Telling the Truth About a Telling Fact

Rob Weir has a characteristically sharp and original analysis of the recent approval by ECMA of Microsoft's Open Office XML:

Thus the remarkable achievement of Microsoft and Ecma TC45, who not only managed to create a standard an order of magnitude larger than any other markup standard I've seen, but at the same time managed to complete the review/edit/approve cycle faster than any other markup standard I've seen. They have achieved an unprecedented review/edit/approval rate of 18.3 pages/day, 20-times faster than industry practice, a record which will likely stand unchallenged for the ages.

I think we would all like to know how they did it. Special training? Performance enhancing drugs? Time travel? A pact with the Devil? I believe you will all share with me an earnest plea for them to share the secret of their productivity and efficiency with the world and especially with ISO, who will surely need similar performance enhancements in order for them to review this behemoth of a standard within their "fast track" process.

I am optimistic, that once the secret of OOXML's achievement gets out, the way we make standards will never be the same again.

Code is Law, Code is Power

Yup:

Ministers were today urged to consider abandoning the multi-billion pound Joint Strike Fighter project unless the United States agrees within weeks to share sensitive technology.

...

Ministers have previously threatened that the UK could pull out of plans to buy up to 150 of the military planes for the RAF and Navy unless America agreed to transfer secrets about its software that Britain argues are needed in order to operate and maintain them independently.

The Virtual World of China

Talking of the blurring of distinction between life and games, here's a great rumination on certain aspects of modern China (a subject that interests me greatly). I was particularly struck by these two passages:

In China’s case, I’d say morality is probably 5% instinctual, 20% customs and traditions, and 75% fear of law and loss, with an overall lower bar for morality. It is interesting to observe how this is very similar to how morality evolves in an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer On Line Role Playing Game). Religion has nothing to say about how your Avatar’s life should be conducted (hah! What Would Arthas Do?), and there is little rule of law on the servers. Thus, if one was to take a walk through SecondLife, one would commonly find copious quantities of sex-related items for sale, and presumably there are many people who will also sell you virtual sex for Linden dollars. Maybe this is a stretch, but I think the underlying moral lessons are not too different from the scene I saw in the Hard Rock Cafe Beijing.

And:

Beijing is in the process of building an enormous Olympic park. They tear down whole neighborhoods and pave roads over them in a matter of weeks. They are building an 11 or 12-route subway system that promises to rival the subway system in Manhattan for connectivity and completeness. Watching this happen reminds me of how I play Sim City. If you’ve ever played the game, you’ve probably remorselessly bulldozed huge sections of Sim Cities that you messed up the planning on, and improved your city’s long-term productivity through doing that. The Beijing government seems to restructure the city with about the same attitude and efficiency...

Fascinating. (Via GridBlog.)

It's Only a Game

One of things I have come to appreciate, albeit rather belatedly, is how gamer culture is going mainstream. By that, I don't just mean that it's more acceptable to be a gamer, or that more and more sectors of society are playing games, but that the gaming world-view is starting to seep into other areas of life.

Take Amazon's new Askville, for example:

Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic. It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know. You can learn something new everyday or help and meet others using your knowledge. Askville even helps you learn by giving you cool tools to help you find information online while you are answering questions. It’s all about sharing—what you know and what you want to know—so go ahead and meet someone new today and Askville!

But most interestingly:

Every time you answer a question on Askville you will earn or potentially lose experience points in the topics that were associated with that question. Askville uses experience points to determine how knowledgeable a user is in a given topic. Experience points are broken up into various levels. To reach a certain level you need to have earned a certain number of experience points in that topic. Go to Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins in the FAQs to learn more about experience points and levels.

Which, of course, is precisely how a game works. In other words, Askville is a game. Life is a game. (Via TechCrunch.)

Wordie for Wordies

How could I not love this totally pointless site? Actually, come to think of it, I'm sure it'll feed into some interesting mashups. (Via TechCrunch.)

Energy Worries: Not Just Virtual

Following the recent excitement about Second Life's energy consumption, it seems that people are beginning to realise that it's not the only one with problems:

The nation's biggest technology companies sat down with federal regulators Wednesday to assess the industry's thirst for power amid fears that volatile and expensive energy could hinder the growing sector.

The fierce competitors at the table -- including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard -- rarely gather to talk strategy. But they were lured by the chance to influence the development of national energy standards.

"I think we may be at the beginning of a potential energy crisis for the IT sector," Victor Varney, a vice president for Silicon Graphics, told the regulators. "It's clearly coming."

(Via Slashdot.)

Google Joins Eclipse

In another sign of the ascendancy of Eclipse, Google has joined the club:

Ending months of speculation, Google has officially joined the Eclipse Foundation as an add-in provider, according to officials at both organizations.

