If you’re reading this afterwards and just wanted to remind yourself of the running order for the evening – well, that’s what they’re here for, really. Any questions about what happened? Grab me on twitter, @DiarmuidOM.

Finally, if you’re reading this before the talk, but don’t know about the talk, it’s on April 12th in Engineers Ireland, Clyde Road, Dublin 4. Starts at 7:30pm, and everyone’s welcome. But it is going to be all in Irish, which may put you off. And there won’t be subtitles. Sorry :-/

(But really, come anyway! It’ll be great! I even managed to sneak a Playboy centrefold into my slide deck!)

Oh, and there’s some stuff about the free internet too, and a bit of Microsoft v Apple fun, and obligatory mentions of self-driving cars, and a look at the future of the hybrid car, and loads more that still hasn’t been sorted through. Hope you can make it!

7:30 on Thursday, April 12th, in Engineers Ireland, Clyde Road, Dublin.

Also, there’s been some fresh rumblings on the nós* front. Not for me to make any announcements (not like I know that much anyway…) but I’m excited for the return of the most exciting development in the Irish language media in many, many years.

A: Microsoft had grand ambitions to make this kind of thing super-easy with Windows Media Centre, but I’ve yet to see any real evidence that they’ve succeeded. Basically there are three main options here:
i) Directly connect the laptop to the TV with a HDMI cable, or a VGA cable, or something else convenient.
ii) Move the media onto some sort of external device (USB stick, DVD, CD, portable hard drive…) and plug that into the XBox.
iii) Stream the files, via some sort of network (ad hoc or otherwise) to the XBox (this is how Microsoft would like you to do it).

Of the three, i) is the easiest, but only if you have the right cable, and the right connections on both ends. If HDMI is an option on all three then go for it, but it does mean you’re tethered to the telly. You won’t be controlling things from the opposite side of the room, at least not unless you have a super long HDMI cable. And that would mean nasty cable clutter, which is nobody’s idea of a good time.

This is the only picture I could find even vaguely related to the subject of XBox video streaming. And actually, it kinda isn't.

Option ii) is also pretty straightforward. Transfer files onto a USB stick, plug into the XBox, and you’re pretty much good to go. It does, however, lack elegance.

Finally option iii), streaming, Microsoft’s favourite, and mine too. Microsoft offer a couple of ways of doing this, but as per usual there’s a better third party option, in this case TVersity. It does require that the XBox and laptop are both networked together, which may be an issue, but even if that isn’t the case this might be as simple as plugging the XBox into your router with a standard network cable. Anyway, TVersity is the simplest network-based programme I’ve ever had the pleasure of setting up. Simply download it to the laptop, follow the installation instructions, and you’re good to go. Assuming that your XBox and laptop are on the same network you should be able to see it by going to Guide, then Media, then Video Player.

As far as plugging the laptop into the XBox, this is how that would work – if you’ve no network to speak of you could probably get away with what’s known as an ad-hoc network between the laptop and the XBox. In its wired incarnation this basically means plugging a network cable into both the laptop and the XBox and hoping for the best. Wireless, if your XBox has such a function, would work like this. If you were hoping to just pass video through your xbox directly through VGA or something, that’s not going to happen – the XBox 360 doesn’t have any pass-through functionality like this.

Finally, I’m always suspicious when things, especially networking things, work as easily as TVersity did for me. Be warned that your milage, as the cliché goes, may vary dramatically. There’s a guide here to setting up TVersity, which may help avoid the problems that I was expecting but which failed to crop up.

[This is the first post in a series which which may or may not stick around. Questions, if you have them, to @DiarmuidOM (that's twitter, for anyone who's struggling to keep up).]

I wouldn’t agree, but then what do I know? Unlike just about every government official in the entire world these days, I actually quite like the idea of a free internet.

On both those counts, however, I don’t really care, because I think there’s a bigger issue here. If we’re targeting a structural deficit of 0.5% of GDP, that still means that even ignoring the stuff that you don’t count as part of a structural deficit (namely cyclical deficit and specific “one-off spending”), we’re still aiming to spend more than we bring in. The retort to this is that growth should outstrip that, meaning that our debt to GDP ratio will stay the same. And that’s all very well, but it means that we’re going to be paying to maintain debt pretty much forever, and that we have no chance whatsoever to put money into (for example) a pension reserve fund, which might actually help us survive the quite-possibly-imminent pension crisis. Imminent might be too strong a word – 20-30 years is more likely, and that’s fine for the big-wigs. They’re all well into their 50s and 60s, for the most part, and by the time the shit really hits the fan they’ll have long rode off into the sunset.

