Tsana Associates: Computing News

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:48:43 GMT

In their ongoing quest to ~~shut down post offices~~ offer a great customer experience, the UK’s Royal Mail has been encouraging visitors to their website to print their own postage-paid labels. As the system is browser based, delivering the labels as pdfs, even hippy Linux lovers were able to use the service to post their Christmas prezzies around the world.

This standards compliance was too good to last. Following an upgrade, the labels now feature a big ‘Sample’ marker when viewed on screen: “‘Sample’ will not appear when printed”. Unfortunately for Linux lovers, common software like evince and xpdf doesn’t understand the Royal Mail’s game, and prints labels complete with ‘Sample’ markings - very expensive sticky waste paper.

Royal Mail chiefs have refused to regress the software ‘upgrade’, claiming that “The change to add the word ‘Sample’ to the screen was taken as a security measure as it was decided that screen prints of the postage impression could pose a risk of fraud.”

The fact that the ‘protection’ can be bypassed simply by clicking the ‘print to file’ box on Adobe Reader appears to have passed them by.

Possibly loss of face is a bigger issue for the Royal Mail than loss of business.

- John [Meall Dubh]

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:15:49 GMT

IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says . BRUSSELS, Belgium -- IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union's group of data privacy regulators said Monday.
By Aoife White. [washingtonpost.com - Business]

Just because you can, doesnít mean you SHOULD!

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:04:55 GMT

Mouth Eyes PicturesñEEEK!

No, this isn't the latest gossip about who's leading the Iowa Caucuses, this is a story about some people who have enough time on their hands to do some pretty scary Photoshop work. The picture above is one of many Mouth Eyes Picturesfrom the Freaking News web site.

This particular contest started 12-18-2007 and ended on the 20th and contains 78 entries. So, it's too late to enter this one (don't worry, there will be more). The one above of Hillary Clinton was done by Chucklebuck. And, as expected, he lists his “clan” as the “Republicans“. This images has been viewed 1,165,541 times (although we suspect it’ll get a few more now particularly by Obama fans).

Oh yeah, Obama got in his “licks” too. Here’s the Obama entry by jsodessa.

Just to prove we’re not some sort of anti-Democrat rag, here’s one of the current Republican President, George Bush (also done by jsodessa).

Not all entries were political in nature, here’s one we like, Paris Hilton by Mandrak.

As we said…EEEEK!

Actually, the funniest part of this contest is the rotating Google ads that accompany this contest, specially this one:

Trench mouth
Symptoms, causes, and treatments of Trench mouth
www.Healthline.com

Ya gotta wonder whose keywording those ads.

See all the entries here.

- PSN Editorial Staff [PhotoshopNews]

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:09:14 GMT

InfoTrends says 89% of Pro Photographers are “Digital”

InfoTrends Study Shows Significant Changes in Pro Photography Workflows as Image Capture Volumes Increase

InfoTrends Press Release: According to a recent InfoTrends survey of over 1,000 professional photographers across specialties, the increased use of digital photography is leading to new opportunities in the imaging industry. Itís no surprise that the percentage of total digital images captured by pros has grown from 82% in 2006 to 89% in 2007; however, a pronounced increase in the number of digital images captured per week by the average pro suggests that software, service, and printing solution providers are likely to benefit in the long run.

The study indicates that over 90% of professional digital images captured are saved and stored, suggesting that pro photographers will need help managing their image workflows and backing up their work. The market for image management tools is wide open, and storage media vendors have yet to fully capitalize on this opportunity by committing more of their marketing dollars to the professional photographer segment.[sgl dagger] The survey also shows year-over-year changes in the production of proofs and final prints, which has implications for photo labs, retailers, and printer vendors.

ìTodayís photographers are technologically savvy, as a significant majority is using image editing software and many are using RAW conversion and color management software,î commented Ed Lee, Director at InfoTrends. ìItís particularly interesting to note that 83% of professional photographers are using the Web as part of their business and about 30% use an online photo service provider. This suggests that a variety of Web services providers could see future growth opportunities.î InfoTrends is currently conducting a study that specifically examines the Web services market for professional photographers.

