The Apotheosis of VisiCalc

If the name Dan Bricklin means nothing to you, you obviously missed out on the PC revolution's prehistory (or maybe I'm just showing my age). Bricklin is one of the Ur-hackers, author of the almost mythical VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet (yes, there was one: the idea has not been present since the dawn of time).

But more than being a mere coder-god, Bricklin is a man with his heart in the right place. He did not attempt to "patent" the idea of a spreadsheet, and for that deserves our eternal thanks. Continuing this fine tradition of altruism, his latest program goes even further, and is being released under the GNU GPLv2. It's called wikiCalc: it combines the best of Bricklin's past with today's increasingly trendy wikis.

As its home page at Software Garden explains:

The wikiCalc program lets you make web pages with more than just paragraphs of prose. It combines the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and calculating metaphor of a spreadsheet. Written in Perl and released under the GPL 2.0 license, it can easily be setup to run on almost any server as a web application or on a personal computer to publish by FTP.

There's also a fuller explanation, as well as the code itself. Whether you do it out of a sense of historical piety, or because you want to play with tomorrow's cool - and open - toys, it's really worth taking a look at.

One World, Science.World

A hopeful development here:

Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Under Secretary for Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has signed an agreement with Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, to collaborate on the development of a global science gateway. The gateway would eventually make science information resources of many nations accessible via a single Internet portal.

Called ‘Science.world,’ the planned resource would be available for use by scientists in all nations and by anyone interested in science. The approach will capitalise on existing technology to search vast collections of science information distributed across the globe, enabling much-needed access to smaller, less well-known sources of highly valuable science. Following the model of Science.gov, the U.S. interagency science portal that relies on content published by each participating agency, ‘Science.world’ will rely on scientific resources published by each participating nation. Other countries have been invited to participate in this international effort.

I particularly liked the following paragraph:

Increasingly science projects are international in scope, with researchers across the globe collaborating on projects as diverse as energy, linear colliders, genomes and the environment. At the same time, the US and UK have recognised the importance of providing their citizens with one-stop electronic access to increasing volumes of science information, with a growing sense of the need for reciprocity and sharing of science knowledge across national boundaries.

Looks like another reason that this sort of thing is doomed to fail. (Via Open Access News.)

Behind the Great (Fire)Wall

Here's something I wish I knew more about:

Zhang Shiliang, who is in charge of the use of open source software in Beijing's Pinggu County government, spoke about the problems of Linux use in his organization. Chinese government is one of the biggest Linux buyers in the country. Since the Pinggu government began to push the use of open source software in 2004, 85% of their 4,680 computers have installed Linux or other open source software. But 53% of them still have to install Microsoft Windows as well, because their superior government uses Windows or other operating systems -- even other incompatible editions of Linux.

And some worrying figures at the end:

According to Lu Shouqun, China's sale of Linux was 175 million yuan ($21 million) in 2005, increasing 81% compared with the previous year. The sale of other open source software that year was 160 million yuan ($19 million). In the operating system market, the share of Linux increased from 4.2% to 9.8% between 2003 and 2005.

But Microsoft also won in that game. "In fact, China's increase of Linux users didn't impair the use of Windows," Lu says. According to his figures, Windows' share of the operating system market increased from 55.1% to 64.8% between 2003 and 2005. Linux mainly took users from Unix, whose share decreased from 30.9% to 19.8%.

There is no War on...Botnets

After the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, now, it seems, we are to have a War on Botnets:

Mr Toure said that whatever the solution, the fight against botnets was a "war" that could only be won if all parties - regulators, governments, telecoms firms, computer users and hardware and software makers - worked together.

But it is a truth universally acknowledged, that as soon as you declare "war" on some amorphous entity like "drugs" or "terror" or "botnets", you've already lost, because you shift from the practical to the rhetorical.

This is all about security theatre: talking tough instead of acting intelligently. Sorting out botnets does not require a "war": it's simply a matter of telling Windows users the truth about their bug-infested system, getting them to use a firewall and anti-virus software and - maybe, one day - getting them to understand that downloading or opening unknown software is hugely risky.

Community-Created Content

One of the great things about books dealing with open content is that, to be internally consistent, they are generally freely available too. Here's a case in point: Community Created Content. Law, Business and Policy can be bought in dead-tree format, or downloaded as a PDF. (Via Boing Boing.)

The Coming Victory of Open Access

In this blog, I've emphasised the parallels between open source and open access. We know that as Microsoft has become more and more threatened by the former, it has resorted to more and more desperate attempts to sow FUD. Now comes this tremendous story from Nature that the traditional scientific publishing houses are contemplating doing the same to attack open access:

Nature has learned, a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.

The "pit bull" is Eric Dezenhall:

his firm, Dezenhall Resources, was also reported by Business Week to have used money from oil giant ExxonMobil to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace.

