Recycling information: the innovation behind the mashups

Business Pundit is currently featuring an article that frustrates and annoys me yet leaves me in semi-agreement, which only serves to frustrate and annoy me all over again ("The dangers of re-use: how mashups can stifle innovation").  The premise of the item appears to be that unless you know a technology to its deepest level, you are doing little more than playing make-believe, pretending you are doing something new when instead you are drowning the world in your own mediocrity.  The argument has a distinct Keensian elitist tone, inferring that unless you understand your tools you have no right to be using them.

I felt somewhat mislead about the article in general.  It's not until the very end that I discovered (hence my annoyance) that the core assertion was not that mashups were mediocre and boring (they can be) but instead was that mashups need to be kept in perspective (which I agree with) and urges the reader not to confuse "imitation with innovation" (which I didn't think I was, but there you go).

Like the author, a lot of mashups leave me cold.  After all, I don't really care if I can geo-tag a photo on Flickr and locate it in Google Earth so I can see exactly where on this planet an out-of-focus photo of a bee was taken.  However, that is not the point.  It is not the mashup that is the innovation, rather what makes the mashup possible.  RSS feeds, open APIs, enabling services like Pipes - the ability to mine and manipulate vast quantities of previously unavailable data has enormous potential.

I see this as a classic forest/trees, baby/bath water confusion.  Just because the results don't inspire you (and are used indiscriminately by the great unwashed) doesn't automatically diminish the value and importance and potential of the underlying framework.

Now if you will excuse me, I think I will go off and see if I can combine my low quality cameraphone photos of my son with Google Maps.  Spite is such a wonderful motivational technique after all.

Emails a danger in the workplace. Apparently.

A senior representative of leading IT consultancy BearingPoint, Robert Hilliard, has declared that email is a "terrible way to do the majority of business". BearingPoint recommend businesses adopt "collaboration technologies". The core of the argument appears to be that person-to-person communication does not have enough visibility, while a collaborative process is more open and transparent.

I'm not convinced.

The issue of visibility and transparency appears to be driven by legal coverage issues and not underlying issues with the technology itself. Collaboration shifts the focus on to "group communication", maximising the number of people who can see the information development process and spreading the points of blame in turn reducing individual levels of risk. It's not improving communication, it's improving arse coverage.

Mr Hilliard does have a good point when he says:

A person-to-person piece of communication is not visible to anybody else. It is a legal document. You would never consider writing a letter between two organisations without having an appropriately authorised person reviewing it but you don't hesitate to have two junior members of two companies write an informal email to each other that would expose both organisations.

The problem is not one of the tools but of the processes of the operating environment. The solution isn't "collaboration tools" (which he doesn't define but I'm assuming it's things like MediaWiki, Google Docs and Basecamp as examples) which add extra layers of complexity to what should be a simple process of communication. The solution is greater education and simple, clearly defined guidelines on appropriate levels of interaction at an officer-to-officer level.

After all, it's not as if BearingPoint would have a vested interest in promoting introducing collaborative models in favour of existing email infrastructure, now is it?

Just another IT consultancy selflessly promoting more technology as the answer.

envelope originally uploaded to Flickr by timothymorgan. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution 2.0 licence.

Governments behave questionably on Wikipedia. Media pretends to be shocked.

Wikiscanner has been fun, hasn't it? For those who have come in late, Wikiscanner traces the IP addresses of edits to Wikipedia back to home organisations. It's a simple idea really, and it has been marvelous in its execution. All manner of dodgy edits from corporations have floated to the surface (see this collection from Wired for a start) and perhaps least surprisingly, governments have been in the thick of making changes, too.

Australia isn't coming out of this cleanly with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Defence copping some unwanted attention due to the editing activities of its staff. While the SMH article does indicate that most edits were legitimate ones, that still means that some weren't including (according to this Techcrunch article) some hot political issues locally like the Children Overboard affair and mandatory detention.

The biggest surprise about this story? That anyone is surprised at all. Governments do some apparently shifty things some times. More often, individuals with a particular issue to grind will do even shiftier things. Individuals work in Government departments that may or may not do shifty things. Is this news? Yes. Is this a scandal? Not really. Anyone using Wikipedia as a definitive resource will get what's coming to them anyway.

Move along people, there's very little to see here. Some people got caught out while other legitimate Wikipedia users will suffer as access to the resource is restricted. I think the big lesson out of all of this is that anonymity online is something of a myth unless you go to great efforts that are probably disproportionate to what you are trying to achieve anyway.

I think there's something in that for all of us.

Twitter hits the mainstream...

...just as I'm about to wave goodbye to it.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a three page article on Twitter, the latest darling of the hyped-up 2.0 set.

