Friday, August 08, 2008
I live in Seattle, Washington and love it. This place is a bastion of liberals and humanistic ideals. The Spotted Owl would love it here. There would be nary a quibble about extending its protection from teeth gnashing farmers for about another century, population growth notwithstanding. It's here that Bill Gates founded first Microsoft and then the greatest philanthropic organization of our time: the Gates Foundation. Seattleites expend a lot of thought and energy on causes. As an African, one of the causes that I hear strains of all the time, is about preserving endangered cultures. To be fair, there is no din about this per se. It usually manifests through mostly sincere interest in your cultural roots and wished it does not disappear – which aligns with my interests in general. But for the most part, I am more worried about the continued economic survival of Igbos and Nigerians that the abstract fact that all the niceties of our culture is preserved.
The whinging about preserving the world's endangered cultures is just that - whinging. Supposedly, these people and cultures will disappear from the world and it will be a great tragedy™. Some of the most vocal proponents of this are well meaning and sincere, as indicated above. Yet most of the agents of culture destruction are the power elite of these same people in question, in full throated shortsighted callousness; whether it be through the WTO or simply on the back of a Coca Cola marketing rights deal.
Yet with all that, consider that endangered cultures and the efforts around to protect them are very short of fundamental. What people need in endangered cultures is empowerment: the means of production and some serious power and influence over the difficult things in and around their world. Consider that once these things are in place, there is no need for a dogmatic preservation of external trappings of ancient culture. Fundamental empowerment tends to reinforce the best and valuable parts of culture and frees up people to adapt the least valuable and evolve them to fit the circumstances of a changing world. And sometimes, if that includes language, so be it.
Consider that there is no definitive culture of the West. Caucasians, who are undeniably in control of most of the power levers of the world, do not by any stretch, have any allegiance to some deep culture. On the contrary, western culture is constantly changing and adapting to fast technological flux, while preserving what is necessary (and the definition of what that is, changes) for identity or simply tourism. This is so persistently the case that the west is inextricably linked, in these days, with the adoption of bleeding edge technology. No one realistically agitates about preserving white or Caucasian culture. And even those who do, betray the bottom-line of what amounts to real Caucasian culture. On observation, real Caucasian culture is about the amassing of power, control and influence; the agents of flexible self determination. If you listen hard to the most vocal proponents of white culture or power, that is their bottom-line.
Other cultures will do well to emulate them (since they are successful), even if it means the sacrifice of certain elements of their existing culture. Rigid concerns about preserving culture are worthless without being placed in the context of establishing a thriving environment in the present world for the people of that culture.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
It makes sense when you're browsing (consuming, syncing, mashing up) your own stuff that you want access to an organized1 mass of it. You're essentially the curator and your audience is you + other who you will decide to give access to some or all of it. However when other people are added as an audience, it's not clear whether you should send them a message with some of the stuff (the ones you have selected or curated) or give them a link that points back to the source of the data so they can make their own decisions on what is compelling. Traditionally the distinction between the 2 modes of third party consumption are messaging and sharing.
Messaging is great for spontaneously making stuff available to an audience, especially in manageable doses (limitation or a feature?). It's also well suited for form factors that transcend the PC, like phones. What is missing from messaging is extended discovery; being able to step beyond the curator (you) to get to interesting stuff that matches the long tail of consumer individuality in consumption. On the other hand with sharing, sometimes the inundation of information is pretty overwhelming or pretty irrelevant. Curators exist for a reason.
Some axes to determine efficiency: a) bandwidth consumed b) long tail satisfaction (or discovery) c) satisfactoriness of the information proffered in context of interest in the information proffered d)effort of the curator, including repetition.
I suppose the most efficient model I have seen is mating sharing with a social graph so that messaging is accomplished implicitly instead of explicitly (basically all my contacts get notified if I upload pictures, I don't have to send an email), and discovery is also possible since all the available information is up for perusal. If that's true then messaging is losing out. Watch out email, mms and sms J.
1 Data organization is hard. The music devices and software have it right – use the metadata to pre-organize for consumers. If they want to layer their own taxonomy on top of that, fine…
Thursday, June 26, 2008
'Cloud Computing' in the newest valley buzz word. Quickly retiring 'web 2.0' as the wonder note to strike as hungry entrepreneurs pitch the venture capital set for money to create the commercial enterprise of their dreams. Cloud computing is a variant on 'grid computing' and 'utility computing'; past notes that have failed to grip in one way or the other, at least not up till now. The main knock on these buzz words is that no one has figured out how to make substantial profit from them except for the pundits. So the search for the next buzz word continues, so that the money can keep flowing, so that the entrepreneurial set can keep renewing their lease to try and crack the code.
There are more companies bleeding red from these generally related concepts than not. Basically if you can't manage to charge people a subscription or a stiff fee for your cloud computing offering, you're probably losing money. If you're storing more than text-based payloads in your cloud computing infrastructure and you're not charging a fee upfront to the majority of your customers; you're most definitely losing money – even if you have ads.
