Warning: Taggers at Work (Again)

Over the New Year period I'll finish off tagging older posts to improve navigation on this site. So please excuse the RSS deluge that follows.

Banking on Benkler

Trust Yochai to give us a way forward - and some hope:

In the mass media environment, there was a general culture of "I saw it in print, therefore it must be true." This culture led to a relative atrophy of critical faculties, and made the public sphere highly manipulable, or simply prone to error. It is not, for example, that well-trained media critics could not point out the dozens of ways in which any given news report or television program were biased or incomplete. They could. But the readers, viewers, and listeners by and large adopted a trusting relationship to their media. We long spoke about the need to teach critical television watching. But that never happened, really. I think as a new generation grows up reading things that never have a clear voice of authority, that have only provisional status as inputs, we will begin to see a more critical, investigative form of reading, as well as listening and viewing. The act of reading will be more like an act of investigation, as one picks up pieces of evidence with variable levels of credibility, triangulates them, and arrives at a conclusion that continues, nonetheless, to be revisable and falsifiable. This is the essence of the scientific method. It is high time that people adopt it more broadly. I embrace this uncertainty, for with it comes critical reading. This trend is then strengthened by the widespread practices of cultural production, what I have characterized as the re-emergence of a new folk culture in the digital environment. People who create know how to be more critical users.

Those who Cannot Remember the Past...

...are condemned to release again it ten years later.

I was interest to read that Sun has launched its Looking Glass interface. Not just because it's yet another 3D-ish approach, with some interesting applications coming through. But also because Sun seems to be blithely unaware of the history of the Looking Glass moniker. As I wrote in Rebel Code:

Caldera was set up in October 1994, and released betas of its first product, the Caldera Network Desktop (CND) in 1995. The final version came out in February 1996, and offered a novel graphical desktop rather like Windows 95. This "Looking Glass" desktop, as it was called, was proprietary, as were several other applications that Caldera bundled with the package."

Caldera, of course, eventually metamorphosed (hello, Kafka) into SCO....

Enter the Metaverse/Matrix/Neuronet

An eagle-eyed Mark Wallace spotted the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT), a new Web site/organisation, with its intriguing - and possibly redundant - Neuronet:

IAVRT is working with its VR member peers and the global community to create and govern a new real-time virtual reality network, separate and distinct from the Internet, which will be called the Neuronet. The Neuronet will be designed from the ground up as the world's first - and only - network designed specifically for the transmission of virtual reality and next generation gaming data. The Neuronet will organize the virtual reality world and ensure its safety, reliability, and functionality.

The purpose of the Neurornet will be to facilitate cinematic and immersive virtual reality experiences across distances. These will include almost every type of experience imaginable with some of the most obvious being real-time video chat, video streaming, virtual reality travel, history, adventure, gaming, entertainment, sports, hobbies, business, education, medicine and training to name just a few.

The Neuronet will function similarly to the Internet in its ability connect users in different locations, but instead of the user interface mechanisms associated with the Internet, it will use Virtual reality (VR) technologies to facilitate cinematic and immersive virtual reality experiences for end-users.

Sick in the Genome

From the nation that brought you whaleburgers:

The breeder told Mr. Sasaki that he had bred a dog with three generations of offspring — in human terms, first with its daughter, then a granddaughter and then a great-granddaughter — until Keika was born. The other four puppies in the litter were so hideously deformed that they were killed right after birth.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Google's Open Airbag

Google-watchers of the world, arise: a new name to add to the list of Googly things: Airbag.

In many cases trying to determine the exact cause of the crash can be as frustrating as the crash itself. Identifying the causality for crashes is a critical aspect of fixing the crash condition and making sure it doesn't re-occur.

That's where Google's open source Airbag project comes in. According to Google, Airbag is a set of client and server components that implements a crash-reporting system.

(Via Linux Today.)

Free Software's Rottweiler

I've noted before that FSF is changing; Bruce Byfield has noticed too, and written a good summary of what the new FSF has done in 2006 - and what lies in store:

Looking ahead to 2007, [executive director of the FSF] Brown sees only more of the same activism for the FSF. Both the BadVista and Defective By Design campaigns will continue, and he suggests that other campaigns in the coming year will probably focus on hardware drivers for GNU/Linux and software patents.

"It's going to be a busy year," Brown predicts. "2006 was great, but 2007 is going to be huge."

I can't wait.

Against Anti-Anti-Copyright

There's an interesting piece in the Reg by the photojournalist Sion Touhig, entitled "How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer." It's well worth reading, even though I think its attacks on the "anti-copyright lobby" are misguided.

The main problem according to the article seems to be big business taking copyrighted material from the Web, or employing user-generated material without paying for it. Addressing both of these seems a better solution than simply hankering for a past that will never return now that the Web 2.0 genie is out of the bottle.

