The Mad Men episode about the slide projector reminded me of this little case I bought somewhere second-hand for $9.
I don't know why. I don't have many slides. I just liked it. I use it as my foot rest.
<p>10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.</p><p>Here it is: my crazy summer project to reinvent desktop human-computer interaction. <br /><br />This video examines the benefits and limitations inherent in current mouse-based and window-oriented interfaces, the problems facing other potential solutions, and visualizes my proposal for a completely new way of interacting with desktop computers. <br /><br />There's more information at http://10gui.com .</p>
Charles Leadbeater talked about Cloud Culture at QUT by raising the question of who or what should control the clouds - of data that is.
If you leave it up to algorithms it's dicey.
Amazon's algorithms recently recommended he buy his own book, We-Think. Facebook's algorithm started a rumour that he and his wife were not on speaking terms because they hadn't written on each other's walls in so long - he assures everyone that they are on more than speaking terms still.
He started out telling a room full of academics that he wasn't really one of them - he's a journalist. He worked for the Financial Times. He worked in Weekend TV.
But when he started out nobody was asking him what his business model was and no one in the "traditional media" game wondered what their end-users were doing with the content they produced.
All that's changed in the past 10 years. He expects the rate of change to maintain its momentum for the next 10 years.
Basically, he thinks that the new business model may lie somewhere on a spectrum between aggregators and Apple - he actually thinks that a process is underway called Applizing.
He pointed to the fact that Google's new products - like Buzz - are failing while Apple's selling hundreds of thousands of iPads.
And he thinks Google's search function is second-rate - perhaps that's why Facebook has taken the search crown this year.
People tend to concentrate on the ferocious struggle between old and new media but it's the ferocious struggle between the new and newer and still newer media which will determine the landscape of the future.
So who does get to control the cloud?
He says it's obvious that governments would have a preference for doing deals with one or two players: Apple and Facebook? There's Apple again.
However, he says Facebook is "fatally compromised" because the more it goes commercial the less "social" it becomes - and there's a pesky issue of privacy.
While Apple is upfront about its dealings - it's commercial. It helps you to be cool. Thereby it serves you. (Them's aren't actually his words I'm just interpreting here)
And one of his big lines is that it's the renegades and the pirates - the guys who DON'T get government subsidies - who will be the game changers.
But there's room for all - at the moment anyway.
For instance, the UK's pollies spend many hours doing interviews with netmums in this election campaign - which has only 600,000 members.
Clouds will come in many shapes and sizes and compositions - depending on how the governance issues pan out.
The users and creators of clouds will come from a "pebble beach" landscape (METAPHOR) - with large organisations such as aggregators, public institutions, universities, libraries, galleries being the "boulders".
They will replace the boulders of the industrial era - newspapers, TV etc.
And then there's the pebbles - amateur and professionals who blog, create, post, mash ... RT even.
Cloud capitalists and governments are possible enemies of cloud access and equity - governments because in an effort to control the cloud they will want to make deals with capitalists.
One interesting question came up in the Q&A: Google's attempt to access cheap hydro power for its server farms.
I asked Mr Leadbeater about this slight contradiction between consumption and supply - this carbon footprint problem of the technology revolution.
He admits that it's an issue which few are addressing.
Or is it because I went to Applications and turned off the switch so that Facebook's partners can't automatically customise me if and when I go to their sites??
I'm hoping it has significant ergonomic benefits.
I see that the jury is still out in ergonomics blogs.
I believe that just having an option to alternate between is beneficial.
I love writing on the iPad - but only with the keyboard dock.
The angle of the screen is great for me but you have to work at a desk or table that is the ideal height so that your feet are still flat on the floor.
But surely if the screen is too low for you use the phone book - if you still own one - as a tower.
The only function I'd like to see added to the iPad is a voice recording function - with an edit program/app.
I've only been using the iPad for a week but it feels more comfortable to write on because I can access all the programs with a touch - rather than a click.
And I can edit the text with a touch.
I downloaded Pages - the Apple equivalent of Word Doc - for about $15.
The screen and text is large enough to read.
The second thing I did was load my audio books.
The battery lasts all day.
But then I'm not playing music at the same time as I'm writing.
And I'm sure playing movies will drain the battery much faster.
This technology is an absolute Godsend for journalism in my opinion.
And my opinion comes from the "restless years" of using clunky old laptops to write court stories when juries come back with their verdicts at 9pm; writing remotely from parliamentary sittings and sending news stories via clunky phone hook-ups from country Queensland and from writing police news stories in my head speeding back to the office so that I can type it straight into the computer.
Broadband is still a major hitch for emailing stories remotely.
The only other interesting thing is I keep touching the computer screen to edit the text now.
Oh well. I can't wait for the next gen computers.
Now touch screens are a value to me.
I really couldn't be bothered with iPod or iPhone.
Touch screens - yeah.
Now touch screens - YEAH!
Just because we can, does it mean we should? This was a philosophical question raised at the X/Media/Lab conference last week at the Sydney Opera House.
Just because you can record your sexual prowess on a website – the number of times you get it up, the times of the day or night when you’re at your sexual peak etc – should you?
Writer/journalist Anand Giridharadas tickled everyone's fancy with a little afternoon delight - there's a website called bedposted.com .
This became the running joke for every speaker who followed.
The ABC was there, The Edge from the State Library of Queensland was there, a party from QUT’s Creative Industries was there too.
X/Media/Lab has become a major event for anyone interested in digital media.