This amuses me as, once again, I'm stepping off a bandwagon just as the mainstream media picks up on it. I was curious about Twitter for a number of reasons, including because it was new, it revelled in its simplicity but also because it was the latest brainwave of Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger, before it was assimilated by Google.

Ultimately, I just didn't really get Twitter. Maybe it was because I didn't have any actual friends, real or virtual, who used the service. In the end it became almost like a micro-rss reader as I slowly stopped updating my own account but kept reading a handful of others. It hasn't helped that Australian users were denied SMS access while Twitter changed the UK number it recommended we use, while at the same time it seemed like the Twitter servers were down every other day. Scaling up can be a hassle sometimes, I guess.

So now I'm on that other great micro-blogging hype machine, Jaiku. Jaiku is similar, but has more features such as comments and "channels" (kind of like an old-school irc channel with a shiny 2.0 interface) and, to me, a stronger feeling of community.

*shrug*

I might just as likely drop Jaiku as quickly as I've let Twitter slide. Half of the fun is trying out new things so it won't be time wasted, even if it wasn't time spent being productive.

Are you part of the Shadow IT?

An evening on the computer
Photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Unhindered by Talent Used under a Creative Commons licence.

I stumbled upon a fascinating article in CIO magazine, regarding the battle between the users and IT in the workplace. I found it relevant both from the perspective of a user in a locked down Standard Operating Environment (SOE) and from the perspective of a sys admin-in-training.

The Shadow IT

The "Shadow IT" are the users who know too much, or just enough to cause problems. They want to use their corporate desktops as they would use their home computers, installing non-approved software. When they want to work on something at home, they'll email it to their personal address rather than try and jump through the hoops required for remote access. If they want someone to collaborate on a document, they'll put it up on Google Docs rather than wait for corporate IT to investigate and maybe one day implement a Sharepoint-style system. They want to use IM and Skype.

Corporate concerns

Of course, the Shadow IT causes its own problems. By installing non-approved software, they could be exposing the corporate network to security breaches. I'm not an expert on firewalls (yet - I hope to be one day) but it seems intuitive to me that they could be opening up holes. Who knows what little nasties are buried in the latest and greatest downloadable piece of freeware? From a compliance perspective, who knows exactly where documents are beings sent, hosted or stored once they leave the corporate network? Who else can access them?

I can understand the attraction in keeping a network locked down. If the network and the SOE are tightly controlled, it makes it much easier to keep it secure. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that if users are busy forming a Shadow IT, scheming to work around the barriers thrown up by IT, there may be shortcomings in the work environment that are hurting efficiency and collaboration. One problem may well be that people have a tendency to treat their work desktop as if they own it, rather than as if it was a corporate resource. When you consider that up to 25% of all computers might be zombies (and this is probably a conservative estimate), letting users install software on their desktops unsupervised is probably not a good thing.

Moving forward

One of the suggestions of the article (and something repeated in the comments attached to the US edition) is that the Shadow IT needs to be brought back in to the fold (or "insourced" as the kids are saying these days). If you find they're using IM all over the place, maybe there's a need for the real-time communication and perhaps a secure solution can be found (although what's wrong with the phone, people?). Can remote access be made more user-friendly and readily accessible? Can Sharepoint be set up, or perhaps IT could roll their own LAMP stack and put it up on the intranet. Most problems do have solutions if you're prepared to look for them. Having said this, I recognise that new features and software also requires tech support. If the IT department doesn't have the resources to provide this support, they're going to do everything they can to lock things down and keep it simple.

Dancing in my own shadow

I'll admit that I'm a bit of a Shadow IT guy. My workspace is fairly limited due to a Government requirement that our network has a defined level of security to maintain its pre-determined national security classification. The basics in the SOE are there, but they are not always the tools I choose to use. For example, I like to listen to music as I work. While Media Player 10 is available, most of my music has been converted to ogg vorbis (or increasingly, m4a) which are not formats that Media Player support. Since I can't install software on my desktop (and I'm okay with that - there's a good reason for it), I burn my music to a DVD along with a copy of a music player that stores itself entirely in the memory and requires no installation to the hard disk at all (I originally was using VLC Portable but it doesn't support gapless playback so I now use XMPlay instead). I keep my GTD mojo flowing using GTDTiddlyWiki with Firefox Portable on my USB thumb drive. In my previous job I used the free version of Basecamp to keep track of my major projects. I like flexibility, but I'm also aware of just how far I can push it.

