18 August 2008
17 August 2008
Determined Determinists
Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.
That might seem bad news for dyed-in-the-wool determinists like me (sorry, I can't help it). But no, it was all pre-ordained that no less a personage than Gerard 't Hooft, long ago the top man of instantons, the subject of my PhD, would step in and save the (determinist) day:Gerard ’t Hooft of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1999, says the pair’s conclusions are legitimate — but he chooses determinism over free will. “As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter's choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon,” ’t Hooft says. “If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.”
So where do *you* stand - and remember, you have no choice in the matter....
The Olympian Apache
Here's a nice reminder that open source - in the form of Apache - has been head of the field for more than 12 years, despite what certain companies would have us believe:In 1996 the World Wide Web was truly in its very early stages. The Olympics took place less than a year after Netscape went public, which many consider the key event marking the transition of the Internet from a research network used primarily by the technical community to the commercial behemoth that it went on to become.
The new World Wide Web had the feeling of magic, but, in 1996, it was pretty primitive magic. To begin with, the vast majority of people accessing the Web at the time were doing so over slow dial-up modems with bandwidths of 56 kilobits per second or less. Only at work, if you were lucky, did you have access to faster broadband speeds. It wasn't until years later that broadband usage in the home became commonplace.
As we were planning the IT infrastructure for the Olympics website, hardware was not an issue. We used IBM's SP family of parallel supercomputers which we were confident would provide us with all the computing power we could want.
But the software for web servers was quite immature. Netscape's web software was the most widely used in those days, and while it was adequate for small workloads, its scalability was suspect. We could not use it. Instead, we used the open source Apache Server as the basic web server, and custom built the extensions needed to support its content, applications and other capabilities.
We were pretty sure that the Atlanta Olympics website was the largest such web project anyone had undertaken so far. Because it was all so new, we did not know how many people would come to our website and what features they would use once they got there. We were well aware of the considerable risks inherent in doing such a complex, new project on such a global stage. We knew, for example, that beyond a certain number of users, the response time would start to degrade, and if sufficiently stressed beyond its capabilities, the system could become unstable and crash.
...
Our Olympics website worked quite well, except for some unduly slow response times when traffic got very heavy. Overall, the site handled 187 million hits – that is, individual pieces of information served to users. We learned a lot about the requirements for building and operating large, complex websites. All in all, it was a very successful experiment.
The Bankruptcy of Patents
One of the difficulties of fighting patents is that they are so abstract. This makes explaining their deficiencies doubly difficult. It's one of the reasons why I like to hammer home that they are monopolies: most people understand - and hate - monopolies, and can see why getting rid of them might be a good idea.
Analogies are useful, too, and the idea of using the concept of subprime patents by analogy with the crisis in the financial world wrought by subprime mortgages is brilliantly effective:In many countries, many regulations (financial controls) were removed and so the market was finally flooded by what any common person would denominate "fake money". The same fake money as the one created with a fake notes machine, but just that much more complex and nicely sold.
But equally, and curiously roughly matching in dates, it has happened in the patent system during the last ten to fifteen years mainly. The regulations have been raised time ago. To get a patent has become almost for free. No innovation effort is almost needed. No innovative step almost. No disclosing of technical knowledge is needed. No invention "as such" is needed, using the patent jargon words. Artificial complexity of the system has reached levels where only the experts bureaucrats working on it understand it. The innovation of the bureaucracy reigns. Real inventors, formerly experienced and brightly engineers, have been replaced by patent technocrats and patent trolls. Those same patent technocrats who indeed decide, with little or no political implication, the patent policy of some of the biggest economical sectors of the world.
The result of this is a patent inflation. The most important patent offices of the world (mainly the namely "Trilateral") have granted surely some millions of subprime patents… that at the end mean fake assets and fake money. Many of these patents are fake because imprecise, too wide and/or non inventive, but many others are fake because are just out of the limits of the patentability. Their subject matter never should have constituted an "invention", but they were granted. "Obvious" is a word who lost it sense time ago.
