THE DEATH OF SOFTWARE

InformationWeek caught my eye today. Entitled "China E-Book Firm Challenges PDF", the article is obviously a sign of the times: The era of Chinese global economic domination is fast approaching, as the millions of graduates from the highly efficient Chinese education system are entering innovation and tech development.

On a more personal note, as I am currenty experiencing the latest abominable Adobe bug a.k.a. plugin, I also welcome any and all competition that Adobe might encounter, being no fan - to put it mildly - of Adobe's memory-gobbling and constantly bugging applications. I left Adobe PDFs for FoxIt ages ago, enjoying immensely how everything instantly sped up the very moment my Control Panel closed, and good riddance.

But the real attention-grabber in InformationWeek was the fact that the Chinese are not challenging Adobe on Adobe's home turf the computer, whether we are talking servers, stationary PCs or laptops: They are going straight for the money-pumping jugular of the future: the handhelds - the pad and the phone.

I mean, why should they? As cloud computing is replacing personal software on home computers, there will be no money in developing generalist software for the personal computer. When Microsoft launched MS Office 2010, the reviews were scorching: "What do we need this for? We've got OpenOffice, Photobucket, gMail etc. We don't need this." Despite its advanced features and improved lay-out, MS Office 2010 was obsolete even before it hit the stores.

And speaking of software ... Haven't you noticed? The word is dying in public use, as the everyday dichotomy of "hard" and "soft" of the personal computer era is being replaced by the word application. The two words have co-existed, being more or less synonomous, but the word application is a word for the future, as hardware and software are becoming more or less indistinguishable from one another for the average consumer. The market for software-in-a-box is evaporating faster than the Arctic ice cap.

Time flies, and the Chinese are right on the mark: Anyone even thinking of launching a competing alternative to MS Office today, is totally out of sync with the future, a stark raving Rip Van Winkle. Just like the Norwegian company Norske Skog Union, which infamously some years ago decided that paper production for newspapers (!) was a sustainable road to future glory and prosperity.

Results from the Technology WC:
Microsoft-China 0-1
Adobe-Beijing Founder Apabi Technology - TBA on a pad or a phone near your hand.

May the best applicationmaker win.

MAC-HEADS, BEWARE!

Dear Mac-heads.

When this author and others with me have declared that the PC is dying, and that the laptop will eventually follow suit as we enter The Age of Pads, you may have been thinking: "Oh, the Microsoft PC, the MS laptop, sure, but not my iMac, not my iBook."

Well, you were wrong.

There is no stopping cloud computing. Soon you will all be wearing pads, we will all be carrying pads - though mine will run on Windows 7 - and hopefully some time in the future on LINUX.

But don't just take my word for it. As usual Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons) is right on the spot: Apple and (the real) Steve Jobs are fast leaving everything that made you love them. Read it and weep.

Sorry.

TREES SHOULD BE EXUBERANTLY HAPPY (environmentalists too, even all you paperomantics)

In accordance with what I have written before, saluting the demise of print and hailing the era of electronic reading, here's a clue for all you paperomantics out there, who are still clinging to your futile hope of the survival of the printed book and the newsPAPER: Shift your focus, rejoice in the death of paper.

The positive climate effect should be your new perspective. Be progressive - eBook and ePaper ftw! Here's why; Lynn Hesselberger sums it up: 100 million trees - in the US only.

For my own country Norway, the no. 1 newspaper-reading country in the world, the figures should be appr. 2 % of the American numbers.

Spruce and fir, be happy.

THE NEWSPAPERS AS WE KNOW THEM - Will NYT, WSJ, Times, le Monde and Aftenposten survive the i-, Win- and other Pads?

The March 22, 2010 issue of the ever unafraid WIRED says it bluntly: The pad is the future, the laptop is dead. Not all of the "13 of the Brightest Tech Minds"* that "Sound Off on the Rise of the Tablet" proclaims the death of the laptop, but most of them do. January 29, 2010, I wrote a blog post The iPad and I here on Intermashonal, expressing much of the same sentiments. However, something Fake Steve Jobs, who is NOT CEO of Apple, says in his trashing of the New York Times in the mag, made me want to take the discussion a step further. Here's what he said:

"The iPad isn’t about saving newspapers. It’s about inventing new ways of telling stories, using a whole new language — one that we can’t even imagine right now.