My shadowiness formed because I have found that corporate IT departments tend to be very inflexible and unreceptive. As an example, I used to use Freemind, a small and free Java-based app, extensively for mind mapping and brain storming. However, when the workplace refreshed the SOE, only a Java runtime was provided instead of a full installation of Java, which meant that Freemind would no longer work. My options were:

1. request an installation of the full Java environment so that I could continue to use this "non-critical" app (unless you are totally incapable of doing your job without it, it's non-critical);


2. request an installation of the mind mapping software that work had spare licences for, if they had any spare licences and if my manager was prepared to approve the several hundred dollars that the licence would cost my unit; or


3. stop using mind mapping software and reduce my effectiveness and functionality.

It's probably no surprise that I went with option 3 because I knew from past experience that "non-critical" apps are dismissed out of hand without consideration and that no one was going to approve several hundreds of dollars of expenditure, especially when I didn't need or even want that level of functionality (I just wanted my simple brain storming tool).

C’mon Corporate, work with me here…

What I would like to see are IT areas prepared to receive requests and at least do a basic analysis on whether or not the request will impact on security, the effectiveness of the network (ie isn't going to choke bandwidth and reduce other people's ability to use the network), cost money or require extensive support. If something passes that test, approve it. Don't just dismiss it out of hand.

Working together, corporate and shadow IT could really be an effective team. The trick is to have the processes in place that allow that conversation to happen in the first place. If I ever become a CIO, that's exactly the kind of environment I want to create.

Fairfax launches online newspaper in Brisbane

Out with the old, in with the new?

Australian media company Fairfax has decided to go head to head in Brisbane with the News Ltd owned The Courier Mail, which until a couple of days ago was the only game in town.

The new news outlet The Brisbane Times is going to be an entirely online newspaper. The Brisbane Times will be staffed by locally-based journalists and it looks like it will source national and international news from its sister Fairfax publications The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.

Breaking the cycle?

I remember when I grew up in Brisbane a second newspaper would start up from time to time but would be unable to maintain a readership big enough to continue as a sustainable business. The last such paper was the Daily Sun, which shut down in the early 90s. The Australian, News Ltd's national paper, has been available for a long time, along with a selection of Sydney and Melbourne papers. However, no paper has been able to really break the stranglehold of The Courier Mail. I find it intriguing that a city with a population nearing 2 million and has continued to record steady levels of growth appears to only have room for one newspaper.

Brave new world or the same tired old one?

The unanswered question in my mind is what do Fairfax hope to achieve? While online news services seem to grow in popularity, the necessity of a computer does make it somewhat inconvenient to read the news over breakfast, or on the train or in the, ahem, smallest room. The website looks very similar to the SMH and The Age with a smattering of local news (which no doubt will grow over time). However, without a physical daily, I can't see what the business model is. Advertising? The journalists have to be paid somehow and I wonder how long Fairfax would be prepared to absorb costs before expecting the site to pay its own way.

On the other hand, maybe this is just the beginning of the metamorphosis of "new media" becoming plain old media. Middle-of-the-road goes 2.0. I guess it comes down to how serious Fairfax are in wresting Brisbane eyeballs away from The Courier Mail.

I predict (quite foolishly, no doubt) that the news content will begin to look more and more like any other Fairfax publication and the only thing that will end being of any interest to the punters will the comments section of the Opinion "blogs". How so very 2.0 that is.

Edited 14/3/07 16:56 : fixed heading sizes. Looks much better now.

Gadgets suck. Apparently.

Former editor of well known gadget-crazy Gizmodo has launched a widely publicised spray at gadget makers and the early adopter gadget freaks who can't stop buying them.

Some of my favourite quotes from the rant include:

These guys want me to write a weekly column, but I hate consumer electronics, I hate marketing, and I hate you people, because you're all so dumb.

and

You may think you're making up the "bleeding edge" of "gadget pimpatude" but you're really just a loose confederation of marks the consumer electronics industry uses as free market research and easy money. "Give me the latest version," you coo, hiking up your skirt another inch over your exposed wallet. "Point Oh One upgrades make me so hot."

and

Get it together: every single one of these consumer electronics companies should be approached as the enemy. They work for us. Hold their feet to the fire when they say their product is going to change even a small part of our lives. Circle back again in six months when they're shilling the incremental upgrade and ask them why the last version didn't cut the mustard.

The real kicker for me is that not only do "slowly slowly" tech lovers like the readers of the (very excellent) Signals vs Noise blog from the guys of 37 Signals generally agree with the rant (do a quick scan of the comments here), but there were many comments on the Gizmodo site as well.

I will be the first to admit that since I don't read Gizmodo I'm probably missing some context to the rant (reading the comments makes that clear to me) and Brian Lam of Gizmodo did say quite explicitly that the editorial was posted to "stir things up" but that doesn't mean that the rant still isn't valid.

