Ged Carroll

Category: technology | 技術 | 기술 | テクノロジー

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.

One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.

My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.

I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.

My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.

Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.

That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.

  • Older iPhones + more news

    Apple CEO Cook breathes new life into old iPhones | Reuters – how Apple’s lower models contribute in markets like India. Older iPhones resold also drive services sales on an ongoing basis, whether the older iPhones are based on to children or sold on

    Culture

    Funko CEO reacts to stock’s 40% plunge on figurine maker’s first day as a public company | Geekwire – surprising given the prominence of geekdom in popular culture

    Gadgets

    aibo | Sony Japan – Matt’s commentary on this from his Web Curios newsletter ‘When I was about 20 I was obsessed with the idea of Sony’s Aibo, the robot dog that was JUST LIKE A REAL PUPPY  but with no hair or faeces or propensity to maul people.; now Sony have announced a rebooted version which is slightly less robotic and slightly more cute, and doubtless far more sophisticated in its ability to dance and caper and charmingly present to demand tickles that will never feel. The weird thing is, though, that now I am older I look at this and feel nothing but a deep and abiding sadness at the thought of the sort of people for whom this actually designed – not rich twats who want a toy, but the terminally lonely for whom a small robotic dog and stroking its plastic, unfeeling case in lieu of actual biological contact. Imagine that being your only interaction with another ‘thing’ for days and days and days on end. I don’t want to grow old.’ Not too sure if this a manifestation of his realisation of mortality that usually kicks in with the start of middle age. It does reflect the resurgence of Sony and how it thinks about consumer products for a greying market.

    Marketing

    See the cool kids lined up outside that new restaurant? This app pays them to stand there. – The Washington Post  – “They hire promoters and marketers and PR agencies to connect, but it’s a one-sided interaction that involves blasting out a message to get people engaged, but they don’t necessarily know if that message is being received.”

    WPP’s PR Units Slip as Sorrell Warns on ‘New Normal’ – O’Dwyer PR  – “It does seem that in new normal of a low growth, low inflation, limited pricing power world, there is an increasing focus on cost reduction, exacerbated by a management consultant emphasis on cost reduction and the close to zero cost of capital funding of activist investors and zero-based budgeters,” wrote Sorrell in WPP’s trading update.

    Online

    Damning stat Facebook tried to bury | News.com.au – 270 million accounts are duplicate or fake

    Software

    This app is like Shazam for fonts | The Next Web – genius, more design related content here.

    Berlin’s Ada Health raises $47M to become the Alexa of healthcare | TechCrunch – would the money be better spent on building skills into Alexa or Google Home?

    Wireless

    Q’comm Profits Dive Amid Patent Disputes | EE Times – ingredient brand most hated by its partners….

  • The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

    I bought The One Device when it came out in July and have gone back and forth reading it. I’d read books on Silicon Valley before; the Apple eulogy  Insanely Great by Steven Levy which told of the graft and hard work that went into the original Macintosh or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner & Lyon which discussed engineers working really long works. My favourite one is still Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires that portrays Gates as a coupon-clipping megalomaniac and Steve Jobs as a sociopath cut from the same cloth as Josef Stalin.

    Merchant’s The One Device is different. It doesn’t eulogise in the same way, but it also lacks immediacy as it feels detached from its subject matter. Unlike Levy’s work, Apple didn’t cooperate with Merchant at all. The book is broad in scope and sometimes loses its way, each one of the chapters could have been an interesting short book in their own right and this leaves it being faintly unsatisfactory.  I guess this is one of the reasons why it took me so long to read it.

    In the meantime the book stirred controversy over quotes attributed to Tony Fadell about then colleague Phil Schiller.  This made me cast a critical eye over some of Merchant’s adventures in the book. In particular inside the Foxconn industrial complex.

    On a more positive note, Merchant’s vision is grander than previous authors. One man’s mission to pull all the intellectual threads together on what made up the iPhone. The iPhone moves from becoming the child of an over-worked and under-appreciated Apple engineering team to being the totem of a global village.

