Gating Technology: The E-Factor

I'm starting to write more posts about energy efficiency, since it obviously feeds into issues surrounding various environmental commons. But it's increasingly clear to me that its impact is going to be much more direct on the technologies I consider on a regular basis.

Take this, for example:

In a piece of research that could have implications for the future of mobile broadband, a US analyst firm has claimed that new mobile applications will make pure cellular technology too energy-inefficient to be practical in the future.

This is going to happen again and again, changing the course of technology development just when everyone thought they knew where it was going....

Becta Late Than Never

I've been a bit remiss in not posting this earlier, but it's still worth underlining the major shift that's going on here, at all sorts of levels.

A while back, I was moaning about Becta not giving free software a chance in UK schools. Well, they've obviously been on holiday to Damascus, because in the recently-published interim report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007, Becta seems to have seen the light:

The report found that whilst the new features of Vista add value, there are no “must have” features in the product that would justify early deployment in schools and colleges. The technical, financial and organisational challenges associated with early deployment currently make this a high risk strategy. Early deployment is therefore strongly recommended against.

...

As the costs of deployment of Office 2007 would be significant, Becta has not identified any convincing justification for the early adoption of Office 2007. Recognising that many schools and colleges already have perfectly adequate office productivity solutions there would need to be a strong case to justify the necessary investment.

...

The report compared Office 2007 with a range of competitor products and found that many of them delivered about 50% of the Office 2007 functionality, enough it is believed to meet or exceed basic office productivity requirements of many schools.

Becta therefore calls on the ICT industry to ensure that computers for the education marketplace are delivered with a choice of Office productivity suites available, which ideally should include an open-source offering.

The ability for schools to exercise choice is further restricted by interoperability difficulties and Becta is calling on Microsoft to improve its support for the ODF interoperability standard.

There is also concern that the current lack of support for Microsoft’s new file formats in competitor products (particularly “free to education” products) may exacerbate “digital divide” issues. Becta therefore advises that schools and colleges should only deploy Office 2007 when its interoperability with alternative products is satisfactory.

Definitely better late than never.

Shining Mirrored Pages: A Visual Commons

This is art, right?

Thus, by making a public display that is attentive to its community of users, a Visual Commons, it becomes possible for the community to escape the present hegemony of one-way communication, or "broadcast," of generic information (such as the time, or stock prices) or the barrage of mass-media advertising (such as occurs in New York City's Times Square). In effect, dynamic processing of community feedback regarding the contents of the display enables it to become more than just a billboard.

What would Tulse Luper say? (Via OnTheCommons.org.)

We Are All Modular Now

One of the central theses of this blog is that for things like software, modularity produces more and better code, because it allows a kind of Darwinian selection to kick in on an atomistic basis.

But wait: isn't another of my theses that openness is appropriate across a whole range of activities - notably content production? And so...that would suggest that content should become more modular too, allowing a similar kind of winnowing process to take place.

Eek!

Horde Groupware (Also for Humans)

This sounds rather good:

Horde Groupware is a free, enterprise ready, browser based collaboration suite. Users can manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project. Horde Groupware bundles the separately available applications Kronolith, Turba, Nag and Mnemo.

And I can't help feeling that the timing is perfect....

Of WikiSeek and Digital Tyrants

WikiSeek sounds a good idea in principle:

The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.

Wikiseek utilizes Searchme's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.

It does, of course, replace one digital tyrant (Google) with another (Wikipedia).

Real Knowledge of Virtual Worlds

If anyone has the right to pontificate about virtual worlds, it's Howard Rheingold. Fifteen years ago, Rheingold wrote Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society. We're still waiting, of course, but that only makes his historical perpective on things even more valuable:

Some things about online social behavior seems to be eternal and universal--trolls and griefers and the eternal meta-debate about what to do about them, for example. There's a widespread amnesia, as if these kinds of cybersocializing were new. Not many people online have much sense of history. That's probably true of just about everything. What I really like is that it's so easy to roll your own these days. It used to be a big deal to set up your own chat or BBS or listserv. Now it's part of the tool set for millions of people, and it's mostly free.

