I am so into this photo essay

I love places like this: labs where geeks do their geekiest stuff. Thanks to Seed Magazine, you can see some great pictures, like this one taken at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Extra points if you can actually ID any of the gear in these racks.

Apple’s MobileMe frustrations

Apple’s MobileMe, its replacement for its .Mac cloud computing service, is having birthing pains, as this article by Carol Pinchefsky states. “Users are still having problems with the MobileMe service, five days after its launch. …The problems are particularly vexing because, in principle, MobileMe is a very good idea whose time has come.” You can read more along with my pungent quotes. And in a follow up piece, Carol also quotes me in talking about how Apple is giving 30 days of free service to try to make amends.

Fake iPhone commercial

No, I don’t still have one yet, although am thinking about it. Too bad you can’t share your minutes with your existing AT&T phones — you need a new contract. But while you mull that over, enjoy this commercial. And no, it doesn’t feature FSJ.

A grown-up’s guide to legal music downloads

The reason for the title is simple: we all know that a world of music is available for the stealing from any number of sites. But if you want to download music legally - and if you are going to pay for it you might as well get it without any DRM copy protection restrictions — what are your choices?

Before embarking on this project, I asked my kids if they have ever heard of any of these services. Other than iTunes, I got blank stares. Of course, none of them pay for their digital music, and don’t care. Here are the five sites that I spent time with:

eMusic.com offers several different monthly subscription plans for what they claim  are from two million DRM-free songs. The cheapest is for 30 song downloads at $12 per month, up to the most expensive at $20 for 75 songs a month. No matter which plan, you get 50 free downloads and you can cancel your subscription at any time. If you want to be really mercenary about the whole deal, you can sign up, take your 50 songs, and cancel within the same day, without spending a dime. You have to sign up before you can browse their store, however.

Rhapsody.com from Real Networks claims more than four million songs, and you can just listen to the full length of up to 25 tracks a month for free, provided you sign up and give them the right to send you unlimited email solicitations. (They are a bix obnoxious in that regard.) If you want to download them, you pay 99 cents per most songs or $10 per most albums. You can only download a song once, and if you use their Windows software, it will automatically add the songs to iTunes (but not Windows Media, they are still a bit huffy after the lawsuits). Mac or Linux users can download a zip file with multiple songs included, and then you have to manually import them into your music library.

Amazon.com has “millions” of songs, but unlike Rhapsody you can only listen to a 30 second sample and not the entire song. They have optional downloading software for Windows, Linux and Mac that will add them automatically to iTunes (or Windows Media) and makes buying multiple tracks simple. If you don’t use the downloader, you have to download one track at a time. Each song is 89 or 99 cents, albums range from $6 to $10. The ones I purchased had fairly high encoding rates of 256 kbps. You can only download them once like Rhapsody.

iTunes Music Store (who claims a catalog of five million songs) is beginning to experiment with DRM-free music from some of its publishers. The songs are 256 kbps encoded and cost the same as the copy protected songs. If you have bought a DRM’ed version previously you can upgrade for an additional 30 cents a track or a third of the price of the original album purchase. To do this (not that you want to give Apple any more dough), you go to the iTunes Store within the latest version of the software, click on the link for “iTunes Plus,” and then click on the upgrade button. It will show you which of your tracks can be upgraded and what it will cost. Unlike the other services, you are buying an AAC file rather than an MP3, but most portable and PC-based players will be okay with this format.

Finally, there is SpiralFrog.com, an interesting site run by a friend of mine that doesn’t charge for its downloads, but only gives you music that contains DRM. They claim 800,000 tracks and have a large music video selection as well. You need to be running a recent version of Windows, Windows Media Player and dot Net Framework. Unlike eMusic, you don’t need to register and Install their download manager to browse the site, so you can get an Idea of what they have to offer. But once you install their software, you can download whatever you desire. And one other limitation: you can’t copy their tracks to more than two portable players, and you can’t play them of course on iPods. You also can’t play them on Zunes, which shows you how messed up Microsoft’s DRM Is.

