The smartphone is the computer!

And the last NASA mainframe is being mothballed. Sort of like how you feel watching Ali shake from Parkinson's.

Via NASA's blog:

This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA’s last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe.  For my millennial readers, I suppose that I should define what a mainframe is.  Well, that’s easier said than done, but here goes -- It’s a big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful.  They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices.  

In my first stint at NASA, I was at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a mainframe systems programmer when it was still cool. That IBM 360-95 was used to solve complex computational problems for space flight.   Back then, I comfortably navigated the world of IBM 360 Assembler language and still remember the much-coveted “green card” that had all the pearls of information about machine code.  Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic – today, “there’s an app for it!”

And now, an actual picture from the blog post:

I would so love to have an old mainframe in my house. Or, better: one of those big old "data processing machines" with the spinning tape wheels. That would kick ass. 

Mathew Ingram covers (new) media for GigaOm. He writes often on how old media simply doesn't get it. They don't understand twitter. Or "free". They fail to grasp the futility of paywalls. A "conversation" with readers is alien to them. Digitization and abundance are ideas that frighten them. Those writers that complain that their stories are essentially "aggregated" by others, including GigaOm, are dinosaurs.

Unlike, say, his employer, GigaOm. Which resides in the heart of those that "get it"; Silicon Valley.

A sampling from Mr. Ingram. From just the past 2-3 weeks:

I’ve argued before that the news occurs in different ways now than it used to; it’s no longer a packaged product that newspapers and TV stations create, but a process that involves Twitter reports and blog posts and video clips and all kinds of chaos. 

There are plenty of reasons why the traditional media business — including the advertising industry — is in the shape it is in, including a failure to move quickly enough to adapt to changing market conditions. But one of the primary flaws is a failure to appreciate how the structure of the media industry has been disrupted by the web and the democracy of distribution. 

Traditional media critics attack the Huffington Post for its aggregation, but as Nieman fellow David Skok pointed out recently at the Nieman Lab blog, aggregation is deeply embedded in the DNA of the media industry, and always has been. And as we’ve tried to point out before at GigaOM, aggregation and particularly curation are two of the skills that modern media companies need the most. 

The NYT needs a lot more than just a paywall. Another thing the NYT could — and should — be thinking about is what the role of an information provider is in the digital age. 

Om has described in his posts about the “democratization of distribution,” and as I’ve pointed out in posts about the disruption of the business of journalism. If anything, the original sin of newspapers was a failure to appreciate all the ways in which the internet was going to fundamentally change the nature of their business, and a failure to try and adapt to those changes quickly enough. 

Sky News joins the anti-social media brigade

One of the realities of a world in which distribution of content — including news — has been fundamentally democratized is that the value of a “scoop” or breaking news update is declining rapidly. The half-life of that kind of news is so short, and it becomes a commodity so quickly, that there is little value in trying to protect it for very long.

Mr Ingram's views are clear. And, as he so often quotes his boss, founder Om Malik, likely the consensus view of the site. To wit, old media fails to understand the *realities* of new media, the "democratization of distribution", the fallacy of the paywall, the power of social media and in all ways are watching their readership and financials collapse because ours is now a "digital age" and they have "failed" to "adapt to these changes quickly enough."

But is this true? 

Perhaps. Traditional media outlets can't seem to earn a profit. Are not growing. Paywalls have not proven beneficial to most newspapers. Their financial tell us as much.

Maybe Ingram and GigaOm are right, then, about old media. If so, how come they can't seem to make it on their own in this brave new world?

Consider how GigaOm describes itself:

Founded in 2006, GigaOM has grown into the leading provider of online media, events and research for global technology innovators. The company is one of the most credible and insightful voices at the intersection of business and technology, with an online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors; industry-leading events, including Structure, Mobilize, GigaOM RoadMap, and Structure:Data; and a pioneering market research service and digital community, GigaOM Pro, which provides expert analysis and research on emerging technology markets.

Six years in, a "leading provider" of online media, events and research. "One of the most" credible voices on business and technology and operator of "industry leading" events.

Then tell me, why has it required over $14 million in venture capital funding, at least, to sustain GigaOm? For such a leader, an enterprise that truly gets the new world of new media, has the company earned a profit? Ever?

Are they in the black? When are they expected to do so?

Last week, GigaOm purchased PaidContent -- the "biggest deal in their five-and-a-half year history". They refused to say how much. My guess is the price was far less than the nearly $10 million the Guardian was rumored to have purchased PaidContent for in 2008.  

Can the leaders of new media, so quick to teach old media the error of their ways, similarly not eke out a profit? Even without the legacy costs?

Last year, TechCrunch was acquired by AOL. TechCrunch was Silicon Valley's king of digital media. And was privately held. The company did not reveal whether or not it ever actually earned a profit on content -- or whether it was even able to generate the cash required to create and aggregate content.