These are some of the tactics being considered:

Dezenhall also recommended joining forces with groups that may be ideologically opposed to government-mandated projects such as PubMed Central, including organizations that have angered scientists. One suggestion was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC, which has used oil-industry money to promote sceptical views on climate change. Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000–500,000.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, you may recall, are the people behind the risible "Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life" campaign of misinformation about global warming.

This is a clear sign that we're in the end-game for open access's victory.

Brazil's Free Software Utopia

A great piece by Bruce Byfield, in which he peeks behind the mainstream media's traditional image of Brazilian free software:

According to the international media, Brazil is a leader in free and open source software (FOSS) adoption. The New York Times describes the country as "a tropical outpost of the free software movement," while BBC News claims that "Increasingly, Brazil's government ministries and state-run enterprises are abandoning Windows in favour of 'open-source' or 'free' software." However, FOSS advocates familiar with Brazil describe a less hopeful situation.

They talk about unsystematic support by the government, and a business atmosphere in which mention of FOSS is more about hype than understanding the underlying philosophy. They say violations of the GNU General Public License are commonplace. Some genuine FOSS adoption does happen, they say, but, too often, it is marred by inefficiency, and possibly widespread corruption.

We should have known: "utopia" means "no place".

Seduced by Virtual Elizas

ELIZA was a very simple AI program written forty years ago that nonetheless convinced many people who interacted with it that it was indeed a real person. If we can be so easily convinced by text, what hope do we have against Virtual Elizas in Second Life?

Open Linux Router

When I wrote about the open source router Vyatta, I noted that it was slightly ironic that only now is free software addressing the area. So it's good to see another project, called simply the Open Linux Router doing the same:

The Open Linux Router will be a network appliance unlike any other. Its modular design will empower the user with the ability to pick and choose what features and/or services will and will not be included on the implementation. By scaling the features and services down, the Open Linux Router can easily be installed on a small, embedded device. Although, if the implementation demands functionality, it is just as easy to add the features, which provides the Open Linux Router with a wide and diverse demographic. Residential and small business implementations have a certain set of needs, while an enterprise implementation requires a more concentrated operation and thats what drives the modular approach to services and features. The learning curve is also greatly reduced through a consolidation of the nominal devices that your IT staff would currently have to master to rise to the same level of productivity. This project aims to encourage open source software for network systems and solutions.

(Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)

Interview with Second Life's Cory Ondrejka

I have an interview with Linden Lab's CTO, Cory Ondrejka, over at LWN.net - now out of paywall purdah. What impressed me about Cory - as with his boss, Philip Rosedale - was the tredendous passion he radiated for both virtual worlds and open source. This is a powerful combination, and will lead to great things, I believe.

Why Collaboration, Why Now?

A good point:

Word, Excel, Powerpoint were all about making me, as a worker at my desk, able to create more work per unit of time. But, I think we've eeked out the last bit of individual productivity gain at this stage. I mean, does the new ribbon on MS Word make me more productive as an individual? Probably not. It's a great interface, but it's unlikely that there is a massive gain in personal productivity.

This next wave that we're in is about productivity gains achieved NOT by making the individual more productive, but by making groups more productive. The massive penetration of email means that we're in touch with one another like never before and dependent on teams like never before. That means that there is a huge opportunity for productivity gains through more effective collaboration.

- Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite and JotSpot, now at Google.

Has Dave Miller Gone Nuts?

Dave Miller is one of the top kernel hackers. I had the pleasure of interviewing him for Rebel Code all those years ago (eek: how time flies). But something seems to have happened to him on the way to Australia:

I live for the warm nuts

Virtual Architecture

One of the defining characteristics of Second Life is the ability to build things. The most notable manifestation of this is the tens/hundreds of thousands of buildings that dot Second Life's landscape. If you've ever wondered how people create the amazing constructions there, here's a short YouTube video that gives a handy introduction. (Helpful hint: lose the Beethoven 9 - it's hardly suitable as background music, and really doesn't add anything to the video.)

It's a short machinima from The Arch, which is written by Jon Brouchoud (SL Keystone Bouchard):

I’m a RL Architect, and have recently dissolved my practice into an exclusively virtual mode. I started by using Second Life as a professional tool, and have since decided to devote all of my energy toward developing and contributing to the convergence of architecture and the metaverse.

It's probably the best place to keep on top of the burgeoning virtual architecture scene.

There is no War on Terror

Blimey, there's hope yet:

London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.

Blogspot Bloggered?

I've been trying to post for the last hour, but Blogspot seemed well and truly bloggered. Apologies if you've been trying to read something. Just goes to show that the Great God Google is maybe not quite so godlike after all....

Shut Out from Citizendium

I've written a number of times about Citizendium, Larry Sanger's fascinating project to create a new kind of user-generated online repository of knowledge. Well, it's now officially open to the public - sort of. As the press release puts it:

For the first time, anyone can visit the website (www.citizendium.org), create a user account and get to work within minutes. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

The catch is that you not only need to create a user account to "get to work", but even to view what's already there, as far as I can see. I can't help feeling that the best way to get people to join this worthy venture is to let them see what's going on. To lock out casual visitors from anything but the home page seems counterproductive.