So there you have it. There are some choices, other than stealing your music. If you want to do a lot of downloads, I would go with eMusic, especially if you go beyond 15 or so songs a month, but it is a subscription service and right now you might feel as I do that you are paying enough between monthly charges for premium cable, premium DSL, and premium unleaded gas.

If you are the occasional downloader, as I am, then Amazon makes the most sense, especially as I have my music on my Mac and it has a nice client for that OS. You can turn on the one-click ordering and it is effortless. I don’t like Rhapsody’s corporate culture, and if you use the iTunes player the imports into your library is cumbersome. And while the iTunes Plus Music Store is trying to get more DRM-free tunes, most of its music is still copy-protected, so best to steer clear until that changes. Finally, SpiralFrog has an Interesting twist on the music download, but since I am Mac and iPod-based it isn’t for me.

This column was picked up by Pajamas Media (with a much better title, I have to say) and has some interesting comments from their readers.

Five things about news that will never be the same

I met Steve Boriss shortly after moving to St. Louis and he is one very smart dude. He teaches the class “The Future of News” at Washington University here and blogs at TheFutureOfNews.com. He and I have put together programs to help organizations and agencies succeed in the emerging news environment. I asked him to write this week’s column to introduce himself and to provoke some interesting discussion about the changes he sees coming for the news industry. Take it away, Steve.

For decades, when people referred to “the news,” we all knew what they meant.  It was what was covered by our handful of local metro newspapers and TV network affiliates.  And it all looked and sounded about the same – the same stories told from the same angles (a.k.a. “the national conversation”).   

But with the Internet now providing multitudes of new choices, audiences are completely rewriting the definition of news.  No one can say for sure where “news” will end-up, but it is already clear that news will no longer just be about these 5 things: 

1. Not just about “truth”

In America, the field of journalism essentially demands that its practitioners swear they are delivering “truth.”  Yet for all their efforts, only 18% of the public considers newspapers to be consistently believable.  A big problem is that the Internet reveals far too many instances where papers get it wrong, or alternative ways to look at events and come to nearly opposite conclusions.  But an even bigger problem is that delivering truths is a job that has always been better-suited for scientists, historians, and think tanks, not writer-generalists under intense deadline pressure. 

Look for news to become less about supposedly unimpeachable individuals publishing verified truths, and more about reliable individuals leading with rumors and unconfirmed reports, with accuracy refined over time as part of a conversation that draws in both official and unofficial news sources. 

2. Not just a single point-of-view

An unfortunate corollary of American journalism’s quest for truth has been the presumption that this quest can only lead to singular, correct answers, like in science.  But news today mostly covers issues relating to social and political sciences, which share their last name with hard sciences, but do not operate the same way.  Unlike true scientific disciplines, public policy issues are not testable using variable-controlling scientific methods that are capable of proving or shattering hypotheses.  There will always be unknowns and unknowables.  Moreover, in a free country there will always be room for citizens to state preferences based on their own pursuits of happiness, and to choose news outlets consistent with their own worldviews. 

Look for news outlets to fragment by partisanship or worldview, as audiences select outlets that share their voices.  For a sneak preview, look at London’s collection of partisan papers. 

3. Not just facts separated from opinion

It’s impossible to address this topic without a nod to the elephant in the room.  The idea that today’s journalism provides facts without opinion, as the field continues to insist, is no longer tenable.  An overwhelming two-thirds of the public no longer believes it, and they are right.  This is not because today’s journalists are incompetent – it is because separating facts from opinion is an utterly impossible goal.  The mere decision that an item is “newsworthy,” among the infinite number of possible stories and angles available, expresses an opinion, and it typically puts one person or cause on the defensive.   

Separating facts and opinion is not only impossible, it is also undesirable.  Why not let those who are more knowledgeable about news topics help us understand their meaning, or fill-in their best guesses on the unknowns?  We would never think to ask a doctor, lawyer, or other person whose more informed opinion might help us withhold their opinions. 