InfoTrendsí recently released report, ìDigital Imaging and Professional Photographers: 2007 Survey Results,î provides further insight into the opportunities that are available as a result of the transition from film to digital. It also examines the digital photography behaviors of professional photographers, including the equipment they own; what they plan to buy; how many digital images they take, save, store, and print; the types of software they use; and more. A subset of the study, entitled ìPhoto Printing and Professional Photographers,î looks specifically at output activity.[sgl dagger] As appropriate, each document considers how the results from this yearís survey compare to the results from previous yearsí studies.

The complete research reports are available immediately to clients of InfoTrendsí Digital Photography Trends Service and Photo Printing Trends Service. For more information about either report or to make a purchase, visit our online store or contact Matt OíKeefe at +1 781 616 2100 ext. 115 or matt_okeefe@infotrends.com.

InfoTrends, a Questex company, is the leading worldwide market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry. We provide research, analysis, forecasts, and advice to help clients understand market trends, identify opportunities, and develop strategies to grow their businesses. Additional information about InfoTrends is available on the Web at http://www.infotrends.com.

- PSN Editorial Staff [PhotoshopNews]

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:12:42 GMT

NHS database 'could be targeted'. The man in charge of setting up the NHS IT system says "you cannot stop the wicked doing wicked things". [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

We should praise successes of the NHS IT project

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:39:50 GMT

With ministers now pondering what to do with the Â£12bn programme to computerise the NHS in England, it's worth trying to separate the truth from the spin about what five years of work have achieved. As usual, it's a more mixed picture than the "IT fiasco" stories make out. While the ill-conceived scheme to standardise acute hospitals' software has been a disaster, there are welcome signs of progress elsewhere. I've commented previously on the programme's success in jollying the NHS along to replace film X-rays with digital imaging.

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:24:30 GMT

Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

John Nack writes about the the development of Photoshop and compares it to a Johnny Cash recording One Piece At a Time singing about the building of a Cadillac from 20 years’ worth of evolving, mismatched parts. John Nack says: “I’ve gotta say, I know the feeling.”

He goes on to say “In fact, I sometimes joke that looking at some parts of the app is like counting the rings in a tree: you can gauge when certain features arrived by the dimensions & style of the dialog.”

But later in his post he says “The good news is that we’ve been plotting the solutions for a number of years, chipping away at the problem. Good stuff comes to the surface in bits and pieces, but we haven’t quite turned the corner–yet.”

Read his entire post at Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash

- PSN Editorial Staff [PhotoshopNews]

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:40:55 GMT

Computer Kaizen

We were at a business meeting and my coworker was waiting impatiently for his laptop computer to finish booting up. He and I were sitting next to each other, had identical machines, but I was already working. He made some comment about my machine booting faster for some reason.

But that wasn’t the case.

Here is his laptop startup sequence:

Unzip bag, remove computer from bag, set on table: 7 seconds.
Remove power cord from bag, unwind: 8 seconds.
Crawl under table to plug in power cord: 14 seconds.
Re-emerge, connect power cord, connect network cord: 11 seconds.
Open lid, press start: 3 seconds.
Wait: 61 seconds.

This seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Why was my setup faster?

Unzip bag, remove computer from bag, set on table: 7 seconds.
Open lid, press start: 3 seconds.
Remove power cord from bag, unwind: 8 seconds.
Crawl under table to plug in power cord: 14 seconds.
Re-emerge, connect power cord, connect network cord: 11 seconds.
Wait: 61-33 =[sgl dagger] 28 seconds.

The core question is “Why can’t I turn on the computer sooner?”

It is a laptop. It will start up just fine on the batteries while I fidget with the power cord. And the networking doesn’t come on line until well into the boot cycle, so no time is lost if the network cable isn’t connected right away.

Net result is my wait time was half of my co-workers even though we both did the same thing. We just did them in a different sequence.

