Snow Has Arrived in New England (briefly)

Hearts of Darkness on DVD

By way of Very Short List (a great daily email by the way), I see that Hearts of Darkness - A Filmmaker's Apocalypse--a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now--is coming to DVD for the first time. I have an older laserdisc copy--yes, really, laserdisc. Today, Apocalypse Now is widely, though of course not universally, regarded as the best of the films about or set in the Vietnam War. However, for many years, films such as The Deer Hunter and Platoon were more highly regarded.

In any case, the film production, as documented in Hearts of Darkness, was a fiasco. To quote Very Short List:

Narrated by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor (who also shot the on-set footage), and directed by Fax Behr and George Hickenlooper, Hearts plays like a paint-by-numbers demonstration of how not to make a big film: The Apocalypse Now production is underfunded, the crew is overworked, and the script is unresolved. The actors are either too high (Dennis Hopper), too sick (Martin Sheen, who suffered a heart attack on the set), or too weird (Marlon Brando) to perform; meanwhile, monsoons destroy the sets.

It's a great documentary about the making of a classic film. Check it out.

Sony and Life Blowups

In a pair of previous posts on the CNET Blog Network and here, I noted that a photograph that Sony used in its "When Timing is Everything" and the original version published in Life Magazine weren't quite the same although they were clearly from the same sequence. However, the deltas are hard to see in the shrunk online versions. (In fact, I initially thought that they were the same photograph.) Therefore, I'm posting a couple of blowups--one from the Sony ad and one from the original 1965 John Dominis photo as published in The Best of Life.

The top photo is a scan from The Best of Life.

The bottom is from the recent Sony ad.

It's clear from these that the differences are not just the dust (which could well be written off to retouching) but also the position of the baboon's mouth. These are different photos in the sequence.

More Sony Funniness

[UPDATE: As a few people have commented--some more politely than others--the point of the ad is bad timing, not good timing. So I missed this point of the ad. That said, I'll still argue that this particular instance of Sony's ad campaign is so subtle as to be a bad choice as I discuss on my other blog.]

Earlier today, I blogged ("Sony: When timing is everything...") over on my Pervasive Datacenter blog on the CNET Blog Network about a Sony ad for their A700 DSLR headlined "In Photography: Timing is Everything." One problem: the photo that they chose to highlight their camera's motion-capturing virtuosity was from 1965. It was probably captured on Nikon gear and, in any case, predated Sony's entry into cameras by decades.

There's actually a secondary layer to this latest Sony mis-step that's more subtle but just as amusing. Unlike the origin of the photo, it's conjecture, but I'm pretty confident is something close to reality.

Sony didn't use the John Dominis photograph that appeared in Life Magazine in 1965. Rather, it used a very similar image that was perhaps one or two frames separated in a motor drive sequence. (This being 1965, we're talking film of course.)

Now, while acknowledging that photographic choice is subjective, I think the frame published in Life (as can be seen on Getty Images) is the slightly better photo than the one Sony chose to use in its ad.  The differences are subtle, yes, but in the Life/Getty version you can see the baboon's lower body better and it appears to be shouting defiantly. In the Sony ad, its mouth appears to be closed and its body is largely obscured by dust. (The differences are probably more obvious in the original ad and a large blowup of the Life photo I have in The Best of Life, but trust me on this.)

Why did Sony use this alternate image? Well, perhaps it liked the picture more. I'm skeptical. I don't. And neither did a couple of other photographers I quizzed. I suppose it's possible that whoever chose the photograph just had a more highly-tuned sense of what made a great photograph than did Life's photo editors in 1965. Wouldn't bet on that one. The more likely hypothesis for me is that the alternate image was cheaper to use. (Or perhaps there were restrictions on using the original photograph.)

Whichever the case, the net result is that not only did Sony pick a competitor's camera to illustrate "Timing is Everything." They (it would appear) implicitly chose to go with a tagline that might be better described as "Pretty close timing is fairly important."