    If you’ve read a quality newspaper you know what he’s going to say about the global supply chain. He also touches on the decades of software and technology development that led up to the iPhone.  How its multi-touch interface came out of a 1990s doctoral thesis. Ultimately the value of Merchant’s book many not be his writing, but instead becoming a new template for journalists writing on Silicon Valley to look beyond the David & Goliath mono-myth and instead dig into the tangled history of innovation. More book reviews here.

  • Apple Knowledge Navigator + other things

    Apple Knowledge Navigator

    Apple Knowledge Navigator was a rewarming of Vannevar Bush’s ideas in his essay ‘As We May Think that’ was published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic. There is a clear line between Vannevar Bush’s notional Memex machine and the Apple Knowledge Navigator.

    While Bush had the good sense to realise that a device with all of a user’s books, records, and communications had value. It reminded me a lot of the modern smartphone or the Wikireader. But there was less consideration with regards organisation and search in the Memex.

    These were some of the challenges that Apple thought through in this 1987 concept film.

    The Apple Knowledge Navigator concept film had really interesting search concepts in it. It is a shame that we’re nowhere near where Apple thought search and natural language processing would have been in 2007. This is still a concept video for today.

    Business

    Apple should shrink its finance arm before it goes bananas – The Economist – the risks associated with Apple’s cash mountain

    Media

    Update on Our Advertising Transparency and Authenticity Efforts – Facebook Newsroom – desperately trying to get ahead of regulation

    China Box Office: ‘Geostorm’ Blows to $33 Million Win as ‘Blade Runner’ Flops – Variety – interesting that Blade Runner cratered. I talked to a couple of friends and found out that the first film was not known in China, even amongst film buffs. Secondly the Chinese name was very misleading – moviegoers were expecting a film about a killer.

    How many people see your content on each digital channel? | The Drum  – bookmark for heuristics

    Retailing

    Amazon gains wholesale pharmacy licenses in multiple states | stltoday.com – this is going to blow up the share performance of Walgreens, CVS etc etc. More related content here.

    Security

    Facebook denies ‘listening’ to conversations – BBC News  – probably not the microphone, but would be surprised if they aren’t dipping into chat data or beyond

    Software

    Huawei AppStore and Huawei Video Service heading to Europe in 2018 – Gizchina.com – interesting move challenging Google

    LG K7i (LGX230I) – Smartphone With Mosquito Away Technology | LG India – if this wasn’t being sold on a legitimate LG site I would question if this was a shanzhai phone with fake LG branding. Its an interesting idea though

  • Great Scud Hunt + other news

    Great Scud Hunt

    What the Great Scud Hunt Says About War With North Korea | War Is Boring – pretty grime reading. The Great Scud Hunt was a key aspect of the Gulf War. The Great Scud Hunt pitted allied special forces units against the Iraqi army which had scattered its Scud launchers across the desert. The Great Scud Hunt was important to stop Israel coming into the war and fracturing the alliance against Iraq. it was also to prevent scud missile attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and cities. Despite the terrain being reasonably flat and barren, the allies weren’t as successful the Great Scud Hunt as they would have liked. By comparison North Korea is mountainous and covered in vegetation making the job orders of magnitude harder. North Korean missiles could target the US, Japan and the whole of South Korea. 

    DD-ST-92-07789
    A relic of the Great Scud Hunt – a missile being examined after having been shot down in the desert by a Patriot missile

    Economics

    3D printing a threat to global trade | ING – Research report with hyperbole

    Legal

    INMA: Pros, cons of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation for publishers  – GDPR could lead to a reduction in programmatic ad spend because advertisers will struggle to measure whether their ads lead to purchases, according to Eric Berry, CEO of TripleLift. There’s uncertainty about how the law will be enforced, but if users have to give consent to individual publishers, demand-side platforms, and attribution vendors, the attribution companies won’t have enough data to make accurate measurements

    Luxury

    Supreme Said Close to Deal with Carlyle | Business Of Fashion – was the Louis Vuitton deal just rolling out the carpet for private equity interest?

