The price of a minimally speced Windows box keeps going down. So the portion of the price that is the OS keeps going up. I predict that eventually Microsoft will just give you a computer with each of copy of Windows. Oh, they already do that: it’s called the XBox!

In local news, if sea levels rise 7m then Docklands, Port Melbourne and Albert Park will be marine parks.

The Age reckons nowadays that all the cool kids workers need IT degreees, regardless of what they’re doing.

In the 1970s, an arts degree gave graduates the foundation to get a good job in most fields. In the 1980s it was a law degree, and in the late 1990s it was a commerce degree. But this looks to be the decade of the IT degree.

Sure, but I’ve got both the commerce degree and the IT degree, and where has it got me?

Wow: Photographic proof of a time-travelling city appearing offshore of Penglai, China. Clearly visible are a number of high-rise buildings of various construction. Scientists claim it’s a mirage, but we know the truth, don’t we?

Update: there seems to be some trouble viewing this image. I can see it at http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/mmsource/images/2006/05/08/4316seasea.jpg, which is hosted in China. If there are more difficulties I’ll post it on our server.

Here’s an idea: rather than sending advertisements to user’s computers, why not send scripting code to calculate [the valuable thing, like, I dunno, pi or hacking the encryption on HDDVD or something] and send the results back to your central computer?

Come on, you know you want to. And it’s free!

Popular mechanics examines various alternative fuels, but isn’t good at figuring out cause and effect.

Point one:
Global warming is caused by too much greenhouse gases; Burning stuff creates carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Burning stuff causes global warming. Not digging stuff up out of the ground.

Point two:
Hydrogen is easiest to create by passing electricity through water. Electricity is mostly created by burning coal (heating water, turning turbine, yada yada yada). See point one. This has just been pointed out in an Age opinion piece on public transport.

Which is why ethenol, methenol, biodiesel, natural gas, electricity and hydrogen aren’t anti-greenhouse fuels; Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and geothermal are.

Only electric batteries / hydrogen cells can act as crossover technologies from renewable generation sources to transport. Anything else is going to have water lapping at your front door in a century; but hey, Venice is a romantic city – and wouldn’t it be great if many more of the cities of the world were romantic like Venice?.

Mark Pesce delivered a presentation, “Piracy Is Good?“, on May 6th, 2005 at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. In it, he asserted that bittorrents exhibit demand-driven bandwidth supply, and are thus a better utilization of bandwidth than terrestial television broadcasting. Which is an apples and oranges comparison. But that’s where the title came from.

He then goes on to note that viewers are shunning broadcast television in preference for web-acquired content. He attributes this to the advertising, as I have done in the past. He asserts that Watermarks – or bugs – in visual entertainment are going to become more ubiquitous, inserted as advertising at production time (so, instead of the Channel9 logo in the righthand bottom corner, you’ll see… Nike). I predict someone will become annoyed enough to invent a watermark remover. Oh look, they already have.

So Mark Pesce is wrong. The advertising is going to have to be more subtle and harder to remove. But initially it’s going to be less subtle – animated, say – to annoy the simple-minded watermark removal programs.

Technology will march on, and auto-adapting watermark removers will be developed, and then you’re looking at product placement. I wonder how that will work with sci-fi programs? “Worf, take us to warp factor nine. We have to get to Chase Manhatten Bank to do a funds transfer; I prefer their friendly service and forward-looking technology.” Perhaps we’re looking at the death of sci fi? And historical dramas? And documentaries aren’t looking too hot either. Neighbours should be fine. Perhaps merchandising will be how shows make their production budget.

An observer has noted that the order of release of content is becoming arranged by profitability – so you’ll see more TV shows released on DVD, then broadcast when sales drop off. The world’s gone all topsy-turvy.

A TV salesman is advocating the government buys a set top boxes for each analogue TV in Australia. He says it’s the best way to save the government money, because it’s costing AUD$50m/year to dual broadcast. And in financial terms, he’s right. Perhaps banning the sale of analogue sets might also hurry things along a little. $150m is his estimate for the government to bail itself out of dual-broadcasting.

But digital signals bite arse; SDTV has the same resolution as analogue, with the upside of no ghosting and the downsides of a loss of colour-depth plus dropouts affecting the audio and video streams. If you’re not getting ghosting on your current analogue signal (or it’s not annoying you), SDTV is a step down. HDTV is a massive improvement in raw data resolution, but no TVs are capable of displaying a raw 1920 x 1080 (the 1280 x 720 signal is academic, because it isn’t broadcast in Australia; and the signal is 1080i, there isn’t enough bandwidth allocated for 1080p) picture.

