It’s official – TV makes us smarter. Some more precision would be good here – I am thinking IQ points for jump shots, time jumps, number of un- and interrelated plot lines and so on. Then, a mental nutrition pyramid and a point scale per program. Mandatory plot complexity governed by the authorities. “Have you seen your show today?”
E-mail, on the other hand, makes you less smart.
So that’s why. I don’t watch enough television and I read to much mail. I knew there was a reason….

Book to get: William Alford: To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization. I haven’t read or even ordered this, but it is the third time I have come across it – independently, from a Concours project on What Every CIO Should Know About China, in this Joho post.
According to a Chinese student of mine who is studying the DVD pirate market in China, the pirates tend to have better products than the originals available six months after the original release (in contrast to my own experience). At a conference on DRM a few weeks ago, one of the participants told me that it would not matter much what we do here in the West – what is important is how the Chinese will do.
Stay tuned.

Tom Evslin is reminescing about Visicalc over in his blog, how it saved his bacon when he was road commissioner for Vermont.
I suspect there are my stories like this. I always liked the quote from Dan Bricklin, about people’s reaction to the program:

In those days, if you showed it to a programmer, he’d say “Yeah, that’s neat. Of course computers can do that–so what?” But if you showed it to a person who had to do financial work with real spreadsheets, he’d start shaking and say, “I spent all week doing that.” Then he’d shove his charge cards in your face.

(This from Licklider, T. R. (1989). “10 Years of Rows and Columns.” BYTE 14(13): 384-390.)
Pervasive computing – we seem to have forgotten how much this technology has changed our lives, how abundance of processing power is in everything.

The Economist has a story on how the French see Google as a case of English-language imperialism and want to combat this with a competing French language search site (sounds OK to me) which should be sorted not by popular demand, but by a team of properly authenticated (by Academie Francaise?) experts, lest something as vulgar as how popular a page is be used as a criterion.
If it wasn’t for the dateline of March 31, I would have thought this a very Economist April 1st joke…..

Google has a couple of cool new features: If you put in a sticker symbol, it will give you a quote. And if you have Firefox or Mozilla, it will pre-fetch the first page for you, so that it is already cached when you click on it.
Which leads me to suspect (especially when you include Google Desktop and Google’s limitation of its first page to 26 words or so) that Google is a company populated by Morlocks intent on bringing back the command line interface….

Interesting article in the Washington post about how the Secret Service in the States is using grid computing to crack passwords. Interesting because it adds an aspect of social engineering by creating targeted word lists based on the suspect’s emails, web cache etc.
In other words: Be eclectic, multilingual, and really good at remembering non-meaningful passwords…..
(from Slashdot, which for once had some good jokes in the comments)

Anyone who has been the recipient of a “cease and desist” letter should take a look at the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website before responding. This is an excellent source and a great example of how universities and research organizations directly benefit society.

JohnJim McGee (with whom I briefly overlapped at Harvard) has written an excellent essay on architecture of buildings and systems based on Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn.
I first encountered this perspective back in the mid-90s, when I worked at CSC and Richard Pawson pursued the same ideas, thinking about how systems architecture could learn from the adaptive architecture ideas of Brand and Christopher Alexander (who wrote A Pattern Language, a collection of architectural “ideas that work”, much read in the circles that practice extreme programming).
McGee adds a thoroughness to the analysis that I haven’t seen before, and nicely points out the contradiction in Brands conclusion: That building work if they are either adaptable or non-changeable (the latter, I suspect, being more an artifact of the stability of the activity taking place in the building than the building itself.)
I have recommended Stewart Brand’s book for years (and have given away at least 3 copies so far, the last time when we were designing the new building for the Norwegian School of Management). It really is an amazing book and an enjoyable read whether you are an architect, a systems engineer, or just someone who happens to take an interest in your surroundings.
Highly recommended (both the essay and the book).

Via Gizmodo comes this mocked up Mac Mini back-pack docking station. Let me be the first to point out that this looks uncanningly like one of the weirdest computer products ever to see the light of day: The MacCharlie, a wrap-around PC-compatible computer that turned a Macintosh into an IBM clone back in 1985.
Those were the days…..

Once upon a time (in the mid-1980s to be slightly more precise) I expressed a wish for a desktop that would be real and electronic – that is, it would be the size of a real desktop, with a touch-sensitive interface. The idea was to create the paperless office (anyone who has seen my office knows what a pipe dream this is) where only the coffee cup would be “real”.
Now, we seem to be getting a tad bit closer with this beautiful screen from Wacom (via Gizmodo.) Let’s see, if we set about four of these side-by-side….

The main problem with technology use (and education) today is that there is too much know-how (and teaching of know-how) and too little know-why. In order to move from know-how to know-why, you have to apply abstraction.
Hence, applied abstractions.
Well, at least it’s an objective.

Bruce Schneier has a crisp and good explanation of how to think about BitTorrent download speed.
(Come to think of it, BitTorrent is one of the few instances where BiCapitalization makes sense.

Don’t know how I managed to miss this one, but Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet innovator and IT illuminary, takes Nicholas Carr to task on Why I.T. Matters in Tech Review.
Highly recommended.

Via Boing Boing comes a link to the paper “Safecracking for the computer scientist” (PDF) by Matt Blaze. This has caused some consternation within the locksmithing industry, but I don’t really see why – anyone who has read Richard Feynman’s brilliant “Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman!” know how to pick locks already. And believe me, it works even on a standard key lock, as I found out having locked myself out of the house one day, having to diddle the lock with a screwdriver and a bent paper clip. It is actually surprisingly easy, and most toolsmiths should be ashamed of themselves, mostly for making products of so low precision that you easily can detect the wheel imperfections.
Security by obscurity, indeed.