The stellar line-up at last week’s event at the Sydney Opera House included Robert Tercek, a renaissance man of the entertainment industry; Ralph Simon, founder of the modern mobile entertainment industry (inventor of the ringtone); Fanshake founder Dana Al Salem, who built the Yahoo! Europe team when she was 18 or so years old; and Amin Zoufonoun, Google’s director of corporate development.
Most of them, like China’s Haidong Pan who built a Chinese Wikipedia, stuck to the theme of how do you build an innovative global Media idea into reality.
Google's Amin Zoufonoun quoted World Bank figures to prove his point that the digital economy should indeed warrant closer inspection by investors and governments: for every 10 percent increase in broadband speed there's a corresponding 1.3 percent economic growth. NOTE: no private investors were present at the conference. Well, there was one angel from New Zealand but he didn't raise his hand.
The overall message delivered by most speakers was that digital is a new ballgame but it’s the same game. Digital businesses need to solve a real-world problem, or tell a compelling story, and do what they do well to be successful.
Ralph Simon, who flew in from South Africa where he worked on the World Cup, identified the key common ingredients of great innovations: originality; a network of believers who spread word by mouth; adequate seed funding; international connections and a cast-iron belief & persistence. These ingredients apply across the board – not just to digital innovation.
Dana Al Salem identified two tribes. She supported her argument that the more things change the more they really stay the same by comparing today’s GenY and the hippies of 40 years ago.
Hippies championed free love and so does GenY who are known as the Hook-Up Generation. Hurricane Katrina now//Hurricane Camille then. Glastonbury now // Woodstock then. Virgin Galactic space travel now // Copncorde’s first supersonic flight then. Vietnam War // Iraq War … BP spill // California spill in ‘69. The big difference between the Baby Boomers and GenY? GenY’s overstimulated so they’re difficult to excite, they love change, they are a tagged species. Hippy freedom didn’t include an acceptance of loss of privacy and a love of exclusivity.
While most speakers talked about how to make money one speaker spoke about the need to create a philosophy to govern digital ethics and life. Anand Giridharadas, the tech columnist for the International Herald Tribune, has been writing a book living in a small, isolated Indian village. And he too came to the realization that the digital era has not really changed the workings of social networking. The technology’s changed, the platform has changed but it’s still a village where everyone can hear everything that goes down through paper (or grass) walls.
He calls it ambient sociability. He says it’s something old wrapped in something new. Giridharadas says the internet is not a rootless, new phenomenon without precedent, it’s all the bickering, praising, coming and going that makes up life in a traditional village. But he suggests that there are more challenging areas than marketing and economics that the digitally enabled society has to solve. There’s a question of civility, universality and transparency. Issues such as how much anonymity is too much? Should people be held accountable for their online actions with the introduction of a persistent digital identity?
What happens to honesty and personal integrity when people, being conscious of the image they project online, start to edit themselves to make their personal brand more palatable? Does that kind of self marketing turn people into liars?
He ended on this note:
“We need to figure out the shape of the life we wish to lead and ask how all these magnificent, dangerous ones and zeroes can be put to the task.”
“How do we evolve a digital philosophy? What would it look like?” Just because we can, does it mean we should?
UPDATE: Sony got back to me. They paid for a repair man to come out and replace the power board - apparently they are now called static converters.
Sony have moved their call centre to New Zealand. A few of the guys I spoke to were very, very helpful. I guess it pays to be patient.
One important lesson though: Don't be lazy.
You have 21 days with Sony to return the item.
The one-year manufacturer's guarantee covers repairs not replacements.
I should have packed the TV back up immediately and taken it back to the store for a replacement on the first day.
Original post:
When I bought a Sony Bravia widescreen 62cm TV for about $1000 in January I extended the warranty (FIVE YEARS).
I didn't realise that the warranty doesn't mean that they will replace it if it is faulty - what exactly is a warranty worth to a customer?
Do I have to be an alchemist to turn a warranty into a warranty?
I didn't realise that the initial one-year warranty offered by Sony itself doesn't even cover the cost of getting someone out to fix the fault which it appears they actually knew about when they were selling the X5500 model to dopes like me. By the way it also affects the Z5500 model. Wonder how many dopes there are suffering it out like me?
I should've taken it straight back the moment it switched itself off without warning on the first day 30 minutes after I installed it - I just couldn't hack repacking it and then reinstalling it.
Apparently Sony released the Firmware Update Version PKG1.428AA patch in January - the month I purchased it.
The download stops the TV from launching into self diagnosis i.e. going dark.
On Friday afternoon my TV switched itself off and went dead. I went to bed disgusted. It still didn't work on Saturday morning.
And at 9am today, Monday morning, a Sony representative informed me that the only option I had to fix the TV which was still under a 1 year warranty was to download this patch, put it (the patch not the Tv) on a USB stick and then stick the USB into the back of the dead TV. Self service. The new Sony warranty.
If I wanted to get a repair man out to do it then I would need to pay for it myself.
So just for fun I asked for the number of the closest Sony repair guy - at this stage I believed I could download the patch myself but I wanted to know how much it would cost to fix a TV under warranty.
Call me troublesome.
The repair guy told me he needed paperwork from Sony to come through normally before he could come out otherwise it would cost me.
He thought it was weird too.
So I went to the website to download the patch - however the download is not Mac compatible so all I got was a page of crap. So I rang Sony again.
They wanted a reference number from my initial call and I told them that the generous guy who took my call didn't give me a reference number or take down any details.
No he "offered" me this download and website directions only - EVEN THOUGH THE ... TV... is still under WARRANTY!
They have promised to get back to me tomorrow. My 10-month-old TV is having a little lie down.
Shall keep you posted.