(...)

Hacks, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to save you. Frankly, I don’t read magazines or newspapers, and if every last one of you were all erased from the planet tomorrow I would not notice and I would not care."

As I read Fake Steves ranting ("you pie-eyed crackhead"), I started to wonder if the assumptions I had made about the future of newspapers, was incorrect. Yes, Fake Steve is right, newspapers as we know them, may actually soon be gone. Not just gone in the sense of leaving the paper format, wandering off from paper onto pad, but gone. In a note to my above-mentioned post, I wrote "... as the news-paper draws its last breath". Should we just drop the (here:rhetorical) dash and consider the death of newspapers as such? You know, The Times, The Guardian, The Sun, le Monde, China Daily, Wall Street Journal? Or our very own Aftenposten, the only national newspaper of integrity left in Norway?

I have recently tried out several all-in-ones for PC. First there was iGoogle, but somehow it seemed clumsy, and the Facebook and Twitter part of it was too limited; I don't do Facebook or Twitter by phone, I hate small screens; I use glasses, all right? I tried TweetDeck for a while, but I didn't think it performed as I had hoped. HootSuite looks like som old pastel Win95-software, but has great performance, the shortening machine for URLs fast becoming a must for me. It takes Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, MySpace, LinkEdin, Wordpress and others, it is superior on retweets, it even has stats.

But then I tried Treadsy. Not as sexy looking as TweetDeck, but very, very friendly. And I like that. I don't like no MS Dog to run around my Word documents, telling me what to do or suggesting lotsa stupid things when I'm late for a date, or have idiot pop-ups tell me I've got unused icons on my desktop. - YEAH, I'VE GOT UNUSED ICONS ON MY DESKTOP! SO?! YOU THINK I DON'T KNOW THAT?? GO **** THAT UGLY YELLOW DOG, YOU PRODUCTIVITY-HAMPERING MORONS! (Yeah, I still remember that one, never forgotten, never forgiven, grossly insulting! - OK, OK, I'll chill, it's a long time ago.)

Treadsy also takes all your cloud email accounts and places them beside your Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds. Now, mail is still an existing way of communication. The once so revolutionary email has, at least in the tech-savvy parts of the Western World, been killed by Facebook, MSN, Skype and others as the main means of digital communication on our spare time. However, it is very much alive and kicking within businesses and NGOs, and I still get newsletters and also messages from our beloved sluggish, even slothish authorities, who NOW, in 2010 are discussing the not so very avant-garde idea of "laptops for all Norwegian school kids" and are "offering" us mail connectability to all official bodies and municipalities in the country by maybe 20...12? Make it a pad, guys. Or you will **** yourselves.

What do I want? I'd like BBC World Service streamed as my wallpaper. I'd like Aftenposten streaming headlines and Breaking News, my Facebook and Twitter, I want my mail accounts, and I want all this to be fully operational, as if they were stand-alones or split-screens. I want it all, including subscriptions, RSS feeds on new posts on blogs I follow, I would like to be able to tag certain Twitterers ... I said all.

In short: a pad Version 2.0. I'm waiting for that special interface that can give me all-in one. What would I need a newspaper for then? Unless a newspaper was willing to give me an all-in-one interface, I would have no use for it.

Would I be willing to pay a vendor of newspapers, an agent, a syndicate? Maybe. But what if I wanted international news from the BBC, Norwegian news from Aftenposten, sports from my local paper Adresseavisen, selected comments from the Guardian?

The newspaper as we know it, used to be our portal to the world. But now, whether the newspaper will survive as such or not, I'm not ready to answer yet. However, I' sure that today's pad will become tomorrow's portal, and the newspaper as information icon will be just one voice among many. Of that I'm sure. And maybe they even will fuse with TV stations? The BBC-Guardian Network Alliance? Fox-Sun Media Network?

Of course, we could all be wrong. I predicted Apple's death in the mid-1990ies, so did WIRED. We were wrong. The real Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, did it again. But this time I think we are on the mark.

