Is there nothing open source cannot do?Campcaster is the first free and open radio management software that provides live studio broadcast capabilities as well as remote automation in one integrated system.
It comes from Campware (right....); GNU/Linux, GPL'd, in case you were wondering; screenshots here. Amazing.
I swear that free software for pigeon-fanciers can only be a matter of time. (Via tuxmachines.org.)
Just to show that it's not all theoretical:I've now successfully built Second Life from source on both Mac OS X and Ubuntu. The Mac OS X build in Xcode went smoothly. The build in Linux was a little more finicky, but not bad considering that it's still alpha. Read on if you'd like to vicariously live the gory details.
Kudos.
It would be hard to imagine a more definitive study of the field of copyright than this: over 5,500 pages, in seven volumes, occupying 25 in./63 cm of shelf space. Although there are no figures on the weight, these are clearly weighty tomes.
It takes a particular kind of individual to devote seven years of their life to writing such a treatise (and goodness knows how many more acquiring the ability to do so), but the author, Bill Patry, seems to have the perfect biography for the task:Bill Patry is a renowned expert on Copyright Law who currently serves as Senior Copyright Counsel to Google Inc., where he is involved in diverse cutting edge issues. Patry has practiced copyright law for 25 years, 12 years of which have been in private practice, including appellate advocacy. He has been cited numerous times in landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
As a full-time law professor for 5 years and an adjunct for another 5 at the Georgetown University Law Center, Mr. Patry appreciates the importance of teaching and scholarship.
From his eight years in working in the U.S. House of Representatives and Copyright Office, Patry is familiar with the nitty-gritty of legislation and the broader policy issues that Congress deals with. He has testified before Congress, and been retained as an expert witness on numerous occasions.
Patry is the author of numerous law review articles and several books. He also served as editor or editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA for over ten years.
Given the centrality of Patry's expertise for many of the areas covered in this blog - notably open content and open source, to say nothing of intellectual monopolies - and his current position at Google, which allows him a privileged perspective on the online world, I thought it would be interesting to ask him a few questions about his work.
Glyn Moody: As background to yourself, could you say briefly what exactly the Senior Copyright Counsel to Google does - what sort of things do you get involved in that readers might know about?
Bill Patry: Google's legal department is uniquely organized. We have the traditional litigation and transactional lawyers, but we also have "product counsel," counsel who work on particular products, like Books or Videos. We also have policy and government relations lawyers. People tend not to be segregated though, and will work on projects across what in a law firm would be called a department. And that's my role par excellence: I deal with copyright issues wherever they arise.
Glyn Moody: How did the copyright treatise come about - is it something you'd been dreaming of doing for years? Was there any particular inspiration?
Bill Patry: The book started out as a second edition to an earlier work and had I stuck with that, it woudn't have taken so long. But I got into a dispute with my prior publisher, pulled the book, rewrote it almost entirely and expanded it about three fold. My idea was to write a book that drew on all the things I done and to also rethink the way legal treatises are written and used. Blogging has been an important part of that process, making the exchange of ideas interactive and not just one-way.
Glyn Moody: Could you give a few facts and figures about it for those of us who won't have the opportunity to get our hands on the real thing?
Bill Patry: The book is 7 volumes, no appendices, about 5,832 pages, 25 chapters. It is the first new multivolume treatise on copyright law in the U.S. in 17 years, is the largest by almost 100% (in text), and is I think one of the largest legal treatises even written by a single individual.
Glyn Moody: How will the The Patry Treatise Blog function alongside the book? What do you hope to achieve by creating it?
Bill Patry: I have high hopes for the blog as helping in a number of respects. It provides a way for people to give me feedback, suggest things, ask me what I meant etc. All of us have read things and have not been sure what the author meant. We're reluctant to ask the author and it takes time to write letters. With a blog, you can do it quickly, easily, and get very fast answers. I also want to be able to provide readers with important updates before the actual updates come out and to try out concepts.
Glyn Moody: Looking to the future, do you think there will ever be another such hardcopy treatise on copyright, or is this the last one before everything is purely online? Any hope the next one will be free and accessible to all?
Bill Patry: I'm not a futurist; I can't understand the past or present, much less the future.
Glyn Moody: As a copyright scholar, what's your view of Richard Stallman's GNU GPL, which draws its power from copyright? Is there any weakness in the GPL's approach to granting software freedoms from a copyright point of view?
Bill Patry: I met Stallman about 20 years ago, but haven't folllowed him since.
Glyn Moody: What impact do you think Google and its various projects will have on the field of copyright?
Bill Patry: Don't know.
Glyn Moody: From a historical perspective, how important do you think open content and the Creative Commons movement will prove? Are we moving from one copyright era to another? Is the role of copyright changing?
Bill Patry: I think Creative Commons has been wonderful in providing a way for people to license their works as they see fit. Recently, I did a post on the "Long Tail" and its effect on copyright. Copyright is an economic right and it will follow, willingly or not, where the market eventually goes.
Glyn Moody: From a theoretical viewpoint, in the best of all possible worlds, how would copyright evolve to create a legal structure that allows all these new kinds of uses to flourish? Similarly, drawing on your knowledge of copyright in the past and present, how do you think copyright will actually evolve - both in the US, and globally - in the short term and longer term?
Bill Patry: I think copyright has become less and less responsive to the balance of incentives and exceptions that the 18th century English common judges grasped intuitively. Our ability to adapt has been seriously hampered by trade agreements, and that's a big problem.
Glyn Moody: Do you have any words of advice for people like Larry Lessig who are trying to change the legal framework of copyright to allow more sharing and collaboration?
Bill Patry: I have trouble enough figuring out my own problems.
Glyn Moody: Any other comments you'd like to make about your treatise or copyright?
Bill Patry: Please buy it, use it, and give me feedback.
Iris is one of the messengers of the gods. Project Iris is a UK border biometric control system. Make that a failed UK border biometric control system:An evaluation of the Home Office scheme to operate border controls via iris recognition "pretty much fails" Project Iris, according to Tory MP Ben Wallace. Wallace has been doggedly pursuing the results of the evaluation since autumn 2005, and these were quietly placed in the House of Commons library in late December. They reveal, according to Wallace, that Project Iris "failed half its assessments."
I think there's a message here for Tone and his ID card, one of whose utterly foolproof biometric control systems was, er, iris recognition.
I'm afraid this is proprietary for the moment, but the idea's clearly generalisable:Skyhook Wireless Inc....today announced at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that ReignCom, a Korean manufacturer of media devices, will launch the Wi-Fi enabled iriver W10 portable media player with the Wi-Fi Positioning System from Skyhook Wireless. This device will be the first commercially available media player with location awareness...
The iriver W10 media player is designed for the 'urban explorer.' At a slim 14 mm thick, the iriver W10 comes loaded with full-function multimedia capability. The Wi-Fi Positioning System provides accurate location information by detecting Wi-Fi access points in range and comparing them against a database of geo-located points. Unlike GPS or cell tower systems, the WPS works indoors and in dense urban areas. Not only can a W10 user listen to music, watch movies, or play games on the go, but can also navigate and retrieve information about what is around them.
If for nothing else, Denmark is notable for two things: Hamlet, and being the seat of the Microsoft's largest European development division. This makes the question of openness a real political hot potato. If you've ever wondered how the drama is unfolding in said country - and admit it, you have often wondered - here's a handy history from John Gøtze.
Here's an interesting idea:Use Linux or Microsoft Windows, the open source sndpeek program, and a simple Perl script to read specific sequences of tonal events -- literally whistling, humming, or singing at your computer -- and run commands based on those tones. Give your computer a short low whistle to check your e-mail or unlock your your screensaver with the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Whistle while you work for higher efficiency.
