When Google fails and an expert succeeds

We were looking for a cheap corporate videoconferencing solution that would allow us to share whiteboard, and even projected screens, in regular lighting conditions.

We knew that Apple's discontinued iSight webcam was good enough, but it's, you know, discontinued. In any case, we don't have Macs at the office (yet). We knew from recent research and past experience that no other consumer grade webcam would work. We also knew that firewire based camcorders (digital video cameras) had been known to work with OS X iChat AV and on XP wiht help from 3rd party software, but I thought firewire camcorders were extinct. USB camcorders, for unclear reasons, don't seem to have the ability to act as a webcam on XP, though there's some software that claims to support them on OS X.

I spent some time on Google and Amazon looking for a firewire consumer camcorder, but all the pages I found were old, and many of those were in decline. None of the camcorders they mentioned are sold now. I searched on Canon's web site and on Amazon, but I couldn't find anything. Even now that I know the Canon ZR 850 has what I need, I still can't find that information on the Canon website.

So a colleague asked at the Roseville Minnesota National Camera office. An expert there thought we had two choices, but he recommended a hands-on test.

We tested onsite with my MacBook and we found both of the old-fashioned camcorders worked with iChat AV. Next we'll buy one and test in an XP box with a firewire card and some XP add-on software. If it works we'll buy a few cameras for the team. We'll pay a premium for the cameras, but it's just payment for help we got -- and its corporate money.

Which brings me to the moral of the story. Even in these days, there are some seemingly easy questions Google can't answer. This wasn't a question about cancer therapy, all we needed to learn was if there were any firewire consumer camcorders left on the market. That seemingly simple question required a human expert [1] to answer.

[1] I now realize I probably could have asked in Apple's iChat AV forum, but we were thinking XP, not Mac. Even then, of course, we'd be relying on a human expert.

Do children watch television any more?

For reasons that have everything to do with expediency, and nothing to do with virtue, our children don't watch television - broadcast or cable. They do watch a total of 3 DVDs a week, and some of them are commercial-free extracts of television shows. Even in that case, Loony Tunes and the Flintstones beat Jimmy Neutron.

That's not all that remarkable.

The remarkable thing is the kids don't complain. We've been doing this for ten years; when we started I assumed the complaints would rise with school and peer pressure.

Nothing happened. As far as I can tell, there's no peer pressure.

It occurred to me that maybe children don't watch television any more. This 2001 UK study suggests that was so even then ...

British children prefer Internet surfing to watching TV - study - (2001)

....A recent survey of UK families by the Family Assurance Group has revealed that surfing the Internet is now seven times more popular among British children than watching television. The survey also showed that some young Internet users spend up to 70 hours per week online...

Our children do complain about their miserly screen-time allotments, and they're starting to complain about the lack of any game console.

So, quietly, without my taking note of it, children's television watching seems to going the way of smoking [1]. I wonder if they'll ever get the habit, or if television as I've known it [2] is going to be largely gone within 15 years.

I find the way these things leave to be at least as noteworthy as the way they arrive ....

[1] We smelled a cigarette at a park the other day. Everyone looked around startled, but it seemed to have wafted in from far away.
[2] Ok, sort of known it. I can't actually watch TV. Even the "science" and "history" shows give me hives. Some of the commercials aren't bad though.

Security outsourcing: The US needs its mercenaries

American security operations have, it is alleged, been outsourced to a far greater degree than most people imagine. Hillhouse claims we can no longer perform even covert operations without our mercenaries.

She doesn't describe why everyone from the FBI to the CIA to the NSA to the Army has been privatizing core operations. Surely it can't be to save money -- Blackwater operatives make far more than their military counterparts.

I suspect it's all about bypassing federal rules and American law. There are many operations the FBI cannot perform, but it can always outsource these operations to the less constrained private sector.

It will take many years of non-GOP rule to make a dent in their colossal mess.

Phil Nugent: the mind of GWB

The Phil Nugent Experience: Living the Dream is a medium-length, articulate, occasionally humorous, rant on the nature and character of GWB. Keep at hand for next November, when the media will be writing fond farewells to a "statesman". It will be an essential anti-emetic.