I never rooted for the laptop, that's just a gadget. But I am, however, rooting for the pad, because I share the revolutionary perspective of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, first investor in WIRED:

"At a minimum, it needs to hold 100 books and wirelessly access any of the titles stored on nearby tablets. So, if you ship 100 of these to a remote African village, each loaded with 100 different books, that’s 10,000 books in the village — more than you and I had in primary school. I’m talking about the tablet version of the XO from One Laptop per Child, proposed for 2012. By that date, we will have moved from laptop to tablet ..."

So get me that all-in-one smuud interface on a sexy xPad, if you please. That Facebook-Twitter-Guardian-YouTube-browser-Skype-webcam-mail-BBC-New Scientist-eBook reader-Irish Archeology-Spotify-Blogger-Aftenposten-OpenOffice-Diablo3/DunePleasePlayable-cloudPhotoshop-Adresseavisen portal that without me asking, informs me of the new Dillinger Espace Plan album. It could be a portal, an installed software or an all-cloud application, call it what you like. The word software is rapidly disapperaring, anyway, into the sphere of cloud computing, murdered by apps.

A MyPortal with 20 pixel camera and video edit options, phone, great microspeakers and retractable, wireless headset, where everything is compatible with everything, no format excluded, and where QuickTime and other hate-objects are nowhere to be found. MYPortal, not yours. Will it go by the name of a newspaper? Of Aftenposten? Svenska Dagbladet? The BBC? Will there be several portals? Political portals? MyGreenPortal, including dietary tips? Will Apple develop it? A Chinese geek in Hongkong? Will it be just as badly programmed at the Facebook core?

And yes, I'll stick to my holographic screen and keyboard requirements, thank you. I want Avatar in my airport lounge.

*Martha Stewart is the only one that still insists on the survival of paper: "Ultimately, the tablet will not take the place, I hope, of the printed page in terms of the magazine format." But she is the sole luddite among the thirteen.

"PIRACY DIDN'T KILL MUSIC AFTER ALL. SORRY!"

Despite all the overkill judicial counterstrikes and the stalinesque rhetorics, piracy is peaking. Although there seems to be a shift from movies and music to games, there can be no doubt about it: The war on piracy is a complete failure.

But then again, it has been a ridiculous campaign from the very start, destined for its very own Waterloo at some point. The music lovers of the world have never accepted the basic argument: As long as nobody comes running to tell you that you are going to jail or be heftily fined for borrowing a car from a stranger (at your own and his/hers risk), e.g. in an emergency or just by a friend's recommendation, nobody in their right mind is willing to accept the greedy arguments of the music and movie corporations. You wanna lend your lawn mower or your book to someone, it's your own damned business. You buy a product, and it's yours. Simple as that.

That point may be coming now. Figures from the U.K. tells us that the revenues from CD sales are finally being surpassed by that of legal downloads.

If the recording, gaming and movie industry had realized that they had the world's greatest marketing tool at their hands in the first place, it would never have come to this. And the hypocricy has been blatant. Everybody who's ever been to a torrent site knows that it actually has been used in clandestine marketing operations from the majors - or left to music managements or some other pilatic smart-ass. E.g. Fergie was massively promoted on "illegal" sites, by whom we will probably never know.

President Obama has realized that the war on marihuana is just as stupid as the Prohibition: All the ban on alcohol ever did, was promoting organized crime. People kept on drinking, because they did not accept the ban. For the millions of people, and I for one, who enjoy the pleasures of marihuana and hashish, it has always been only a matter of time before the paranoiacs and the pietists would succumb and do the Canossa waltz.

To the gaming industry, I can only say: Check your price tags. The publishing industry is grudgingly accepting that an eBook simply cannot cost the same as a paper hardcover book, so face the music. They are not going to stigmatize us all, like you have done. Greed does not pay.

To the Swedish authorities, I can only say: Drop the charges against The Pirate Bay, and do it now. Or you will look like fools in 10 years time. Do the Google thang, let the greedy autocrats sail their old old-school waters. Because the pioneers of Pirate Bay, eMule and all the other piracy sites will for ever be our heroes, champions of the freedom of the consumer's right to a product we have legally bought, just as we damned well please; champions of the free float of information, champions of the future.