Sharing: As Natural as Childhood

Children are increasingly swapping music via mobile phones, often without realising they can be breaking the law.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

...

Almost a half (45%) of children who said they did not swap music via their phones said they would like to.

Inevitably this story is provoking howls from the music industry. But it teaches us two things.

First, that - just as RMS has always said - sharing is natural, part of our genetic make-up that allows us to function as social beings. And secondly, that this is an opportunity, not a threat: these children are doing free marketing for the music companies, spreading the word about cool music. Copyright owners should rejoice, not fret about it - and move on to coming up with a way to make some money selling more music off the back of all this fantastic viral distribution.

China's Virtual Money Woes

It's spreading:

As if Chinese leaders did not have enough of a headache trying to manage the country's rising but still undervalued currency in the testy world of international trade, now the growing popularity of virtual money enters the already complex equation.

The so-called "QQ" coin - issued by Tencent, China's largest instant-messaging service provider - has become so popular that the country's central bank is worried that it could affect the value of the yuan. Li Chao, spokesman and director of the General Office of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), has expressed his concern in the Chinese media and announced that the central bank will draft regulations next year governing virtual transactions.

So tell me again the difference between real and virtual currencies....

Is Germany Really Losing It?

I have a great deal of respect for the German nation. More than anyone else, I think, they have come to terms with their recent history - specifically with the Nazi period - and emerged stronger, wiser and more admirable (compare, for example, Turkey's rather sad denial that a genocide of over a million Armenians lies festering in its past). But recently, I've noticed some signs that German society - or at least its politicans, which I concede is not quite the same thing - are really out of touch with reality.

I wrote yesterday about its daft plans to monitor PCs while connected to the Internet - blithely ignoring the near-impossibility of this idea. Now we have something else equally stupid: the criminalisation of violent video games. According to Der Spiegel - probably the best news magazine in the world - the Bavarian minister for internal affairs wants to make the "production, sale and purchase of such games punishable by up to one year's imprisonment."

This is so obviously a knee-jerk reaction by frightened old politicians, unable to deal with the technological changes that are happening around them. What makes it particularly sickening is that it concerns itself with virtual violence, and blithely ignores the rather more pressing issue of all the violence present in this world - as practised, for example, by the US Government in its various torture camps around the world. Get real, people.

BrainGumbo

This has to be the coolest name for a project in recent years: BrainGumbo. No wonder, perhaps, since it's pressing some of the hottest hot buttons in computing today:

The BrainGumbo Project aims to build a virtual movie (machinima) production studio in Second Life, from the work of amateur enthusiasts and free components.

IBM and Microsoft's OpenXML: Update

I'm impressed: IBM has just stuck a dirty great clog in the engine of Microsoft's machinations to get its Office XML format adopted as a formal standard:

IBM voted NO today in ECMA on approval for Microsoft’s Open XML spec.

Heavy stuff: I think we expect some horse heads to start turning up soon.... (Via C|net.)

Correction: further to Bob's comment, I've gone to the ECMA site and found the press release announcing the approval of the standard. Naively, I thought that somebody voting against it would block it: not so. Apologies for my over-enthusiastic analysis. I suppose IBM's move was therefore more symbolic than anything. Ah well.

Second Life Goes Really Brazilian

In a significant sign that Second Life is beginning to expand beyond its early-user, largely anglophone base, the Internet arm of Brasil Telecom has announced that it is coming out with a localised version of Second Life this month.

The company estimates that there are currently 30 to 40 thousand Brazilians already active in Second Life, a number it hopes to double in the first year of operation. It also aims to help those currently using the English-language version to migrate to the new Brazilian client.

A separate arm of Brasil Telecom is being created purely for this venture; worryingly, the company behind it talks about "selling advertising inside the game". I don't think that's going to go down to well with the (virtual) locals....

The Open Source Brain

At first sight, there's something appropriate about Paul Allen paying for the Allen Brain Atlas:

an interactive, genome-wide image database of gene expression in the mouse brain. A combination of RNA in situ hybridization data, detailed Reference Atlases and informatics analysis tools are integrated to provide a searchable digital atlas of gene expression. Together, these resources present a comprehensive online platform for exploration of the brain at the cellular and molecular level.

After all, he did work on an "electronic brain" as they were mockingly called back in those dim, dark days of early computing. And it comes as no surprise that the freely-available and rather impressive 3D Brain Explorer - think Google Earth for the mouse brain - is only available for Windows XP and the Macintosh.

