Brief weekend outage due to Apache and H-Sphere

06 February 2006 - 19:46

Exaflop.org became unavailable on Sunday night until early Monday morning. Sunday is usually the best time of the week to have your website unavailable, but this past Sunday was extra good timing what with the Superbowl. The website was unavailable because I had to change it's IP address and the DNS update takes time to propogate. Read on for the reasons why. [Read More]

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YouTube and copyright

19 February 2006 - 17:44

YouTube is a website that allows you to upload videos for other people to watch. That's all there is to it really. Of course it has groups and tagging and comments and RSS, etc., but that's all pretty tengential to the fact that it lets you store video on their site and have thousands of people watch it, all without charge. God knows how they intend to make money in the long term - the server farm and gigabits of bandwidth must be burning though the cash and the only obvious way to make money as it stands is to run adverts on the pages with the videos.

Anyway, seeing as I don't have the bandwidth on my own server to share videos at the present time, YouTube could be a godsend for me and other bloggers who want to put video in their blogs. The really good thing about YouTube is that it allows you to embed their Flash based player in your own web pages.

BoingBoing has a story about YouTube receiving a takedown notice from NBC about the Saturday Night Live skit, Lazy Sunday. What interests me here isn't that NBC wanted their video taken off YouTube, it's the reaction to this from the editors of BoingBoing and their readers. It just happens that this particular story was posted by Xeni Jardin, but it might as well have been by notorious copyleftist Cory Doctorow. The article goes on at length about how stupid and ungrateful NBC are for sending the takedown notice (they call it a 'nastygram' presumably because the letter uses nasty legal language - that's because it's a legal document!)  They argue that it's ungrateful because illicit sharing of the Lazy Sunday video was responsible for it's popularity and may have resulted in more people watching SNL. They then, frankly, whinge about how the video is available on NBC's website but only plays reliably on Windows and how NBC put the video up on iTunes but charges for it there.

While there is some argument to say that TV companies should be more tollerant towards fans sharing clips (or often entire shows) in violation of copyright, the fact is, IT'S ILLEGAL! Not that I'm against people uploading copyrighted material to YouTube - if they didn't you'd just be left with phonecam videos of teenagers doing stupid stuff. I intend to upload TV commericals that I find amusing, so I'm not getting all righteous about it, but the fact is that if a copyright owner wants you to stop distrubuting their material, it's just tough. It doesn't matter what argument you come up with about how they should allow it or how you are doing them a favour even - the decision is up to them. The last part of the BoingBoing post that I find interesting is:-

This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere -- not to mention the fan-made AIM icons and web banners. Viral means the stuff has a life of its own, guys, and that's what made it a hit.

This is a lot like the arguments people made in defense of the original Napster before the RIAA got it killed off in totality. That it was music fans that were sharing the music, that Napster  was just a conduit as it were. That fans sharing music was actually doing the artists a favour by getting them more exposure. Whatever you think of those pro-sharing arguments, the fact that Napster got shut down because the vast majority of material on it was copyright infringing should serve as a warning to YouTube. I'm not the only one who has noticed how much infringing material there is on the site including music promos, TV show clips and even entire soccer matches.

At the moment YouTube has it's head burried in the sand eBay-style in that they allow copyright owners to contact them and get stuff taken down, but there's no way for ordinary users to say: this is obviously copyright infringing, get it off. YouTube only takes down videos reported by users to break it's terms of service and that mostly just means porn. Somebody should really open a book on how long it'll be before YouTube starts getting hit up with some large lawsuits (and not just 'nastygrams').

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The poor state of Formula 1 team websites

14 February 2006 - 17:27

I'm cross-posting this to the Exaflop Technology Blog as well as The Racing Blog because although it's about Formula 1 websites specifically, the principles apply to all corporate websites.

Robert Scoble is famous for saying that if your marketing website doesn't have an RSS feed you should be fired. He's taken a lot of criticism for that stance and when I first read it I wasn't convinced it was that big a deal. However, I was recently compiling a list of Formula 1 team websites and was disappointed to find that only one of them had an RSS feed for it's news page. So I guess I'm now a believer.