I, on the other hand, am 22. Assuming a pretty typical career trajectory, I’ll be in the prime of my tax-paying life in about 30-40 years. At which point, by my reckoning, this country, along with all the others who “only” overspent by 0.5% of GDP, will be in the same pretty badly indebted state we’re in now, but with a demographics crisis to add to our problems. Personally, I don’t really understand the rationale here. Social spending (that is, spending on increasing the quality of life of those who can’t spend their own money to do so) is all very well, and I’m certainly a long way from the American right-wingers who’d let someone die for the crime of not having medical insurance. I love the idea of living in a country that’s rich enough to guarantee a certain minimum standard of living for everyone.

The reality, however, is that right now we don’t. Complaining about having to cut back on social spending is all very well, but let’s maybe have the guts to admit that we just don’t have the money to spend on this. And if you’re going to spend it, at least have the guts to point at the group(s) that is/are going to be paying for it, and say aloud that you think they’re not contributing enough just yet.

Whatever you do, stop spending my inheritance.

*Some people are pointing out that it isn’t really a treaty, per se. But I’m going to keep calling it one anyway, because it makes damn all difference.

EDIT: Slight revision with thanks to @Seosamhoc, who understands the issues far better than I do. Not sure he’d totally sign off on even this edited version, but it’ll have to do for now.

One of the worst examples I can pick out of recent memory (the culprit will remain nameless) is the comparison of Apple’s market cap* to the GDP of small countries. And actually, with a market cap hovering between $400 billion and $500 billion, the country doesn’t even have to be that small. The countries in that range, according to the IMF’s 2010 list, are Poland, Belgium, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Norway and Iran. Ireland isn’t even close, nor are the likes of Portugal, Egypt, Israel, New Zealand… The list goes on.

You may, at this point, be saying “Wow, Apple worth more than Ireland. How extraordinary!”. But that’s to completely miss the point. I hope you stay with me long enough for me to correct your perception, for you see GDP is an annual number, while market cap is just a number. If the Earth were rotating around the sun twice as fast then our GDP would only be half what it is now, even though nothing else would change. (Actually, doubling our speed would change quite a lot of other things, most notably the long-term prospects for life on this planet, but let’s ignore that fact).

So what is the fair comparison between GDP and market cap? Well, the whole point is that there isn’t really one. If you’re going to compare anything, it would maybe be a company’s revenue versus the country’s total tax take, but that comparison is still pretty meaningless. But even though it’s meaningless, people still make these kinds of comparisons all the time.

I’m about to make one of my own though, because it’s a fun figure that will blow your mind:

If you were to send someone all the data on a blu-ray, character by character, by text message, and if you were paying 10c/text (which is pretty much what we do pay), the total cost would be…

*drum roll*

THAT’S RIGHT! €91 MILLION!!

That figure’s meaningless, because texts (or SMS messages, to my international readers) are obviously not designed to be used like this. It would, after all, take 900 million texts**, and I think my thumbs would run out long before I could get through a notional €90 million inheritance texting someone the blu-ray version of Casino Royale. Furthermore, networks make money on texts that, were they not making it on texts, they’d have to make on something else.

So, as I say, utterly meaningless. But fun, nonetheless.

I worked this out while idly scratching out ideas for a talk I’m giving to Engineers Ireland on next April 12th (that’s 2012, in case you’re reading this post in the archives). It’ll be on in Engineers Ireland, Clyde Road, Dublin, and I believe it’s a public event so if you’re in the area do stop in. Although it’s as Gaeilge, so if you don’t speak Irish you may be a little lost.

*To the uninitiated, this is what the company is valued at by the overpaid, under-rested 20-something year-old traders that are collectively known as “the stock market”. It’s not what the company would cost you to buy, necessarily, but notionally it kinda is. Actually, it’s easier if we just pretend that it is.

**These figures are based on a 128GB blu-ray and work out to be just over €700/MB. Which, let’s be honest, is pretty insane. In fact, it’s even more than data roaming, which is quite something. Up to now, I thought that nothing could possibly cost more than data roaming.

This, apparently, is what a breast implant looks like. I don't know if this one has already exploded, or is about to explode, or what's going on. Whatever the case is, this kind of "exploding offer" is significantly more dangerous than the one I'm dealing with, and should be treated as such.

