She was a wonderful, kindly, loving lady. With her husband Bruce, she grew us vegetables in her garden, showed us interesting parts of California, and was always the neighbour you dream to have. We will miss her a lot.
Friday, 19 September 2003
In Memoriam Gilda Wickelgren
Our neighbour Gilda died early this morning after a long fight against hepatitis and its complications.
She was a wonderful, kindly, loving lady. With her husband Bruce, she grew us vegetables in her garden, showed us interesting parts of California, and was always the neighbour you dream to have. We will miss her a lot.
She was a wonderful, kindly, loving lady. With her husband Bruce, she grew us vegetables in her garden, showed us interesting parts of California, and was always the neighbour you dream to have. We will miss her a lot.
Thursday, 18 September 2003
Mark Petrovic of Earthlink
I had a long and fascinating discussion with Mark Petrovic today. David Beckemeyer - the Hecklebot creator - introduced us.
it's very encouraging to meet somone paid to think deeply.
it's very encouraging to meet somone paid to think deeply.
Wednesday, 17 September 2003
Monday, 15 September 2003
Updated with Photos
The St Luke's Chapel site now has photos.
Rosie's Science Class, which is held at the church, has Photos up too
Rosie's Science Class, which is held at the church, has Photos up too
Saturday, 13 September 2003
BloggerCon IRC details
I just posted BloggerCon IRC details over at the BloggerCon 2003 Weblog.
This includes a link to my experimental simple OS X IRC client written in Python & PyObjC. (Currently it's so simple it only lets you into #bloggercon...)
This includes a link to my experimental simple OS X IRC client written in Python & PyObjC. (Currently it's so simple it only lets you into #bloggercon...)
Friday, 12 September 2003
Lunch with Dave Sifry
Interesting things are afoot with Technorati. Dave's prodigous database just keeps growing.
Thursday, 11 September 2003
YesVideo tapping the American experience
I met with Subutai Ahmad of Yesvideo.
They have taken an interesting approach to the power law distribution of people with video cameras. They taregt the long tail who can't be botherd to edit it themselves. Instead they drop off the videotape at Walgreens with the photos, it gets shipped to Yesvideo, and they digitise it, make a DVD and ship it back. They have smart image processing to pick good chapter points and even make short highlights video.
Watching the multiple screens of people's home movie in the processing plan there I was forcefully reminded of Andrew Odlyzko's point about how much privately made media there is:
Historically, it appears that privately taken pictures have traditionally been the dominant source of data. An interesting accounting of all the information stored in the world in 1997 by Michael Lesk [Lesk] found that home photographs were the dominant component. (For a more complete and up-to-date accounting of information, see [LymanV]].) They contributed about 500,000 TB each year (even when one assumes that each picture is stored as a modest 10 KB JPEG file). By comparison, all the texts in the Library of Congress amounted to around 20 TB, while the graphics and music in that collection came to about 3,000 TB. Thus even this great library contained less than 1% of the world's information. (The publicly accessible Web pages currently contain a few tens of terabytes, just a few percent of what the Library of Congress has, but comparable to the text collections in that library.)
An obvious comment to the estimates above is that the purpose of a library is to select the most valuable material, and that most of those photographs contributing to the 500,000 TB are of no interest to most people. That is true, but that does not stop those pictures from being taken, and it will not stop an explosion in volumes of data collected this way in the future. A few pictures or video clips will turn out to be of great interest, in spite of amateur production. Just think of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, or the Rodney King video. More importantly, many of the pictures being taken are of interest, or might be of potential interest, to at least one person. Most of the world will have no interest in a picture of your newborn baby, but your mother will cherish it. Similarly, in the future you will be taking digital video clips of your children and sending at least some of them to your mother.
Imagine if this company was hooked up to the Internet Archive
They have taken an interesting approach to the power law distribution of people with video cameras. They taregt the long tail who can't be botherd to edit it themselves. Instead they drop off the videotape at Walgreens with the photos, it gets shipped to Yesvideo, and they digitise it, make a DVD and ship it back. They have smart image processing to pick good chapter points and even make short highlights video.
Watching the multiple screens of people's home movie in the processing plan there I was forcefully reminded of Andrew Odlyzko's point about how much privately made media there is:
Historically, it appears that privately taken pictures have traditionally been the dominant source of data. An interesting accounting of all the information stored in the world in 1997 by Michael Lesk [Lesk] found that home photographs were the dominant component. (For a more complete and up-to-date accounting of information, see [LymanV]].) They contributed about 500,000 TB each year (even when one assumes that each picture is stored as a modest 10 KB JPEG file). By comparison, all the texts in the Library of Congress amounted to around 20 TB, while the graphics and music in that collection came to about 3,000 TB. Thus even this great library contained less than 1% of the world's information. (The publicly accessible Web pages currently contain a few tens of terabytes, just a few percent of what the Library of Congress has, but comparable to the text collections in that library.)
