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.
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...
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...
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?
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.
Bright side #5: interesting GTD software, including for Mac
I am a long-standing devotee of the David Allen "Getting Things Done" (GTD) approach to life, as I first described in this Atlantic article about him four years ago. We've become friends and stayed in touch since then too, which at least for me has been very enjoyable. Plus, since long before the Atlantic wrote about him he has been a loyal subscriber!
The GTD Way mainly involves habits of mind and action, but it also places a lot of emphasis on having the right tools, gizmos, and gimmicks to support those habits. Over the years I've used a variety of software to set up GTD-based systems on my computer. Ones I've liked include Results Manager and Chandler. The one I keep coming back to for my own purposes, more than a dozen years after I started using it, is the idiosyncratic but powerful Zoot. Zoot is PC-only, and for that matter text-only (no graphics etc), but it runs flawlessly on a Mac under VMWare Fusion.
Here are three more to bear in mind, with different strengths and idiosyncracies of their own:
"Clippy" update -- now, with organizational anthropology!
As mentioned yesterday, my personal crusade during my 6-month spell as a Microsoft Word team member, waged from my stronghold in Building 17 on the main "campus" in Redmond, was an effort to get "Clippy" removed from Word and other programs.
There's an aspect to the struggle that suggests that big organizations anywhere share certain traits, whether their product is "national security" (the Pentagon), a "harmonious society" (the Chinese Communist Party), or "great software" (Microsoft). One such trait is the effort of people up and down a bureaucratic hierarchy to guess at what the boss would "really" like, and do that -- even if the boss has never said so, and even if it's might not be what the boss actually has in mind.
Looking on the bright side #2: Offline Google Docs
As a reminder: The big plus of cloud computing is that you can get to your information from any computer any place, as long as you have an internet connection. The big minus is that you can't do much of anything if you're not on the internet. For instance: I conduct most of my email life through a variety of Gmail accounts. But unless I download and store the messages on Outlook (or Thunderbird or Mac Mail or something else), I can't read or answer them when I'm on a plane, visiting an office building, or generally wondering how I will ever dig out of the email hole I have created for myself in a month away from the computer.
Six weeks ago, Google introduced one useful tool for dealing with this "what about when I'm offline?" problem. This was an unobtrusive, elegant, and so far (for me) bulletproof way of keeping an online Google Calendar synchronized with a calendar file in Microsoft Outlook. I find this surprisingly useful. I can enter -- or change, or delete -- a datebook item either at my "real" computer, when using Outlook, or on the Google calendar if I'm using someone else's machine, in full confidence that the changes will ripple through all versions of my calendar information. Including the version I can get from any mobile phone via SMS if i send a text message asking for details on the next place I'm supposed to go or number I'm supposed to call.
Over the last four weeks, Google has been slowly rolling out another tool that potentially can make cloud-computing more usable. This is the "Offline" version of Google Docs, which in turn relies on a utility called Google Gears.
A new report from the Pew Internet Project indicates that most internet users in China accept the idea that material on web sites should be monitored and controlled -- and that the government should do the controlling. For instance:
Most readers of the Western press are aware of efforts by the Chinese government to control what its people can read and discuss online. Outside observers and human-rights groups monitor and criticize the government's actions and publicize the techniques through which technologically savvy Chinese internet users can work around restrictions. Some analysts also track and interpret the government's subtler shifts in balance that seek to encourage internet development while still exercising control over it...
[O]ther evidence suggests that many Chinese citizens do not share Western views of the internet. The survey findings discussed here, drawn from a broad-based sample of urban Chinese internet users and non-users alike, indicate a degree of comfort and even approval of the notion that the government authorities should control and manage the content available on the internet.
The report goes on to say that 84 percent of Chinese internet users felt content should be controlled, and about the same number approved of the government's doing so. It also explores some of the reasons behind an attitude that confounds many American expectations about what the spread of the internet "should" mean. The discussion is based on a nationwide survey funded by the Markle Foundation and conducted by a respected Chinese social scientist named Guo Liang. It is very much worth reading, in connection with ongoing stories about mainstream Chinese views of news from Tibet and of criticism on that and other subjects from overseas.
I've been interested in these same issues and explored some of them in a recent article on how the China's Great Firewall works. I should probably mention at this point that the China office of the Pew Internet Project is a little desk in our bedroom, about ten feet away from the Atlantic's China bureau, and that the author of this report, Deborah Fallows, is my wife.
A relatively stable and very attractive beta version of Firefox 3 has been around for a week or two. Windows, Mac, and Linux versions, in most languages you can think of, available free here.
It is a beta -- in fact, beta 4 -- so it has some rough edges. For me the main one is that some Firefox plug-ins I use all the time aren't yet compatible with this version. (Biggest stopper for me: Chinese Perapera-kun, for help reading Chinese characters on line.*) But it has a variety of tricks to make it run faster, and use less memory, than Firefox 2 does. Also, you can keep both 2 and 3 on your machine and use them alternately, though there can be slight start-up delays when you load one after using the other. I switch back to 2 only when I want to use that Chinese plug-in.
F3 B4 has many other nice functional and stylistic improvements, especially in managing downloads and bookmarks and in auto-completing addresses you have typed before. Hasn't crashed or hung for me on either a Mac or PC... yet. Take a look.
(*Update: This wonderful tip from Lifehacker explains how to get plug-ins like Perapera-kun to run under the new beta. It worked! As the Lifehacker post explains, this is in the realm of do-it-yourself surgery and not worth trying if you're squeamish. But it took less than a minute, and it means I can run this new beta version all the time now.)