I've Started Writing a New Blog

I have a new blog over at the CNET Blog Network, The Pervasive Datacenter. It will feature a combination of posts from Illuminata Perspectives and pieces written specifically for the blog. To quote my introductory post:

This blog will have its home base in the datacenter itself and will cover topics from servers big and small, to multi-core processors, to operating systems, to virtualization, to power and cooling concerns. However, it will also look at the software and the services out in the network cloud that are consuming datacenter computing cycles and storage and thereby determining the future of the back-end. I'll also spend some time on the bigger questions: Is Software as a Service the next big thing or merely Application Service Providers warmed over? What's the future of Open Source in a Web-delivered software model? Do operating systems even matter any longer?

And, because my premise is that the pervasive datacenter touches everything, I'll feel free to, now and then, head out to the very edge of the network. I'll try to stay clear of overly trendy and self-referential debates, but will write about important trends in client devices from UltraMobile PCs to cameras and the services that run on them.

I'll also keep this blog active at some level. However, I expect that musings and discussions that relate to computing in most forms will tend to migrate over to The Pervasive Datacenter. What remains here will be more along the lines of personal interests and links to material that others may find interesting.

TiVo Series3 and HD Get eSATA

eSATA (external SATA) lets you connect low-cost external drives to a computer with much higher performance than USB and Firewire. Frankly, it's a standard that has taken way too long to be broadly adopted. Whenever I open up a computer case--often to add or swap out storage--something often goes wrong and things end up broken. Much better to keep most of your PC's storage in an external array. Thus, I note approvingly that TiVo Sewries3 and HD models are reportedly getting their eSATA ports enabled with the latest TiVo software.

I guess it's time to make the high-def TiVo jump. I'd been holding off mostly because I had made some unofficial upgrades to my Series2 to add capacity. However, TiVo has a deal going that would let me transfer my lifetime subscription to a new HD model. Now that I know the upgrade won't result in diminished disk capacity, I guess I should make the plunge. The only other downside is that it will mean dealing with Comcast at some point to get a CableCARD when I upgrade my cable service to take advantage of the high-def capabilities.

Twittering Away

I haven't exactly become a full convert to the "micro-blogging" Twitter service. But, as I've become more serious about using Facebook--and have become exposed to Twitter through its Facebook app in the process--I'm starting to understand the attraction. Why haven't I been intrigued before now? Well, Adam Engst captures it perfectly in Confessions of a Twitter Convert.

Frankly, I put much of the blame on Twitter itself, asking as it does, "What are you doing?" as a way of prompting people to post 140-character messages. For the most part, as I acerbically noted before, no one cares what you're doing. However, that's not entirely true, and what I missed in my quick and disdainful overview is that a certain number of people do care what you're doing, as long as it's interesting, funny, or relevant in some other way. And here's the other thing - they, not you, get to decide if you're interesting, funny, or relevant.

Adam goes on to say

To help you think about what to twitter about, let me suggest some alternatives to Twitter's "What are you doing?" question:

• What do you think about some current event?
• Tell us about something funny you just saw.
• What neat thing have you learned recently?
• What have you done lately that was particularly cool?
• What question would you like to ask your followers?
• Give us a link to the last great article you read.
• What was your last blog post/Flickr photo/YouTube video?

Now this makes sense. Assuming that you're not one of the self-proclaimed Silicon Valley cognoscenti with thousands of "friends," I'd actually like to hear interesting suggestions and recommendations from a modest list of people with whom I share common interests. In fact, this starts to look a lot like email distribution lists--but both more regularized and less obtrusive.

In short, Twitter's marketing is really bad. Good thing that (conventional) marketing seems not to matter in a Web 2.0 world.

Update and Upcoming

Things have been pretty quiet on this blog of late. It's a combination of a hectic travel month in August and a need to focus some energy on other projects. I haven't been reading much, far less writing; In fact, I finally had to go and hit the big "All Read" button on all my blog subscriptions so that I could start again from a psychologically manageable point. September isn't going to be a lot better. However, I do have a combination of some equipment usage reports and a number of things around digital photography partway-there that I'll get to as I can.

In the meantime, between the hubbub of OSCON and the somewhat less hubbub-ish (but still busy) LinuxWorld, I did get to spend a week in the central Oregon Cascades. I've uploaded some photographs on flickr here.