But dig a little deeper, and you find something rather telling about the real "brain" behind this brain:

Processing the amount of data produced during the Atlas project (approximately 1 terabyte/day) requires a fully automated data processing and analysis pipeline. A goal of informatics is to provide the infrastructure that will allow scaling of an increase in image data and complexity of image processing. The IDP was designed to be modularized and scalable to support a library of informatics algorithms and to function so that additional incorporation of informatics modules does not interrupt production systems. The system must also have the flexibility to accommodate defining multiple workflows using some or all algorithms and is iterative in its processing of gene image series. Parts of the process are computationally intensive, such as image quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) and preprocessing, registration, and signal quantification. These tasks are scheduled and run in parallel on the server cluster.

Right. And just as a matter of interest, what might that cluster be running?

The cluster consists of a total of 148 CPUs, 32 HP BL35p blades with dual AMD 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM and 21 IBM HS20 blades with dual Intel 2.8Ghz Hyperthreaded, 4GB RAM, all running Fedora Linux.

Obviously someone used their brain.

Carousel Fraud: Virtually Virtual

I'm always amazed when people raise their eyebrows over the money involved in virtual worlds, because it's obviously not "real", and so doesn't count (ever stopped to consider how valuable that piece of paper you call a banknote really is?). But when I read things like this, I have to shake my head:

Missing trader or carousel fraud cost Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs £3bn in the last financial year.

...

Carousel fraud involves importing, or claiming to import, goods from another EU country without paying VAT, then selling them on and pocketing the tax. The same goods will often go from country to country earning fraudulent tax at every stage.

Increasingly, the goods don't even physically move.

So, this is fraud to the tune of billions of pounds per year, "increasingly" involving goods that don't move - and that presumably only exist as disembodied numbers passing through the UK government's IT system: and they're telling me that virtual money doesn't count?

Arrested for Sharing a Kurdish Ubuntu?

Here's a rum to-do:

Controversy followed the release of a Kurdish translation of Ubuntu in Turkey last week. The release was originally reported in Millyet, a Turkish national newspaper, on November 21. This first release of a Kurdish language operating system and software has caused a stir in Turkey, where, up until 1991, it was illegal even to speak Kurdish in public.

...

Subsequent reports in the Turkish press suggest that Mayor Abdullah Demirbas of Sur, a town in Diyarbakir, Eastern Turkey, is currently under investigation by the Diyarbakir chief public prosecutor's office following the launch. It is not clear what Demirbas is being investigated for, but it is probably related to Turkey's less than tolerant stance on the public use of Kurdish.

Who - aside from RMS - would have thought that making a distro could be a political act?

Solaris Lives - Live

I've been slightly unkind to OpenSolaris in these parts. This was particularly reprehensible since I've never tried it (but why let the facts get in the way of some good bigotry?). Truth to tell, I've not really relished the prospect of grappling with its installation. Now I don't have to.

The greatest thing since the proverbial sliced bread - the live CD - has come to OpenSolaris. Significantly, this Solaris live CD, which is called BeleniX, hails from Bangalore - surely a sign of things to come. I'm off to download it to give it a whirl.

The Politicians' Big Disconnect

According to heise online:

the [German] Federal Ministry of the Interior declares the ability to search PCs without physical access to them to be a key component in the fight against terror.

Well, it can declare away until its booties fall off, but as the article points out:

How a screening of PCs protected by a firewall or tucked away behind a router with Network Address Translation is to be carried out the proposals of the politicians concerned with internal security remain conspicuously silent, however.

Quite. Throw in a modicum of serious data encryption, and you have a PC that is seriously hard to hack - however much the politicians might declare this approach to be a "key component in the fight against a terror."

All of which provides a further demonstration, if one were needed, of how this idiotic "fight against terror" is merely a pretext for governments around the world (step forward, Mr Blair) to impose pointless and unworkable schemes that serve no other purpose than to trample on the freedom of all of us, while the ne'er-do-wells laugh up their terrorist sleeves.

ODF Support from Apple?

Here's an interesting pair of screenshots, that seem to show that Apple has added ODF support to TextEdit tool. It may be a small stone, but it all adds to the cairn. (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

Samba Dances Towards the GNU GPLv3

According to this story, the Samba project will move to GNU GPLv3 once it's finished. That's a big win for the the FSF, since Samba is undoubtedly one of the most widely-used and highest-profile open source projects.

What a Waste of Energy

The official Curmudgeon of Computing, Nick Carr, stirred up a little excitement recently by pointing out that Second Life, for all its virtuality, really does use quite a lot of electricity. But before we start grabbing the digital pitchforks and descending upon Linden Lab for being such an ecological extravagant bunch, it's probably best to put things in context.

That's exactly what this post from KnowProSE.com does. It points out that the problem is not really Second Life's, it's the Internet's - ours, in other words. And it's certainly a big problem.

