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June 3, 2008
A cow produces about 15 metric tons of C02 per year. A Range Rover produces 352 g/km which is about 3.5 tons per year at 10.000km per year.
There are over 600.000.000 motor vehicles in the world, which - assuming all of them are Range Rovers - brings us to 2.1 billion tons of co2 per year. There are about 3.3 billion cows, sheep and goats in the world, which works out at about 49.500.000.000 - thats almost 50 billion tons of co2 per year, from cattle. Cows, sheep and goats produce 23 times more co2 than cars, even when we assume that all the motor vehicles in the world are Range Rovers.
Here’s a thought: If we all become vegetarians, and stop caring about animals at all, thus extinguishing every single cow, sheep and goat in the world, global warming - and i don’t think that co2 has anything significant to do with global warming, but that’s another matter - wouldn’t be a problem at all.
Why oh why does eveyone blame the car?
It enabled us to travel, without the car, mankind would be unable to do anything. Some environmentalists say that the greenest journey is one, that isn’t made at all. Now, if we would think like that, we wouldn’t accomplish anything. Is what they’re saying that we should stop science? Mankind has always pushed the outside of the envelope, that’s what we do.
Plans to reduce co2 from cars include raising taxes for cars that produce a lot of carbon dioxide. So, maybe we can reduce the amount of co2 produced by the car in the order of about 5%, banning leather sofas would reduce the amount of cow in the world, reducing the co2 produced by men by much more.
English scientists found that a journey on a train, with all the seats occupied takes slightly more fuel per pessenger than a car with all the seats occupied.
If you want to safe the enivronment, buy a range rover and kill a cow.
-stefano
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May 1, 2008
What will the future of television look like? In this article i’m going to take a look at media, entertainment, how we’re going to get it, what does it look like and what can it look like.
To see where all the efforts are going at the moment, i am going to take a look at three rather different things, all of which have got some momentum recently.
Revision3
If you don’t know revision3, you might want to have a look at it before reading further. Basically, revision3 is a television network that broadcasts over the internet. In fact, the only difference from a traditional television network is that you can download the shows, either manually or syndicated via rss. There are quite a lot of show’s, my favourite one being PixelPerfect, a show with Bert Monroy, where he show’s - as he frequently says - “all kinds of Photoshop stuff and whatever else comes to mind”. The show is 15 to 20 minutes long, too short in my opinion, but quite intresting. But i’m biased here. You could say, the show’s on revision3 are TV style, tech oriented - more than you’d find on a broadcast network. Which is nice, but it’s not suprising. The concept of putting tv shows on the internet and only on the internet is new, in effect, the viewership seems to consist of mostly young people, early adopters, people who care about technology. Unfortunately, Revision3 fails to deliver the proper material for this audience. What they try to do instead is serve an audiance who is not tech savvy, but intrested. I don’t think that audience is there, quite frankly. The daily tekzilla tip or howto that shows me something i already knew or don’t care; Systm, where i can learn to overclock my pc, basically 20 minutes to deliver 30 seconds of real information; Social Brew, which is great for people who would answer the question whether they’re in a relationship with “it’s complicated” and of course, Diggnation, which is - along side PixelPerfect a great show. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht go over the hottest stories on the “social news” site Digg.com, i like it. To sum it all up, Rev3 has some great shows, that i watch every week. Well, two. The rest is mediorcre. It serves and audience that isn’t there and i don’t have the slightest idea where they get that much money, because the productions seems quite expensive. It is well made, but misses the point, overall. Too bad. Rev3 also has a live stream, which is not exactly live - it runs all of the latest shows from the network one after the other, and people can chat while they’re watching. Usually a ten guest_x’s who have a battle gaming the curse-word-detection-system. Interactive? I did manage to find out where Rev3 originated, and that would be something called TechTV, ZDTV, or something else, depending on the timeframe. TechTV was, you guessed it, a mediocre tv network.
