Category: Technology

In the market for a non-SLR digital camera?

What if you’re in the market for a non-SLR digital camera? The old standby has been, and continues to be, Canon compacts. My current favorite would be the SD800 IS (for the wide angle lens), but there is a plethora of options. But! On the horizon is a batch of large-sensor, fixed-lens, small-body (and stylish looking) cameras which might be worth waiting a few months for. The one that’s out now is the Sigma DP2. This mixed review is worth reading in part because it explains the whole phenomena. But check out leaked pictures of the maybe-upcoming Olympus E-P1. Update: The head-on image of the Olympus disappeared from the page, but here it is:

Olympus E-P1

I also feel like I should be throwing in a word for the Panasonic DMC-LX3, but it seems to not be selling much, which is usually a red flag.

David Barringer on the Kindle

“I do think that ebooks are a step backwards, however. It’s like the fax. It’s not flexible or useful enough. Handheld computers should have greater power, and the Kindle instead has less. You should be able to access encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other searchable resources, just like we can on the computer or the iPhone. That’s where the real benefit of portable handheld units are. Who cares about downloading Twilight? I care about having access to entire online libraries of reference works, maps, and encyclopedias.” — David Barringer on the Kindle.

What’s so great about Twitter

twitter fail whaleA pretty good argument for Twitter by Steven Johnson in Time (via). People keep asking me this question, but I figured someone would come along and make the case. Still, a few thoughts:

  • The following aspect and the composing aspect are both equally important to what Twitter is all about, yet they deserve completely separate discussions.
  • On the following side, you have three distinct groups: Your friends, celebrities you admire, and Twitter stars — people you pay attention to just because they happen to be really good at making awesome 140-character collections of words (e.g., SeoulBrother!). There’s also assorted weirdness (the Mars rover?), and a zillion tools. And it’s all mixed together in chaotic order on a page custom-made just for you. (In fact, feature request: show me what other users’ home pages look like.)
  • On the writing side, Johnson observes that it really can be interesting to describe what you’re eating. The real challenge tho is: what is the awesomest thing you can say in 140 characters right now, which turns out to be an interesting question to try to answer.
  • Twitter can now be set to update your Facebook status, so you have no excuse from that perspective.
  • I personally do not get the buzz that the search stuff has been getting. It turns out that I care what people have been saying over the last few seconds or minutes about any particular thing approximately never. Maybe there were a few minutes after the plane hit the Hudson that Twitter live search was really shining, but as soon as the first bulletin went up on CNN.com (what, 15 minutes later?), Twitter is back to being useless in this particular respect.

For the time being, the only way to see what Twitter is about is to try it out for a few days. It’s pretty easy to find people to follow — just see who other people are following. The harder part maybe figuring out what to say. I guess it’s like blogging — the fear of the proverbial blank piece of paper. On Facebook there are a million pictures to comment on, cheesy quizzes to play with, and an endless stream of other stuff to react to. Twitter is all about you and what’s in your brain at that particular moment.

Hulu Desktop has no stop button

Hulu desktop

I guess it makes perfect sense that Hulu Desktop has no stop button — it’s “simulating” a TV, you see. But it still seems disconcerting and weird. I’ve also noted that Hulu has not been adding new shows at any particular speed (at least, not anything I’m going to watch). Still, it works — sort of — with the Hauppauge remote that came with my Dell, and figuring out how to use it is obvious, so I’m giving it a shot. Update: Complete clusterfuck. Forces you to download software updates, otherwise refuses to start. Hangs intermittently. Sometimes impossible to exit fullscreen mode. Crashy.

What’s the future of Wolfram Alpha?

wolfram alpha Wolfram Alpha launched the other day. The reception has been mixed, but most of the positive press seems to be from folks who’ve gotten a guided tour. You can get the same experience, if you haven’t already, by watching Steven Wolfram’s screencast. Awesome, right? All the world’s knowledge at your fingertips?

Well, not quite. Farhad Manjoo’s reaction is actually typical for folks who’ve played with Alpha for a little bit:

Once you start conjuring your own searches, it’s clear that the samples offer a misleading impression of the site’s depth. Ask how many calories that male runner would burn if he were swimming, cycling, playing tennis, cross-country skiing, or golfing—it’s clueless. Say you wanted to know how life expectancy differed by state in the United States—what’s the life expectancy of a male in California, and how does that compare to the life expectancy of a male in Kansas? “Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know what to do with your input,” the site tells me. And on and on it goes. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know the homicide rate in South Africa or Baltimore, it doesn’t know how many copies M.I.A.‘s last album sold, it can’t tell you the per-capita GDP of the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’s got nothing about the top speed of the Bugatti Veyron. It may sound like I’m nitpicking, but I was careful to construct questions that emulated Wolfram’s own examples. As it kept coming up empty, Wolfram Alpha came to seem less like HAL 9000 and more like a chatbot.

Even more embarrassing, Alpha sometimes shows outdated data when the more up-to-date data is easily findable on Google.

What’s happening here is Wolfram Alpha is pulling information from discrete online databases, including the CIA factbook, Census reports, and the stock market. These sources are connected to Alpha by its human handlers, who teach it how the data relate to each other. (Many other websites, e.g. Every Block, do the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale.) Insofar as it’s just launched, we should expect Alpha to get smarter and smarter as the months turn into years, right? Well, not necessarily. Using human operators to organize the web is how Yahoo! search used to rule the world, until Google came along and let machines give it a try. As the web grew, it outpaced the ability of any number of human librarians to keep up with.

So how can we make software be able to understand the databases that are scattered around the internet? Well, mostly you do it by changing the way the databases are organized, to make them more easily machine parseable. What we’re talking about is the semantic web, which Tim Berners-Lee explained (he’s one of the people with a claim on inventing the internet) earlier this year at Ted. He describes the frustration of connecting data one database at a time, and he lays out some ideas of how things might work when data are connected. (Raw Data Now! It’s going to improve the world!)

Berners-Lee throws out a few examples of how this might work, but it’s mostly along the line of mashups. We can create all sorts of data mashups (that second thing is cool, click on it, seriously), but the act of creating the mashup and using it are distinct, right? The genius of Wolfram Alpha is that, within its currently limited sphere, it allows you to mash anything. Well, once the Semantic Web tips and more and more data starts to become available in machine-readable format, the potential power of tools like Alpha will grow exponentially.

Whether the tool that ends up winning the race to harness this data is Wolfram Alpha, Google, or something else remains to be seen. But at least we can now imagine what that tool will look like — something like what Wolfram Alpha looks like today, but able to handle any question that Farhad Manjoo (or any research scientist, or any kid in school) can throw at it.