The Unix Wars: The More Things Change...

Writing from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) a couple of days back, I noted that many of today's debates are taking place in a very different milieu than the Unix Wars that helped spawn Open Source (or more precisely Richard Stallman's "Free Software" in the first place.

However, as Dennis Byron, notes:

Truth in advertising, Gordon--like me--is a "Grey Eagle" (Data General alum), which in addition to meaning that he went through the minicomputer wars, also means that--like me--he has probably seen it all before. It is not surprising then that his and my sense of OSS history agree even though we have never spoken about it. There is one place we differ. He says, "We’re now moving to a world increasingly distant in time and place from the Unix wars." I think the interminable debates about GPL vs other licenses, the Novell/Microsoft agreement, free vs. open, and so forth are just a continuation of the UNIX wars. The AT&T legal issues he talks about have never really been settled.

There's a lot of truth in what Dennis says. There are threads of past debates in today's discussions. For example, the heated debates over attribution clauses in Software as a Service (SaaS) licenses merely recapitulate ancient fights over the so-called "advertising clause" of the original Berkeley license. However, there's even more truth in the macro sense--the sense in which enormous energy is expended over niggling details. To be sure, some of those niggling details can turn out to be incredibly important down the road, but more don't.

Not that this fault is especially the province of the software industry. HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray, anyone?

Five Input Devices for the Future. Part 1.

[This was getting a bit lengthier than I intended. So I'll begin with the first two for now.]

There are lots of gadgets out there that people use to communicate with their computers. However, only two--the keyboard and the mouse--are really in broad, mainstream use. If you add controllers for games, there are a few more input devices depending on the genre: game pads, joysticks, and steering wheels. However, although game pads of one sort or another are the predominant way to communicate with gaming consoles, their use on PCs is far more limited and specific to a limited set of uses.

So is it the keyboard and mouse forever? I would be surprised, shocked really, if we were to see anything replace the keyboard and mouse (BTW, I lump trackballs in with mice because they're different ergonomic takes on the same basic function) on the desktop anytime soon. But could one or more of the devices that we see at the fringes today become something truly mainstream--if not universal, then at least a common site on your typical desktop. I think the following are potential candidates.

 1. 6 Degrees-of-Freedom (DOF) controllers. Like most of the things on this list 6-DOF controllers aren't new. They've been used in 3-dimensional computer-aided-design (CAD) applications for a while and they've had price tags to match the pricey software that they've been used with. How they feel to use is a bit hard to describe but it's essentially a sort of knob that you can push down, pull up, rotate, and push or tilt in any direction. Essentially this lets you move and adjust your view through 3-D space using  single control. 6-DOF controllers are interesting today for two reasons. First, we're starting to see inexpensive examples. The 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator PE (Personal Edition) 3D Navigation Device USB ( 3DX-700029 ) is about $55 for a little device with a great feel. Second, we're starting to see 3D environments--other than space battles--where such a device could be really handy. Virtual worlds are one future possibility--especially if they get to be as important as some think they will be. But, even today, navigating through Google Earth with a SpaceNavigator is truly eye-opening. It transforms it into a whole new experience.

2. Write-able screens (most likely multi-touch). I have a basic Wacom Graphire tablet. It's just the latest in a string of tablets that I've owned over the years, but it mostly sits gathering dust. I bought it mostly to edit photos in Photoshop, but I just don't find it all the useful. The problem is that there's essentially a physical disconnect between writing on the tablet and what's happening on the screen. The two things aren't happening in the same place. Tablets are fine for tracing but I don't find them much use to create or edit something that's being displayed on the screen. I imagine that one can develop a better feel, but FWIW I've heard the same thing from professional artists. The best solution is to write on the screen. We've seen some impressive multi-touch demos of late (to say nothing of the iPhone). However, even just having affordable modest-size LCDs we could write on would be a god start. Wacom makes the very snazzy Cintiq, but at $2500, it's clearly a tool for graphics professionals. Why does this matter? I'm happy to make the argument that this is a key missing ingredient to having distributed meetings and discussions. Where's the whiteboard in such a meeting? (Please don't tell me to either do a napkin sketch using a mouse or to draw something, scan it in, and then send it to people. Ick.) A low-end and more-affordable version of the Cintiq would be invaluable for people who need to sketch out a quick idea or a concept. Add in the fact that more and more people have multiple monitors and having one of them be a writable version is a natural.

