nerds-with-a-heart only: the passion of the USB
Poor little USB! Previous chapter here, which includes links back through the whole trail of tears. When last sighted, the USB had been through a Chinese washer and dryer twice, had been resurrected through the miracle balm of WD-40, and was now chugging along in a working computer, minus any protective shell.
(Reminder picture here:)
Let's not get into the details, but ... while operating in that exposed state, the little USB got some, ummmm, beer all over it. It made a snazzling sound, there was a little spark, and suddenly there was no more "Removable Drive F:" on the computer. The beer was only Yanjing, the Beijing area's answer to Shanghai's REEB, so it was as benign and watery a splash as it could be. Still....
Powered down the computer, and started the USB on a long, long soak in WD-40. Now the extensive drying out process begins (below, fresh out of the WD-40, on a napkin from a local eatery). When the vapors of WD-40 have dissipated in a day or two, we'll see just how much this tough little device can take.
In the "look on the bright side" spirit, a word about two pieces of software, both previously mentioned but now in new releases, that I appreciate, admire, and rely on all the time.
- SugarSync, by Sharpcast. Several months ago I noted that I found the product's name slightly creepy but was intrigued by its features. I've used it daily since then and have only better and better things to say.
Its purpose is to keep files in sync among a number of computers. It does that in a way so effortless that you stop even thinking about the program's presence. SugarSync easily connects PCs and Macs and, in some circumstances, handheld devices. Meanwhile, it doubles as an online backup for all the files in your computer, which is of course useful if you have a crash but also if you are in one part of the world and realize that file you want is on the computer back at your office or house. It has recently introduced several new features, including one that lets you safely edit files that "live" on your home computer from any internet-connected computer anywhere. Really a smooth product, by whatever name.
- Fusion, by VMware. I have previously praised this software ad nauseam. Its point is to let you run any Windows-based program, driver, system software, you name it, on an Intel-based Macintosh -- and, unlike the Mac's own Boot Camp utility, to do so right alongside native Mac programs, cutting and pasting from one to the other. I've mentioned it before because it has been practically bulletproof. As a side note for later discussion, in general it allows Macs to run Windows programs better and faster than most ordinary PCs, mainly because it supports a "pure" version of Windows rather than one burdened by the horrible, unwanted, pre-installed features known as "craplets" that have made so many PCs so unpleasant to use.*
A new version 2.0 of Fusion has been released, as a free upgrade for users of earlier versions. This new release has eliminated the one problem I'd ever had with Fusion (a screen-corruption issue, discussed here) and has many other enhancements.
The similarity that connects SugarSync and Fusion is that each represents another step toward freeing users from purely practical concerns -- did I remember to copy that file? do I want to work on it with a PC or a Mac? -- so they can concentrate on the actual ideas and work they want to deal with.
One further bit of cheer: If you use either Gmail or Google Chrome and have not committed to muscle-memory the extensive keyboard shortcuts for each of them, you're working harder than you need to. Gmail keyboard tips here; Chrome's, here. ______ * If you start with a Mac and buy Fusion, you also need to buy a copy of Windows, ideally XP, which you then install in the Fusion part of the Mac. Since you buy this copy of Windows as a standalone CD/DVD, not as something pre-installed by Dell or HP or whomever, you get it in pure form, not encased in all sorts of other junk that comes on most PCs now.
I'm increasingly convinced by the argument that Windows Vista seems so terrible in part because it mainly comes on newer machines that groan under an intolerable burden of these craplets. I am sorry to say that my once-beloved ThinkPad brand seems, under Lenovo, to be tarnishing itself in this way. Turn back before it's too late, Lenovo! More on this later.
October 13, 2008
More on the Sequoia Capital presentation
Yesterday I mentioned a presentation by the tech VC firm Sequoia Capital, about what the financial contraction would mean for start-up businesses and the tech economy in general.
After the jump, extra notes on the presentation from someone at the meeting.
This account appeared first on a subscription-only site, TheFunded.com, so I won't quote very much of it. But even a brief sample suggests that when future economics teachers want to give their classes a concise lesson in how economic downturns spread, or what a "vicious cycle" means (a term prominently misspelled in the Sequoia presentation itself, one of several signs of a rush job), they can use this session as a convenient example. Thus:
The VC firms warn that tough times are at hand; their advice is that all their startup companies cut, cut, cut, laying off as many people as possible and eliminating every purchase or investment they don't absolutely need to survive. The startups do that-- and then the companies they used to buy from have to begin cutting drastically themselves, as do the people all these firms have just laid off. Everyone is buying less, and... The point is right out of Ec 101, but this is a particularly clear and real-time example. _______
This is impressive, and yet sort of sad (USB immortality dept)
Over the last three and a half months, I have recounted the travail of my brave little USB stick:
First an unanticipated trip through the washer and dryer. Then, miraculously, it survives and still works! Then, a warning from a tech savant that corrosion is already setting in. Then, a bath in WD-40 as salvation. Then, another trip through the washer and dryer. And another WD-40 dunk. And all the while... still chugging along.
Here is how it looked after the first ordeal:
Yesterday, I grabbed it to switch it to another machine, and the plastic housing simply fell off. Post-traumatic stress effects of the washer and dryer? Of WD-40? Of general abuse? Who knows. Yet even in this naked, skeletal condition .... still it works. Though here is how it looks these days: The bare green circuit board, shown plugged into a ThinkPad, is what's left of the USB stick. It's hard to see in this picture, but its red LED light is flashing, showing that it's actively doing something. (Click for closeup.) The castoff plastic housing, like a shed skin, is beneath it, in two halves.
I will rename my USB stick "Hawking," signifying a being that, as its corporeal shell has suffered and been diminished, has been distilled to its pure thinking essence.
Very sobering report from Silicon Valley
A number of friends in the SF Bay Area have directed me toward this recent slide show by Sequoia Capital, one of the biggest-deal tech VC firms. It's been widely viewed in the tech world and is said to reflect, and no doubt partly shape, the prevailing sentiment. (Update: Also, I see now, it was recently mentioned on the NYT tech blog.)
At least for me, with an ever-shaky internet connection here in Beijing, the 56 slides of this presentation are quite slow to load. But they have a lot of useful data about the origins of the current crisis, plus a lot of chastening advice for companies that want to survive. I introduce them here as part of the effort to shift attention from the purely financial-market disasters of the moment, important as they are, and toward the longer-term implications for the companies that create products, jobs, and real wealth.