Early this year, yet another Silicon Valley new media outlet "at the intersection of business and technology" was started: PandoDaily. This wretchedly named site is, yes, funded by venture capital and a variety of very wealthy Silicon Valley insiders.

I wonder: in their business plan, did PandoDaily pledge *ever* to earn a profit off content?

All of which raises several questions, none of which connected to all the bullshit the leaders of new media have been preaching to the dinosaurs of old media. 

In the heart of Silicon Valley, the leading, best funded, most popular media outlets may be unable to actually generate a profit.

Why are they not talking about this?

And what does this portend for all the other businesses and business models in Silicon Valley? In buying PaidContent, Om Malik stated:

We are quite strategic about our acquisitions — we acquire media entities only if we love the people and believe that we are at the starting phase of a trend. In 2008, we acquired jkOnTheRun as our tip of the hat to the growing demand for mobile devices and the changes it would bring into society. Later that year, we brought in The Apple Blog because we knew the best was yet to come for Apple. Both of those acquisitions have helped GigaOM cover the issues that matter most to our ultimate customers — you, the reader — in a smart, sensible fashion.

Nice, but did either of those blogs earn a profit? Ever? 

Are we getting the truth from new media?  Can we?

What if every "leading" media outlet covering the auto industry, for example, was effectively funded and controlled by wealthy auto execs? No doubt we would learn of the latest gadgets. There would be stories on the horsepower in the newest sports models. Snide remarks would fill the posts mocking those without the latest, greatest autos.

Would we receive the full story on speed limits, however? What would be their take on the auto bailout?

Such sites may indeed offer the highest quality news and/or most posts on this year's line-up of cars but would they dare broach the subject of global warming, for example? Or of personal safety?

What would they not cover? Do we spend too much on roads and not enough on public transit? Are all these car-centric neighborhoods bad for our health? What are the hidden costs?

Considering the growing importance of technology (and Silicon Valley) in our lives, we must ask: Why do the best and brightest covering Silicon Valley require what appears to be a continuous stream of benefactor funding? Why are they not actively attacking the very business model -- display ads and "industry (insider) events" -- for *limiting* what we read and for limiting what is possible in a world where content creation itself has almost no barriers?

In announcing their purchase of PaidContent -- for an unstated amount -- GigaOm head, Om Malik, stated:

We are in a time of chaos where the very idea of media is being questioned. And as a Chinese proverb says, from chaos emerges opportunity. I believe the best is yet to come for media.

Over the past few years we have started to see the transformation of media by new technologies, new methods of distribution and newer ways to consume information. Mathew Ingram has been writing about these disruptions on a regular basis, and now we are going to double down on what we think is a great new chapter in the media industry.

Frankly, this is the Silicon Valley party line. We readers deserve better.

Yes, yes...from chaos, opportunity. Disruptions, understood. Doubling down -- that means buying up. All of which is the *exact* language and the exact thought processes  of those funding our (new) media.

This is, I'm afraid, a story they never tell.

Certainly, these sites will congratulate themselves for their "transparency", informing us if a company they cover is similarly owned/funded by their specific benefactors. But this badly misses the larger story of what is and is not covered and why.

Perhaps I will be accused of simply "not getting it". But I believe that media is best when not controlled by a few wealthy insiders. I believe media works best when it has the ability to stand on its own, which I'm not sure that any of the big blogs of Silicon Valley can do -- or have ever done.

I believe that when the people who are the leading funders of an industry are also the leading funders of (all) the primary media covering that industry, than we will never have the coverage -- of all the issues -- that we readers deserve.

Maybe the very first story a free and independent new media outelt should cover is: why aren't the best and brightest at the most powerful, most innovative, most disruptive technology firms, which we cover regularly, able to build an infrastructure which can support us?

An epic long read from the Atlantic:

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

Twelve of 44 schizophrenia patients who underwent MRI scans, the team found, had reduced gray matter in the brain—and the decrease occurred almost exclusively in those who tested positive for T. gondii. 

This is the real reason why Steve Jobs created the iPhone. He decided that Aussies weren't fat enough.

Why on Earth would anyone give money to Harvard?

It gets ungodly sums from the US government (taxpayers), every single year. It pays zero taxes to the city of Boston or state of Massachussetts. 

Harvard's endowment is over $30 billion.

Are people so desperate for recognition from Harvard? So bereft of the creativity necessary to consider *any* other worthy charities? Are those who attend Harvard so weak as to believe they must continue to give to the university so it can continue its mission of making sure everyoe believes that "attending Harvard" earns that person a free pass?

Anyway, there's this:

In a brazen effort to raise funds, Dixie State offered naming rights to individual bathroom stalls in a musical theater company’s planned building. 

Laugh if you want, but Dixie State isn’t the first cash-hungry college to seek money for bathrooms.

