Tag: Computers

Sun’s big black shipping container is the most exciting thing to happen in computer hardware since they stopped shipping them with casters..

I remember sitting around rapping with my friends (my less fashionable friends, obviously) ten years ago about how, one day, you’d be able to rent computing power like you rent a skip or a generator or a portakabin or some other very basic unit of business capacity. I seem to remember wondering if it might come on a flatbed truck in a sort of anonymous-looking box and that you might just have to plug the thing in, attach it to the Internet and forget about it.

We speculated that the thing would probably ‘virtualise’ its capacity so that it appeared on your network as a single (huge) block of CPU and storage, no matter what was actually in the box.

Of course it didn’t occur to us that this thing might help with the kind of capacity crunch that hits a Web 2.0 business when its trendy site goes viral or gets onto the Yahoo home page. Nor did we really worry for a minute about the disastrous environmental impact of the vast datacentres serving YouTube and Google and MySpace (it didn’t occur to me that it might need its own water supply, either, I suppose).

What I like about The Black Box Project is that it’s evidence of Sun‘s continued creativity and defiance of the apocalyptic commoditisation of their core business. Sun ought to have gone bust three or four years ago: fast, flexible CPU is now cheap as chips, the UNIX workstation is no more. Not one of Sun‘s unassailable differentiators turned out to be defensible. Sun is proof that brains can reverse the ugly trend towards zero in the hardware business. Well done to Sun. I’m going to be looking out for Black Boxes round the back of all the big businesses I visit.

Thanks to Eastern Waste Disposal for the picture of a skip.

In May 2002 I wrote this piece for The Guardian. In it I celebrated the unlikely survival of the big, dumb, general-purpose PC – over-determined, over-specced and over here. Four years on… Gordon Bennet. Would you credit it… it’s still here… Not so big, slightly less dumb but even more general-purpose.

As before, though, there’s no rational reason for the survival of the PC as a product category. All of its functions should by now have migrated into a cloud of special-purpose intelligent chaff floating around your home and your person. But no, it’s still here, and treasured by its fans more than ever – the PC looks likely to be around for a while yet…

Mind blowing sale at Christies: ‘The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking & Telecommunications’. Over 200 important documents from the history of computing, mathematics and calculation – some over 400 years old and valued at up to $70,000.

Finally, a gadget that allows you to rewind life. A tiny video camera (the manufacturers expect you to clip it to your glasses – but if you got used to that Bluetooth headset this should be easy enough) that records continuously and retains a 30-second buffer. Pressing record writes the last 30 seconds to disk – in principle, you need never miss anything again. In practice, of course, you’ll find yourself needing a larger and larger buffer. I think I’d need about thirty-five years…

The wholesale Tivo-isation of life is under way. There’ll soon be no need to actually experience anything – you can just wait til you get home and replay the whole thing on the big screen in your living room. Once we’re all time-shifting life, the disconcerting feeling that your companion is experiencing things a couple of minutes behind you (because they put life on pause while they went for a smoke) will become commonplace…

I’ve been thinking about Creo’s interesting attempt to improve on P2P file distribution – a product called Tokens (I blogged it here the other day). If you want to try a Tokens transfer yourself, email me and I’ll send you a token. You’ll need to download the free Tokens Redeemer but, once you’ve done so, you’ll be able to snaffle a set (or should I say a ‘limited edition’) of three photographs taken by me at the wonderful Carters Steam Fair when it came to St Albans in August 2003.

The photographs were all taken on 35mm Kodachrome film and scanned at 6MPixels so you’re getting a total of about 7MB of high resolution JPEGs (you can click the small pics above for larger previews to see if you like them).

I’ve published the photographs under a Creative Commons License that allows you to do pretty much what you want with them except modify them or make money from them (like you’ll bother).

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Creo integrated a Creative Commons licence creator with Tokens? That way, creating (or deciding not to create) your CC licence would be part of the Token Creation process and, if Tokens catches on, it could become an automatic step in the distribution of creative works in this machine-to-machine way. Tokens could become the default application for distributing files with embedded rights (but not for ‘DRM’ which is a totally different animal).

Things change at different rates. Bandwidth, for instance, is all over the place. At the net’s core – in the trenches between ISPs and data centres – aggregate bandwidth in the last decade has multiplied by… ooh… a million? Up the path to your house, though, it’s barely doubled. What have you got, right now? 56K? Pathetic. Even ADSL gives you barely twenty times what you got from Demon in 1993. Meanwhile, your hard drive is filling up with bigger and bigger files – 3MB for a 6MPixel JPEG, 50MB per album for MP3s, 4GB for a DVD movie, 60GB for an hour of DV – but the tools we use for moving these enormous files around are as old as the hills and either inadequate (email) or inaccessible (ftp). We need new tools.

So I’m testing Creo’s Tokens – a tool for moving huge files around machine-to-machine without having to set up ftp accounts or worry about email attachment quotas and other annoyances. It works on the Adobe Acrobat model – if you want to create and send big files you buy a product called Token Creator (analagous to the Acrobat authoring tools).

You drag-and-drop your files onto the Creator app which makes a pair of new files: a ‘bundle’ which contains the original data (compressed and mashed into a single file) and a ‘token’ which is a tiny pointer designed to be sent in email. Recipients need to download a free app called Token Redeemer (analagous to the Acrobat Reader but with a slightly more religious name). Once you’ve got the Redeemer installed, double-clicking on a token starts a direct transfer from the Creator’s machine. Bingo. Creators can time-limit their tokens so that storage-eating bundles disappear automatically after a few days or weeks.

There’s a server app for people who intend to distribute lots of files and if a firewall gets in the way of a smooth transfer Creo’s own server cuts in and relays the file via http (a service Creators pay for).

I like the product and I certainly have a use for it (mostly swapping Laurel & Hardy MP3s with my friend Paul). I can also imagine lots of cool new uses once it becomes more widespread. I’m worried about the business model, though. Creators pay $49 to play which doesn’t seem unreasonable until you examine the product’s likely uses. If it’s strictly a business product then charging to create is fine, but if, as I suspect, there’s a ready audience among consumers swapping those big media files it’s hard to imagine it taking off.

The model already has three tiers: Redeemer (free), Creator ($49) and Server ($395). Adding a free Creator (perhaps limited to n transfers per month or with the relay service switched off) would jump start the creation of tokens and that might be enough to get the product onto the web adoption curve properly. With creation choked off, though, getting to critical mass is going to be take a long time and cost a lot of money.

Some really good books from O’Reilly have arrived lately. The Hacks series is going to some really interesting places, taking in Google, Amazon, TiVo and now eBay (I reviewed the Google book in The Guardian a few months ago). David Pogue’s Missing Manuals series is also getting more and more useful. Standing permanently next to the Near Legendary Kitchen Cube (it’s a Cube and we keep it in the kitchen) are the latest on iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto plus the essential iPod text and two little handbooks ? one on Digital Video and one on Google.

I’ve been using Macs since 1985 (I make that 18 years) so I’ve felt at home there for a long time but OS X is a fascinating and foreign place for me, even a couple of years into the experience. So now I’ve got a copy of O’Reilly‘s excellent Mac OS X Hints next to the bed. So far I’ve learnt how to speed up iPhoto on our very old kitchen Cube (turn off the drop shadow), how to cd by dragging a file into Terminal (is that cool or what?) and how to speed up iMovie rendering (hide the app). This is a useful book.