Soonr is one of the few new startups that seems to be offering a service that's useful; it lets you access your PC from a mobile phone, and place calls via Skype using the computer. There's only one problem: it's not open source. Make that two: there isn't even a GNU/Linux client. Maybe it'll happen, sooner or later.... (Via TheOpenForce.com.)
Here's a post that wraps up a lot of ideas.
I've often wondered why micropayments have never taken off. Personally, I'd be fine with the idea, and I can't believe I'm the only one. But they haven't, even though various technologies have been around for over a decade.
Maybe eyeballs are the solution. That is, the attention economy creates a de facto micropayment system without the need for a complicated infrastructure:Money is a very important and useful medium of exchange for high-value, tangible products. For small-value, intangible products, the costs tend to exceed the value of the transactions—especially when you add in the overhead associated with making payments at a distance. Fortunately, human beings are clever. We’ve begun to find a variety of substitutes for money that work better in cyberspace. This isn’t the repeal of market economics, but rather an extension of them to deal with changed circumstances.
(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)
One of the key features of the ODF standard is that it can be supported by many different programs. But this begs the question what the standard should look like in practice - i.e., which implementation does things properly.
This test suite, currently under development, goes some way to answering that by providing screen shots of various features in both OpenOffice.org and KOffice. It's both useful and fascinating. (Via An Antic Disposition.)
DVD Jon is one of free software's folk heroes, famous for reverse-engineering the control software used by DVDs, to allow GNU/Linux systems to play DVDs people had bought (a rather reasonable desire, one would have thought). Now he's doing something similar that is so clever it's painful:DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights, and it’s a big piece of fruit. He has reverse-engineered Apple’s Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple’s devices. Instead of breaking the DRM (something he’s already done), Jon has replicated it, and wants to license the technology to companies that want their content (music, movies, whatever) to play on Apple devices.
So what will Apple do? Sue him for helping to increase their sales? It's true that the music industry does precisely this when it goes after P2P systems, but Apple's more savvy, right? Right???
Talking of open access, here's the one paragraph explanation of its economics:The central idea of ‘author-side’ payment in order to secure open access for the formally published research literature (and as a side benefit, transparency of the proportionality between the amount of research done and the cost of the literature) is to use the same money now used for subscriptions (reader-side payment) in a different way. Not extra money; the same money.
(Via Open Access News.)
You may not care much about the Poincaré Conjecture - shame on you - but you should definitely be interested in the way in which its proof has been announced.
Most mathematicians would have submitted their paper to some high-profile publication in order to gain maximum publicity. But not old Grigori Perelman. A well-known churl of a genius, Grigori simply posted his proof to the arXiv.org server, and says he has no intention of publishing it elsewhere. So for one of the most important mathematical achievements of recent years, the open access repository has been chosen over all the traditional methods.
The press release from Cornell University has an interesting thought:"Perelman's choice of arXiv to disseminate his proof is a watershed event in scholarly communications," said Sarah E. Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "Although Perelman declined the Fields Medal, perhaps, if offered the Clay Mathematics Institute prize for solving the Poincaré Conjecture, he'll donate the million dollars to the arXiv to enable the global community of scholars and scientists to continue to benefit from this transformative resource."
Nothing new here, but Sir Tim's wise words on Net neutrality have a weight that few others can match. Pass them on to your favourite telecoms company.
It can be argued that arXiv is one of the two main wellsprings of the open access movement. This makes an article by Dr arXiv himself, Paul Ginsparg, of particular interest.
Wittily entitled "As We May Read" - a reference to Vannevar Bush's famous "As We May Think" paper - it provides a good explanation of how arXiv works, and why the open access revolution is likely to be completed sooner rather than later. And he makes an interesting point:A form of open access appears to be happening by a backdoor route: using standard search engines, more than one-third of the high-impact journal articles in a sample of biological/medical journals published in 2003 were found at nonjournal Web sites (Wren, 2005).
He concludes:On the one-decade time scale, it is likely that more research communities will join some form of global unified archive system without the current partitioning and access restrictions familiar from the paper medium, for the simple reason that it is the best way to communicate knowledge and hence to create new knowledge. Ironically, it is also possible that the technology of the 21st century will allow the traditional players from a century ago, namely the professional societies and institutional libraries, to return to their dominant role in support of the research enterprise.
