Conservation Commons

A little while back I was urging you to sign a petition calling for open access in the European Union (you did sign, didn't you?). Now here's another worthy cause, asking for open access to environmental information - the ultimate, double commons:

Principles of the Conservation Commons

Open Access: The Conservation Commons promotes free and open access to data, information and knowledge for all conservation purposes.

Mutual Benefit: The Conservation Commons welcomes and encourages participants to both use these resources and to contribute data, information and knowledge.

Rights and Responsibilities: Contributors to the Conservation Commons have full right to attribution for any uses of their data, information, or knowledge, and the right to ensure that the original integrity of their contribution to the Commons is preserved. Users of the Conservation Commons are expected to comply, in good faith, with terms of uses specified by contributors.

You can sign up online. See you there. (Via Open Access News.)

iHavenosenseofhumour

Catch it while you can.

All That Jazz

This looks an interesting project:

The Jazz research project seeks to extend the Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) software development environment with collaborative capabilities to support coordination, communication, and awareness among a small close-knit team of developers. This involves creating connections to server infrastructure for messaging, awareness, and source control, building hooks into the Eclipse development environment to supply awareness of the developers' interactions with source code and source control, and integrating user interfaces for communication and awareness within the Eclipse environment to provide unobtrusive access to in-context team information.

Let's hope that this Jazz does better than the earlier one from Lotus (which was bought by IBM):

Lotus Jazz was an office productivity suite for the Apple Macintosh, released in 1985 for $595, after the substantial success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC. It was a commercial failure due to its low quality and aggressive competition.

Ah yes, I remember it well....

Steve Ballmer on Open Source

I am always amused - and slightly annoyed - that so much space is devoted to the wit and wisdom of Steve Ballmer, because basically he has none. That is, his words are pure marketing-speak, full of the right phrases, but signifying nothing. But at least in this FT interview, there's some interesting information about how Microsoft understands the open source challenge:

The biggest competitive challenges that any business faces is actually alternate business models. It is not a company. If you tell me somebody wants to come compete with us and do software in an area where we compete, or that we are going to get in a new area and it’s the same business model, it’s selling software, I know we can do it.

When somebody comes with a different business model, that’s where you get… or a phenomenon comes with a different business model.

What was the number one different business model that our company has confronted in the last six years? It’s Open Source. Open Source is not a technology phenomenon; it is a business model phenomenon. Frankly speaking, exactly what that business model is, is still unclear.

But that is a different business model and we had to ask ourselves: What do we do to compete? And we wound up saying it’s all about value and total cost of ownership, and high performance computing is a good example. It’s about 30 per cent of Linux share, and we are saying: Hey look, this is actually an area where we can take a lot of share with the right innovation, and the right total cost of ownership.

We shall see, Steve.

O Brave New World

It's not every day that a new continent is announced.

Anyone for Open Source TreeCAD?

Just when you think there can't be any areas left uncolonised by free software, you discover treeCAD. (Via MMORPG.)

Not so Corny for the Mexicans

By embracing the NAFTA treaty, Mexico surrendered its corn output to the vagaries of the North American corn market. Now, all of a sudden, Americans want corn, lots of it. As part of a dubious strategy to make “cleaner” gasoline while rewarding Big Agriculture and farm states, the U.S. Government is shoveling huge subsidies to corn-based ethanol production. This new demand has bid up prices in the U.S. and caused acute corn shortages in Mexico, which in turn has tripled and quadrupled the price of tortillas.

Which just goes to show that "free" trade is neither free as in freedom nor free as in beer.

British Library Closes Down Knowledge

As I feared, the close relationship between the British Library and Microsoft has led the former to start producing online exhibits locked into the latter's proprietary products:

Turning the Pages 2.0™ allows you to 'virtually' turn the pages of our most precious books. You can magnify details, read or listen to expert commentary on each page, and store or share your own notes.

Turning the Pages 2.0™ runs with Internet Explorer on Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 with .NET Framework version 3, on a broadband connection. We have detected that you do not have the necessary software. You may also need to check that your hardware meets the 'Vista Premium Ready' specification.