Clickable version below; or this direct link to "Sequoia Capital on Startups and the Economic Downturn." Caveat lector -- by which I mean, in this case, not so much that the reader should beware of the source as that we should beware of the conditions ahead.
September 13, 2008
One time only: Java-Javascript smackdown
Truly nerds only.
Twice in recent days (here and here) I've mentioned my reactions to Chrome, the new browser from Google. A number of dopes "low information readers"* have written asking what I have against this new entry in the browser wars.
Nothing at all! I am now using it, alongside Firefox, on all three computers here in the Beijing HQ -- one ThinkPad, two Macs. (I am composing this post via Chrome, on a MacMini.) Chrome is Windows-only but runs fine, like all other Windows programs I've tried, under VMware Fusion on the Macs. It is a very interesting program with some immediate advantages over Firefox. Most obvious one: when you have a lot of web pages open, a freeze in one page or "tab" is unlikely to make all open pages freeze, as can happen in Firefox.
My point, to clarify for those who can't read benefit from repetition, is an "enthusiasts versus civilians" distinction. If you are a computer enthusiast, of course you're going to find this fascinating and worthwhile. If you're a civilian user -- not interested in the process, just in getting the results -- I say, there are enough transition difficulties that you should wait a while. Wait, for instance, until Chrome can easily handle RSS feeds, or has extensions like Firefox, or runs in native-Mac version, or has improved bookmark handling.
Now, the promised smackdown. Recently I posted comments from one tech veteran, Ken Broomfield, about what Chrome's emergence says about the "early days" of web programming, ie the mid-1990s. In included the argument that if the Java programming language had developed the way it could and should have, a lot of latter-day workarounds would not be necessary.
After the jump, the Other Side of the Story, from another tech veteran who doesn't want to be named. This is an one time only "fairness doctrine" airing of a contrary view. I lack the expertise to referee future rounds of argument, and there are other places where nerds can hash it out. But since Fox News is not the only institution that believes in fair and balanced coverage, I post this response below.
* Apologies to anyone who took offense! A splenetic little joke, based on too much email from people who, in my view, were not trying hard enough to understand previous posts.
1) Basic up-down decision: After a week of using Chrome on my Windows machine and under VMware Fusion on my Macs, I restate my original triage judgment with even more conviction. If you're interested in software, by all means check it out. If you mainly want to get your work done, don't bother -- yet. For ordinary non-nerd civilian users, the improvement touches in Chrome are outweighed by the inconveniences. For instance: can't use any of the numerous invaluable "extensions" for Firefox. And RSS feeds work poorly if at all.
2) Nerds only:This article in Network World does a very nice job of explaining the philosophy behind and implications of Chrome's technological design.
3) Browser nerds only, concerning i-Rider: I have long had a soft spot for a $29 browser called iRider, from the company Wymea Bay -- which, as it happens, is based in California rather than Hawaii. When introduced five years ago, iRider was way ahead of Firefox and IE i browser-convenience features and still has a number of slick touches, mainly for dealing with a lot of open pages at once. (Feature overview here.)
And to illustrate the company's "cut the BS spirit," here is what its page says about compatibility with different operating systems (it's Windows-only):
As will surprise no one who follows the technology press, we still
cannot recommend Windows Vista. If you're using Windows XP, we'd advise you not to upgrade
to Vista, and buyers of new computers should consider having XP installed, which is an
option many manufacturers still offer.
After the jump, on a nerdy-nerds only basis but very interesting for that audience, a message I received from Ken Broomfield. He is iRider's founder and earlier was one of the key developers of the indispensable XTree Gold. He has a note about the ironies and the potential of Google's introducing Chrome. Skip if you're bored by inside-baseball details - but if you're interested, read on. ______
As recounted previously here and here my doughty little 8GB USB stick has now survived two inadvertent but complete trips, two months apart, through the washer and dryer. After a day-long bath in WD40 and a thorough air-drying process, it is now back in duty... and again working like a champ!
I had been sobered by the expert view that, despite its brave initial recovery from the trauma, the USB was already doomed because corrosion of its tiny circuits had begun. It was bound to fail in four to eight weeks. Then another expert said that WD40 could reverse the process...
It's now 10+ weeks since the first wash-dry cycle. Every four weeks or so I'll report on its health -- until I get bored, or I have to report its demise.
Meanwhile, I have received a note about a kind of "Survivor" USB stick designed to go through the washing machine -- and nuclear winter, and whatever other torture test you have in mind. I'll try to take this in the right spirit -- and not as if I were a diner in a restaurant being offered a bib after repeatedly dripping food all over myself. Thanks, I think, to Dave Proffer for the tip.
September 10, 2008
New hope for the dead (USB dept.)
Ten weeks ago, I revealed the heartening news that a little PNY Optima Attache USB stick had gone through the wash-and-dry cycle in a pants pocket, and had come out working fine.
Or so I thought. Several correspondents soon pointed out that the tough-seeming device was actually on a terminal watch. The corrosion had started, and it was a matter of time -- maybe four weeks, maybe eight -- before the circuits rusted all the way through and the device simply stopped. In the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "in the midst of life we are in death."
Then another reader suggested that a bath in WD-40 could hold off the inevitable... maybe indefinitely! I got a friend to bring me some from the US, and about a week after swimming in hot, soapy washing machine water the USB stick was being gentled laved with the balm of WD-40.
That cure seemed to work for ten weeks, until today, when - for reasons still being litigated here in the Beijing HQ -- the same stick went through the washer and dryer AGAIN.
When it came out -- amazingly -- it worked AGAIN. But taking nothing for granted, I have plunged it immediately an inch-deep pool of WD-40 and will put it through a careful resurrection process. If it's still alive in two months, I will report this achievement. Or I'll report its demise.
______ * To spare the usual readers the effort of sending the usual email: Yes, I do realize that USBs are inanimate objects and therefore can't technically be "dead." This is similar to my being aware that, despite making a light reference to Marie Antoinette, there are significant differences between my situation and that of an 18th century queen of France destined for the guillotine. Every now and then I recklessly employ the concept of "whimsy" or "a minor joke" in online posts.
September 8, 2008
In which I reveal myself as Marie Antoinette (VPN dept)
Through the past year-plus I've discussedseveraltimes the value of Virtual Private Networks, VPNs, for avoiding the hassles created by China's internet-control system generally known as the Great Firewall. I won't give one more plug for the for-pay service my wife and I have been using, since I've mentioned it so often. But at $40 per year, per computer, to us it is worthwhile.