[More to follow...]

Podcasts and WiFi

Now that people have had a breather of a week or so from the endless iPhone hype, I see it's time to start of the 6G iPod rumor cycle. I'm sort of vaguely interested in this. I have a 4G and have started to think that maybe an upgrade is in order one of these days. The current generation didn't have enough new to make me plunk down a few C notes but I'm definitely curious about what comes next.

The betting money seems to be on something that looks similar to an iPhone but without WiFi or phone capabilities. That makes a lot of sense, but WiFi could be nice. Here's why.

As I've written about previously, one of my personal problems with podcasting is that:

It's not exactly hard to get a podcast onto your portable flash memory music thingamajig. But it does take several steps more than just turning on the freekin' radio. When we get to the point that your home computer handles this all automagically between itself and its counterpart in your car, OK.

I just don't sync my iPod on a regular basis. It's not a big deal to do but I just don't do it. That was always my issue with PDAs as well. I didn't get around to syncing them--which is one reason that my Treo 700p is the first "PDA" that I find truly useful. As a result, I don't have current podcasts on my iPod, which means I don't listen to them, which means I don't think about syncing my iPod to get new podcasts, and so forth.

Automagical syncs though. That would be interesting. I'm afraid it might not be as automatic as I would like in any case (for one thing I don't generally use iTunes as my preferred music organizer) but WiFi would at least open up the possibility of some sort of fairly transparent syncing to a PC on the same wireless network.

(Embarrassed as I am to admit it, this thought got kicked off after running across this digg comment that said: "All I want is an iPod that auto updates all my podcast feeds without needing to connect to a computer. Give it WiFi and let is start downloading as soon as I walk into my house at the end of they day or anyplace that WiFi is connected.")

A Blast from the "distant" Past (c. 1994)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1l6aBgX5UY

Richard Seltzer notes that:

This video was created by me (Richard Seltzer) and Berthold Langer in February 1994, when we worked at DEC. NCSA (creators of Mosaic, the first Web browsers) and dozens of other organizations, distributed thousands of copies of this video, using it to help spread the word about the business potential of the Web, which, at that time, many business people found difficult to imagine. Thanks to David Wecker and Gene Kusekoski for converting it to avi.

The Ultimate AT&T Takedown

I really didn't mean to even mention the iPhone. The story was becoming almost (but not quite) as annoying as the incarceration of certain hotel heiresses that shall remain nameless. But I ran across a truly wonderful line yesterday.

As my colleague John Webster notes in Am I Too Old to be in the iPhone Line?, the biggest problem with the iPhone is AT&T (the only network on which it runs)--and more broadly the telco model of the world where they MUST OWN EVERYTHING. Think of it as Microsoft on steroids.

I'll leave you to read John's piece for the rest. However, for a more succinct (and somewhat less family-friendly) description of AT&T's deficiencies, I refer you to Gizmodo:

Signing up for the iPhone is like being tossed into a menage a trois with Angelina and Rosie O'Donnell. You want the beauty, you have to sleep with the beast.

Links for 06-22-2007

• MAKE: Blog: Binary marble adding machine
  This is awesomely cool.
  [tags: diy]
• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Yahoo!/eBay Actually Makes Sense, but Won’t Happen
  Makes a good case.
  [tags: yahoo,ebay]
• O'Reilly Radar; Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA
  Some good discussion in the comments around the lack of an SLA for Amazon's S3 storage service.
  [tags: amazon,webservices]
• tecosystems » Does This Mean We’re Not Friends Anymore?
  Friend seems to have become rather too overloaded a term in the social software world.
  [tags: social]
• The 10 Second Rule: How to Write for Diagonal Readers | Copyblogger
  How to grab attention with diagonal readers, i.e. scanners.
  [tags: writing]