If photographers can't afford to sue - another problem that needs to be sorted - they can at least name and shame: a central Web site for the purpose would do very nicely. And as for the exploitation of user-generated content, the solution here is education. If people were more aware of the cc licences, and used them, then the situation would be more regulated, if not controlled.

At the end of the day, though, photo-journalists will need to adapt, and find new ways of generating money from their work - maybe quite radical ones - just as we writers have had to adapt over the last decade. Perhaps that's regrettable, but it's also the way things are.

Your (Second) Life Flashes Past You

Although not quite on the level of LWN's comprehensive review of the year, Giff Constable's Second Life timeline is a handy summary of what happened when in undoubtedly crucial year for SL. And for all those getting their knickers in a twist over the issue of SL's user base (you know who you are) he makes an important observation:

There has been a lot of questions and skepticism around the numbers, and retention rates, which Linden Lab estimates around 10% - 15%, but if you just look at concurrent users, a year ago max concurrent users was around 5 thousand. Today it is around 20 thousand, a 300% growth rate, although still a fairly small pond.

I'd underline that this is concurrent users, so the total number in a given day is some multiple of this: if I had to guess, I'd say around six to eight times. This would give an active user base of around 150,000, which is consistent with a 10% retention rate and two million signups.

Let's Go 3D

As perceptive readers of this blog may have noticed, there's been an increasing number of stories about the rise of 3D technologies in computing, particularly in terms of the interface we use. Well, here's another one - a short but well-written piece about the different strategies of Google and Microsoft in this sphere from my favourite news magazine, Der Spiegel. (Via Ogle Earth.)

From ODF to UOF and Back Again

Since both of the ODF and UOF office formats are based on XML, it isn't (theoretically) hard to move between them. Nonetheless, it's good to know that someone has actually put together code to do exactly that:

Peking University recently released a program to convert office documents between OpenDocument Format and the Specification for the Chinese office file format based on XML (UOF for short). Both standards are XML office document standards, UOF being a "National Standard of the People's Republic of China". The converter, which took nearly a year to complete, enables users to convert text, spreadsheet and presentation documents between ODF and UOF.

Why Wireless is Hopeless: Manufacturers are Clueless

Here's a thorough journalistic investigation into why manufacturers of wireless hardware have been less than helpful to the free software world:

Some of the non-responsiveness of manufacturers may just be bad PR work, but the same companies that wouldn't talk to me have also refused to reply to free software programmers who have requested the same information. The impression I got from most of these companies (excepting Intel) was that they were not at all prepared to deal with the issues of firmware redistribution rights and hardware API documentation requests. That they have ignored free software programmers' requests is not necessarily a sign of unwillingness to participate, but perhaps a general sense of confusion as to how they are able to help. No one seems to know whom to talk to at the company, and in some cases the proper documentation may not exist -- or it may belong to yet another company that the hardware manufacturer outsourced the firmware development to.

Open Source Software City: Foundations Laid

I've not mentioned Korea's open source software city before because details seemed rather scarce, and there are, after all, plenty of other cities using open source. Now, thanks to ZDNet Korea, we have something more, er, concrete:

Gwangju was designated as OSS City by Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA) to bring up its economy and competitiveness through IT industry using open source to construct improved infrastructures in city's key industries like opto-electronics, automobile, mobile, and semiconductor.

The project with total cost of $45.7 million in three phases will run from 2006 to 2010. The first phase began in 2006 has completed Information Strategy Planning, surveying applicable open-source areas for the city to install open-source software as a main operating system of their infrastructures. Basing from the findings the open-source solutions were applied to Gwangju Information & Culture Industry Promotion Agency and Jeonnam girl's commercial high school giving channel to produce specialists through education sector.

(Via LXer.)

Thanks a Trillion

The RIAA has done a huge service by taking on the doughty AllofMP3 service.

The December 21 lawsuit argues that 11 million songs were allegedly pirated, and seeks damages totaling $150,000 per violation. That's a $1.65 trillion lawsuit - a value slightly less than the Gross Domestic Product for the United Kingdom in 2005.

Put like that, you realise that RIAA is now certifiably bonkers: a tiny Russian company has caused almost as much financial damage as one of the world's biggest economies to an industry worth at most a few billion dollars? I don't think so.

Virtually Not Shocking at All

Now, why is it that I am not surprised by this result of a virtual recreation of the famous Milgram experiment?

