Linden Lab: Yes, They Really Get It

Further to this post, here's conclusive proof that the people behind Second Life get it:

Linden Lab objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody. Indeed, any competent attorney is well aware that the outcome of sending a cease-and-desist letter regarding a parody is only to draw more attention to such parody, and to invite public scorn and ridicule of the humor-impaired legal counsel. Linden Lab is well-known for having strict hiring standards, including a requirement for having a sense of humor, from which our lawyers receive no exception.

In conclusion, your invitation to submit a cease-and-desist letter is hereby rejected.

CrowdSpirit

Crowdsourcing in the French Alps:

Our business model is simply to design innovative electronic products by “you” for “you” and to reward the best “you” based on the products sales revenues& in practice “you” will be made by a community. CrowdSpirit will provide the means for this community to design, invest, produce, market, distribute and support the products that make business sense. To conclude, the community will assist and participate in every step of the product cycle and will earn money from these products based on each person’s contribution.

Dunno if it works, though.

Acoustic Ecology and the Commons of Silence

Some interesting information about the Acoustic Ecology Institute:

a New Mexico-based non-profit working to "increase personal and social awareness of our sound environment, through education programs in schools, regional events, and our internationally recognized website," and to build "a comprehensive [online] clearinghouse for information on sound-related environmental issues and scientific research."

Am I Dreaming?

Dreaming in Code: a book about Chandler.

Chandler? Out of several hundred thousands pieces of free software he choose Chandler??? A project that after nearly four years still has not yet got to a 1.0 release? A project that, though started with the best intentions (which I applaud) is essentially irrelevant now that we have Lightning, based on a program (Thunderbird) that is already widely used?

Great title: pity about the subject-matter.

The (Other) Foundation

As a big fan of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, I was delighted to learn that the Linux people have done their psychohistorical calculations, and realised they need to create one themeselves.

Why Don't You Get a Life?

This is good.

This is better.

Hrant Dink's Memorial

Surprisingly, there is tiny consolation to be found in the murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish Armenian shot dead outside his newspaper's office last week.

The killer presumably hoped to silence Dink from speaking his wise, calm words about the genocide of over a million Armenians at the hands of the Young Turks in 1915, and of the need for reconciliation, not recrimination.

And yet Dink's death has probably done more to highlight that genocide than any of his words. A casual search for "armenian genocide" on Google News turns up well over a thousand hits over the last few days. At least in the age of the Internet, the truth about such things, once exposed, is not so easily hidden.

This is Dink's memorial.

Citizendium Unforks

Citizendium is a wonderful test of many things, and it just became even more interesting because it has decided to unfork itself from Wikipedia:

After considerable deliberation, indicating broad support, we have decided to delete all inactive Wikipedia articles from the Citizendium pilot project wiki. This will leave us with only those articles that we’ve been working on. The deletion will take place on Saturday at noon, Eastern time.

This is an experiment. In other words, we’re quite seriously thinking of not forking Wikipedia after all. If we see more activity on the wiki, which is what I expect, then the Wikipedia articles will stay deleted.

(Via Open Access News.)

The Smell of Conspiracy Theories in the Morning

Lovely:

The truth can now be told. We have a nine-floor complex beneath Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Dick Cheney's home state. We employee three-hundred Oompa Lumpas, ostensibly here on student visas, to read through the 6,000 page OOXML specification. They then input their concerns into a massively parallel computer, based on the old Deep Blue chess computer that beat Gary Kasparov. The computer takes the objections, formats them into English, inserting random literary quotes from The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, and then posts them in blogs and press articles. The computer can express these objections in the form of sonnets, haikus, or even as crude limerick. Every year on January 14th (Thomas J. Watson's Birthday) at 3:14am the Oompa Lumpas come to the surface, smear their bodies with blue paint, dance around a bonfire, howl at the moon and entreat the gods to vanquish their foes, mainly Microsoft, who canceled their favorite application, Microsoft Bob. Rob Weir doesn't really exist. He is just a subroutine. As they say, "On the internet, nobody knows your are a subroutine processing data input by Oompa-Loompas working for IBM underground in Wyoming"

But is it just coincidence that the time quoted in this extract - 3.14 - happens to be precisely the Köchel number of the Flute Concerto by Mozart that is almost certainly the lost Oboe concerto written for Ferlendis? I don't think so....

The Richard Stallman of Water

Heavy, man:

Late last year, I had a lunch meeting in New York City with the president of a foundation associated with a national protestant denomination. When the waiter came by to ask if we wanted a bottle of water, my lunch partner responded, “Tap water will be fine. I don’t drink bottled water.”