Now this isn’t a classic exploding offer, I don’t think, because I’m pretty sure the company in question isn’t some second-rate coding sweatshop*. Hard to be sure, of course, but when I was interviewing I was nodding and smiling and thinking “yeah, I could totally work here. Definitely”. It was my first choice, hands down. The problem is that what was my second choice (a big, nameless multinational – maybe the one you’re thinking of, maybe not) pay about 50% more than the offer I have in my hands right now. Now I’m no mercenary, not by a long shot. There’s a very, very long list of things I won’t do for money. And I’d rather do a job I love on a salary of €(x) than a job I don’t on €(x * 1.5). But there’s no guarantee that “small (relatively speaking) Irish software consultancy” will be any more fun than “huge faceless multinational”, and the salary difference is enormous.

This is, notionally, a picture of a "faceless corporate HQ". Actually, I think it's WordPress' HQ. Not only am I a fan of their work (as you can see from this very page), but I'd be ok with working in that building.

But then I don’t have an offer from “huge faceless multinational”, so the bigger salary is purely a notional one. And there’s the whole notion of “work to learn, not to earn” (that was either from “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, or perhaps “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, I’m not absolutely sure which. Probably the latter).

The dilemma, if it wasn’t already clear, is whether to accept an offer for dramatically less money than I might get elsewhere, or hold out for a job I want at most as much, but perhaps a little bit less, but which pays way more money. But which, if it wasn’t already clear, I might very well not get.

I wish there was a conclusion to this post. Maybe one where I go back to “small (relatively speaking) Irish software consultancy” and tell them about my dilemma, and they say “oh, looks like your offer was missing a zero – let me just sort that out for you…”. But that doesn’t seem likely.

So, for now, I’m just gonna sit around, mulling it over, and get no real work done all weekend.

Chat soon.

*[An interesting side-story to all this is that this unnamed company are also the company that bought my Dad's software consultancy after he died (this is probably enough for any super-keen detectives to work out who I'm talking about - but if you're really that keen, I think I'm doing the world a service by putting you to work on something trivial for a while). There's something bizarre about the idea of working there, in a way, but also something nice about how things have come full circle. But that's not really the point, at all, and doesn't really help the dilemma.]

So Google will track everything they can about you, and use it to sell targeted ads, and Facebook will do the very same thing. And so will lots of other companies, but for many of us those two account for probably 90% (or more) of what’s available online about us, so we’re as well to just talk about the impact of them having that data.

And what is that impact? Given everything Google know about me, what’s the absolute worst they could do? Or Facebook, for that matter? This is not just the most important question, by the way, but it might well turn out to be the only question, because if the answer is “not that much”, then who really cares? If the only impact of Google having all that information about me is that they can target ads a little bit better, so what?

So let’s talk it through. I’ve used GMail pretty much since it was first released – since January 15th 2005, to be precise. I was using Google searches a good long while before that. I’ve been using YouTube since before Google owned it (I think – it’s a long time ago now though), and Maps since it became worth using, and Google Reader for probably 4 or 5 years now. Oh, and Google+ for a brief period of about a week after it launched. There are probably one or two more, but those are the big ones.

GMail, they’re not really supposed to be accessing beyond letting their ad-bots skim through and target ads at me, and given some of the ads that they target me with I’m not too worried about that. Whatever method they’re using for parsing text just isn’t accurate enough for them to be building up a super-accurate picture from just my e-mails. What if they were to start reading them? Well I guess there are probably a few e-mails in there I wouldn’t be mad about being made public, but not many. The occasional slightly bitch-ey comment in one of my chats, perhaps. But nothing that’s going to end my social or professional lives, and the damage to Google of releasing things like that would go way beyond the damage to me of them being released.

And this is not to mention the obvious question: what, exactly, is Google going to gain by betraying my trust like this? For a company with profits of almost $12 billion last year, it’d want to be either a very big bribe or an unbelievably lacking security policy for someone to pull off accessing that stuff without getting caught.

YouTube? They probably can’t accurately track every video I’ve ever accessed. Too many different PCs and different IP addresses. But let’s say they could. Let’s say they knew exactly what videos I’d watched when, and how long I’d spent watching them, and which bits I rewound and watched again, and which bits I skipped over. They don’t know all that (although they probably do have a lot of that on record), but if they did? Well, they’d know that I enjoy Katy Perry’s music a little more than I generally let on (except they don’t know how much I generally let on), and that I’ve watched the video to Cosmo Jarvis’ “My Day” more times than most would consider appropriate. They’d even know that on more than one occasion I’ve set Girlfriend (by Avril Lavigne) on repeat, although they probably wouldn’t get the in-joke that made that funny even if I explained it with a diagram. And… well, that’s pretty much all they’re getting from YouTube.