The rapid growth of the blogosphere was an indication of how thirsty the public was for opinion, particularly the opinion of those whose worldviews matched their own.  Look for the distinction between fact and opinion to continue to blur, and for the growing irrelevance of those who continue to insist that they can separate the two. 

4. Not just about the public sector

As Carolina Journal’s Jon Ham has noted, looking at the front page of almost any daily newspaper would lead you to believe that government and public sector programs are the essence of American life.  But, most of us have little to do with the public sector – the private sector is where we work, raise our kids, and live.  This obsession with the public sector has been more of a reflection of how journalists have defined their role in the country — as a powerful force for social change — and less of a reflection of what audiences have really been interested in. 

Look for more news about the private sector, our vocations, and our lifestyles. 

5. Not just about the lives of others

At its root level, “news” is simply new information shared within a community.  Since the community we care about most is our family and friends, it is not surprising that one of the biggest Internet developments so far has been the emergence of social computing, e.g. sites like Facebook and MySpace.  Yet, our news has been dominated by stories at the metro-area level and above.  This is not because audiences necessarily preferred this news, but because technology could efficiently deliver it. 

Look for more news about the people we know and the communities we live in, and relatively less about those we will never meet and places we will never go. 

Now that the Internet has given audiences more to choose from, they and not journalists will define what news is.  It will never be the same. 

 

Cheap tech, unusable tech

While gas prices continue to climb, it is helpful to see how much technology is a bargain these days. In doing some research for one of my speeches, I pored over some old computer magazines that I have, especially their ads, in a walk down memory lane. (I have been doing a lot of public speaking: today I am in Vegas, next week I am off to do a speech at my alma mater Union College.)

As short as ten years ago, a typical base price for a 16 MHz PC was $5,500, with 40 MB of disk storage. I think greeting card CPUs have more disk and clock speed than that old school PC. By the time you got a monitor, all of 12 inches in diagonal (try to find something that small today!), and some more RAM (2 MB sold for about $1,700), you were closing in on 10 large. Today, you would be hard pressed to pay more than $2,000, and you can get a decent laptop for less than half that.

When I first started doing IT work for Monolithic Insurance, I had to buy memory boards that were just the boards, devoid of any memory chips on them. This was back in the Jurassic era of computing, when 640 kilobytes was the maximum RAM we could use. We had to then “stuff” them with the little RAM chips, and make sure we didn’t bend their numerous pins as we were doing so. Those were the days. Now, a one gigabyte memory “stick” is about the size of my finger and no assembly is required, and can be had for less than $100. Just to put this in perspective, my daughter’s iPod has more storage than any of the PCs that I have owned up until a few years ago.

But it isn’t just that prices have come down. Lest we forget how important Internet connectivity is, two recent stories from the news show you why you wouldn’t want to leave home without it. After a woman’s Mac was stolen, its owner was notified that the thief was online and using her IM account. She then used the built-in camera and remote control software to capture a picture of its thief – who turned out to be two people she knew. The police were able to capture them and return the computer to the owner. And an  Eye-Fi equipped camera, stolen in Florida, automatically uploaded the photos taken by the thieves to the owner’s Web site. Too bad the photos didn’t reveal the location or the identity of the criminals.

I am not making this up. What this says to me is that Internet connectivity has become so intrinsic to the PC that we forget not too long ago you had to jump through all sorts of protocol hoops to install it and configure it. Now we just open up our laptops no matter where we are and usually can get a connection, and a free one at that.

But as I stumble down memory lane, I am beginning to feel my age. Some of these tech gadgets can be downright annoying, and I am starting to see how some of these thieves mentioned above feel when I go into the average public bathroom. Even though I am surrounded by technology during my business day, I don’t want to have to rely on my engineering degree to do my business.  With all of its electronic sensors and other technological wonders that are part of Bathroom 2.0, it can be frustrating even for the uber geeks among us. How about the soap dish that so nicely dispenses just two drops of soap,  or the automatic  faucet that splashes an inadequate amount of water on my hands? The final touch is the automatic paper towel (or air dryer), neither of which can deliver the goods. The former often presents me with a square of paper that could barely be used to dry one finger, let alone both hands, while the later either blows just enough air to move the water around your hands or shuts off after a few seconds, leaving you wet and frustrated.