In an Atlantic article six months ago about the Great Firewall, I noted that $40 per year meant different things to different people:
An expat in China [me!] thinks: that's a little over a dime a day. A Chinese factory worker thinks: [$40] is a week's take-home pay. Even for a young academic, it's a couple days' work.
My reaction to a new VPN offering shows that I may have forgotten my previous point. The service is called Hot Spot Shield, from AnchorFree. It's effective, extremely easy to install and run, designed for both Windows and Mac -- and absolutely free. (To download, and for more info, go here.)
I first heard about this from my friend Simon Elegant, and then from other China-based users. I tried it and found it technically very nice and efficient. But I didn't like using it at all. The reason is its "ad-based" business plan. In order to underwrite its free VPN service, it inserts an inch-high banner ad, often flashing, at the top of every new web page you load or visit. There is a "close" button on those ads, but unless you click it every single time, you have an extra, flashing ad wherever you go.
To me, on a day at the desk when I might open hundreds of new web sites, it is worth a total of 11 cents not to see a flashing banner at the top of every one. But the recent surge of interest in Hotspot Shield within China suggests that for lots of people, this is an attractive tradeoff.
Update: Peter Bollig reports that the Opera browser automatically ignores the banner ads. Probably others can be configured the same way, but I didn't take the time to figure out how to do so with IE or Firefox.
Non-politics: Google Chrome, first in a series (updated)
If you're interested in software just because it's interesting, you should definitely check out Google's new web browser, Chrome, at the download page here.
If you're interested mainly in using your computer, rather than tinkering with it, there's no huge rush. Also, Chrome is Windows-only for now, XP or Vista; Mac version in the works. _____ (From the wonderful comic book-style user's guide:) ____
Only one way: Just shut up when tempted to say or write anything about it. Otherwise you'll be driving people crazy with your enthusing about how useful and convenient it is, and what its potential might be, and how many elegant decisions are evident in its conception and design.
I'm talking mainly about high-level functional design: what should the whole system be able to do? What functions should be built in or omitted? Rather than the physical industrial design of the device itself -- which is quite nice but is widely recognized as Ver 1.0 of something that will go through many refinements and tweaks.
After the jump, two points about functional-design elegance, then maintaining silence on this subject for as long as I can: ____________
I haven't watched any gymnastics, live or on TV; don't follow the sport; and have no opinion on how old members of various teams look and how much that matters.
But this new post, from the Stryde Hax blog, does an impressive technical job of finding information that has not yet been removed from caches of official Chinese sites. At face value it makes a strong circumstantial case that one of the gymnasts, the double gold-medalist He Kexin, was born in 1994 rather than 1992, making her 14.
The post also includes links to two cached screenshots of Chinese birth records that, for now, still exist. (Many others have been very recently removed.) See them here and here. No harm in saving or printing a screen shot..... These are Chinese charts that show name, sex, date of birth, place of birth. The name in question is 何可欣, and one of the lines where it appears says:
618,"何可欣","女","1994.1.1","湖北"
(# 618, He Kexin, female, Jan 1 1994, Hubei)
Worth further looking into. A very nice touch is that Stryde Hax shows us all his work, so the searches are checkable. (Thanks to John Scott and of course Slashdot.)
Update: Really, I don't care about gymnastics! And as noted before I'm delighted that China is doing so well in these games, and sorry about Liu Xiang. What interests me in this case is the technical sleuthery of the guy who found the cached pages, and the deeper issue of "transparency" in the Chinese system. Revising public records is not something Chinese people or outsiders should want to see.
August 10, 2008
Nerdy nerds only: Version 1.0 of Chandler officially released
For more than a decade I've followed the genealogy of the personal-info manager now known as "Chandler." A little while ago I got a message saying that it had (finally!!!) been released.
Background:
Some of the earliest Paleolithic rumblings here, in the second half of an Atlantic article written in early 1996. The first half of the article describes the wacky new concept behind a approach to software called "Java," and gives quotes on that subject from a promising engineer at Sun named Eric Schmidt.
Another installment here, from eleven years ago, which gave the tragic history of Lotus's too-innovative Agenda program -- and the still-live ambitions of its sponsor, Mitch Kapor, to create the info-management program of everyone's dreams.
Two years ago, this update on how Kapor was faring now that he had named this dream program "Chandler" and moved its development to the Open Source Application Foundation, which he initially funded. And late last year, this interim report on how an early version of Chandler looked and worked. And let's not forget Scott Rosenberg's very good book about the whole Chandler project, Dreaming in Code.
Now version 1.0 is ready for release. I am downloading it, in Windows version on one machine and Mac on the others, as I type. Linux is available too, and all are free.
Nerds only: very impressive new beta of VMware Fusion
Recently I mentioned that I was having a video-corruption problem with a Beta 1 version of VMware's Fusion. (For those late to the story: Fusion let's you run Windows programs on an Intel-equipped Macintosh, right alongside the normal Mac programs. Parallels software does the same thing, but I like Fusion better.)
I'm still having that video problem with the new Beta 2 of Fusion. Perhaps that will make my compliment all the more sincere when I say that the new release is a truly phenomenal piece of engineering. I hope VMware fixes the bug that is annoying me -- and that, according to VMware, is in fact a flaw in Apple's own video drivers for the MacBook Air. But even with the bug, which is work-aroundable since it shows up only in Fusion's "unity" view, I highly recommend this program.
The earlier incarnations of Fusion already went far toward making the Mac a useful platform for those who don't want to relearn all their computing habits or cut themselves off cold-turkey from the vast world of Windows-only software. I have been using it for several months, on a MacMini and a MacBook Air, to run my workhorse Office2007 programs (Outlook, Word, Excel) plus a number of Windows-based favorites, like Zoot and BrainStorm.
The new Beta 2 release includes, among many other things, three big features that matter to me:
keyboard mapping, so you can make a Mac produce keystrokes that its own (deficient, IMHO) keyboard lacks. For instance, the equivalents to Ctl-Home and Ctl-End in Word, to get to the beginning or end of a document, on Mac portable keyboards that don't have those keys -- or PrintScreen, or Insert, or a slew of others. You can assign any command that's missing from a Mac keyboard, or that your fingers are used to producing in a way the Mac doesn't normally allow, to keys it does have;
Trouble in paradise: VMware Fusion + MBAir + Firefox
I've mentioned previously my admiration for Firefox 3, VMware Fusion, and the MacBook Air -- the last with some limits, since its elegantly stripped-down design makes it great for traveling but too limited (in disk space and ports) to be a "main" computer.