The main conclusion of our study is that humans tend to respond realistically at subjective, physiological, and behavioural levels in interaction with virtual characters notwithstanding their cognitive certainty that they are not real. The specific conclusion of this study is that within the context of the particular experimental conditions described participants became stressed as a result of giving ‘electric shocks’ to the virtual Learner. It could even be said that many showed care for the well-being of the virtual Learner – demonstrated, for example, by their delay in administering the shocks after her failure to answer towards the end of the experiment. To some extent based on previous evidence this was to be expected. In fact, it has even been taken for granted that virtual humans can substitute for real humans when studying the responses of people to a social situation. For example, this was the strategy used in the fMRI study described in [19], where participants passively observed virtual characters gazing at the participants themselves or at other virtual characters. However, no previous experiments have studied what might happen when participants have to actively engage in behaviours that would have consequences for the virtual humans. The evidence of our experiments suggests that presence is maintained and that people do tend to respond to the situation as if it were real.

And people still dismiss Second Life and its ilk as just as "game"....

(Parenthetically, great to see this published on the new PLoS ONE.)

More than Academic?

I'm always a bit sceptical about academic studies of open source, since they tend to tell what you already knew, but five years late and dressed up in obfuscatory language. That said, there seems to be some genuine content in this specimen, entitled "Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla". Worth a quick gander, at least. (Via AC/OS.)

The Mainframe is Dead; Long Live the Mainframe

Interesting:

IBM today announced a mainframe milestone as more than 390 IBM business partners now offer nearly 1,000 applications for System z customers running Linux, a 100 percent increase over the last year. IBM recently reported a 30 percent year-to-year growth of mainframe customers running Linux....

This increase in Linux application development for the mainframe is being driven by a number of factors, including the overwhelming acceptance of partitioned Linux virtual servers -- and the associated great price and performance -- which is driving new workloads on System z.

(Via Enterprise Open Source Magazine.)

Open Source Goes Dutch

More good news from Europe (Via Australia, bizarrely):

The City of Amsterdam said Friday it will spend euro300,000 (US$400,00) testing open source software in two administrative districts in 2000...

City spokeswoman Marjolijn van Goethem said Amsterdam's housing department and one of its borough offices _ Zeeburg _ would test a Linux-based operating system on city computers, and open-source document software, replacing Microsoft Windows and Office.

The nub:

"Earlier this year, a study ordered by the (Amsterdam) city council showed that an 'open' software strategy leads to more independence from suppliers," the city said in a statement. "In addition, the use of open software can lead to better exchange and storage of information, without unacceptable financial or logistical risks."

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

Distro Delight

Beautiful.

A Nobel's Noble Words on the Pharmaceutical Commons

Great piece in the BMJ excoriating greed and stupidity in the pharmaceutical industry:

It is hard to see how the patent issued by the US government for the healing properties of turmeric, which had been known for hundreds of years, stimulated research. Had the patent been enforced in India, poor people who wanted to use this compound would have had to pay royalties to the United States.

And:

In 1995 the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in the establishment of the World Trade Organization, which imposed US style intellectual property rights around the world. These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded. As generic medicines cost a fraction of their brand name counterparts, billions could no longer afford the drugs they needed.

History will not be kind to those behind this disgraceful state of affairs. (Via Slashdot.)

Electric London

Well, London is electric, so it makes sense for local delivery lorries to go electric too. The only questions are (a) what took so long given that milk floats have been doing it for years (as the article above points out)? and (b) why isn't everyone doing this?

Desperately Seeking Search Wikia

It seems appropriate to return to active blogging after hours spent mindlessly tagging old posts (and I hope you lot are grateful) with a mega-story that could well shape the online world next year: Jimmy Wales' planned rival to Google, built on open source technology (Nutch and Lucene), and open source methodology. There's not much more to say at this point, but I predict I (and everyone and his/her dog) will be writing more about it.

Warning: Taggers at Work

As I've noted before, tagging seems to be something people visiting this site find useful. So I've decided to tag all the older posts on this blog that were written before Blogger got around to adding that facility.

Please, therefore, note that most posts that turn up on RSS feeds over the next few days are not really new: do check the date before you get too excited by what is likely to be very old news.

Squeezing the Espresso Book Machine

Printing-on-demand has long been a dream, and the Espresso Book Machine looks like it's making it a reality, albeit on a small scale. But what's interesting about this - aside from the ability to get public domain books printed on the spot - is that it depends on the existence of a knowledge commons. Pity that recent copyright laws are doing their utmost to squeeze that space. (Via Slashdot.)

Kind of Blue

One of the less well-known benefits of creating a commons is that it allows people to experiment with those resources in an unfettered way. This often means that they come up with new and exciting uses that would never have arisen had the underlying material remained enclosed.

A good example is Flickr. This is a tremendous resource, and people just keep on coming up with new ways of using it. The latest is the wonderful Flickr Color Selectr: just chose a colour, and the site will search through Flickr for cc pictures that match it. Not just useful, but highly therapeutic too, for when you're feeling kind of blue.... (Via Creative Commons.)