Another step toward the online "cloud computing" life
Web-based computing has these advantages: It doesn't matter what kind of computer you use. Mac, Windows, Linux, Ubuntu -- they're all the same. It doesn't matter whose computer you're using, or where. You don't have to drag hard drives or USB sticks or even computers around with you, or copy files between a desktop and a laptop machine to keep them up to date. You just sit down wherever you get a web connection and dig in. Everything you need is stored in the internet "cloud."
(For the Atlantic's premonition of such cloud computing 12 years ago, check here, and after the jump.)
Web-based computing has a small disadvantage: working with an online program like, say, Writely (now Google Docs) is slower than using one based on your own machine, since info must constantly go back and forth from a remote server.
It also has a huge disadvantage: when you're off line, you're out of luck. You can't get at your web-based mail, you can't get at your online calendar or contact list or documents, you can't do very much. Traveling in China, I spend a lot of time off-line, so for me this is a deal-breaker.
All of which is why, to me, the news that Google Calendar will sync with Microsoft Outlook is big news indeed.
As of Saturday night, March 15, China time, in Beijing:
- The screen goes black on CNN one second after any report about the situation in Lhasa begins;
- Similar coverage on BBC World TV has, oddly, come through unmolested -- though BBC has often been blacked out in the past. This evening I saw footage on BBC of riots in Lhasa, cars being burned, accusations of attacks on monks, and so on;
- CCTV coverage (that's state-run China Central TV) has included at least one brief mention we saw, similar to those in the papers previously discussed here, saying that small groups of hooligans have attacked soldiers in Lhasa but that things are under control.
- Just about every blog, web site, or online news source I've tried for info about Tibet has been blocked by the Great Firewall, using one of the techniques I discussed in this article. The URLs for those sites -- say, NYTimes.com -- aren't permanently black-listed or blocked. But when the GFW's filtering system sees troublesome words in the actual content of the page you're reading -- and let's assume the words Tibet, Lhasa, and Dalai Lama now all qualify -- it breaks the connection and interrupts all attempts to go back to the site for certain period of time. So far, my VPN has gotten me around this barrier. But, as discussed in the article, avoiding the Great Firewall is enough of a chore and an expense that most Chinese citizens don't bother. I imagine some people in Tibet are bothering now.
It was more than ten years ago that I first praised in print the quirky little info-management program called Zoot. Looking at that article from August, 1997 is a reminder of how much has changed since then -- it was written before the internet boom, before the internet bust, when the "new" operating systems were Windows95 and WindowsNT, when neither Google nor Web 2.0 nor the iPod had been heard of, and when Apple was at such a low ebb that it wasn't clear that the Macintosh as a PC-alternative would survive.
The one thing that has been constant in my computing life since then is that I have used this same little program to collect and organize information for everything I write. The program has been honed over those years by one Tom Davis -- a 31-year old lone programmer when I wrote about him, a still jaunty looking lone programmer now. (Before moving to China, I went to Boca Raton, Florida, near where he lives, and met him for the first time. Here he is at the Boca Raton airport, pointing at the Z, as in Zoot, on the tail of the Cirrus SR-20 that I owned then and had flown to Florida.)
Ah! Why didn't I think of that? (Chinese internet dept)
The internet these last few days in Beijing has been like molasses. Pages that take one minute or more to load. Many pages that time out, give up, and won't load at all. As I mention in my article on China's Great Firewall in the current issue of the Atlantic, one reason internet censorship is so effective in China is that you're never quite sure why you can't find the sites you're looking for:
Andrew Lih points out that other countries that also censor Internet content—Singapore, for instance, or the United Arab Emirates—provide explanations whenever they do so. Someone who clicks on a pornographic or “anti-Islamic” site in the U.A.E. gets the following message, in Arabic and English: “We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” In China, the connection just times out. Is it your computer’s problem? The firewall? Or maybe your local Internet provider, which has decided to do some filtering on its own? You don’t know. “The unpredictability of the firewall actually makes it more effective,” another Chinese software engineer told me. “It becomes much harder to know what the system is looking for, and you always have to be on guard.”
The MacBook Air chronicles #4: success with VMWare
As reported a few days ago, my new MacBook Air -- while undeniably svelte and beautiful, and while having surprisingly good battery life, and while generally performing in much snappier fashion than my Vista laptop -- was giving me trouble in one big way. I had been trying to install either VMWare Fusion or Parallels, the two systems that let you run Windows programs (on an Intel-powered Mac) side by side with Mac OS X. Or that's what the two programs are supposed to do. I couldn't get either of them actually to start up a session of Windows XP. (Was I going to load Vista? Let's be serious.)
Problem now solved! And it proved not to have been VMWare's fault. I don't know about Parallels -- even though I bought that program for full $80 retail at the Apple store in New York last month (it being the only one available), I never heard back on my requests to its tech support line. But VMWare, which I downloaded as a free 30-day trial product, did reply and gave me the right answer. (Details below.*) I will with relatively good cheer pony up my $80 to register the product -- or $50, after a $30 rebate for previous purchasers of the rival Parallels.
MacBook Air running WinXP, under VMWare, with "dock" of Mac program icons at the bottom:
Eventually we'll get to whatever philosophical differences separate computing on the fancy new MacBook Air ultra-light machine from computing on a classy high-end ThinkPad T60 running Vista with its latest updates. (Hint: differences less profound and sweeping than many people assume.)
Also, some of the practicalities involved in shifting the center-of-gravity of your work from one platform to another. (Hint #1: If you have a lot, lot, lot of info stored in Microsoft Outlook .PST files, as I do, a full shift is not as easy as you've been told. Hint #2: At least for me, neither VMWare Fusion nor Parallels, the two programs that let Intel-powered Macs run Windows programs, has been all that simple to configure and get running -- though I remain hopeful that I'll get one of them to work!)
