E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (summer reading list txt) 📖

be at the scientific and industrial levels, although

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