Dear Malcolm: Why So Threatened?
Chris Anderson responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s column from yesterday. His example may work, but I agree with calcutt’s comment (I would link to it but I can’t), the example Anderson mentions is fine for some topics, but I’m not sure a by-day civil engineer could knock up an article on war crimes in Sudan that takes a year to research, that needs a full-time, paid, professional journo, not someone who is only writing from personal experience (no offence).
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson
I tend to agree with Gladwell here, free simply isn’t an option. To get quality you need paid professionals, just look at the lapses we’ve seen of late with people relying on Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, instead of checking a professionally vetted (and therefore costed) alternative.
As a society we became more successful when we let people specialise, but if a journalist doesn’t get paid for their work how can they dedicate themselves to it?
That’s not to say that some content may not become freely distributed, there are other revenue streams, such as advertising, be it overt or not, but do you really want to read something where a little voice in the back of you mind is questioning if they really think the new car/gadget/cosmetic is great or if they’re just saying that because they got a nice hand-out?
Long live the TV licence so we get a professional, unbiased news and entertainment service.
Trans-Atlantic MagLev
A nice idea, but costs and the small matter of the mid-Atlantic ridge would be fairly sizeable problems I imagine.
Who goes to a creationist museum?
I’m slightly concerned about this quote:
The retired businessman dismisses Darwin’s theory as “not even a low grade hypothesis” and said it had “no substantial science” in it.
Sorry, Darwin’s theory of evolution has no substantial science in it? Well at least it’s backed up by some scientific evidence, and has survived every attempt to dispel it for 150 years. Sounds fairly robust to me compared to some words written in a book over the last 2000 years by persons unknown and translated nobody knows how many times (thereby opening yet more opportunity to misinterpretation).
I should probably point out I’m reading The God Delusion at the moment. I don’t have a problem with people being taught both versions, but don’t ban evolution.
I also find it interesting that the people quoted seem to think they’re the unheard minority in the US, when they’re the loud majority who have been trying to ban students even being taught about evolution.
Oil Eating Bacteria Found
Potential for terrorism against oil fields there, which would bring the western world to a halt or just drive the price of oil up.
England 6 – Andora 0
I used to be a supporter of letting all of the teams in FIFA’s world rankings compete for a place in the World Cup, but I am now coming round to the argument that teams like Andora should go through a pre-qualification phase before they’re allowed to play against the bigger teams.
One of Andora’s players plays in Spain’s fourth division, another in Italy’s second, most aren’t full-time footballers. We don’t let teams that low start playing against premier league teams in the FA Cup, why should we do it at international level?
To give you an idea. There are 207 teams in the world ranking, Andora rank 196, so there are only 11 teams in the world below them. The other teams in England’s World Cup qualifying group are:
- Kazakhstan, ranked 132
- Ukraine, ranked 19
- Croatia, ranked 8
- Belarus, ranked 81
England are ranked 6th. So, my thinking is, why are we playing Andora, Kazakhstan and Belarus? Let them have a pre-tournament and earn the right to play teams in the top 50. Otherwise we risk turning internationals into a pointless exercise.
Power Consumption
I borrowed an energy monitor plug this week to check what my home entertainment devices were pulling down. Some surprising numbers:
| Wii (Standby) | 1w |
| Wii (On) | 16w |
| Wii (Max) | 18w |
| TV (Standby) | 0w |
| TV (On) | 118w |
| TV (Max) | 119w |
| Laptop (Charging) | 24w |
| Laptop (Boot) | 58w |
| Laptop (Idle) | 46w |
| Mac Pro (Standby) | 5w |
| Mac Pro (Idle, disk usage) | 180w |
| Mac Pro (Idle, no disk) | 166w |
| Mac Pro (Boot) | 210w |
| Mac Pro (Max) | 218w |
| HTPC (Standby) | 3w |
| HTPC (S3 sleep) | 4w |
| HTPC (Idle) | 80w |
| HTPC (Playing back recorded programme) | 82w |
| HTPC (Watching live TV) | 90w |
| HTPC (Recording one channel, playing back recorded programme) | 100w |
| HTPC (Max) | 105w |
| 19″ monitor (On) | 26w |
| 17″ monitor (Standby) | 1w |
| 17″ monitor (On) | 33w |
I’m a little surprised by the HTPC results. Jeff Atwood has a build quite similar which idles at 46w.
Making some assumptions, I would calculate that the HTPC costs about £48.48 per year (£4.04 per month) to run. That’s based on:
- 6 hours a day full usage, total 180 hours a month
- 100w usage for all of those hours
- 4w per hour for the rest
- 720 total hours a month
- 20p per kWh
- Using the handy electricity calculator
PC futures shown off at Computex
I have to say that I tend to agree with Nvidia’s idea of the future being PCs everywhere if we can get the power consumption and cost down sufficiently. (Obviously this won’t be the only PCs in the future, but I think we’ll start to see more and more things coming with computers in)
Surf the Google Wave
I’ve watched all 80 minutes of the presentation on what Google Wave is and it looks awesome. I work as part of a team that spends a lot of time managing data and communications both internally and with other teams and to do this we use a mind-numbing array of email, IM, Skype, Office docs, Wiki pages, web pages, OneNote and more besides so I can see instant applications for Wave technology.
Not least are the contextual spell checker and the translation tool for communicating with colleagues whose primary language is not English. It does look like an exciting step forward in communication.