The Open Laboratory

In a sense, turning blog posts into a book - a blook - misses the point, which is that blogs are living, interactive things. Equally, if blog postings can thrive in that form, who am I to gainsay the move?

Certainly, I wish the splendidly-named The Open Laboratory (available from Lulu.com) every success. It's " a collection of 50 selected blog posts showcasing the quality and diversity of writing on science blogs".

Science blogs are, indeed, some of the most readable around, probably because their subject-matter tends to be more substantial than the usual fluff you find in the medium (and I speak as someone who has produced a fair amount of fluff in his time.) It's also probably significant that the ScienceBlogs site is one of the more successful attempts to unify and consolidate related blogs.

Of course, you can still read the posts online (or the longer list of suggestions for inclusion), which makes the collection thoroughly OA. (Via Open Reading Frame.)

Death of Venice

Joost? Joost??

The Tragedy of the Enclosed Lands

How could I resist a blog entitled "From Sink Estates to SQL", with the subtitle "Thoughts on Housing, IT, FOSS and Politics" - to say nothing of posts called "The Tragedy of the Enclosed Lands" with long, sad tales like this:

Last year I attended a demonstration by some companies looking to supply us with a GIS solution. I did not get to hear any costs at this point, but what maddened me somewhat was the level of restrictions the data suppliers wanted to put on any information they gave us.

These included :

- Insisting that if we put map data on our intranet we'd have to buy a licence for every potential user, i.e. every person who has access to our intranet. Considering this is over a thousand people now (and growing) this is fairly ridiculous.

- Advising us that we would only be able to print out maps (to include in publications to customers) if we got additional licences for this.

- If we decided not to renew our licence for the data, we'd have to destroy all maps produced/printed as well as the more obvious step of deleting all data we'd produced and uninstalling the software.

Reasons why proprietary approaches are doomed, No. 4,597. But do read the rest of the post, it's very thoughtful, and concludes stirringly:

I actually believe that mapping data will be de-facto public domain within the next decade. Until then though, we have alternatives. Of the data we collect, I intend to submit it all to the Open Street Map project (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Main_Page) which is an excellent attempt to bypass some of the legal faggotry in the copyright datasets. Collectively, we can tear down the enclosures. We can rebuild a commons which can help organisations of all sizes innovate with GIS technologies (surely something which can only increase with better mobile devices?)

Prague: The MMORPG

If online games and virtual worlds are becoming realistic to the point of blurring the boundary with the real world, it is perhaps inevitable that the real world itself should turn into an MMORPG:

This is the Prague Files, the first "live game" from Live Games Network, and I spent two weeks in December playing through the title with other players from across the US. It's a new kind of web-based game that enlists players as secret agents, but it's not all virtual—when several players from New York head down to the accident site, they actually find a crashed car and an unsavory thug keeping an eye on it.

Red Hat's Balkan Mystery

This sounds wonderfully cloak-and-daggerish:

Serbian minister of science Aleksandar Popović and Red Hat Corporation vice-president Werner Knoblich will sign a letter of intent on January 15, the government said in a statement.

Aha! But intent to do what....?

Is the Great God Google Too Good?

A few weeks back I wrote about how that nice Mr. Google was sending me around 50% of my traffic to these 'umble pages. I have a confession to make: I was wrong, it's not 50%. It's more like 60%, going on 70% some days. In fact, if the graph of visitors sent to me by Google continues to climb at its current rate, I shall probably soon have the entire planet visiting every day.

And it seems I'm not the only one impressed by Google's ability to deliver what we used to called "eyeballs" in those good old Web 1.0 days. Here's what The Daily Telegraph's "digital editor" (impressive, I'm still analogue myself) says:

“The most important driver of all readers [to our site] is Google, except for people who know us and come directly. It plays a critical part of exporting our brand, particularly to the U.S.”