Let's talk today just about numbers: ones that have gotten my attention. They involve the lost-time overhead a computer imposes on you while you wait for it to work. What I've found:
Putting the computer to 'sleep' (so you can save battery power when you step away for a while). Time from issuing command till end of disk activity and screen display, three trials: Thinkpad T60 / Vista: 12 seconds, 13 seconds, 15 seconds, average about 13 seconds. I am excluding as an anomaly the first time I ran this test, which took 80 seconds. MacBook Air / Leopard: 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, average about 3 seconds.
I’ve only just now begun installing “real” software on my newly acquired MacBook Air.* So until now, I’ve been using the Air exclusively for online activity – and haven’t been giving it the full long-airplane-flight test to see how much time it takes to run the battery down while doing real work.
Instead, I’ve done indirect tests, like setting the Air up to play nonstop streaming audio from internet radio broadcasts while running on battery power. That way, I know that it’s continually drawing power to work the WiFi and run the speaker (yes, the speaker -- just one, and not that good). The screen, though, self-dims in a way it wouldn’t if I were sitting there typing.
Still: this has been enough to give an impression. Battery life on this machine seems “pretty good,” and the time it takes to recharge the battery is not bad at all.
Two week ago I mentioned that the March issue of the Atlantic -- by that point snugly in subscribers' hands! -- would include my article on how the Great Firewall of China actually works. That article is now online, here. So is the entire issue, which is full of great stuff.
Also, my interview about the article and the general China-tech scene is online here. It was conducted by the Atlantic's estimable Abby Cutler -- as the last thing she did on our staff before leaving to begin medical training. Applying the healing touch in different venues, is the way we like to think about it at the magazine.
I didn't expect to return from my latest trip to the U.S. with a brand-new MacBook Air in my hand, but for various surprising reasons that's what I brought back.*
I have not given it a full workout yet, and the reason is related to one of the quirks of this machine: it has no CD/DVD reader and is designed to install software wirelessly, either from the Internet or via a connection to another Mac or PC. I have not yet gone through the process of installing the programs I'd like to use on it, so all I've done with it is work online. Collect email, check out the news, and, yes, compose and post this message.
More reactions to come later, about the aspects of this machine that have raised most questions. How good is the battery, really -- considering that unlike most laptops, but like iPods etc, you can't change it yourself or bring a second to swap in during a plane flight? Is its 80GB hard disk big enough for modern computing life? How well does its wifi-only approach actually work, given the absence of a CD drive and an Ethernet port? Will the remote installation process let me put Parallels or VMWare on the system, so I can run the Windows programs I really care about? All this, as I say, for another day.
For today, an aesthetic and emotional reaction: This is an astonishingly successful work of industrial design. Even industrial art. Its case is very small and thin, and seems even smaller and thinner. It is very light, and seems lighter than it is. (Maybe adrenaline rush to the arm muscles?) By the specs, the processor is not tremendously fast, but the computer feels agile and responsive -- all the more so in contrast to my Vista ThinkPad. The screen is bright and big (maybe related to battery life?), and the keyboard is full-sized and convenient. It is as beautiful a piece of machinery as I have seen in a long time.
Later: how it works when I'm trying to do something more than reach web sites. Maybe the shock of aesthetic appreciation will have worn off -- somewhat -- by then.
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* To spell it out: these reasons do not include any baksheesh, "demo copies," or other favortistic efforts by Apple or other companies.
I know I'm tempting fate by even mentioning this, but...
The latest set of patches and updates for Windows Vista, mentioned recently, really do appear to make the system noticeably faster and more responsive.
In addition to eliminating (so far) the chronic previous crashes when my laptop went into or out of hibernation, they seem to have reduced another big annoyance: the interminable periods when the computer appeared simply to be paralyzed -- "it's thinking," is the more charitable way my wife once put it -- and would not respond to keystrokes or commands. In real time these could last 30 or 40 seconds, which seemed like centuries. Such brain-dead spells -- for a fast computer with a lot of RAM -- have been cut way down.
Similarly: the new version of Lenovo's Rescue and Recovery utility (available through the ThinkVantage Update software that comes on new ThinkPads -- more info here) is a big improvement. This software makes frequent backups of everything on your computer, which are obviously reassuring to have. But its original version was a significant culprit in my first big problem with Vista on a ThinkPad -- that it gobbled up every bit of available disk space. The latest release works faster, takes less disk space, and is easier to use.
The Vista patches will be part of the "Service Pack 1" that is circulating informally and is supposed to be officially released soon. New ThinkPads presumably come with the latest Lenovo utilities installed. If my first exposure to Vista and the Lenovo utilities had been to this new, improved incarnation -- and I hadn't had the last year of hatred-inducing frustration behind me -- my impression would have been much more positive, and I would now own fewer Macs. I suppose I've merely re-proved the principle that wiser souls discovered long ago. Never buy or use a new release of Windows, or perhaps of any major system software, until it's been on the market at least a year and has gone through its first "Service Pack." Live and learn.
The household census of computers here at Beijing HQ now includes:
- 2 WinXP laptops (one ThinkPad T40, one Compaq. This last is my wife's; Stoic that she is, she makes do with one.)
- 3 Macs (Mini, iBook, and the unbelievably glamorous MacBook Air, subject for another time)
- 1 Vista laptop (ThinkPad T60; used to be two Vistas, until I "downgraded" the T40 back to XP)
Each has its place in the great and intricate division of local labor. The Vista machine is partly a test bed to see how things are developing in Vista land. I have been making a list of tweaks and improvements to mention, but here is one that immediately caught my eye:
The latest WindowsUpdate for Vista (via WindowsUpdate on the Start menu -- important patches usually come out on the second Tuesday of each month), includes #943899, "an update that improves the performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista." As if there might be any room for improvement in those realms.... The good news is that this patch is aimed at one of the most egregious (for me) Vista problems: its tendency to crash, hang, or churn for minutes on end when going in or out of hibernation. In specific the welcome news is:
This update improves performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista in various scenarios. This update resolves the following issues on a Windows Vista-based computer:
• You receive a "Stop 0x000000A0" error when you try to switch the computer to the hibernate state.
