Oblomovka

2003-01-27»

The talk I gave at the SDForum meet has now been slotted into the archive. It’s an hour long. I wouldn’t bother listening if I were you – I can give you the juicy bit in a nutshell.

I spoke about the old idea that Europe is approximately 18 months behind the US in terms of PC and Internet tech. My position was that this was true from about 1994-2001, but that this was a temporary blip, spurred mostly by the geographical and cultural advantage the US had in Internet adoption. Here’s the really fun graph:

I stole most of the stats for this graph from this paper. As you can see, between 1984 and 1994, PC ownership as %age of the population in the UK was higher than the US. The US sneaked ahead during a burst of computer ownership in the late nineties (I think perhaps spurred by faster Net adoption), but since then the distance between the two curves has narrowed. Or at least, I think it has – I had to a bit of extrapolation for some of the points on that last bit of the curve.

Here’s the other graph, which shows the narrowing of the “18 month” gap between the UK and US a bit more clearly.

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Reading Doc Searls’ entry on how American TV is changing, I think about my impressions about how slow, hide bound and expensive American TV networks appear compared to the UK networks. UK television is caught between the need to be very cheap (small country, higher costs) and the requirement to keep up some semblance of quality (big, well-funded BBC with high values). Now add to that a recent market-liberalisation-through-technology: Brits get dozens of channels via broadcast, digital satellite (23%) or digital terrestrial (6%), digital cable (8%), or analogue cable (7%). Forty percent of British TVs have some kind of interactivity feature, 80% of them have Teletext. (Stats grabbed from the ITC

Setting up a TV channel in Britain is surprisingly cheap: at the most basic level, you just pay for a satellite transponder, which can be less than a million quid. Of course, turning a profit in that multi-channel market isn’t easy, but the low barriers to entry and fierce competition does encourage innovation. Well, the innovation that leads to Millionaire, Robot Wars, and dozens of below-the-radar cheap-and-cheerful throw away shows, anyway. Your typical market competition, in other words. The BBC, curiously, doesn’t rise above this bear pit: much to the dismay of some its more patrician elements, it wades on in, fists flying, grabbing for audience share in an attempt to justify its license fee.

I don’t think one system is particularly better than the other. I am, however, surprised how it turns out. It seems to me that the slow-moving, top-heavy, seasons-and-repeats American model leads to the high production values, low risk, staid and cumbrous epics that you’d expect from a public service broadcaster. By contrast, the British market benefits from competing with the BBC, producing exactly the sort of bright, popular scrappy cheap tat that a more liberalised market is supposed to provide.

Doc’s piece is about how Reality TV is changing the American model – encouraging them to dump the expensive season and repeats model for a more lively, staggered run, with cheaper shows. I’m not surprised that a lot of those reality shows were forged in the furnace of the UK market.

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2003-01-26»

I’ve switched around my desktop a little, to see if it will encourage me to write more blog entries. I now have a tab on my terminal window dedicated to my latest blog entries, like Dave does, only with less outlining and more vim.

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2003-01-24»

Looks like there’s a large-scale DDOS going on. Rumour has it that it’s a Microsoft SQL worm. Certainly looks kinda nasty.

I’m going to sleep now, so I bet this post will look really stupid in the morning when we find out that it was actually aliens.

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2003-01-22»

As a result of my previous lifestyle as dramatist, impresario and monologuist, I have a wide array of glamourous and alluring British celebrity colleagues. But by some quirk of circumstance that I cannot fathom, the stars who I truly bonded with were not the type who hung out at top London nightspots and graced the front covers of GQ and the Evening Standard Magazine. They were the ones who sat at home of an evening, playing Everquest and downloading pornography. So, for instance, while I have worked many times with my marvellous beautiful and generous co-host Sara Cox, the closest we ever became, as friends, was when she got the director to ask me to stop staring at her during a “shoot”. On the other hand, Richard Herring was always very close, frequently calling me up to fix his computer and clarify more abstruse details of Star Trek chronology. A true friend, and never one to be put off by a little friendly staring.

Anyway, Richard Herring has a new and very funny blog. Another thing we have in common! I must email him or something. He’ll remember me, I’m sure of it.

