Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2011

Belgian newspapers win appeal against Google

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

Apparently, even a short summary and a hyperlink are considered to be a violation of copyright in Belgium:

A Belgian appeals court has upheld an earlier ruling that Google infringes on newspapers’ copyright when its services display and link to content from newspaper websites, according to press reports.

The search engine giant is responsible for infringing the copyrights of the papers when it links to the sites or copies sections of stories on its Google News service, the Belgian Court of Appeals said, according to a report in PC World.

Google must not link to material from Belgian newspapers, the court said, according to the report (in French). No translation of the ruling is yet available.

[. . .]

The newspapers argued that they were losing online subscriptions and advertising revenue because Google was posting free snippets of the stories and links to the full article on Google News.

Google’s search engine offers links to the websites it indexes but also to “cached” copies of those pages. The copies are stored on Google’s own servers.

April 23, 2011

Google Easter egg hunt

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:18

A bit of light fluff for the Easter weekend: Another Dozen Google Easter Eggs.

QR on Demand With Goo.gl
Most Google easter eggs are played strictly for laughs, but this one’s actually useful: When you’re working with Google’s URL shortener, goo.gl, simply add “.qr” to any shortened URL to generate a scannable QR code for the Website in question

April 10, 2011

A world always at war

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, History, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

This is an interesting site:

The screencap above shows the significant sites in the Mäntsälä rebellion in Finland in 1932 (no, I’d never heard of it either). Use the slider at the bottom of the screen to choose the time in history, and the map will show you the known conflicts for that period.

April 8, 2011

Graphic illustrating why I don’t expect my MP to change

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Whitby-Oshawa 2008 votingWhitby-Oshawa 2008 legendHere’s the riding of Whitby-Oshawa in the 2008 election. Notice all that deep blue colour? As the legend says, the opacity of colour indicates the strength of the party in that area. Up in the Brooklin area, you can barely see the underlying road pattern for all the blueness.

You can find how blue (or red, or whatever) your riding is by using the cyberpresse.ca Interactive map (this is now available in English: the original was in French). It’s another illustration of how to use Google Maps to display geographical data in interesting ways.

This time around, I’ll at least have a Libertarian candidate to vote for: Josh Insang is running for the Libertarian Party. Check the LPC Candidate page to see if you have a Libertarian running in your riding.

April 1, 2011

Google introduces “Gmail Motion”

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

February 18, 2011

How to view PDF documents natively in Chrome

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Royce McDaniels provides step-by-step instructions for installing the PDF reader plug-in for the Chrome browser:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s How To segment here at The Walrus Says! Today we’re examining another useful feature of the Chrome web browser from Google, namely the ability to display Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files directly in the browser rather than via an external application like Google Docs which has been necessary before. The instructions below not only show you how to activate this feature of Chrome, but show you an interesting way to access Chrome functionality not part of the standard configuration menus! (Chrome itself is an Open Source project sponsored by Google; you can get complete information about the browser’s development at The Chromium Project. Enjoy!

I’m still (barely) sticking with Firefox as my primary browser, although it’s becoming a pain to use these days: for example, as I’m typing this line, the letters I type are appearing several seconds after I type ’em. It’s a bit like using an old 300 baud line with a small buffer. If the next major release of Firefox doesn’t fix this problem, then I’ll be switching to Chrome as my primary browser.

September 30, 2010

Chopping off the “long tail” of Google searches?

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:29

For your daily contrarian view of the wonderfulness of Google’s new Instant Search feature, we turn to SmoothSpan:

The Internet is a Mighty Echo Chamber, and with one fell swoop, Google Instant Search has added a big ole’ Marshall Stack to turn the Echo levels all the way up to 11.

Google reports that Instant Search will save 350 million hours of user time per year. What isn’t reported is how it will cut off the Long Tail where it starts by promoting banal sameness for searchers. This is great for Google. After all, keeping up with every last oddball search someone may want to do costs them more infrastructure money. At their scale, it is significant. So, corralling everyone into fewer more common searches is a good thing.

[. . .]

How does Google Instant Search contribute to the Echo Chamber? Well anyone who has bothered to look through keyword information on their website will see that people find sites through a bewildering array of queries. Some might even say much of it is accidental, but looking over these lists gives a wonderful window onto how your content is found and perceived by others. How often do we get to commit such telepathy with our followers? Rarely. Yet, Instant Search will substitute popular searches for those individually created. More people will be driven off the back roads search trails and onto the superhighways that lead to whomever controls the first few search results connected to the Instant Searches Google is recommending at the time.

Oddly enough, I was talking about Google searches the other day with DarkWaterMuse (whose blog is offline at the moment), but it was more in the context of “how often are the sponsored links actually useful to you?” We both agreed that the correct answer fell somewhere in the range of “rarely” to “never”.