You can't use a smartphone on an airplane -- even in "airplane mode"

Current FAA regulations say you can't use a smartphone on an airplane -- even if the phone portion of the unit is disabled:

Travel: ATA Tries To Have You Arrested For Using Your iPhone In "Airplane Mode" - Consumerist

...Well, as much as ATA's attendents were dicks about it, they were right Buried in the Contract of Carriage under Rule 190 (Baggage) on page 37 it reads: '...Cellular phones, cellular phone games and pager use is prohibited after door closing and should remain off in flight. This includes cell phones equipped with airplane mode function.'...

This was taken from the comments section about a man threatened with arrest for using his iPhone, in airplane mode, on an airplane.

So if you have a separate phone and a PDA, you can turn off the phone and use the PDA. If you have a smartphone though, you must turn off the phone and the PDA both.

Except that mostly flight attendants ignore the rule and treat a phone that's not be an ear as though it were a generic device.

Until the plane lands, at with point if you have a separate phone and a PDA, you can turn on the phone but you must turn off the PDA. If you have a smartphone though, you can use both.

Does anyone think we have a problem here?

Not to mention that whenever I open a laptop on a plane, it shows me every laptop with an open WiFi peer-to-peer port on the plane. (I then remember to turn off my WiFi.)

Sigh.

The future of the POB?

The coalition that ruled America from 2000 to 2006 is, the world prays, in its death throes. The increasingly shattered GOP is now better known as the POB ...

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

... As one of my ex-Republican friends put it yesterday: the left-wing Democrats are the party of Jefferson and Roosevelt, the right-wing Democrats are the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower, and today's Republicans are the party of Bozo...

So where is the POB going? More importantly, how many Americans belong to the POB?

I think we'd do ok with two years of Democrat control of the Presidency and the Congress, but in the longer run I'd like a GOP, not POB, controlled Senate.

Assuming that Clinton takes the White House [1], who will reform the POB? I don't like Guiliani, but I have to admit the man has a certain stubborn quality that might make him an effective POB reformer.

[1] I'm an Edwards supporter myself, but I'd throw a victory party for Clinton or Obama too.

Thank you Mr. Gore

Gore and UN panel win Nobel prize.

Too cheap to bill: storage and electricity

This post is neat on various levels. Read the whole thing to see what he says about the cost of storage:

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Storage: too cheap to meter?: "I saw Chris Anderson make a presentation in which he quoted the famous 1954 prediction by Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, that 'our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.' Having paid my own electric bill last night, I think I can say with confidence that Strauss was slightly off in his forecast."

Storage costs have fallen much faster than the costs of bandwidth or processing power. On the other hand, electricity costs may start rising exponentially over the next few years. Rising electricity costs and the limits of CPU design may mean that in the near future processing costs will rise, but electricity rise may have less impact on storage.

Storage costs look to keep dropping for many years to come. Sooner or later, and maybe sooner, storage may be bundled as a freebie with services such as bandwidth.

Its interesting to think about what relative costs of computing, including heat dissipation, will do to the design of our end-to-end computing environment over the next few years. Getting that right is worth so much money I'm sure a lot of people have thought it out in depth -- but not published all the results.

Captcha death: My DeLong comment fails

I was trying to submit a comment to Brad DeLong's typepad based blog:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal - typepad comments

Verify your comment
As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This test is used to prevent automated robots from posting comments.

I authenticated using my TypePad ID, but I was still asked to pass the captcha test. I tried four times, but the captcha kept getting more and more cryptic. I had to give up.

I swear I have a high res 21" LCD and I can still read. True, I am a bit demented, but so is everyone over 25.

I assume that captcha difficulty is being driven by the spam wars. I think we've now hit the wall. The spam technology and/or techniques have defeated the captcha.

It's time for phase II - the end of anonymous comments and robust identity management.

Twenty years of wasted cycles ...

No surprises in this article:

86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins

... When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity."

See also my post on FullWrite Professional. I work with some very sophisticated developers using cutting edge .NET libraries, domain specific languages and very complex architectures ... but I also remember when programs written in Macintosh Pascal were reliable and fast on hardware that couldn't run a modern phone.

I suspect we'd be better off today if we'd stuck with Pascal and never touched C++. A 1990 geek would be shocked by how little improvement we've seen over the past 18 years.

On the other and, I wouldn't try editing a 12MB Canon CRF file on that Mac Plus!