In the terms of a changeover, this is identifying internal tasks that could be external and moving them there.

This is the kind of improvement opportunity your Team Leaders should leaders should learn to spot. In most cases, though, they should not implement a change. Instead they should use the opportunity to teach the Team Member who does the work how to see this opportunity, and teach the Team Member how to make the improvements.

What kind of performance would you have if everyone in your operation thought this way for a year?

- Mark [The Lean Thinker]

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:48:55 GMT

British Airways blocks Boing Boing. David Weinberger -- author of Everything is Miscellaneous -- is in London's Heathrow airport today, and he's discovered that British Airways' internet terminals block Boing Boing:

Internet Access to this site has been BLOCKED
British Airways Plc prohibited website information page.
British Airways has blocked access to certain Internet sites which may be considered to be illegal or offensive. This site is currently on the barred list.We understand that the Internet changes constantly and that the decision in respect of this particular site may no longer be appropriate. If you would like us to review the decision to bar access to this site, please give the website URL and a contact e-mail address to a member of staff at the Lounge Reception. The response will be written confirmation that either the ban on this site has been lifted, or that the site continues to contain material that is inappropriate and, therefore, the bar on access will continue.
Thank you for your co-operation.
Date/Time: - 07:29:54
Website: http://boingboing.net/
Category: "Nudity;Personal Pages"

BA is probably using one of the censorware companies like SmartFilter, who also supply the censorship technology to governments in countries like Syria and the United Arab Emirates. SmartFilter's business model is to fill sleazy boiler-rooms with prudish unemployable drones who spend all day clicking on web-pages and classifying them based on whether they'll offend the delicate sensibilities of the world's tyrants.

BA contracts with these scam-artists to control which information the adults who fly on its planes can use -- because you lack the capability to choose which web-pages you want to look at, and need an airline to choose the pages for you. We've been vocal critics of these companies, and so they all block us, using rubrics like "nudity" or "circumvention" -- because if you have one nude thumbnail or one page about circumvention, then all the tens of thousands of pages on your site will be blocked. What a "non-nudity" site is, then, is a site in which no nudity has ever appeared and no nudity ever will appear (SmartFilter says that a web-page with a picture of Michaelangelo's David counts as a "nudity site").

I'm a BA platinum flier, logging hundreds of thousands of miles per year on the oneworld network. I guess it's time to try Virgin instead. Link, Link to Boing Boing's "Defeat Censorware" page

[Boing Boing]

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 08:17:08 GMT

Widgetbox's App Accelerator turns widgets into Facebook apps. People can make their own Facebook applications, and now Widgetbox users can make them faster with App Accelerator, a new Web-based helper tool. CNET Editor Jessica Dolcourt tested it out with her very own Webware application for Facebook. [CNET News.com]

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:39:51 GMT

Explaining the Excel Bug.

By now you've probably seen a lot of the brouhaha over a bug in the newest version of Excel, 2007. Basically, multiplying 77.1*850, which should give you 65,535, was actually displaying 100,000.

Before I try to explain this, I should disclose that I did work on the Excel team, but that was thirteen years ago. I haven't been there for a long time. I don't even think I know anyone on that team any more. I'm just trying to explain the bug a little bit as a public service.

The first thing you have to understand is that Excel keeps numbers, internally, in a binary format, but displays them as strings. For example, when you type 77.1, Excel stores this internally using 64 bits:

The display is showing you four characters: "7", "7", ".", and "1".

Somewhere inside Excel is a function that converts binary numbers to strings for displaying. This is the code that has the bug that causes a few numbers which are extremely close to 65,535 to be formatted incorrectly as 100,000.

If you use the number further along in calculations, for example, if you add 2 to the results, you'll get the right thing.

=77.1*850 -> displays

=77.1*850+2 -> displays 65537, correctly.

Just to throw people off, this bug also exists for a few numbers which are extremely close to 65,536. They display incorrectly as 100,001.