There is an interesting article by Larry Sanger at Kuro5hin called Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. Sanger argues that as long as Wikipedia does not provide for recognizing expertise in a formal way, few serious experts in specific fields will bother contributing articles, since any fool with an agenda can screw them up, necessitating much maintenance.
I agree that some of the policies of Wikipedia need to come up for revision. I used to be a relatively frequent contributor to Wikipedia myself, but lately I have spent less time editing there. The reason is simple – when Wikipedia was new and growing, there was need for a lot of “quick writing” on many topics. I am reasonably eclectic in my knowledge and can quickly write short stubs, sometimes backed up with some Web research – so I started many articles with what I knew. For example, I started articles on Martin Heidegger and Primo Levi, people I had a reasonably educated person’s knowledge about. For some articles, like Fridtjof Nansen, I knew more, because I am Norwegian and had recently read Farthest North, his book about trying to reach the North Pole. That was fine for an initial posting, to plug an obvious lexicographical gap. As time went by, each article grew to a point where further improvements require both commitment and more specialized knowledge. The article on Heidegger was pretty soon taken over by some people with more knowledge of Heidegger’s philosophy, and is now a point where I certainly can’t add anything. The same has not happened to the article on Primo Levi, but eventually it will. And for Fridtjof Nansen, quite a bit of my text is still in there.
I think this is a natural evolution: As the content of each article becomes deeper, the lay person’s role shifts to language, formatting and readibility editing. I suspect that one reason topic experts are reluctant to write in the Wikipedia is that an encyclopædia is not written for other topic experts – that’s easy – but for someone with a certain level of general knowledge. Writing popular science or popularized explanations of philosophy or economics is hard – witness the popularity of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophies World, which is basic popularized textbook in philosophy masquerading as a rather trite novel. Anyone who can explain general realitivity for laypeople (myself included) will have an audience – but if you can do it, doing it in Wikipedia does neither pecuniary nor academic rewards bring. As Mark Twain said, “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
As Wikipedia matures, it is pretty clear to me that some sort of authorization process needs to occur – perhaps in the form of a fork, as argued by Sanger. I suspect the time to fork still is a little early. Wikipedia was formed to generate raw material for Nupedia, a properly reviewed encyclopædia on the Web. Nupedia turned out to be too slow a process, and Wikipedia took off. Perhaps we now are beginning to have enough grist for a more standard lexicographical process – and perhaps it is time to impose a little bit more structure and qualification, both from the content and presentation side?
In the meantime, I will continue to use the Wikipedia as my first lookup for overview knowledge. I will continue to fix obvious errors and extend articles where I can do so easily. I don’t think I will take deep responsibility for particular areas – but I am sure someone else will.
The fact that Wikipedia is maturing and needs to evolve also in its policies does not change the fact that it is one of the most exciting Web projects ever – a communally written, free, dynamic knowledge store of surprisingly high quality. Go ‘pedia!

Jon Rahoi has an excellent article on buying and watching Chinese pirate DVDs at Hollywood Elsewhere. My experience exactly. I went to a Chinese market and bought a handful of DVDs just to see – and Jon’s observation that the film studios don’t have much to fear, at least not at the current level of sophistication, is entirely correct. Out of 8 DVDs, two are unusable, either because of technical problems or because the copy is shot in a cinema with a handicam. For the rest, both quality and quantity suffers – I got the three Lord of the Rings movies for $2 apiece, but rest assured, I will buy the three-disk extended edition when it eventually comes out. The quality is so bad that in the scene where the hobbits are cheered by the inhabitants of Gondor, you can barely see their faces.
Didn’t get any pirated music CDs, though – I assume the quality would have been better there. Seems you get what you pay for, up to a point.

Turns out Google desktop can save lost files because it keeps some copies tucked away somewhere on your hard drive (losing formatting, but still…)
Google Desktop has become a very useful tool – I am constantly surprised at the number of times I have forgotten that I wrote or downloaded something earlier – and GD will find if for me. Excellent.

The Register speculates that IBM might get into some relationship with Apple following IBM’s sale of its PC unit to Lenovo (fomerly Legend). Makes sense, though, with IBM promoting Open Source platforms and wanting access to the lifestyle market – given IBM’s image transitioning from Big Brother to Cool Dude the since the mid-90s, Apple’s image might actually be enhanced by this. IBM lent corporate legitimacy to the PC when it entered the business – it might do the same to Apple.

stefangeens.com steangeens.com (which, incidentally, has a very elegant blog design – I really like his “sideblog” comments) – has a great entry on the most efficient way to crack The de Bruijn Code – that is, how to spin through all possible combinations of a four-digit number with as few keystrokes as possible (allowing for continuous recombination).
Now, if only the da Vinci Code had had just a little dusting of a bit of a shade of this way of thinking and writing…..

Bob Cringely has an interesting idea: That Wal-Mart could become a WiMax operator. This makes sense – and leads me to wonder who the aggregator could be in Europe. Someone with continental presence, a strong network, many locations and the coffers necessary to outcompete the regular telcos. Some of the oil companies, possibly, using gas stations? There is no Wal-Mart in Europe, the retailers are market segmented, though some chain collaboration might work. McDonalds? Lack the network and the regulatory moxie. Hmmmm…..