mip's scan

All About RSS

For those of you who read my posts each day simply by clicking on the link you may have received from my email or perhaps that email was passed on to you, I know that many of you have asked me before "What is this RSS thing?" I was recently working with a small group here in my lab facility and was explaining RSS and used the resources on CNET's site to assist in the discussion.

Finding it hard to stay abreast of the latest news and conversations on the Web? You're not alone. The number of sites and people producing content has grown over the years to an unmanageable size. Fortunately, you can now separate the signal from the noise with subscriptions to sites you enjoy and with newsreaders that can filter only the important news you need to get ahead at work.

So I thought I'd pass it along to my readers who might not have gotten into subscribing to other feeds yet. Or for those of you who already know the ins and outs of RSS, you might find this a useful site to pass on to people when they ask you for info. I particularly liked the video and played it in my lab as an intro to this group of learners.

Game On

So are you feeling as down about the prospect of no hockey this season due to the lockout as I am? Well all is not lost if you can tune into G4TechTV which is planning to air the exact 2004-2005 NHL season as played out between teams on a video game platform. Yes, you read right. I was reading about this over on the CBC site in an article titled The virtual puck drops here.

G4techTV plans to have the full season played out on video games, beginning with the Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning facing off against the Philadelphia Flyers on Oct. 13. The highlights, scores and stats will then be shown on the network's daily sports program Sweat.

Subscription Music

I was chatting with a musician friend of mine about how his industry is changing. He was telling me about a new subscription based music service that should be launching anytime - that being VirginDigital. It's not the first such service to launch, but it is (I'm pretty sure) the first retail store getting into the subscription business. To me, though, the whole rent-a-song concept just doesn't work. People want to buy a song, once. End of story. What about if I build a huge music library with something like VirginDigital over the course of a year or two. I listen to it on my PC, I can transfer music over to my digital music player (thanks to some nifty technology from Microsoft that allows subscription music streams to be transfered over to mp3 players) - all is good. Then I decide, for whatever reason (price goes up, selection of music shrinks, etc.,e tc.) to stop using VirginDigital. And that's when it happens - all the music I've been listening to, is gone. Everything. I go to use my digital music player and (thanks again to that nifty technology from Microsoft) those rented tunes won't play any more. And this is what music listeners don't like about subscription based offerings. You can buy a single track from iTunes for .99 - its yours. End of story. That song cost you .99. But with subscription services, in reality you are paying for that song again and again and again - the minute you stop, its gone. This musician friend of mine speculated that in the long-term, subscription based music services would overtake the single-track-99-cent download model because for $8 / month you could get all the music you wanted rather than just 8 songs. I don't think so. For $8 a month, you are getting about 43,000 listening minutes - and nothing else.

Yahoo's Potential Music Approach

I've been thinking about music for the past few days, specifically online music. The acquistion last week by Yahoo of MusicMatch for $160M was what got me thinking about it. My first thoughts was that this marketspace of online music is getting crowded, with Apple's iTunes being the dominate marketshare leader and everyone else fighting over the small percentage of the market that is left. So I started think about what Yahoo's spin on this market could be. It was as I watched my daughter using her PC that it struck me - instant messaging. Yahoo has a solid instant messaging application and it has the ability to stream radio through it. Would it be too much of a stretch to begin building an online music service around this IM model. The strength would not be in being able to buy music online, similar to iTunes and others, but to leverage the instant messaging strength of conversing with buddies. What if you could share a tune while in an instant mesenger conversation using Yahoo's IM application. Not share the file from the sense that person A sends it to person B - that would quickly make the recording industry freak out. But rather, lets say my daughter had purchased a particular song and then while conversing with a friend, she allowed that tune to stream to her chat buddy? I think that this would be a natural area of Yahoo to go. You can see that Microsoft is already beginning to think about this as well as they are currently experimenting with playlist sharing using a service called 3 degrees. From the 3 Degrees web site they describe their service as

3 is software that connects a small group of family and close friends, people who know and trust one another, so they can do fun things together in a whole new way. 3 is a beta test of an innovative application that lets users connect online, extending real-world social interactions.

With 3 you can: Throw a personalized animation on your friends' desktops with winks. Listen to a shared play list simultaneously, created from music that you own. Easily send digital photos from last night's party to your friends. Initiate group chat with MSN Messenger.

If Yahoo decides to launch a web portal for selling online music, then they are playing catch-up with iTunes in the same way that MSN Music and others are doing. The flipside of that is that when you look at activities that people do on the web instant messaging ranks right up there with e-mail and Web surfing as one of the most popular activities. Instant messenger users are very loyal to whatever application they use and they stay connected for hours at a time. What a perfect mix, pardon the pun.

Robot Skin

In our Youth Technology Program for kids our robotics stream has them building & programming robots. We spend a lot of time exploring the whole area of sensors. I use the 5-senses to lead these discusions. On of the senses is touch, and for these projects there are touch sensors that the kids can integrate into their robots and program to react to the environment around them. One of the challenges is that the touch sensor is often only good for a localized area on the robot. There are innovative ways that the kids increase this touch area, through the use of bumpers or cat-like whiskers that when bumped depress a touch sensor and send feed back to the robot. This works but again, the amount of area covered is always limited by the number of touch sensors you can put onto the robot.