For those not familiar with Formula 1 racing, there are currently 11 teams. All teams are required to design and manufacture their own cars (the engine may be bought in) to very high standards of both performance and safety. There are 18 races this year in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania. Annual budgets range from $40M to $300M and staff levels from around 100 to over 1000. 6 of the 11 teams are owned by or closely allied to major motor car manufacturers. So this is a big global business - a long way from the likes of Champcar or IRL - and only the best will do for even the smallest of F1 operations. Even the manufacturer owned teams depend on external sponsorship and sponsors require maximum exposure in order to justify the money they hand over. That makes every chance to expose and promote their sponsors very important to the teams. So you'd think they would put a lot of effort into their web presence....

Well in a way they do. Almost all the sites are slickly produced by experienced web design agencies. Unfortunately these design agencies seem most intent on fulfilling a brief that was penned by someone who knows nothing about web usability or even good web marketing - as long as it looks pretty on this person's screen, they are happy.

The following is a table of woe. As you can see, only Renault have an RSS feed for the news section of their website. Many of the websites are all-flash affairs. Now I don't object to the use of flash on a website, but if the entire site is one big flash file it makes it impossible to bookmark pages, navigate using the standard back and forward buttons, or copy/paste from press releases etc. And that's without going into many of the accessability issues that web-standards fanatics like to go on about. Those sites that avoid the all-flash fate then have a chance to fail by using Frames is such a way as to make the bookmarking of individual pages almost impossible.

Team Name (link)	RSS Feed	All Flash	Bookmarkable pages
Renault F1	X	-	X
McLaren	-	-	-
Williams	-	-	X
BMW Sauber	-	X	-
Ferrari	-	X	-
Red Bull	-	X	-
Midland F1	-	-	X
Scuderia Toro Rosso	-	X	-
Toyota F1	-	-	X
Honda	-	-	X
Super Aguri F1	-	?	?

Renault F1 is the only team to come out with full marks - fittingly for the 2005 world champions! Williams, Midland F1, Toyota F1 and Honda are almost as good, they just need to add an RSS feed so fans can keep up with their news more easily. The rest should hang their heads in shame, sack their current web partners and start again.

[Note: Super Aguri F1 haven't really got a website yet - they're got their work cut out getting a car ready for the start of the season being the new boys for 2006 - so I'm not rating them yet.]

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Prepare for Cell Processor hype onslaught

08 February 2006 - 08:44

Just watching the US CNBC Squawkbox over here in England and they're going on about how amazingly powerful and revolutionary the new IBM Cell Processor is going to be. And if a product that isn't available yet and for which there is no new news available to get appearances on CNBC means that the PR engine has swung into full-on hype mode. Expect floods of blog postings about the chip and stories in all the news websites.

It's all PR hype though. We know the Cell is going to be the core of the Sony Playstaion 3 and there are possibly other applications for it in workstation accelerators. But don't expect to see it as widely used as IBM would like it to be. Firstly the Cell is not a cheap chip to manufacture. Some of the early hype made claims that by putting lots of simple processors together on one die they could make a very powerful chip at low cost compared to traditional solutions. This is just not the case though. The primary determiner in the manufacturing cost of chip is the die space it takes up and the Cell is as big as any high performance design. Even though the individual units of the Cell (SPE or Synergistic Processing Elements in IBM speak) are small and simple, when you jam 8 of them together (and add another true PowerPC processor to co-ordinate them) you end up with a big chip.

The other concern over the Cell is the ease of programming. Writing highly multi-threaded code is difficult anyway unless you have an easily seperable algorithm as your main computation task. But if you then take into account that the SPEs don't have access to main memory - only the 512KB they are bundled with - the whole business of co-ordinating data transfers to and from the SPEs adds an extra layer of complexity that any programmer would rather do without.

There is plenty of debate among game programmers over whether the PS3 offers as much useable processing power as the more conventional three-core PowerPC CPU in the Xbox 360 because the potention of the Cell will be so hard to realise. Being able to decode 48 MPEG2 streams simultaneously isn't that useful in most applications.

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