=77.1*850+1 -> displays 100,001, incorrectly.

This is still only a bug in the number formatting code; if you try to make a chart with that number in it, you'll get a correct chart.

Now... you may have noticed that I said that this bug exists for numbers which are extremely close to 65,535, but not for 65,535 itself. Indeed if you enter 65,535 you see 65,535. But, you notice, 77.1 * 850 should be exactly 65,535, not extremely close to 65,535!

Look closely at the binary representation for 77.1:

See how there's a lot of there at the end? That's because 0.1 has no exact representation in binary... it's a repeating binary number. It's sort of like how 1/3 has no representation in decimal. 1/3 is 0. and you have to keep writing 3's forever. If you lose patience, you get something inexact.

So you can imagine how, in decimal, if you tried to do 3*1/3, and you didn't have time to write 3's forever, the result you would get would be 0., not 1, and people would get angry with you for being wrong.

The same thing happens in binary with numbers ending in 0.1: they are repeating decimals, so when you do mathematical operations on them, very small insignificant errors creep in somewhere way to the right of the decimal point. (PS: same for .2, .3, .4, .6, .7, .8, and .9, but not .5).

The IEEE has a standard, IEEE 754, for how to represent floating point numbers in binary, and this is what almost everybody uses, including Excel, and they have for a really long time, and it means sometimes you get imprecise results when you add a lot of 0.1's together, but if you're rounding the numbers to a reasonable number of decimal points, you won't really care.

Back to the Excel bug, which is a genuine bug, not just an artifact of this IEEE 754 stuff. Since 77.1 has no exact representation, Excel stores it as

and then when you try to multiply it by 850, you get something very close to 65,535, but not exactly 65,535, because of the fact that 77.1 wasn't stored exactly because that would take infinite memory. And this number, which is very close to 65,535, happens to be one of only 12 possible floating point numbers which trigger this bug in Excel.

OK, Q&A.

Q: Isn't this really, really bad?

A: IMHO, no, the chance that you would see this in real life calculations is microscopic. Better worry about getting hit by a meterorite. Microsoft, of course, will be forced to tell everyone "accuracy is extremely important to us" and I'm sure they'll have a fix in a matter of days, and they'll be subjected to all kinds of well-deserved ridicule, but since I don't work there I'm free to tell you that the chance of this bug actually mattering to you as an individual is breathtakingly small.

Q: Shouldn't they be testing for these kinds of things?

A: I'll bet that most of the numeric testing done on the Excel team is done automatically with VBA code. Cells containing this value display as 100,000, but from VBA, they're going to look like 65,535 (since the number would be passed into the Basic runtime in binary, before the display formatting.) I'm sure there's plenty of code to test display formatting, but with a bug like this that only happens on 12 out of possible floating point binary numbers, it's unlikely that any set of black-box tests would cover this case.

Q: What caused the bug?

A: I'm not sure exactly, since I don't have the code. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that would cause this behavior. Play around with Quanfei Wen's IEEE-754 calculator, maybe you'll find something.

Q: Why not use "exact" (decimal) arithmetic?

A: It's much slower than floating point arithmetic, since there's no hardware on your CPU chip to do it for you natively.

Over the years, Microsoft got so much heat for floating point rounding artifacts in the Windows Calculator that they rewrote it to use an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. Since you have to poke at Windows Calculator with a stick, it doesn't have to be as fast as Excel. That said, CPUs have gotten pretty fast. I'll bet an arbitrary-precision version of Excel would perform pretty well these days. Still, the Microsoft Excel support team has spent the last 20 years defending IEEE 754, and it's not surprising that they've started to believe in it.

And let's face it -- do you really want the bright sparks who work there now, and manage to break lots of perfectly good working code -- rewriting the core calculating engine in Excel? Better keep them busy adding and removing dancing paper clips all day long.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

By Joel Spolsky. [Joel on Software]

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:12:03 GMT

More blog, less roll.