The readers of SvN raised an interesting point in the comments: does this early adopter sheeple (my words, not theirs) attitude for gadgets extend to inhabitants of the bleeding edge of software? Does regularly using beta versions and jumping on a 1.0 release leave you open to the same sort of attack? Possibly. You could certainly raise a convincing argument along those lines. However, one of the differences there is that beta software is often released free or with an "early adopter" discount. 1.0 releases, on the other hand, seem to be released at an earlier stage in the development cycle than they used to be. It's almost become acceptable that a 1.0 will still have bugs and the inevitable bug-fix or service pack patch will be along soon enough. It's a situation I find distasteful as I don't think that paying customers should be used as some form of free beta-tester, but it looks like it is part of a growing trend. I don't think it's "agile development" either where you release a small product and incrementally update regularly with new features. That's a different thing altogether (and is one I like the sound of, although it may be quite different in practice. What would I know? I'm just a geek in training.)

I'm regularly grateful that my personal circumstance leave me in a situation where I can't be an early adopter, no matter how badly I want to be one (so badly that it hurts - trust me on this one). I only own two real gadgets - my first gen black iPod Nano (it is first gen for a Nano but I felt that 4 successful years of iPoddery meant that I could trust it to not suck) and my Motorola RAZR V3x mobile phone, which had been out in various forms for a while before I bought it. I also did a bit of research into it so, while I knew it would have some shortcomings I was prepared for them (battery life sucks, but it is the same for most 3G phones). I am on the bleeding edge of software a bit in the sense that while my new laptop is simply a low-end Dell, it is running Vista. When you consider that I only just upgraded my desktop to XP from Windows 2000, this is quite a big step for me.

Being a gadget watcher does have some benefits, my favourite being that I can jump on a bandwagon early during that small window where something has been around for a while so the worst kinks have been ironed out but ownership is still rare enough that I can enjoy the coolness of it, if for only a little while.

I'll take any coolness I can get.

On Apple and DRM

Steve Jobs, in his recent "low key" posting on the Apple site "Thoughts on music", set the cat amongst the pigeons. After hinting that DRM doesn't work because "there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music", he outlined three alternatives for the future:

1. status quo (everyone develops their own vertically integrated solution like the iTunes Store or the Zune Marketplace);
2. Apple could license FairPlay to other manufacturers so that songs bought through iTunes could be played on other players; or
3. abolish DRM and sell all music DRM-free and encoded in open and licensable formats.

The above is not exactly earth shattering. In my opinion, they are stating the obvious. However, Jobs then goes on to say that Apple would "embrace in a heartbeat" the DRM-free option if only the Big 4 record labels would let them (that's SongBMG, Universal, EMI and Warner). In other words, Jobs is saying "Don't blame me, blame them. We would gladly give you all what you want if they would just let us".

An important question to ask however is, why now? As has been reported on Ars Technica amongst many other places, Canada's Nettwerk Records and one of their major artists, Barenaked Ladies have been trying to convince Apple to let them sell their products through the iTunes Store as a DRM-free product, only to be told no. Of course, there are some side issues to this, including offering consumers a consistent experience (how many confused customers would complain that they could share some songs and not others, and why is the store broken?) but the fact remains that the opportunity has been there. Similarly, I'm sure many indie artists have tried to sell their songs DRM-free with the same result.

As these stories from ZDNet and CNet highlight, Apple is currently facing a number of anti-trust style lawsuits in Norway, Germany and France as European governments seek to "open up" the market currently dominated by Apple and iTunes. One of Apple's arguments against these sort of lawsuits is that, on average, each iPod has only 22 songs bought from the iTunes Store, meaning that the rest of the songs on an iPod have been obtained from other sources anyway (most likely ripped from CDs they already own - CDs being the major way music is distributed and is by and large DRM-free, excluding some reprehensible attempts from Sony with their root kits and EMI's abysmal Copy Control technology).

Similarly, another ZDNet editorial makes note that now is a good time for Apple. No DRM means no lawsuits in Europe. Even if DRM remains, Apple still owns the market. In fact, Apple is so dominant that it is probably the only company that could get away with taking a stance. The record industry is ripe for change, eager to break down Apple's stranglehold and take back some of the power they have ceded to Jobs and of course, DRM-free music is already available. The aforementioned Nettwerk already sells high bit-rate MP3s (192 kbps, as compared to 128kpbs AAC files from iTunes) from their website and eMusic has sold DRM-free tracks for many years with some success.