Maps? They could probably guess that I desperately want to drive Route 66, but I’m pretty sure that won’t ever get me fired or make me a social outcast. If Maps was real-time I guess I might be tempted to follow people around on it, and that could get a little creepy, but that doesn’t happen so I’m safe on that front.

Google Reader? There’s a lot of feeds in there that I don’t read, or that I read because I don’t agree with them, or that I read one post in 20, or that I read for about a day after adding but then got overwhelmed by all the new posts and just haven’t gotten around to cleaning out yet. Could they tell some stuff about me? Sure. An accurate picture? Not nearly as accurate as they’d like to think

Searches are all that are left. Potentially a big one though. What if someone was to find out that you search “boobs” on Google?! Well, here’s a (minor) newsflash for you: the search term “boobs” is searched something around 1,830,000 times every month in this country (Ireland, that is – population of just over 4 million, by the way). So as soon as Google starts spreading around that you’ve been searching “Cheryl Cole Boobs” (2,400 searches/month), “lily allen boobs” (6,600 searches/month) or even “Sharon Osborne boobs” (a mystifying 170 searches every month from this apparently filthy, depraved little island), you have to assume that other people might get a little wary of using Google for their late night searching.

And this is the nub of it, really. Google can embarrass you, sure, but in doing so it hurts itself more than it’s ever likely to hurt you. You’re worth far more to it as a target for advertisers than you could ever be as a victim of some notional Google Let’s-Air-Everyone’s-Dirty-Underwear Department.

As for being a target for advertising, is that really such a bad thing? Some people seem to think so. They paint a dystopic picture of the future, where we can’t walk down a street without being hit with targeted advertising. Where we only ever see ads that are deemed relevant to us by the “powers that be”. Well that may happen, sure, but the conclusion that is drawn is that this gives advertisers absolute power over all the media we consume.

Bollocks!

I’m not naive enough to claim that advertising doesn’t influence me at all. I own a Samsung Galaxy S, one of the most heavily advertised phones of recent times, and just last month I spent €130 on a nespresso machine, another one of the most heavily advertised products I can recall being aware of. But I consume media that I’ve never seen advertised, and frankly distrust any political message delivered by billboard or by flashily-produced TV ad.

Is a lack of irrelevant advertising really going to narrow the scope of my reading? Does the fact that I’m subscribed to the RSS feeds of Tim Bray, Seth Godin and James Altucher really stem from the fact that I occasionally see ads for products which I’m never going to buy?

On the other hand, will this increase in focussed marketing drive me so insane that I bankrupt myself buying the beer and after-shave that so clearly are being targeted at me? Not unless I’m an idiot I won’t – I may be subtly influenced by advertising, but nobody can make me spend money I don’t have, nobody apart from me, and no amount of “targeting” is going to change that.

What about Facebook? Well it’s more of the same, really. They could embarrass you, sure. I’m sure there are profiles we’ve all spent a little too long lingering over. There might even be a picture or two we’ve returned to more than some might consider absolutely decent. To Facebook, this is their bread and butter. This is, to a large extent, what people use Facebook for: anonymously stalking potential partners, interviewers, lecturers, bosses… When Facebook start letting this stuff out, people start leaving in their droves, and not one of the dystopia-peddlers has been able to explain to me what Facebook are supposedly thinking when they release this stuff.

Just like Google, Facebook have FAR more to lose than they have to gain by betraying the trust of their users.

There are, of course, other areas of legitimate concern when it comes to the future of privacy, but I don’t see any evidence that this kind of cyber-invasion-of-privacy (a new term I’m working on) has the potential to be anything more than a small conker hanging over our heads. Sure, it might fall, at some point, but the person holding the conker has a hell of a lot more to lose than anyone else if the conker ever does fall. Are you the kind of person who’s going to spend their whole life worrying about something that not only probably won’t happen, but something that wouldn’t be that bad if it did happen? On what level does the decision to worry about these things make sense to you?