• You receive a "Stop 0x0000009f" error when you switch the computer to the hibernate state or to the standby state. Or, you receive this Stop error when you resume the computer from the hibernate state or from the standby state. This problem occurs on a computer that has a wireless network connection.
• The disk does not spin down after a specified time of inactivity.
Well, those are the exact problems I often have. If this truly "resolves" the issue, then Huzzah. We will see. If you have Vista on a laptop, check it out.
News of the future: Internet, Olympics, Great Firewall
I believe that the Atlantic's March 2008 issue is already in subscribers' hands. The link on our main web site will be available in a little while. (Another illustration of the "Better than Free" principle laid out by Kevin Kelly!)
In the new issue I have an article about the "Great Firewall of China" -- the government's means of regulating the internet, or trying to. When that article comes out, you'll see why I was so interested in this recent AFP/Yahoo news story, about the government's deliberations over what to do with the GFW when Beijing is crawling with foreigners during the Olympic games. Basically: I have some inside details that complement what the Olympic organizers are now saying in public. Stay tuned.
Correct link for "Better than Free" essay by Kevin Kelly
The previous item, about how organizations might be able to sell the same information they are giving away via the internet, had the wrong link to Kevin Kelly's valuable "Better than Free" essay. Here is the right link -- also now fixed in original item.
A very good essay about the economics of "free" info on the internet
(Updated to fix bad link.)
The Atlantic -- which was early to the idea of making its content available free on the internet, then went to a subscriber-only model, and now has come back -- is one of many publications wrestling with the question of how, exactly, you sell something you are simultaneously giving away.
One of the best accounts I've seen of why our current approach might make sense -- and more generally, of why individuals and organizations may still be able to do well selling information they're also offering free -- is this one, from Kevin Kelly, on his "The Technium" blog. His analysis does ring true to me, and it clarifies some possibilities I've heard discussed mainly in hazy terms.
Everyone knows that the world demand for sophisticated, rapid, reliable information and analysis can only keep rising -- and everyone also knows that the traditional models of paying for such information are in trouble, with newspapers being the most obvious case. Ten years from now, or twenty, or some time, a new way of paying for the information will have evolved. I found this essay useful in pointing toward some potential paths of evolution.
(Thanks to Paul Holbrook, of the Zoot users' forum on Yahoo, for this tip.)
Yesterday, a NYT tech column suggested that Mitch Kapor of Lotus was responsible for the fundamental innovation of the spreadsheet.
Today I said, quoting Dottie Hall, that actually Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had invented the spreadsheet, with VisiCalc for the Apple II -- but Kapor had brought it to the PC world with Lotus 1-2-3.
Kapor writes to say that's wrong too!
As long as we're beating a dead frog, let me add my two Linden dollars*: Bill Gross was responsible for Lotus Magellan, not me. I had nothing to do with it.
Also, "and while he (me, that is) can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC," is not true either. Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.
As for Bill Gross: I've written a whole string of articles lauding him for the programs he has created. The only one of these articles I can find online right now is this. from my own days as a NYT tech columnist.** Gross was also the force behind a program I have praised so often I should be on its payroll, X1. (To spell it out: I'm not, and I paid for my copy of X1.) I had assumed that as Kapor was institutionally responsible for Lotus Magellan, but he should know.
And as for spreadsheet genealogy, I have already received so many accounts of how this happened that I have decided to quote only Kapor's for the moment, since the rest have so many variations on points large and small.
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* For those embarrassed to ask: Linden dollars are the currency of Second Life.
** Back in my day as NYT tech columnist, the paper ran a correction when I made a mistake. I'm just saying.....
For the record, two (interesting!) boiled-frog updates
Both referring to yesterday's shock-horror revelation that the NYT, Oxford Univ, and a skilled tech writer had combined to repeat a cruel bit of misinformation.
1) My friend Dottie Hall, a veteran of Microsoft, Symantec, Eclipse Aviation, and other ventures, points out in her blog that the boiled frog story was not the only canard in the NYT article. The column, by G. Paschal Zachary, also said this:
Businesses crave a sweet spot: where the line is drawn in favor of the innovator. The late Akio Morita, founder of Sony, talked about satisfying appetites that people didn’t even know they had. He achieved such a feat with the Sony Walkman, the music player introduced in 1979. While at the Lotus Development Corporation, [Mitch] Kapor created another such “killer app,” or application: the spreadsheet for the PC.
Mitch Kapor is a wonderful guy, creator of such truly innovative programs as Agenda and Magellan during his years at Lotus and in recent years hard at work on the innovative Chandler project. And while he can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC, namely Lotus 1-2-3, that was less a break through than the real innovation of creating the spreadsheet itself. All honor for this latter achievement lies (as Dottie Hall points out) with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented VisiCalc for the Apple II.
2) Reader Gregory Sokoloff points out a version of the boiled-frog story that, if we called it boiled-salaryman, might actually be true. He lived in Japan when I did, in the late 1980s, and reports:
You may remember that the most common form of bath in homes was of a design not found in the West. The bath would first be filled with cold water, then a natural gas heater would be lit and the water would slowly circulate from the bath into the heater and then back into the bath, much like a heated swimming pool. The recirculation was achieved simply through convection without any pump, and thus the device was very, very quiet. Apparently, people commonly would get into their baths when the water was tepid, fall asleep, and then wake up with serious burns requiring treatment in a hospital. I don't know if there were deaths. Of course, only one who has lived in Japan can fully appreciate how sleepy and inebriated many Japanese are by the time they take a bath after rounds in the local bars (the best named one where I lived was the "Salaryman Daigaku" ["Salaryman University"]).
