Why Windows is Not the OS of the Future [The Future Boy Blog]
An image, courtesy of the Register, of Microsoft crashing the information screens at Baker Street on the London Underground. The crash is due to a nasty little piece of spyware called iexplore.exe.
Looks familiar, doesn't it? How many times have you seen a touchscreen in a public place, a tourist destination, an official kiosk of some sort, that's been knocked out by some impenetrable Windows crash? The staff, of course, have no idea how to restart it -- and so there it remains, a blot on the landscape, an affront to 21st century civilization, a thumb-to-the-nose at the dream of effortless touchscreening in modern life. The parasitical spyware wins.
You'd never see a dumb-ass crash like this on a Linux or Mac machine, of course. But there's still no mass-market version of Linux that's simple enough for London Underground workers to not freak out around, and of course Apple would never sully its hands with something so base and anonymous as a public touchscreen. And so we sally forth into the future, the world running on an outdated OS. But one day, inevitably, the tide of history will wipe this arrogant, corrupt code off the face of the planet.
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Future Boy)
Lou Reed Meets Web2.0 [The Key]
If you're a Lou Reed fan, this story will depress you.
Last night I headed to San Francisco's Palace Hotel to attend a party ASK.com threw as part of the Web2.0 conference. I strolled into the lobby at 9 pm, and it was still crowded: A sea of blue shirts, people smoozing, typing on laptops, staring at their phones or some related device. The usual.
I wasn't sure where I was going. Then, I heard some live music coming from a room off the hallway. I pulled open a conference-room door to discover--admittedly, it took me a good minute to realize who it was--Lou Reed playing on a small stage. Yes, that Lou Reed, as in Velvet Underground, Berlin, Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Sweet Jane and on and on and on. Now, here's the painful part: The crowd was yaking away like it was some wedding band. Blackberries were aglow. Cell phone chatter continued.
Lou looked miserable. He ended a song, looked out and, in that distinctive Lou Reed voice, said to the crowd: "Maybe you can talk louder."
He continued: "I can turn the sound up and hurt you."
Some people cheered.
Lou gave the order to the sound guy: "Turn it up."
He strummed a blaring chord, then spoke some more, turning up the irony.
"This is the moment I've waited for my whole life. When I was on St Marks Place I thought, someday there'll be a cyberspace and I'll be playing for AOL." (AOL sponsored the concert).
Then Lou and his trio rocked. It was an unusual lineup. He was accompanied by two amazing bass players, Fernando Saunders, who played standard-style electric bass, and Rob Wasserman, who played a totally funky Clevinger electric upright.
It was all ear-splitting and wonderful. Even this crowd couldn't ignore
him. People lept from their chairs. Everyone pushed towards the stage.
He played Sweet Jane. It became an amazing show.
The crowd screamed for an encore, but Lou would have none of it. He was done.
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Paul Sloan)
Real Soft Gadgets: Haptex Seeking Virtual Velvet [Soft Gadgets]
ComputerActive has an article on a European research project, Haptex, which aims to "to develop a Virtual Reality System (including both
software and hardware) for visuo-haptic interaction with virtual
textiles." "Haptic" refers to the sense of touch, and haptics are a growing field of virtual interaction, wherein gloves and styluses are used to collect physical interaction from the user and give back to the user physical feedback from the system, like resistance or vibrations or an electrical shock. (Obviously, these have big applications in gaming.) The current technology, nicely shown off in a video at the Haptex website (QuickTime link) basically consists of "feeling" 3D digital object with a pair of motorized chopsticks or thimbles. 
But Haptex doesn't want you to just drag and drop virtually rendered 3D blocks--they want you to go shopping for clothes. That requires measuring the 3D and surface properties of a real object, much as a camera records andimage or a recorder captures sound. It requires being able reliably reproduce that information (think film development or image display/speakers) in an interactive way. The future implications for Web, er, n.0, from shopping to sharing, would add a whole new hardware element to your browser. (Imagine MySpace 2015 with parents desperately trying to stop kids from sharing the feel of their hair or fingertips.)