15 August 2008
Another Reason Open Source Is Unbeatable
The post by Tom Evslin is talking about ad networks on blogs, but the insight is general:
Big profits attract lots of competitors. Would-be competitors can point to your profits and easily get funding. Funded competitors can undercut your rates and "steal" your bloggers. Whoops; the circle is now turning in the non-virtuous direction. If you're doing well but running at or close to breakeven, you've made it impossible for anybody to undercut you without running at a deficit which is hard to get funding for – at least in this market. The biggest danger to you is someone who finds a way to substantially cut costs or to deliver a better product. Obviously you've got to be vigilant about that and ought to lose some sleep over these possibilities – but keeping prices down keeps a plague of me-too competitors from cutting off your growth.
This is why it's so hard to compete with free software: it's free, and the profits made around it are much smaller the the price-gouging that proprietary software has traditionally gone for. (Via Jeff Jarvis.)
ISO's Day of Shame
So ISO has decided it wants to be irrelevant:The two ISO and IEC technical boards have given the go-ahead to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard after appeals by four national standards bodies against the approval of the document failed to garner sufficient support.
Oh, and why would that be?None of the appeals from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela received the support for further processing of two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, as required by ISO/IEC rules governing the work of their joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology.
Riiiight: so there was insufficient support among the technical boards for their dirty laundry to be aired in public. What a surprise. The fact that standards bodies representing the second- and fourth-most populous countries in the world were unhappy with the way the standardisation process was carried out doesn't matter, apparently.
Time for a new international standards body, methinks....
14 August 2008
Gawd Bless Whingeing Brits
Britons are still not convinced the 2012 London Olympic Games will be a success, according to a new survey.
Only 15% of the 2,006 people who were quizzed online think the Games will be good for the United Kingdom's international reputation.
That's the kind of attitude we want to see, none of this pathetically up-beat 加油 nonsense....
From Great Firewall to Great Flamethrower
Brilliant analysis of why the Internet has not led to the huddled masses of China seeing "the light", but rather led to them seeing red over mistakes in Western coverage. Interestingly, it's specifically about Russia, but applies equally to China - which suggests that this is going to be an important technique widely used by authoritarian regimes as away of taming the Internet through stoking up an anti-Western nationalism:One of the chief ways to create such a climate was to fund the proliferation of sites that would selectively pick reports from the Western media, translate them into Russian, and offer ample space for commentary, often resulting in many articles amassing thousands of comments from angry Russians. The primary pillars of this e-smear campaign in Russia have been sites like Inosmi.ru (a shorthand for "Foreign Media", owned by the infamous RIA Novosti agency) and, to a lesser extent, Inopressa.ru (a shorthand for "Foreign Press", it belongs to Newsru agency ).
These sites would typically pick a dozen articles from the foreign media - mostly American and British, but also that of the Baltic states and Eastern Europe - and translate them into Russian. Needless to say, they usually do their best to pick the most heinous articles, most of them full of bad reporting and stereotypes about Russia. This may seem relatively innocent but Inosmi has quickly gained a large following, which particularly delights in commenting on articles, mostly to report on inaccuracies in the articles and ignorance of their authors.
Sites like Inosmi do their best perpetuate the myth of the "great brainwashing" -- that the Western media is either utterly biased against Russia or simply incompetent - and that the Western public and policy-makers are being constantly kept in the dark as to the true nature of things in Russia (this in itself is quite comical, as Russians themselves squandered most of their independent media in the early Putin years; arguably, they are in much greater darkness).
Understanding this makes it easier to counter - for example, by translating articles in Chinese and Russian into English, so that people on the other side can see and comment on the slants in reporting. Of course, the best approach would be for Western media to check for blatant errors *before* publishing....
British Libel Laws Violate Human Rights - UN
Ha!The British libel laws have come under attack from the United Nations committee on human rights for discouraging coverage of matters of major public interest. The use of the Official Secrets Act to deter government employees from raising important issues has also been criticised.
The intervention by the UN comes in the wake of international disquiet over the use of British courts for "libel tourism", whereby wealthy plaintiffs can sue in the high court in London over articles that would not warrant an action in their own country.
IOC Stays True to Olympic Spirit...
...the Beijing Olympics spirit, that is:
the IOC sent a take-down notice to YouTube for a video posted by Students for a Free Tibet.