Not surprisingly, the RIAA appears to have missed the point. This LA Times article quotes the RIAA as saying:

Apple’s offer to license Fairplay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels. There have been many services seeking a license to the Apple DRM. This would enable the interoperability that we have been urging for a very long time.

I don't think anyone else in the world seriously thought that Jobs was offering to open up FairPlay (in fact, Jobs argues the opposite when he highlights that opening up FairPlay just increases opportunities for enterprising individuals to hack away at the DRM system). Whether the RIAA is making a point of its own or is just plain stupid remains to be seen.

The Economist sums it up best:

Mr Jobs’s argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right.

Who is watching IPTV anyway?

The latest steaming pile of hype being flung around the internet is the news that the oft-reported new project of the guys who created Skype, the so-called Venice Project, has been rebadged as "Joost" (apparently it doesn't mean much of anything, it's just a word). Joost is still in beta and is currently unavailable to the great unwashed like myself although there are some screenshots floating around the place.

Joost is being hailed as the great white hope in the battle between content delivered online and content delivered through traditional channels such as free-to-air broadcast television and subscription services.

I'm going to admit right now that I know very little about technical aspects of Joost. I have no idea if they intend to be pushing HD content; if the focus will be on streaming, download based or a combination of the two; or even where the content will be coming from. Luckily, this is not a discussion on the hows and whys of Joost, but the whos as in "who is going to be watching anyway?"

One big problem with Joost and the Democracy Player (created and distributed by the Participatory Culture Foundation) is that, in general, watching video on your computer is a pretty sucky way to spend your time. I don't think I'm stretching here to say that most computers are in studies or dens or rumpus rooms and are not set up in a way that is conducive for long-term viewing.

Then there is the question of streaming vs downloading. I'm not a big fan of streaming. It's the same as standard broadcast TV - pausing/ff/rew is difficult (I've watching quite a few streams over the years where pausing makes it start over again). "Real time" video is often constrained by the speed of your connection (my 512k DSL connection makes anything over about 5min long a challenge to watch) as well as network usage. On the other hand, downloading a video file first takes away from the broadcast-ness of the whole idea. It becomes less of a broadcast network and more of a queuing service like Quickflix. In my view this is actually a plus. Apart from sporting events and breaking news, how much of the video that you currently consume needs to be watched "live"? Wouldn't it be better for it to sit in a box somewhere, waiting for you to select when you want to watch it?

This leads me to the issue of the content delivery itself. If watching on the computer isn't comfortable, how are they watching it? While HTPCs (home theatre PCs) are a growing section of the market, until you can buy a media black box at Harvey Norman or JB HIFI or The Good Guys, HTPCs have not caught on. Only the alpha geeks will have built their own little media centre so they can watch video and listen to music through their TV and stereo system in their lounge room, most people won't have this sort of convenient convergence. For example, at the moment when I want to watch a long-form video (like DL.TV), I download the video file (usually in h.264 for high def) and then convert it to DVD to watch on my TV using my DVD player. The conversion process alone can take up to 2 hours (2500+ CPU - no doubt this would be much much much less of an issue if I had a Core2 Duo system *sigh*) so it's hardly convenient. At least I'm comfortable when I do watch it.

Obviously, the best solution would be to have an HTPC hooked up to the TV and a high-speed broadband connection. That way, video could be streamed to the TV or read off the hard drive in a high def format. How many people have a setup like this?

Finally, where is the quality content coming from? "Old tech" TV networks have considerable budgets where they can either buy quality content (depending on individual definitions of quality of course) or commission their own in-house. Where are IPTV providers getting their content from? From what little I have seen of Democracy (I'm still struggling to use it - it steers like a cow on my slow system and my relatively slow connection makes download speeds slow, even with the built-in BitTorrent), the content is almost entirely user-submitted YouTube-style stuff or video podcasts pulled off RSS-feeds from around the globe. While I might find some interesting stuff (eg DL.TV, CommandN, MacBreak etc), I have no idea if there was anything for my wife to watch (and if either of my grandmothers were still alive, I have serious doubts whether there would be anything they would want to watch either). There are sources for independent film and documentaries, but it is still a mammoth task to wade through the crap to find the gems.

One solution may be for the content to be aggregated for you, but then you're just watching a different network which ultimately will have the same issues as entrenched media organisations. Maybe social networks with tagging and recommendations will come to the rescue here.

While IPTV is an interesting and attractive idea, I think it still has some way to go before it will start moving any closer to the mainstream. Unless Joost is an outstanding, out-of-this-world product (which it may well be - I'll definitely check it out when it comes out of beta), I don't think it will be so much revolutionary as evolutionary.

I hope I'm proven wrong on this one. Time will tell.

Embryonic stem cell research in Australia...

