April 7th, 2008
The glide path to an open society
The International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Switzerland-based group responsible for Olympic event planning, has been putting pressure on China to open the Internet during the games in Beijing as part of host-nation commitment to media openness. As Ars Technica reported, the results have been decidedly mixed. Though Chinese Internet users have noted that access to sites like wikipedia and blogspot have been somewhat improved, links to sensitive topics, such as the Tiananman Square incident of 1989 and the current uprising in Tibet, are either inaccessible, or available inconsistently.
The fact that China even responds to such requests for media openness, however, is a function of China’s status as host of the Olympics. Further, the fact that China, as a WTO member, has become heavily dependent on exports and trade links to the rest of the world makes the Chinese government that much more sensitive to perceptions of their country.
Opposition to human rights abuses is perfectly justified. Such criticism should continue, and if necessary, be followed up with symbolic action. There are, however, limits. The lesson of history, even in this case, is that “engagement” is a better policy than isolation.
There was a time Read the rest of this entry »
April 4th, 2008
Invincible ignorance and the Pirates Bay
Some people are truly exasperating in the depths to which they will go to justify what is clearly wrong. To add insult to injury, their activities undermines the cause of real reformers who might help build a copyright system less tilted against consumers which recognizes that intellectual property is different, and should have reasonable limits on the length of time of its protections.
I’m speaking, of course, of Sweden-based Pirates Bay, an organization that is downright gleeful in its efforts to assist downloaders of copyrighted content. Most recently, they have told the record companies to “go screw themselves” in response to a request for damages lodged with a Stockholm District Court. Previously, they have described attempts by the Swedish government to co-opt ISPs in its fight against illegal downloaders as being a “declaration of war on an entire generation of young voters.” They even managed to inject a bit of pointless nationalism into the debate by declaring it “shameful” to go after young people “on behalf of the American movie and music industries” (if they want, I’m willing to claim ABBA and The Hives as American).
This reflects a Read the rest of this entry »
April 3rd, 2008
All-you-can-eat multithreading
Yesterday, I ran across an interesting report by Dan Warne regarding research work at Intel’s Shanghai office. It had a number of notable nuggets, such as remote graphics rendering technology that receives wireless video signals from a pocket-sized PC (coming soon to an airline seat near you), or software to assist in data mining of videos and images (which would take ego surfing to a whole new level). Music video production software featured near the end of the article, which was designed to quickly turn your library of home videos into music videos modeled on real ones created by major artists, seemed a bit out of left field, until I remembered this was the Shanghai office, situated as it is in a part of the world that is absolutely Karaoke-crazy. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Feed me enough Soju and I’ll be belting out Radiohead or Police songs in the best Karaoke hot spots in Koreatown (albeit in a voice considerably deeper than Thom Yorke’s or Sting’s).
What most interested this software developing blogger, however, was compiler software designed to turn your single-threaded applications multi-threaded.
Clearly, this is going to be absolutely essential technology, particularly as we bump up against the limits of Moore’s law. It’s simply not possible anymore to count on single-CPU speed improvements to achieve performance gains given quantum limits related to miniaturization. This means proliferating cores will be the norm. Four to eight cores are quite common now, but in the future, it is likely that cores will number in the thousands.
This creates Read the rest of this entry »
April 1st, 2008
The strange journey of HD disc formats
THe battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray is firmly in the category of “old news.” With the shift of Warner Brothers to the Blu-ray camp and the domino effect in terms of industry support that caused, Toshiba quickly decided to cease its backing of the format it developed and championed, an event that resulted in some rather expensive charges.
Even so, the outcome is decidedly weird. Normally, the less expensive format wins the day, and HD DVD was clearly less expensive. In fact, during Christmas of 2007, HD DVD had managed to reach the $100 mark, albeit through promotions that probably weren’t near term sustainable. In a way, however, that might have been the thing that sealed HD DVD’s fate, as Warner Brothers worried that the new low price point might have helped them to reduce the sales advantage Blu-ray experienced as a byproduct of PS3’s integration of a Blu-ray player. That could have prolonged the format war endlessly, and Warner Brothers had a strong interest in achieving a single format that would keep the movie disc revenue pipeline flowing strong.
