Day: August 9, 2000

ZDNet ran an interesting preview of an upcoming presentation by Intel — to
sum it up, Intel will announce near the end of August that it is working on
peer-to-peer networking or so-called virtual private network software for consumer
and business purposes. In plain English this is what that means — probably
within less than two years you will be able to run your own private Napster.
Then the record industry is really going to be in hot water.

As I have said on previous occasions, I do not believe in pirating music. I
think compact discs are cheap and when I want MP3s I actually go buy the CD
and rip it onto my hard drive. But the people I know who do use illegal MP3s
do not necessarily use Napster. A lot of people I know simply borrow CDs from
friends and rip those. One person I know actually borrowed the massive CD collection
that his DJ friend had and spent a couple weeks ripping hundreds of CDs on his
computer. I have had several people offer to burn me a CD-R filled with MP3s
— it is the 21st century version of the mix tape.

The sort of software that Intel is planning — and that others will create
with or without them — merely obviates the need to have a physical medium in
the middle. What I would like to see is an ICQ-style application (actually it
would be better to build this as an add on to ICQ). Suppose I am online chatting
with my brother and I mention that I just took my wife and daughter to the zoo.
He would love to see the pictures. Okay, I click on his username in ICQ and
instantly he has access on his end to the directory on my hard drive that contains
my most recent digitized photographs. This is what Intel is pushing as a possible
application and it would be very useful. Imagine an extended family giving each
other access to the various photographs stored on separate hard drives of the
last family reunion, for example.

But of course as my wife Lisa summed it up, the two largest uses of such a
system would be to trade in porn and music/movies. Think about it — why use
a service like Napster where you could potentially be tracked down for passing
along an MP3 for someone? Instead, set up a virtual private network so you and
your close friends can have access to each other’s MP3 files and swap those.
No central server keeping track of who is doing what — nobody would even know
what is being traded since in order for the corporate types to buy into this
sort of thing for their uses, there has to be some pretty serious security built
into the system.

Obviously the main thing that is missing in this picture and in Napster to
a large extent is broadband services. There is no way I am going to let my brother
tie up my 56K connection to download JPEGS of my daughter making faces at the
monkeys, but if I had a DSL connection I might be willing to set aside a fraction
of that for a peer-to-peer network. Once broadband is widely available (and
when that is likely to happen is anybody’s guess), this is really the future
of PC networking. If the speed and the software ever arrive, this will change
the personal computing experience just as much as the rise of the World Wide
Web did. What a glorious time to be alive.

Source:

Intel
likes what it hears in Napster. John G. Spooner, ZDnet.Com, August 9, 2000.

Another example of a person I doubt actually uses the technology he writes
about can be found on CNET where today Daniel Grotta gives advice on archiving
digitized images. After considering and then dismissing Zip drives as a
long term solution, Grotta writes:

CDs, on the other hand, are reliable and will work with most backward-compatible
drives. Sure, it may cost more to burn information onto a CD, but you don’t
want to lose those baby pictures, do you?

That may have been the case 3 years ago, but has Grotta shopped for CD-Rs lately?
I just bought a back of 50 for $35. That works out to about one-tenth of a cent
per megabyte of CD-R storage. On the other hand the last 100mb Zip disk I bought
cost me $15 which works out to 15 cents per megabyte. Far from being more expensive,
CD-R media is more than 100 times cheaper than a Zip. Initial hardware costs
might be somewhat lower for the Zip, though CD-R prices are hitting rock bottom
for lower end drives (which are still much faster than Zip), but anyone who
does any serious amount of archiving would quickly recover that additional cost.

Source:

Saving
and archiving images. Daniel Grotta, CNET.Com, August 8, 2000.

    In late July, large oil finds were announced in both Kazakhstan and Nigeria.

    The Nigeria find was the smaller of the two. The Royal Dutch/Shell group announced it discovered new oils in the Soku field in Rivers State. The new reserves are estimated to hold about 100 million barrels and Royal Dutch/Shell plans on beginning production of 10,000 barrels a day from the field by within a few weeks.

    In Kazakhstan, the Offshore Kazakhstan International Operating Company announced a possible major oil discovery under Kazakhstan’s section of the Caspian sea. Based on initial exploration, Kazakh officials estimate there are at least 7 billion tons of oil underneath the Caspian Sea, which would make it one of the largest oil finds in the world.

Sources:

Oil in Kazakhstan. The BBC, July 24, 2000.

BIg Nigeria oil find. The BBC, July 23, 2000.

    On August 4, biotechnology company Monsanto announced it was going to give its genetically modified rice grain to developing countries royalty free. The rice is modified to express high levels of vitamin A.

    Rice, a staple food in many parts of the world, is very low in vitamin A content. Vitamin A deficiency is believed to cause up to a million child deaths annually as well as up to 300,000 cases of blindness.

    Monsanto also plans to make public the genome for rice which it sequenced earlier in the year. The genome database will be at a web site set up for the purpose, Rice-Research.Org.</p?

    One of the many environmental groups which has been going after Monsanto, Friends of the Earth, welcomed the move but cautioned, “We have to be careful in case this is a public relations exercise designed to gain acceptance for GM crops.”

    Yes, god forbid the public actually started accepting products like rice genetically modified to provide Vitamin A to the hundred million or so children who are deficient in the vitamin. What would Friends of the Earth put on its fundraising letters then? According to a UNICEF report, if children in developing countries can just get enough vitamin A, they can increase their chance of long-term survival by up to 23%. Better that Friends of Earth prevent Monsanto from a public relations coup than give poor kids in the developing world a shot at life.

Sources:

GM rice patents given away. Alex Kirby, The BBC, August 4, 2000.

Monsanto to provide royalty-free licenses for ‘golden rice’ development’. The Associated Press, August 4, 2000.

Over the past couple months there have been numerous stories about how women are intimidated from using computers and related technologies. Studies, almost always based on anecdotes, attempting to show the web and Internet industries are still all-male bastions are a dime a dozen.

Unfortunately for those claims, a new study highlights the reality — more women use the web than men. The study, by Media Metrix and Jupiter Communications, found that during the first quarter of 2000, 50.4 percent of U.S. web users were women and girls. Moreover, the number of female web users is growing faster than the general population of web users. While the number of total Web users grew by 22.4 percent during 1999, the survey of 55,000 Americans found that the number of female users grew by 34.9 percent.

The age breakdown is fascinating as well. The conventional feminist wisdom is that young teenage girls are turned off by male-oriented computer games and male computer culture and give up using computers. But last year the number of girls 12-17 who used the web increased by a whopping 125 percent.

Aside from the data about the high level of female users, the other interesting fact was that the heavily funded sites geared toward women, such as Oxygen.Com, don’t draw the sort of heavy female audience that they had hoped. Instead the list of most visited web sites for women reads a lot like the most visited sites for men, with AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! web sites at the top of popularity (which is not surprising given how vapid and dumbed down sites such as Oxygen.Com tend to be).

Source:

The Web: It’s a Women’s Thing. Reuters August 9, 2000.