They'll be displaying a prototype next week at the Helsinki Information Society Technologies conference, and have a lot of technical papers at their site. A field to keep a hand on. Link via Tech Digest.
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (SaheliDatta)
Go Daddy Goes for Spice [The Key]
Go Daddy’s Bob Parsons had intended to speak about the patent his company received, but, in true Parsons form, he played a bunch of videos at the Web2.0 conference instead. Parts probably wouldn’t make it by the decency committee. Yes, those are the words “Go Daddy” scribbled on this woman’s chest.
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Paul Sloan) and software by Elliott Back
Time for an Apple Phone [The Key]
Microsoft (MSFT) is getting tons of publicity about its upcoming Zune music player, and it might indeed take a slice of the iPod market. But think about it: Isn’t this the perfect time for Steve Jobs and the gang in Cupertino to finally launch the Apple (AAPL) branded iPhone? Apple watchers have been speculating about this for ages, and I reported back in April 2005 that a iPhone was in the works. So what better way to send the team at Microsoft back to the lab then to start to phase out the iPod itself and phase in the iPhone.
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (Paul Sloan) and software by Elliott Back
Giving Search A Fresh Look-Yahoo, MSN, & Exalead Win [Soft Gadgets]
Today at the Web 2.0 conference Safa Raschty of Piper Jaffray presented a panel of "regular " users—teens and moms–and quized them on their online habits. In this sample, anyway, Google (GOOG) dominates search. One woman noted that she sometimes uses Yahoo (YHOO) by mistake because of her toolbar, and another woman said she likes Ask.com because of questions versus keywords. Another woman said she had never even seen Live Search, offered by Microsoft. (MSFT) I found a flyer for hakia—" a new meaning-based search engine." It seems like a return to the old promise of linguistically smart search, instead of the keywords and links that won out with Google. And who knows–maybe computers and technology have improved enough that it’s time to revisit that concept.
But in the mean time there is the reality that we are almost all deeply conditioned to use Google. As one of my editors [...]
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (SaheliDatta) and software by Elliott Back
Giving Search A Fresh Look-Yahoo, MSN, & Exalead Win [Soft Gadgets]
Today at the Web 2.0 conference Safa Raschty of Piper Jaffray presented a panel of "regular " users---teens and moms--and quized them on their online habits. In this sample, anyway, Google (GOOG) dominates search. One woman noted that she sometimes uses Yahoo (YHOO) by mistake because of her toolbar, and another woman said she likes Ask.com because of questions versus keywords. Another woman said she had never even seen Live Search, offered by Microsoft. (MSFT) I found a flyer for hakia---" a new meaning-based search engine." It seems like a return to the old promise of linguistically smart search, instead of the keywords and links that won out with Google. And who knows--maybe computers and technology have improved enough that it's time to revisit that concept.
But in the mean time there is the reality that we are almost all deeply conditioned to use Google. As one of my editors said today, "when your competition's name has become the verb for your product, you're in trouble." The scientist in me recognizes that branding can be more influential on people's perception of the quality of an experience than quality itself, and Google is incredibly well branded. One teenager enthused that if Google were a person, he'd be friends with it. I can't do stastistically rich comparisons of these engines, but every now and then it might be worth it to do a spot check comparison. So I entered the same business-related query in all Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN Live, hakia, and Exalead. I wrote up the paragraph on what I was looking for before, below, before I saw the results, and then scored each page for the proportion of the first page of results which were relevance, noticing bonus shine for super informative relevance. The results were
- Google: 2/10
- Yahoo: 6/10
- Ask: 3/10
- MSN Live: 4/10 with extreme shine for relevance.
- hakia: 1/10 with some shine for relevance
- Exalead 4/10: with some shine for relevance.
I should note that by using keywords instead of questions, I was operating outside of hakia and Ask's preferred paradigm. My question, rationale, and the results after the jump.