I don’t remember the step from Black and White TV to colour, but I know that colour sets were happily picking up the B&W signal before the changeover, and B&W sets kept working after the changeover. That would be bi-directional compatability. Same gig with FM radio when it went stereo – bi-directional compatability, because the stereo signal was on a seperate carrier encoded as the difference to the mono signal – cunning. Digital and analogue are co-existing quite happily at the moment, because the signals are being duplicated and transmitted (has anyone noticed the digital signal lags the analogue signal by about a second?), and apparently it costs a pretty penny to keep the dual broadcast going – probably in equipment maintenance costs (I don’t think the electricity is costing $1m / week).

So what do you actually get for your dollars in converting? If you step up to HDTV (no native resolution sets, remember) you get native widescreen capability rather than letterboxing, plus 5.1 sound rather than poxy stereo. Because of the compression, for a given set of bandwidth, you can have more video streams (approximately four SD can fit in the bandwidth of a single HD broadcast). Bitrates and compression can both be played with to improve the signal’s reliability and quality. And channels don’t bump into each other like they do in the analogue world (which is why the stations are on such widely seperated bands). But look at pay TV – like Bruce said, 57 channels and nothing on. Are you fixated by what’s currently available on broadcast TV? Will more channels increase the amount of TV you want to watch?

What was the point in this whole process anyway? What’s wrong with the PAL signal, and why did we rush in and select digital TV formats? Why didn’t the Australian government emulate the Irish government and just sit on it’s hands for a decade, waiting to see what happened in the US, Japan, Europe and China, and then evaluate the technical aspects of the winning systems? Why encourage the public to run around spending $10,000 a TV on technologies that are prone to disappointing failure (pixel death)? Any why are we shipping so much cash offshore to pay for the damn things?

We should have delayed going down the Digital TV road until it became attractive.

Owen turned four (months) recently, and he was taken to the doctor for that round of innoculations. That reminded me that when Cathy and I were doing childbirth classes we discovered that the lunatic fringe is alive and well in Melbourne. The subject was “Sleeping Soundly”, the opening minutes of which were about vaccination for no reason I could discern.

The World Health Organisation, whom the Choices for Childbirth speakers quote when lamenting (quite rightly, in my opinion) the high medical intervention rate during childbirth, is studiously ignored when talking about how one ought to explore both sides of the “debate” over immunisation. The WHO says “No child should be denied immunisation without serious thought about the consequences, both to the child and the community”.

Humans are terrible at estimating risk (also known as probabilities). They happily play lotteries (one in millions chance of winning), but then drive their kids to school (running a pronounced risk of a car crash and injuries vs a vanishingly small risk of a perverted old man snatching their kid and having his way with them). Humans are prejudiced machines – they decide things without knowing all the information (pre-justice, or pre-judge). They make decisions based on what they can recall on the subject. And this counterpointed by the news media, which reports news. They don’t report that millions of Aussies got out of bed, went to work and came home again, without incident. That’s not news. Someone being bitten (or better yet, taken) by a shark, that’s news – because it hardly ever happens. Things that are unusual, different, out of the ordinary and notable are part of every night’s TV viewing. A viewing night of four hours – 240 minutes – includes 30 minutes of really unusual stuff, so odd and weird that the TV station sent a film crew out to take pictures of it (ever woken to find a camera crew filming you getting out of bed? “This morning, Josh got out of bed…” No, didn’t think so). And humans think “I better be careful when I go swimming, a shark could get me. I’ve seen that happen a couple of times in the last few months. In fact, just to be safe, I won’t go swimming”. We have crime shows on every night, leading viewers to think “there’s a lot of crime out and about. I’ll drive to the shops”. The news loves a good kidnapping “little girl snatched from her bedroom”, and happily ignores the fact that almost all child abductions are performed by relatives. But we’ll drive them to school, to keep them safe (and fat). So when the Tabloid TV shows announce that a child has reacted poorly to an innoculation, immunisation rates plummet, in the same way breast cancer screening rates jumped right after Kylie got it. More often than not, they use their power for evil rather than good.

These same TV shows give equal time to minority and majority opinions, in the interests of fairness. Which would be fine, except humans will go “hmmm, it seems that professional opinion on this seems to be divided down the middle, I’ll just be safe and not vaccinate my child (besides, needles hurt).” It’s dangerous and irresponsible, scaremongering amongst the vaccination decision makers – parents. And they’re being affected by it. Infectious diseases the developed world thought it had eradicated (think whooping cough, which was almost wiped out – ) are resufacing as a result of the crazy hippies who reckon that this vaccination thing is all a money making scam by the multinational phamacutical companies.

