This sign just off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley amused me. Amongst all the tie-die shirts and “ban the bomb” bumper stickers I thought it was surprisingly un-PC!
Tag Archives: usa
Merchant Bankers
I came across this sign while exploring China Town in San Francisco. Certainly in my dealings with CitiBank I have often thought that they were speaking a different language. This sign explains a lot.
(Yes, I know that this is the retail banking arm of Citi, but I didn’t want to spell out what I think of them on a family website.)
Double Standards?
Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications ((It amuses me that with all the money that Microsoft has, the best their marketing people can come up with to describe this is “squirting.” At best that sounds comic, at worst somewhat rude. What were they thinking?)). But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.
If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days ((Even this, it turns out, is a simplification. At least one of the major record labels has forbidden wireless sharing of their music entirely. Unfortunately they don’t tell you about this until you actually try to transfer the file yourself. Is this legal? Is it not a case of adding restrictions after the sale?)) but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.
What about movies? Sorry, bad news here. You can’t transmit them at all.
Zune can also store pictures. What limits have Microsoft provided to protect photographers?
The answer, it turns out, is none. You can transfer as many pictures as you like to as many people as you like. Once transferred, they are visible indefinitely and can even be copied to further Zunes.
Er, hello? Double standards?
I imagine that the main argument is that most people don’t have a bunch of professional photographs on their computers but do have commercial music. How far can we get with that line of thinking? Well, in fact, there is a certain logic in that. Most people don’t write their own music, even with relatively simple to use applications like Garageband, but they do have large collections of holiday snaps.
However the argument starts to fall down when you start to think about movies. Do people have only commercial movies and nothing personal? I don’t think so. While it is possible to rip a DVD and put it on your iPod it’s legally dubious, non-trivial (because of the CSS scrambling scheme) and time consuming (transcoding to MP4 takes a long time even on quick machines). Even if you use P2P software to download an illegal copy it’s likely to be is DivX format which cannot be used directly by the Zune, so that time-consuming transcoding step returns. My guess is that people are, in fact, much more likely to have home movies. Of course, if you made the movie you’ll also own the copyright for and are quite likely to want to send to friends and family. Certainly my wedding video has done the rounds and my attempts on a Segway has been distributed fairly widely.
That being the case, then why are the limitations on distributing movies even more severe than that for music? There’s a definite mismatch between desired usage patterns and the programmed restrictions.
So where have the restrictions come from and why do they vary so widely? Maybe a clue can be found in the fact that Microsoft are paying the RIAA $1 for each Zune sold.
Why would Microsoft do that? Clearly, in the US, the RIAA, for music, and the MPAA, for movies, hold a lot of sway. But for photographers? I’m not aware of a single organisation that has the same level of influence.
I’m sure Reuters and PA protect the copyright of their own images, but who protects everyone else? Perhaps this is because while movies and music require large teams, photography is more often a solo activity but certainly it has no relation to the value of the medium.
Ultimately I think this is another strike against the draconian DRM measures that are currently being applied to movies and music. I have nothing against digital rights management in the abstract, but implementations that restrict or remove rights that you already have by law just make the music labels and movie distributors look like money-grabbing opportunists.
When is a pencil and paper better than a computer?
In this article in MacUser Howard Oakley notes that a number of schools have recently banned the use of wireless networks due to the unknown effects of the radio waves used. He then connects this with the declining number of people taking science subjects at those same schools and their ability to understand the likely risks of said networks.
It’s an interesting piece, but what I find interesting is that as the general populations understanding of how the world works dwindles, so our reliance on high technology increases ((As this article asks, in relation to decreasing interesting in science degrees, “do they just totally not care about where things like web search and MP3 codecs and 3D graphics and peer-to-peer protocols come from”?)).
One incredible thing is that sometimes we start moving to a highly technical solution despite there being little advantage in it. Or at least as far as I can see, the advantage is that it is digital and new.
My favourite example is that of electronic voting machines. It’s easy to point and laugh at all the problems that they’ve been causing, particularly in the recent elections in the US. But despite the problems, despite every indication that they often choose who wins an election rather than the electorate, there is still a drive to increase their use.