THE TEARS OF NASA: IS SPACE EXPLORATION DEAD?

Some seem to believe that the age of space exploration is over, now that US president Barack Obama has sent NASA back to the 50ies, like some even predicted. But that notion would be a serious mistanke on behalf of any brain. AIDS made condoms popular, and in much the same fashion, the financial crisis of the Western World has made anti-space exploration sentiments legit once more. However, Western sentiments are completely irrelevant for space exploration. A gnat's bite, at most.

Once upon a time in the West, resistance to, even scepticism towards space exploration used to be a sign of backwardness, of sun-dried farmland roots, of manure and chaff-studded sweat. Not so these days. Today, being a critic of space exploration is a simple way of flagging yourself as a supporter of fiscal restraint, in the US an Obama-rejecting Republican. The consensus is suddenly wide-reaching. The political left has abandoned its John F. Kennedy-humanist view of space exploration uniting mankind, demanding instead that priority be given to the poor (first).

American and West-European space exploration may be on the vane. But just 3 years ago, we read this CNN article, on Helium-3. And on China, of course. Yes, of course - China! C-H-I-N-A. It is a totally different tune we shall hear in this replay from 2006 - yes, it's an imperial march, it is quite distinct:

What makes helium-3 so attractive as an alternative future fuel source is its environmentally friendly credentials, as it does not produce radioactive waste.

(...)

Scientists have been working to prove nuclear fusion works but much of it still remains theoretical. It is thought to be at least 50 years from being proven to work on a large scale.

The potential, though, is enormous. It has been estimated that about 25 tons of helium-3, equal to just one payload of a space shuttle, would provide enough energy for the U.S. for a year at current consumption levels.

(...)

"We are planning to build a permanent base on the moon by 2015 and by 2020 we can begin the industrial-scale delivery... of the rare isotope helium-3," said Nikolai Sevastianov, head of Russian space vehicle manufacturer Energia, at a seminar in Moscow in January (2006 - MJ).

His bold statement might have been more of a publicity drive for Energia rather than a clear commitment to a program, but China, which has committed itself to a space program to land men on the moon by 2017 has also stated its interest in helium-3.

"China's lunar project can incorporate the mining of helium-3 (HE-3) as a new, clean, efficient, safe and cheap nuclear fusion fuel. The foreign sales and internal uses of HE-3 will help offset the high price of maintaining a lunar base," wrote Stacey Solomone from the University of Hawaii in an article in Futures Research Quarterly.

China is undeterred, Russia is undeterred, India is undeterred. Financial crisis or no financial crisis, Brazil will join them, so willl Canada, and so will other nations, many other nations. Nations without a budget deficit numbering billions, even trillions. Man is headed for space. Richard Branson is undeterred.

And we have been talking just helium-3 her. Space mining as such has a bright future. There is quite literally gold and platinum out there. The mineral deposits by Mother Earth's bosom are depletable. Mankind will need more.

The space quest will continue. But it looks like space exploration is fast becoming a non-Anglo thang, maybe even predominantly Asian.

So much for Kennedy's visions. But then again, I was never that much of a Cortez, Rhodes or Columbus fan, anyway.

(First published on BRENTBLOG, MARCH 3rd, 2010.)

FINALLY - A REFERENDUM FOR A FREE, INDEPENDENT ALBA (SCOTLAND)

Finally, 690 years after the Declaration of Arbroath and 303 years after the Treaty of Union was passed, the 5 millions inhabitants of Alba (Scotland) have the opportunity to make their country a sovereign, independent republic. Today First Minister Alex Salmond announced the Referendum Bill, giving the Scots the right to answer the two following questions:

* whether the Scottish Parliament should have more devolved responsibility

* whether there should be an additional extension of power to enable Scotland to become an independent country

I would like to extend my congratulations to the Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba (SNP) and express my sincerest hope that the referendum will lead to independence, and that the English rule shall finally be abolished, and that ...