There seems to be quite a buzz around the world that the Senate here in Australia has passed a bill allowing cloning of human embryo cells for stem cell research. The consensus seems to be that it's almost a fait acommpli that this bill will soon become law, with the proviso that animal eggs are not used in the process (which would count out this sort of thing happening).

What some people don't seem to realise is that this isn't even half way there. For a bill to become law, it has to be passed by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In the Senate, the Government has a rare majority of two, with the sole Family First Party representative likely to side with the current Government as they are conservatively aligned. The bill was able to pass because a "conscience vote" was allowed, which meant members did not have to toe the party line but could vote as they felt morally obliged to vote. Even with that, the bill passed by a mere two votes.

In the House of Representatives, the current Coalition Government holds 86 of 150 seats. Even with a conscience vote, that requires a lot of people who ordinarily hold a fair amount in common to cross the floor and vote the other way. Even allowing for some moderates to cross the floor, you can also count on a handful of the Opposition who are more conservatively minded to contemplate crossing the floor themselves.

I don't see this passing the House of Reps, I really don't, which to my mind is a real shame.

Where's the IE7 love?

Well, it looks like my love affair with Windows 2000 means that once again, Microsoft is leaving me out in the cold.

When I built my computer (technically I picked the components and got the shop to build it for me - I certainly wasn't as geekier-than-thou in those days) XP had been in the wild for about 6 months and hadn't even been "Service Pack"-ed yet. As such, I was much happier to have Win2k on my system instead. Since the store only offered XP OEMs, I went out, endured the sticker shock and bought a retail version of Windows 2000 for I think close to $600 at the time. Yes, it did hurt, but I felt smug about it for some reason (shock, I think).

Since then, I've stuck with Win2k because there hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade to XP. Sure, it looked a little prettier but there didn't seem enough of a difference to shell out another $200 (less now) for the upgrade. There are relatively few programs that don't support Win2k, and what products do exist in this consumer space (for example, Pro Tools LE and MaxMSP) are not things I actually need for day-to-day use (although if I want to salvage my wife's Digi001 and put it in my PC, I'll need to think about it).

With all the hype surrounding the new Internet Explorer 7 upgrade, I thought I would check it out. I try not to be a OS or application bigot, and if IE7 was over all a better browser than the upcoming Firefox 2.0 release, I was prepared to switch back. In the end, it's about using the better software for the better computing experience. It's not a pure geek attitude I know, but since being geek isn't my day job, what I use at home really needs to work as well as possible without as few problems as possible.

It turns out that I haven't been paying attention as the IE7 upgrade requires not just WindowsXP, but XP with Service Pack 2. In other words, no new IE for you!

C'mon Bill, where's the IE7 love for us stuck in the past Win2k users? It's not enough that you keep trying to end-of-the-line my chosen operating system, but you stop giving us new goodies too?

I guess I'm sticking with Firefox then.

Spacing Out

When I was a kid, getting into outer space did not seem all that exciting to many of the people around me. Looking back, I guess it wasn't exactly an exciting time for space exploration. There wasn't much in the way of orbital habitation (or space stations), particularly as the International Space Station was beset with budget problems and the only other option was Mir, the Russian station that seemed to be held together with little more than gaffer tape and Soviet issue chewing gum.

Space news focused on things like the Voyager program, the Halley Armada probes that rendezvoused with Halley's Comet, or the Galileo probe NASA sent to Jupiter.

Certainly no one was landing on anything, and the Challenger disaster reinforced that space exploration was an expensive and inherently dangerous thing.

I would still sneak out of my bedroom at night and stare up at the stars. I didn't give a damn about anyone else. I still wanted to be up there, floating around weightless, teaching ants to sort tiny screws in space while I admired Mother Earth as she floated majestically in inky blackness, surrounded by the endless void.

I had plans. There would be space stations where space craft could be built that wouldn't need a massive fuel load to escape earth's gravity well, there would be lunar bases, there would be Mars bases, elevators built, asteroids mined and comets harvested for water. NASA might have dropped the ball on space, but if for some reason I ended up with an obscene amount of money, I would set things right.

In the end I had to move on (as much as I tried, no one would give me obscene amounts of money).

Then one day it hit me - space was sexy again. The X-Prize offered US$10 million to the first team to launch a piloted spacecraft with a payload of three people 100km straight up, and then do it again in the same craft inside of two weeks. Space tourism became the next big thing for people with more money than they knew what to do with. Talk about space elevators became news, and with the successful completion of the X-Prize, Richard Branson and Virgin got in on the act with Virgin Galactic (warning: Flash heavy) and an expected launch date (oh yes, you better believe pun intended) in 2008 or 2009 (depending on testing).