From Napster to Amazon: A Yahoo! insider's DRM history and projections

This gentleman has been around -- from WinAmp's Napster-associated glory days to an exec position at Yahoo! Music. He says Yahoo! is done with DRM ... (for music, anyway!)

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends at FISTFULAYEN

... But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.

Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong...

It's a great history lesson as well as a sign of the times.

There may be grounds for optimism with music DRM, but I think the story will be a bit different for video. I'd still watch the next transition point, which will be when the CD dies. There'll be room to return to DRM then.

I don't count this as a sign of public awakening --  financial interest (easy stealing!) and wisdom (DRM really is bad) were too aligned in this case to support optimistic lessons.

BTW, it's kind of obvious I hope, but this is not a problem for Apple. He put his DRM-free Amazon tunes on his iPod.

The American right is dying - or not?

An optimist would call this the death throes of a dying beast ...

Shrillblog: October 2007:

... To visit Michelle Malkin's cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they've spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game -- he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children's Health Insurance Program. For this, right wingers travel to their home, insinuate that the family is engaged in large-scale fraud, make threatening phone calls to the family, interrogate the neighbors as to the family's character and financial state.

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he "really" needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children...

A pessimist would call it the labor pains of something historically familiar.

I think it could go either way.

Waterboarding: read the comments

Recreational Waterboarding? - The Opinionator - (Suellentrop) has a quick reference to a great example of banal evil, a WSJ OpEd by Bret Stephens. Remember that name so you can stay far away from him.

It's a worthwhile quick post, but the comments hold greater value. I didn't know the US had used waterboarding torture during the Vietnam war, for example. I did know, however, than post WW II the US military considered waterboarding to be grounds for execution.

That's ok though, nobody cares.

Generation Q: Outrage is dead. Please help us ...

I "caught" Emily reading David Br__k's "Odyssey" OpEd this morning. She was lured by the intriguing title, but I didn't bite. I know exposure to Brooks causes brain damage; I ought to block his URL to protect our children.

On the other hand, Friedman, once every seven months, by purest chance, writes something non-toxic. This time he wrote about his daughter's generation (emphases mine):

Generation Q - New York Times

... Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them.

There is a good chance that members of Generation Q will spend their entire adult lives digging out from the deficits that we — the “Greediest Generation,” epitomized by George W. Bush — are leaving them.

When I was visiting my daughter at her college, she asked me about a terrifying story that ran in this newspaper on Oct. 2, reporting that the Arctic ice cap was melting “to an extent unparalleled in a century or more” — and that the entire Arctic system appears to be “heading toward a new, more watery state” likely triggered by “human-caused global warming.”

“What happened to that Arctic story, Dad?” my daughter asked me. How could the news media just report one day that the Arctic ice was melting far faster than any models predicted “and then the story just disappeared?” Why weren’t any of the candidates talking about it? Didn’t they understand: this has become the big issue on campuses?

No, they don’t seem to understand. They seem to be too busy raising money or buying votes with subsidies for ethanol farmers in Iowa. The candidates could actually use a good kick in the pants on this point. But where is it going to come from?

Generation Q would be doing itself a favor, and America a favor, if it demanded from every candidate who comes on campus answers to three questions: What is your plan for mitigating climate change? What is your plan for reforming Social Security? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit — so we all won’t be working for China in 20 years?

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual...

I've already written that we boomers have failed our generational test. We bear the same relationship to "Generation Q" as America does to the world; the appropriate response to our moral criticism is bitter laughter.

Still.

Someone needs to act. We know true leadership is suicidal for a 21st century American politician, leadership has to come from someone on the brighter side of 30.

Please? The world needs you. Try to shake off your Future Shock, your justifiable nihilism, and your despair. I'm on my knees now. Pretty Please?

Update: for another opinion on Mr. F's column.

Why would computerworld send me spam?

I know Conde Nast has a spam addiction, but why is Computerworld sending me marketing emails? It's a bit weird. My guess is that they use a very old fashioned email address for opt-in email, and that spam using one of my email addresses hit their opt-in list.

The reason I suspect this is that their opt-out process requires an email address to be submitted, which is also archaic.

I'm filtering all their email to the trash now, so if they want to send me a note they'll have to use the comments to this post. If they'd had a one-click embedded link opt-out I'd have given them another chance, but if they're not guilty of spam they're certainly guilty of technical incompetence. Firing offense either way.