These three elements are very good individually and even better together, with one exception. Since the release of Firefox 3, I've found that running it at the same time I'm running Windows programs under Fusion, on the MBAir, frequently leads to a video-corruption problem that makes the screen look like this:
It doesn't happen if I'm using Firefox without Fusion, or using Fusion without (native Mac) Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox and Fusion (which allows you to run any Windows program) are two programs I use all the time. When they're running at the same time and I am switching from one to another, sooner or later I will have this problem. It doesn't cause lost data, but it means a tedious chore of closing down and backing out of programs when you can't see what's on the screen. The menu bars still are visible, and work, but you have to guess-remember what the on-screen dialogue box is saying as you close each program.
VMware claims this is an (acknowledged) Apple video bug in the MBAir, and that Apple will some day fix it. I haven't asked Apple's side of the story. I mention it just for the record, as the one and only serious instability issue I've had with the MBAir, and as part of the continuing quest for de-bugging our technological lives.
July 27, 2008
Newbie Kindle reactions (cont)
1) Whole different way of thinking about buying books:
Sitting on the airplane at Newark airport Friday afternoon, getting ready for the 13-hour flight to Beijing. People are still trudging aboard, still OK to talk on the phone, chatting with a friend who mentions a great new book he's sure I'll want to read. While talking with him, I take out the Kindle that I got three days earlier, search the Kindle online store, find and buy the book, have it delivered to the Kindle to read during the flight -- all within about two minutes total. Huge reduction in the gap between "thought that a book might be interesting" and "paying money for that book." Works only for books in the Kindle catalogue, of course. Implications not so good for book stores but positive for the overall industry of selling ideas / thoughts / writing, I would think.
2) And about not buying books:
Giant supply of books for free download, in Kindle and other eBook formats, here and here, among other sites. They're mainly out-of-copyright classics, from Ulysses to War and Peace to Huckleberry Finn to Persuasion to Looking Backward to The Oregon Trail to Anne of Green Gables to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (and many by PG Wodehouse). Plus a few new ones. Small donations solicited here. In most cases you download to your computer and transfer to Kindle via USB cable, which is extremely easy.
3) And about the process of reading:
Spent six or seven hours of the flight reading on the Kindle. Perfectly pleasant and legible. Only one inconvenience relative to " real" books -- harder to flip ahead or back several pages at a time. (You scroll page by page, or else go to the table of contents.) And a kind of mental-picture adjustment: it's easier to insert bookmarks or placeholders, or seach for a specific word in the text; harder to have a remembered visual image of a certain passage as it fits on a certain place on a page. Not good for books where pictures, illustrations, maps, production quality matter a lot. Very, very good for reading Word .DOC files or .PDFs that I would otherwise have to read on the computer.
My theory: television didn't eliminate radio, telephones didn't eliminate personal conversations, eBooks won't eliminate real books. People always find more ways to communicate, and this will be another way. Very good for some kinds of information, not so much for others. A welcome new addition to the mix.
July 23, 2008
I'll try not to become a nerd-bore on this topic too, but: Kindle
Had resisted buying one because I knew that the spiffy wireless-delivery service wouldn't work outside the US, and anyway I didn't have time for yet another gadget.
I eventually spent enough time to learn (duh!) that I could use it wherever I was in the world, with or without wireless delivery. You just download the e-book files to your computer, over the plain old internet, and then transfer them to Kindle with USB cable. So as part of the provisioning run on this quick trip to the U.S. I ordered one and received it yesterday.
First impressions are all of the "beating expectations" variety. Screen nicer to read than I expected. Navigation takes about one minute to learn. Instant-gratification feature more satisfying than expected. You think: I'd like to read that book! A minute later, it's literally in your hands. On my last provisioning run, I wanted to get Joseph O'Neill's celebrated and then-new novel Netherland. But it wasn't in any of the book stores that I passed by, and I didn't have time for "legacy" Amazon shipments. Now I have it, for about $10 versus about $25.
Unexpected and potentially important practical aspect: I'm always getting very long book or article manuscripts to read, usually in .DOC or .PDF files. I don't want to use the paper to print them out, so generally I have to be at a computer to deal with. But I can email them as attachments to a Kindle.com address; then for 10 cents a document, they're resent to my own Kindle in a form I can read and annotate when not at a computer. Have already used this system to queue up a couple of book-length manuscripts I'm supposed to read while on the road in the next week or so.
We'll see how this wears -- in particular how this replicates the intangible satisfactions of reading an actual book. I like holding and reading real books. We'll see how likable these virtual books are on longer exposure.
Main drawback I foresee right now: my wife being distinctly unamused if on our next trip together or next evening at home I end up starting at yet another digital device. This may have to remain a private vice.
July 16, 2008
Two sophisticated and well-worth-reading documents on national security
1) From Bruce Schneier, renowned and sensible expert on taking terrorist threats seriously without overreacting and defeating ourselves in the process, on exactly which aspects of the Chinese "hacker" menace are worrisome, and which ones aren't.
Executive summary: these hackers aren't controlled by the Chinese government or military and basically are sharp, cocky young men showing off their technical skills. "The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living." That is reassuring in some ways and not in others. But the essay should be read in full. (Thanks to Edward Goldstick for tip.)
2) From one Barack Obama, on the mixture of military strength, non-military influence, assertiveness, and restraint that will advance American interests in this era of ongoing terror threats, ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan combat, financial and economic chaos, resource and energy crises, rise of China, unruliness of Russia, and so on. Full text and some video here.
Executive summary: any speech that begins and ends with allusions to George C. Marshall's vision 60 years ago is quoting the right authority but setting a high standard for itself. This is a speech rather than a whole implemented years-long program, in contrast to the great Marshall's achievement. But as a speech it stands up very well and deserves to be read and absorbed in toto rather than relying on news clips.
July 3, 2008
Dead men walking, USB-stick variety
"In the midst of life we are in death," as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. Every faith has a way of conveying the same idea.
The technology world's version is the sad recognition that any device starts becoming obsolete the instant you buy it. But there perhaps should be a specific line or verse referring to USB sticks. I mentioned recently that one of mine (a PNY Optima Attache model) had survived a trip through the washer and dryer and still worked fine. Reader Gary Allen Vollink brings the unsurprising but sobering news that all is transience even with the hard silicon of USBs:
The corrosion starts once they get wet. There's no stopping it. It will die suddenly and unexpectedly. It will probably take between 4 and 8 weeks.