Links for 06-19-2007

• Sebastien Marcel on Face Recognition
  Interesting interview with Sabastien Marcel on facial recognition.
  [tags: google]
• blog.pmarca.com: Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far
  I don't read as much science fiction as I used to. I'll definitely be checking some of these out as it seems as though Marc's tastes may have similarities to my own.
  [tags: SF]
• How do I know this person? Through the Web! « Jon Udell
  From the comments: "The patterns of community enabled (and popularized) by the Internet are anything but new (except in scale and ubiquity). History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot."
  [tags: social]

Documentation for Old Systems

The post Hardware Archaeology by Simon Phipps at Sun reminds me of the time a few years back when I got contacted by someone wanting to port NetBSD/OpenBSD to some (very) old Data General Motorola 88000-based AViiON hardware. (I used to work for DG.) He was looking for any code or schematics associated with the hardware and email addresses for engineers who had worked on the platform "as they have a lot to teach us." I had a bit of trouble gently getting the point across that it seemed unlikely anyone at EMC (who purchased DG) would have much interest spending the time/money to chase after old documentation to help get BSD running on a very obsolete piece of hardware.

Links from 06-18-2007

• How do I know this person? Through the Web! « Jon Udell
  Great line from the comments: "The patterns of community enabled (and popularized) by the Internet are anything but new (except in scale and ubiquity). History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot."
  [tags: social]
• Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering - Joel on Software
  Good look at the difference between Microsoft and Apple font rendering philosophies.
  [tags: apple,design]
• Splogging in the Sun
  *Pay Per Post is a dark side of the mechanical turk.*
  [tags: blogging]

Links for 06-12-2007

• John Battelle's Searchblog: You Think Google Won't Do What It Takes to Win? Think Again.
  "Google is most definitely a cat, not a dog, when it comes to brands. The image of Google is rather feline - it sits there unruffled, not really *needing you*, but then it jumps in your lap when you least expect it. Google is not a brand that, well, asks for attention."
  [tags: google]
• Trulia Hindsight » Maps of Properties Through Time
  Very cool home property mapping through time.
  [tags: maps,visualization,history]
• The Digital Bits presents... The Soapbox
  I don't really have an opinion on this, but interesting post on why HD-DVD won't win. As I've said before, BOTH sides are shooting themselves in the foot in any case.
  [tags: film,dvd]
• Mountain Gear Adopts SprayCool Solution - Data Center Knowledge
  I'm a sometimes customer of Mountain Gear's. I didn't realize that they were big enough to have this scale of datacenter.
  [tags: cooling]
• Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Open Thread: Do You Crave Offline Web Apps? «
  My personal view is that readers of blogs like Web Worker Daily may have a distorted view of connectivity in the broader world. Even with my Verizon wireless service, my data connection is hardly "always on"
  [tags: mobility]
• Dynamist Blog: What Are Magazines For?
  "Long essays--4,000 words-plus--are ideally suited to magazines, and satisfying to read in that format. It's not clear, however, that there's an advertising market to support them. So medium-sized ideas tend to get chopped down to column length or blown up to masquerade as books."
  [tags: writing,business]

Separate Professional and Personal Networks?

There's an interesting post to check out by the Fortune technology staff that discusses whether people will maintain separate profiles for their personal and professional lives--and whether those profiles will reside on separate social networks. The discussion builds on an interview with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye in which he said

said people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life. The argument, self serving as it is, makes a certain amount of sense. Not good to have a prospective employer stumble on to those photos of you freshman year in Delta Kappa Epsilon.

Now, I'm sure that some of the radical transparency/Web 2.0/etc. advocates would argue that there is no such thing as separate professional and personal lives. At some level, I suppose that's true if by "not separate" one means that there are any guarantees that wild drinking stories posed on the Web aren't going to be found by a prospective employer. However, I'm unconvinced that for most people personal and professional lives are quite as intertwined and inseparable as the blogging crowd and others in the coastal high-tech bubbles think they are.