Let's review: Profitable 'cloud computing' companies – Salesforce.com (subscription), Digg (text based payloads), Google (text based payload). Unprofitable cloud computing companies – Gmail (text, pictures, video), YouTube (video), Flickr (photos), Hotmail (text, pictures, video), Plaxo (contacts). You get the picture. While always-available consumer and corporate data and content services are incredibly popular for a range of scenarios, they're incredibly expensive to host and maintain. In the end very few companies will be able to do this profitably, because it will be a tripartite equation: audience size, data payload size and egress/ingress rates and payment model. Anyone who fails to balance the three in a sort of perfect triple point will fail at it.
Overall I love the concept of cloud computing for consumers. All my stuff in some, ahem, cough; cloud. Able to connect all my devices to that sweet data and have it all synced effortlessly. The mere vision is drool worthy.
But wait a minute! If you scrutinize the core cloud computing scenarios, you'll find that there is a couple of core stuff in there: anywhere availability and any device access. The cloud itself has to be a bit more endpoint aware and able to sync your stuff to your multiple devices. And when you boil it down to this, you find that there are definitely other ways to solve this problem. For instance, personal peer to peer content and application delivery is a possibility. The typical personal computer circa 2008 sits at home at the end of a reasonably quick broadband connection, doing very little except bloating your energy bill; sipping on some watts and juice, if you'll pardon the hip hop pun. Imagine being able to put down a fairly robust set of web services on that PC and the being able to access that data from anywhere in a way that scales to the expected demand. Pictures, video, contacts, email – all your stuff you already store on your computer. There ARE several challenges to this vision today: uplink speeds in broadband connections, reliability of broadband connections, reliability and uptime of home computers1, a software licensing model that allows easily customizable web services on residential computers and finally (and the hardest) easy naming and discovery of the web services on a personal computing device – it really does have to be as dead easy as typing in http://hotmail.com in your browser to get to stuff stored on a computer at home.
We just have to redefine the 'cloud'; away from that uber grid owned by some wunderkind to that underused supercomputing capacity stored in your home. Uplink speeds WILL grow, Home based PCs WILL become more reliable and energy efficient. They WILL become more powerful, powerful enough to serve all your pictures to anyone who wants them, including your grandma. We still have to figure out how to connect to web services that are going to be naturally behind home routers/firewalls using easily understood naming techniques (some of which have not been invented)2. However once we do, this redefined 'cloud' will be more efficient and cost effective than that cloud farm in the Nevada desert - for one you don't have to pay for network access and egress rates, the customer does. And it will let software vendors still sell traditional software licenses; freeing them from choosing between a rock and the web 2.0 hard way3.
Heck, I expect my phone to become an internet accessible server within 10 years. Fully available and scalable – mom will be checking out the pictures I just took at the concert with the phone, using her web browser.
1All those NAS servers and Microsoft's Windows Home Server are the first wave of servers pushing services from outside the home firewall to the outside.
2Also ISPs and network operators have to stop being total *******s and get with the network neutrality program.
3Home web services can even use 'clouds' as backup and redundancy, for only those times that the homer web service is unavailable for some reason.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
I've assiduously tried to acquire as many books as possible over the past 5 years. My personal library bulges with loved books from my childhood, books further exploring trajectories I began years ago when they gripped and all sorts that I have developed an interest in over time by exposure to others. My working theory in some of this acquisition is that it will aid in developing a love for books in the next generation. I certainly benefitted from books being readily accessible in my father's library. I am still under the thrall of books that I developed years ago (I am a ludic reader). However I can see this trend for actual physical books ending soon: with the advent of the Kindle and the iphone; and with Moore's law ever lurking in the background, books are going to definitely go on a portable device which will let you buy and read books on the go. Note that this is advantageous all around: more efficient publishing (no ink and paper), more books sold (more accessible social networking, aiding seamless book recommendation, mated with impulse buying over an always on network…) and a deeper ability for random access to knowledge. Device bound content is also a bit less susceptible to piracy than PC bound content – which the industry will love. About the only thing that will suffer will be attention spans and the ability of people to get into physical conversations – but even that will evolve in our brave new world; I suspect that people are much more adaptable to this than most commentators think.
Overall I expect to stop buying physical books by 2010. I hope the Kindle category takes off. I hope someone figures out how to not to put draconian drm on these products.
Chez Udezue's current book loot.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Here is an excerpt of an email I sent to some people on my team I was having a conversation with, about a future where everyone who is interested and competent will be able to become a programmer:
Just a quick summary of the conversation around programming languages and making it easier for people to 'speak' a programming language. I thought about it a bit more and wanted to coalesce my thoughts:
Today if you need to start as a programmer i.e. before you even apply code to hard or real world problems or both, you have to have 3 things taught to you: a)Logic b)Programming syntax c)Programming structure, form and other special 'code only' constructs.