I may be repeating an urban myth here, but a good friend of mine their swore she witnessed the aftermath of such an incident.
So, consistent with my emphasis on the scientific approach to tall tales, I hereby request that henceforth people begin the cliched story thus: "Throw a salaryman into a boiling hot bath, and he'll scramble right out. But put a salaryman in a nice comfy tub, and....."
You really do learn something by reading the paper
And what I learned from today's New York Times is that tomorrow the Atlantic will remove the firewall that for years has applied to most articles in the print magazine and our very extensive archives.
Hmmm! The Atlantic, believe it or not, has been a serial innovator and pioneer in the web area. Back in the dimly-remembered mid-1990s it was one of the first non-tech magazines even to have a web site and to put much of its content online free. A few years ago it changed to the firewall / subscribers only model. Now, with the centrality of the web to the kinds of discussions we hope to provoke, this latest change, which should certainly continue the expansion of the site's influence and audience.
It will also do something that I think will be of even greater long-term importance:
The Atlantic Monthly, as we have pointed out oh, once or twice in the last while, is now 150 years old. In fact, working toward 151.
There is a phenomenal amount of fascinating and historically important material in our archives from those 150+ years. Not all of it is available online. (If you have seen the bookcases full of back volumes, you know what a gigantic challenge the mere scanning and OCR-ing will be.) Some of the highlights have been collected by Robert Vare and Daniel Smith in their superb recent 150th Anniversary anthology.
But a lot of unexplored material is available, and searchable, in the archives, and this will be an important journalistic, academic, and historic resource. Once again, a new era begins.
(I no longer have to say, "Subscribers Only" about some articles. Still -- subscribe! The timeless story of media-and-technology is that as new "delivery vehicles" arrive, they create additional forms of receiving information; eliminate a few old forms, like the cuneiform tablet; but mainly expand the range of choices people have by leaving most old forms in place. Despite television, we still have radio; despite radio and television and the internet, we still have books; despite email we still have phone calls; and for quite a while despite the internet we will still have something physically like a book or magazine, just because there are so many times and places where it's the best way to see what you want to look at. Eg: On my latest 13-hour plane flight, some of passengers mainly used laptops or iPods. Virtually all had some kind of book or magazine. Magazine content, words and pictures alike, looks far far better in real magazines -- though the web version is indispensable.)
In any case, another new beginning as of tomorrow.
As promised, I am giving a rest to the whole question of Vista, the Mac, hibernation, blue-screen crashes, etc. We're phenomenally fortunate to have today's computers at all -- I remember the days of the TELEX machine and the suitcase-sized Compaqs and Kaypros -- and I forswear further whining. And to think back to the days before most software had "auto-save" or "recovery" features. Brrrrrr!
Unfortunately a lot of interesting e-mail arrived only after that promise kicked in. So after the jump, a few of the interesting addenda and responses. Anyone who would like to pursue the issue is invited to do so via Comments, enabled for this post only.* Anyone who is bored by this entire topic -- Sorry!
*Update: Never mind! The Movable Type editing screen I am looking at has the box for "Accept Comments" clicked Yes. But the actual post shows no Comments line. Oh well. The e-mails below are still interesting, and they will have to suffice.
Let's let Bill Gates have the last word about Windows Vista
... as he did, in this widely-circulated but still fascinating and completely winning video clip.
I agree with my Atlantic colleague Ms. McArdle that computer operating systems should be a matter of practicality rather than ideology. (Although I prefer to think of myself as a pantheist, rather than an agnostic like her.) I've always had both Mac and Windows systems and have continually tried out others. It's a question of where your "real" work gets done, and that's what I'm reexamining to see how much of a PITA it would be to change..
And in response to one of many very interesting emails....
I noticed that both you and your friend both experienced long resume times from hibernate. There's good reason for that, which is that it has to read your complete memory state from disk. This is a very slow process, which is limited by hardware. I was wondering -- why don't you just use sleep/standby? My Thinkpad wakes up in about 1 second and is completely responsive. I always hear people complain about hibernate, but my thought is always -- why use it then?
I say: you're right. The Vista "sleep" command actually works very well. But it draws a little bit of current, and when you're really hoarding power or shutting down for a long time, "hibernation," which draws no current, would seem the better choice. EXCEPT for the very slow recovery time. In part that's is because a system like mine has to read 2GB worth of memory-state from the hard disk. But it's also ... something else, since even after the computer appears to have regained its previous state it takes an inexplicably long time before it will respond to any commands.
Oh well. As Bill Gates says above, Ask me after Microsoft has put out its next version of Windows. Until then, as with the Beijing air, I'll give this subject a rest!
As mentioned recently, ongoing struggles with Windows Vista, here in our Vista/XP/XP/Mac iBook two-person, four-laptop household, have led to me consider all alternatives. Now, the rest of the story:
Soberingly enough, I have used personal computers longer than several of my fellow Atlantic "Voices" have been alive. I got -- really, built -- my first computer in 1978. (Taste of days gone by: "The SOL-20 was probably the first PC to incorprate a keyboard and video with the machine.") It used an Intel 8080 chip, and as the Intel-PC-Windows paradigm has emerged, I've stuck to that course.
Through those years, I've considered switching tracks to the Mac world three times.