The video, which showed a pro-Tibet candle-light vigil in New York City and images from the March protests in Tibet, was dutifully pulled by YouTube. However, it was unclear what infringement the IOC was claiming. Although their famous interlocking rings were briefly shown, that would seem to be a trademark, not covered by the DMCA. Even if they claimed the rings were copyrighted creative content, their creation in 1913 places them firmly in the public domain (on copyright, the trademark remains -- but the DMCA isn't for trademark). Luckily after a number of sites questioned the action, the IOC withdrew their complaint.
13 August 2008
Data Snooping Mission Creep
Oh, look, what a surprise: it's not just for anti-terrorism:
Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone's personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday.
And, look, they still haven't learned about the dangers of centralised databases:The government has already indicated that it intends to go one step further this autumn by introducing a draft communications bill which would require all the telecommunications companies to hand over this data to one central "super" database so that the police and other public authorities will be able to access it directly without having to make a request each time to the individual company holding the records.
Well, at least that will make it easier to steal....
12 August 2008
Is Huggers Hunkering Down to Openness?
Hope:the BBC has always been a strong advocate and driver of open industry standards. Without these standards, TV and radio broadcasting would simply not function. I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web. These technologies have matured enough to make them viable alternatives to other solutions.
and even a touch of humour:This is a rather important moment for me personally. Having been responsible for driving one of those proprietary alternatives, it feels great to be at the forefront in driving the next wave in internet audio and video technologies and services.
Now, about those iPlayer downloads for GNU/Linux....
Dell Builds on GNU/Linux
Interesting:Dell’s Latitude On works by bypassing the Windows operating system so that you get immediate access to things like your calendar, email, Internet, and contacts. It’s a fully integrated technology that will appear later this year on the Dell 4200 and 4300 Latitude series notebooks, and is powered by a Linux OS, sort of as a secondary operating system.
How Many Out of Ten for Number 10?
Number 10 has a new look for its Web site...and it's rather good (love the blues). Moreover, it's gone all Web 2.0: Flickr stream, YouTube channel - even Twitter.
That's all well and good, but I wonder whether Team Number 10 has taken on board what Web 2.0 is really about: listening to the community of users (that would be the electorate, Gordon), not just dictating in an authoritarian manner.
Time will tell whether it's a real sea-change, or all just Spin 2.0....
Update: Turns out it's something *much* richer....
The Recording Angel
Thousands of recordings that had been largely consigned to the realm of prehistory in the digital age have gained a new life, thanks to the tireless efforts of one man.
...
As the digital music movement started in earnest, Bolling began digitizing his records, and posted a list of first 1,500 songs he had digitized so fellow collectors could see what kind of progress he had made. Finally, he decided to upload MP3s of every song on the list so that he could access them from anywhere, and so that curiosity seekers could find them.
And so another commons is created, thanks to Cliff Bolling.
Microsoft (Hearts) Intellectual Monopolies...
...provided they are its own:
Microsoft has always been rather strident on the topic of copyright infringement, as you may have noticed, which makes tale of its "Iconic Britain" photo contest all the more astonishing.
The competition was designed as part of the marketing campaign around Windows Live Image Search, with Nikon as the prize partner. Unlike most photographic competitions, which tend to involve photographers submitting their own work (crazy, I know), this one invited entrants to search for other people's online pictures, then submit the ones they felt were iconic British stuff, in the hope of winning a Nikon camera. As for the photographers themselves, they get nada--not even a link-back to their site or a credit of their name.
photos
Spotted the problem yet?
Inevitably, the reality of this situation hit the photographic community, following which the feces really hit the fan. Here's a particularly entertaining thread on Flickr, in which members vent at the fact that their photos--many of which had been set for private viewing only--had been scraped by Microsoft and pulled over, creditless, to Microsoft's servers.
Another case of do as I say, not as I do.
11 August 2008
10 August 2008
09 August 2008
T-Mobile Gets the Open Meme
T-Mobile is working with the industry to foster an open wireless services platform which will provide developers with the tools and information they need to make new, innovative experiences available to T-Mobile’s more than 31.5M customers.
I'm not sure exactly how open their open is, but it's interesting that T-Mobile has adopted this as a strategy to fight back against its bigger rivals.
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