Don’t drink bottled water? I couldn’t remember the last time I heard someone say that – especially in New York City. I began to explore the issue with him and learned that he and many others in his church no longer drank Dasani (bottled by Coca-Cola) and other commercial bottled waters because they see the privatization of water resources as an intensely moral and political issue.

Obvious, when you think about it.

Indies not so Independent

When I saw this:

The world's biggest record label, albeit a "virtual" one, emerged today at the Midemnet conference in Cannes.

Indies have found themselves treated as second class citizens or ignored altogether in the era of digital music. The new organization Merlin will act as a global rights licensing agency, and represents the growing influence of the independent sector acting collectively.

My heart leapt. Could it be, I said to myself, that we might see some independent thinking in the music biz at last - you, know, no DRM, sensible pricing, that kind of stuff?

Nope:

Alison Wenham of the UK-based Association for Independent Music (AIM) confirmed that indies would demand the removal of content from sites such as YouTube if they didn't cut Merlin a similar deal to the one negotiated by Universal Music, the world's biggest label.

Clearly, this Merlin the wizard ain't so wise: YouTube = free publicity = more sales.

Convergence of the Ads

Not quite the kind of convergence I was hoping for, but indicative of the way things are going:

Google is about to buy its way into in-game advertising, paidContent.org has learned, and WSJ is also reporting the same. It has been in talks to buy a small in-game advertising firm AdScape Media, in an attempt to bring its technologies, mixed with Google’s own contextual technologies, into the console and casual games market.

A Confederacy of Dunces

It's amazing how dim clever people can be. Here's a piece in the Washington Post from some apparently clever chaps about net neutrality. But listen to this:

Blocking premium pricing in the name of neutrality might have the unintended effect of blocking the premium services from which customers would benefit. No one would propose that the U.S. Postal Service be prohibited from offering Express Mail because a "fast lane" mail service is "undemocratic." Yet some current proposals would do exactly this for Internet services.

Metaphors are so seductive because they can be grasped more easily than the matter to hand. But they are dangerous because of the potential imperfection of the comparison. In this case, there is a fatal flaw in the metaphor: net neutrality is not about blocking "fast lane" postal services. Proponents of net neutrality have pointed out time and again that anyone is welcome to buy faster Net connections if they need them.

The real comparison is if a postal service were offered that guaranteed faster delivery for letters that contained a particular kind of content. This would act as a barrier to someone "inventing" new kinds of content for letters. Net neutrality is about ensuring that the playing-field is level for everyone - that anyone can invent new kinds of content, so that users can then decide which to use without other biases coming into play. It is not about blocking generic "fast lane" services.

The point is that even if there are cases that could be pointed to where priority might seem be beneficial, the overall impact is negative: once you start giving network providers the power to discriminate, they will - and not in the ways that will be good for the network. If priority is needed, it should be provided - and paid for - on a generic basis.

In the Shade of the Commons

One of the central themes of this blog is the commons, and how it's often helpful to re-frame discussions about software, content, the environment etc. in terms of this idea. So I was delighted to come across an entire collection of essays taking this approach. It's called In the Shade of the Commons,and it's freely available.

David Pogue Meets The Pogues

This fine piece of doggerel deserves to become No. 1.

It could do with a catchier title, though: instead of "Ode to the RIAA", how about "pogue mahone"?

It Ain't Over Until Blake Ross Sings

There are three names that most people would associate with Firefox. Ben Goodger, who works for Google, and whose blog is pretty quiet these days. Asa Dotzler, who has a articulate and bulging blog. And then there's Blake Ross, also with a lively blog, but probably better known for being the cover-boy of Wired when it featured Firefox.

Given his background - and the immense knock-on effect his Firefox work has had - Ross is always worth listening to. That's particularly the case for this long interview, because it's conducted for the Opera Watch blog, which lends it both a technological depth and a subtle undercurrent of friendly competition:

I think Opera is better geared toward advanced users out of the box, whereas Firefox is tailored to mainstream users by default and relies on its extension model to cater to an advanced audience. However, I see both browsers naturally drifting toward the middle. Firefox is growing more advanced as the mainstream becomes Web-savvier, and I see Opera scaling back its interface, since it started from the other end of the spectrum.

(Via LXer.)

Time Jumps When Microsoft Snaps Its Fingers

I missed this the first time around:

So, for most of the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the law for 250-425 years. That's a well-established standard by anyone's definition. Who would possibly ignore it or get it wrong at this point?