The message below is from my "friend" -- never met him, but corresponded for years -- Kenneth Rhee of Northern Kentucky University. We made contact long ago via a support forum for the nonpareil info-handling program Zoot*. Zoot is Windows-only, so Rhee, like me, has done his main work on PCs.
Recently he made The Change -- after wrestling with a new ThinkPad that came with Windows Vista pre-installed. This week Rhee submitted the following report on the the Zoot forum, plus some passages from a followup email to me:
I switched over to the Mac last year after getting a bit frustrated with Vista (I still run Vista in my Thinkpad on a rare occasion if I want to get "frustrated-little joke here but it seems to happen every time I use it these days).
My experience goes something like this. I wanted to use a few Mac programs and bought a MacBook thinking that I'll probably use it 10-15% of my time. After a month, I noticed that I was using my Mac 85-90% of the time, and having more fun using it rather than getting more frustrated fixing things or waiting for things to happen. So, I switched over completely and bought a new MacBook Pro with Leopard to replace my Thinkpad and haven't looked back.
Might as well keep this coming, while Santa is preparing his lists and so on.
1) My choice for best-ever utility for indexing and searching hard drives on a PC, X1, has come out with a new release with numerous small but important improvements. Speed, stability, range of files it can index, etc. If you happen to be using Vista, the new release is also stable under Vista, as the old one wasn't.
I've often complimented X1 in the Atlantic's pages, but here's the sincerest sign of my regard: Officially you can get away without ever paying anything for X1. After your initial 30-day free trial expires, you just keep on with the unlicensed trial version, which gives you no tech support and has certain limitations but is better than most other indexers available. (Or, you can use the similar limited version offered free as Yahoo Desktop Search.) I've gotten by on the trial version for years. But now I have actually ponied up my $50 for a legit license to the "Professional Client" version. My official reason is that it does a few things, like indexing archived Outlook files, that the free version doesn't -- plus the tech support. My real reason is that I have used this product so often for so long that I feel I owe these people something. Check it out.
2) Chandler - where do I start? This is one of the great epics/dramas/melodramas of the last two decades of computer-dom. In part it is the fulfillment of Mitch Kapor's vision of creating the perfect tool for organizing the data you need for your daily life. He began this quest decades ago, with the creation of the sainted Lotus Agenda program when he was in charge of Lotus. (Part of that background here and here). In part it's a very demanding test of what kind of software can be developed on a non-commercial, purely open-source basis. It even has an Atlantic connection, since part of its vision is to realize the vision of Vannevar 'As We May Think' Bush, who in our pages laid out the principles of the internet and of information management more than 60 years ago. It's also just an engrossing story -- one told in the recent book Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, which as its site shows I liked enough to blurb effusively.
Saying anything more about the Chandler saga would be too exhausting, except for this: a usable version now exists, even though it has only some of the features envisioned for the grand climax of the project. It is usable enough that I actually am using it. You can start here to find out more. Warning: at this point, it's still in the "mainly for tinkerers" stage. But it's very interesting, and is free.
As mentioned earlier, the good news for Windows Vista users is that Service Pack 1 is heaving into view. According to early word from Office Watch, it will be somewhat faster and more reliable.
The other news -- well, let's consider this good news too: Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is also in its beta stage, for official release some time next year. According to this recent report on CNET news.com, via reader Chet Shannon, the long-in-the-tooth Windows XP with its new SP3 is twice as fast (on several benchmark tests involving Microsoft Office functions) as Vista, even with its new SP1:
Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds. Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent.
More details about the test at CNET's site. I'll think of this as Happy Holiday news for XP users -- putting the XP into Xmas, perhaps.
Just in time for Christmas: some (apparently) positive Vista news!
I've mentioned before how much I value the Office Watch website / newsletter. It is basically sympathetic to the Big Two products from Microsoft, Windows and Office, but it takes an informed and completely no-BS approach toward the good and bad aspects of them.
Therefore I was cheered to read the latest dispatch, under the headline "Vista Service Pack 1 is looking good." For those who haven't been through the drill before, the "Service Pack" is the omnibus set of bug-fixes and improvements that Microsoft puts out six to twelve months after major new releases of its software. The standing joke is that Service Pack 1 (SP1) should be considered the "real" release, everything before that being an extended beta-test period that users have to pay to participate in. Often there's a SP2 as well. Zillions of PC worldwide are running happily right now under Windows XP / SP2.
Since buying a ThinkPad T60 factory-installed with the first release of Vista early this year, I've been unhappily triple-tracking my own computing life. I have a Mac iBook, which I need to connect with the Atlantic's head-office server; the Vista ThinkPad T60, which I've kept running as a test bed; and a kind of heirloom ThinkPad T41, on which I installed Vista but then "downgraded" to XP/SP2, and which is both more reliable and faster than the Vista machine. On this one I do much of my actual work.
Last month, as a Thanksgiving gift, Microsoft (and later Lenovo) engineers explained how I could keep the new system from gobbling up every bit of the 105-GB storage on my TP60's hard disk. I was thankful for that! What it didn't change was the slowness and unreliability of Vista on this machine. I always have to allow between three and six minutes for the machine to become usable after I start it up or bring it out of "hibernation." It takes about as long to shut it down. At least twice a week, sometimes more, I have a "blue screen of death" system crash under Vista, which happens maybe once a month on the XP machine. One occurred just minutes ago, while I was on a Skype call on the Vista machine.