August 12, 2010

If you search for “James Buchanan worst president ever” you get 1,550,000 hits

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:47

But in spite of that, he’s still getting a dollar coin minted in his honour:

The 15th coin in the presidential $1 coin program honors President James Buchanan. It features an image of the president with the inscriptions “James Buchanan”, “In God We Trust”, “15th President” and “1857-1861.”

The reverse side of the coin shows the Statue of Liberty. The ceremonial launch and coin exchange will take place at Wheatland, the former president’s home.

About the only thing that might make this a good idea is if the value is pegged to the pre-Civil War dollar.

June 16, 2010

The irritating part of “mobile computing”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Cory Doctorow just got back from a book tour, but unlike all the other ones, he found this tour was both pleasant and productive, thanks to mobile computing:

I “rooted” my Nexus One, breaking into the OS so that I could easily “tether” it to my laptop, using it as a 3G modem between tour stops (we didn’t have to root my wife’s matching phone, as Google supplied us with an unlocked developer handset). My typical tour day started at 5am with breakfast and work on the novel, then a 6am interview with someone in Europe, then pickup, two to four school visits with a short lunch break, three or four interviews, then a bookstore signing or a plane (or both). As busy as that sounds, there’s actually a fair bit of dead time in it while sitting in the escort’s car, trying to find the next stop.

This time round, I plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and the phone into the laptop — this gave the phone a battery charge and the laptop internet access. And best of all, it meant that I could harvest those dead minutes to answer emails, keep on blogging, and generally stay abreast of things.

Which meant that I got lots more of the touring author’s most precious commodity: sleep. On previous tours, returning to the hotel meant sitting down for three to four hours’ worth of emails before bed, which cut my sleep time to less than four hours some nights.

So all is sweetness and light with modern mobile computing, yes? Not quite:

. . . the fundamental paradox of mobile — so long as the mobile carriers remain a part of mobile computing, it will only work for so long as you don’t go anywhere.

One of the more frustrating parts of travelling with my iPhone has been that I have to basically lobotomize it before crossing the border, reducing it from really powerful smart phone to a PDA with a phone line: the data and “roaming” charges are so high that it’s not economical to use them for anything other than an emergency. Just when being able to get driving directions or hotel or restaurant recommendations would be most useful — on the road or in an unfamiliar city — the cost is usually too high to justify turning on the damned feature.

Yes, you can hunt down wifi connections (and I did, on my last few trips to the US), but it hardly counts as convenient. The phone companies still assume anyone travelling with a smart phone is going to be spending their employers’ money and therefore won’t notice or care about the up-front costs.

June 11, 2010

It’s not really about market share: that’s just keeping score

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:45

Eric Raymond thinks a lot of people are missing the point on the ongoing iPhone-Android battle:

It’s not about whether or not Apple will be crushed. It’s not about who makes the “best” products, where “best” is measured by some interaction between the product and the speaker’s evaluation of the relative importance of various features and costs. It’s about what the next generation of personal computing platforms will be. Down one fork they’ll be open, hackable, and user-controlled. Down the other they’ll be closed, locked down, and vendor-controlled. Though there are others on each side of this struggle, in 2010 it comes down to whether Apple or Android wins the race to over 50% smartphone market share; after that point, network effects will become self-reinforcing until the next technology disruption.

If he’s right — and he very well might be — then Apple’s moderately disappointing upgrades in the newly announced iPhone 4 may have handed the long-term advantage to Google. This may be bad news for Apple shareholders, but it’ll be a long-term positive for mobile computing.

May 22, 2010

Copyright suits . . . and profanity

Filed under: Humour, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Cory Doctorow finds fulfilling both interests easy in this case:

You know what I’m interested in? Copyright lawsuits.

And profanity.

Lucky for me, Google and Viacom have provided both today, in the form of a series of emails released through the discovery process in Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube. In these emails, the two companies take turns cussin’ and spittin’ and swearin’ about each other. Hilarity ensues. Ars Technica rounds up some of the highlights.

May 11, 2010

Android alert!

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Apple fanboi faithful must be having mass cases of the vapours with the news that Android sales are eating everyone’s lunch:

I’ve written before that I think Google has been running a long game aimed against the telecomms carriers’ preferred strategy of customer lock-in, and executing on that game very well. Against the iPhone, its strategy has been a classic example of what the economist Clayton Christensen called “disruption from below” in his classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. With the G-1, Google initially competed on price, winning customers who didn’t want to pay Apple/AT&T’s premium and were willing to trade away Apple’s perceived superiority in “user experience” for a better price. Just as importantly, Android offered a near-irresistible deal to the carriers: months, even years slashed off time-to-market for a state-of-the-art cellphone; a huge advantage in licensing costs; and the illusion (now disintegrating) that said carriers would be able to retain enough control of Android-powered devices to practice their habitual screw-the-customer tactics.