That's why this development I just read about was particularily interesting. It builds on our own sense of touch vis-a-vis our skin. I haven't seen any robots that have sensitive skin ,but that all seems to be about to change. Through the use of organic, or plastic, field-effect transistors as pressure sensors deposited on a flexible material, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created exactly that - a robotics skin.

The researchers' prototype is an eight-centimeter-square sheet containing a 32-by-32 array of organic sensors -- a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter. In contrast, humans have 1,500 pressure sensors per square centimeter in the fingertips, though far fewer in most other places.

Obviously this isn't as sensitive as human skin, but it clearly is an amazing breakthrough. The applications for this type of skin would be limitless and would greatly improve industrial and domestic robotics ability to sense their environment for such things that require sensitivity (ie. picking a person up....you wouldn't want a robot to apply the full pressure of its mechanisms and risk bruising a home care patient for instance). Reseachers estimate that the electronic skin could be ready for practical use in four to five years. To read the entire article pertaining to this you can click here.

We the Media

I posted a short book review for a recent book I read called We The Media but I was impressed enough with this book to actually post a blog entry as well. It really causes you to stop and think about the changing landscape of the media and how we, the everyday person, are bringing this change about and how technology, the internet and the power of web logs (blogs) is accelerating this change. What I really liked in this book was the whole idea of "open sourcing the news" drawing on the strengths of the open source model for software and how that applies to journalism as well. From the book we read:

Open source software projects are a digital version of a small-town tradition: the barn raising. But open source projects can involve people from around the world. Most will never meet except online. Guided by project leaders—Torvalds in the case of Linux—they contribute bits and pieces of what becomes a whole package. Open source software, in many cases, is as good as or better than the commercial variety.

And then later on in the chapter we read:

An open source philosophy may produce better journalism at the outset, but that’s just the start of a wider phenomenon. In the conversational mode of journalism I suggested in the Intro­duction, the first article may be only the beginning of the con­versation in which we all enlighten each other. We can correct our mistakes. We can add new facts and context.

If we can raise a barn together, we can do journalism together. We already are.

It's very thought provoking and I'd recommend this book as a really good read. I read the ebook version of it and now plan to buy the hardcopy. You can read the ebook version online by clicking here.

You can buy it online here or here.

The Pendulum Does Swing

A pendulum can be defined as

"an apparatus consisting of an object mounted so that it swings freely under the influence of gravity "

So what you might ask? Well, the many dimensions of IT are a lot like a pendulum - just picture it as a object mounted that freely swings under the influence of corporate strategies, IT budgets, emerging technologies and whims of the day. The important part is that it swings.

Case in point - for the last few years, all we've heard about is outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing (and did I mention, outsourcing). It's been a hot area in IT management to reduce costs and allow businesses to focus on their core compentencies. The IT pendulum has swung far, far to the left as everybody seems to be either selling outsourcing services or organizations look to outsource. But perhaps the IT pendulum has reached its zenith and is now beginning to swing back in the direction it came from, with regard to outsourcing that is.

Financial services company JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Wednesday that it plans to absorb 4,000 International Business Machines Corp. employees and contractors that work on the company's account, in a move to reintegrate previously outsourced portions of JPMorgan's technology infrastructure.

It's not often in the past few years that this kind of story has surfaced. The headlines have most times read that 4,000 exmployees were going to an IBM, EDS [insert any outsourcer name here]. What I found interesting was the reason that JPMorgan gave for insourcing at this time.

"We believe managing our own technology infrastructure is best for the long-term growth and success of our company as well as our shareholders. Our new capabilities will give us competitive advantages, accelerate innovation, and enable us to become more streamlined and efficient. In addition, there will be many career opportunities for returning employees," said Austin Adams, JPMorgan Chase's chief information officer.

In the next 6-12 months, outsourcing will continue to be a key area in IT, but I think that the JPMorgan move is something we'll see more of, especially as ten-year outsourcing contracts signed 3,4,5 years ago begin to expire. Will it ever go back to the way it was before where huge IT departments were created inside organizations - that I'm not convinced of. I think that outsourcing will play an ongoing role in IT decision making for many years to come, especially with newly emerging markets for offshore talent like China. But I do think that we'll see many organizations in-source due to promised results not being realized, for competitive advantage and to leverage emerging technology.

In Time for The Holidays

It looks like a leak by Walmart has revealed that the Nintendo DS will be out by the end of November going for a price of $199 (US). You can see the details at this link, unless of course, Walmart removes it due to it being a leak.

Firefox 1.0

Well Mozilla has released the preview of Firefox 1.0 and I must say it is very nice. I particularily like how they've integrated RSS feeds into the bookmarks, calling them Live Bookmarks.

So for those of you using an older version, or those of you who are still using Internet Exploter you can grab the free download of this outstanding browser here.

And do spread the word. Their goal is to hit a million downloads in ten days. You can see the progress toward that goal here.

Linux Study Follow-Up

"I for one, can't wait to see this report."

That was how I ended a post I wrote back on August 19th titled Linux Study. I don't want to re-iterate that posting here but in a nutshell I was writing about the fact that...

...Microsoft commissioned a study for the implementation of Microsoft over that of Linux. This study (surprise, surprise) found that it actually is more cost effective to implement Microsoft in the enterprise than Linux...

Well it seems that this report, that was to be made available, is still mysteriously absent. But fret not faithful readers, it seems that the folks over at the Register have got the details and written an excellent article.

It is quite revealing to say the least. Its long so I've pulled out some highlights.