So instead of opening up access to knowledge, the British Library is now foisting Microsoft's closed source on its visitors. A sad day for a once-great institution. (Via The Reg.)

Peugeot Drives Off with 20K SuSE Desktops

Well, strictly speaking, it's "up to" 20K:

PSA Peugeot Citroën, the second-largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, and Novell just signed a multiyear contract allowing the deployment of up to 20,000 Linux desktops plus 2,500 Linux servers from Novell.

Still, a good win for SuSE - and for open source.

Of course, that pre-supposes there's no massive oily patch on the road ahead for the Microsoft-Novell "mixed-source" juggernaut.... (Via Open Sources.)

Barely Born, Vista Gets a Second Life

Well, I suppose this was inevitable; call it the Clash of Hypes: Microsoft Vista is being launched at ten locations in Second Life. And nothing wrong with that - although intriguingly, as Kitten Lulu points out:

4 out of 9 are places where you can find sex escorts, and there is also the Isle of Lesbos that is somewhat sex-related.
I guess they want to convey the idea that Windows Vista is sexy… but not free.

Me, I just feel sorry for the bloke "coolz0r", whose MS implant seems to be overheating with all the excitement:

What they have done is beyond all imagination.

Yikes! (Via 3pointD.com.)

MySQL's IPO: Hot News - or Maybe Not

Amazing news - MySQL is planning to go public:

after years of rumo(u)r the company is finally preparing to go public, joining a select group of open source vendors that have made it to the publicly traded markets.

Or maybe not quite so amazing, since Marten Mickos had already told me this last July during an interview for Linux Journal (page 74, January Issue, if you're interested, published in December 2006):

We're aiming for an IPO. We're actually aiming for an independent existence and to do that you need to do an IPO, but the IPO is not the aim, the IPO is just a step. People say: What is your exit plan? and we say that we're not going to exit.

Go to Jail; Do Not Pass Go

At a time when this is happening:

The jail system is in "serious crisis" with overcrowding affecting rehabilitation of offenders, the chief inspector of prisons has warned.

Anne Owers said some jails have become "riskier places to manage" because of the overcrowding problem.

Do we really need this?

The European Parliament's committee for legal affairs meets today to vote on proposals for criminal penalties to be imposed on those who infringe intellectual property (IP) rights.

The vote today will determine whether or not a person who downloads a single unlicensed track of music could be sent to jail.

Think about it - because you can bet that most of the politicians won't....

Behind and Beyond Halloween

The publication of the first Halloween memo in 1998 was a pivotal moment in the history of free software. For the first time, it was clear that internally Microsoft was worried by this new threat, despite its outward-facing bravado and rhetoric.

Of course, there was no confirmation from the company that the memo was genuine, so there was always a theoretical possibility that they were faked in some way, although the internal evidence seemed overwhelming. But now, Groklaw reports, we have official proof of their genuine nature. The posting also offers an interesting meditation on how all this feeds into Microsoft's current attempts to "go legit" with the ECMA standardisation of its Office XML formats.

Not Drowning but Waving

Here's a clever idea, a Web site called goodbye-microsoft.com that doesn't just encourage you to install Debian alongside Windows on a dual-boot system, but actually does it for you, directly from the site, using your browser running on Windows as its starting point.

Wave good-bye as you go. (Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)

Enter the WeblogMatrix

For fans of matrices, here's another one: Weblogmatrix, which compares the main blogging platforms. (Via Quoi9.)

Aieee: It's IE8 (Internet Explorer 8)

Further proof that Firefox has changed the rules for browsers. It took Microsoft five years to move from IE6 to IE7, but there are already signs of an IE8 in the works.

At Your Service

It is no coincidence that services lie at the heart of companies based around open source:

In 2006, the share of the service sector in the global employment progressed from 39.5 per cent to 40 per cent and, for the first time, overtook the share of agriculture that decreased from 39.7 per cent to 38.7 per cent. The industry sector represented 21.3 per cent of total employment.

(Via Technocrat.)

'Omics - Oh My!

