(Rezzed) Signs of the Times

This comes into the "dog walking on hind legs" category: it's not so much that it's done well, as that it's done at all.

Someone is offering signs in Second Life linked to Web pages: changing the latter updates the former. Certainly, a sign of things to come. (Via eHub.)

Update: Here's an post about why there are other reasons this is interesting.

Croeso i Agored.com

This one will make Alan Cox happy:

Agored, a new free office software suite is being launched today by Culture Minister Alun Pugh. The suite, a Welsh and English dual-language version of the OpenOffice suite used worldwide, has been developed over the past two years at the Mercator Centre, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Me, I'm still waiting for the Anglo-Saxon version: "Oft him anhaga, are gebideth...." (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

On the Meta-Wonderfulness of Blog Plonkings

Whether or not you agree with arguments, this extended post by Clay Shirky on "Social Facts, Expertise, Citizendium, and Carr" is worth taking a look at. It's well written and interesting, as you'd expect; it's crafted on a generous scale - and it's totally free.

I mean, it's just plonked there on this blog, for any passer-by to read: isn't that just amazing - that access to this kind of stuff is now just taken for granted in the meta-wonderful, wacky world of Web 2.0?

MA ODF: Drawing a Balance

Following his rather downbeat piece about the musical chairs in Massachusetts over bringing in ODF, Andy Updegrove has now complemented this with a nicely upbeat one detailing the net effect of all these political games. The final verdict:

ODF has had, and continues to have, a vital impact on the marketplace that is highly beneficial to all stakeholders. It's important to remember that the greatest single event that has resulted in this state of affairs was the courage of a few public servants in Massachusetts that had a vision of what the future should be, and had the courage to commit to it and follow through.

We owe them a debt of gratitude, and I think that they will be remembered long after their more pedestrian peers in state government have been forgotten.

Amen to that.

Is that an 8-Node Beowulf Cluster in Your Pocket...?

...or are you just glad to see me?

Little-Fe is a complete 4 to 8 node Beowulf style portable computational cluster. Little-Fe weighs less than 50 pounds, easily and safely travels via checked baggage on the airlines, and sets-up in 10 minutes wherever there is a 110V outlet and a wall to project an image on. By leveraging the Bootable Cluster CD project, and its associated curriculum modules, Little-Fe makes it possible to have a powerful ready-to-run computational science and HPC educational platform for under $2,500.

I want several of these, please. (Via KnowProSE.com.)

No Net Neutrality, No Virtual Worlds

Here's a thoughtful analysis of another harmful knock-on effect of the loss of network neutrality:

What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment – particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. Furthermore, a large — even overwhelming — portion of the value of these offerings comes from their “network effects” — the tendency for the game to become more enjoyable and valuable as larger number of players joins the gaming network.

And that means things like Second Life and all the other virtual worlds that are currently under developmentwill also be hit. So, net neutrality is concretely about the future of the Internet, not just abstractly about the importance of preserving an online commons. (Via Terra Nova.)

Free Our Postcodes

Postcodes are something that should obviously be a commons - owned by and available to all. Instead, in the UK, you have to pay serious dosh to use them, with all sorts of inefficiencies. The obvious solution is to create an open postcode database, and that's what they're doing here. Pity I don't have a GPS device.

Prizes, Not Patents

I've written enough about why the patent system is broken; criticism is easy, but it's harder coming up with alternatives. Here's one: using prizes instead of patents. (Via Technocrat.)

ID Cards: Cracked in All Senses

And talking of ID cards, here's more bad news.

Update: And how could I leave out the inimitable Mr. Lettice's wise words on the subject?

Murder Will Out

Well, what a surprise:

In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer today declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property.

In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell Inc. earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."

And there we all were, thinking that Microsoft really wanted to be free software's best chum.

The Seed Gestapo

For millennia there has been a seeds commons - a shared store of seeds produced by farmers from this year's crop for the following year.

In my wife’s dialect of kari-ya, which is spoken on the island of Panay, in the Philippines, there is a word binhi, which refers to the grains of rice that are set aside and used as seeds in the next planting season. There is a knack to choosing these. You want plump grains with no blemishes. Every farmer knows how to do it, and usually their families too.

And then:

It seems clear the government is working with the seed companies to strong-arm farmers into buying seeds instead of producing them themselves. So doing, it is paving the way for GMO seeds and the jackboot legal regime that comes with them. (In the U.S., Monsanto has sicced its lawyers on hundreds of farmers for “patent infringement”, often when the patented seeds in question simply blew into their fields.)

I, For One, Salute Our New Antiguan Overlords

Many martial arts are based on turning your assailant's power against himself. Sounds like the plucky Antiguans have taken a course or two:

If the United States remains recalcitrant [over its refusal to open up online gambling], under the WTO rules, Antigua would potentially have the right to suspend its own compliance with the treaty that obligates it to respect the United States' intellectual-property laws.

Go, Antigua, go.

No ID, No Comment

This is what will happen if you're not carrying the ID card that nice Mr Blair wants us all to have....

Open Earth

I came across this story about Whirlpool offering 3D models of its white goods for use in Google's Sketchup program. That's interesting enough, but it led me to explore Google's 3D Warehouse for that program a little, and I was frankly amazed how far things have come since I last looked at this area. For example, the Cities in Development area is full of detailed models of real buildings.