As first reported by Above the Law, Harvard Law School recently opened the Falik Men’s Room. Like tuition, bathrooms seem to cost more in Cambridge. William Falik told Above the Law he received the honor – if you want to call it that – after donating $100,000 to his alma mater to create a public interest fellowship in his father's honor.

Not all would-be bathroom benefactors have such open-minded alma maters. The venture capitalist Brad Feld approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about 10 years ago offering to endow a bathroom. After a few months of back and forth, he said, MIT officials told him that would be inappropriate. Feld was shocked, having thought the college would use his proposal as a chance to upsell him on his annual giving.

But Feld was vindicated when he paid to name a bathroom after himself in a University of Colorado at Boulder science building. John Bennett, director of the university's Alliance for Technology, Learning & Society, offered Feld a campus restroom for $25,000 after hearing about his rejection at MIT. Feld, who lives in Boulder, agreed immediately. He visits his masterpiece of plumbing every couple of months and occasionally checks in there on foursquare.

Bennett said the building’s seven other bathrooms are still up for sale. So far, there have been no takers.

It may have started tongue is ass, er, cheek, but trust me on this: nobody better at securing money from others than American universities. They are the experts.

Nothing like a presidential election year to grease the palms! Per the New York Times:

After months of painstaking talks, the nation’s biggest banks have agreed to a $25 billion settlement that could provide relief to more than two million current and former American homeowners harmed by the bursting of the housing bubble, state and federal officials said. It is part of a broad government settlement aimed at halting the housing market’s downward slide.

Fuck that! Why should I be left out just because I didn't go to public school -- and can do math?

If our government is going to take $25 billion from the banks, I want my fair share.

There's about 325 million people in this country (legally), so that's about $75 a person. I damn well better get my $75!

I love this short film below which, yes, is just video captured by a iPhone with music in the background. Only...

The soundtrack is created in real-time based off the visual information presented. That is, music is being created, instantly, by the device, based on what the camera sees.

It's from the app, Sonified.

Sonified takes real time visual information from your iPhone/iPad video camera and uses it to mix 16 stereo tracks of CD quality music in real time, translating what your video camera sees into sound. A real time instrument, Sonified uses your iPhone/iPad's video camera to translate qualities of light and color into music, a process called "sonification". Using Sonified allows the iPhone and iPad user to connect vision and sound in new ways, creating video and soundtrack at the same time. Record Sonified QuickTime movies with CD quality audio and share with friends and other Sonified users.

Why stop there?

Essentially, Sonified creates a real-time soundtrack to what our smartphone is pointed at. What happens when everything, every home, street, mailbox, person, lamppost, business, tree, rock, pet and everything else is connected to the web?

What data will they offer that, seen only by our smartphone, not our own eyes, will alter how we see, hear and perceive? 

What messages might people leave at every spot that stand in? Can we soon upload to the web, via a Twitter 2.0, say, that tells the world exactly how we feel?

Groggy and nervous, perhaps. 

What if a person does this while waiting at a bus stop? And the next person and the next? And before we even take our place in line, from at least 100 feet away, we know --because of our smartphone -- that the mood hanging over the bus stop is dark, angry, or maybe unexpectedly giddy?

How might that alter our interactions with those people and that place? How might it alter our interactions once our smartphone takes that real-time 'mood' data and combines it with all the historical mood data, traffic patterns, information on all the businesses in that area, criminal statistics, demographics of the neighborhood?

Our smartphones are fundamentally altering our interactions. Soon, they will fundamentally alter our perceptions.

More on the creator of this app:

Now a prolific multimedia artist and writer named Perry Hall [Flash required], who was born with his own version of Nabokov’s quirky gift, has developed an iPhone/iPad app called Sonified that enables even those low on the synaesthetic spectrum to experience light, colors, and movement morphing into sounds.

I first became interested in Hall’s work seeing a series of haunting HD videos made in 2006 that he called Material Study, featuring light dancing on the surfaces of ferrofluids that surge and swell like some kind of protean lava. While convalescing from a bout of Lyme disease, Hall decided that he needed to set his synaesthesia loose in the wild, as he puts it. He and his digital collaborators developed software that siphons the luminance and color values from the video cameras in iPhones and iPads (only later-generation devices like the iPhone 4, 4S and iPad 2 will work correctly) and uses them to trigger stereo samples from a library of CD-quality audio composed for the purpose.

The effect of the audio-visual-kinesthetic link-up was unexpectedly profound. Instead of feeling like Sonified was imposing its digital soundtrack on the world, I felt I was accessing a layer of reality that is normally hidden from us. It was like a little dose of Morpheus’ red pill in The Matrix.

It's America so if a person's dead, we can write anything we want about them, right? Even put quotes around shit or tell stories without any evidence whatsover?

Right?

Okay, good.

Anyway, in publicizing his OMG APPLE OMG STEVE JOBS book, author Adam Lashinsky offers up a great even if likely completely bullshit story about Steve Jobs yelling at some Girl Scout.