... the English, who ought to be satisfied with what belongs to him since England used once to be enough for seven kings or more, to leave us Scots in peace, who live in this poor little Scotland, beyond which there is no dwelling-place at all, and covet nothing but our own. (Declaration of Arbroath, 1320)

SOAR ALBA

THE iPAD AND I

I must admit that I was somewhat ambivalent, as I am no fan of Apple, when the AppleTablet hype came to its crescendo. On the one hand, I am extremely impatient to see a permanent eBook solution, but I was fearing that the somewhat snobbish Apple image and the general overpricing of Apple products would make the second phase of the eBook revolution an exclusive epoch for the fashionable and somewhat wealthy. I'd hate to see my books being read by only Apple-heads. But I was ready to do a Canossa, IF the product itself was the groundbreaking gadget, like some of the most optimistic predictions seem to imply.

But with no phone, no camera, no Flash and only one application runningat a time, I find that this iPad review covers fairly my own thoughts:



However, what I do embrace, is the fact that the race is on. Microsoft is working on a tablet, HP as well, and soon there will appear competing gadgets based on Windows 7, as the iPad surely will inspire the competition, just like Nokia's Express series, of which I am a happy user, can be considered an answer to the iPhone.

There can also be argued that while Apple is mainly producing gadgets for the consumer market, the PC is undisputably the computer that is most suitable for businesses.

If we define 'computer' in a traditional and strict sense, i.e. as we so far have known them, one might say that the infamous IBM dismissal of the personal home computer was slightly prophetic after all. The iPad and similar gadgets will appeal to people who use their PC just for browsing and networking. With an eBook reader included, their needs will have been met. "Nobody will want a personal computer at home."

The stationary PC is already being outsold by laptops, but laptops and stationary PCs and iMacs alike are also being undermined by the next generation of television sets. Samsung and other companies are developing TV sets that function more or less like a computer screen. In the future, you will get sets that display a mail icon down in the lower right corner when somebody has sent you a mail, and if somebody makes a comment on one of your Facebook posts, you will get a small red icon in the upper right corner, and Twitter will be running in the left TV margin as you watch "Dexter" Season 10. If Facebook and Twitter hasn't become obsolete as well, that is.

Thus, most people will have a television set at home, maybe a game console as well. Only professionals and die-hard gamers will need more at home.

When leaving home, we will want to carry an All Purpose Device (APD) that covers all our needs. This is why I was never a fan of the single purpose Kindle. When the mobile phone and the camera fused, everybody was delighted. The iPhone infused music to the phone, reducing the iPod to a jogging utility.

But this APD will have to include music, a camera, a phone, chat, an eBook reader and everything else that we are accustomed to on our laptops. As the news-PAPER is mortally wounded, an APD must include the possibility of subscription to newspapers and magazines as well. You may not be willing to pay for your newspaper, but your current subscriptions to web-based magazines like All About Beer, Deer & deer Hunting and Popular Science, will most certainly in the future be downloaded to your APD, pre-paid. However, if the interface is improved, making the web-based newpaper of today seem obsolete, unaestetic and slow, you might even be willing to subscribe to The Guardian or The New York Times, especially if a Breaking News service or some kind of exclusivity is included, even though you may not be willing to pay more than a nominal fee, perhaps spiced with a contribution to a given selection of NGOs.

And the eBook? In a panel debate at the Oslo Science Fiction Festival last autumn, my distinguished colleague Charles Stross argued against my eBook optimism, refering to the sordid fact that only a minority of the Western World's population actually do read books. But that is also a question of price and accessibility. With books and book clubs available on your APD at a far lower cost than the paper book of today, we have no reason to believe that the number of book enthusiasts will drop. However, when it comes to single purpose devices like the Kindle, Mr. Stross may be right.

Today the Norwegian politicians are handing out laptops to all our school children. That might prove to be a costly investment, if HP or MS in a year or two or three come up with an APD that also can read upgradable school books with videos and interactive functions.

Now, all we need is a holographic 42 inch screen that can be projected onto any white wall ...

Next time in Intermashional Times I shall meditate a little around the fact that no-one in institutions of power has even thought of the unemplyment wave that will hit the workers of the paper-, transport and printing industries, as the paper book dies, as the news-paper draws its last breath, and weeklies and magazines will all be out of print.