TWiT (This Week in Tech)
TWiT’s founder Leo Laport, who - by the way - also worked at TechTV, describes TWiT as a Netcast Network. It is - in a nutshell - a bunch of podcasts and a pretty website. Audio only, at the moment. The great difference to Revision3 is, and this is quite a big deal, TWiT has interesting content, and lots of it. Frequent roundtable discussions with known authorities like Paul Thurrott (windows guru), John C. Dvorak (a cranky geek, major journalist), Dick DeBartolo (Mad’s maddest writer) and so forth. For every show there are some people who know a thing or two about the particular topic. The topics are clear, MacBreak Weekly is about the Macintosh, Windows weekly about Windows, This Week in Tech - their best horse, is about recent news in technology, i get it. The conent is great, that’s why - even though it is audio only, it’s numbers far outweigh revision3, as i was able to hear from a prime source. Soon, TWiT will start doing more with video, the promise is that it’s going to be “way better” than what Chris Pirillo does. Good. Another thing i like about TWiT is that their show’s are long, you need an hour to fit some sort of content in there. Instead of a 15 minute show with a 2 minute advertising, TWiT podcasts - uh i mean “Netcasts” - are typically one and a half hours of interesting roundtable discussion, with one ad in there, which is made so that it doesnt bother you too much. I easily get tired of GoDaddy and netflix ads (heh).
Chris Pirillo
Pirillo is a major geek who caters a technology focussed audience. He streams video from his office 24 hours a day, and records five short segments for youtube during each day of the (business) week. Answering email, talking tech, telling stories. His audience is fairly young, he doesn’t touch any particular topic too deply in his videos, it’s overall an easy listen. I personally don’t care about his videos, but - he has got an audience. Getting 1000 people to watch you drinking coffee takes more than a couple of 30″ monitors. Now, here’s the twist: Pirillo has, along with the video, a chatroom which he (more or less) interacts with, since the video is always live, and only segments get recorded, the audience feels as if they would be involved in the making, this helped him build quite a community. His audience may not be to savvy, they may be mostly 14 year olds, but he has surely build some momentum.
What does the future look like?
If you were trying to decide which of these approaches will come out as a winner and finally replace the old tube, you didn’t get it.
The point of the internet, is not to find a model and have everyone adopt to it. The point is that everyone is able to make something different. It costs you virtually nothing to make a podcast, and there may be a hundred people wating for what you have to say. The point is, that the audience finally has some control. If you don’t like something, you can look at something else. Every day, there seems to be a billion podcasts being syndicated, the choice is up to you, and if you want you can make your own for cheap. Some more sophisticated approaches get more momentum, have a bigger audience, be it because auf quality of content, lack of alternatives or that you just want to have somthing you can listen to while you’re working. Most of us understood by now that tv is pretty much certainly going to die - if slowly. The future of television is not Youtube, not Rev3, not TWiT, not Chris Pirillo: it is Youtube, Rev3, TWiT and Chris Pirillo. And lot’s of other stuff. We don’t need to change anything, the internet changes itself, communities come and go. We shouldn’t forget that the era of the broadcast network deciding what we’re going to watch, is almost over. And you won’t need to run out and get an iPod, or an RSS-Client:
You won’t miss an episode.
-stefano
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April 10, 2008
These are a few reasons why you want to buy music and why they are invalid or you should at least worry.
I want to stick to the law, get my music in a legit way so that i don’t get into trouble.
Go ahead, try to buy your music to act legit. Thanks to drm you still will be criminalised for your acts if you’re not carful about what you do. Did you know that, when you buy a song from, say, iTunes, you don’t actually own a copy of that song? You just have the right to play it under the terms you bought it. So, you can play it on up to three computers and iPods as well as your AirPort Express. You can burn a copy for your car under the terms of fair you right? Make sure your friends don’t get a hold if the copy. Lending it to a friend is illegal in many states, especially the us with its redicolous digital millenium copyright act. You are the criminal my friend!
I want to support the artists, i think music is hard work and should be paid off properly.
First off, iTunes get’s 30 cents for every dollar you pay. The Music industry (Sony-BMG, EMI and so forth) get a huge cut, the artist, in fact, often doesn’t get more than 0.08 cents, not dollars, per album you buy. This information is kept secret fairly well, thus hard to prove, but however you want to judge my ability to find good information, it can’t be much more than that. Even if the artist get’s a cent per album, even 10 cents, do you think you support the artist? The fact of the matter is, artist these days, especially super-stars as they call it, make most of their money with concerts and gigs at festivals. Selling cds is a small market, selling music online is marginal.
I want to own my music and do with it whatever i want, i want it to be like with cds and lps.
You can never own music that comes from the sony-bmgs of this world. You just buy the right to play it, sometimes you just have the right to play it on one computer, a specific number of times or something alike. You never have the right to do with it whatever you want. More on that later.
I want to have access to a lot of music whenever i want, without the hassle of searching.