Apple’s tracking of iPhones is the kind of development that worries me more, or it would if not for a few things:

1) It’s still illegal to track people without permission, and there are plenty of people ready to jump up and down and point at people who look for permission. That whole iPhone thing was dealt with, and is unlikely to rear its head again, at least not in the near future.

2) It’s opt-in. You don’t need an iPhone, you don’t need to have it turned on. When the government start issuing ID cards that can be tracked, and forcing you to carry them, THEN you get afraid. Very afraid, actually, because I can almost guarantee that it would go horribly wrong given the total lack of any sort of technically competent individual in any government anywhere in the world (how many ministers/members of cabinet around the world know what TCP/IP actually is? Can distinguish between the two? Know what a DNS server is? I could go on, but mercifully I won’t). But that isn’t happening right now.

3) We’re still, broadly speaking, in control. Yes, stuff passes through governing bodies that we don’t like, sometimes becomes law, that sort of thing. But for the most part, there are very few laws on the books in this country, or the books of any of our near, dear neighbours, which we all think are ludicrous. When something comes up like the TwitterJokeTrial, we call it that, and I think it’s almost a cert that it will result in new legislation that will fix things. The same isn’t entirely true in the US, where the PATRIOT Act is still going strong, but that’s because the US is full of Republicans who like that sort of insanity, get off on it even, and frankly there’s not a lot that can be done about that in the short term. (A real education system will help in the long term, I think – but let’s cut that conversation short before I insult anyone with a gun fixation).

Ultimately, I guess the most important point is that Google/Facebook/whoever can never know you as well as you might be afraid they can. It would take Sherlock Holmes himself, poring over every detail of your online existence, to get anything close to a full picture of who you actually are, and there simply isn’t the will or the manpower in any of those corporate giants to try and replicate that kind of focussing of deductive power. And why would they bother? All they need is to know you well enough to try and sell you stuff.

Seriously – if you want to keep a secret you still can.

With the notable exception of powerful drugs (and possibly some of the super-persuasive torture techniques being practised by the CIA), the chances of that ever changing are pretty slim.

As an MEP, you’d expect Paul Murphy would understand this. But then perhaps he’s confused, having never been elected himself? That’s perhaps a little unfair on him. He didn’t, after all, write the rules which led to him being co-opted into Joe Higgins’ seat in the European Parliament, but he did take advantage of them, and I think the principle is pretty much the same in both cases. Yes, we live in a democracy, but that DOESN’T mean that we vote on every single thing and it DOESN’T mean that the government should be strong-armed into holding a referendum on an issue which doesn’t legally require one, simply because a lunatic fringe wants them to.

Is this democracy? (Hint: Yes. Yes it is)

Given the amount of farcical fear-mongering that went on before the Lisbon referendum, and the subsequent failure of the treaty to pass, it would be utterly irresponsible for the government to go down that road unless absolutely forced to.

I would never, ever question the seriousness of individuals like Paul Murphy and Joe Higgins. They very much believe what they’re saying, and on certain points I don’t absolutely disagree with them. On the other hand, ignoring them is hardly cause for an accusation of “non-democratic goings-on”, or whatever they’re accusing the powers that be of doing. If they truly represented “the people”, as they claim to, then I think they might possibly have more than 2 TDs, an MEP and a handful of counsellors under their banner. Perhaps?

Anyway, it’s not terribly important. The decision of whether a referendum is needed will be taken by the courts, and not by “a wanker whipping up fear”, as our Dear Leader would say. Speaking of which, I’m sure this as good a way as any to sign off: Our Dear Leader, and what he thinks of US Republicans

Dailytech’s coverage of Chrome-for-Android launch

I’ll add some value by saying that I think this is an important step for Android. If tablets are to really become mainstream, and take the place currently occupied by notebooks in most people’s lives, then they’re going to need to start getting decent programmes/apps/call-them-what-you-will. Chrome, supposedly, is a pretty decent programme on Android.

Also, I’ve been looking into it and the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime is the tablet to go for right now. I tried ordering one from komplett the other day. Due to some confusion (that I’m absolutely refusing to take the blame for) they wouldn’t accept my order. By the time that had been worked out I’d realised I couldn’t really justify the expense, so the full review will have to wait a little while longer. I’m getting closer and closer to pulling the trigger, because frankly I’m feeling pretty out of the loop at the minute on my smartphone/laptop/desktop setup. But I’ve taken a step back for now, while I once again consider if I’d get any added value at all from adding yet another gadget to my life. Not that that’s the point, but it takes a while to fully suppress common sense and just go for it.