Sadly, I've done this with THREE already, and one of them was also an Attache. They all reacted - pretty much the same way.
That is -- back up your backup.
Book of Common Prayer: "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower." Tech world: "Back up your backup." It comes to the same thing.
Update: this does nothing about the human "in the midst of life" problem, but reader Matthew Wilbert reminds me that soaking the USB stick in WD-40 can do wonders against corrosion. "That's (more or less) why it was invented." FWIW.
July 1, 2008
Endurance champ (flyweight division)
Yesterday I mentioned that because I couldn't find a USB stick, I had rigged up a clumsy ad hoc network just to transfer one file.
It turns out that the USB stick wasn't actually lost. It was.... only resting, deep in a pocket of some pants that had gone into the wash. The pants have now come out of the wash -- in specific, a trip through the washing machine and the dryer, though not the ironing board. Of course only after all that was the USB stick discovered.
With a sense of doom, I tried it -- and it still works fine! All the files that were on there before are on there now, and perfectly readable. I just used it to make another file transfer: no problem. It even passes the performance tests for "ReadyBoost" service as temporary RAM under Vista.
So if you're looking for the USB stick that, in the words of the ancient Timex slogan, takes a licking and keeps on ticking, I say: look no further than the PNY Optima Attache 8GB model. This genuinely surprises me. And think of the seconds you'll save not having to empty your pockets.
PS the reddish background in the picture above is not some lush grosgrain but the back cover of Bowl of Cherries, a racy recent comic novel about teenaged lusts, the war in Iraq, modern college life, etc. It is the first novel from Millard Kaufman, who was born in 1917. He is said to be at work on his second. Endurance champ of a different sort.
June 30, 2008
Catching up quickly UPDATED & CORRECTED!
Clamboring toward and through the airport for the long flight "home" to Beijing -- whose own airport has the delightfully old-school identifier PEK -- two items leap out at me from quick exposure to headlines of the past week.
What???? As I was discussing ever so recently, the security agencies in the Chinese government have chosen the run-up to the Olympics as the moment to crack down on citizens and foreigners in the most ham-handed of ways. Like its familiar Time Out counterparts in other major cities, TOB is a frothy but very useful entertainment-and-lifestyle guide. And even this is an intolerable menace? As the Times account said:
The decision seems to have been taken not because of any racy or politically incorrect content. Time Out Beijing has fallen victim to the accelerating imposition of restrictions on any aspect of life in the capital deemed to pose a potential threat to a smooth Olympics.
UPDATE: It appears that this episode is a little more complicated than it appeared at an in-airport glance. Perhaps it involved Olympic-crackdown matters; perhaps it was largely a question of following business-licensing laws. Overview of the snarls here, at China Law Blog, with many subsequent links including to Shanghaiist and Beijing Boyce. In the meantime, this will teach me about catching up too quickly or passing on tips I haven't checked out myself. More later.
2) According to Steve Lohr of the NYT, even Intel has decided not to "upgrade" its own computers to Windows Vista? Wow and wow. Out of a sense of sportsmanship and a dim awareness that if I've said something 99 times I may not need to say it the 100th*, I've kept to myself recent illustrations of the ponderous nightmare that the Vista Experience has meant for me. But this, from the other half of the Microsoft-Intel partnership that for years has ruled the PC world, has got to sting.
And it of course is a fitting complement to a related, bonus half-item: the now-widely-circulated and wonderfully expressive and human email from Bill Gates about his own frustrations in using Windows XP. I would really like to see what he said when trying to make Vista work.**
Response from Mozilla on a rumored security concern
A few days ago I got a note from a technically-minded friend who also has worked in the military/security field. He wrote with a warning about a problem with the newly-released official version of Firefox 3.
He said, “Browsing history can no longer be readily cleared upon exit as with previous versions (like release 2). It is now stored in an encrypted file that, any turkey with half a brain, can readily decrypt, or if they have physical access / web access to your machine, can download / copy at will.” This person travels frequently in China and said he considered this too serious a risk if he had to leave his machine unattended. “I think this is not the browser that I would want to travel around many places and work with.”
Worse, he said, when he went back to Mozilla to find the Firefox 2 install files so he could return to a system he found more comfortable, the files were no longer there.
I was about to post his comments and say that while this person was more security-conscious than I was, the point was worth knowing about in illustrating how much more digital information about ourselves we leave at every turn. Then I thought: why not ask Mozilla?
It turns out that, according to Mozilla, these concerns are unfounded. I heard back quickly from John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, and Mike Beltzner, the program lead for FF3, about where these apparently-missing features could be found. If anyone has harbored concerns like my friend’s, responses (tied to this screenshot) come after the jump.
It appears that I am indeed the last person in the world to figure out how to conceal the large Ribbon at the top of Office2007 apps -- Word, Excel, etc. Good to find this out! And extra tips:
1) Ctl-F1 is the easiest way to get the job done, toggling the Ribbon on and off;
2) Double-clicking on one of the headings at the top of the screen "View," "Insert" etc also works as a toggle. This I knew.
3) Something I didn't know, and that is quite elegant for the keyboard-centric like me. If you have minimized the Ribbon, you can then hold down the Alt key -- and guides to the keyboard shortcuts for various commands appear. (Actually, this Alt-key trick works if the Ribbon is full-sized too.) There are many of us who have spent years learning the sequence of keys to get a job done without going to the mouse. Most of them still work, and this Alt-key trick provides clues. Picture below shows effect of Alt key with normal sized Ribbon -- for instance, Alt-A-L to align copy to the left.
Thanks to Erik Love, Steve Endow, and a cast of thousands.
How did I go so long without knowing this? (First in a million-part series)
Microsoft's two big releases of 2007 were Vista and Office2007. At least I liked one of them! The new Office07 products -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc -- have a number of small refinements that I appreciate. They look much nicer than their predecessors, at least to my eye, and they're technically improved, including with a new file format that takes only half the storage space of previous versions. Some of the commands are annoyingly different from the ones my fingers had been used to for years. But, conveniently, in most cases the programs will still recognize what you're trying to do if you hit the old sequence of keys.
What I don't like is "The Ribbon." This is the big banner at the top of each Word, Excel, etc display that takes up an awful lot of screen space with its new menu of commands.