What's striking about this is that it is an example of Net-based collaboration on an open project - in this case, modelling the entire planet by placing these 3D models on Google Earth. Where this gets really interesting is when you start creating Second Life-like avatars that can move freely around that Virtual Earth, interacting away.... (Via Ogle Earth.)

Another View of the Opens

Here's a presentation by Jamais Cascio, a "foresight specialist", who despite his daft job title has put together quite a nice gentle trot through the opens. He gets most of it right, aside from the egregious clanger of calling Linux an operating system....

Digital Fish Wrap

There is a wonderful evolutionary winnowing process underway within the mainstream media: those that get the Internet are thriving, while those that don't, come up with ideas like this:

Here's my proposal: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals -- Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN -- with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from "mainstream" media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap.

See Darwin run. (Via Techdirt.)

We, the Undersigned...

Here's a slightly hopeful development. On the 10 Downing Street Web page (Tony Blair's official cyberhome), there's a new facility: e-petitions - kudos to Number 10 for adding this. Especially since the most popular petition is currently the following:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.

So, if you're a Brit, do sign; the cynic in me says it's not going to make the blindest bit of difference, but hey, it's worth a try. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Update: The petition against ID Cards is also soaring away: you know what you need to do, O Britons!

Crumbs from Google's Bigtable

For a company that is so big and important, Google is remarkably opaque to the outside world (blogs? - we don't need no stinkin' blogs.) Any info-morsels that drop from the Big Table are always welcome - which makes this downright gobbet of stuff about Bigtable particularly, er, meaty:

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance.

Get some while it's hot (and hasn't been taken down by the Google Thought Police.)

The Other Planet Solaris

Since Solaris is one of my favourite planets, and since I was less than generous the last time I wrote about OpenSolaris, I feel duty-bound to pass on the information that there is another Planet Solaris - Planet OpenSolaris, to be precise. (Via SunMink.)

The Problems of a Synthetic Biology Commons

Here's a fascinating paper:

Novel artificial genetic systems with twelve bases instead of four. Bacteria that can be programmed to take photographs or form visible patterns. Cells that can count the number of times they divide. A live polio virus "created from scratch using mail-order segments of DNA and a viral genome map that is freely available on the Internet." These are some of the remarkable, and occasionally disturbing, fruits of "synthetic biology," the attempt to construct life starting at the genetic level.

All good stuff, but there's a problem that may be of interest to readers of these posts:

synthetic biology raises with remarkable clarity an issue that has seemed of only theoretical interest until now. It points out a tension between different methods of creating "openness". On the one hand, we have intellectual property law’s insistence that certain types of material remain in the public domain, outside the world of property. On the other, we have the attempt by individuals to use intellectual property rights to create a "commons," just as developers of free and open source software use the leverage of software copyrights to impose requirements of openness on future programmers, requirements greater than those attaching to a public domain work. Intellectual property policy, at least in the United States, specifies things that cannot be covered by intellectual property rights, such as abstract ideas or compilations of unoriginal facts, precisely to leave them "open" to all – the public roads of the intellect. Yet many of the techniques of open source require property rights so that future users and third parties will be bound by the terms of the license. Should we rethink the boundary lines between intellectual property and the public domain as a result?

Why Sun Mobilised the GPL Now....

Here's a fascinating analysis of why Sun went for the GPL and why now:

In summary, Sun opensourcing Java is all driven by mobile. The timing came from mobile. The license is due to mobile. Motorola, in my opinion, was the target, not IBM. I am a Java fan and I always will be. They were clearly late but maybe not too late. Let's see what happens next. This market is moving so fast, it will be interesting to watch... Once again, though, one thing is clear to me: mobile open source is king and it is gaining momentum every day.

Do read Fabrizio Capobianco's full post - it makes a lot of sense.

King Coal Rides Again

The greed and cynicism of some is simply beyond words:

Whatever the cost to the ecosystem, it could be an immensely profitable bet. Company executives say the plants will provide cheap electricity for Texas, make lots of money for shareholders, conserve more valuable natural gas and reduce the pollutants that make smog.

"Whatever the cost to the ecosystem": that's us, people.

Trouble 't Mill - No, Really

This is not good - although it would be interesting to know what exactly went wrong. It may just be that the old GNU/Linux desktop just wasn't ready for what they wanted. (Via LXer.)

Google: Is That the Sound of Crying?

Google search is useful - my day revolves around it. But you'd be hard-pushed to claim it was cool anymore. On the contrary, it's archetypally a tool that you use and forget about.

But this is cool:

OWL multimedia has launched an audio similarity search engine stocked with 10,444 CC-licensed tracks from ccMixter and Magnatune, with many more to come from other CC supporting sound repositories.

You can search OWL via search.creativecommons.org but its real power is finding new music through music. Drag an mp3 into the OWL interface and you will be shown tracks that sound similar to the mp3 you provided. You can select a segment of a track to search on and of course you can limit your search to tracks with licenses that permit uses you require, e.g., commercial or derivative use.

Google, are you listening?

Is Sun Trying Too Hard to Be Good?

Not content with GPL'ing Java (for which they have my unalloyed admiration), Sun has now also given some dosh to Creative Commons.

What are they after - the Nobel Peace Prize?