E-books and e-publishing - Samuel Vaknin (best historical fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗
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these will trickle down to consumers and businesses in a
myriad ways. “The fabled Home Entertainment Center” has
indeed not yet arrived, but not because it’s technologically
impossible - more because consumers have not been shown
compelling reasons and results. However, we have seen a vast
amount of this “convergence” in different ways. Consider the
extent of entertainment now provided through PCs and video
game consoles, or the relatively new class of PDA+cell phone,
or the pocket MP3 player, or the in-car DVD, …
4. Dot.coms have bombed. Now nanotechnology is touted as the
basis for a “New Economy”. Are we in for the bursting of yet
another bubble?
Unrealistic expectations are rarely met over the long term.
Many people felt that the dot.com era was unrealistic, yet the
allure of the magically rising stock prices fueled the
eventual conflagration. The same could happen with
nanotechnology, but perhaps we have learned to combine our
excitement of “the next big thing” with reasonable and
rational expectations and business practices. The “science”
will come at its own pace — how we finance that, and profit
from it, could well benefit from the dot.bomb lessons of the
past. Just as with science, there’s no pot of gold at the end
of the economic rainbow.
5. Moore’s Law and Metcalf’s Law delineate an exponential
growth in memory, processing speed, storage, and other
computer capacities. Where is it all going? What is the end
point? Why do we need so much computing power on our desktops?
What drives what - technology the cycle-consuming applications
or vice versa?
There are always “bottlenecks.” Taking computers as an
example, at any point in time we may have been stymied by not
having enough processing power, or memory, or disk space, or
bandwidth, or even ideas of how to consume all of the
resources that happened to exist at a given moment.
But because each of these (and many more) technologies advance
along their individual curves, the mix of our overall
technological capabilities keeps expanding, and this continues
to open incredible new opportunities for those who are willing
to color outside the lines.
For example, at a particular moment in time, a college student
wrote a program and distributed it over the Internet, and
changed the economics and business model for the entire music
distribution industry (Napster). This could not have happened
without the computing power, storage, and bandwidth that
happened to come together at that time.
Similarly, as these basic computing and communications
capabilities have continued to grow in capacity, other
brilliant minds used the new capabilities to create the DivX
compression algorithm (which allows “good enough” movies to be
stored and distributed online) and file-format-independent
peer-to-peer networks (such as Kazaa), which are beginning to
change the video industry in the same manner!
The point is that in a circular fashion, technology drives
innovation, while innovation also enables and drives
technology, but it’s all sparked and fueled by the innovative
minds of individuals. Technology remains open-ended. For
example, as we have approached certain “limits” in how we
build semiconductors, or in how we store magnetic information,
we have ALWAYS found ways “through” or “around” them. And I
see no indication that this will slow down.
6. The battle rages between commercial interests and champions
of the ethos of free content and open source software. How do
you envisage the field ten years from now?
The free content of the Internet, financed in part by the
dot.com era of easy money, was probably necessary to bootstrap
the early Internet into demonstrating its new potential and
value to people and businesses. But while it’s tempting to
subscribe to slogans such as “information wants to be free,”
the longer-term reality is that if individuals and businesses
are not compensated for the information that they present,
there will eventually be little information available.
This is not to say that advertising or traditional
“subscriptions,” or even the still struggling system of
“micropayments” for each tidbit, are the roads to success.
Innovation will also play a dramatic role as numerous
techniques are tried and refined. But overall, people are
willing to pay for value, and the next decade will find a
continuing series of experiments in how the information
marketplace and its consumers come together.
7. Adapting to rapid technological change is disorientating.
Toffler called it a “future shock”. Can you compare people’s
reactions to new technologies today - to their reactions, say,
20 years ago?
It’s all a matter of ‘rate of change.’ At the beginning of
the industrial revolution, the parents in the farms could not
understand the changes that their children brought home with
them from the cities, where the pace of innovation far
exceeded the generations-long rural change process.
Twenty years ago, at the time of the birth of the PC, most
people in industrialized nations accommodated dramatically
more change each year than early industrial-age farmer would
have seen in his or her lifetime. Yet both probably felt about
the same amount of “future shock,” because it’s relative The
“twenty years ago” person had become accustomed to that year’s
results of the exponential growth of technology, and so was
“prepared” for that then-current rate of change.
Similarly, today, school children happily take the most
sophisticated of computing technologies in-stride, while many
of their parents still flounder at setting the clock on the
VCR - because the kids simply know no other rate of change.
It’s in the perception.
That said, given that so many technological changes are
exponential in nature, it’s increasingly difficult for people
to be comfortable with the amount of change that will occur in
their own lifetime. Today’s schoolchildren will see more
technological change in the next twenty years than I have seen
in my lifetime to date; it will be fascinating to see how they
(and I) cope.