One of the fun aspects of writing my book Digital Code of Life was grappling with all the 'omics: not just genomics, but proteomics and metabolomics too. Here's what I wrote about the latter:

"Metabolome" is the name given to all the molecules - not just the proteins - involved in metabolic processes within a given cell.

And here's the big news:

Scientists in Alberta say they are the first team to finish a draft of the chemical equivalent of the human genome, paving the way for faster, cheaper diagnoses of disease.

The researchers on Wednesday said the Human Metabolome Project, led by the University of Alberta, has listed and described some 2,500 chemicals found in or made by the body (three times as many as expected), and double that number of substances stemming from drugs and food. The chemicals, known as metabolites, represent the ingredients of life just as the human genome represents the blueprint of life.

This does seem to differ from my definition, but hey, my shoulders are broad.
(Via Slashdot.)

GNU/Linux on the Desktop: Get the Facts

Some say that 2007 is the year GNU/Linux is going to make its breakthrough on the desktop - just like last year, and the year before that. So instead of looking forward at what might happen, why not look back at what did happen?

Linux on the desktop grew and matured in 2006. While some analysts reported a slowing of Linux penetration on the desktop in 2006, a number of significant milestones were reached that promise to continue to move the Linux desktop ahead in 2007. As Gerry Riveros, Red Hat product marketing manager for client solutions put it, "What I think was most important [in 2006] were all of the 'under the hood' incremental improvements that took place around printing, plug-and-play support, laptop enablement and the arrival of the compositing manager that allows for modern graphics."

These and other improvements are setting the next stage of growth for the Linux desktop. A number of projects and teams have moved beyond alpha positioning and ownership to focus on how their efforts contribute to overall desktop Linux objectives. "In 2006, it appeared that developers were aware of how each other's projects help to accomplish the shared goals of all the projects," said John Terpstra, Advanced Micro Devices Linux Evangelist. Over 70 of the key desktop architects have met three times this year to agree on focus areas that would make desktop Linux "just work."

Open Healthcare

A new one to me:

1: What is “Open Healthcare”?

The nature of the Internet as a means of disseminating health media is changing. The first wave of online technology enabled organizations to extend their topdown, “command and control” communication methods to a new channel. But a new wave of open publishing technology now enables any individual, with or without professional training, to communicate with global audiences to share health-related information and opinions.

This communication occurs through multiple formats, including blogs, podcasts, wikis, message boards, videocasts, collaboration, community and review sites, as well as other forms of social media and peer-to-peer services. This grassroots media continues explosive growth with or without permission or endorsement from established healthcare institutions. Healthcare is entering a “New Era”, foretold by the Cluetrain Manifesto (http://cluetrain.com/), which greatly inspired this “open healthcare” movement.

(Via James Governor's Monkchips.)

Acceptable Intellectual Property

Although open genomics is one of the key areas of this blog, posts on the subject are few and far between. This is really a reflection of the fact that the whole area receives relatively little attention in the media. This makes articles that reflect on issues of openness and associated topics - notably intellectual monopolies - particularly welcome.

Here's one in the New York Times, which points to this very interesting paper entitled "Acceptable Intellectual Property":

Beginning in the 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, decisions about intellectual property became visible and contentious public issues. A variety of actors—including many NGOs, academics, scientists, industry groups, and governments—now view decisions about intellectual property not as rational outcomes of an autonomous process of legal reasoning, governed by precedent and safely left to appropriate experts, but as political choices with profound stakes. Aside from a small band of libertarians, virtually no one contends that the answer is to dispense with intellectual property entirely. But there is a growing sense that the intellectual and institutional foundations of IP policy are too weak to manage its newly recognized political dimensions. Nowhere is this more true than in biotechnology, where controversies about the ownership of knowledge and biomaterials have generated profound public anxiety. This brief discussion paper outlines the sources of tension that animate these concerns and reflects on the capacity of existing institutions to reconcile them.

It's short, sweet and to the point: well worth reading. (Via Against Monopoly.)