But that's in the past! Office Watch says help is at hand, in the form of SP1:
While installing Vista SP1 isn't always easy, the final result is worth the trouble. In our test Vista SP1 is noticeably more stable than the version previously foisted on the public. [Note: "foisted" is the mot juste here, and it demonstrates Office Watch's spirit.] Take with a grain of salt the talk of performance improvements in Vista SP1, especially regarding file copying and network transfers. The 'boost' is really fixing Vista bugs and putting Vista on the same performance level as Windows XP. .... When Vista SP1 is released to the public in 2008, we're inclined to recommend getting it. Though we know that most people are wisely staying with Windows XP for the moment, Vista Service Pack 1 might tip the balance in favor of Vista for new computers.
According to Office Watch, anyone "brave enough" can prowl around the Microsoft web site and find the beta version of Vista SP1. (More tips on finding it here.) Having put in my time as an involuntary beta tester of Vista, I am not going to do that and am instead going to wait until the real SP1 is released early next year. But for those of you who can't wait to open presents, be my guests...
Crying wolf: Barry Diller, the Economist, and China
Three updates! Below
The Economist.com takes at face value a silly speech by Barry Diller*, based on a silly survey, and draws silly sky-is-falling conclusions.
The headline on the Economist.com item was: "America's emobyte** deficit: China's youth surpass their American rivals online." The story opened with a quote from Diller:
:
“THE Chinese people seem to be way ahead of Americans in living a digital life,” said Barry Diller, an American media mogul, last week in a speech to students in Beijing...[Diller's data] revealed that in this arena as in so much else, China is surging ahead..
They "seem" to be way ahead? I suppose, in the same sense in which I "seem" to be way taller than Yao Ming. Both of these seem true only if you ignore the actual facts. In a million different ways China deserves to be taken very seriously. But there are only two ways in which Chinese people really do seem to be "ahead" of Americans digitally.
A few days later, a Chinese blogger named Ruan Yifeng mentioned my report on his own blog, and went on to discuss other ways Chinese users could deal with the internet filters collectively known as the Great FireWall (GFW). The original Chinese version of his post is here; a translation by the indispensable Roland Soong** of Hong Kong, on his ZonaEuropa/ESWN blog, is here; just for the hell of it, an auto-translated version via Google's online translation tools is here. It's very interesting to compare this with Soong's native-speaker, hand-crafted version.
Two days ago, Ruan Yifeng said that he had been reported to the authorities for putting such subversive information on the internet. (Original Chinese version here; Roland Soong's translation here; Google auto-translate version here.) From the ESWN version:
I just found out today that someone had just reported my "Methods of bypassing the Great Firewall of China" to the China Internet Illegal and Harmful Information Reporting Center.
I cannot help but say: Fuck, what a stupid jerk! No wonder someone said: When there is a shameless, disgusting government, there will necessarily be shameless, disgusting people.
(The auto-translate version of the second sentence is: "I really could not contain himself: damn, really such a SB!")
Ruan Yifeng says that Baidu (China's leading search engine, with a huge lead here over Google) has already filtered out his site, and "it is a matter of time when government filtering occurs." His whole saga is very much worth reading at Soong's site, for what it says about control on expression in China -- and the spirit of those trying to work their way around it. For instance, Ruan Yifeng directs his real fury not at the censors who implement the GFW but at the Chinese fellow citizen who informed on him:
"It is the existence of people like you that makes people despair about this country."
Not so thankful for this at Thanksgiving (Japan Big Brother dept)
Flying from Beijing to Tokyo this morning -- generally an invigorating experience! Japan looks startlingly neat and organized even if you're arriving from Switzerland. And when you're coming not from Switzerland but from China.... Anyhow I arrived excited at the prospect of a few days here.
Unfortunately Japan's way of ushering in the Thanksgiving holidays has been to institute mandatory fingerprinting and photographing of all foreigners entering the country. Let me put this bluntly: this is an incredibly degrading, offputting, and hostility-generating process. The comment is not anti-Japanese: when the U.S. does this to foreigners, it's wrong and degrading too (as many people, including me, have pointed out over the years). But Japan has just ushered in this procedure, and they deserve to take some heat for it.
My family has so many real and important things to be thankful for that of course I can only address the ephemera here. For instance:
Windows Vista is no longer consuming the totality of my hard drive! Talk about your happy Thanksgiving Day!
Anton Kucer and his colleagues at Microsoft dutifully tried to figure out why, on a 105GB hard drive containing maybe 30-35GB of "real" data, my computer kept showing that it had virtually no space left.
They came up with an answer! We won't exactly call it a bug, and we won't exactly call it user error, but we will call it an interaction among three forces: Lenovo ThinkPad design, Microsoft Vista design; and JFallows user design. All details are after the jump, but the headline version is: if you have Vista and are using a ThinkPad, there is a way to keep your hard drive from being totally gobbled up. I take my Thanksgivings where I can find them.
Here is the the way the keyboard on my Thinkpad T60 looked three months ago, when it was four months old.
Here's the way it looks today, at seven months of age, after three more articles and one bazillion additional emails have been pounded out on its keys:
This second one is a little harder to see, but here's the casualty count.
Now entirely gone: the E, N, and A keys, plus the < marking.
On their way: L, M, R, S, and >
Worried: D, O.
Should be worried: U, B
No wonder my fingers are tired -- I mean, strong! And good thing China is dotted with electronic parts shops where I can buy a new keyboard, cheap, when too many letters vanish from this one. I can probably find a supplier who sent them to the factory in the first place.
When I find that guy, maybe I'll ask him whether they would consider investing an extra 50 cents for more durable keytop decals. (Yes, I know the Mac's, and others, are molded in.)
About that plan to "speed up" Thanksgiving air travel
Sorry to ring in the Thanksgiving travel week on a discouraging note, but: the plan announced with fanfare from the White House last week, to reduce airline delays by opening up military airspace, is preposterous. It will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel. You think the media were gullible about Administration claims five years ago? Gee, it's good to see that that will never happen again....
What's wrong with this plan?
