FYI I’ve been posting over at wmy.me (over 400 posts since the last entry here) as it’s easier, more spontaneously and ultimately more fun.

Integrated Wave Technologies

Imagine you’re a soldier in Baghdad, don’t speak Arabic and you must shout a command to a pack of angry-looking insurgents: “Drop your weapons!” You could fire warning shots, or take out a handheld computer and use a stylus to scroll through a list of preprogrammed phrases on a touchscreen and then flip the device around to show enemy combatants the command in Arabic.

According to BBC radio 4 ‘s ‘A World in Your Ear‘ (Tx 21.4.07) the US military has spent $15-20m/yr over the past five years on such voice recognition technologies – surely offering Arabic lessons to soldiers in Iraq would be more cost-effective? Er, no.
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On this low-tech side of the pond, we all know that by repeating your English phrase slowly and loudly, Johnny Foreigner will magically acquire instant translation skills.

Now the AppleTVhacks.net crowd have truly surpassed themselves by getting OS X 10.4.8 to run on the box. This means that would be the cheapest Mac available at $299, or £199 – if it wasn’t April Fools Day…

Link…

FT.com site : DROWNING IN NUMBERS: The rising cost of ‘free’.
24 January 2007
The rising cost of ‘free’

The 21st Century appears increasingly benevolent, particularly regarding technology, products and services. Consumers and businesses are being offered an ever widening range of goods, for a ticket price of zero. Apparently.

Open Source has disrupted the software sector, to a large extent because of its perception as a free product. But once you factor in installation, maintenance and customisation, Open Source may no longer appear cheap.

The impact of free services can, overall, be destructive. The minimal marginal cost of sending e-mails has enabled spam to flourish. Spam now represents more than 95 per cent of all e-mail sent, equivalent to more than 60bn messages each day.

Free e-mail also allows viruses, worms, spyware and other malicious code to be carried gratis to millions of unwitting recipients. Free though the service may be, it is estimated to have cost consumers $7.8bn to repair or replace infected PCs during 2005 and 2006.
By contrast, paid-for SMS services, on which consumers spent approaching $100bn in 2006 alone, were relatively spam-free; most likely because the economics of spam simply do not work within a commercial setting.

Instant messaging (IM) has suffered a similar fate. The average IM user can expect to be interrupted with junk messages about five times a day, and those interruptions are forecast to rise to 27 times a day by 2008.

The genuinely free lunch may still be some time away.

*Statistics and opinion by Nick Pflaeger, technology partner, and Paul Lee, research director, at Deloitte.

Here’s the argument in a nutshell:

1. Open Source is often regarded as zero-cost
2. Other zero-cost services exact an unwanted cost, which is often malicious
3. Paid-for SMS services have little of this malicious unwanted cost
4. Ergo, “The impact of free services can, overall, be destructive.”

Analysis
First, open source does not represent a zero-cost solution (and those who consult on the implementation of open source solutions are negligent if they imply that). The definition of open source is code that is open to everyone to view, amend and enhance. Not for everyone, to be sure, but it ensures that if the code is not fit for purpose, it is possible to modify it to do so. The ‘free code’ of open source that he refers to is confused with the zero acquisition cost. (The ‘free’ in ‘free speech’ is not the same as ‘free’ in ‘free beer’).

In industrialised countries labour costs are high. The investment of time in learning a new software package is significant (which is why well-designed human interfaces, can save time and by extension, money). The time it takes to adopt a new package is a very real cost, irrespective of whether that package is free. The free services he refers to provide a benefit to the users, for which they trade the currency of their attention (a subset of our available time).

Second, the malware they refer to – which is egregiously ubiquitous on Windows machines, and completely absent on my Mac – has for example, nothing to do with the cost of that operating system, and everything to do with the size of the user base and the security weaknesses in the system. That contradicts his original premise: the impact of paid-for services can also be destructive.

Third, paid-for SMS services are malware free, because they are such a simple technology (160 characters, piggybacking on a voice transmission infrastructure) and because they work within a walled garden of operator constraints, not “because the economics of spam simply do not work within a commercial setting”.

Finally, there is an egregious non-sequitur between second and third paragraphs. One moment, the authors are talking about Open Source, the next about spam, viruses, worms and spyware. And by implication, linking the two. Naughty.

The point that the authors miss is that increased connectivity (or ‘connexity’, to use Geoff Mulgan’s phrase) always means an increase in background noise. But where the noise level becomes too high, we change our behaviour to reduce it to a level which is comfortable (switch mail providers, use spam filters, pass laws to put a financial burden on spammers). We are accustomed to wall-to-wall advertising (something that would shock, nay offend, a person a hundred years ago) but we have adapted to filter it out. And now, we can do so using software (my NY Times and Economist.com sites are beautifully rendered sans ads).

Still, we have always been willing to put up with noise in order to get want we want. 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages”.

I wonder what he would have said about today’s TV?

But what is interesting in his analysis is his description of the terms ‘trust’ and ‘transparency’ as it relates to the interaction with the ‘customer collective’.

Marketing hyperbole, which works well for an atomised marketplace, is less effective in an interconnected customer base, where massive intercommunication can expose a company’s exaggerations through the post of a single (influential) blogger.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who’s no stranger to high volume messages, is clearly of the old school hyperbole brigade:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6YgZc5th6g]

Which makes you wonder whether Bill Gates sulkiness at being compared to the John Hodgman character in Apple’s ads has its roots closer to home.

From the Shanghai Fight Club merchandising department

Very nice parody from Wonderbra’s ever-inventive ad agency.

Here’s the AMV BBDO original (by the ‘A‘ in ‘AMV’).

But there are practical advantages to understanding the science of food. My first experiment with MG of sorts (courtesy of the excellent khymos.org) was with the simple steak. The problem with traditional methods of steak preparation is that the outside has to undergo a Maillard reaction which requires a temperature in excess of 120°C, while to maintain its rareness, the inside has to stay below 55°C. I’m sure it’s possible to spreadsheet the thermal conductivity coefficients of different types of Hereford, import them into Mathematica and then send them to Heston Blumenthal for sign-off, but there is an easier way.

The method of cooking sous-vide has been used on an industrial scale by top New York kitchens. However, with sous-vide machines costing up to $6k, even the most succulent Wagyu would be flattered by such lavish attention.

A low-maintenance version is to get your Hereford from Harrods, where they will vacuum-pack it on request. Get a digital thermometer, place the vacuum-packed steak in a water-filled saucepan and heat to the required temperature, ensuring that it does not go above this.

You can leave the steak as long as you like (the longer the better since you want the steak to equalise with the temperature of the water-bath). As this was my first time, I decided to go for a temperature of 57.5°C so I didn’t end up with an underdone petri dish (actually, this was actually my second try – my initial sortie resulted in a texture approximating shoe leather).

After letting things cook for about 45 minutes (with brief application of the gas to compensate for cooling effects), I removed the steak from the packing and seared both sides in a very hot, buttered frying pan.

Et voila!

However, my enthusiasm for the magazine’s new-found depth was short-lived; with insights like these, who even needs to go to the trouble of learning to read?

Benkler is a leading prophet of today’s gift economy, and he fits the part: his bounteous beard resembles Kropotkin’s.

Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism–but only if they don’t get too greedy.

When the author in question cries: “I certainly don’t want to be replaced by volunteers.” You can’t help but think: “Dude, if it wasn’t for the free-gift-with-subs and the smart ad sales departments at Time, people wouldn’t even be reading your stuff”

Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free — Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007 — Page 2 — TIME