In Christensen’s model, a market being disrupted from below features two products, sustaining and disrupter, both improving over time but with the disruptor at a lower price point and lesser capabilities. Typically, the sustaining company will be focused on control of its customers and business partners to extract maximum margins; on the other hand, the disruptor will be playing a ubiquity game, sacrificing margin to gain share. The sustaining company will gold-plate its product in order to chase high-end price-insenstive customers; the disruptor will seek out price-sensitive low-end customers.

I have to admit, I didn’t see this coming . . . I thought Google was mistaken to put so much development effort into the mobile phone market. I was clearly wrong about that.

In the smartphone market I have been expecting a disruptive break that would body-slam Apple’s market share, but I expected it to be several quarters in the future and with a really fast drop-off when it happened. Instead, it looks like Apple took a bruising in 4Q 2009 and has failed to regain share in 1Q 2010 while Android sales continued to rocket. Android hammered market-leader Blackberry just as badly, a fact which has gooten far less play than it probably should because the trade-press loves the drama of the Apple-vs.-Google catfight so much.

What actually seems to be going on here is that Android is successfully disrupting both Apple and Blackberry from below; together they’ve lost about 25% of market share, not enough to put Android on top but close enough that another quarter like the last will certainly do that.

I’ve heard several comments from folks that Apple’s iPhone sales are probably lower because of the widespread interest in the “next” iPhone model, which is likely to be announced in the next few weeks. Apple has followed this pattern since introducing the original iPhone, but there’s no rule saying they can’t break the pattern.

I’ll be interested in the announcement, as I’ll have a year left in my Rogers contract, so if the next iPhone isn’t a block-buster, I’ll be considering other options for when I’m out of contract.

April 30, 2010

The revolution is almost complete . . . hold on tight

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Charles Stross thinks he understands why Steve Jobs won’t allow Adobe Flash on to the iPhone and iPad:

Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why . . .

We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing. With increasing bandwidth, data doesn’t need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. Modem uptake drove dot-com 1.0; broadband uptake drove dot-com 2.0. Now everyone is anticipating what you might call dot-com 3.0, driven by a combination of 4G mobile telephony (LTE or WiMax, depending on which horse you back) and wifi everywhere. Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. (3G is already good for 6mbps, which is where broadband was around the turn of the millennium. And there are ISPs in Tokyo who are already selling home broadband delivered via WiMax. It’s about as fast as my cable modem connection was in 2005.)

[. . .]

This is why there’s a stench of panic hanging over silicon valley. this is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it’s why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone’s trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Read the whole thing. I don’t see any obvious flaw in his line of thought. It may not happen the way he predicts, but it is consistent with what we know, and it should frighten the heck out of Apple’s competitors.

April 1, 2010

Gmail’s latest problem

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 15:57

December 21, 2009

The evolution of the smart phone

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Charles Stross looks at the rapid changes in the mobile computing and telephone markets brought about by the smart phone:

Pre-2005, digital mobile phones typically ran on GSM, with GPRS data limited to 56kbssec, or Verizon’s CDMA. This badly choked their ability to do anything useful and internet-worthy. By 2005, the first 3G networks based on WCDMA (aka UMTS) began to open up. By 2009, 3G HSDPA networks can carry up to 7.2mbps. The modem-grade data throughput of the mid-noughties smartphone experience has been replaced by late-noughties broadband grade throughput, at least in the densely networked cities where most of us live. (I am not including the rural boondocks in this analysis. Different rules apply.)

To the mobile phone companies, 3G presented a headache. They typically offered each government billions for the right to run services over the frequencies freed up by the demise of old analog mobile phone services and early TV and other broadcast systems; how were they to monetise this investment?

They couldn’t do it by charging extra for the handsets or access, because they’d trained their customers to think of mobile telephony as, well, telephony. But you can do voice or SMS perfectly well over a GSM/GPRS network. What can you do over 3G that justifies the extra cost?

Version 1 of their attempt to monetise 3G consisted of walled gardens of carefully cultivated multimedia content — downloadable movies and music, MMS photo-messaging, and so on. The cellcos set themselves up as gatekeepers; for a modest monthly fee, the customers could be admitted to their garden of multimedia delights. But Version 1 is in competition with the internet, and the roll-out of 3G services coincided (and competed) with the roll-out of wifi hotspots, both free and for-money. It turns out that what consumers want of a 3G connection is not what a mobile company sees fit to sell them, but one thing: bandwidth. Call it Version 2.

Becoming a pure bandwidth provider is every cellco’s nightmare: it levels the playing field and puts them in direct competition with their peers, a competition that can only be won by throwing huge amounts of capital infrastructure at their backbone network. So for the past five years or more, they’ve been doing their best not to get dragged into a game of beggar-my-neighbour, by expedients such as exclusive handset deals (ever wondered why AT&T in America or O2 in the UK allowed Apple to tie their hands and retain control over the iPhone’s look and feel?) and lengthening contractual lock-in periods for customers (why are 18-month contracts cheaper than 12-month contracts?).

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