Two reasons I object to The Ribbon: it's big, intrusive, and busy, getting in the way of the actual material I'm supposed to be thinking about. And, it reflects the same questionable design trade-off as Microsoft's previous and dreaded Clippy feature -- "You seem to be writing a letter!", that Clippy. These quasi-tutorial aids are possibly useful the very first time or two or ten you use the program and are still figuring it out. The next million times you use it, after you've learned how it works, these "assistants" just get in the way. Or, again, that's how Clippy and The Ribbon are for me.
Am I the last person on earth to figure out that you can make The Ribbon go away in Office 2007 programs? It is easy, though underpublicized. I came across it by accidental keystroke. You right-click at the top of the screen, in the command bar or the big fat Ribbon zone; you chose "Minimize the Ribbon," and it is gone! Five or six more usable lines of screen real-estate immediately come into view. (Depends on the specific program, font size and zoom factor, etc.) And if you need to see ribbon commands at any point, you just click on "View" at the top of the screen and it toggles on and off.
If anyone else had been in the dark: well, now, let there be light.
June 18, 2008
For nerds and Sinologists alike: the Firefox 3 snarl
As mentioned two days ago, the Mozilla organization, creator of Firefox, has been trying to gin up a world-wide effort to get as many people as possible to download the official version of Firefox 3 on its release day, June 17. And if users around the world hit the servers all at once, they could set a Guinness World Record for most downloads in a 24-hour span. Great!
So of course when the fun began about 12 hours ago, as the release files went up and users everywhere logged in -- the Mozilla servers promptly froze and crashed.
Let's see. You're a leading internet company, and you're drumming up action from all around the world for what you hope will be a simultaneous assault on your servers, maybe you should be prepared for... a huge surge in traffic?? Just a thought.
And, hmmm, why does this make me think of the Olympics?
This is fundamentally silly -- people pledging online to set a world record for software downloads in a single day. Fortunately, the software in question, the official release of Firefox 3, is highly worthwhile. Beta and Release Candidates have been available for several months and are great. Download day for the official version is this coming Tuesday. Windows, Mac, Linux.
The Download Day Map lets you say where you'll be when you download. If I'd thought about it, before answering honestly (China) I would have chosen some place where I've actually been but that is underrepresented in the count -- say, the Falkland Islands or Liberia. Not that I'm in favor of giving misleading answers to polls. The map of pledged downloads actually is quite interesting: as of now, 263 Firefox users are (reportedly) signed up from North Korea!
June 9, 2008
Mac nerds only: becoming a believer on the battery front
I mentioned earlier that I was using a pricey (~$300) battery extender, from QuickerTek, to make up for one of the MacBook Air's biggest limitations: that you can't swap its battery out. The device in question is the square thing on the left in the photo below. And, yes, that's the Windows XP welcome screen, running very nicely on the Mac under VMware Fusion. If you squint, you can even see the icons for Zoot and Brainstorm, my trusty PC programs. Outlook and X1 are in there too.
Latest data point: during travel yesterday I used the MB Air away from an electric plug, but with this battery extender, for ten straight hours and was nowhere close to using up the power. Details after the jump, but my experience is: for a price, this is a way to eliminate all questions about whether you can get enough working time out of the MBA.
I mentioned yesterday that I was trying, and liking, the (blush) "Magic Briefcase" feature of the program SugarSync. It's an easy way to work on the same set of files, on different computers, and always have the current version on hand wherever you work.
As one, the blog-reading public has risen up to remind me that in any discussion of sync programs, it's important to include a familiar contender, Microsoft's FolderShare, which I have used in the past and will try again; and a newer (to me) entrant, AutoSync from Memeo.
I will give them both a try and report results. What are computers for, if not to fritter*? In the meantime, be advised of these sync possibilities too.
________
* My friend Stephen Manes, novelist and tech writer, has lifetime copyright to the term "fritterware" to describe activity of this sort.
June 3, 2008
While waiting for political news, three nice things to say
1) If you're looking for a file-sync program it's worth checking out the widely-praisedSugarSync. The name gives me the creeps, and I'm almost embarrassed to use its "Magic Briefcase" feature. But these people have figured out something important: an easy way to keep files synchronized among a bunch of computers.
I actually do use three computers almost interchangeably: a ThinkPad PC laptop, a MacAir notebook, and a MacMini desktop. I always taking notes or checking off items on files I want to keep current among all the machines. (Word files; Excel files; my oddball Zoot and Brainstorm files; and others.) I've generally transferred these from machine to machine with a USB stick, or emailed them back and forth. Overall, this is a pain, plus it can be hard to remember which file on which machine is the current version. With the "magic briefcase" feature, which I won't explain, changes in the files on one machine are instantly available on all the others.
SugarSync is initially available on free trial and then costs about $30 a year, which I'll probably pay. It makes me reflect on how computer spending has changed. I very rarely spend money for actual software any more. But I'm paying more and more for services -- $40 a year for a VPN, $25 or so for photo storage, $40 or so for online backup service, more than I want to think for internet service and international cell phone and data service, and about ten others I can't think of now. I guess I'll think of it as part of the evolution toward a "service" economy.
As mentioned earlier, I have twice installed and twice removed versions of the much-touted Outlook indexer Xobni. In theory Xobni was great; in practice, for me, it was no good because it gobbled so much of my computer's memory and CPU that it paralyzed everything else on the machine. Details in previous posts.
Through controlled experiment I think I've established that my Xobni problem is a "scale" issue. I've tried it on a computer with only a few hundred emails to index; it worked like magic. On my real computer, with tens of thousands of emails in Outlook .PST files spanning the last decade, it broke down. (In its current version, Xobni does not allow you to choose which .PSTs you want it to handle; it tackles everything it finds. I understand that this may change -- and that other speed and scaling improvements are on their way.) This would explain why some people who've written in are so happy with it -- they don't have that many stored emails -- while others share my exact complaint.
An alternative to check out: the non-touted Lookeen, from a tiny little firm in Germany. The searches it runs are extremely fast, and it imposes no detectable burden on the computer's overall speed. It lets you choose which .PST files you want to include or omit -- though you might as well include everything, since it seems to handle a > 100,000-item index about as fast as a small one. Fourteen-day free trial available; after that, $39.80. Worth a look -- as is, of course, the long-time champ of very fast, very scalable PC search engines, X1.