In any case, the Fortune post then goes on to wonder whether such separation need be achieved by a standalone company like LinkedIn or whether it might be more logically implemented as an application on a social network like Facebook.

Wouldn’t it at least be smart, then, for LinkedIn to deploy itself as an application on Facebook, given Facebook’s new open API strategy? Quite possibly, said Nye who pointed out that [LinkedIn founder] Hoffman was an early investor in Facebook, and that Facebook backer Peter Thiel also has money in LinkedIn. “We know each other well,” said Nye. “We like each other.”

Bottom line: the jury is still divided on how much consolidation to expect in social networks, but it will be interesting to see how all these real world social networks hold up when their virtual counterparts begin to merge, or falter….

Links for 06-08-2007

• ongoing · Thread Herrings
  Lots of good pointers from Tim Bray to discussions about programming for massively threaded resources. (aka the issues surrounding concurrency)
  [tags: programming,processors]
• A game of inches - Joel on Software
  Clock radios and UIs. And what they tell us about the value of incremental improvements and designing software.
  [tags: design]

Not My Foleo

Tom Krazit over at CNET has a piece that pretty well summarizes some of the problems that I have with Palm's new Foleo--which is essentially a svelte network computer in a laptop form factor. Although the new not-yet-shipping device has its supporters, the overall chatter has been pretty negative. I hate to pile on, and probably wouldn't, but I'm such a natural customer for this and yet I'm not rally all that interested.

Why am I a natural customer? Well, first of all, I have a Treo 700p, a smartphone that is the intended companion to the Foleo. Second, I am a big fan of Foleo attributes such as small and light. Instant-on too. I used a Jornada 820 for several years for notetaking when I traveled. I only abandoned it when I got a more compact laptop (a Fujitsu P5020) and the lack of wireless networking (and even limited wired networking because of outdated software) became just too limiting. So I get the tradeoffs associated with having something compact and portable; I've consistently tilted in that direction when I've made my device choices.

So why is my initial reaction to the Foleo negative?

Because it's neither fish nor fowl. The Treo is a step function form factor reduction from a laptop (which, of course, brings with it some usability limits). I can pull it out of my pocket to check and respond to email without opening up a "computer." I don't need to carry a bag to transport it. And it gets a full day of battery life or better. In short, it's fundamentally different from a laptop.

This isn’t. It doesn’t have the pocketability of my Treo. At the same time, it’s only incrementally smaller/lighter/faster-to-start than my laptop—while not being able to do lots of things I can do with a laptop. Perhaps if I used a big, high-end “desktop replacement” style of notebook, I’d see this as a more useful intermediate point but as things stand, I really don’t.

A Blast From the Past

The 100 oldest dot-com domains. Many are no longer with us. The three oldest are, perhaps unsurprisingly, out of Cambridge Mass with Symbolics obtaining its domain about a month prior to BB&N (the builders of the first Internet routers) who one might reasonably have expected to hold the earliest.com. And, assuming that MCC.COM is Masscomp Computer Corporation, the top five are all out of Massachusetts. Going down the list, one sees the names of most of the computer companies that existed in the mid-1980s in addition to (mostly) other tech companies of one sort or another. Data General (DG.COM), who I used to work for, is about midway down the list.

 

Via Simon Phipps.

One Thing Netflix Doesn't Do Well

In general, I'm a big fan of Netflix. I'm usually pretty flexible about which movie I watch on a given evening and am happy to choose between what I have checked out from Netflix and what I've purchased and not yet watched. It's certainly not a case of saving money relative to other options. Rather, it's the convenience of sitting down at my computer, listing out what I want to see, and having the rest happen automagically. Over the past few years, I've become of great fan of using the Internet, auto-pay systems, etc. to relegate as many tasks as possible to the "don't have to think about" bin. But back to Netflix.

Another nice thing about Netflix is that if I run across an interesting-looking film on a Website or a Very Short List daily email (very recommended by the way), I can just pop it onto my (long) Netflix queue, for future consideration if nothing else. I was in just such a mode as I was reading an interesting article over on Filmwad called Theatrical Cuts vs Director's Cuts when I was reminded of something that has annoyed me a bit about Netflix in the past. Namely, it often offers just one version of a movie.