The main thing that I want to know about the voting machines is this. What problem are they solving? What part of the old system was so broken that it required a complicated, flawed and unreliable new system? ((It’s also worth noting that before the new electronic machines, the US had problems. Remember the “hanging chads” problem with Bush’s first election? That was a flaw in a method of automatically counting votes.))
Some say that the current system is inefficient or labour intensive or slow. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, that’s either untrue or by design. The system needs to be both anonymous and yet track fraud, two ends of the privacy spectrum. The model in use is similar to public key cryptography in that working out who made a particular vote is not impossible. In fact, in principle, it’s very easy. But unless you have plenty of time to manually check thousands of ballot papers it’s going to take a while. This is by design.
Similarly, the effort required to count the votes in the first place is also a benefit. It makes it more difficult for any individual to have a dramatic effect on the final outcome. This is a good thing.
And slow? It’s simple to make quicker: throw more people at it. That makes it quicker and reduces any inherent bias.
I love new technology and gadgets, I’m fascinated by how they work and the effect that some of them have on society. But in the end, you have to use the right tool for the job. And the right tool does not always have an embedded computer.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
I don’t normally split a single trip into several pages since it annoys me on other sites where you have to keep clicking “Next” just to get the complete story, however I was impressed enough with the Monterey Bay Aquarium that I thought it deserved separating out. There is another page for the commentary and pictures from Berkeley, Point Lobos and Carmel.
One of the main focal points in the aquarium is the Kelp Forest, a large tank with kelp and a diverse range of fish swimming around. Of course, as a long-time user of Linux I’m always impressed by penguins, and who wouldn’t love a playful sea otter?
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Most of the penguins were stood still but one was busy. It would carefully select a pebble, passing over most of the easily reached ones for that perfect stone. Picking it up in its beak, it would waddle over to a little cave, drop it in there and start over the whole process. Quite why I have no idea. The other penguins seemed either to be just as bemused or maybe just indifferent.
I was most impressed with the jellyfish. I had no idea that they were so diverse and beautiful. It was all helped by the nicely contrasting lighting.
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The bad news is that it was very dark and most of my pictures came out blurry, dark or both. I guess that just means you’ll have to go see it yourself!
Berkeley, Point Lobos and Carmel
Not since my trip to three countries in one weekend have so many people questioned my sanity. This time only one country was involved, but so was a ten hour flight and an eight hour time difference.
Despite the logistics it was a great time to go to California as spring starts much earlier there than here in London. It’s nice to be able to walk around in T-shirts in the middle of February.
We stayed in Berkeley. Previously the only thing I knew about it was that the university was home of the Berkeley Standard Distribution of Unix. Until last year I didn’t, for example, know of its proximity to San Francisco, or that you could see the Golden Gate Bridge if you go up a particularly steep hill.
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After we’d (more or less) recovered from the flight over we headed south to Monterey, which is where we’d spend the Saturday night. But we had other places to visit before we called it a day.
Carmel, in the UK at least, is most famous for being the town where Clint Eastwood was mayor. We didn’t see him, but we did see a building that was either owned by or simply dedicated to him. We wandered up and down the main street, peering into the various tourist-oriented shops and some expensive-looking designer outlets. We failed to buy anything more expensive than a coffee and a cake.
The reason we had so little time was a detour to Point Lobos. It’s a beautiful spot on the coast where the Pacific crashes powerfully into the beige coloured rocks. There’s a tradition of taking family pictures here and we were keen to add another to the collection.
Carmel was surprisingly busy and we were pleased with ourselves for booking a restaurant. Back at the hotel in Monterey we slept and then spent some of the morning peering out at the water trying to locate seals and sea-otters. (Partially successfully!)
Fortunately we didn’t have to rely on luck for closer sightings of nature as we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Before heading back to Berkeley we had a look around the Carmel Mission. We had mistakenly thought is was this building in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but despite missing the movie references still found it to be an interesting spot.
On Monday we just hung around the East Bay. I wandered up to the main street in Berkeley, enjoying the sun and picking up a Peets coffee.
So am I crazy? I don’t think so. It was a long way to go for a weekend, but it was fun and it was great to have a brief reprieve from the grey, London weather.