Vaccines don’t always work. They are not 100% effective. You can get a disease after being vaccinated against it – the vaccine may not provoke an immune response. And that doesn’t have to matter.

Needles hurt. vaccines have an inherent level of danger. Injecting pathogens into your body isn’t something it’s really designed for, and keeping vaccines viable for an acceptable time means there’s stuff in them that some bodies will not react well to. Some immune systems go ape shit when they see the disease. Some people die. I’d like to point out how badly the bodies of these people will react when they get the real, live, unattenuated, unadulterated, honest to God virilent form of the disease – exceptionally poorly. But none the less, there is a potential cost associated with being vaccinated.

I’m going to talk about Herd immunity and the free loader effect. A certain level of non-vaccinated members of the population is acceptable, but varies from disease to disease – the immunisation you’re given may not invoke an immune response in you, but at the same time, if about 90% of the population is immune, generally an infectious disease is not going to become pandemic. Which is fine, and everyone’s happy. Until God damn hippies start running around not getting immunised, becoming free loaders on those of the population who have run the risk of reacting horribly. With enough people unimmunised, eventually the herd immunity effect breaks down, and the kids of the hippies end up getting diseases that we thought no one got anymore. And, no doubt, the hippies whinge about it, but refuse to take the blame for the kids of responsible parents who got the disease despite being vaccinated against it – because their bodies failed to produce an immune response. And those responsible parents will be too grief stricken to blame the hippies for killing their child.

The Australian federal government’s Immunisation Myths and Realities booklet talks about the complaints that hippies put forward. Myths such as the MMR vaccination causing autism.

The adverse reactions a vaccination may produce are mild compared to what would happen if they actually got the disease. The only elevated risk is to those intolerant of egg products.

Let’s have a look at what these diseases do. Because, if you were against immunising against them, they can’t be that bad, insofar as diseases go, right? Because you’re happy to run the risk of your child catching and living with (and dying from) these diseases, verus the risk of your child having “something happen to them” as a result of being vaccinated.

From the Australian National immunisation program schedule of immunisations, things that you’re innoculated against:

• At the moment of birth: hemoraging. Normally Vitamin K is produced by bacteria in the intestines, and dietary deficiency is extremely rare unless the intestines are heavily damaged. But newborns are nearly sterile – if the embryonic sack is intact, they are sterile. Thus, no bateria, and no Vitamin K, which is needed for the posttranslational modification of certain proteins, mostly required for blood coagulation.
• Polio, check out photos of polio victims. The virus invades the nervous system, and the onset of paralysis can occur in a matter of hours. Polio can spread widely before physicians detect the first signs of a polio outbreak – so forget pulling your child from school when someone is noticed with polio, this is not a prophalatic method with any level of success.
• Diphtheria, check out photos of children with Diptheria, a baterial infection. Long-term effects include cardiomyopathy (the heart wastes away) and peripheral neuropathy (ie, paralysis).
• Pertussis or whooping cough. Doesn’t sound so bad, a bit of a cough. Check out the photos of babies with a bit of a cough. Complications of the disease include pneumonia, encephalitis, pulmonary hypertension, and secondary bacterial superinfection.
• Rubella, a relatively mild disease (photos) unless it’s caught by a developing fetus. Lifelong disability results. But I guess that’s the fetus’ problem, not yours.
• Mumps usually causes painful enlargement of the salivary or parotid glands. Orchitis (swelling of the testes) occurs in 10-20% of infected males, but sterility only rarely ensues; a viral meningitis occurs in about 5% of those infected. In older people, other organs may become involved including the central nervous system, the pancreas, the prostate, the breasts, and other organs. The incubation period is usually 12 to 24 days (again, don’t bother pulling your kids from school – they’ve already got it). Mumps is generally a mild illness in children in developed countries. So your child should get it.
• Hepatitis B – Over one-third of the world’s population has been or is actively infected by hepatitis B virus, so it can’t be all that bad. Hepatitis B infection may lead to a chronic inflammation of the liver, leading to cirrhosis. This type of infection dramatically increases the incidence of liver cancer. Only 5% of neonates that acquire the infection from their mother at birth will clear the infection. Seventy percent of those infected between the age of one to six will clear the infection. When the infection is not cleared, one becomes a chronic carrier of the virus.