At least I don't seem to have sunk quite so low as The Times, which

“is training journalists to write in a way that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google’s unpaid search results.”

Maybe Google is becoming a little too efficient at this game - to the extent that it's warping the world it's supposed to be serving.

This is the House the Fabbers Built

More signs that the fabbers are marching towards us from the future - this time, building houses as they go:

It involves computer-controlled robotic nozzles which pipe quick-drying liquid gypsum and concrete to form walls, floors and roofs.

Inspired by the inkjet printer, the technology goes far beyond the techniques already used for prefabricated homes. “This will remove all the limitations of traditional building,” said Hugh Whitehead of the architecture firm Foster & Partners, which designed the “Gherkin” skyscraper in London and is producing designs for the Loughborough team. “Anything you can dream you can build.”

The robots are rigged to a metal frame, enabling them to shuttle in three dimensions and assemble the structure of the house layer by layer.

(Via Slashdot.)

Sock Bots

After sock mobs, Jamais Cascio warns us about sock bots:

as politics and political figures move into the virtual worlds such as Second Life, we should also expect to see a parallel phenomenon there, taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the space.

Let's call the fake personae that are likely to show up in a virtual world trying to appear as a political mass Sock Bots.

Opening Up

Barely a week after Linden Lab freed the code of the Second Life viewer, we have a fork: Open SL. Not much there, yet, but this is going to be fun.

Snap Decision

As you have probably noticed, there are no images on this page. This is largely to speed the loading: with pix, it would take much longer, and generally slow down the experience of reading the blog.

Clearly, though, much of the Web is graphical in nature, and many Web pages are visually attractive. So it's a pity not to be able to show this as an enticement to explore the links in these posts further.

But I think I've found the solution. I've decided to install Snap Preview Anywhere on these pages. When you move the mouse pointer over an external link, you should see a small floating image of the page linked to (you need Javascript enabled for this to work). To follow the link, either click on it as usual, or click on the image of the page it leads to. More details here.

I hope you find this useful - I know I do on other sites that have installed it. If you don't, you can turn it off by clicking on Options in the floating window, and disabling it.

Update: Following suggestions in a comment (for which thanks), I've now activated Snap Preview for internal links. And you'll notice a small search box in the pop-up window: this leads to Snap's search engine, which also uses its preview technology to good effect. Feedback on these moves is always welcome.

Open Source War and Google Earth

How's this for a confluence:

Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.

Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.

The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.

Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.

So what do they do? They try to censor the images. But guess what? That's not going to work, and it's going to get worse. The two main solutions are (a) change the way you fight wars or - rather better - (b) don't fight wars in the first place.

iPhone = Crippleware

Quite.

Getting it Right on Copyright in Europe

The European Union is commissioning some seriously serious research these days. Yesterday I wrote about the impressively named and indeed impressive "Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU"; and now here we have one entitled "The Recasting of Copyright & Related Rights for the Knowledge Economy".

I can't pretend to have read all 305 pages of it, but I did spot a couple of sections in the Executive Summary that suggests it has its heart (and head) in the right place:

Holders of neighbouring rights in performances and phonograms have expressed concern that the existing term of protection of 50 years puts them and the European creative industries, in particular the music industry, at a disadvantage, as compared to the longer protection provided for in the United States. Chapter 3 examines these concerns, first by describing and comparing the terms in the EU in the light of the existing international framework and existing terms in countries outside the EU, secondly by examining the rationales underlying related (neighbouring) rights protection and finally by applying economic analysis.

The authors of this study are not convinced by the arguments made in favour of a term extension. The term of protection currently laid down in the Term Directive (50 years from fixation or other triggering event) is already well above the minimum standard of the Rome Convention (20 years), and substantially longer than the terms that previously existed in many Member States. Stakeholders have based their claim mainly on a comparison with the law of the United States, where sound recordings are protected under copyright law for exceptionally long terms (life plus 70 years or, in case of works for hire, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation). Perceived from an international perspective the American terms are anomalous and cannot serve as a legal justification for extending the terms of related rights in the EU.