With apologies to those whose juice (or whatever) may be reduced by it, I’ve deep-sixed the blogroll. As a move this was long overdue. The ‘roll on my old blog had grown longer than Dumbledore’s beard, and was just as antique. When I moved the blog over here I carried along mixed feelings about having a blogroll at all, and then went through lots of uncomfortable questions about whose blogs go on it, in which order, and so on.

I don’t have time to explain much more at the moment, so here are the reasons I just gave in an email to a reader who asked me about it (while also providing some very good advice):

Fact is, it’s outlived its usefulness. I hardly use it. Others pay more attention to it than I do, and too often for selfish and/or trivial reasons. Maintaining it takes effort far out of proportion to its value. Blogrolling itself looks like advertising, gatekeeping, or both. Feh. Worst of all, it’s not live. It’s a stale relic of blogging’s origins in the Static Web era. Time to move on.

For what little it’s worth, I’ve sometimes been credited with coining the term “blogrolling”. But that was 10,000 blog years ago, before we had RSS and Live Web search engines that index everything posted within seconds, plus countless other ways to assist and participate in the public polylog.

I’m open to suggestions for what other things I might put in my sidebars. Guidance: I’d like it to be live, or at least current, engaged in Conversations, and (perhaps even) fun.

[Doc Searls Weblog]

Six Sigma and Lean Meet BPM: Q&A With Software AG's Bruce Williams

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:16:47 GMT

(Q) You've written white papers and offered seminars about the opportunity to magnify the benefits of continuous process improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma and Lean with the aid of BPM. Can you start by describing where Six Sigma and Lean have come up short? (A) As a rule, the Six Sigma practitioner is an industrial engineer, a mechanical engineer or maybe a business person. They are not IT people, they may not understand IT, and furthermore, when they've looked for data and measurement around processes, they haven't had a lot of success getting it out of IT. The IT department has generally asked them to take a number and get in line because they have had other priorities. As a result, Six Sigma and Lean practitioners typically collect information on their own and then they measure it, analyze it and design and implement improvements outside of enterprise IT, which means several things. Number one, there's a lot of redundant gathering of information and a lot of problems calibrating the data sources. As a result, they're spending way too much time in the measurement phase. Secondly, when these continuous process improvement efforts get back to the control phase, there's no closed loop. Six Sigma and Lean teams tell people what to do to optimize a process, but it's like herding cats [because there are no measures or control mechanisms in place]. Finally, Six Sigma and Lean initiatives have tended to affect human-centric systems, but not the system behind the iron curtain of IT. In the early years of a Six Sigma or Lean initiative you could make a lot of hay just fixing human-centric problems without ever touching IT, but the next-highest level of low-hanging fruit involves enterprise IT. By Doug Henschen

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:40:10 GMT

NBA Basketball Referees as Single Points of Failure. When one trusted insider can control the outcome of a complex system, foul play is a slam-dunk. It's not just that basketball referees are single points of failure, it's that they're both trusted insiders and single points of catastrophic failure. These sorts of vulnerabilities exist in many systems. Consider what a terrorist-sympathizing Transportation Security Administration screener could do to airport security. Or what a criminal CFO could embezzle. Or what a dishonest computer-repair technician could do to your computer or network. The same goes for a corrupt judge, police officer, customs inspector, border-control officer, food-safety inspector and so on.

[Wired Top Stories]

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:31:54 GMT

YouTube tests viewer-friendly ad format. After more than a year of promises, Google unveils ads that are mostly transparent and vanish after 10 seconds. [CNET News.com]

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:32:02 GMT

Nielsen/NetRatings serves up July's social media numbers. Blog: The firm's latest results show that LinkedIn may be growing faster than Facebook, that YouTube is still video king, and that way too many people read TMZ. [CNET News.com]

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:34:29 GMT

Toyota Production System Applied to Software Development.

Some of the most interesting insights into the Toyota Production System come from the experiences people have with implementing the TPS outside of manufacturing. Whether it is in schools, hospitals, or software development firms, the challenge of understanding and applying the principles of the Toyota Production System result in new perspectives on things that some of us old hands at TPS we think we already understand.