Valleywag Goes Downhill

Sigh.

When I first came across Valleywag's rather narrow-minded attack on Anshe Chung recently, I assumed this was just the kind of editorial misjudgement that happens when publications aim to go beyond the usual pap served up by mainstream titles. As an ex-editor and ex-publisher, I can forgive this kind of thing.

But upon reading this subsequent story, entitled "Virtual world's supposed economy is 'a pyramid scheme'", I'm forced to conclude that Valleywag is simply desperate for attention and thinks that choosing a high-profile victim for its attacks will garner it some traffic (and it's correct, of course: after all, even I'm giving it some).

You can get the gist of the piece from the following:

What you're left with is lots of people putting USD in, and a small group taking those USD out, leaving the rest with no financial claims on anything - just an imaginatively sexy avatar.

Oh, yes, silly me: that's what Second Life's all about, isn't it? Putting money in to get money out. Forget about all that creativity or community stuff: after all, that's just reducible to an "imaginatively sexy avatar", right? (Via Slashdot)

Update: The Man in this sphere has spoken, and all is clear:

It's not a con game. It's a village-sized market. In fact it's a tourist attraction-type village: the big numbers of the people you see are one-time visitors. Newcomers are arriving in droves. Land speculation is rampant. But it's not thick; it's tiny. Not a ponzi scheme: a little mini gold rush.

The Future Belongs to Chindia

It's not just mobile phones:

Productivity growth will help India sustain over 8% growth until 2020 and become the second largest economy in the world, ahead of the US, by 2050, Goldman Sachs has said, scaling up estimates of the country's prospects in its October 2003 research paper widely known as the BRICs report.

The original report had projected that India's GDP would outstrip Japan's by 2032 and that in 30 years, it would be the world's third largest economy after China and the US. The new report goes one step further by moving India up from No. 3 and No. 2 in the global sweepstakes of tomorrow.

Ni hao - namaste: I, for one, salute our Chindian overlords. (Via Technocrat.)

For "Against Intellectual Monopoly"

I've written several times about the wonderful online book Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, which argues that we don't need patents and copyrights:

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not neccesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

There's a new version available, with a hard-copy version coming from Cambridge University Press as well. Highly recommended.

Mapping the Fourth Dimension

Good to see that Yahoo is letting OpenStreetMap use its aerial imagery to speed up the process of free map creation.

Of course, we still need to get all those street names and features. GPS traces are by no means dead - think of the new housing estates and areas without imagery. But instead of cycling down every road you should be able to just pass lots of them at either end to get the names. Or just from memory.

Where does this bring us to? Well the ‘big map companies’ use expensive cars and expensive aircraft with expensive cameras and expensive GPS units to create maps. Maybe our GPS units are cheaper and less accurate, but does it matter? I think not. We now have all the pieces of the puzzle and we’re putting out great maps for Free using Free tools.

But I was even more impressed to see that OpenStreetMap has already mapped some of the future too: take a look at the entries here for March 2007.

A Flock of Cormorants

If you're interested, there's a new version of the super-social browser Flock, code-named "Cormorant". Me, I'm waiting for the gannets. (Via Vecosys.)

The BBC's Other Virtual World

You could argue that radio is already a particular kind of virtual world - one created by the wetware between your ears on the basis of the code downloaded by your radio (television clearly isn't a virtual world, because there's little processing or no degrees of freedom involved). But not content with that, the BBC is apparently launching another one:

A virtual world which children can inhabit and interact with is being planned by the BBC.

CBBC, the channel for 7-12 year olds, said it would allow digitally literate children the access to characters and resources they had come to expect.

Users would be able to build an online presence, known as an avatar, then create and share content.

The youth of today....

Voici L'Avenir...

...des idées - gratuit. (Via Lessig.org)

China Mobile: More Users Than the Entire US

Think about it:

There are more mobile phone subscribers at one Chinese operator than people in the entire U.S., according to figures China Mobile posted on its Web site late Friday.

OOo: The Seagull Spreads Its Wings

Good to see that OpenOffice.org project getting more ambitious:

The scope of the ODF Toolkit project is:

1.

To improve the ability to use OpenOffice.org as a programming framework for creating and processing OpenDocument (ODF) documents rather than to use it as a desktop application. This will be achieved by transforming an appropriate subset from the OpenOffice.org source code basis, and by adapting it to the new purpose.

2.

To provide a home for components that can be used for processing ODF documents and that are either based on the new ODF Toolkit, or complement it.

Both together constitutes the ODF Toolkit, which is a toolkit for ODF document creation and processing. This toolkit shares its source code with the OpenOffice.org desktop application where ever this is reasonable. That is, based on the OpenOffice.org source code, there is the OpenOffice.org suite, and an ODF Toolkit, which is tailored to processing ODF documents outside traditional office desktop applications.

(Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)