To take an example from the article, Alexander Revisited - The Final Cut (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) isn't available from Netflix; only an earlier, apparently out of print version is. There are counterexamples; Netflix offers both cuts of Superman II. However, in my experience, Netflix tends to have just one version of a given film.

I speculate that this decision has more to do with keeping things simple than anything else. After all, Netflix is one of the ultimate "long tail" companies; a few more copies of films popular enough to even merit new, alternative versions would, I assume, be barely a blip in Netflix' DVD inventory. Rather, my guess is that they don't want to risk confusing the average user of their site with film fan minutiae about different director cuts or alternative endings. So, for the most part, they just stock a single version. (As far as I know, Netflix also just stocks the Widescreen version even when a Fullscreen version is also available.)

Does Photojournalism Matter?

In his recent post Elegy for the Photojournalist, Nick Carr writes:

I would agree with Gillmor that this trend [citizen photojournalism] seems inevitable, but I'm not so sanguine about its effects. It's not that I have anything against amateur photographers (being one myself); it's that I think we'll find - are finding already, in fact - that while amateur work may be an adequate economic substitute for professional work, there are things that pros can accomplish that amateurs cannot. We see in the decline of professional photojournalism how the Internet's "abundance" can end up constricting our choices as well as expanding them.

My initial reaction was that Nick had overstated the case. His familiar "Does IT Matter?" has always struck me as a similarly (and, I suspect, somewhat deliberately) overstated argument. The underlying trends are quite real. But the logical extrapolations are a fair bit exaggerated.

Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired, has an extensive and thought-provoking comment in which he makes at least a partial counterargument. Among other things, he notes that:

However, while much of what pro photographers once did can be done as well by the greater collective of amateurs, not everything can. Very specific assignments -- a portrait of a famous singer, or the inside of a new designer's home, or a story on elephant trackers -- simply are not going to show up on Flickr. It takes too much coordination, money, and expertise to pull these off.

But the implications of "crowdsourcing" and the changing nature of the news business on photojournalism are, at a minimum, complicated. Kevin goes on to note, among other things, that Flickr (and presumably iStockphoto and the like as well) will become more common for most uses. To a large degree, it will increasingly only be situations where access is controlled for some reason or another (you can't give everyone a photo pass to the Superbowl)--or where a very specific set of images is needed--you need to hire someone, which is to say you need a pro photographer. And, of course, some photographers will through talent or whatever be able to create images consistently recognized as superior--even if the "masses" have similar access to a scene.

Kevin also notes that "The truth is that there were never very many professional make-their-living photographers." In a sense, we've been having this argument for a long time. Life Magazine died recently. But it died before in 1972, prior to which it had essentially defined the category of photojournalism. The competition that time wasn't crowdsourcing. Rather it was the more immediate impact of television news taking the place of a weekly magazine of photographic journalism.

At the end of the day, I'm not (yet) convinced of Nick's argument. There always has been and always will be a tendency for for-profit businesses (especially if those profits are being squeezed) to substitute free, even if it brings the quality down just a bit. And both businesses and individuals have long had to compete with all sorts of free content and with people whose hobby skirts very close to another's profession.

IRIS for Flickr

Bob Brewin's keynote here at JavaOne is San Francisco yesterday was packed with loads of cool demos. For example, a geospatial browser based on NASA's World Wind (using the Java OpenGL API) deservedly received lots of applause. From a personal perspective though, the one that really stood out for me was IRIS, a "rich client" app that uses Java applets to browse and edit photos stored on the Flickr online photo service. There seems to be some roughness around the edges with the login process (try just browsing a user's photos if you have trouble actually logging in) and Sun's servers hosting the project got hammered by the load after the demo. However, the application is just an amazing advance over Flickr's own fairly crude tools such as Flickr Uploader. It uses Java graphics capabilities to full effect to both edit and show the photos in a Flickr album. What's more, the user doesn't have to explicitly download anything.

Congrats to Ken Russell and his co-workers for putting together this very impressive demo.