The story of Fujitsu Prime Soft Technologies Limited and how they applied the Toyota Production System to software development is related in the book Applied!! Toyota Production System to an IT Company

Far more interesting than the details of the training they received or the Lean tools they applied to software development processes were the lessons learned related by the various kaizen instructors who were each leaders of the projects within Fujitsu. The chapters are written as first-person reflections on challenges with applying TPS during various stages, by different kaizen instructors from Fujitsu.

One of the valuable insights was stated simply as:

"Kaizen is getting rid of waste. Waste is what is abnormal. Think "this is abnormal". Find abnormalities. Train your eyes to see abnormalities. People will not act unless there is an abnormality."

Basic stuff, you may say, but how many of us train our eyes to see abnormalities?

There are many abnormalities surrounding you, if you only have eyes to see. As an example given in the book, if you buy a notebook for one dollar yen but you only use 30% of the space on each page to take notes, you have wasted 70 cents. The blank space on each page represents money you waste.

At one point the book asks:

"When you look at one thing, how many things do you notice?"

Standing in the Ohno circle is a good way to train your eyes to do see abnormalities and to find many small things to fix, some of them immediately, without the need for a kaizen team or Six Sigma project. This is the type of thinking that the team at Fujitsu used to apply the Toyota Production System to software development.

Another gem was how they overcame the resistance to applying TPS to software development. People asked, "Why the Toyota?" and the kaizen instructors would ask "If there is another way, please tell us. It is easy to deny another person's idea. If you are going to deny it, you must present a different idea." At least with regards to improving the software development process, nobody had any better ideas for how to improve, so they agreed to try TPS.

One of the kaizen leaders from Fujitsu also made an interesting distinction between kaizen and kaikaku. The popular term in Japan for what we might call a Lean transformation or a major business process redesign initiative is "kaikaku". It literally means "reform" or "radical change".

The Fujitsu kaizen instructor explained:

"While you can think of kaikaku as a large paradigm shift, it is over in an instance. Kaizen on the other hand is many continual changes you make daily. TPS is kaizen, not kaikaku, so there is no ending."

In the West we often think of a Lean transformation or Lean deployment as a kaikaku. It is "done" at a certain point, and we begin to ask "How do we sustain this?" This is the wrong thinking and the wrong question. It is never done, only begun. There is no sustaining, only doing.

[Gemba Panta Rei]

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 08:13:39 GMT

iLife '08 with new iMovie. Video: iLife '08 with new iMovie. From Apple's Cupertino, Calif.-based headquarters, CNET's Molly Wood takes a first look at iLife 08, the latest collection of "digital lifestyle" software with a new and improved iPhoto and totally revamped iMovie.
[CNET News.com]

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:57:26 GMT

Gmail Error Proofing for Attachments. I don't know if this is a new Gmail feature, or if I just discovered it, but there's some nice error proofing built into the web-based mail application. If it detects the word "attached" in an email body, but there's not a file attached, it gives you this pop up message.

This is similar to the the method for error proofing Outlook that I wrote about earlier.

To the left is a fuller screenshot (click for a larger view) of how this looks when composing an email. This is smart design, a good use of technology for error proofing the situation where you forget to attach your file. As with inspections, there are some "false positives," but the cost is minimal to the user, in terms of wasted time.

Subscribe via RSS | Lean Blog Main Page |Podcast | Message Board

[Lean Blog]

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:44:53 GMT

Bug Labs (initial review).

I went to a real interesting dinner tonight in San Francisco, to get introduced to a New York-based startup, Bug Labs, along with Ryan Block of Engadget, Robert Scoble and Jerry Michalski.

We met with their CEO, Peter Semmelhack, and their San Francisco-based consultant, Jeremy Toemann. Dinner was at Le Colonial in San Francisco.

I'll try first to list the pieces of what it is, in the same style as the What Twitter Is piece I wrote a few days ago, with the understanding that this will be less thought out since I've known about the company for a very short period of time.