(Via Open Access News.)
Nice piece in The Independent about a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers on the cost of capping greenhouse emissions:The cost of curbing the soaring emissions of harmful gases that are blamed for causing global warming has been estimated at $1 trillion by a major study of the cost of climate change.
The volume of emissions of the gases that cause global warming will double by 2050 unless rich countries agree to take significant policy steps to cut energy use, it shows.
The report, byPricewaterhouseCoopers, lays bare the potential damage to the environment of the industrial revolution in China and India. It puts a price of $1 trillion (£526bn) on the cost of sorting out the problem spread over the next generation. The bill is equivalent to a year's output of the economy of Canada, and less than half of the total stock of debt that has been built up by Britain's households. But it is less than the cost in terms of environmental catastrophe and loss of life that scientists fear will happen as temperatures and sea levels rise. "It is implicit from our findings that a trillion dollars certainly is a cost worth incurring," said John Hawksworth, the chief economist at PwC and author of the report.
As the surprisingly intelligent thread on Digg points out, these figures are amazingly doable. For example, one trillion dollars is only three times the current spending on the war in Iraq. Similarly, it is only 40 times the cost of one small global-warming induced weather disaster, that caused by Katrina. There are going to be rather more than 40 Katrinas if things carry on as they are.
What's most heartening about this report is that a terribly respectable outfit like PricewaterhouseCoopers is taking the exercise seriously. This is what we in the trade call a Good Sign: it means those in power are starting to realise that it will actually be cheaper to prevent rather than cure. And once the rich get behind moves to preserve this particular commons, we are almost there.
A little while back I pointed out at some length how flimsy was the logic found in a white paper that claimed Microsoft's Vista would bring "benefits" of $40 billion to six European countries - conveniently forgetting the fact that those $40 billion of "benefits" were actually a cost.
And now, what do we find, but a study from the US film industry that purports to show:movie piracy causes a total lost output for U.S. industries of $20.5 billion per year, thwarts the creation of about 140,000 jobs and accounts for more than $800 million in lost tax revenue.
But fortunately, there's someone else on hand who isn't taken in by this Vista-like logic:
It's important to remember, however, that even though piracy prevents money from reaching the movie industry, those dollars probably stay in the economy, one intellectual property expert said.
"In other words, let's say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field," Jason Shultz, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an e-mail.
Quite.
Some time back I wrote about the European Digital Library. But it seems that this isn't enough: now we have the European Archive, too, which seems even more ambitious. For as well as providing access to digital versions of traditional content, it seems to be aiming to become a European mirror of the wonderful Internet Archive:The European Archive is a non-profit foundation working towards universal access to all knowledge. The archive will achieve this through partnerships with libraries, museums, other collection bodies, and through building its own collections. The primary goal of collecting this knowledge is to make it as publicly accessible as possible, via the Internet and other means.
...
As the web has grown in importance as a publishing medium, we are behind in bringing into operation the archiving and library services that will provide enduring access to many important resources. Where some assumed web site owners would archive their own materials, this has not generally been the case. If properly archived, the Web history can provide a tremendous base for time-based analysis of the content, the topology including emerging communities and topics, trends analysis etc. as well as an invaluable source of information for the future.
The foremost effort to archive the Web has been carried on in the US by the Internet Archive, a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco. Every two months, large snapshots of the surface of the web are archived by the Internet Archive since 1996.
This entire collection offers 500 terabytes of data of major significance in all domain that have been impacted by the development of the Internet, that is, almost all. This represent large amount of data (petabytes in the coming years) to crawl, organize and give access to.
By partnering with the Internet Archive, the European Archive is laying down the foundation of a global Web archive based in Europe.
Obviously, all this begs scads of questions to do with access and copyright, but at least it's a start.
'McPatent' McCreevy is at it again:In the context of the debate about the resolution of the European Parliament on future patent policy the EU Commission will press ahead with an official communication and an action plan of its own and will thereby seek to support the much criticized European Patent Litigation Agreement, Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, told the European Parliament during a plenary session in Strasburg on Thursday.
And there was a telling quotation:"compared to our major trading partners, Europe is losing ground," Mr. McCreevy, referring to the patent systems in, for example, the United States and Japan, critically observed.