I'm excited that space is once again something that people can aspire towards. I can keep clinging to the dream for a little while yet.

Happy World Space Week everyone.

Watch the skies! Keep looking!

AMD + ATI merger: trying to make sense of it all.

While it probably isn't news to anyone that cares, the merger between CPU maker AMD and graphics chipset maker ATI has been given final approval from competition regulators in the US (home of AMD), Canada (home of ATI) and Germany (where most of AMD's chip fabrication plants are located). As the pieces finish falling in to place, I'm still trying to work out the ramifications of the marriage between the two major market players. It's not an easy task for a faceless government administrator, so I can only build my knowledge based on what scraps of information leak into the public domain from industry insiders.

What is the merger going to do the market place? Prior to the formation of the mega-corp, the CPU and graphics markets were fairly even split: NVIDIA and ATI battled it out in the graphics and motherboard chipset market while Intel and AMD tussled for market share with CPUs. Intel was still market leader but AMD had been steadily eroding that advantage for some time, particularly in the enthusiast market where AMD was considered to have better bang for buck. Both NVIDIA and ATI made chipsets for motherboards that supported both Intel and AMD. In fact, most motherboards for the new AM2 were based on NVIDIA chipsets.

The AMD-ATI merger leaves a number of questions that I don't have the capacity to answer (and would love it if someone could point me towards someone who can) :

• what does this mean for motherboard chipsets? Will NVIDIA still make NForce chipsets for AMD? Will ATI still make chipsets for Intel chips? I hate seeing competition reduced in any market
• what is the future of NVIDIA? Will it need to enter into exclusive agreements with Intel in order to survive, or is it big enough and bad enough to manufacture and develop for both parties?
• related to the above points, one of the dangers of vertical integration is the inclination to favour your own product over a competitors. Even if NVIDIA continues to develop products for AMD, will the development environment remain open?

There are substantial benefits for AMD in the merger. ATI technology is the basis for both the XBox 360 and the Nintendo Wii (NVIDIA is supplying the graphics tech for the Playstation 3). AMD missed out on supplying the CPUs for the Xbox, but now they have an "in" through ATI, as well as a new business partnership with IBM, who have developed the multi-cored PowerPC chips for the Xbox. ATI also have a growing business in mobile graphics technology, particularly for handhelds and mobile phones.

What could be more exciting for the partnership are the future development options. While the current focus in CPUs appears to be multiple cores, it surely can't be too long before the focus switches to integration with other areas. We already have "integrated graphics" on most motherboards (particularly on corporate systems where a graphics card makes no sense cost wise). I would imagine the next logical step is to integrate entire graphics processing units (GPUs) into the chipset as well. Current PCI-e technology is fast, but whenever information is shifted through a PCI bus, there has to be a performance hit of some kind. Moving the GPU on die would reduce that hit (if not eradicate it completely). AMD and ATI are now in the perfect position to begin development on this CPU/GPU integration. In the short term, this is likely to manifest in integrated (but not on-die) solutions like the rumoured Yokohama platform for notebooks which will see an AMD-ATI collaboration with third party Wi-Fi.

There are flow-on effects from this integration as well. Current high-def DVD set top players are pretty much just a small computer running Linux in a pretty box that fits in with your home theatre setup. Imagine the potential leap on your competitors if you could be the first one t0 market with an "all-in-one" solution for high-def playback - fast CPU and excellent on-die graphics in one small package. I'm not sure what the heat implications are, but no graphics card means one less fan in the system. Less noise = home theatre goodness.

The one thing I haven't picked up much noise on is the possibilities surrounding ATI's physics engine development, which will compete with physics processing unit (PPU) solutions such as Ageia PhysX. The Ageia PPU is a separate PCI card (although a variation of the technology will be used with the PS3) which can be used for physics acceleration, presently lusted after in the gaming arena. The ATI solution involves adding a third graphics card which be transformed into a dedicated PPU. I'm not sure of the physical realities regarding available slots (especially if you're using two cards for a Crossfire set up and want to add a card for PPU work) but I'm sure that if the software can combine all the cards together, then surely the potential to use the technology on-die isn't far away. With multi-cores already in use and quad-core not far away, the next logical step (to me anyway) is many cores serving different functions. What's to stop a multi-cored CPU to also have additional GPUs and PPUs or other general, programmable PUs waiting to be used (maybe even dynamically?).

The AMD-ATI merger is going to have its problems. Merging two large corporations generally does. However, once the initial teething troubles are put to rest, I think the new entity will be a force to be reckoned with. Integrated GPUs, physics processing, mobile graphics, consumer set top boxes - many fingers in many pies.