(For those joining us late: the reason to bother with any of these is that the built-in Outlook search system is so clumsy and slow.)
May 24, 2008
The next three points about MacBook Air
As promised recently, the ongoing MacAir report will unfold in compact, digestible three-point installments. (Index to previous installments here.) Today's three points:
1) Is the MacAir suitable as your "real" computer? No.
OK: that's a spoiled-sounding thing to say. What I mean is that this machine is optimized for ease, convenience, and elegance as a portable computer, at the expense of features that would make it better for day-in, day-out stuck at the office use.
Most obvious illustration: this is one of the very few modern computers with no CD/DVD drive at all. (Unlike its closest PC counterpart, the new Lenovo ThinkPad X300.) You can work around that with a convenient utility to read from another machine's DVD drive, over a network -- but that means you have to have another machine. Similarly: you can work around the absence of an Ethernet port (with a separate dongle), and the presence of only one USB port, and the absence of a microphone jack. But they are workarounds, and there is no getting around the limit on the hard drive, which holds a maximum of 80GB. Not a huge amount, by today's desktop computer standards.
The MacAir remains elegant and beautiful; it has stood up well to travel (protected by this neoprene sleeve); I have no complaints about fit or finish or any other mechanical feature. But just as some resort properties are suitable mainly for those who can consider them "second homes," this is suitable mainly for people who can consider it a second computer. Though a nice one....
Via Wired.com two days ago, an astonishing and apparently legit internal document from Cisco back in 2002, when it was preparing to sell the Chinese government the routers that were initially necessary to make the "Great Firewall" system of internet censorship work. (My Atlantic article on how the Firewall works here; also, followup interviews with Network World and TheAtlantic.com. For the record, the official name for the firewall and related systems is not the Great Firewall but the "Golden Shield" project.)
The "To Be Sure" section:
- Cisco has always claimed, and this document supports, that it didn't tailor any of its products particularly to the Chinese government's needs. Its normal product just happened to be what the government wanted;
- Whatever Cisco did or did not do six years ago, China no longer needs any outsider's help to make the system go. As I point out in my article, China's own companies, notably Huawei, can provide everything the government requires;
- There was never very much money involved. (According to Wired, $100,000 - could it really have been so little???);
- A Cisco official told Wired that he was "appalled" and "disappointed" at what the document showed.
Still: pages 48-58 of this PDF presentation seem to remove any doubt that Cisco knew, at the time, exactly what China had in mind with the "Golden Shield" program -- and viewed it as a great business opportunity.
May 19, 2008
Technology, not politics
Andrew Sullivan asks in his blog a question several readers have asked me (as well as him) directly: Why is his part of the Atlantic blog empire blocked by the Great Firewall of China, while the rest of the Atlantic's site, archives, photos, comments, etc is not?
I love the idea that discerning Communist cadres in Beijing have pored over and parsed everything in the magazine and determined that Andrew's posts are in some basic way more threatening to the regime's long-term legitimacy -- they're betting on Hillary? -- than anything else the magazine serves up. Alas, there's a prosaic and purely mechanical explanation.
For legacy reasons -- ie, his long pre-Atlantic blog existence -- Andrew's blog is hosted on an different system from everything else displayed on TheAtlantic.com. The system Andrew uses is one of several that are subject to blanket black-outs by the Great Firewall; the one that hosts the rest of the magazine is not. Andrew, come join us on the new system! Andrew's aspiring readers in China: try a VPN!
I think of the following episode when considering the how and why of Chinese press-control policy: A few months ago I ran into a man who was operating a fairly daring museum, which had many relics from the Cultural Revolution. I asked him whether the government was giving him trouble. "The government is busy," he said. Saves time just to turn whole web domains on and off.
May 15, 2008
My three computers (MacBook Air saga, cont..)
Three months into my use and ownership of both a MacBook Air and a Mac Mini, and nearly 30 years into my use and ownership of computers in the CP/M -> DOS -> Windows lineage, I keep waiting for the moment to give a "complete" and panoramic view of the pluses and minuses of each approach.
That moment will never come. So I will resume the piecemeal descriptions offered before (here and in previous installments).
For reference: my three-working-computer setup here at Beijing HQ, in a posed but not entirely unrepresentative configuration. On the left: venerable Thinkpad T60 running Vista and a zillion Windows-style programs. On the right: the MacBook Air in all its svelteness. In between, a Mac Mini, connected to a big flat-panel display and a Mac-style aluminum keyboard.
I still use all of them, through day by day the trend is, ratchet-like, in the Mac direction. I wouldn't be embarrassed to have a multi-system life for quite a while ahead, since each has its strengths --and since I don't regard this as a religious or cultural all-or-nothing decision. As soon as I even think about trying to present the ins and outs of each system, I get nervous about what a long chore that would be. (Also, I know that David Alison's excellent blog has over the last few months chronicled in exquisite detail every shift, surprise, irritation, how-to, and satisfaction he has gone through during his switch to the Mac.)
So I'll make this manageable by doling out three or four points per post, which cumulatively may someday represent the complete Mac/PC almanac so many people dream of.
Yesterday I mentioned that Network World had run a Q&A (with me) about how the Great Firewall of China does and doesn't work. Just now they've put up a nice conceptual slide show on "How the Chinese Internet is Different from Yours," here. Worth a look, and includes at least one thing I didn't know before.
May 12, 2008
Interview about Great Firewall in Network World
In the new issue of the tech journal Network World, I have this Q-and-A, with Carolyn Duffy Marsan, about the workings, weaknesses, and evolution of China's "Great Firewall," expanding on this article in the Atlantic two months back.
May 9, 2008
New, "official" GTD blog site
Two or three years ago, David Allen, father of the "Getting Things Done"/GTD approach to life, started a personal blog. He kept it up for a couple of months and then, no doubt realizing that this kind of daily fritter was at odds with his larger message about sensible use of your time, put it to sleep. (My 2004 Atlantic article about David Allen here; recent item about GTD-type software here.)
In the absence of blog-world messages from The Man himself, many other GTD-related blogs have continued to spring up. That's all to the good -- but a few weeks ago Allen and his team launched their own blog, straight from GTD Central. It is called GTDTimes and is worth checking out.
May 7, 2008
Nerds only: pulling the plug on Xobni
I mentioned two days ago that I'd liked the idea of the spiffy Outlook-indexer Xobni, but that when I'd tried a beta version in January it had slowed my PC to a point of paralysis.