If you guessed “Microsoft”, you may advance to the head of the class.

Datetimes in Excel are represented as date serial numbers, where dates are counted from an origin, sometimes called an epoch, of January 1st, 1900. The problem is that from the earliest implementations Excel got it wrong. It thinks that 1900 was a leap year, when clearly it isn't, under Gregorian rules since it is not divisible by 400. This error causes functions like the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function to return incorrect values in some cases.

Here are Rob's updated thoughts on the subject, and how the problem is being propagated by Microsoft's rival to ODF, OOXML.

He Gave Me of the Tree

And I did eat.

Wicked.

Alan Cox Stands up for Closed Source

These aren't words you'd expect to issue from the mouth of one of the most senior Linux hackers:

Cox said that closed-source companies could not be held liable for their code because of the effect this would have on third-party vendor relationships: "[Code] should not be the [legal] responsibility of software vendors, because this would lead to a combinatorial explosion with third-party vendors. When you add third-party applications, the software interaction becomes complex. Rational behaviour for software vendors would be to forbid the installation of any third-party software." This would not be feasible, as forbidding the installation of third-party software would contravene anti-competition legislation, he noted.

But, of course, he's absolutely right - which emphasises how lucky we are to have someone as sane as Alan representing the free software community when too many self-styled supporters present quite a different image.

Live a Little: Try Knoppix

How can anyone resist this sort of thing? Go on, live a little: you know it makes sense.

Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner...

...and a geek to boot, that I love these kind of things:

We've taken a selection of maps featured in the London: A Life in Maps exhibition and converted them into a Google Earth layer.

(Via Ogle Earth.)

ScientificCommons.org

Access to all open access science? Ambitious, if nothing else, this:

The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries. Currently ScientificCommons.org has indexed about 10 million scientific publications and successfully extracted 4 million authors out of this data.

(Via eHub.)

Blogs 2.0

This is the kind of stuff that John Battelle is best at:

A brief dip into nearly every blogger's referral logs shows that a very large percentage of readers - nearly 40 percent in some cases - come directly from search - someone who put "steve ballmer throws chair" into Google, for example, and lands here.

Now, this person doesn't have any frame of reference about Searchblog, or its grammar, audience, or ongoing conversation. He or she is most likely to hit the post in question, read it (perhaps), and move on. This site loses a potential new reader, and this community loses a potential new member, because, in the end, I, as the publisher of Searchblog, have done nothing to demonstrate to that reader the wonders and joy that is Searchblog.

Interesting (says someone whose Google referrals are rather higher than 40%.)

There is a There There

I had occasion to use Second Life in anger the other night, by which I mean I made a serious, business-related use of it. Taking up the kind invitation of the splendidly-named Gizzy Electricteeth (SL name, of course), I went to visit IBM's recreation of the Australian Open, which I had written about earlier (and which Gizzy had spotted).

As I had surmised when reading about it, this is an impressive virtual construction, not just for what it is, but mostly for what it portends. The ability to capture a ball's path in real time, and then recreate it in Second Life - and a rapidly-moving ball at that - means that other, more sedate sports like football and cricket will be even easier to reproduce in this way.

As a result, fans of those sports (I'm told there are one or two) will not only be able to watch matches as they happen, but also replay them, watching from different angles. They could even join in - for example, taking the viewpoint of the umpire/referee, or one of the players (even I found myself "playing" tennis, with balls careering towards me at high velocity - and magically being returned).

I think this alone makes IBM's work important, because it may well be enough of a hook to get couch potatoes off their sofas and staggering towards their PCs (until, of course, somebody produces set-top boxes for TVs specifically designed for Second Life.)

But impressive as all this work was - knocked up in less than a month by a small and clearly dedicated team including said Gizzy - what really struck me most was something quite different. This was the fact that I was engaged in this immersive experience while I sat at my computer, late at night in a wintry London, as Gizzy sat at her computer, mid-morning in Australia, in the summer, and while both of us "met" in that somewhere land we call Second Life.

Whereas my previous experiences of SL have been purely of an exploratory kind - and hence retained an element of being "there" only in a shallow, unengaged sense - my visit to the IBM site, which involved me being myself, a journalist asking questions, as I do in ordinary life, was far truer, far more real. Not because of where I was, or what I saw, but because of what I was doing, which was a seamless extension of my life in another place that was neither here nor there, but simply was.

Argo Sets a New Course

The rather fine Argo Genome Browser,

Broad Institute's production tool for visualizing and manually annotating whole genomes

has now been released under the LGPL.