The problem, however, is that the decision has taken the industry back to a more expensive format, one in which the lion’s share of players will become obsolete once profile 2.0 gets finalized — an update necessary to remedy the feature shortfall between HD DVD and Blu-ray (HD DVD had more standard features, making the Blu-ray outcome yet weirder).
Further, it’s still Read the rest of this entry »
March 26th, 2008
Standards competition and globalization
I’ve been thinking a lot more about globalization and the important role standards have played in “version 3.0″ of that process due to my reading of Friedman’s book “The World is Flat.”
In a globalized world, standards are critical, as they are what keeps the digital highways that link all the corners of the Earth open and accessible to all. The Internet, in other words, wouldn’t be the Internet without HTML, TCP/IP and HTTP serving as the digital age’s lingua franca. Any company with an intention of being an important player in this globalized world - a group that clearly includes Microsoft - needs to understand the importance of truly open standards.
If standards are so good, why aren’t governments asked to decide which standard technology to use, thus avoiding the painful process wherein companies reinvent wheels in parallel silos as part of the competitive positioning that goes on in young markets?
That, however, doesn’t work, because no person or group can have enough information to make such choices, irrespective of how “smart” the people involved claim to be. You can’t declare unilaterally that a particular technology is the standard, nor can you hope to catch the wave early in its run and impose a standard technology ahead of wide adoption in hope of avoiding the fragmentation and competitive positioning stage. The fragmentation stage is important, as that is what helps to delineate the problem domain sufficiently so that potential standards have a decent chance of modeling a large enough swath of real-world usage patterns necessary to ensure staying power in a fast-changing technology marketplace.
That doesn’t mean Read the rest of this entry »
March 24th, 2008
Apple colonizes Windows through Safari
I have three web browsers installed on my system. One of them, obviously, is Internet Explorer, the browser I use the vast majority of the time. The second is Firefox, a browser I downloaded originally for compatibility testing, but found myself using more than I expected on account of the integrated spell checker functionality. The third is Opera, a browser I never use except for testing.
Adding a fourth browser seemed to be no big deal, so being the inquisitive sort (in the “curiosity” sense, not a “tendency to scald unbelievers with hot irons” sense), I opted to download the recently released 3.1 version of Safari for Windows. Safari, a browser based on code from the open source Konqueror project, was developed by Apple as a way to make itself less dependent on the whims of a certain third-party software company by whom I am employed. These days, it is as identifiable with Mac computers as Internet Explorer is with Windows.
Firefox and Opera never really kept my interest for long enough to become tools I used regularly. I don’t find the Firefox UI all that exceptional, and I have always found the Opera interface downright ugly (tastes vary, clearly, so please take that as just my opinion). Therefore, I didn’t have high expectations when I installed Safari Friday evening. I had seen Safari on a Mac platform and thought that it was nice enough, but I didn’t expect them to try to bring the Mac UI experience to Windows.
I was clearly wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
March 21st, 2008
Globalization’s roots in the boom 90s
I’ve always wanted to read Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” a book that describes the globalization forces that have shaped the first decade of the 21st century, and in Friedman’s mind, constitutes version 3.0 of a globalization wave that will be more intense - and move faster - than the two waves that preceded it. Since I tend to visit the “Borders” book store on El Camino Real in Mountain View whenever I visit the Microsoft Silicon Valley office (on account of their wonderful selection of computer books, which is a rare thing indeed these days), I decided to pick it up due to a “buy 1 get 1 half price” sale going on at the store.
I’m only on page 70, but already it has got me thinking pretty seriously about how much has changed since 2000.
The “flattening” of the world which serves as the unifying theme of Friedman’s book is, in essence, a computer and network-driven reduction of the distance barriers that prevented workers in one country from competing directly with those in another. Friedman lists some surprising outsourced professions that I didn’t know about, such as the ability to hire a dedicated India-based personal assistant for $1500 / month (useful for executives who want someone to read books for them and summarize the contents, or crunch the numbers and chase down references for a research paper), math tutors with high-level degrees available for $15 / hour who interact with students through their computer, or more suprising, a McDonald’s franchise that has outsourced its “drive-thru” order service in a way that has halved the wait time from the McDonald’s national average, thus boosting throughput and raising revenue by 20% (though in this case, the outsourcing was to Colorado Springs, and employment costs only went down by 1%).