Flat rate music streaming services like Rhapsody are great if you don’t want to have the hassle of finding your music in the different online stores. For 15$ a month you get unlimited access to a large collection of music. Of couse, you don’t support the artist, most of them have never heard of such services. The record labes get a cut of your 15$, that’s it. As if it wouldn’t be enough, the music you do get is generally a) drm “protected” (i like to refer to drm as use protection instead of copy protection) and b) in bad quality. If you have a broadband connection and if you can live with 96kbit variable bitrate drm protected windows media streaming music in a browser window, rhapsody or napster might be just right for you.
I will not encourage you to illegaly download copyright protected material! However, the current state of the industry must be adressed. The Time has come that huge corporations like Sony need to learn that they don’t own music, artist start to go independent, amazon offers (at least) drm free mp3 in okay quality. People who “steal” music from peer to peer sites don’t steal music, they wouldn’t have bought the music in the first place. If you can’t find a song at amazon, i don’t find it morally questionalbe to download it through peer to peer. I find it morally questionalbe to give all your money to Sony-BMG. That i find wrong.
We have no choice at the moment, but times are changing. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails came to see the light.
CD sells are dropping dramatically and the big record labels blame file sharing for it. The simple fact of the matter: People just don’t buy cds anymore. I’m in the last of generations to which buying a cd is the most normal thing in the world, but be just a few years younger and you’d expect to get your music online, through whatever means, and rightly so! At the moment, online music stores are just no substitues for cds, because you can’t do what you want with the music you buy. You may not burn a copy for your car, you may not transfer it, in some cases you may not listen to it on tuesdays (which is technically absolutely possible thanks to microsofts windows media format). If you have a zune, you can use the “squirt”-feature to transfer a song to your friends zune, he will be able to listen to it…. wait for it…. three times! Or three days, whatever comes first.
When a distribution system is in place that allows us to get the music and do with it whatever we want, in a fair use policy, people might start to buy as much music as they used to. But i don’t think it will happen.
Record labels don’t want us to own our music, they want to control us. They don’t make much money off of cd sells, however, they make quite a bit of money of apple, microsoft, sony and lots of other electronics manufacturer as well as recordable cd manufacturers because they pay them a “piracy fee”. If you buy an iPod, if you buy a computer, you pay a percentage of the price directly to the record labels. Because they expect you to be a pirate.
Doesn’t that upset you?
I would reccomend to buy cds for now, _if_ the cd comes from an independent record label that is owned by the artists. Some artists get their money, buy their cds if you like them. For everything else, i see no solution.
I never buy music.
-stefano
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
http://www.jamendo.com/
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March 18, 2008
or why the email is a bad thing.
The Primary Problem of email seems to be spam. However, issue is much deeper than that. If you’re not a geek, you may skip this paragraph. Let’s for a minute think about what happens when you click the send button.
This is complicated, isn’t it? What do we want it to look like though? I, personally, and you may think otherwise, think that Alice should be able to write and email to Bob directly, without any third party. But this isn’t possible, because - believe it or not - there aren’t enough IP-addresses for everyone of us. So to solve this problem, some genious invented NAT, which basically throws down the principle of every pc being connected to every other pc (this was formerly known as “the internet”). But “they” are working hard to solve that with IPv6 (yes i said you can skip this paragraph if you’re not a geek). This work which is largely done by Google is going to change the internet as we know it for good. And it will be possible that the vision of the inventors of the internet will come back to life again, who knows. In every case, the problem of E-Mail is not being solved.
Problems (Practically)
The main practical problems with email are the following: Spam, e-mails not being recieved, poor control over what you recieve, you have to aquire your email instead of recieving it and potentially some security issues. When i heard a talk at Google where a system was proposed, that worked on an address book basis, so that you only recieve what you expect to recieve, i thought for a second that the problem had been solved, but i was wrong. If you only recieve the email you are wanting to recieve, how does someone contact you the first time? Via email, right. Two of the problems wouldve been solved, but people just won’t buy into the idea because it’s not easy, it’s not intuitive so to speak. This brings me to spam. The problem with what we do at the moment is, that we try to filter spam. Filtering did never work and will never work. We have some of the best spam detection algorithms you could possibly imagine (the Google one being the best of them all), but you still get spam, if not you, somebody else does. So the best we can hope for is a low amount of spam, but we havent been able to think of a system in which spam is not possible - at least not one that wouldnt bug the user, causing him to fall back on his ol’ reliable email. If you would have a system that delivers email on a contact database basis, where the user decides from whom he wants to get email, you would effectively shift the cost of storage and cpu cycles to the sender, which sounds like a good idea, but making it happen smoothly is actually very difficult. Getting rid of all those instances in between however, which you would have to in order to make it happen, is just genious in my oppinion.