The new release has been getting a lot of buzz, so I thought I'd try it again.
No dice. After two days of torpor I have just taken it off the machine. Made the already-glacial startup process of Outlook (under Vista) almost interminable. Used so many CPUs and -- especially -- so much memory that the computer wasn't good for anything else. Could just be me. Could just be my computer. Could be the evil Vista (on the computer where I installed Xobni). Could be entirely different for you. Just reporting my experience.
And maybe it's not just me. When you uninstall Xobni, it asks you why. The choices:
"Please tell us why you uninstalled so we can improve:
" 1. I wasn't using it.
" 2. It used too many computer resources
" 3. Outlook froze during normal operation
" 4. It made Outlook startup too slow.
" 5. Sidebar disappeared or stopped loading
" 6. It slowed down my Outlook.
" 7. I just temporarily uninstalled and will reinstall.
" 8. It did not index my mail properly
" 9. Outlook crashed"
I checked 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9. But when they have a new version...
May 5, 2008
Nerds only: Giving Xobni another try (Updated)
Back in January I tried the beta version of Xobni*-- a new system for indexing and arraying your email within Outlook that is now getting a lot of attention, thanks to a rave in the NYT yesterday. (Or, "this morning," US time.)
In the beta version, I found it so incredibly CPU-intensive and greedy for system resources that it brought my PC (ThinkPad T60, 2Gb RAM, 4GB "ReadyBoost" RAM supplement) nearly to a halt. True, this ThinkPad was running the hated Windows Vista at the time, so it was looking for any excuse to halt. And true, I was asking it to index many GBs worth of old Outlook .PST files. But I unloaded Xobni, thinking: wouldn't it be nice if this actually worked.
Several friends say that the new version works better. We'll see. And this note is also a teaser for the omnibus, final MacAir / MacMini / ThinkPad compare-and-contrast exercise later this week.
UPDATE: Xobni still breaks my T60 laptop. Consumes so many CPU cycles and memory that everything else stops. Will un-install, reinstall, and try one more time.
* Xobni's name has the same etymology as that of Shanghai's beloved local beer, REEB. Reeb is of course "beer" spelled backward, and...
May 4, 2008
Real-time report: Olympic ticket-ordering system
There are various ways in which China will be tested to see if it is "ready" to host the Olympics. For instance:
- buildings, venues, stadiums -- these are well underway, they look impressive from the outside, and everyone seems to assume they'll be great;
- physical infrastructure: the new terminal at Beijing's airport has just opened, countless subway stops are scheduled to open in time for the games, I would imagine that this has been well-planned and will work out;
- social infrastructure: posters appear every day reminding people to spit less, stand in line more, be gracious hosts, etc. There's a big push that seems to have a willing spirit behind it. Over the months I have encountered exactly one Beijing taxi driver who knew more English than I know Chinese, but a big effort in teaching taxicab English is reportedly underway. And all subway lines have signs and announcements in English as well as Chinese.
- natural environment: here's hoping!
Then there is the general and hard-to-pin down question of simply handling the Olympic-scale volume -- for traffic, crowd control, whatever. One proxy is the system for ordering Olympic tickets. Residents of China (foreign and Chinese) had their third opportunity to order tickets starting at 9am China time today -- 45 minutes ago as I write. My wife and I are trying to order some tickets to the rowing events, where (a) huge numbers of tickets are available, and (b) we have some friends involved in the competition. After the jump, a real-time chronicle of how it's going.
(Update: summary of chronicle below is that two and a half hours after the experiment began, the transaction failed and the web site invited me to try again from the start. Five hours after that, at the end of its first business day of operation, the system still wasn't working. Obviously the ticket system is overwhelmed by the volume of traffic coming at it all at once. But that brings us back to the original question about being ready to handle the predictably huge, surge-style peaks of Olympic-related volume. We'll see...)
Extra-final update: Success! At 6:45pm China time, only nine hours and forty-five minutes after first logging on, I landed three bargain seats for the rowing heats, @ 20RMB ($2.85 -- the 30RMB seats must have been sold out). End of the chronicle.
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Based on all available feedback, the problem is not that I'm missing some tweak or setting in Outlook. It's that the program has a basic design flaw in the way it handles "all day events" -- for instance, St. Patrick's Day occurring on March 17.
Apparently Outlook provides no way to assign that event to the entire day itself. It is designed to assign it to a 24-hour span, so whenever you change time zones, you're screwed. The 24 hours that had run midnight-to-midnight now go 3am-to-3am. This is a design decision worthy of Clippy in its user-unfriendliness.
Oh well. Now at least I know. But please, Microsoft folk, can't you do better than this?
UPDATE: Here's what is really objectionable about Outlook's approach. The system's display suggests that there IS a difference between an "all-day appointment," like St. Patrick's Day being on March 17, and a 24-hour appointment running, say, 1am to 1am. The all-day event displays as a single line on your calendar; the 24-hour appointment spreads across every one of the hours included. But in their underlying architecture, it appears that there is no difference at all. An "all-day" event is just another 24-hour span, which happens to display as a single line if you're in the same time zone you were when you created it. To the best of my knowledge, this is different from how, for instance, Google Calendar handles the issue: GC treats "all-day" events as conceptually separate from other 24-hour appointments. The Outlook design decision seems unwise to me, because of the frustrations it creates. But its display decision goes beyond being unwise to being outright deceptive, since it suggests a distinction that the program itself does not support. (It would be as if Word, in certain conditions, displayed a passage in italics, when really the words were all stored as plain text.) Can't someone on the Office team do better than this?
May 2, 2008
Nerds only: There has to be a fix for this flaw in Outlook, right???? (Updated)
Here is something that has driven me crazy about Outlook for the ten-plus years I've used it. I can't really believe it's insoluble, because that would mean that the program has a more glaringly troublesome defect than others we know about. But I haven't found the solution -- and I'll offer the traditional bonus of a year's subscription to the Atlantic to the first person who can tell me the answer, which I'll share. (Sincerity alert: these are actual paid-out-of-my-pocket bonuses, not company freebies.)
The problem involves Outlook's handling of time zones.
Nook and Kindle: Via Chinese manufacturing- world contacts, I have known this was coming for a while. Looks nice (left), and even if it looked bad it would be a huge plus for the industry, the reading public, and the publishing world to have competition for Amazon and its Kindle. I say that as a member of a two-Kindle household who has spent a lot on e-books. I'll see if I can rationalize a "need" for the Nook at some point.