There are other diseases, but I’ve only got so much time. Read the Australian federal government’s Immunisation Myths and Realities booklet. And for the love of all that’s right in the world, get your children immunised.

Just because you don’t understand statistics, science or even simple logical reasoning, doesn’t make vaccinating your children a bad thing. Perhaps, if you don’t understand any of these things, you should leave the decision making on vaccination to the professionals?

Yesterday I answered the ‘phone. Because I was home, having a holiday, which is soon to be rudely interrupted by a short working stint, but that’s by-the-by. I could tell that whomever had called didn’t know anyone in the house; the phone’s listed in my girlfriends name. “Hello, Mr [Girlfriend's-name]?” is a dead giveaway that they’ve pulled the number from the phonebook, and immediately puts me on the defensive. Which is why I have no interest in having the phone in my name. I can spot low-life scum a mile away with the arrangement as it is.

Now, the first thing I do when I have a telemarketer on the phone is to get them to tell me who they are. The lass weasled about, talking about a survey. Surveys don’t care about the identity of the respondent; this was marketting. Eventually she said she was representing the Jehovah’s Witnesses, at which point I terminated the call; religous fundamentalists get up my nostril.

Neither Cathy nor I get any telemarketing calls – oh, well maybe we get a couple a year from local gyms. It’s because we’re signed up to the ADMA’s do-no-call list. If you’re not signed up, stop reading, and go sign up now. The local gyms get the line “we only purchase goods from members of the Australian Direct Marketting Association” and they’re taken care of.

So, here we have technology being used for evil. Evil, not only because it’s evangelical fundamentalists at work, but because they claim they’re doing a survey about how people in the local neighbourhood feel about stuff. Because it’s a survey, that would be covered by the Australian Market & Social Research Society, which (they would claim to keep the statistics clean) doesn’t operate a do-not-call list (in spite of the fact that people that don’t want to be surveyed are going to do all sorts of bad things to their stats).

Worst of all, I don’t think there’s much I can do about it, except I remember hearing about a guy who had installed a PABX with and IVR – “if you want to talk to Cathy, press 1 now. To talk to Josh, press 2 now. Pressing 3 now will let you talk at Owen, but don’t expect a cogniscient conversation out of him.” Apparently, in the US, he was getting zero telemarketing calls – which is quite a feat.

Questions:

1. Has the obesity epidemic reached the point where the Jehovah’s Witnesses can’t be bothered leaving the house to recruit souls so that they can, pyramid-sales-scheme-like, go to heaven?
2. Why don’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses tell people up front you’re not going to heaven, even if you convert (there’s only 144,000 spots – what are the chances you’ll be goody-two-shoes-super-converter enough to get in)?
3. Why doesn’t the AMSRS operate a do-not-call list?
4. Why doesn’t the government ban harrassment like this?
5. What can I do to stop this from happening again?

Scoble argues that RSS’s importance isn’t in how many people are using it, but who those people are.

He’s right, but the other point to make is that RSS isn’t mainstream yet. Email and the web are mainstream, but took years to catch on with the general public, even after being widely available. RSS is widely available, but only used by a minority of the general online population.

That will change, as the tools used by the great unwashed pick up and highlight RSS functionality. That’s not Newsgator or Firefox, but IE and Windows.

It’ll change as the influential early-adopters persuade others.

And it’ll change as the standard is sorted out — not just the XML, but how it’s advertised — that orange button needs to be ubiquituous, just like “www” and “.com” in URLs are now.

So if your site doesn’t support RSS now, it’s important to get it doing so very very soon.

Bill Gates has issued a high-level memo to the company about future direction. You might recall the 1995 memo that famously turned them onto the Internet, and started the browser wars. In 2000 a similar change got them heavily into XML and web services… which has obviously been a factor in highlighting XML to the world (and thus helping companies like the one I work for, eVision, which specialises in messaging technology, and XML).

This time it’s about Internet services — the next step on from web services.

• Ray Ozzie’s (MS Chief Technology Officer) earlier memo
• Comment from Dave Winer, who got hold of the memos

Of course it may just be a big PR stunt. But given the examples from Google (people integrating Google maps into their web sites) and elsewhere, you can understand why people see it as the way forward: opening up the myriad of useful services out there on the Net for use and re-use, and critically, making them economically viable (through advertising or otherwise).

Whatever we’re about to see, if Microsoft is turning to move into it, it’s bound to be big.