1) Military airspace is not that big a factor in NYC area or BOS-WASH corridor travel, which is where the worst of the delays originate. The FAA has a great little website, here, which shows you the status of "special use airspace" (including military space) pretty much in real time. Here is how it looked mid-afternoon Friday EST last week -- a busy travel time!
It's not worth explaining all the details here, but the main point is: there aren't that many "special use" areas near the big East Coast airports. If New York City were where Camp Lejeune is, in North Carolina, then military airspace might be an issue.* But, umm, it's not. The NY-area special airspace that looks biggest -- the brown thing off Long Island, which says ZNY (meaning that its airspace is controlled by "New York Center") -- is a "warning area," which differs from those off-limits to airliners and is way out over the ocean anyway.
Or maybe: the best $39.99 I have spent on a legitimate purchase, so I don't have to weigh this against the boxed set of all episodes, ever, of The Simpsons, plus all seasons of The Sopranos, plus some other stuff, which together went for something like that price at Even Better Than Movie World in Shanghai.*
And maybe: the best $39.99 not spent on alcoholic beverages, so I also don't have to weigh it against the mixed case of Rogue Dead Guy, Brooklyn IPA, Red Seal, and other American microbrews that I got in Shanghai, back when I still was trying to find good beer and hadn't yet embraced my fate of drinking Yanjing etc through the rest of my time in China. (By the way, shrewd business planning by the Chinese beer industry! These same local Yanjing-etc brewers are ideally positioned to withstand the current and alarming world-wide shortage of, gasp, hops. You can't run out of what you don't use.)
In any case: I'm glad to have spent just now $39.99 for a year's subscription to Personal VPN, from WiTopia.net. I tried it out of desperation and found that it solved two nagging and related problems.
This picture shows three ways I have paid for transportation in China:
The green card at the top is the wonderful, convenient, and all-purpose Shanghai Transport debit card. It is more modern than anything in the United States. You add money to it at a subway kiosk -- for me, usually 100RMB at a time, or $13.50. Then whenever you use almost any kind of transportation in Shanghai -- a subway, a bus, a ferryboat, and, crucially, a taxi -- you swipe the card across a reader and it deducts the fare. The joys of never having to find change for taxi fare are hard to imagine until you've experienced them. (Plus the joys of flat-fare non-tipping, a subject for another day.)
It turns out that quite a few sessions from last week's "Google Zeitgeist" conference are available via YouTube, here. The session that starts up when you hit that page is a conversation between Tom Brokaw, of NBC, and his friend Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia and very much a non-digital-age guy. (Chouinard says that his fingers have never touched a keyboard.) Clip starts with a brief setup of their discussion, by me. The other interviews and clips are linked from that page.
Query for others behind the Great Firewall: all of Blogspot blocked again?
My experience with the Chinese Great Firewall over the last year-plus has been weirdly variable. Sometimes I can get to almost any site I'm interested in, even without using a proxy server or VPN. Sometimes a large number are blocked. With a proxy server, of course, almost anything works.
For the last few days I've been in circumstances where I can't use my normal proxy server. And here's what I find: - Wikipedia -- all entries blocked - Blogspot -- all blogs hosted there blocked - Blogger -- ditto
- My pre-existing personal site, on WordPress (jamesfallows.com) -- blocked, so I can't put any posts or updates there
Yet BBC.co.uk -- often impossible to reach from within the Great Firewall, today is wide open without problems. And so is the very-frequently-blocked Technorati.
My intuition is that the offs and ons of the Firewall have as much to do with inadvertence and happenstance as with some coordinated master plan. But this is tighter control, or at least more broadly obstructive control, than I've noticed in a while.
Is it due to the Burma upheavals, to diminish awkward discussion of China's role? I don't really think so, because Burma-related sites not on Blogger or Blogspot come through - plus lots of news on the BBC (which forthrightly calls the country "Burma.") Run-up to the 17th Party Congress, which begins in about three weeks, and before which there's been a general attempt to damp down controversy of any kind? For now I don't know the cause, only the effect.
In case anyone doesn't know this: new flight sim in Google Earth
From the start Google Earth has been fascinating in its own right. But since its introduction about two years ago, it has been additionally interesting as a "development platform" -- a layman's glimpse at the sophisticated world of "geographic information systems," which are essentially ways of mapping complex data onto a real, visible map. (More info here. Subscribers only.)
The latest and in a way most surprising application to be laid on top of Google Earth is its new, semi-hidden flight simulator. You call it up with Ctl-Alt-A in Windows systems, and Cmd-Opt-A on the Mac. If that doesn't bring up the simulator, you don't have the current release of Google Earth. which you can find here. I haven't played with it enough to know whether it matches the best real flight sims, from Microsoft and X-Plane. Also, any flight simulator, IMHO, requires a joystick rather than control-key operation to be any good. But that it exists at all is interesting, and its connection to the worldwide terrain coverage of Google Earth is a plus.
Nice touch: the two aircraft it offers are the Air Force's F-16, its design influenced by John Boyd and his "fighter mafia" allies; and Cirrus Design's SR-22, its design determined by the Klapmeier brothers and their colleagues in Duluth. More info about the flight sim, which has already been extensively publicized in tech blogs, here and here.
I am a fan of OfficeWatch, an Australian-based online journal that is a friendly-but-fearless critic of Microsoft's mainstay products. It's friendly because Office and related software are its bread and butter. It's fearless because that is why people read it and not just company brochures.
Its latest issue concentrates on a topic much on my mind recently: the mystifying slowness and incredible resource-hunger of Windows Vista. The article contends that an important cause is a design failure in Vista's new and heavily touted "instant search" feature. According to OW, this new Vista indexer does not "scale" well:
