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I have finally, after a fair amount of
(quite manageable) trial and error, got everything I wanted
running under Windows 8, on both my 2012 Lenovo laptop and my
2010 Sony Vaio desktop. It all runs, with the exception of my
Vitamin D Video
surveillance software. The bad news is that some of it needed
tweaking the average user will not be able to do. I don't know
how bad that is, to be honest, you could hire somebody like me
to figure it out for you, or you could buy a new, Windows 8
compatible, dingdong, and put the old one on Ebay. Lots of
possibilities. None that make Windows 8 bad. The Vitamin D
Video software runs under Windows 8 on my Sony Vaio, but it
frequently hangs, and then has to be "recovered", a useful
function in Windows 8, except for the one time when Vitamin D
hung while shutting down, and became completely unrecoverable.
That state it crashed in even made it impossible to uninstall,
which I then had to do by hand, after which I had to run a
full error recovery on Windows 8, this to fully repair the
registry and other "Windows innards". I have not tested it in
my other Windows 8 machine, but considering the rather
damaging effect, I don't even want to try. It wasn't a biggie,
I have several other surveillance packages that will store
pictures on a remote server, just had not bothered to bring
them up.
If you think you may, in the future, progress to a Windows phone
and/or a Windows tablet, get Windows 8 now (as I write
this, Microsoft still sells the update for US$ - hold on.. the
original cutoff date for the $14.99 Windows 8 upgrade was
January 31st, but I now see the date has changed - February 28,
2013, is the latest). It gives you time to learn, and you will
achieve something you cannot with Apple: a unified interface
across multiple devices with freedom of vendors. Getting
the Windows operating system does not tie you to a hardware
vendor, or an online system you must give your personal
information to to activate your device - Windows runs on PCs,
laptops, tablets, smartphones, and even some semi-smartphones. I
am afraid I am allergic to vendors who force you to use their
services to make your purchase actually work. Microsoft, too,
tries very hard to get you to give them your data, but it does
not make it mandatory. And the interface is fully touch screen
compatible (Windows has had touch screen drivers for many years,
going back to Vista, anyway, so that will not be buggy), but has
the classic desktop readily available - and it runs faster and
smoother than Windows 7 did, and Windows 7 was not bad to begin
with.
So I do apologize it has taken me more than a month to do a
proper assessment, but you really can't test an operating system
faster than that. I had to solve quite a few small "niggly bits"
that won't much matter to you, and won't impact your computer
experience, but I like to see what does not work, and why,
so the second I finally discover some errors I am in second
heaven. With the Lenovo laptop, the power management software
would not find its driver, and just sat in the device manager
with a question mark. That's a flaw in the way Windows 8 looks
for drivers - I retrieved the Lenovo Windows 7 power management
package, installed it, and the problem went away. Similarly, one
out of the three Bluetooth dongles I tried did not work. I
managed to install the other two, since I use a Bluetooth
keyboard / track pad combo, and wanted that to work,
because that way I can use two computers side-by-side with one
keyboard (the keyboard can switch between devices with a
keypress).
The Vaio was interesting too - the optical audio (Dolby) drivers
would not load, so I had to install them by hand, the same thing
applied to the power management drivers (but I use the Vaio with
a managed UPS, so maybe that was OK - the All-in-One with a
USB-attached UPS thinks it is a laptop). And there were some
other drivers that installed fine, without hiccups, but only
manually. The strangest was the power driver, that made a list
of failed Bluetooth drivers go away. I am not complaining, it
all works, but it probably is not for the faint of heart, who
don't want to ignore error messages, that can indeed be lethal.
My latest struggle, still ongoing, is the disk defragger, now
called "disk optimization". You can set this to run
automatically, which I always do, but on the Vaio it won't run
automagically, while on the Lenovo it does. One of the reasons
your system eventually runs slowly is that your hard disk may
suffer from fragmented data, and the defragger built into
Windows since XP does away with that - provided you set it to
run when you are not using your system, say, at night, which for
many people isn't an option because they turn their computers
off. Disks, you see, do not defragment while you are using them.
So, while the Scheduler settings on both systems are the same,
on one it runs, on the other it doesn't. Go figure. Please be
aware that disk fragmentation may cause you to crash your
system, even lose files, and can put your entire harddisk at
risk. I am very firmly convinced that many of the "virus
problems" consumers think they experience are due to the lack of
maintenance on their PCs. Turning them off will stop any
maintenance in progress, creating risk, rather than reducing it,
and I have noted consumers turn off laptops even more readily
than they do PCs. All of my systems are on 24/7, and, at night,
every night, automatically run full disk maintenance and a full,
deep, virus scan. Neither of those can be done while you are
using your system, whatever the manufacturer says - Windows uses
the hard disk for virtual memory, and thus always writes to and
reads from the disk, all it needs is one running program, or a
couple of open files.
So anyway - Windows 8 is new, and some stuff needs to still get
fixed, that isn't a problem. It runs well, is smooth, is fast,
boots fast, and Media Center works well, which is good news for
those of us who like to watch TV on our computers. Media Center
allows that, because it has DRM (Digital Rights Management)
built in, and I have to say that the HD screen image, under
Windows 8, is superb, even on a 50 inch display. Most
importantly, it doesn't just run well on new PCs and laptops,
for the older systems, even if the manufacturer tells you they
"are not supported", Windows 8 is a true improvement. My Vaio,
which I bought with the manufacturer provided Windows Vista
Professional, has been through Windows 7 Business, and
now, under Windows 8 Pro, it runs at least twice as fast as it
did under Vista, is more frugal with memory, and is not at all
in need of replacing. This is partly due to the excellent Sony
motherboard build, I must say.
Postscript: Forgot to mention something that is likely more my
discovery than specific to Windows 8, but.... if you connect
both your WiFi and a wired Ethernet connection, and bridge
the two (select both, right click and select "bridge"), you
actually end up with more bandwidth, and a bit more network
speed, if your modem is capable of that. I actually have two
routers hanging off the cable interface, and that seems to lift
me well above the port speed, though it isn't a straight shot.
As I said, I had never tried this before, so for all I know you
could do this in XP, but I do know that bridging was finicky,
and used for failover, and this is very easy and compounds as
well as provides you with a potential failure recovery. I mean,
you could hardwire into your router, and then use the
neighbour's Wifi, and you'd never go down. Umm, I didn't say
that :)
Before you read this and
subsequent musings about Windows 8, here's Menno's Law: do not
buy a computer with a new operating system until it has been on
the market for a year (I will now go on to tell you why I am
breaking my own rules ;) For Windows 8, that would be October
2013. Apart from the obvious reason - it needs to be debugged in
the marketplace, and after a year Microsoft will have fixed 95%
of whatever doesn't work right - it is clear that, for the
moment at least, most computers are sold with Windows 8 Core,
which is a crippled version of Windows 8 Pro without Windows
Media Center. You'll have to pay to get upgraded to Pro, and
then pay to add the Media Center software, which you can't even
buy if you don't have Pro installed. I should imagine by October
2013 there will be lots of affordable computers with both Pro
and Media Center off-the-shelf. By that time, Microsoft will
have made the money it needs to support its share price.
If you're wondering, I managed standardization and rollout of
two entire Verizon subsidiaries, one in the US and one in
Indonesia, on the workstation/PC front, converting the standard
from PC to laptop, and managing the vendors that provided
equipment, imaging and support, down to the Help Desks. I helped
the Indonesian Army combat PC viruses, as well, but that's a
different, though somewhat related, story.
I've always had "Windows internals" as part of my personal
knowledge base, and so I've ordered a new Windows 7 laptop, which I should be able
to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro cheaply, while Windows Media Center
can be downloaded for free from Microsoft until January 31, or
thereabouts. Doing those installs will teach me more than buying
a cheapie Windows 8 laptop, so there you go. I ran around from
Bellevue to Everett to see what was available Thanksgiving night
and Black Friday, and clearly, 99% of what was out there was
limited in capabilities, had large screens (most folks buy
laptops as their primary computer these days, and want 15.6 inch
or larger screens) and the crippled Windows 8. Nothing was a
really good deal, except for one single Toshiba Windows
7 model at one single Best Buy, and they had had run out of that
by the time I got there.
Then, I'll start customizing equipment for my colleague in Asia
Pacific, who I've been supplying with his computing environment
since 2010, when I handed him a customized Acer in my hotel room
in Beijing. We then couldn't find the Peking Duck restaurant we
wanted to go to, using the Beijing subway, and ended up in a
Finnish restaurant, where we had... Peking Duck.
It was, I suppose, high time a really new version of Windows was
released - Windows was getting very long in the tooth, not
having materially changed since the early versions, like Windows
286. By "changed" I mean the basic concept, user interface, of
course there was significant advancement in Windows' internals.
But if I look back to the Windows version I worked with in the
late 1980s, at the First Boston Corporation in Manhattan, I can,
if you like, "see" the line Windows development has taken. So
with the advent of touch screens - like it or not, that is what
tablet computing is really about - it was clear Microsoft had to
do something to facilitate the integration of notebook,
laptop, tablet and handphone. And it is clear that Windows
Phone, Windows 8 and Windows RT, together, create a new way of
computing. Over the past few days, after the initial influx of
Windows 8 laptops in the Black Friday sales, I am seeing the
Windows 7 laptop return to the shelves, while the user
experience of many largely uninitiated buyers of Windows 8
laptops slowly ripples through the PC-verse. I am looking
forward to see how many applications and user environments have
Windows 8 versions available, and interested to see how much
innovation Microsoft has put into the new user interface, which,
if "old" Windows is a guide, may be around for decades, assuming
there will not be new user interfaces beyond "touch" any time
soon.
I am not in any danger of losing data in my transition to
Windows 8 - I will continue to use my Windows 7 laptop, at least
for the foreseeable future, until I am comfortable it works OK,
and I have learned all there is to learn about "8". It is a
professional need I have had throughout my career - always have
a spare PC to fall back on, should your primary fail. For now,
the Windows 8 laptop will be my learning machine - I have bad
experiences in terms of losing data to new operating systems.
While I have always advocated keeping a spare PC if that is a
must-have item for business or work, that view has changed. The
average consumer, today, has so much essential data on their PC,
from tax returns to banking information to coursework and
thesis-in-progress, that having just the one PC (laptop, for
many) is really a risk you cannot afford to take. I currently
use a Lenovo laptop as my primary system, which I back up on a
daily basis, it is actually the very first thing I do, after
checking my email, updating my finances, and having coffee. I
have a Vaio All-in-One PC, equally running Windows 7, as a
backup, all I would need to do is install my essential software
and restore my backup up archives there should the Lenovo fail -
the last time I did that was when my previous HP laptop failed,
I moved my data onto the Vaio, then was able to take my time
finding and installing the Lenovo I now use. To make sure the Vaio works when
I would need it, I use it to watch TV when I am at my desk, and
as a surveillance webcam when I am away. One thing I can tell
you about spares is that if you don't use them on a daily basis
(and maintain them, of course) they are quite likely not to work
when you need them. You need to either use your spare for some
trivial purpose, or swap between the two PCs every week or so -
but that would mean transferring files all the time, which is, I
think, too much work for the benefit you get.
So, you look at every App in
"All Aps". Nothing there. Back to Control Panel. and check all
the links. There is something called "Windows 7 File
Recovery", which, since this is an upgrade from Windows 7
Home Premium, probably lets you somehow back out Windows 8.
Let's take a look.
No, it isn't. Windows 7 File Recovery is actually the
Windows 8 "Backup and Recovery". What the heck? Is this (apart
from mentioning the wrong version of Windows) done to force you
to use Skydrive??? What'sGoingOn? No Microsoftie noticed this
"small" typo?
I don't have an answer, but it does look like it. Everything
that comes natively with Windows 8 drives the user, unashamedly,
to using the Microsoft Cloud. Everything - there
is even the offer of free Microsoft Office Cloud service,
complete with a change of your Hotmail or Live email address to
an Outlook.com address, the successor to Live.com, which was the
successor to Hotmail.com. Microsoft did this before, when they
gave us Windows Vista Professional with a slew of Live
environments, everything from storage and email to virus
defense. Now, Live is dead, the entire sophisticated Live suite
of utilities has been murdered, and the Outlook name is being
recycled.
Windows 8, then, has become a dual purpose operating system. The
stuff you used to use Windows for is still there, actually works
well and has lost weight and gained pace, but the front end, no
longer a Start button but a Start screen, is completely designed
to make it unnecessary for you, but especially for the novice
user, to never have to go anywhere than Microsoft for anything -
well, beer and coffee maybe. Whether on a Windows tablet,
Windows smartphone or Windows PC, you can now always be in the
same look-and-feel, with the same tools. The Start screen comes
up with tiles for everything you could ever need, from Search,
Travel and Weather to Explorer and everywhere that can take you.
And as it all want you to sign in with your Microsoft mail
account, everything you do on any of these devices is
automatically accessible from all your other Windows devices.
This goes all the way down to Microsoft Office, which is now
free and running in the Microsoft Cloud.
Ignore the commentary you may read about how Microsoft's phones
aren't selling, how the Surface tablet is too expensive,
Microsoft is in there for the long haul, building an ecosystem
that aims to shackle Windows users completely to Microsoft. That
isn't going to happen overnight, but Microsoft has very deep
coffers, and needed to do something to not lose more custom to
Apple and Google. Windows 8 is it, it does, in combination with
its mammoth partners, like Intel and Nokia, soup-to-nuts
communication-and-computing.
It took me a couple of days
to do the basic install of Windows 8 Pro, much of which was
spent figuring out what has gone where. You will likely not need
to do that, anything that isn't in the tiles on the Start screen
you can either find by right clicking in that screen, "All Aps"
will come up bottom right, or click on the "Desktop" tile and
you'll go to the conventional desktop you are used to. From
there, you can slide your cursor to the bottom left to activate
a Start screen representation you can click on (clever, that, it
is where the Start button used to be), or go to the top right
and slide down to the Start icon, or Search, or Settings, and
some other choices. It is pretty simple and self explanatory -
kudos to Microsoft for making major major changes without
complete alienation. That's one of the hardest part of Human
Factors design.
Because:
this is smooth! It cold boots in something like five seconds,
amazing (although there is a boot setting somewhere, but even
the slow boot only takes twenty or so seconds), and it runs
quite a bit (that's just shy of significantly) faster than
Windows 7 did. It is in fact so smooth and usable that I am,
after a week, considering upgrading my Vaio All-in-One, which
runs Windows 7 Professional, as well, something I had not
intended to do as I need to be sure I can access my files and
applications, and I do not take risks with new operating
systems. But it must be said: I do not like the marketing and
personal data mining aspects, but I haven't had a single crash,
not one hang, no blue screens, only a couple of installation
mishaps that Windows recovered from by itself (!).
The Apps that get tiles on the left side of the Start screen
clearly are Windows 8 specific, I am assuming they're ubiquitous
in Windows Phone and Windows tablet as well. On the right side
appear the "traditional" Windows applications you install -
Windows Media Center, for instance, free to download from
Microsoft until the end of January (it is not included with
Windows, I expect because most consumers do not use it), becomes
a right side tile, not a left side App, although it is fully
Windows 8 aware. You can copy the shortcuts and put them on your
"old style" desktop, if you like.
Beware of the Windows 8 Core that comes with the cheap laptops -
I don't actually know what it lacks, but I do know that even
Windows 8 Pro does not have "Media Center", so getting something
that is intentionally "simpled" and can't be upgraded cheaply is
never a good idea. You're better off, I think, buying a Windows
7 laptop, while they're cheap, and upgrading to Windows 8 Pro
for $14.99, which you can do here
until the end of February, at least if you're in the good old US
of A. The Windows 8 Pro upgrade for Windows 8 Core costs
(as I write this) $39.99, a price that seems to fluctuate by the
day, and you cannot use the $14.99 upgrade to do that. Duh.
What I have seen in the cheap-and-cheerful Windows 8 section, then, seems to mostly consist of large screen laptops with underpowered processors, not enough (2GB) memory and smallish (250GB) hard disks. That may be enough for you, but to future proof yourself, I recommend getting a 64 bit motherboard, 8 GB of RAM, and a terabyte hard disk. If nothing else, the larger the disk, the faster Windows will run, provided you turn on write caching, and turn off buffer flushing, on the drive. That upgrade, and the free (for now) Windows Media Center, are here. I use it to watch cable on one of my systems, using the AverTV USB tuner for Windows, which works a treat, auto-installs under Windows 8 without a hitch, too.
Anyway, the last two
things I managed were my Blu-ray drive and the Lenovo Power
Driver. The latter was not supposed to run under "8", but did,
and I managed to install and update the Nero 8 software that
came with my Buffalo
Blu-ray burner, and play back both Blu-ray movies and
HD-DVD movies, I own a library of those, and I kept that drive
around so I can still play them (I have a regular player for
them as well). I am not suggesting this is important for you,
it is one of the things I happen to think is important, that
folks aren't convicted to replacing their gear, if they are
willing to invest some effort, use the information on the
internet, and make something work. With the exception of one
of my three Bluetooth dongles, everything I threw at Windows 8
works, and I was able to install it on an older, unsupported,
desktop, as well as my more recently acquired laptop. Pass,
pass, pass, people.
What should
be of concern is the proliferation of useless technology - but
by "useless" I do not mean the resulting products have no
purpose. I mean more that the technologies are being used to
generate corporate profits but do not otherwise provide a
benefit to anyone.
Reading an article about
the fortunes, or misfortunes, of GPS manufacturer Tom-Tom, I wondered
whether or not the development of smartphones, and their
assuming the role of navigation equipment, was a foreseeable
development. I am particularly knowledgeable about this
development, as I worked on GPS applications for the
telephone network very early on, when Navteq was building the
first navigation units, and I went up to Palo Alto to test
the state of the art, which had recently been installed in a
few Hertz rental cars. It did not work very well, this due
to mapping technologies that needed further development -
the technology itself had been kickstarted to assist in the
mapping of the Atlanta, GA area for the 1994 Olympic Games
there. But by 2007, I bought a Nokia mobile phone with full
navigation functionality in the Philippines (that's it on
the left) - it was not, at that time, available in the
United States, as American wireless carriers were not
interested in making it available. They did not - dig this -
think this was a product that would make money, and were
under pressure from car manufacturers, which wanted to build
the technology into vehicles as a sales incentive, and
develop things like OnStar, which needs GPS.
I see it
as a - technically astute - sign
of desperation within Microsoft. You've
installed Microsoft Pro, it
runs nicely, the problems you've had to
solve were survivable, you've made a copy of the master
disk, and now you'd like to back
up, before something goes wrong and you lose all
your work. Backup & Restore, an application
normally packaged with a Windows Professional, lives in the Control Panel, so
you right-click in the Start screen,
click "All Aps" at the bottom
right, and start the Control Panel. Not.Because:
this is
smooth! It
cold boots in
something like
five seconds,
amazing
(although
there is a
boot setting
somewhere,
but even the
slow boot only
takes twenty
or so
seconds), and
it runs quite
a bit (that's
just shy of
significantly)
faster than
Windows 7 did.
It is in fact
so smooth and
usable
that I am,
after a week,
considering
upgrading my
Vaio
All-in-One,
which runs
Windows 7
Professional,
as
well,
something I had
not intended
to do as I need
to be sure I
can access my
files and
applications,
and I do not
take risks
with new
operating
systems. But
it must be
said: I do
not
like the
marketing and
personal
data
mining
aspects, but I
haven't had a
single crash,
not one hang,
no blue
screens, only
a couple of
installation
mishaps
that Windows
recovered from
by itself
(!).
Two news trends
jump out - the number of celebrities falling off their pedestals, and the number of internet companies
showing less (or no) growth. Even Google is
falling prey to the times, it seems. Interesting is that, in the realm of internet
companies like Google and Faceook, a drop in revenues or
profits is seen as related to their
inability to monetize the mobile advertising ecosphere.
There had been no
rain in the Seattle area since July 23, thirteen weeks, not even
a thunderstorm or passing weather front. The total measured
rainfall is .03 inches, that's about 7 millimetres, and I think
that was all in a bit of overnight rain a month ago. But it's
done, it is raining on Friday October 12, with more to come,
although I am not seeing the deluge the forecasters promised.
Now the yellow can turn green again... even lawns that received
regular water turned yellow, water is expensive here, and
cisterns aren't a common household appliance here. The roads
will be slick and slippery for days while the rubber-and-oil
crud that accumulated over summer washes away, thankfully
there's quite a bit of rain expected, so they should be clean
again in a few days.
Being a UNIX - Lotus Notes guy
the other thing is harder - Microsoft's Sharepoint. I tried to set
up a test environment, only to find out that Sharepoint needs a
full blown Windows 2008 server with a full SQL environment, which,
in turn, needs a heavy duty four processor server. I had the
server available, last year, but not a license for the latest
server software, so that was that. My bad, I suppose, when I came
up to the Seattle area I didn't think about Microsoft's dominance,
and how that might affect other companies here. As it turns out,
even Amazon's technical management is all Microsoft - because that
is where most of them used to work, they brought their expertise
and tools, I guess. I spent my entire career in development and
project management in the world of UNIX, first in the labs (even
at Bell Labs I worked on a flavour of UNIX) and then in the
product deployment environment. We've always had a propensity to
use UNIX for everything, I recall that when I set up my data
center in Arlington, VA, the only Windows server environment I
signed off on was for Lotus Domino, our staple mail-and-database
tool. As I said, my bad, I didn't think about it and didn't know
enough about the way Microsoft has permeated the local development
environment. It is curious though - you could download a free
Linux version, and start learning UNIX tomorrow, but no such thing
where Windows is concerned. That's a shame. 
Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote
a tell-all book, the Afghanistan war is failing to the point
CBS has sent Lara Logan
back there, several European countries have run out of
money, several others are trying to form governments, and
Jimmy Savile is
rumoured to have been a pedophile. Dunno, folks, I think
this is mostly, largely, in the "grim news" arena. Even the
prognosticators that predict Obama is a shoe-in don't really
brighten the day - in general, I have begun to ignore most
news based on tealeaves - there really isn't anybody who can
predict the future. I mean, there never was, but today the
proliferation of "news" publications is such that you can just
go to Google News
(change countries if you need to, that's one of the strong
points of Google News) and pick the future you would
like.
Perhaps that is how we will vote, in the future.... I see it among some Catholic friends, who, in many cases, will decide their vote on the basis of who favours abortion and contraception, which is hardly relevant in terms of doing what is best for the People and the Country. Then again we seem to be "filling" in the news - CBS' Jan Crawford, this morning, regaled us how she asked Mitt Romney on his airplane point blank (her emphasis) if he thought he could win this election. I'll spare you his response, but how is this journalism? How much are we paying this woman to dog Romney's footsteps and do irrelevance? It is, in my view, a general issue, especially in the American press - there are so many programs and articles and journalists end up with absolutely irrelevant and nonsensical contributions - you can't very well call the home office and say "this is a non-story", as I famously did to one newspaper after it sent me to cover a 'jewelry smuggler" who turned out to have a diplomatic passport.
CBS seems to have landed among the news media that say the American population "has woken up" and now understands there isn't an easy solution to the economic downturn, although I have not seen or heard anybody offer a solution. I've been saying for years that "renewable" energy is not renewable. Hybrid and electrical vehicles, for the most part, are more expensive than regular vehicles, if anything is on the positive side, it is that there is increasing realism among consumers. Although, I continue to be amazed to hear the Washington State energy folks say we do so well in generating so much cheap hydro-electricity, but then I see that just about everybody in the Seattle area heats and cooks.... on gas, 60% of which is imported from Canada. That's two entire energy infrastructures to achieve one service, and that does not in any way save anybody money. Two steps back, and look at the woods, not the trees.
We seem to generally be
confused, and developing technology just for the heck of it. I
am all for technology development, please don't get me wrong,
but I just can't see the point of driverless cars. Any
initiative that is likely to put more cars on the road, rather
than fewer, won't help us economically or in terms of
efficiency. Driverless taxis and trucks, maybe, but then we'll
put even more people out of work. Driverless infrastructure will
be very expensive, and will prevent even small changes to road
signage and landmarks without some kind of feedback to the
technology. It is absolutely great Google develops new
technologies that do not yet exist, but they're not doing that,
as I heard on Fox this morning, to "help the elderly". You can't
drive any more, that's it, and you then won't be able to use a
car you can't drive in case of failure, same as you need pilots
on today's largely automated airplanes, which can even land
automatically.
WiFi in airplanes? Great, but the whole idea between working on the internet is that you don't need to travel, can work remotely. This story completely misses the point, and the huge cost of putting WiFi in airplanes. Yes, the airlines need to make more money, and once they all have WiFi some will offer it for free, and then the ticket prices will go up. Same-o same-o. I can certainly understand why airlines want to make flying more attractive, providing "all the mod cons", but we have the technology that makes much business travel unnecessary, and pushing that technology, creating more facilities for remote working, might give us a new product for export. Apart from which, the skies are crowded to the point that the Fed is spending billiuons on new traffic management systems we should really no longer need... The secret: redesign enterprises to do away with the offices and centralized locations. Redesign schools to do away with classrooms, and soccer moms. Etc. We have the technology, but making so many systems and standards obsolete would not help the economy, on the contrary. Perhaps we need to rethink our ways, as parts of our economy are based on essentially useless activities - yes, Apple doing its own mapping service creates jobs, but all that work has been done before. The people who are now going to fix the iPhone's navigation could be employed creating more useful services - we do, after all, have at least three large and experienced mapping and navigation companies, and you could make an argument that Apple's incessant walling off its products prevents any form of useful standardization. It was bad enough when Google decided to "roll its own", but at least they added value, invented, in creating Streetview, which has become an indispensible tool for many, consumers as well as businesses, not to mention the tax office.
I am not, as you may think, knocking our technological efforts. Some of this stuff, like driverless cars and WiFi internet in airplanes, was hard to develop, and it is brilliant. The issue is that these aren't efforts that will help the economy "kick it up a notch". Nor will, as I hear candidates say, creating more small business help. Small business, largely, is local, and it can't thrive if people don't have money to spend. What with the downsizing of many businesses, and the automation of others (Amazon is a good example, the company is automating the picking process in its warehouses), there are few jobs that used to exist. Amazon is an excellent example in another respect, too - it employs far fewer people than does Walmart, and sells much of its stuff at much lower prices. To some extent, Amazon pioneered a business model that now has many products shipped, cheaper, with tracking, right from the manufacture - in China. That, my friends, you need to take notice of - it is the new outsourcing. It is a very significant way in which the Chinese government supports its population, much more so than manufacturing solar panels. And nobody seems to notice.
If anything amazes, it is that
the Pakistani
minister who put a bounty on the head of controversial
anti-islam filmmaker Nakoula
Besseley Nakoula was not fired and arrested (and maybe Mr.
Nakoula should have been returned to Egypt, if that is where he
is from?). I think calling for someone's killing is a big step
up from insulting a deity, and for the Pakistan government to
leave this minister where he is.. Combined with previous
problems with Pakistan, one wonders where does this permission
come from? Is this an expression of Pakistani permissiveness, or
is the Pakistani government saying this is a fatwah? And is it
true that only insulting the Prophet, as opposed to important
folks in other religions, warrant the death penalty? Is it true
Islam is that different from other religions, and why is this
so? Religion, over time, leads to a lot of grief - they still
have protestant and catholic football teams in Glasgow..
But I think I've finally
managed to crack it, helped to some extent by Windows 7's
capability to interactively set up a router, using, I believe,
WPS. That doesn't work on my WinBoxes unless I do a full full
reset on the router, which I don't like doing as it loses me my
customization, and it can come up with the same IP address the
core router uses, so everything goes down. Etc. But you see,
you've got to figure this at some point, so that's what I've
been doing the whole freaking week, until nothing worked any
more, I had to go right back to scratch to get it working, no
shortcuts and clever things. And to be honest, it says WPS was
invented to make it easier for "civilians" to set up their
stuff, but when I see how much jargin is involved, I am not
seeing Grandma do this. It's a start, and it is nice that folks
can use their Windows client to set it up, rather than having to
log in to the esoteric router interface through an IP address,
but it isn't anywhere near what I would think is user friendly.
Worse, if WPS can be used by Windows for setup without
authentication, it is really easy for hackers to hijack a router
or router/PC pair. That's a huge concern.
I came across a
Wired article the other day, in which the
CAP theorem is mentioned - see an excerpt in the
following paragraph:
"When you spread data across hundreds of machines, the
theorem explains, you can guarantee that the data is consistent,
meaning every machine using the system has access to the
same set of data at the same time. You can guarantee that
the system is always available,
meaning that each time a machine requests a piece of
information, it receives a definitive response.
And you can guarantee partition tolerance, meaning the system can continue to operate when part of the system fails. But you can’t guarantee all three. You can guarantee two of the three, but not all. As an established bulder and designer of high availability systems, I had to reread the story a couple of times, as it didn't make sense to me that you could guarantee even two of the three, or, paradoxically, that you can actually positively guarantee all three."
How do I 'splain.
To the right, one of those redundancy examples - a WiFi broadband router with a 4G fallback facility, in a hotel room. Before I built my first fault tolerant box (click here for a picture and documentation), I had to learn how the phone company implements high availability. Based around a telephony switch, which is to all intents and purposes a fault tolerant computer with analog interfaces, the special requirements of operator services come into play here, operator services (call center) automation is what I was working on, at the time. Fascinating stuff, because you get (or got, in those days) full control of every aspect of the process, from software and human personnel (operators) on the one side, to the customer's equipment, and their wiring, on the other.
To make your reading a little more challenging, I will, at the same time, take a look at another article, that dealt with ex-Google Marissa Mayer, and her reviewing every new hire at Yahoo - the article has it that is how Google hires, too, although I don't know that any reporter knows "innner workings" that well.
But - woof. That's scary. I've worked for a couple of those micro-managing managers, but I have never myself adopted the methodology, because I think you lose more than you gain. And, to get back to the previous, this is the last thing you want to do building a high availability environment. I firmly believe that deciding all of your new staff yourself is a good way to prevent innovation, unless you think you know everything. You make yourself (and I am not saying I believe the article about Ms. Mayer) a single point of failure. Remember that whenever you look at a rocket scientist, you don't see the sidekick that keeps them in check.
Anyway, we'll get back to the human angle, let's tackle the premise first: guaranteeing system uptime, something we've been struggling with since networks were invented. However many times I reread the CAP theorem, I am not seeing definitions that make it really clear what the author means. When you say "each time a machine requests a piece of information, it receives a definitive response", it is clear that response can simply be an "I don't have it" or "I'm not here" statement, directing the requestor elsewhere. That would be valid, but doesn't get you what you need. But then in what I have learned in the phone company is that even a response that leads you to a "I cannot deliver this now" or "I cannot deliver this at all" would be valid. You'd then issue an alarm to a system or entity or human that/who can resolve the issue.
The problem is always at the back end, you see. Whether it is Marissa Mayer, who cannot vet resumes while she is giving birth, or a huge storm that takes down the infrastructure around Amazon's center in Northern Virginia, there is a cause-and-effect. I am assuming Netflix went down, during that storm, because it does not have a fully triplicated infrastructure, although one of the articles seems to indicate the failure to fail over lay with Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing, which didn't do what it was supposed to do. How that could be related is not clear to me, because Load Balancing is a service that needs all of its component parts online, but should continue to function (read: cease to be active) if one of its resources fails.
I have seen that happen, and I've been at the business end of the design decisions, too. Running a fully duplicated infrastructure is incredibly expensive, you see, and leaving all of the failover and security in the hands of a vendor entails a significant risk. Having said that, if Amazon has a center go down, and Netflix can blame it on them, and the outage is only a few hours, that constitutes a fair tradeoff with cheap service. Not to mention folks like Pinterest and Twitter, which the consumer does not pay for at all.
There is an interesting phrase in this Forbes article by Kelly Clay: "Resiliency .... needs to be part of the way we design our companies to recover from outages".Actually, but I am nitpicking a bit, the resilience would prevent the outages from happening. Or, and that is the cheaper way of doing things, a failure would cause a deterioration in service, but not a complete outage. But the part about designing companies very much rings a bell with me. In many, if not most, cases, companies are set up regionalized, and then end up being "backfilled" as their active regions change or increase. Look at Facebook and Twitter, and you'll see a U.S. centric design, these are companies that began trading on the U.S. MAN (Metropolitan Area Network). Look at Microsoft and RIM, and you'll see an international design - these were companies trading all over the world when the cloud came into being. Google, to me, is the odd man out, a U.S. centric company that was internationalized successfully, though it unfortunately has not been able to get a good footing in China, something Yahoo did temporarily manage, and Amazon is trying. I am, as an aside, fascinated by how hard it seems to be to work with the Chinese - and I am saying that as someone who was involved with Chinese networks, years ago, I still keep my Chinese business card in my collection:
Be that as it may, a German Siemens R&D executive, many years ago, said exactly the same when, in Munich, he showed me a telephone his artsy colleagues in Milan had concocted: it had an interchangeable keypad that could be personalized to the owner - this in the days before cellular telephony took off. He had it that you couldn't introduce these advanced technologies unless you redesigned their work environment - effectively, redesigned the entire company the technology was supposed to work in. You must, in assessing that, realize German technical companies are, more often than not, run by engineers, rather than lawyers, and engineers think about efficiency and friction reduction and stuff, on a global scale, which is why the entire Chinese government drives Audis.
It is the one thing I had a hard time getting used to, when I came to the United States - in the words of a Canadian CEO I worked under, much later: "What we do is like building a 747 during takeoff". Back in Europe, in them days, we'd spend umpteen years designing, like GSM, which took almost eighteen years to roll out. I am still in two minds about that, because it was GSM that took over the world, after all that, not the American CDMA - but part of the reason for that may have been the FCC setting it up to fail (unwittingly and unintentionally). At any rate, in this day and age, we can no longer afford to spend many years building things in labs, I was lucky to be at the tail end of that, in the 1980s.
But back to the CAP theorem, and the article that says, in part, that "Amazon doesn’t guarantee consistency across multiple zones" in its AWS design. I looked at AWS, a while ago, since I was being interviewed by one of Amazon's AWS executives (who unfortunately had a fatal accident the weekend before my scheduled interview, but that's another story). Thinking about that statement, I think Amazon actually does let you guarantee consistency, but it is a framework, not a ready made service. The part where you can replicate data across multiple geographical zones is where the customer needs to do some work, and write some requirements. AWS, or anyone's cloud, for that matter, isn't as simple as that. Consistency across multiple zones would mean that information contained in one instance of a database is an exact mirror of the information in every other instance. That's easy enough to achieve, but it means that all instances must communicate with each other, and not release the latest update until there is some kind of confirmation that all data is synchronized. The problem isn't in the synchronization, the problem is in the amount of time it takes to do the verify, and how quickly you need your data available.
Let me explain. If you have a fully fault tolerant server solution, and you're working on a spreadsheet online, you will want to see a cell update immediately, within a millisecond or so. If one of your database instances is not just across the country, but the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in Singapore, and you're in New York, the verification of that instance is going to take more than a millisecond - that's mostly simply travel time for the bits to get from NYC to S'pore and back, and the verification software to do its job.
It reminds me of the way the Space Shuttle computer flight management systems were designed - I was told about this while researching flight management systems here at Boeing, and at British Airways at Heathrow. In the Shuttle, originally, there were two systems that would compare readings, to make sure they were consistent, and then, because this was designed for real time, a third system was available that would only "wake up" if there was a discrepancy between the primaries, and decide which of the systems was closest to its own data. I haven't done the calculation, but if you think about it you'll understand that the statistical chance that you still end up with wrong information is quite high. But it is the best you could do in the time available - and even though we have much faster and much more capable computers today, you can reduce the risk, but not eliminate it, and as you add complexity you add risk factors.
In other words, the CAP theorem really can't work, even in two instances out of three, because you can't get a guarantee in a timely fashion unless you introduce restrictions in the physical locations of your server parks. The question then becomes one of application - where does the data you need have to be available? A theorem, as such, can't have restrictions, after all. No wonder high speed trading companies have now begun working not on the redundancy, but on having very high speed data connections available - closer to the source, faster connection, more, fast fiber, fewer routers, avoidance of POP hotels (POP - Point of Presence), and so on. The problem here is that this flies in the face of the CAP theorem - in order to provide security and redundancy, you need time, and in order to do high speed trading, you must reduce time as much as possible. We've seen some spectacular trading losses, recently, that show we're sacrificing accuracy for speed, for the sake of profit, deliberately. And perhaps what that means is that CAP, postulated in 2000, is obsolete, killed by its own elegance. Because, after all, whether or not a system serves its purpose predominantly depends on its requirements, and those are, talk to any ISO auditor, the primary problem.
Look at what are arguably the best distributed systems today, Amazon's and Google's (I don't have experience with Microsoft's cloud, and my worldwide network experiences are too aged to use for comparison). Amazon built its system for e-commerce, while Google designed its network to do rapid lookup processing. The former is, then a combination of processing and databases, the latter a very fast distributed (I would almost say dispersed) database application. Google is particularly fascinating, because it had to build a system that could retrieve websites, information, from anywhere, something nobody had ever done before. What this means, effectively, is that neither network was originally designed for the cloud, but eventually adapted to it. Amazon, as I understand it, decided to start seling some of its excess capacity, and even though it began providing e-books and streaming video, this did not require a real time network. Similarly, Google did not need real time capabilities until after it acquired Youtube, and began to stream in real time.
When I first looked at "real time computing" I found the discrepancy between high availability and fault tolerance staggering - fault tolerance cost five times as much as high availability did. What, effectively, the cloud has done is institutionalize high availability, reducing its price by scaling up it infrastructure. To some extent, that works - if you compare the supporting infrastructure for banks, and then compare American "up" time with Europe, you can see that our experience with 24/7 operations, necessary because our economy is so much based on 24/7 commerce, has led to much better availability of services. I read worldwide newspapers, and notice the frequency of outages in online banking and ATM operations in Europe, at a much higher rate than what we're used to here. It is hardly surprising, then, that the cloud was invented here, and that price regulation in Europe has forced providers to invest less than what we're used to - 24/7 availability, after all, is a competitive aspect of society. If you read my 1994 HA talk, you'll note that Europeans, not that long ago, did not have access to their money in their banks, after hours. That was "normal". This at a time when I could retrieve money from my New York bank account in Jakarta, Indonesia - around the clock (admittedly, HSBC, with headquarters in both Europe and Asia, did have 'round the clock operations more or less from Day One).
Of course, when I began work on fault tolerant systems, the target became what we refer to as "5x9", or "five nines" - systems with a designed uptime of 0.99999%. That's a downtime of about 5 minutes 15 seconds or so per year. This is a failure rate not achievable in hardware, so the way you look at "five nines" (or even "three nines") is in terms of service. From a RAID array, capable of functioning when one of its drives fail, to a redundant bus, when signals in the system have multiple paths to choose from, you can combine hardware and firmware to provide failure protection. You can go quite far, as some of us do, with multiple terminals and network connections, using different methods of connecting. One terminal using a cable internet connection, for instance, with the other using (something we can finally do now) 4G data. And that shows you, forgive me the elaborate example, how finicky and not-quite-secure this methodology is - because, on 9/11, in downtown Manhattan, everything failed. The cellular antennnas were on top of the WTC, there wasn't enough capacity across the rivers, and the fibers quickly became unusable - all of them.
I could go on, but I don't want to terminally bore you, and there is "Songs of Praise" - oops, I mean the Monza Formula 1 Grand Prix waiting for me, now that I have access to the Beeb. Next stop Singapore, ah, when will I get to travel again? And yes, I know, I haven't finished this article, in my next installment I'll address the human angle a bit more, as there is much more human in the cloud than we give it credit for...
Can't quite figure out why
they have this convention, or the Other One, for that
matter. Don't Republicans have Skype? Don't we have too many
carbons in the air? I mean, this Romney fellow is the
candidate, so do these nice folks really have to get
together to hear his wife tell them how great he
is? What else is she going to say?
There are, perhaps, traditions that are a bit archaic, and not necessarily conducive to bringing the change we need. In a day and age where we are all interconnected, and we know who the candidates on both sides are, and we have, in the U.S., decided we still do not want more than two parties, like real democracies, why the show? Even England went to a multiparty system..
Just asking... and then a decidedly old Clint Eastwood steals the show, and the media don't go "Good show!" but "What was he thinking?". Sheesh. We need to lighten up, people. Yes, we're in a recession, but not laughing isn't going to help that one bit.
Back to the venerable BBC, older than Clint Eastwood, first in the world to broadcast television, in 1936, from Ally Pally, near where my partner's parents lived, when I was living in Norf London. Checking one of the applications installed on the Blackberry Playbook tablet I've been using since the beginning of the year, I noticed something I had seen and ignored a dozen or so times before - the help file has it there are ways of getting TV feeds from various overseas places. I don't know if you've ever tried that, but most foreign TV broadcast channels available on the internet are country restricted, and those few that aren't, usually come in various unintelligible tongues. But this time I checked what these folks were on about, and it turned out that one of their solutions, which gives you a network address in the country you'd like to watch, actually works reasonably well. So I am watching some of Britain's normally restricted broadcast channels on my US-based computers, especially gratifying since I lived in England for a long time, and for some weird reason that left me Anglophile.
There is, normally, a license fee a British TV viewer must pay, which, like in other European countries, subsidizes free TV broadcasts. Being a good boy, I went to the licensing site, to see if they had created a way for overseas folks to pay a license fee. I mean, I know we're not supposed to be able to watch, but why not make it possible to pay? No way, I am afraid, if you don't have a UK postal code, no dice. Perhaps I should use my old office address in Wood Green? Ah no, that would not be legal either...
Come to think of it, perhaps it wasn't living in England that made me Anglophile. Maybe I was Anglophile before, and that's why I moved there. I don't really know. All I know is that I've been watching science fiction and British TV since before I moved here, and still do, after 26 years. With exceptions, American TV does not appeal to me. And having gone to the trouble of connecting to British broadcasters, I really have to ask myself why. American television is watched the world over, by millions and millions of people. So that sort of does leave me the odd man out.
Scrolling through the program offerings (or, in English: programme offerings ;) I suddenly realize one of the reasons, as I come across Parade's End, with the superb Benedict Cumberbatch. Just his name has something undefinably Old World. (re)written by Tom Stoppard, it is just something incredibly soothing to have going in the background, or, as I do today, on the other screen.
One wonders, as an aside,
whether it is "Parade's End" for the United States. Taking
place in World War I, Parade's End chronicles the
approaching end of the British Empire, and suddenly,
having watched Mitt Romney announce new jobs without ever
telling us what these people are going to be doing,
building, making, I wonder whether our form of capitalism
is at an end, now that everybody and their grandchild
seems to do what we do better than us.
Hmm. I am not trying to say there's anything wrong with America or Americans. This is somewhat hard to explain. If you've grown up in Europe, and spent half your life in the old cultures (I moved to the U.S. at age 38), you just look at life, and zings, differently. And that is all it is, different. I recall conversations with my colleagues in New York, American engineers, who really hadn't come across an engineer who'd taken Latin and Greek in high school. I could go on about this, suffice it to say America is a segmented society, even more so than Britain is. Or perhaps I should say "was", as I haven't lived there for many years, and England has changed a great deal since the 1980s.
Anyway, so it is Culture I meant, I guess I got a bit wordy. I like watching television programmes that keep me thinking, lines of dialogue whose origins I can follow. I remember a COO walking into a conference room in Jakarta and starting off with a baseball joke. Which no Indonesians there got. A Brit would have said something colonial, like driving on the same side of the road, and that would have got a laugh. A Brit, or a Dutchman, would have spent some time understanding his audience. The people. And when I watch American television today I still don't see much of anything international that can educate the average American. The NBC even cut the bits they thought too "English" out of the Olympic's opening show, and the commentators had little understanding of what they were watching, replacing intelligent commentary with about 400 repeats of the words "industrial revolution". It is what I noticed when I moved here, American culture is a bit inward looking, in "House" the doctor has to be American, when American hospitals are littered with England educated physicians. Imagine what Hugh Laurie could have done with that part in British English! Fake, you see, is fake, however good you are - and you can be English and be American at the same time, just ask (or watch) Left Coast TV host Craig Ferguson, who technically harks from Scotland, of course.
On another occasion, I'll talk to you about the limited use we seem to make of all of these capabilities - yes, the BBC broadcasts ABC News, and some PBS stations broadcast some BBC World News (the BBC runs the largest news organization on the planet, I believe), but giving the populace everywhere live access to everybody else's television is not exactly happening. The carriers and ISPs, as well as the governments, aren't interested in giving you "the world at your fingertips", their only effort seems to be in the area of selling expensive services to those who can't get them anywhere else, like selling Zee to (East) Indians, and some international channels from other countries in premium cable or satellite packages. I have personally always found the level of attention to national and international evening news ridiculous - the main broadcasters give you just half an hour of news, squeezed in between hours and hours of local news, with the advertisers continually baying at their doors to broadcast Law & Order or Entertainment Tonight. It is high time we began thinking outside of the box, internationally, there must be ways beyond the conventional to begin providing international information that isn't preselected by broadcasters, that can help educate our youngsters. We talk about the Chinese and the Iranians censuring things, and what we don't realize is that we're doing the same thing, as - for instance - folks overseas can't watch NBC, because NBC sells Law & Order to carriers, and so you cannot watch American television broadcasts on the internet. How crazy and dysfunctional is that?
It is the end of summer, somehow, the Fourth of July holiday weekend, I am not used to this weather, but the temperatures here in the Pacific Northwest are on their way down already, but of a heatwave at the end of July, and that was it. I think I'll take a run out and see what goes on at the Washington shore, where I've never been...
I don't know if
you've been following Mitt Romney's
rhetoric about energy self-sufficiency, I find
much of that noisy election-speak, rather than that it
has any basis in reality. Only the other day, I caught
him on CBS Morning News beginning a sentence with
"energy self sufficiency in Am...", then quickly
swallowing his sentence, and turning "Am.." into
"North America". And his noise about the infamous
pipeline is noise about a pipeline from Canada to the
United States, nothing whatsoever to do with American
oil. No, Mitt, Canada is not the United States, and
while they are a good neighbour, they have their own
agenda. Rather than go to England and Poland and
Israel, when you went walkabout, you should have gone
to Canada and Mexico.
The oil coming through this pipeline (which has not
been canceled but simply needs to redo its permit
application) is Canadian, and we will have to pay the
Canadians for it. Makes no difference with Saudi or
Kuwaiti or Iraqi oil, especially since we're paying
for much of the pipeline, while the other guys pay for
their own tankers. Thinkaboutit.
I've looked at what goes on here in Washington State, which technically should have the cheapest water-generated electricity in the United States, and I see that many people (I can't say "the majority" since I don't have the data) use gas to heat and cook. Gas that comes... from Canada. When I see that I wonder whether we're even close to looking at generating electricity and using heat pumps to reduce the cost of imported energy. Romney just wants to add more Canadian oil to the mix - as I understand it the majority of the oil in use on the West Coast comes from there anyway.
So if you're replacing "self sufficiency" with "North American self-sufficiency", sure, you can make lots of irrelevant comments about energy. But Romney, as a business person, should know this: you can't make money by spending less. You make money by selling more. And I am not seeing any plans on Mitt's part (or on Obama's, for that matter) to sell oil or energy to India and China, both countries desperate for the stuff. Using hydro-power to free up oil and gas for exportation, now that would impress me. But nobody is thinking or talking about that. We're talking about bringing gas prices down. Nice, but with a drought that cuts into ethanol production... Shell Oil advertising they are working with their Brazilian partners on ethanol production.. guess what, that's imported. Not only that, it's bullshit, as well - the Brazilians began producing ethanol to be less dependent on imported oil in.. 1975, and built the first car to run on 100% ethanol in 1979. They combined ethanol production with sugar production, so ended up with two products out of one - sugarcane. And Shell advertising Brazilian ethanol in the United States in 2012 - let me put it this way, Brazil is the second largest exporter on ethanol in the world, and has a population of only 190 million, and an enormous fertile landmass to grow this crap on.
All I am saying is that I would love to talk to some folks with good ideas, the election rhetoric, if they get anybody to believe some of it, is only going to make things worse. It's getting to be like a game show, this election.
In the meantime, the industrious Germans, in the middle of being hit by the Eurecession, have some terrific economic news (that link is in German!): in the first half of 2012, they have managed to increase their agricultural exports (these are people we think of as engineers and manufacturers) to non-Western countries by 13.3%, to some 7 billion Euros. Total agricultural exports were worth some 29.5 billion Euros, In other words: the Germans "saw it coming" and managed to increase exports to countries less affected by the recession, something they could only do by careful planning and preparation - the screen capture to the left shows you GEFA's Mandarin Chinese website, they have them in quite a few languages. I am using this example because I can see the Germans looking ahead, while our candidates are not. I would need Romney (and Obama, of course) to be talking about where we need to be ten years from now, and how we get there. And I'll give you a couple of clues: it's got nothing to do with Medicare (we need to make more money so we can afford healthcare, we're not going to be healthy by saving money) or with finding life on Mars (robots need to go out here and find and harvest the natural resources we need, screw the bacteria - if we want to find life we can just watch Obama v. Romney).
If you have followed
Facebook's exploits, you'll have noticed the company
is having a hard time monetizing its mobile users. As
I've mentioned now and again, forcing Facebook members
to pay for data services for advertising is likely not
a brilliant idea. The screen capture to the left show
you one way they might tie users to their service,
financially - paying the carrier for the user's data.
It looks like they are doing that with Claro, probably
as a test - Claro is a brand that belongs to America
Movil of Mexico, owned by multimegatrillionaire Carlos
Slim. It is one of the largest
telecommunications providers in the world, and of
course South and Middle America, where Claro operates,
is full of lower income folks who could not otherwise
access data services on mobile phones. In many cases
in those regions, though, mobile is the only way they
could access data, as there isn't an advanced
telecommunications infrastructure in much of its
coverage area. So, please, Mr. Zuckerberg, can you
tell us if you're paying Mr. Slim, with some of that
lovely investor money, or is it the other way around?
With the ongoing collapse of Groupon, and the non-success of Facebook's IPO, it is increasingly clear that their formulas work to achieve a membership, but do not work as a method to achieve income. Groupon may be a completely different case, where possibly the recession is making it hard-to-impossible for sellers to maintain pricing that allows discounts. But Facebook joins a long line of social networks, from CompuServe via AOL to MySpace, that haven't worked, in the long run, and that probably because they don't charge a membership fee. The cause may simply be competition- CompuServe and AOL used to charge for access, then ended up having to lower their prices as the "free" competition came along, offering the same thing for no money. In the end, everybody went belly-up. Going back to where advertising paid its way, that was in magazines, which consumers pay for, newspapers, which consumers pay for, and television, fully financed by advertising (in the United States). There was, when all this came about, little television - just three channels, and I should imagine that now that we have the ability to publish everything electronically, and have as many TV channels as we want, the method simply no longer works. Surf channels on your cable box, and you'll find huge numbers of advertising-only channels, and I will bet you that their proliferation is because they no longer work. I can't imagine any internet connected teen ever watching infomercials again. If that is how you make your money, get out, before it bankrupts you.
Why listen to me? Like your teens, I have spent most of my life on the internet, I worked on internet's forerunners, began my career with IBM, and moved to the press just as electronic page makeup became a reality (we were a bit quicker with that in Europe than American publishers were, my publishers had fully electronic page makeup, including transmission to the remote printing factory, in the late 1970s). In other words, I have a twenty year head start on most of today's internet users. And, for what it is worth, I do not read paper papers, do not watch television advertising, do not watch infomercials, and ever since the World Wide Web and search engines became available to me (mid-90s, as I was in a development lab and could use UNIX tools on the nascent WWW, which is to all intents and purposes a giant UNIX box) have used those tools to find things. And what I see is that children growing up today do the same thing - they do searches and, as children do, use their peers for reference. The main variable are the parents - many still feel children should "read books", for whatever un-thought-through reason; others do not understand children need smartphone and laptop skills to advance in their studies and their careers, so buy crappy phones and cheap notebooks; and it goes on. Insofar as there are technologically deprived children, that is a class created by parents and, to some extent, governments. I remember talking to one parent, the daughter of a friend, who home schools her children, and does not feel the children need more than dialup internet for their homework. I feel sorry for them, and I think parents like that should be fined or jailed, but there it is, there will be another underclass.
Anyway, the telephone is virtually free, the internet is virtually free, so I don't know either how we're going to monetize the new media. One thing is for sure: we're going down the wrong track.
Soon after I got
my new Blackberry Torch, in May, I noticed that the
"home portal" T-Mobile provides, web2go.com,
changed. Where I'd had news headlines from CNN
before, from the look of it the headlines now come
from Yahoo. I'd seen the Yahoo headlines before,
when logging into my Yahoo mail account, they're
usually an eclectic mix of Britney Spears, the love
life of Tom Cruise's son, and drivel about Olympic
athletes' tax bills. Little or no news, in other
words, at least not stuff I consider news. I have to
be careful saying that, of course, plenty of people
love this entertainment stuff, or there would be no
TMZ.
At any rate, the question is how you present yourself, as what we used to call a "portal". The only company that cracked a formula was Google, which realized that there wasn't anything you could present that interested all people, so you should simply ask them what they wanted to know. Where, usually, anybody who thinks of a new concept gets pipped by number two, or three, or four, look at AOL getting upended by the World Wide Web, Google took off and got so far ahead its competitors can't even smell its exhaust any more.
As Deepak Chopra said on CBS News, the other day: "My five and six year old grandchildren don't even watch TV any more, they get up, they go to Youtube". Youtube, a,k.a. Google video. Or Google TV. Or whatever you want to call it. And the Google folks just keep going, they have an idea, get it started, if it doesn't work they move on to the next idea.
So now we have one of the head Googles, Marissa Mayer, stepping up to fix Yahoo. A Yahoo that, famously, went and bought some 40% of then fledgling Chinese internet company Alibaba seven years ago, and so should have had the ability to make a good entry into the Chinese market - Alibaba is a profitable behemoth today. Except the story has it Alibaba is planning to buy out Yahoo's share.
China is a really hard nut to crack. Google pulled out - voluntarily, but even so, Facebook didn't even try, Twitter hasn't managed, I am not seeing Blackberry there, Apple manufactures there, so is a different animal, and then Skype is in China, Microsoft is in China, Nokia is in China, but they are among the few. My company, back when, NYNEX/Bell Atlantic, pulled out, you couldn't do telecommunications in China without participation of the People's Army, which was an issue. Much has been written about how to crack the Chinese market, but I don't know that anybody has the Golden Grail. I found a dichotomy in China - yes, the Chinese want to play in the world market, but then you turn around and see they really don't.
All I am saying is that I would hope Marissa Mayer can find another way of dealing with them - Yahoo's connection with China goes back a long way, and is likely related to one of its founders, Jerry Yang, who is of Taiwan Chinese ancestry. Ditching that chunk of Alibaba would be a bad move, from the development perspective, in my opinion. The press has it Ross Levinson, the interim CEO at Yahoo, is the architect of the Alibaba buyout - is his departure related to that not being considered a good move? This is just me conjecturing, please understand I am totally besotted with China, where the general atmosphere reminds me of New York in the 1980s, when I got here, and I keep thinking (or maybe hoping...) there has to be a way to "do this together". If there is anything that is totally stupid, in my world, is that 1.5 billion Chinese can't get on Facebook. There has to be a batter way of "doing the internet" - we may have invented it, it really is high time to separate a computer network from human rights. This is what you do with customers: you find out their needs, their limitations, and then you build what it is they're looking for. You do not send Hillary Clinton to lecture them on politics. Or try to hide "dissidents' from their police.
As I am sure Marissa Mayer knows well, the American and European markets are stagnant. Yes, there is an uptick at places like Google, but the cause of that is an increase in advertising, companies think advertising more will increase sales, hence the interest in new advertising technologies like SEO and Targeted Marketing. Not so, in a bad recession, but these aren't folks that can think out of the box. When Costco sees an increase in memberships, and the only item they make money on is those memberships, there's something else going on altogether.
Growth is in Asia, that's actually been the case for a long time. I vividly remember the first time I went shopping in Singapore, from my Jakarta, Indonesia posting - this was 1995, and the local airlines were flying shuttles between Jakarta and Singapore. Except, those weren't small Airbuses or Boeings, they were Jumbo jets, 747s. And they were full, every hour. It is in Singapore, see the picture to the left, where they put airconditioning in outdoor terraces... think about this, we have never had 747s as airline shuttles, we, unlike Beijing, do not have live TV in the subway, and I've never seen an airconditioned outdoor seating area in any restaurant in the United States. So anyone trying to turn a large corporation around, in the capitalist West, today, and doesn't have functional subsidiaries in India and China, hasn't really gotten the message.
All you need to do,
if you're a business person, is walk around Beijing,
and see that practically every taxicab, police car,
is a Volkswagen, and every government car is an
Audi. Then do some research on how the Germans
market and produce - it impresses the heck out of
me, it isn't like they learn Mandarin in school. The
only reason the Germans aren't more successful than
they are is because they don't speak English - like
the French, the British, the Americans and other
large countries, Germans don't grow up with the
sound of other languages, they dub their movies and
television series into their native language, it is
a shock to me every time I am in Germany, and hear
Captain Kirk speaking German. For Germany, it got
worse at unification, because East Germans spoke
even less English than West Germans did.
I know I am getting a bit off base here, but the reason why small Western countries do so well, in trade and IT, is that we're brought up speaking English. The difference seems marginal, but we learn languages in school, and then, when we get home, we get movies and television series broadcast in those languages, with subtitles. We learn as we grow up, we absorb the sound, we learn the sound we develop better reading skills.
Language is at the core - India, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, do well in outsourcing and IT because they all have English as a native language. China has not decided that's a good idea, learning English isn't encouraged, go into a Beijing computer store and you'll have a hard time finding an English speaking sales person. It is India's main advantage, despite its economic problems - at independence, they made English an official native language.
I don't really have a lesson out of all this, except we're in a recession, and the only way for your company to do well is to either export, or trade overseas, or set up subsidiaries, or do all of the above. With today's transportation, and the internet, setting up shop in Chennai is no harder than setting up shop in Renton, WA. Of course, you need to hire some people who speak the lingo, but being an immigrant nation, we have plenty of those. All I am saying, Ms. Mayer, is: don't sell that chunk of Alibaba - Yahoo will just burn through the money if you do, and outGoogling Google - I don't think so.
Well, says the Wall
Street Journal, "Social-Media Stock Frenzy
Fizzles". Sure enough, but it isn't because the
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs "can't monetize" their
products. It is because Wall Street, way back when,
decided that you could take a product consumers
liked, and give it to them without charging for it,
as if it was 1941, and adding advertising to TV was
opening up a whole new market. Never mind that there
were only three broadcast networks in the United
States then, and that Western Europe thought about
it and decided that was not a good model to finance
television, advertising is now the way we're going
to finance the internet, the subscription model
today is used only by a few hallmark publishers.
Internet, an interactive computer interconnection methodology, isn't even slightly related to television. Apart from anything else, internet is diverse and dispersed, it makes television fully obsolete, something carriers are fighting desperately. In other countries, there are time delays due to the need to translate and edit, but nowhere does a government allow a commercial company to censor a world event (NBC completely replaced parts of the opening ceremony, and didn't stream it live on one of its gazillion cable channels, which would not have interfered with the "main" broadcast). If you want to know why I don't believe in all of this noise about "internet freedom", it is what I've just described to you - yes, the Chinese and the Iranians censor the internet, but Comcast actively preventing live access to Olympic broadcasts amounts to the same thing - censoring. An NBC spokesman, when asked, admitted as much - "the broadcast needs to be put in context" - that's exactly how the Chinese and the Iranians justify their management of the internet, and of television.
"The foundation of a new internet era" the New York Times calls it. Why would there be a new internet era? What was wrong with the old one? What we did was use the existing concept of advertising funded service, then finding out that advertisers aren't paying enough to support all of the media, and invent a mirage called "targeted marketing", forgetting that computers, websites and "handheld devices" cannot read minds. It does not matter how many algorithms you embed in your Android device, there will never be any way it can tell Papa John's when I feel like having pizza. On all of my devices, Facebook tries to force me to turn on my GPS antenna, even if I am accessing Facebook using a mobile browser. If it can do this, it can send you local advertising. Facebook, and its clients, believe that this will help them sell things to you. Left and right, the evidence is that more and more consumers are displeased when social networks track their movements and activities, but this does not in any way alter their methodologies. It is amazing to see Facebook's technique - they began with two of those thumbnail ads in your news feed, then three, now they are up to seven or so, and since that didn't do what they were looking for, the ads now refresh while you are in your news feed. If that isn't desperation, I don't know what is.
Personally, as the broadcast wasn't live anyway, I Tivo'd the whole thing, began watching later, and skipped all of the commercials. What is with these people, broadcasting programs on delay, but pretending they are live, as Comcast does with the Today Show every day, here on the West Coast? I don't know what makes them think this sells more advertising - the deterioration of journalism into "How did it make you feel to become a princess?" and "What did you think when you died?" has to, at some point, begin to become known as "unreality television". I even saw Matt Lauer and his cohorts discuss Daniel Craig's mission to Buckingham Palace to fetch Her Majesty as if that happened in real time. Not to mention their hearing that Paul McCartney's voice cracked, for emotional reasons, when he saw the vast arena full of people in front of him - what they heard, in fact, was Paul McCartney's singing voice succumbing to old age.
Writing about technology, I do, of course, attempt to predict the future as much as the next writer does, I have more experience than most, and I am a patent holding developer and technology integrator. In the case of Facebook and its cohorts, it goes even beyond educated guesswork, as I am a user, a customer, and I've seen and participated in more social media than most. I had my own user group on CompuServe in the early 1980s, leased a server from ITT Dialcom (later BT Dialcom) soon after, was an early Dialogic user, and by the time I made it to NYNEX' research labs in White Plains, NY, in 1990, left AOL by the wayside. I was, by then, able to set up and run my own servers, which I decided was rather more fun than mingling with citizens, who by then were able to subscribe to the nascent internet, and effectively invade and take over our elitist little club.
At any rate, the
way I look at Facebook is the same way I looked at
AOL - where you had to log in and use "keywords" to
get to where you wanted to be. AOL, that compressed
webpages before sending them to you, to save money.
AOL, then Yahoo, and then came Microsoft, that tried
to get on the bandwagon by buying Hotmail, the first
time I can remember a technology company spent a
huge amount of money on a company that had no
revenues. All in the same vein - every single one of
these corporations don't sell a product, they took
over carrying advertising from the printed press,
and have between them fragmented the market to the
point that advertising has become vastly more
expensive than it used to be. Instead of advertising
in fifteen publications, you now have to advertise
on five hundred websites, so bad that the "share"
buttons on a website have to come up in a separate
window. When Hotmail was acquired, in 1997, it had
some 9.5 million subscribers, for the day that's
pretty much Facebook size, and that was going to be
the core of Microsoft's online presence. In various
ways, Microsoft has, since then, attempted to force
Windows users to use their Hotmail address to
register, pretty much the same way some publishers,
today, won't let you register unless you do so with
your Facebook account. Dunno, kids, I get the
feeling some of those marketing folks aren't
learning from history, because it was the consumer,
hand in hand with some governments, that stopped
Microsoft from doing what it was doing, something
that brought them some very large antitrust fines.
So, as the press would have it, is this the end of
Wall Street's love affair with "social networks"?
I've been waiting for the penny to drop - there is
no such thing as Search Engine Optimization, and no
such thing as Targeted Marketing - that is, these
are technologies that do exist, but they don't
produce any sales. The idea behind all this is that
when you go to a search engine looking for
something, it'll take you to General Motors - this
despite the fact that all car manufacturers are
using the same tools. The screen capture to the left
shows you a typical example of "the new internet" -
Forbes thinks that providing four menu areas - left,
right, top, bottom - to the point where it really is
no longer possible to see even a small portion of
the article you were wanting to read, is an
effective way of marketing and selling advertising.
I find it hard to believe "specialists" are making
$250,000 a year thinking up this kind of lunacy, if
anybody bothered to equate their efforts with actual
$ale$ they'd be on the way to the labour exchange.
Think about it this way (and if you're a CEO, pay close attention): you get up, crank up your laptop so you can watch the news, and go to the kitchen to make coffee. In the kitchen, you're met by someone you don't know, who positions themselves between you and the coffeemaker, and is going to ask you questions about some supermarket products, instead of your making coffee. Not while, instead. It is a survey. It arbitrarily collects information someone sticks in a spreadsheet, and someone else the uses algorithms or software or both to predict the future using this information. This methodology delivers data on which Vice Presidents of Marketing base recommendations that go to their CEOs, Presidents, Boards of Directors, and Government departments. If you do not want to take part in the survey, you have to push the person taking it out of the way.
"If you want to make money, sell something people need, food, asswipe", a Vice President once said to me. Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter are nice tools to communicate with, but, the same as it was with my first consumer product, voice dialing, back in the early 1990s, consumers will not pay for products that do things they can do themselves. Consumers do not buy a car because it has a touch screen.
We are, in many ways, our own worst enemy. We had a perfectly good product, the telephone, which we needed to buy service for, so we could speak with one another. That service kept quite a few people in bread and butter, for many decades - it had, if you will, an access fee. Then, someone in Joisey invented a way of doing this without a wire. That made it even more expensive - my first handheld, a Radio Shack phone made by Nokia, cost some $1,200, and the service easily another $200 - per month. Then, someone invented data transmission (part of the original European GSM specification), and next, the portable computer (another Radio Shack first, made by Kyocera in Japan). Eventually, Apple came in with a handheld computing device called the iPhone - and now, we all have handheld computers, with the phone, the only thing we really need, built in - for free.
I haven't
written about health care for a while, but the Colorado
shooting reminds me of one of my hobby
horses: socialized medicine. Health care, here in
the United States, isn't available to many
millions of people, something that Hillary
Clinton, and now Barack Obama, are trying to
provide solutions to.
Something that legislators and voters need to think of, when we look at these deranged killers, is that socialized medicine includes mental health care, and that generally available mental health care can prevent some of these folks running off the rails. In most Western countries, socialized health care includes ways for mentally ill or deranged folk to get some kind of care. It is one of the things that struck me as incongruous, when I came to live in the United States, moving here from England, and before that, The Netherlands - how can you label your country as "the richest country in the world" and not provide medical care to all your people, as we do in Europe? When I moved to New York City, with just a thousand dollars in my pocket, I was able to get incidental care at St. Vincent's hospital, but a kindly pharmacist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where I had received NHS specialist care during my years there, sent me the arthritis medication I could not have afforded in the United States, until I eventually got insurance through my new employer.
I have no way of knowing whether the Aurora shooting might have been prevented had the shooter received psych care earlier in life, I don't know that he did not, all I am saying is that mental health care would certainly "intercept" some of the deranged killers we see, certainly the Virginia Tech shooter had psychological and social issues. Anything that makes people's lives better, and helps them when they have need, we should be able to do. I don't know what's wrong with those who label these efforts "Obamacare" and vow to take medical care away from people who need it, but please think about this when you go to vote. Some of what we do must help those who can't help themselves, or we might as well forget about going to church on Sunday. Or Saturday. Or Friday, Or whenever your religion wants you to.
Rarely
discussed is the cost, both to insurers
and society, of taking care of adults who
have not had appropriate health care
growing up. Children and adolescents who
grow up in bad health will have
significant health issues later in life,
health issues that get progressively more
expensive. Even if they do get health
insurance, as they grow up, they will be
"costly to maintain", requiring the fixing
of ailments that could have been avoided.
There is a cause-and-effect issue here,
one that rarely gets addressed if you
govern your country election-to-election.
Europe has, with its many-party system
that requires extensive negotiation, been
better able to put in place measures that
have long term societal impact, and is
less prone to what we see Governor Romney
propose - rolling back a law that has cost
billions to put into effect, and adding
additional billions in public and private
expenditure undoing it. These types of
change rarely benefit anybody, we're much
better off leaving everything in place,
and working with what's there to make
things better.
Thinking about where it all begins, education, what I would really be interested in is an organization with the temerity to begin a completely new process of dissemination - from education and work to home entertainment, we have new technologies we're not really using in any significant way. Twenty-odd years ago, after I had moved into telecommunications R&D, we had this new thing, the internet, and the Mosaic browser that gave rise to the World Wide Web. We've been coasting on that ever since, and mostly are today trying to put square plugs into round holes, making phones with screens that get progressively larger (this is the most stupid thing on Earth), "tablets" that try to do what only computers can do (looks like Microsoft got that message), and computers that can't do what they're supposed to do, because they generate too much heat, which is hidden from you because of their automated output management we've been told is an advance in technology.
Laptops are either too large, or not fast enough, and I probably don't need to remind you of all of the cellphones that have been catching fire, over the years. Today, the advanced smartphones run out of battery halfway down the day, if we use them at full capacity - I have at least one smartphone that has a "power saving" setting - the fact that it is there means we're not able to manage our technologies. Putting "the internet" into huge TV sets when kids no longer watch conventional television means simply that we have the wrong people in the lab, today. Seriously.
But this isn't about overheating computers. This is about why we still have children learning in schools and classrooms, why we have workers going into offices, and why we have government employees and politicians physically attending conferences. We have, for some years now, had the technology to make all of that unnecessary, and I am beginning to believe that until we begin to push hard to make the use of that technology mandatory, we're not going to get to the next stage of the industrial revolution. If nothing else, we're not going to solve global warming until we get those commuters out of their cars.
Think about it, the majority of those, and they are the majority of car buyers and -users, don't need to actually go anywhere to work. Same for the kids, the soccer moms and the school buses - mostly completely unnecessary, at least in the Western world. Yet, we continue building roads, solving traffic problems, and preparing our cars to deal with the rigours of long commutes - you can message from many cars, using speech recognition, even though we now know that any kind of conversation can fatally distract a driver's attention. It is as if we are addicted to this way of living our lives, moving to a good school district as the kids grow up, even though we can use a combination of home schooling and online education, and make that better than any school class could ever have to be. And there are other ways of tackling education - we could combine kids in a neighbourhood class, taught by parents who rotatingly get time off, we could have traveling, visiting teachers, there are so many different ways we can use that really need trying and creative thinking.
It is out-of-the-box thinking that we are most in need of, today. Look at China, and India, we can see that large proportions of the population are moving into cities - but that is a trend that began in England during the Industrial Revolution, when factory workers needed to be living close to the factories they worked in, in a day when mass transit was not yet available. That Industrial Revolution is the only reason why we have lots of kids in those enormous amorphous schools, something we have built an educational system around. We've built an educational system around something invented in 1750, when the mechanized loom came into being, then re-invented in 1850, when the steam engine became portable. The true interconnectedness of the world didn't happen until the 1980s, when the internet began to connect individual countries and regions, and the 1990s, when Communism took a nosedive that has led to the globalization of various forms of capitalism, which, in turn, connected the rest of the world to the global internet. You could say, then, that the Third Industrial Revolution began in 1980, and as before, had an enormous impact on the world's population. Now is perhaps the time to start making the changes new technologies enable, and begin abandoning the ways we deceive ourselves. After all, when you no longer commute, you don't need that hybrid fuel efficient vehicle, as you're not using much of the gasoline you used to, right? You won't even need that new vehicle, and can just get by using a recycled one, saving energy there, too.
I think we
may have a larger problem than "jobs", when I
look at the advertising flying around - just
on my Tivo (see pic to the right) they sell
some of the sparse screen real estate so they
can put things in front of consumers. These
are folks who access their Tivo in order to
watch television - and just because
advertising was a big thing on TV in 1954, why
does anybody think that is still the case
today? We have some new and some old
advertising technologies, nobody has any idea
which leads where, and we are - in my view -
stupidly adding more advertising without there
being any reason to think any of it works.
Why do telecommunications companies, or insurance companies, think that using the same language across all vendors sells anything? All carriers advertise unlimited data plans that are limited, we've seen the carriers try to change the meaning of the word "unlimited" on several occasions, Chevrolet had the Federal Government change terminology to "distinguish" the Chevy Volt, insurance companies tell you their plans have everything "in network" so you find out it isn't after you sign up, and on top of all that we now have a presidential candidate who says that withdrawing insurance from poor people is "good for America". I am glad to be reminded they can buy their own insurance, which is why they were uninsured in the first place. Have we gone crazy?
The thing is, of course, what do we replace those useless activities with? The advertising is for companies that compete, so even if it worked wouldn't help the economy - the economy does not care whether you buy your service from Aflac or United Healthcare, and as the economy is in a downward spiral there aren't enough consumers who can afford coverage. Worse, we have now entered the realm of deceiving consumers into thinking we give them more than we actually do, thereby hurting the consumer, but actually creating a situation where they have to pay more for less, and that, in turn, has an additional detrimental effect on the economy. As advertisers and the creators of products and services now seriously believe that you can sell something to someone by putting an advert of that thing in front of the consumer instead of the information that consumer wanted, it seriously is high time we asked ourselves why we spend real money on completely crazy activities. Did you ever buy a pair of shoes because they were shown to you instead of the nine o'clock news you pushed the button for?
Here is Deepak Chopra on CBS about his 5- and 6 year old grandchildren: "They don't watch television at all any more, they get up, they go to Youtube". Advertisers must begin to pay attention - and, in my book, should be working on abandoning the traditional media altogether, tomorrow, preferably, I'll help. Free up the talent and the money to create new ways of selling things - you'll sell just as much crap with traditional advertising as without. Promise. Forget Facebook, too - that's for boomers. And boomers are the past. Even just looking at news functionality, the Pew Institute concludes Youtube "is it" as far as news is concerned.
The only way you can get a new, happy customer, is by providing more service for less money, something the Chinese know how to do, and we don't. They won't be able to do this forever, but they prepared, and paid down. We did not.The parcel in the picture left contains a webcam, mail ordered from Hong Kong, for the princely sum of US$4.99 including shipping. Somehow, the Chinese manage to sustain this "onslaught", and all you need to do is go into the store on a Saturday and look at the price of a box of cereal, and you can see we're not sustaining this - even though disposable incomes have shrunk... And I don't believe there are enough consumers that buy games that all of those magical start-ups can "make a difference". Remember that all of that good-for-you green stuff, like solar panels and wind energy, have so far only managed to make energy more expensive, and shortages continue, while there isn't any pollution control that has made a dent anywhere that I can see. Look at the statistics and it will be clear to you nobody is doing anything that has any downward impact on the carbons. Looked at simplistically, if we don't reduce our energy consumption, and make fewer babies, we're not going to bring anything down. Making the Dutch believe that it helps if you unplug your TV when you're not watching is impressive, but doesn't help, as they install solar panels on their roofs in a country where the sun only shines three days a year....
This being the Royal Jubilee year, we're fairly overrun with PBS programming about Queen Elizabeth II, and that brought to my Vaio the well known voice of Sir Trevor McDonald, a voice I had not partaken of since the 1990s. It sort of propelled me straight back to the News at Ten, thankfully one can now go to Youtube and key up bits of history, which had, for me, the unwanted but appreciated effect of the proverbial pang of incongruous homesickness.
I suppose it is partially because there's been such a long gap in my hearing Sir Trevor's voice, I left for America permanently in 1985, but felt very much at home in Britain - paradoxically (and I can't really explain that without writing a book) probably more so than in The Netherlands, where I was born, though it is only partly my country of ancestry.
On the subject of Britain, the BBC reports that publicly funded research will be available to the taxpayer, in the future, as is the case here in the United States (Google publishes most research as well as all U.S. patents for free). It is a pity the BBC gives it a negative slant - this initiative gives "armchair scientists" an opportunity to work from behind their terminal, and will bring more and better science and development into the marketplace. There are lots of very brilliant people that don't make it to Oxbridge or JPL, but have the ability to benefit society with what they do, and this will certainly help, in that respect. No idea why it took so long, but it is a good move - and as I said, we did that long ago, in the United States. Combined with global search engines, it brings science to all. Good show.
By the way, I mentioned recently that many British news websites have loads and lots of American content when they "see" an American IP address - this morning I notice that of the ten or so news stories mentioned on the CBS Morning News, fully half come from British papers. I am not the only one who gets his news from the U.K., then, apart from Randy Rupert's moronic outlets there is really some excellent press coverage going on, as opposed to copying stories others publish, which I see an awful lot of. There's something to be said for journalists whose native language is English (sorry) and who aren't solely driven by selling advertising pages. I just hope it stays this way - I see the Beeb sliding into commercial space on a regular basis, which isn't why it was invented. Keep up the good work, folks, this is one British export that works. One unfortunate side effect of America's insular qualities is that much of the country thinks that "international news" is a report about Mrs. Clinton visiting Egypt, and important news that happens in Thailand or Botswana is relegated to Youtube moments. CBS is at least trying to be different...
Bleh.
The HP Pavilion I thought I had cleverly
saved, by disabling its built-in screen
and hanging an HDMI panel off it, died.
Days of work down the tubes, and that was
a really nice little laptop,
multimedia-capable with some of the clever
stuff HP puts in its "entertainment
devices". Thankfully, I had not yet put my
Sony Vaio All-in-One on Ebay, so was able
to put that back in service, but I guess I
am out the $450 or so I had hoped to
recoup, which would have paid for the new
laptop. Now I need to decide whether or
not to have it repaired, although I
replaced it with a Lenovo that was on
sale, that is actually a brilliant laptop,
but a bit bigger than I like to carry
around with me (meaning it does not fit in
my backpack). But I can work. I
go paranoid when I do not have two working
systems, many years in the phone company,
and especially being "in charge" on 9/11,
have made it a phobia to be able to get
online and work at all times. My internet
is backed up up worldwide by T-Mobile and
a tetherable Blackberry Torch, and I
normally have a spare laptop sitting
around - so there is my current
compromise, one laptop and a Sony Vaio
All-in-One (although, sneakily, with a UPS
that will behave like a laptop, though I
have not tested how long the UPS will
last). Why worry about the Pavilion? It
has some nice extras, like a remote, it
has (with the dock I bought) optical
Dolby, it has eSata, handles HDCP and
digital HDMI, and it is actually good
looking.
Owell. Lot of time wasted, but I do know all there is to know about Microsoft Windows Media Center by now, which works like a dream using a digital cable / antenna TV USB adapter, cheapest DVR you'll ever have, if you have a Win7 PC lying around you don't really need. Of course, if you are a privacy nut and you don't like your cable or satellite provider mining your converter box or DVR for marketing information, the PC/cable adapter solution works well, too. That's why I have liked my Tivo, and why I like my "AverTV Hybrid Volar Max TV Tuner Kit for Windows", which works directly with Microsoft's Windows Media Center - I guess that means you're just providing Microsoft with data, although you can turn that off. Here in the US, cable companies aren't going to tell you whether or not you can use this device on your cable connection, I just tried, and it works (don't expect premium channels, though). I note that a similar unit is available in the UK as well, I have no way testing it with DVB-T and DVB-T2, though, the US has ATSC.
Curiously, this morning, CBS anchor Rebecca Jarvis gave a good example of how little anybody understands about what to do with all of that data, this on the subject of targeted marketing. She quoted department store Macy's as an example, which, according to her, after you had accessed its website four times in the course of a working day, would send you an email with a special offer towards the beginning of the evening, to get you to buy something online.
And that is a perfect example of the simplistic, brainless and useless way we're using the vast masses of data we now collect. To begin with, if someone accesses your website four times during a day, they have likely decided what, or if, they want to buy something, and you don't need to risk upsetting them by letting them know you're watching them. The up and coming generation knows it is being spied on, and how to send you packing. Secondly, you don't know why they accessed your site. They're likely comparing prices for their 87 year old Auntie who has been buying at Macy's since 1933 - not someone you have to market to any more. We must understand we have no clue why somebody does something, and guessing this from their behaviour leads to lots of misunderstanding, go talk to a divorce lawyer if you don't believe me. Last but not least, what corporations do not understand is that impulse buying works only if you spend billions of dollars and decades building thousands of Wal-Mart stores, and then once everybody gets into big box stores and has all of the flat screen TVs you put by the door at half price, and everybody has copied your formula, it dies. Even so, this isn't something you can conveniently do via email, because everybody and his great-grandmother is emailing everybody, and even if you manage to stand out it is only for three minutes. No, you can't predict when somebody gets hungry, even if you can see them through their webcam, something Facebook is trying to build into its business model, until the EU figures it out, and puts a stop to it. The bottom line is that collecting data without knowing what it means is very much a waste of time.
Ann Curry's
departure at the Today Show may not be
the solution Comcast is looking for. It
may well be that the Today Show's loss
of ratings is due not to Good Morning
America, but to the young people
demographic, which is turning towards
the internet, has been for a long time.
Long in the tooth and populated by
plastic people with one hairdresser, the
Today Show has morphed to where their
interviews consist mostly of "How did
that make you feel" and other
tearjerkers, and they get to interview
people because they're the largest.
Anybody who is anybody stubs a toe, you
can count on them to be on the Today
Show the next morning. If they're
legally blind, so much the better. I've
seen Savannah Guthrie, who is a D.C.
lawyer on heels, dispense tearful legal
advice on air, in the news - that isn't
television, and she is no Charlie Rose,
who has a personality. I abandoned Today
a while ago, when CBS, in hiring Charlie
Rose for their morning program, turned
that into a real news program, with lots
of stuff that interests me. An endless
parade of high end New York City chefs
telling housewives what to cook, when
they haven't seen the inside of a
Gristedes on a budget, having to bring
home dinner between work and home on
Friday afternoon, may be cute, but it
does not help anybody, in the middle of
a recession. One celebrity chef has
diabetes, another is twice the size he
used to be, and all that barely anybody
talks about, on air, especially not
Emeril's ballooning. I am not your
average American, whatever that is, but
Today is propped up by populist drivel,
which doesn't make the cut in the
internet era. And no, you can't make
television by doing bits of coverage and
ending them with "see the rest at our
website", or by having doctor Nancy
pushing iPads to help you lose weight.
An iPad costs a month's worth of
dinners, for many. It is a problem, when
you get to be mammoth size, and your
mantra is "it's OK, as long as it
doesn't lose viewers".
What with the demise of "unlimited data " plans on mobile devices, teens and tweens aren't going to watch "Today" on their iDevice anyway, reserving their wireless internet for important things, and a friend recently told me that her iPhone, and her Android phone before that, doesn't have enough battery capacity to watch TV anyway, not if she wants to use them for work, the rest of the day. My Blackberry Torch / Blackberry Playbook combo does better on that score, and together don't cost more than your latest generation iPhone, but that's not something you can sell the American public, or so the manufacturers seem to think.
CBS News had an item on aircraft accidents, and how those are, these days, always due to human (pilot) error - and by now, we have the official verdict from the French authorities. CBS cites, amongst others, the Airbus crash between Brazil and France, and the Queens American Airlines crash. Human error? I don't think so. In the case of the American Airlines flight, the pilot overdid it on the rudder control, and snapped off some of his tail controls. In the Air France crash, a pilot did not compensate properly when the instruments provided faulty readings. In both cases, we have had the technology for many years to deal with these issues - a pilot should not be able to make excessive use of the rudder to the point where something breaks, while the Airbus reported an incorrect airspeed, and the computer disengaged the autopilot. Yes, in both cases the pilots could have saved the flight, but that does not mean the crashes can be blamed on them. What we do is make larger airplanes, heap additional responsibility on air crew, have increasing amounts of air traffic, and create increasingly complicated computer systems that pilots have to manage on top of their other responsibilities. You can't then expect the human computer to take the right decision in a situation it has not been in before. "Adding training" is not going to create better pilots, and the comment I heard, that pilots still need to maintain their flying skills - I don't know, maybe it is time for pilot specialization, with a fly pilot and a computer pilot on the flight deck, as well as an all rounder. Something. But no, I do not accept that this is magically now all "human error". In both these examples, the cause is a system that either failed, or worse, did not exist. Elevating the pilot to a computer repairman is ridiculous, especially with neither the time nor the phone to call a helpdesk. There is a simple rule I apply - beyond a certain amount of automation, you introduce more variables than you take away, and need to do more real world (as opposed to lab) testing, and do limited introduction. Perhaps it is time to re-introduce the flight mechanic.
Captain Sullenburger, the Hudson
River miracle pilot, demonstrated to CBS
news on air how Airbus and Boeing flight
decks differ, with Airbus having a much more
"fly by wire" implementation, and how
traditional controls might have helped the
French pilots realize the co-pilot was
flying "stick back" for several minutes.
Sully certainly has a point, but that is
only in terms of talking about how this
accident might have been avoided. The issue,
or maybe "my issue", is that we have
sufficient intelligence in aircraft to make
it technically impossible to stall an
aircraft. It is the step beyond today's
autopilot, perhaps, but it is a logical step
- still, today, pilots control aircraft,
this because we don't trust our automation
enough to let it take over. I understand
that well - I cringe every time I reboot a
computer with un-duplicated files, as I know
what can go wrong with the disk, and that,
most of the time, disks fail during startup.
Interestingly,
the more traditional design isn't really
Boeing design - it is pilot design.
American airline companies, when this
level of automation became available, were
pressured by American pilots' unions not
to go to what was then called the "dark,
quiet" cockpit. It was the one compromise
they made so they could get the union to
drop flight engineer (three man cockpit)
requirements for transatlantic flights
using twin engined aircraft, saving fuel
and labour cost (two crews had to be on
those aircraft anyway). Boeing, being an
American manufacturer, had little option
but to listen to American pilots, Airbus,
being a new technology European enterprise
not overloaded with former military
"stick" pilots, managed to talk European
and some Asian airlines into accepting the
Brave New World.
Unions traditionally
are wary of automation - all that does is
shift employment, not reduce it, but we
often pay lip service to the labour
requirement. In this case, there is a new
generation of pilots, who don't come out
of traditional military aircraft, and if,
in this particular case, one pilot had an
instinctive response to the autopilot
warning, that is not a bad thing. The bad
thing was that the aircraft didn't
realize what was going on. All that means
is that we are in a transitional phase. I
recall a KLM captain showing me how the
backup and primary destination of his
Flight Management System were in different
countries, and the FMS refused to set a
backup in the same country - so, he
used the same destination for primary and
backup. These were early Airbus days, but
it was a good demonstration of how stupid
the systems are - an FMS doesn't know
about borders, and will happily land in
East Germany, if left to its own devices.
By contrast, a British Airways pilot,
demonstrating the FMS of a Boeing aircraft
to me over London in an approach to
Heathrow Airport (I was a member of the
British press by then, loved that day -
the KLM approach was interesting as well,
especially since the captain shouldn't
have let me be on the flight deck at all
during landing), showed me how the Boeing
FMS let him do what he wanted - though I
must add that Britain is an island, quite
a bit larger than The Netherlands, and an
FMS "knows" not to land in the water.
All this may go away, over time, as there is a new generation of military pilots on the way who know nothing but fly-by-wire - drone pilots. Flying drones thousands of miles away from their actual location will force aircraft manufacturers to solve urgent problems in software, as in some situations the satellite lag time does not allow pilot response in real time - that French Airbus might as well have been flown remotely from Paris for all the good three pilots on the flight deck did. My boss at NYNEX' research lab used to call it "reasonable time". But I repeat, we have to get to where some of these conditions have to be trusted to automation pilots cannot override. Again, I don't think this situation can be blamed on pilots, or on their training. It is having partial automation, and three "operators", on the flight deck that is the problem. Speed sensors have been freezing for a hundred years, that should not have made any difference. Especially, if what Boeing thinks will come true: 34,000 new airliners in the next twenty years, we're going to run out of third world countries to sell the old ones to....
Concorde was the first passenger airliner to have fly-by-wire controls. The picture shows an Air France Concorde at Orly Airport in 1978, having diverted from Charles de Gaulle due to a thunderstorm - it did not carry enough fuel to be able to circle, and had to go to a backup airport straight away (the other backup was London's Heathrow, of course ;). I had just returned from New York on that aircraft on one of Air France's promotional flights, champers and caviar from seven in the morning. We ended up having to be bused back to Charles de Gaulle airport - but after a week in the Waldorf Astoria, and four hours having a positively Gallic dinner, we were way too pissed to mind the ride.
Well, Jeez.
The
Wall Street Journal has it the
reopening of the American supply route across
the Pakistan - Afghanistan border "Offers
Pakistan, U.S. a New Path". No such thing, I
am afraid. A week or so before Secretary
Clinton told the Pakistanis the United States
government is really sorry about their loss of
military life, the Pentagon sent an
appropriation request to the Congress, if
memory serves me, stating a need for some $8.1
billion, to defray the increased cost of
transportation. Much of that would have gone
to the folks that transport Armed Forces
supplies into Afghanistan, a path that runs
from, I think, Estonia through Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, and, of course, Russia, with its
rivers of military rolling stock, and ready
made railways into Afghanistan. I think $8.1
billion would have secured that route forever,
and the Pakistanis understood we had given up
on them.
When I get
or buy new equipment I will be using for a
longer period of time, I try to start a
review I then post on Amazon.com, and my new
Lenovo, bought because the display on my HP
Pavilion laptop is failing (it has since
passed away completely...) , should be no
exception. But checking where to post the
review, it soon became clear the particular
model I purchased at Best Buy wasn't in
Amazon's lineup. I eventually found a
comparable model, but it is now clearly
harder for consumers to comparison shop, as
what I think happens is that manufacturers
create model designations for specific
resellers, and so you are, umm,
"discouraged" from comparing a particular
model, as it exists elsewhere only under a
different designation, and if you're not an
expert you're not going to figure that out.
This Lenovo, the B570 1068-ASU, is
quite fast, has some really nice features,
but I really don't know under which model to
post it, so if you're looking for comparable
equipment I can only hope you can find this
review
Lenovo is an interesting
company - once known as IBM's PC
division, IBM being the company that
invented the personal computer
architecture that is ubiquitous today
(yes, including that of the Apple PCs),
Lenovo has taken IBM's technology based
concepts, and grown the division even
larger than it was. profitable and with
a turnover of some $22 billion. While HP
is larger, it isn't doing well, of late.
What, to me, is interesting about Lenovo
is how the Chinese took some really
clever American technology developments,
many emanating from IBM's T.J. Watson
research labs in New York State, and
redesigned the manufacturing and
marketing engines around them. But the
good bits - for instance the hard disk
encryption - were retained, as Lenovo
understands that finding new customers
does not mean dumping the existing
aficionados. We buy computers for their
technology, not for their toy aspects.
Staple, for instance, need to be HDMI
and eSata ports - Lenovo offers them
both, even on cheap units, they've
become part of the laptop architecture,
rather than "add ons".
There
isn't much point in telling you about
this laptop in and of itself, otherwise,
I am sure you've read a gazillion
descriptions of laptops already. I
bought this particular laptop because it
was cheap. The sale price was $360,
after a Best Buy discount for
discontinuation, all I needed to do was
add a 4GB RAM module - that in itself
was a nice surprise, as every laptop I
had bought, until now, needed its two 2
GB DIMMs replacing - and has a fast
processor, Intel's i3-2330M dual core
processor. This distinguishes itself by
its Sandy Bridge architecture, which
lets it handle four computing threads at
once. It depends on your operating
system and software whether or not that
can be used, to be sure. I was not
disappointed, after I did my usual
tuning of Windows 64, this architecture
flies, and is so much more energy
efficient than previous processors that
this laptop, unusually, doesn't make
intermittent blow dryer sounds keeping
its innards cool. I am not helping my
computers by maxing out their memory, a
64 bit motherboard can generally handle
8 Gb of RAM, and using fast peripherals,
like a 2 terabyte 7200 RPM eSATA drive,
and its HDMI display port.
Thinking about memory and aging, there
was a an interesting article at the U.S.
National Institutes of
Health referenced the other day,
although I should add I don't support
researchers jumping to conclusions about
what causes which symptom, without some
kind of evidence, which is thin in that
report.
I have more than a passing interest in
the matter as my own brain ages, and I
find my analytical and retention methods
change - all by themselves. It occurs to
me that advancing technology may not be
any help in maintaining the brain's
agility. I thought the reverse, and then
I realized I was neither taking a note,
nor bookmarking a page, for the above
reference, as I have 24/7 access
to search engines, on, count 'em, five
devices, at least two of which I carry,
one of which is glued to my hip, or in a
pocket of my dressing gown. I am
privileged, I suppose, in having worked
with computers and in the computer
industry since 1968, and having spent a
significant portion of my career in
telecommunications research. Something I
wasn't quite prepared for, though, is
that so many people in my age group are
only semi-literate in the computing
world, and have lost a portion of the
reference media they used to use.
So while the computer lets us find information, especially older folk have not had training as to how to use search engines, how to use databases, and the PC does not provide a convenient and transparent way to store and organize information - this isn't a criticism of Microsoft, none of us anticipated how this "Windows thing" would become ubiquitous. Having programmed myself, having managed the very large database engines the phone company uses - my first research position involved directory assistance, which uses an enormous online database - and having had dozens of programmers for database development in my reporting structure, I know a lot about how databases work. We had no tools to manage very large amounts of data - we didn't even have very large amounts of data until countries and companies began merging. But, disturbingly, I find myself make less and less of an effort to remember things, because I have the tools to find information instantaneously - why remember information I have at my fingertips? I inadvertently tested my memory skills over the past few weeks, as I had to set up two work computers in a short period of time, one new, and one I have been using, that needed to be "revamped" back to its original state. At that time, I was relieved to notice that my recollection of Windows internals and management consoles hadn't in any way diminished, not a skill I use on a daily basis any more.
So what we're looking at is a double
whammy: the amount of information
unleashed on the unsuspecting public has
increased greatly, while the ways to
find information have been reduced, and
now require a skill set that three or
four generations have not been trained
in. I can, at least, not recall a single
employer I've worked for, excepting my
first, IBM, that provided general
"information management" training. I was
aghast when getting to Indonesia on a
network build, back in 1994, when I
found the secretaries in Jakarta, barely
out of the stone age, had much better
software and computer training than the
secretaries back in New York. Bit of a
shock, that. If you want to know part of
the reasons why Asians are doing so
well, BTW, it is right there. This stuff
was all new to them and they had to
master it to compete - we've grown
complacent, I was writing on, and
programming, my first laptop computer in
1984, and that machine had internet
access - although, most of you wouldn't
recognize a PDP-11 on Dialcom as
internet, but those boxes were
compartmentalized, programmable by the
user, and talking to all the other
Dialcom boxes in the world. In 1984.
But I digress. I've been reading up on
memory and brain aging and brain
function for a while, and I keep running
into contentions (because they're not
based on proven research) that do not
make sense. First and foremost, I keep
reading that "we are nowhere near our
brain's capacity" - this in terms of
storage and computation capability. And
then, out come the examples, of savants
that calculate the value of pi to the
nth degree, other savants can store
impossible amounts of visual data, etc.
But that isn't what it is about. I am
not at all convinced that the human
brain has that much capacity, and I am
not aware that anyone has even managed
to calculate its capability.
Why would evolution over-engineer an organ? All of our other organs are engineered to capacity - a good example is the heart, my ballerina ex-wife had a heart five times the size of mine, due to the six-or-seven times a week training regime dancers and professional athletes go through. So much so that her heart had moved to the middle of her chest, for lack of space where it began. Why do you think athletes need to train so much? Surely not because their organisms are engineered for over-capacity.... And one of my cousins is so much overweight that he has had to have both of his knees reconstructed, not an unusual occurrence in overweight people, but it does mean his knees were not designed to carry that much weight. So to me that empirically proves that the human body is "designed to capacity", and from simple logic that means the brain would be, as well. And that, in turn, in an era where we are bombarded with information due to new technologies, vastly more (a factor of a thousand or so) than ever before, means we may be overloading our brain's capacities. Which makes perfectly good sense. So it would make good sense to research how much mental deterioration may be related to simple capacity failure - assume we have reached capacity, now start researching what the consequences might be. And by "capacity" I don't necessarily mean "full", it may be some folks do not have the ability to organize and store their information, due to the speed with which it arrives, inherent in increased volume, and that that has a deteriorative effect on the brain. Kind of like "memory fragmentation" or "disk fragmentation" in a computer. After all, Windows is now set up to automatically defragment disks, after decades of millions of users losing their computers because they never maintained (didn't know they had to) their hard drives, which eventually ran out of table space. From an engineering perspective, it makes perfectly good sense the same thing happens to the brain, which, in my book, can't have been designed to hold and process unlimited data. I do not expect the Good Lord ever conceived one of Her Creations would start collecting, storing and processing vastly more data than they would ever need or could use.
The shot to the right
shows the scene behind a local Texaco,
where tow truck drivers hang out while
they are on call. There are so many cars
and trucks idling all over Washington
State, I was especially amazed to see car
lines at drive through espresso bars, that
it looks to me the "green" effort is a bit
half hearted. It isn't like this is
Alaska, where you'd freeze if you got out
of your car, much of the year.
Noticing a "Royal
Enfield" motorcycle at a local dealership,
see the picture to the right, I checked
the internet, as I thought that British
company had long since passed, but as it
turns out their erstwhile Indian
(Madras, now Chennai) subsidiary is now doing the Enfield thing
on its own. Rather handsome, don't you
think? It so reminded me of the British
WWII Army bikes, I suppose I just dated
myself there..
What impresses me most
about the Chinese space program is that
they only flew the first manned mission in
2003 - and here we are, nine years later,
and they're docking with their
own first space station component. By
comparison, the United States took some
twelve years from first flight to Spacelab
docking. The Chinese did, of course, have
the ability to use some Soyuz technology
bought from the Russians - and the good
news is that their docking mechanism comes
from the Russians, too, so they would be
able to dock with the Russian module on
the ISS, which is how we get crews in and
out of the ISS, these days. From what we
can see - the Chinese aren't exactly
secretive any more about their space stuff
- this program has a string of hits
without failures, which is pretty amazing.
We're kind of used to American and Russian
space developers trying something new out,
and it failing the first time around, and
what we say is "that is how you learn",
nothing wrong with that. But I would love
to know what it is the Chinese are doing
differently to have this string of
successes, if it is reasonable to assume
they're not "just lucky".
Umm,
Governor Romney, I keep hearing you
all over TV with that buzzphrase:
"Talk is cheap". You appear to not
quite have caught on to the
implication of that: yours is, too.
You have never had to handle anything
like a recession, or anything like an
economy the size of the world. Yes,
Massachusetts was nice, I am sure, but
there are cities in the world with a
larger economy, and it is a state
without manufacturing. Get real, will
you? If we want to size your mouth,
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has
a GDP that is about 50% of the GDP
of... Greater Los Angeles.
So I am back
to double backups, now, of course,
swapping drives every other day. Let
that be a lesson to ya, even the
Master fucks up.
To your
right, an HP laptop displaying on
an HD flat screen - I wonder how
many consumers actually know you
can take an average laptop, and
have it display on a cheap HD flat
panel display. As long as it has
an HDMI port, any laptop will do
it. Good idea to have a 64bit
Windows, and some extra memory,
though - 8 Gb will help. And to
your left, below, an amazing red
rainbow I caught at dusk in
Snohomish County, the other day.
Never seen that before, it was
only there for 20 seconds or so.
laptop
connected to an HDMI flat panel it
looks there's nothing wrong with
it, except for a connection
somewhere in the display hinge. I
am not going to screw with that,
when I have money I can try and
have it repaired, but in the
interim I'll get another display
(50 inches
doesn't fit on my desk) and use it
as a desktop. It's got everything
you could want, plenty of RAM,
digital Dolby, you name it, and
once I have that set up I will
sell the Vaio. That is in fine
shape, all upgraded, but I think
the Pavilion with an HDMI display
will let me do Blu-Ray, and the
Vaio does not, although it does
have an optical Dolby out. Finding
the Pavilion on Amazon to post the
link showed me they even sell the
laptop screen, but I really don't
have that type of expertise, and I
think it may be the connector,
rather than the screen, so I guess
I'll eventually get it fixed, when
I am in need of another laptop.
I
am quite amazed to see that
President Obama has waded into the
European monetary problems.
I am not sure the Treasury folks
this side of the pond understand
what is going on in Europe. I
can't even say I've seen many
commentators the other
side of the pond making a lot of
sense, either. I wonder whether
the problems occurring in the
"problem" countries aren't related
to their post war development. Is
it coincidence that the economies
facing issues are all in former
dictatorships? Greece, Italy,
Spain, all came out of World War
II under the control of a
dictator, and took many decades to
enter the democratic fold. Perhaps
(I am not an expert on economy,
but I was there to see it all
happen) the economic changeover
after the dictators died or
relinquished power was never
handled properly, after all, the
rest of Western Europe came out of
WWII as democracies, and began
rebuilding capitalism based
economies virtually from
liberation day. We need to
understand how "they" got to this
place, and I am not convinced that
we do.
The
return of SpaceX' Dragon
capsule to Earth, and
the return of Aung San Suu Kyi
to Myanmar, certainly fit in
the "good news" category. Elon
Musk has completed an
incredible feat, one that
indicates we've got to the
point we can do orbital
vehicles at lower cost and
sufficient durability. I
expect their next step would
be an actual automated
docking, assuming this whole
Canadarm process was just to
make sure the SpaceX vehicle
didn't bump a dent in our ISS.
Sort
of got drawn into watching the Jubilee
over in Britain, partly, of
course, because I lived there
for many years.. Love London -
funny, last time I went to
London it was to visit friends
who are now back here in the
Seattle area, and for me it
was a bit of a homecoming.
Much like New York, London is
so large it really doesn't
change all that much, over
time, even if you have to
figure out the Oyster card,
and which roaming carrier to
use. I guess for those less in
the picture it is incongruous
- London is massive, a single
city that needs three
airports, all that because it
is so much out of proportion
with the size of Britain
itself. The industrial
revolution began here, and
that created the sprawl from
which it never really
recovered, and I guess it
keeps on growing - the town of
Richmond, Surrey, where I used
to live, now is just another
London postal district, my old
house on the Mortlake Road I
can't even find on Google, and
the heavily Jewish and
somewhat run down district of
Stoke Newington is completely
gentrified.The time machine from June, 2012, with linkbacks to August, 2008, is archived here
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