An obvious comment to the estimates above is that the purpose of a library is to select the most valuable material, and that most of those photographs contributing to the 500,000 TB are of no interest to most people. That is true, but that does not stop those pictures from being taken, and it will not stop an explosion in volumes of data collected this way in the future. A few pictures or video clips will turn out to be of great interest, in spite of amateur production. Just think of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, or the Rodney King video. More importantly, many of the pictures being taken are of interest, or might be of potential interest, to at least one person. Most of the world will have no interest in a picture of your newborn baby, but your mother will cherish it. Similarly, in the future you will be taking digital video clips of your children and sending at least some of them to your mother.
Imagine if this company was hooked up to the Internet Archive
Wednesday, 10 September 2003
Lunch with Tim Oren
I had a fascinating lunch with Tim talking over possible futures of weblogging and how to rescue music from the RIAA mindset.
He later blogged a splendid rant on all the ways the labels destroy value apart from DRM.
He later blogged a splendid rant on all the ways the labels destroy value apart from DRM.
Monday, 8 September 2003
Rosie's Science School
Rosie has begun teaching science to Elementary students. Some details over at Wonder Why Science
Here she is demonstrating kinetic theory with blue ink in cold water and red in warm water:
The hot water molecules are moving faster, and hence mix the ink up more quickly.
Here she is demonstrating kinetic theory with blue ink in cold water and red in warm water:
The hot water molecules are moving faster, and hence mix the ink up more quickly.
Friday, 5 September 2003
Media Heresy - DRM destroys value
People find the familiar comfortable. They want things to be like they were. So when technology did away with scarcity of recordings by making perfect copying easy, they wanted to change things back, to make these digits behave like physical goods.
This is where the dream of DRM comes from - making digital goods scarce, and enforcing payment.
Now using machines to enforce laws is bad. They have no capacity for mercy, latitude or leeway.
And all DRM is readily circumvented as, eventually, it has to turn into patterns of light and sound for people to see and hear, and at this point cameras and microphones can record it. So for the determined adversary, it will be broken.
What this means is that DRM can never thwart the real enemy, it can only annoy the legitimate customers, and they will thus Pay less for the product, or not buy it at all.
There is a very odd reward curve here - the paying customers are getting less value than the non-paying circumventers. DRM is all stick and no carrot.
It is for this reason that DRM destroys value, and business models based on DRM always fail.
The putative counter example at the moment is the iTunes Music store, but as Apple ships a circumvention device with the application, by allowing you to burn the songs to CD, the case is unproven to put it mildly. Remember, the $7M that Apple has grossed from the iTMS is small change to them; they make many times that from selling iPods.
If the labels succeed in making iTMS Windows stricter it will sell fewer songs.
This week I have been reading Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital in which he explains how US property law changed to recognise what was really happening on the ground, rather than what the large landowners wished for. This set off the accumulation of capital that made the US the wealthiest country in the world.
Last week I read The Perfect Store about how Pierre Omidyar created a market for goods online, that was built on mutual trust, and it grew to become eBay, the most profitable of all online businesses.
The time is ripe to do the same for online media, and create a marketplace that reflects people's desires and trust.
This is where the dream of DRM comes from - making digital goods scarce, and enforcing payment.
Now using machines to enforce laws is bad. They have no capacity for mercy, latitude or leeway.
And all DRM is readily circumvented as, eventually, it has to turn into patterns of light and sound for people to see and hear, and at this point cameras and microphones can record it. So for the determined adversary, it will be broken.
What this means is that DRM can never thwart the real enemy, it can only annoy the legitimate customers, and they will thus Pay less for the product, or not buy it at all.
There is a very odd reward curve here - the paying customers are getting less value than the non-paying circumventers. DRM is all stick and no carrot.
It is for this reason that DRM destroys value, and business models based on DRM always fail.
The putative counter example at the moment is the iTunes Music store, but as Apple ships a circumvention device with the application, by allowing you to burn the songs to CD, the case is unproven to put it mildly. Remember, the $7M that Apple has grossed from the iTMS is small change to them; they make many times that from selling iPods.
If the labels succeed in making iTMS Windows stricter it will sell fewer songs.
This week I have been reading Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital in which he explains how US property law changed to recognise what was really happening on the ground, rather than what the large landowners wished for. This set off the accumulation of capital that made the US the wealthiest country in the world.
Last week I read The Perfect Store about how Pierre Omidyar created a market for goods online, that was built on mutual trust, and it grew to become eBay, the most profitable of all online businesses.
The time is ripe to do the same for online media, and create a marketplace that reflects people's desires and trust.
Thursday, 4 September 2003
Watch out CYC
What the #joiito bot knows. I'm dumping it out dynamically with the Twisted webserver, which is all Python too.
For some reason I needed to use a full path to the pickle data, not a local one.
For some reason I needed to use a full path to the pickle data, not a local one.
Wednesday, 3 September 2003
Firehose not straw
Having finally got DSL via Earthlink, I'm swamped by the megabit bandwidth. Lots of nice movies to watch.
Tuesday, 2 September 2003
Greg Dyke's speech in full says less than the press release:
We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.
We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.
Monday, 1 September 2003
Cartoon Network promotes homeschooling
Don't go back to school day is a day of warnings about schools. eg "Here's a helpful tip; while at school, try not to get beat up". It's not John Gatto, but it makes the point...
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