1. It's an architecture for pluggable gadget components. There's a hardware interface, which I know little or nothing about (I'm a software guy). It was explained to me as "60 pins" -- they said they interface all the capabilities of the chip, whatever that means. But at a software level, each of the components interfaces with XML over HTTP. It's as if they read my mind. The pieces are all fractional horsepower HTTP servers. They are using RESTful interfaces everywhere. I haven't actually seen the XML, let's hope it's simple.

2. The designs for the components that Bug Labs is doing themselves are all open source. They're sharing everything. So they won't have any kind of lock in on the devices that are built with it. They asked if we thought they should connect with Stallman. I said of course.

3. There have a very sexy development platform which we saw screen shots of, but didn't actually see running. The users design the hardware products they want. They can share the designs, and code, or sell it if they want. My guess is that it'll be mostly shared. It's a powerful idea, and I believe very soon, realistic.

4. And there's the hardware itself. Again, we didn't see it, they showed us wood mockups, giving an idea of how the pieces fit together. They're going to ship with four initial components, a screen, GPS, a CPU, and ??? Every unit comes with wifi and USB. I'm sure I missed a lot of the details, I think I did get the gestalt.

They said they will ship in the fall.

Backing comes from Union Square Ventures (yet another of their deals, they seem to be everywhere) -- Fred Wilson told me about it at our lunch a couple of weeks ago. Also investing is Robert Young of Red Hat. There may be other investors (probably are).

I really poked around during the dinner, said some challenging things, and it seems Semmehack's head is screwed on tight and his heart is in the right place. He didn't get rattled. He knows he may just be teaching his competitor's users what to ask for. He doesn't expect the major consumer electronics companies to get behind it. They are thinking small at first, which is great, because at first the opportunity will be small.

Photos from tonight's dinner.

I'm really glad someone is doing this. I anticipated it in my second How To Make Money On The Internet piece in early 2001, but I didn't expect it would actually happen so soon. Once again Fred Wilson impresses with his willingness to bet on big ideas.

2/13/01: "Every product that has an embedded computer will shift to user design. Today's companies become fulfillment houses, building products on contract. Manufacturing margins will shrink, the real value will be in the insight -- this is what people want now -- and the risk taken that today few manufacturers seem willing to take."

PS: They should brief Doc Searls. He's going to love this.

[Scripting News]

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:51:21 GMT

How to blow $3 million in taxpayer funds. Blog: Proprietary software forces IT buyers to assume the risk of a software acquisition/implementation. Open source balances risk between buyers and vendors. Here's just one example of how the US federal government could have saved itself a lot of money by n [CNET News.com]

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:40:49 GMT

Facebook - how honest are you?

I noticed on Steve Lamb’s blog, the day after I fired off a Facebook invite to him, that he has some security concerns with the Facebook registration mechanism. And rightly so. Were it not for a large element of honesty, it’s remarkably easy for me to sign up to Facebook and pretend to be somebody else.

Steve’s right to question this issue, it and many others have been on my mind for a while now: why do we have so many social networking sites and why do people sign up to them? What’s the attraction? What do we get back from them? How are they improving the quality of our lives? Are they adding any value to the community?

And if you don’t believe this, how do you know that this person is who they say they are? I’m sure that there are clues…but I could easily upload a picture of a celebrity, use their name and basically pretend to be them. Now there’s an experiment! Incidentally, ~~both Steve and~~ I would appear to be “one person removed” from the aforementioned person! [Update, it seems that Steve knows the aforementioned celeb! Or does he?]

Craig Cockburn also has similar concerns:

Did you know that if you upload your date of birth, hometown, occupation and High School info to a social networking site such as this one that you are giving a potential thief more than enough to commit identity fraud?

Anyway, I’m still writing the blog post that I mentioned here, expect this topic to be raised in that post too.

Technorati Tags: social networking, facebook, security concerns, steve lamb, craig cockburn