There is, of course, the notion that the particular string of keywords I happened to decide on first was not the best set of keywords. If I had been doing the search for real in my usual Google-only habits, I would have glanced at the results and immediately started fiddling with the query. But this seemed like the fairest way. My take home conclusion--mix it up and keep an eye on the others, particularly Yahoo, MSN, and Exalead. Interesting topics I didn't look at--the relevance of the ads and the user interface.
Real Curiousity About Local and Organic Cotton
At work the topic of fair trade and local consumption came up (See this Slate article for background--my interest in American cotton is not because of xenophobia but because of the physical cost of trade.) Say I was an entrepreneur interested in providing cloth made from locally grown organic cotton. (For the purposes of trade-dominated textiles, locally made is the United States.) How would I even begin researching the proposition? Unless I want to be a farmer, I'd probably want to search for American farmers growing organic cotton. I searched for [organic american cotton farmer] and counted pages that I thought would either directly help me find suppliers or tell me about potential competition.
The first page of Google results has a Harper's timeline about agriculture, one page about African cotton, two about Brazilian cotton, three on Indian cotton, a page of links to sellers of organic cotton clothing, a description of organic African cotton on a clothing-merchant's website that practically implies all American cotton is not organic, and (the very last query!) a profile of an American farm that is growing more organic cotton from sare.org, which stands for "Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education." So, 1/10 truly helpful links. Let's count the list of links and call it 2/10.
Yahoo
Yahoo gives us an article about Brazil and an article about the global impact of American trade subsidies. The second result is a promising but extremely low-tech and hard to read article about organic cotton. The third is a profile of a New Mexico cotton farmer. Next a page about a British book on organic cotton, a profile of a California organic cotton grower, a different profile of the New Mexico farmer, another profile at sare.org, a pdf of that article, and a profile of another merchant who works with American farmers of organic cotton. 6/10, considering the duplicate, and not counting the British book, which I personally think would be helpful to an intrepid searcher.
Ask.com
Ask.com used to be Ask Jeeves and is owned by InteractiveCorp (IACI). It gets us a company that is composed of Texan organic cotton farmers and sells fabric by the bolt, two articles on the issue of subsidies and foreign farmers, one genetic engineering, a short page about a California-based farmer of naturally colored organic cotton, a history of American conventional cotton (courtesty of a hemp site), a rant, an article on the general transition to organic farming, and two copies of an article by Josh Sims about organic cotton clothing. 3/10 counting the duplicates.
MSN Live
MSN's Live first gives us the press page of Organic Exchange. It takes one click to understand this, and that's not the best page to land on, but it's by far the most relevant website so far, dedicated entirely to organic cotton and with a searchable directory of organic cotton suppliers and lots of links and information. There's a mess of links on a generic organic portal. Another press page proves, with one click, to be highly relevant--the website for the Sustainable Cotton Project. There's another copy of the Sims article, some pages about general organic farming and foreign cotton, and then the splash page of an audio piece called "What's up with Cotton," featuring the founder of the Sustainable Cotton Project, an organic cotton farmer from California, and a doctor who works with farm workers, as well as several deeply relevant links. That's 4/10, with bonus shine for extreme relevance.
hakia
The first 9 of hakia's results were all either about trade and foreign farmers or general organic issues, but the last was the press page of the Sustainable Cotton Project's website. 1/10, with some bonus shine for relevance.
Exalead
Exalead has the Sims article, a 1995 article about the difficulties facing American cotton farmers considering the organic transition, a 24 page guide to growing and selling cotton clearly aimed at Americans, an article about Indian cotton farmers, a TreeHugger post on the organic cotton supply chain, two ad pages for t-shirts, a junk portal, and a dead link. 4/10, with some bonus shine points for relevance.
Notes:
When the webcrawlers come through and index this blogpost, that will probably muck up the results. I've saved the first page of each engine's results as an html file, and will post them somwhere if necessary.
Original post by noemail@noemail.org (noemail@noemail.org (SaheliDatta)