    Media

    My new chapter: joining Google to better explain search & help bridge the gap – Danny Sullivan is a great person to fill the hole left by Matt Cutts and more. Sullivan’s status as the godfather of search marketing gives him the kind of authority and audience few others have

    Online

    A Farewell to AIM: AOL Instant Messenger Shutting Down in December – ExtremeTech – wow. The ironic thing is that messenger services could (and should) have been the WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger of today

    Retailing

    How supermarkets choose where to open … and where to close | Cities | The Guardian – even retailers don’t like chavvy areas

    Security

    The Uber app can secretly spy on iPhone screens – BGR – mother fucker…

    Screwdriving. Locating and exploiting smart adult toys | Pen Test Partners – one more security issue to worry about

    Guess what Chinese travellers are bringing back home? VPNs, lots of them | South China Morning Post – exaggerates the volume of desire for unfettered access – outside the intelligentsia, most won’t care

    Yahoo says all of its 3bn accounts were affected by 2013 hacking | Technology | The Guardian – how is this only coming out now?

    Technology

    Why isn’t Apple Pay taking off? | The Drum – and other NFC payment technologies for that matter

    Survey: Facebook (FB) is the big tech company that people trust least — Quartz – its only 1,600 Quartz readers

    High Sierra’s Disk Utility does not recognize unformatted disks | Tinyapps – a lot of a fuck up there Apple, although its now fixed by a security update. Related – Think twice before encrypting your HFS+ volumes on High Sierra | Carbon Copy Cloner – big issue

  • Out and about: Blade Runner 2049

    *** No plot spoilers*** Where do you start when talking about Blade Runner 2049 – the most hyped film of the year?

    Blade Runner 2049 starts up some 20 years after the original film. It captures the visuals of the original film, moving it onwards.  The plot has a series of recursive sweeps that tightly knit both films together which at times feels a little forced, a bit like the devices used to join Jeremy Renner’s Bourne Legacy to the Matt Damon canon.

    Blade Runner 2049

    The 1982 film took the neon, rain and high density living of Hong Kong in the late summer and packaged it up for a western audience.  Ever since I first saw  it represented a darker, but more colourful future. I felt inspired, ready to embrace the future warts and all after seeing it for the first time.

    The new film is a darker greyer vision largely devoid of hope. You still see the Pan Am and Atari buildings of the first film, now joined with brands like Diageo. The police cars are now made by Peugeot. It also captures the visual language of the book, something that Scott hadn’t done in the original to the same extent. In the book, Dick (and the Dekkard character) obsess on how the depopulated world’s crumbling ephemera is rapidly becoming dust.

    Visually the film dials down its influences from Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore and instead borrows from the crumbling industrial relics of the west and third world scrap driven scavenging from e-waste in China and Ghana to the ship breaking yards of Bangladesh. The filthy smog and snow is like a lurid tabloid exposé of northern China’s choking pollution during the winter. It paints a vision more in tune with today. Automation and technology have disrupted society, but orphans are still exploited for unskilled labour and vice is rampant.

    Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford do very capable performances. And they are supported by a great ensemble of cast members of great character actors at the top of their game. Dave Bautista, Robin Wright, Barkhad Abdi (Eye in The Sky) and David Dastmalchian (MacGyver, Antman, and The Dark Knight). The one let down is Jared Leto – who now seems to play the same character in every film since his career high point of Dallas Buyer’s Club – I suspect that this is as much a problem with casting as performance. I think he needs to be cast against type more.

    For a three-hour film it still manages to hold your attention and draw you in to its universe without feeling tired. It’s also a film that forces you to think, so if you are looking for visual wallpaper for the mind a la Marvel’s Avengers series of films it won’t be for you.

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