It's an exciting time to be alive and watching the hardware game right now.

Interesting links:
DV Doctor: Why did AMD and ATi get wed and where's AMD headed now?
Ars Technica: AMD + ATI: does it add up?
Asymmetric Physics Processing with ATI Crossfire - ATI white paper (pdf)

MIT Young Innovaters 2006

The MIT Technology Review have released their 2006 list of the people they consider to be the best innovators under the age of 35. Apparently they've been doing this since 1999. Never heard of them before tonight, but then again I'm not exactly deeply wired in to the world. Lately, the chances are quite high that unless you have a good tip to help my son take a day time nap, I haven't paid any attention at all.

A few things to note about the list:

• I recognised just one name - Jason Fried, founder of 37 signals, the online collaboration company that has brought the world the Ruby On Rails Web 2.0 development framework and the most excellent Basecamp project management and collaboration tool (seriously, this thing is awesome. I'm using the free version to manage a major project at work and if it works with the way I'm required to work, I'll be seriously considering subscribing to a paid version)
• There are just 5 women in a list of 35. I don't for one second think this is because there are less women innovating. Where are all the innovative women and why isn't anyone paying attention to them?
• Apparently, to be innovative you have to study or work in the USA. Come on MIT, you can have broader vision than this, surely?
• Biotech seems to be where it's at right now
• Sure, del.icio.us is a cool idea with some interesting results, but naming its creator the most innovative person under 35 in 2006 based almost entirely on the website is a bit of a stretch if you ask me (which no one did, but I'm telling you anyway).

So there's the secret to innovation, kids. Move to America and jump on the Web bandwagon (hmm, dot.com boom, anyone?). Oh, and make sure you are a dude as well if you want anyone to pay any attention.

September: Hot Chips

I recently replaced my CPU. Actually, over the period of about 2 months I replaced my hard drives, PSU, motherboard, CPU fan and CPU (in that order) while troubleshooting random reboots, shut downs and, on bad days, a consistent refusal to boot at all.

Since late 2001 I have been using what I affectionately call "old technology", although it was the height of sophistication for at least two weeks when I originally bought. For 4 1/2 years I ran my hand picked box of increasingly old tech goodies with a Socket A Athlon Palomino chip. It might have quickly become an evolutionary dead end as the Palomino was quickly replaced by new fabrication techniques, but it worked well enough for me. I could run Quake 3, I could play Baldur's Gate (slowly, inexpertly, infrequently and never for very long, but that's my failing, not the chip's), I could surf the net and I could create oodles of 30 second pieces of music using nothing but Virtual Studio Technology, while convincing myself that the inspiration for an actual finished track would be just around the corner.

In the intervening years between when I bought my computer and when the troubles started, the tech seemed younger and younger as my bleeding edge chip became middle of the road before quickly being relegated through the stages of veteran, venerable, out-dated and finally "legacy" (obsolete but there was too much existing infrastructure to bury it completely).

When the troubles started, I did not have much money. I looked for a way to fix it all while replacing the bare minimum of parts. When I decided that the motherboard had to go, I searched extensively for another Socket A board so that I could squeeze another year or so out of my current chip. Palomino was long gone and while Socket A chips still existed if you looked hard enough, they were no longer bleeding edge as to be coated in the dust left behind by the smaller, faster and cooler (both temp and tech) wafers of silicone delights. Although I flirted with a total "budget upgrade" that would still reduce my current machine to relic status as an historical curiosity, I managed to find a Socket A board in the end at a local Computer Fair. I was triumphant! Armed with a new PSU and a new motherboard, I proudly completed my first ever serious component upgrade. Swapping out IDE peripherals like hard drives and DVD-RWs was just practice for the glory that would be earning the title of Small Time Upgrader. Once a boy, soon to be a man.

Of course, in the end it turned out that my problems stemmed from a far deeper place and I eventually had to track down a new but still very much old tech Socket A chip for my replacement motherboard. It was much better than the old chip with a slighty different architecture and a cooler running temperature, but it just wasn't awesome enough. Don't get me wrong here - it rocks, just not very hard.

Even with all my recent upgrading (including my first ever after market CPU heat sink and van - oh, the tingle of delicious thrills cascading down my spine was strong that day), I am still trapped in my buttoned down, slow lane, caravan hauling, bowler hat wearing computing lifestyle. While I putter about with my Socket A Sempron (not even Socket 754 - oh the shame), I'm surrounded by 64 bit, multi-cored, virtual machine supporting processors to the Gods. I wasn't even trying to catch the boat and yet somehow I still missed it.

Processors: they're so hot right now. Maybe one day I will get to have one of my very own.