We already have that: It’s called Jabber.
Instant messaging to save the day?
Instant Messaging is neat, we all know that. Businesses use it internally and individuals use it to communicate with their peers. But seldomly companies use it to talk to individuals, and you would certainly not think about sending an application to your future boss via Jabber (or AIM for that matter). And that is because IMs biggest strenght is also it’s biggest weakness. It is very personal. Sometimes you don’t want that. If your boss would text you on Jabber, and you were online and wouldn’t respond, he would feel as if he was talking to a wall. You may not even sit on your computer, but the program says you’re there, so he get’s pissed off and you don’t get that raise you were hoping for. Bummer.
Other technologies
I was planning to write a whole paragraph on Facebook, Myspace and their spinoffs. But i won’t. The idea to use Facebook for business relations (and by the way, people already do it) scares me, for reasons i may explain in the future, but for the moment, you can make up your own mind on how well you think social networking would work to replace email.
The solution (yes, i have one)
Imagine a perfect world. Your ISP gives you a fast (we’re talking hundrets of megabits) internet connection with an IP address (that never changes), you would then assign a dns name to it which is in some way related to you. You would now have an address that could be compared to, lets say your street address. You could then give out this address to your peers and business relations and they would be able to connect to your machine. This would work with multiple people on the same address, it works currently - remember, you are just a user@somemailserver.
If we could get rid of NAT, if we could have DNS-Records at an affordable rate (e.g. free), if we could get ISPs to give us “the real internet” (with our own ip address), i think an email system is possible that would work.
But what about spam you ask? Someone could just go down every possible IP-Address and send spam, yes, that’s true, but:
1) those people would be easy to make out. If someone sends a thousand mails a second, the isp could put him in a database and offer you to choose not to recive email from him.
2) your software does a great job in filtering everything out, with my proposed system, it could go even further and distinguish addresses by country, region, enterprise or personal, you can still choose what email you want to recieve, and remember, the email does not land on your computer immediately, you would still have to download it from the other person. That means once a spammer is identified on public blacklists, his hard drive would fill up, his internet tubes would be clogged and he would have a much harder time “getting his message across”.
There are some downsides to this
We could always pretty much count on moore’s law when it comes to hardware, but when it comes to how well companies treat us, it’s a whole different story. Internet connections are slow. The fact of the matter is, ISPs don’t want us to have a fast intenet connection, unless maybe we buy the triple play package that they say is the future (which is BS by the way), so that our connection is always congested by the high def tv stream, and even then we are not able to get decent upload rates. I think the companies got the term “net neutrality” wrong there, they think it means compete with your client, give him the least he accepts so you have low costs, make sure everyone else does the same so that there’s no competition, archieve this by closing your lines down, making it extremely expensive for the good people to become a player in the industry. Piracy does also play a roll in that by the way, but that’s another story.
The second downside is that it’s really hard to make people switch. Thus it’s hard to get someone to write good software for all that, making it hard at first and reducing the chance that people switch even further.
The third downside, which isn’t actually a real downside to the system, but a problem in general, is that IPv6 is coming slowly. If you turn of V4, look at the internet through the IPv6 glasses, it’s a fairly dark place right now. So we must expect having to wait, maybe 10 to 20 years until we can even begin to replace email as it is.
The last downside, to wrap this up nicely, is that users would suddenly have to back up their stuff themselves. There is a strong possibility that this would lead to E-Mail providers forming up, completely taking the system ad absurdum. Maybe online backup can help there.
Conclusion
My suggestion is just one of many approaches. It is certainly not going to save the world, and it cetainly has some issues, but it proves a point: We have a problem. If you could get anything out of this article, i hope it’s that the internet isnt perfect, that we have change coming up and that you may not sit there and enjoy your 16mbit dsl connection thinking that everythings fine. The internet is not the new television, its not the new telephone, it’s every possible way of communicating bound together and it has become the most important thing in the world. Maybe it’s time the user starts to control it.
You may read this and think “it works well, why change something that works?”. You’re absolutely right, email works very well and we’re going to use it for a long time. I just wanted to explain why it has not stood the test. It is going to fail, i just hope it fails gracefully.
-stefano
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