So it is great that you can get a 32 GB USB thumb drive for less than $200, about half of what it went for a couple of months ago. But it sure would be nice if we could spend a little more time on making all this stuff more usable too.

Larry Hertzog, RIP

One of my guiltiest of guily pleasures has been listening the past couple of years to Drinks with Larry and Lauren.

A mostly weekly podcast that ran 90 minutes, the show was conversation between Larry Hertzog and Lauren Proctor, two show biz types that have been involved in many different TV and movie projects over the years. I am not one of these E-channel, Spears-addicted, star-tracking types, so it is an odd show for me to listen to. But the conversations were wonderful ways to fill an hour or so in the slower late afternoons and had lots of laughs.

Larry, sadly, passed away this weekend.  The show will be missed, and if you haven’t seen Nowhere Man, go to Netflix and rent a couple of DVDs.

Beware of online scams

I have had the dubious expertise of selling a lot of stuff via Craigslist, both here in St. Louis and also in Los Angeles. Over the past couple of years, I have come across some interesting scam artists who are fairly easy to spot. But today’s email arrived with a new exploit.

Usually, we are selling furniture. My wife is an interior decorator, and we have been through a few decorating changes. Now, when you sell a bed or some other large piece, you are not going to get too many people from out of town who are interested, unless they are moving into town. So the first tip off that something is amiss is when someone from overseas responds to the ad and says that they will pay for it sight unseen, matching your price. This violates three principles right off the bat:

• People like to negotiate prices, no matter how good a deal you are giving them. Anyone who is paying your price is suspect right there.
• People want to kick the tires and make sure that your item exists. Doesn’t matter what it is, but especially for furniture, because no photo can do any piece justice.
• Craigslist is hyper-local. Someone from out of town is suspect.

The legit customer is also going to want to think about his impending purchase, even for a few hours. And they will also pay cash, if you ask. (And you should demand cash, just because checks are so easily forged. Remember Frank Abagnale?) The con men are going to try to send you some kind of check, and mention that right off the bat in their initial email.

So my wife and I have developed our own parsing filter for these email responses, to separate the real offers from the fakers. All well and good, until we began advertising our apartment for rent this week. Today’s email brought the following:

I am highly impressed with the information in the listing. I don’t have any question at the moment. I wanna go ahead in renting the place from you. I’ll be the only person in the property. I work as a Researcher for my company (GLOBAL LINK) and I am coming to the area to carry out some research. They will be responsible for the first month rent and security deposit. I wish to sign the lease agreement in person and will be signing a year lease as soon as i get to the States. I’ll be moving to the States on March the 30th and i want the lease to start same date because I will be moving into the property directly. Kindly get the ad off from all listing because am taking the property for sure.
In the main time, I will like to secure the property asap so that i can attend to other important things for my move to the Country.
In order to proceed with payment, I will need the following information so that we can continue from there.
(1) FULL NAME AS IT WILL BE ON CHECK,
(2) MAILING ADDRESS,
(3) CELL NUMBER AND ALTERNATIVE NUMBER.
Kindly get back to me with the above information and in case of any query, please contact me on my phone number 0044XXXXXXX. Await your response asap.

A few things struck me about this email. First, why is he so eager? Second, why would someone from the UK (based on his phone number) in a financial services firm, move to St. Louis? Granted, we are becoming a bigger banking center with Wachovia buying AG Edwards, but still. Third, why is he using kindly so much? There is nothing kind about this, it is a business transaction. Fourth, the ALL CAPS is another tip-off. Fifth, the email came from Yahoo.com, rather than a corporate email account. Finally, why ask to remove the ad from Craigslist? Something didn’t add up.