This too was perceptive:

An assessment of the acceptance of copyright by the general public is more difficult to make. For this purpose empirical data on p2p file sharing and software sharing were analysed as ‘indicators by proxy’. These surveys make clear that unauthorised use and distribution is the norm for approximately 50 per cent of the populations concerned. However, a much larger share of the European public does recognise the equitability of and the need for copyright protection.

However, in such circles as student communities as well as the ‘virtual communities’ that are p2p networks, the prevailing ethical norm is not so much one of complying with copyright, but rather one of sharing. It was furthermore found that consumer behaviour is also informed by a weighing of the advantages and disadvantages of file sharing versus legally purchasing copies. If a commercial content provider offers the consumer a ‘bad bargain’ in terms of limited availability, high prices or restrictive use conditions (e.g. portability), then the consumer is not likely to find it unethical to opt for p2p file sharing instead.

Virtual Citizenship Association

Behold the Virtual Citizenship Association, a move from the people who tried to buy Ryzom:

We spend more and more time in online universes, talking with friends, playing, working, creating... Virtual societies are emerging everywhere, and are becoming more important every day. However, most of these universes are controlled by commercial companies, which isn't without causing a number of issues.

Decisions, impacting everyone's virtual life, can be taken against the interest of the world residents. Privacy and individual rights can be (and are!) easily dismissed, as nobody is looking over the shoulder of the local police - the world owners. Transparency and honesty are often a remote dream.

Our mission, as stated in the Social Contract, is to protect our elementary rights; living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there, and our rights have to be recognized and enforced.

Raph Koster, he of the Declaration of the Rights of Avatars, has his doubts.

Fortress: Sun's Open Fortran

Ayo, this brings back too many memories of punched cards at midnight:

Sun Microsystems took a new open-source step this week, enlisting the outside world's help in an attempt to create a brand-new programming language called Fortress.

On Tuesday, the company quietly released as open-source software a prototype Fortress "interpreter," a programming tool to execute Fortress programs line by line. "We're trying to engage academics and other third parties," Eric Allen, a Sun Labs computer scientist and Fortress project leader, said about the open-source move.

Fortress is designed to be a modern replacement for Fortran, a programming language born 50 years ago at IBM but still very popular for high-performance computing tasks such as forecasting the weather.

Still, another good move for Sun.

Update: Sun's Simon Phipps has some more details.

Turning up the Heat on Google Earth

Interesting use of heat maps for data representation. This shows how Google Earth and similar could become a really useful mesh for showing all kinds of statistical data with a geographic component (Via Ogle Earth.)

Enclosing the Urban Commons

You don't usually think of cities as being a commons, but here's an interesting perspective that proposes precisely that:

Community development activists, urban planners, and city government officials are increasingly taking note of a disturbing trend: escalating housing costs are forcing lower-income and working- and middle-class residents to leave our nation’s cities. Gentrification and subsequent displacement are rampant. Across the country, millions of us can no longer afford to reside in our major urban areas.

...

Or, to put it in the vernacular of the commons, many of our most vibrant urban areas are being “enclosed.” Our cities which once were centers of diversity (ethnically, culturally, and in terms of income levels) are now becoming modern-day analogues to the medieval walled cities of Europe – available to the wealthy elite (and single, young, college-educated professionals with high levels of disposable incomes) while the people who make those cities function (service workers, teachers, police and firemen, city employees) must move to inner and outer-ring suburbs.

Xbox 360: the Next Windows PC?

More evidence of the convergence of PCs and gaming - and from a rather surprising source:

In what may prove to be a controversial statement, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has described the Xbox 360 as “a general purpose computer”, echoing similarly controversial comments from PlayStation boss Ken Kutaragi when describing the PlayStation 3.

Speaking to the San Jose Mercury News earlier this week, Gates stated that, “We wouldn't have done it if it was just a gaming device. We wouldn't have gotten into the category at all. It was about strategically being in the living room. This is not some big secret. Sony says the same things."