8. What’s your take on e-books? Why didn’t they take off? Is
there a more general lesson here?
The E-books of the past few years have been an imperfect
solution looking for a problem.
There’s certainly value in the concept of an E-book, a self-contained electronic “document” whose content can change at a
whim either from internal information or from the world at
large. Travelers could carry an entire library with them and
never run out of reading material. Textbooks could reside in
the E-book and save the backs of backpack-touting students.
Industrial manuals could always be on-hand (in-hand!) and up
to date. And more.
Indeed, for certain categories, such as for industrial
manuals, the E-book has already proven valuable. But when it
comes to the general case, consumers found that the
restrictions of the first E-books outweighed their benefits.
They were expensive. They were fragile. Their battery life
was very limited. They were not as comfortable to hold or to
read from as a traditional book. There were several
incompatible standards and formats, meaning that content was
available only from limited outlets, and only a fraction of
the content that was available in traditional books was
available in E-book form. Very restrictive.
The lesson is that (most) people won’t usually buy technology
for technology’s sake. On the other hand, use a technology to
significantly improve the right elements of a product or
service, or its price, and stand back.
9. What are the engines of innovation? what drives people to
innovate, to invent, to think outside the box and to lead
others to adopt their vision?
“People” are the engines of innovation. The desire to look
over the horizon, to connect the dots in new ways, and to
color outside the lines is what drives human progress in its
myriad dimensions. People want to do things more easily,
become more profitable, or simply ‘do something new,’ and
these are the seeds of innovation.
Today, the building blocks that people innovate with can be
far more complex than those in the past. You can create a more
interesting innovation out of an integrated circuit that
contains 42-million transistors today - a Pentium 4 - than you
could out of a few single discrete transistors 30 years ago.
Or today’s building blocks can be far more basic (such as
using Atomic Force Microscopes to push individual atoms around
into just the right structure.) These differences in scale
determine, in part, why today’s innovations seem more
dramatic.
But at its heart, innovation is a human concept, and it takes
good ideas and persuasion to convince people to adopt the
resulting changes. Machines don’t (yet) innovate. And they
may never do so, unless they develop that spark of self-awareness that (so far) uniquely characterizes living things.
Even if we get to the point where we convince our computers to
write their own programs, at this point it does not seem that
they will go beyond the goals that we set for them. They may
be able to try superhuman numbers of combinations before
arriving at just the right one to address a defined problem,
but they won’t go beyond the problem. Not the machines we
know today, at any rate.
On the other hand, some people, such as National Medal of
Technology recipient Ray Kurzweil, believe that the
exponential increase in the capabilities of our machines -
which some estimate will reach the complexity of the human
brain within a few decades - may result in those machines
becoming self-aware.
Don’t Blink!
The Case of the Compressed Image
By: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Also published by United Press International (UPI)
Also Read:
The Disruptive Engine - Innovation and the Capitalist Dream
Forgent Networks from Texas wants to collect a royalty every
time someone compresses an image using the JPEG algorithm. It
urges third parties to negotiate with it separate licensing
agreements. It bases its claim on a 17 year old patent it
acquired in 1997 when VTel, from which Forgent was spun-off,
purchased the San-Jose based Compression Labs.
The patent pertains to a crucial element in the popular
compression method. The JPEG committee of ISO - the
International Standards Organization - threatens to withdraw
the standard altogether. This would impact thousands of
software and hardware products.
This is only the latest in a serious of spats. Unisys has
spent the better part of the last 15 years trying to enforce a
patent it owns for a compression technique used in two other
popular imaging standards, GIF and TIFF. BT Group sued
Prodigy, a unit of SBC Communications, in a US federal court,
for infringement of its patent of the hypertext link, or
hyperlink - a ubiquitous and critical element of the Web. Dell
Computer has agreed with the FTC to refrain from enforcing a
graphics patent having failed to disclose it to the standards
committee in its deliberations of the VL-bus graphics
standard.
“Wired” reported yesterday that the Munich Upper Court
declared “deep linking” - posting links to specific pages
within a Web site - in violation the European Union “Database
Directive”. The directive copyrights the “selection and
arrangement” of a database - even if the content itself is not
owned by the database creator. It explicitly prohibits
hyperlinking to the database contents as “unfair extraction”.
If upheld, this would cripple most search engines. Similar
rulings - based on national laws - were handed down in other
countries, the latest being Denmark.
Amazon sued Barnes and Noble - and has since settled out of
court in March - for emulating its patented “one click
purchasing” business process. A Web browser command to
purchase an item generates a “cookie” - a text file replete
with the buyer’s essential details which is then lodged in
Amazon’s server. This allows the transaction to be completed
without a further confirmation step.
A clever trick, no doubt. But even Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s
legendary founder, expressed doubts
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