He's clearly referring to the number of patents in Europe (too low), and their quality (too high) compared to those in the US and Japan. But don't worry, Chas'll fix it....
Here's an interesting take on open access.
The benefits of this kind of openness for scientists and the public have been rehearsed many times; but this paper by Paul Peters, the Senior Publishing Developer of Hindawi Publishing Corporation, one of the leading open access outfits, presents some pretty compelling reasons why opening up is good for publishers - well, the smaller ones, at least:While advocates of open access publishing have tended to focus on the benefits that it can offer authors and readers, there are equally important benefits that an open access publishing model can provide for small and mid-sized publishers. Within the existing subscription-based publishing industry there are a number of market forces that work against smaller publishers, and this is making it increasingly difficult for these smaller publishers to stay competitive. However, by adopting a business model based on publication charges, smaller publishers can overcome many of the difficulties that they currently face in the subscription market.
There are three main advantages that open access can provide for smaller publishers. One important advantage is that it makes the growth of both new and existing journals much easier. In addition, a shift to open access will promote more competition between publishers, which will enable many smaller publishers to gain a competitive edge over the largest and most well-established publishing houses. Finally, an open access publishing model will make a journal far more attractive to potential authors, since they can avoid many of the unnecessary limitations imposed by subscription-based models.
Bad, bad BBC:The BBC has signed an agreement with Microsoft to explore ways of developing its digital services.
The only thing that Microsoft understands is control; if the BBC teams up with Bill Gates' company in any way, we can kiss goodbye to our televisual heritage.
...because they will have no choice. As this Reg piece explains, the worlds of computing and the environment are inexorably becoming more intertwined. From the story:
"Today, energy costs typically form less than 10 per cent of an overall IT budget. However, this could rise to more than 50 per cent in the next few years. The bottom line is that the cost of power on this scale would be difficult to manage simply as a budget increase and most CIOs would struggle to justify the situation to company board members."
Enough to make anyone go green.
Here's another example of open source being invoked in the context of helping to solve environmental problems:Non-patentable shared "open energy technology" has the potential to have a profound impact on the reduction of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, in the same way that open source software has changed computers and the Internet.
There's an interesting twist, in that it also suggestsPossibly the most ideal person to do it would be South African billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, who is currently taking on Microsoft's domination of the operating system market through the development of the open source operating system, Ubuntu Linux.
The reason being that Shuttleworth is a local boy for the publication in question. A nice idea, despite the nepotism.
The Direct Economy:In a system of direct democracy, sovereignty is lodged with the citizens - or at least, with those among them that choose to actively participate in the system. They can not only pick among prepackaged options (vote) or candidates (election) but they also can deeply co-shape the policy process. Switzerland is probably the strongest case: here new laws can be put forth, and even the Constitution modified, by citizens’ initiative. Translate that into business terms and we have a description of a system where consumers have a direct influence on what companies develop and produce for them. The more informed, opinionated and wired (socially connected) they are, the more they are likely to make use of this influence and to try to organize it - exactly as in a direct democracy system.
Sounds like a business using Web 2.0 to me. Still, good to see the memes spreading.
Talking of the past, do you remember Henry Blodgett?Amazon was selling for about $275 a share when a little-known analyst, Henry Blodgett, predicted it would go to $400 - even though Amazon had never made a profit. Amazon did go to $400 and beyond.
Amazon's backer, Merrill Lynch, responded by replacing its pessimistic Amazon analyst. His replacement? Henry Blodgett. While this was great for Blodgett, it proved not so good for investors, many of whom got soaked when Amazon's value fell 75 percent.
Blodgett has said his prediction was based on sound analysis using new ways to measure a company's performance. Wall Street coined a new verb: to "blodgett" a stock.
Now what do we hear?MySpace, the social-networking Web site, could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., a Wall Street media analyst forecast Wednesday.
Those who cannot remember the past....
Update: Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction....
I must have blinked. Bloglines has started offering package tracking and weather forecasts. Makes sense of course: as blogs and RSS feeds in general become the common purveyors of information, you may as well use your aggregator to pull in info from all kinds of sources - even those that have nothing to do with the blogosphere.