This will obviously Read the rest of this entry »
March 20th, 2008
Standards and pragmatism in web browsers
Recently, Microsoft declared that true “standards mode” in IE 8.0 will be the default, indicating that it will try to render all pages marked with the proper DOCTYPE according to the more rigorous (and ACID2-compliant) HTML rendering rules of the improved standards mode in IE 8.0. This is in contrast to the “standards mode” in IE 7.0, which though better than IE 6.0, was not ACID2-compliant, and not really conformant to the whole standard specification.
This is also a shift from Microsoft’s original stance on the subject, wherein they intended to cause “standards mode” in IE 8.0 to default to IE 7.0 rendering rules. The only way to trigger the new standards mode was through a custom META tag that indicated that you wanted REAL standards mode, not the somewhat-standards mode of IE 7.0.
This original policy with respect to standards mode in IE 8.0 caused the web development community to go ballistic, and my knee-jerk reaction was that the community was right. Standards mode SHOULD be conformant to the actual standard, and making it conformant would certainly help the cause of compatibility among web pages.
Perhaps I’m just Read the rest of this entry »
March 18th, 2008
Government endorsement of technology standards
As reported yesterday on ZDNet, the European Commission is considering whether to officially back DVB-H as the “preferred” European Union standard for mobile television. This has been percolating for quite awhile (from at least July of last year, as gleaned through a quick Google search), so it’s not exactly “new” information. An official decision favoring DVB-H, however, would require that all member states mandate support of the new standard, likely through licensing regulations that require owners of wireless spectrum to provide support at least for “official” EC protocols in devices that use that spectrum.
One can to a certain extent see why European regulators might believe that an officially mandated standard is the best approach. Europe was ahead of the pack when it came to mobile phone adoption, with usage numbers vastly surpassing other regions, particularly the United States. This lead helped to turn European wireless companies into technology leaders, and made European wireless brands such as Nokia, Ericsson and T-Mobile into companies with globally-recognizable brands. GSM, the mobile standard used throughout Europe, was similarly mandated by governments. This would lead one to believe that early standardization on DVB-H would yield similar results.
I think, however, that the EC exaggerates the effect that standardizing on GSM had in Europe. GSM, in my opinion, had little to do with Europe’s lead in mobile phone adoption. That is due to the fact that Europeans tend to be spaced much closer together than other parts of the world. This ensured that more customers were served with each cell phone tower installed, creating a “bang for the buck” advantage that accelerated rollout throughout Europe (a region that, due to its wealth, could better afford early cell phone rollout than other more densely-packed nations in Asia).
Likewise, mandating Read the rest of this entry »
March 13th, 2008
A slim API for OOXML
One of things that originally made me want more information about Microsoft Office document formats was the need to harvest data from documents uploaded to web sites, as well as to generate Excel spreadsheets that served as mini-applications for data entry by people in the field. This need occurred to me as far back as 1995, while doing web development for a telecommunications equipment company in Richardson, TX.
Microsoft Office at the time was ahead of most office suites in this regard, as their COM Automation interfaces meant I could do all of this in code. This was one of Microsoft’s competitive innovations, treating every piece of software as an extension of the APIs available atop Windows. Just as they did with web browsers (turning IE into a frame around a configurable set of HTML rendering components), they treated the Office suite as an API, exposing its functionality through a common component-oriented binary framework known as COM (itself a competitive differentiator for Windows, as competing platforms never standardized on alternatives the way Microsoft did on COM). It was a framework that worked well from native C++ through scripting languages (thank you, IDispatch), making Microsoft Office vastly more useful as a tool in the office document processing toolbox.
The problem, however, Read the rest of this entry »
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2005, he's been a Microsoft employee.
Recent Entries
- The glide path to an open society
- Invincible ignorance and the Pirates Bay
- All-you-can-eat multithreading
- The strange journey of HD disc formats
- Standards competition and globalization
Most Popular Posts
- Apple colonizes Windows through Safari
- The strange journey of HD disc formats
- Invincible ignorance and the Pirates Bay
- Standards competition and globalization
- All-you-can-eat multithreading
- Standards and pragmatism in web browsers
Top Rated
- Apple colonizes Windows through Safari+15 votes
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- All-you-can-eat multithreading+3 votes
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