But it seems to me that the solution is less finding all the energy, than reducing the amount used by computers. It's a bit like cars: it's not really hard making them more fuel efficient, but until there are incentives to do so, you carry on using the old, inefficient technologies. We need to re-engineer our thinking, not just out technologies.

Wayback: 85,898,456,616 and Counting

The Wayback Machine is one of the Internet's best-kept secrets:

A snapshot of the World Wide Web is taken every 2 months and donated to the Internet Archive by Alexa Internet. Further, librarians all over the world have helped curate deep and frequent crawls of sites that could be especially important to future researchers historians and scholars.

As web pages are changed or deleted every 100 days, on average, having a resource like this is important for the preservation of our emerging cultural heritage.

And even for someone like me, who uses it all the time, numbers like this still take the breath away:

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine now has 85,898,456,616 archived web objects in it

plus

The database contains over 1.5 petabytes of data that came from the web (that is 1.5 million gigabytes) which makes it one of the largest databases of any kind.

And a cyber-pearl beyond price. (Via Open Access News.)

Set My Libri Free

Everybody knows about Project Gutenberg, which aims to provide texts of as many public domain books as possible. One freedom that is available for such texts is to create spoken versions of them. Librivox is aiming to do just that:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and we operate almost exclusively through Internet communications.

...

We get most of our texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive and ibiblio.org host our audio files.

Not only that, but it offers its files in both the well-known - but proprietary - MP3 format, as well as the less well-known but free and deliciously-named ogg format. Another unexpected plus of the project, is that it can offer several versions of the same text, allowing all kinds of interesting comparisons to be made - to say nothing of cool reworkings.

There is also a small but select group of texts in languages other than English. (Via Creative Commons.)

Google Maps Go to Azeroth

If any further proof were needed of the fading line between real and virtual, here comes a story about Google Maps moving beyond the tangible:

The fictional continent of Azeroth in the World of Warcraft now has an area that uses Google Maps API. The map, if we may add, is amazingly accurate. Accordingly, there are over 15,000 data points covering 69 resources with their exact map location in the WoW database.

I can't wait for the virtual mashups.

Gowers Now Out

The Gowers Review is now out. I've not had time to read it all yet, but there's a good summary in the Treasury's press release:

Whilst the Review concludes that the UK has a fundamentally strong IP system, it sets out important targeted reforms. The reforms aim to:

* strengthen enforcement of IP rights to protect the UK's creative industries from piracy and counterfeiting;
* provide additional support for British businesses using IP in the UK and abroad; and
* strike the right balance to encourage firms and individuals to innovate and invest in new ideas while ensuring that markets remain competitive and that future innovation is not impeded.

There's some good news in this:

To ensure the correct balance in IP rights the review recommends:

* ensuring the IP system only proscribes genuinely illegitimate activity. The Review recommends introducing a strictly limited 'private copying' exception to enable consumers to format-shift content they purchase for personal use. For example to legally transfer music from CD to their MP3 player;
* enabling access to content for libraries and education establishments - to ensure that the UK's cultural heritage can be adequately stored for preservation and accessed for learning. The Review recommends clarifying exceptions to copyright to make them fit for the digital age; and
* recommending that the European Commission does not change the status quo and retains the 50 year term of copyright protection for sound recordings and related performers' rights.

But I worry about what the following will mean in practice:

With the music industry losing as much as 20 per cent of annual turnover to piracy and counterfeiting, the Review recommends strengthening enforcement of IP rights through:

* new powers and duties for Trading Standards to take action against infringement of copyright law;
* IP crime recognised as an area for police action in the National Community Safety Plan;
* tougher penalties for online copyright infringement - with a maximum 10 years imprisonment;
* lowering the costs of litigation - by using mediation and consulting on the use of fast-track litigation. The Review acknowledges that prohibitive legal costs affect the ability of any to defend and challenge IP; and
* consulting on the use of civil damages as a deterrent for IP infringement.

If this means going after large-scale counterfeiters, well and good. But if we're talking about "tougher penalties" and "police action" for all kinds creative uses - mashups etc. - then there are going to be big problems.

Parenthetically, here's a characteristically wise and well-written piece by Larry Lessig in today's FT about one aspect of the report. He's worried that the Gowers recommendation on not changing the status quo for sound recordings may be ignored by the UK Government to keep some of its industry chums happy:

There is not much doubt about what it will say on this proposal. There is much more doubt about whether the government will follow the report's sensible advice.

Lessig then makes his usual sensible pitch about orphan works, including with the following splendid peroration:

There are some who believe that copyright terms should be perpetual. Britain did the world a great service when it resolved that debate almost 300 years ago, by establishing one of the earliest copyright regimes to limit copyright to a fixed term. It could now teach the world a second important lesson: any gift of term extension should only go to those who ask.