Update: As so often is the case, the best commentary on this comes from Jamais Cascio, who also coins a fab neologism in this context:

Genetic Rights Management (GRM) is copy-protection for genes, a direct parallel to Digital Rights Management for CDs, DVDs, and other media.

Blogging Becomes Compulsorier

I think it's a great idea to force journos to roll up their sleeves and interact with their readers; but this may be taking it a little too far:

CNET is mandating that its blogging journalists respond to all reader comments and questions, according to a report in The Guardian. Further, they are also expected to get involved in every debate that "has legs." (Hat tip to Cyberjournalist)

Also, there is a teeny-weeny irony here, in that the Guardian's flagship blog, Comment is Free, rarely sees the posters (many of whom or journos) responding even minimally to comments (with a few honourable exceptions.)

Second Life and Africa

Here's an interesting point:

Many have observed that the African American economy in the US is probably bigger than even South Africa, a country recognised as the engine of Africa, with 47 million people and yet there is no visible connection between this economy and the rest of Africa for the world to notice.

Imagine everyone of us who are privileged to be connected could use our contacts and share them with our virtual friends in this Second Life and all of us can know each other through other people, how long will it take for us to create a social networking virtual space that we can collectively use to negotiate a better life for us and those connected to us.

One of the paradoxes of Second Life is that for all that it allows people to assume any identity they want, most of these turn out to be Caucasian (with a smattering of furries). As Second Life - or its successor - moves closer to the centre of online activity, the issue of bringing in developing nations and their related identities is one that will become ever more pressing if we are to avoid exacerbating the digital divide.

eBay Loses the Plot - and its Future

One thing that is evident online is that the line between real and virtual is increasingly evanescent (for the full half-hour argument, read Ed Castronova's thought-provoking Synthetic Worlds.) It follows that the companies that will thrive tomorrow are the ones that can seamlessly accommodate the sometimes disturbingly virtual alongside the comfier real.

Cross eBay off the list:

eBay is now delisting all auctions for 'virtual artifacts' from the site. This includes currency, items, and accounts/characters

So, here's a question for all you entrepreneurs: who wants to become the eBay of 21st century? (Via Virtual Economy Research Network.)

Update: eBay has managed to find a couple of neurons, it seems.

Pentaho - Tally-ho!

Talking of opening up:

I'm not sure if anyone else noticed, but Pentaho has gone 100% open source.

Thanks to moves like this, the open source enterprise stack gets richer all the time.

The Openness Spreads...to Adobe's PDF

One campaign I have fought over the years has been for people to dump proprietary PDF files and use open HTML instead.

Clearly, I lost that one, but as time goes by, it's becoming less of a problem as Adobe moves PDF closer to being a totally open standard like HTML. Here's the latest news:

Most people know that PDF is already a standard so why do this now? This event is very subtle yet very significant. PDF will go from being an open standard/specification and defacto standard to a full blown du jure standard. The difference will not affect implementers much given PDF has been a published open standard for years. There are some important distinctions however. First – others will have a clearly documented process for contributing to the future of the PDF specification. That process also clearly documents the path for others to contribute their own Intellectual property for consideration in future versions of the standard. Perhaps Adobe could have set up some open standards process within the company but this would be merely duplicating the open standards process, which we felt was the proper home for PDF. Second, it helps cement the full PDF specification as the umbrella specification for all the other PDF standards under the ISO umbrella such as PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E. The move also helps realize the dreams of a fully open web as the web evolves (what some are calling Web 2.0), built upon truly open standards, technologies and protocols.

(Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

Peter Suber's Purview

One source that crops up more than most in these blog posts is that of Open Access News. This is simply the best place to go for information about open access activity. But its creator, Peter Suber, does more than offer a handy one-stop shop for such news: he performs the equally important task of pulling together disparate pieces of information, to create a whole larger than the parts.

A case in point is this wonderful "raft" of blogger comments on the imminent FUD campaign against open access, where Peter kindly includes my own witterings on the subject. Reading this bundle of blog rage warms the cockles of my heart; it also offers a handy reminder of the moral and intellectual energy ranged against the retrograde forces of the anti-open access bloc.

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.)