A quick check online found the managing director of GlobalLink.com in the UK, and about an hour later he was kindly replying with the fact that the gent didn’t exist in his office. So case closed. But I just wonder how many people are less suspicious, or who don’t check out their potential buyers, fall into his trap?

Craigslist is a great site, and we have sold lots of stuff over the years on it. And they do a fairly good job of warning you about the con artists. But this just shows you that the bad guys are getting smarter all the time, which means you have to, too.

The technology behind Springfield’s Lincoln Museum

I am one of those inveterate museum goers. Often on a business trip I will take some time to stop by a favorite gallery or seek out a new one. And so, when I had a chance to write an article for the New York Times about the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., I jumped at the chance.

Alas, the story was cut from the paper at the last minute, but I thought I would share with you some of my experiences. What was interesting about the place, which has been open for about three years, is how it combines Vegas glitz and geeky gadgets to bring the scholarship of Lincoln’s life and the Civil War years into a modern context.

I spent about three hours there on a day that was turning into one of those Midwestern snow squalls, and it was fun to tour the place with their IT manager and see how they built some of the attractions. They have a wide variety of tech in place, from the ordinary such as theatrical lighting to the unusual with very advanced digital holographic projectors. It is far cry from a dusty collection of artifacts in glass cases, and the museum designers have succeeded at bringing many parts of the Lincoln story quite literally to life.

There are dozens of video projectors used throughout the place, including playing key roles in two theaters that run short programs – one is about Lincoln’s life, the other talks about library research where a live actor lip-synchs to the script and is part of a very snazzy special effect. The contrast of old and new stagecraft is fascinating, particularly when the actor told me that the technique used in his show dates back to Lincoln’s time, when they used gas lamps instead of electric lights and fiber optics.

Underneath each seat in one theater are special Butt Kicker speakers that respond to the rifle fire and cannon blasts on the soundtrack, creating vibrations that make these scenes very realistic. What the designers told me is how computer-controlled video programming is being used as another theatrical lighting instrument, and is changing the way they work. All of the video is digitized and plays from terabytes of hard disk storage. All of the systems have sophisticated error-checking routines and emails the technical staff when something goes wrong.

One of the more interesting videos is a short four-minute film that shows a map of the US and the entire Civil War. You see the constantly shifting front line between North and South, the number of casualties, and the major battles taking place. It is a powerful reminder of how devastating that war was.

Another video-intensive exhibit is an interpretation of the 1860 election that was filmed in Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” studios in Washington, D.C. The exhibit shows various TV monitors as if the visitor is in the studio’s control room, and the video clips and commercials are from the perspective of the four candidates running for office and their particular positions. This room alone uses three video servers and has 11 different TV monitors and runs under the control of a Windows NT PC. Yes, a version of Windows that isn’t even sold anymore is at the heart of this wonderful room. (Another PC runs DOS, too.)

The lighting and even temperature of the various rooms are all under computer control all in the goal of providing the best visitor experience. The computers take into account the existing ambient lighting based on time of day and sun position, and one room that shows the deathbed of one of Lincoln’s sons is several degrees cooler than the adjoining rooms, all to make it a bit more eerie.

Still, some artifacts are required to complement the technology. An antique stove that is part of an exhibit on what the White House kitchen of the 1860s looked like was purchased on eBay, and replicas of Lincoln’s famous documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address are in other rooms.  And as a reminder of the contrast between Lincoln’s legacy and his time in office, one room of the museum is devoted to a series of reproductions of political cartoons of the time, showing how unpopular Lincoln was during his presidency.

It is a great place, and well worth the visit if you ever have the chance. What I liked about the museum was how it combines the best of technology with ordinary museum practice to tell some great stories, and to teach people a little bit more about Honest Abe.

Searching for the real Bobby Fischer

There is a wonderful blog entry by Dick Cavett on the NY Times Web site about his interviews and contact with the chess genius and some interesting insights. Well worth the read.