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2003-01-19»

If you’re stuck for anything to do tomorrow (Monday) evening, may I suggest stumbling toward the Silicon Valley World Internet Center in Palo Alto, CA for around seven? I’m speaking to the Software Development Forum’s International SIG entitled “Divergence: How European and American tech markets are growing apart and what kind of headache that gives me in the morning.“. I’m writing the presentation now, and if I don’t start editing soon, it’ll be about Roombas, Warblogs, 802.11b, Wired UK,”Moore Or Less’s” Law, First Tuesday, Opera, Bulgaria, Googlism, and the Sunnyvale Corn Palace. $15 if you’re not an SDForum member or a student, but don’t worry – I won’t see a penny of it.

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2003-01-15»

On this sad day, at least somebody knows how to follow the instructions and stole that book.

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Apple’s done a sterling job popularising and now extending wireless use among computer users recently. But they’ve had a long history of doing the same thing. Back in 1995, when precious few people were considering the topic, they were lobbying the FCC to set aside some unlicensed space for data comms. Here’s a report from the EFF newsletter of the time:

Apple’s petition states:

“The NII Band would promote the full deployment of a National Information Infrastructure (“NII“), extending the effective reach of the NII by making possible high-bandwidth access and interaction throughout a limited geographic area — where mobility is key — both on a peer-to-peer, ad hoc basis and through wireless local area networks. Moreover, it would provide for unlicensed, wireless, wide area “community networks” connecting communities, schools, and other groups underserved by existing and proposed telecommunications offerings.

(The irony is that the frequency that Apple successfully lobbied for is, I believe, the same frequency that 802.11a now lives within. And 802.11a is the standard that Apple has pretty much killed by supporting the speed-bumped 802.11g in its Airport Extreme. Turned out that 2.4Ghz was good enough.)

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2003-01-13»

The STAND campaign is beginning to be picked up by the media. We’ve swung the vote from 2:1 support to nearly 2:1 against in four days.

I’m interested in seeing how the government replies to this. Officially, the consultation is just that, a consultation. The Home Office civil servants are still very insistent that there are no official government proposals on ID cards yet.

That position, unfortunately, was belied by Lord Falconer’s (and Downing Street’s) own press release in December that said:

Public support is growing for the government’s proposals on entitlement cards. The response so far to a public consultation on the scheme shows a two-to-one split in favour of the plans.

… which, really, is why STAND got involved. Public consultations aren’t referenda; but if you want to puff them up as such, you do have to live and die by the numbers. There’s no groundswell of support for ID cards, and the government knows it. There might be, if they actually engaged the public in a discussion. But that’s hard, and central government really have less experience in doing that than you’d hope. They’re also, admittedly, often not in the best place to do so. Who ever trusts a government document? The ID card doc tried very very hard to be an impartial, depoliticised document, and it fell over for two reasons. Firstly, and most crassly, because Falconer decided to politicise it. And secondly, and more subtly, because one of the interested parties in creating an ID card is the civil servants themselves. With all the objectivity in the world, that interest leaked through every page of the consultation doc.

In other news, Alan Mather, who works for the e-envoy (Britain’s Minister for The Bleepy Things), has spotted STAND for the first time. “I didn’t come across them during the RIP hoo-ha.”, he says, which is funny, because I’m pretty sure we started it. Hi, Alan!

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A friend of Rupert Goodwins fell and broke his leg while skiing in the Alps over Christmas. The good news: he could still reach and activate his mobile phone to call for help. The bad news: it was a Microsoft Smartphone.

The next time I looked at the phone it appeared to have turned itself off — so I tried switching it on again. When it eventually came to life I could not get it to dial — a closer examination revealed the legend ‘Radio off’ displayed very legibly on the SPV’s excellent screen. No amount of menu searching let me find anything that would turn the phone’s radio back on. At this point I remember making a few comments about the dubiousness of Bill Gates’ parentage. I eventually managed to flag down a passing skier who let me use her Nokia phone (which switched on immediately) to call for help. Later analysis revealed that the problem arose because of the SPV’s implementation of the ON/OFF button.

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