My thesis is that we should progress to the point where (b) is eliminated (subsumed by already learned syntax i.e. language); and the need for (c) is minimized. We will always need (a). The right place to do it is in ever more abstracted programming languages that asymptotically approach the simplicity of language syntax (albeit language syntax purged of logical loop holes – bottom line, I don't expect people to type plain English into vi and expect it to compile). Of course lower level languages will still flourish for powerful and detailed expression and problem solving. But most people will not need it.
Today, we teach kids to solve problems and build fantastical structures with objects (legos, bricks, etc). We should be making the tools for solving more abstract problems and building abstract fantastical structures more accessible at the exact same time.
Speak English (or whatever your language is). Speak code.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Wow. This requires serious celebration.
Great slideshow of Angelina over at Vanity Fair. Couldn't resist linking. The woman remains impressive in a secular fashion: Blazing her own trail, taking no prisoners and apparently still making some kick ass movies. Me likey "Wanted".
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/jolie_portfolio200807
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Memorial Sunday and I'm busy clearing out some junk and adding some order to the chaos around me. One of the trinkets I run across is a wearable USB key - it wraps around your wrist just like one of those bands that Lance Armstrong made so popular about 4 years ago (LiveStrong), just a little bulkier and less cute. As a card carrying member of the Esquire nation,I had decided long ago that I would not be caught dead wearing the thing (I had causally acquired it at some function or the other) and had left it to languish, unloved - no doubt the pack rat instinct from my amygdala had seen this day coming. As Esquire readers know, some days you just don't give two, so to maximize other tasks, instead of figuring out how to dispose of the thing, I decided to leave it on my wrist. Afternoon came with me still wearing it and not hating it. It frankly didn't look awful and the geek in me could appreciate how handy it would be if I had to hack into the computer systems at the grocery store suddenly if called upon for national security reasons... Ok, implausible, but still. At any rate, a style conscious techie suddenly made the transition from ugh! to hmm! I could see the possibilities.
After some more gazing into the possible future, I've decided that wearable technology and computers is going to be huge. Consider that we're already doing this in some way or the other; I have had a backpack that had iPod accommodations for at least 3 years. Watches are now supercomputers nonchalantly masked as time pieces. And let's not get started on cell phones which we have draped around us in one way or the other all through the day. However within these examples are the seeds of what will be, vs. what the hype is about: fabrics, materials, hugging shirts (I kid you not), mood matching clothes, etc. Essentially stuff you don't actually need. Instead I believe that wearable technology will be firmly grounded in the styles people use today - handbags, belts, wallets, shoes, rings and jewelry. Remember that phone shoe from Get Smart? Coming your way soon in 2010. With Bluetooth.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
I’ve always been a sucker for science fiction. I picked it up very early - early teens and must have been some of the first ‘big’ books that I read. I can remember devouring Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel at thirteen, going on a tear for some time along the same lines and winding up with Robert Heinlein’s Red planet and dabbling in the original Dr. Who book series. I eventually came across some of Asimov’s Hugo winner compendiums and the rest is history.
I’m not obsessive about sci-fi. I’m more classic, digging Dr. Who, Battlestar Gallactica, Stargate and the TV series that came out of that. My only anomalous tick for TV based stories is the lack of love for Star Trek, and this is really because it was not available on TV while growing up in Nigeria. On the more classic book front, which is really more my speed, I now feel lost when I walk into the local Border’s and walk between the double rows of science fiction – its frankly intimidating. Where to start? I have now taken to getting my fix from Gardner Dozois’s sommelier like treatment of the ‘year’s best science fiction’ – buy one thing, get several high quality dozes of the good stuff and all is well with the world. I’ve also gone and dug up a lot of the works of Philip K. Dick. From the Sixth Day to Minority Report to Next (based on The Golden Man), I started noting the quality of the man’s output and I figured the written stuff would be even more powerful and ripe.
So why Sci-Fi? I’ve idly wondered why I like the genre myself and Ezinne obviously does not get it. It only recently crystallized from reading this article by Clive Thompson - Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing. As he comments: “…. brings me to my point. If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.” I completely agree. Science fiction it 3 dimensional and sometime even 4 dimensional literature. It’s what quantum mechanics is to the discipline of physics. The only flaw is that sometime the prose sucks. But hey, you can always read something else.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Today in the shower I made a break through. I told myself "down boy!" and prevented myself from slipping into rage. Now I know you're wondering: "Dude should have figured out how to control his anger by now. That's old hat." And you would be quite right. No fear though, I HAVE learned to control my anger and did so as a wee tot. In fact I'm usually so rational that I rarely ever flair up, it's the rare occasion that will lead me to raising my voice in wrath. However I do seem to get these low intensity emotional angers that are triggered by odd things. Once there, I tend to lock down the "super max" and become a difficult human being for a few hours.
Today I successfully talked myself into an even keel and saved everyone the trouble. Power to self awareness.