Only really, really old-timers - and sad ones at that - remember one of O'Reilly's less well-known products, called simply Internet in a Box, which came out in 1995. Well, it was clearly an idea ahead of its time.
Now, though, we have a real Internet in a box - or rather, Internet dansla première « box » associant l’accès à l’Internet haut débit et les principales fonctionnalités d’un ordinateur.
For 40 Euros a month, and a deposit of 150 Euros, you get EasyGate, which is effectively a super-router that handles not just the Internet side, but the entire PC side as well. If you add a screen, mouse, keyboard and webcam, it'll cost you an extra 99 Euros. But since you end up with a GNU/Linux-based system, completely with Firefox and OpenOffice.org and a GNOME-like environment, that's not bad.
As hardware prices plummet, this was bound to come. But having come, it does look extremely attractive as an all-in-one, techophobe-safe system - rather like the highly-successful Amstrad PCW8256.
I predict we're going to see more and more of these systems, which means that GNU/Linux and open source software in general is going to start popping up in all sorts of unexpected places. (Via LXer and The Inquirer.)
New Scientist reports:Linguists are calling for an online public database, similar to the human genome project, that would allow researchers to collaboratively share different studies of language impairment.
By gathering together studies of developmental disorders that cause communication impairments – such as autism or Down’s syndrome – they hope to provide new clues about the origins of language.
Aside from the interesting nature of the project, what is striking is that the key element is not creating new knowledge, but consolidating it in a database, allowing higher-level knowledge to emerge. Clearly, for this to work in an optimal way, all the data and papers need to be open access. Whether it will be, assuming the project goes ahead, remains to be seen.
Update: Wow, the original article behind the NS story is not behind the usual paywall. So from this I can read:We close by illustrating how systematic analyses within and between disorders, suitably informed by evolutionary theory—and ideally facilitated by the creation of an open-access database—could provide new insights into language evolution.
I don't want to push the analogy too far, but it's amazing how the following passage could almost be talking about free software:The interest and investment and technological momentum in all of these technologies is not only accelerating, but I think reaching some kind of tipping point where the markets really get to be transformed in a way that the next stage of change is actually a lot easier. Even though the amount of growth is going to be a lot larger, it actually gets easier to do, because the whole political equation is different. You've got big energy companies that are supporting renewable energy rather than opposing it, because it's part of their business plan, as opposed to before when they saw it as an unwanted competitor. That in turn changes the political equation, which means that it's easier to get new laws enacted, which in turn tends to speed up investment, so it becomes a real self-reinforcing circle.
Gilberto Gil is something of an icon in the open content world, and with good cause. He's a big name that backs the idea of others creating around his own art. And as Minister of Culture, he's also an influential politician in his native Brazil and far beyond.
Put the two together and you have a man who is in a unique position to talk to powerful people about important things. For example:I had a meeting with the president of WIPO [on 25 September], and I was very much enthusiastic about the future role about the future role we think WIPO should play in terms of interpreting the trends, the tendencies, of intellectual property flexibility, inclusion, as the president himself puts it. Meaning, not just including as many as possible number of countries in the functioning of the institution today, but also inclusion in the sense that we should include the new themes, the new demands, and intellectual property flexibilities is one of the main things today. Not only considering the protection of the authors and of the authors’ rights, but also taking care of the public domain, of the social role of intellectual property, democratisation, universalisation, all of those contexts that should be referential to the work of an organisation like WIPO today already but mainly in the future. So like horizon, we were discussing horizon ahead of us for the next years. This is, I think, besides the regular day-to-day process of the subjects, and the multilateral and bilateral situations for WIPO, we should consider this advancing in terms of substance, of policy, I would even use the word ideology.
Not many people could have that conversation.
Sony is a strange company. Despite its numerous mis-steps - remember that DRM rootkit? - people still seem to harbour a certain affection for the outfit. Maybe it's that all those years spent playing on the Playstation have addled their brains...(well, it couldn't be because of the Walkman, could it?).
Me, well, I never played on the Playstation. I did own a Vaio laptop once (The horror! The horror!): I hated it, and I have sworn never to buy another. So this story about the possibility of Sony going permanently down the tubes rather warmed the cockles of my heart. Pathetic, I know. (Via Monkchips.)
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