(Via LXer.)
An interesting post from Douglas Rushkoff:There's a relatively new phenomenon occurring online these days - an illusion of populist group hostilitiy I've come to call "Sock Mobs," after the "sock puppets" people use to feign multiple identities in online conversations. It works like this:
An anonymous poster picks a fight with his presumed enemy. Whether or not that enemy responds, a number of other posters appear to chime in - agreeing to whatever the accusation might be. "This guy is a commie." "This doctor is a quack." "This guy wants Israel to be abolished." "This professor is corrupting college students." The accusation comes along with twisted supporting evidence. Every once in a while, an underinformed but real person agrees with the accusations; after all, it appears from the posts that this enemy of all things good and proper really might be a threat. All this makes it look like there's a lot of upset people.
(Via Smart Mobs.)
iPhone? We don't need no stinkin' iPhone. We need this:OpenMoko today announced the immediate availability of a completely integrated open source mobile communications platform in partnership with FIC, a world leader in motherboards, graphics cards, mobile solutions, and electronic devices. The announcement of the OpenMoko mobile communications platform coincides with the unveiling of FIC’s Neo1973 smartphone, which utilizes the full OpenMoko platform and will be available in January 2007.
Until now, mobile platforms have been proprietary and scattered. With the release of OpenMoko, which is based on the latest Linux open source efforts, developers now have an easy way to create applications and deliver services that span all users and provide a common “look and feel”. OpenMoko also offers common storage models and libraries for application developers, making writing applications for mobile phones fun and easy while guaranteeing swift proliferation of a wide range of applications for mobile phones. With such extremely high quality open frameworks, developers will be armed with exactly the tools they need to revolutionize the mobile industry.
(Via LWN.net.)
Open source client, and now this: After Rosedale's portion ended with an Electric Sheep Company produced Machinima featuring Star Trek Fans, Moonves announced that would be partnering to build a Star Trek environment within Second Life.
Second Life is clearly unstoppable....
You know you're a geek... when you're running Cat5 cable in the bathroom:Yes, that's Cat-5, and it's everywhere in this place. Everything in the new bathroom is going to be computer controlled or sensed, and I mean *everything*. The window winders will be electric, as will the curtains. Sensors will include ambient light, humidity, temperature, motion, door position, toilet flush, water flow, flowing water temperature, bath water temperature, and anything else I can think of. There won't be a single electrical item cabled in the usual way with a manual switch in line with the device: everything other than basic power points is cabled from a central termination point where it can be computer controlled, and switches themselves are replaced with home-made touch sensitive control surfaces that communicate via Cat-5 back to the automation controller.
Which will run Linux, of course.
(Via The Inquirer.)
John Battelle calls search engines "databases of intentions"; in this respect the top ten lists of queries say a lot about us. Interesting, then, to compare the top Western engine with the leading site for the East - Google vs Baidu.
Here's the Google list for "What?"
1. what is hezbollah
2. what is carisoprodol
3. what is acyclovir
4. what is alprazolam
5. what is tramadol
6. what is ajax
7. what is hydrocodone
8. what is vicodin
9. what is xenical
10. what is xanax
1. What is love?
2. What is the Long March spirit?
3. What is a blog?
4. What is dual-core?
5. What is 3G?
6. What is harmonious society?
7. What are futures? (stocks)
8. What is a trojan horse? (software)
9. What is happiness?
10. What is an ecosystem?
I've never really had the urge to hack on the Linux kernel (not least because I am the world's worst programmer - Fortran, anyone?) but if I did, I'd certainly be using Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linux Kernel in a Nutshell. To both his and O'Reilly's credit, you can download a copy (cc licence), but obviously buying one would be a good idea, too, for all the obvious reasons.
No, not that one, this one:Sandia National Laboratories’ 8960-processor Thunderbird Linux cluster, developed in collaboration with Dell, Inc. and Cisco, maintained its sixth position in the Top500 Supercomputers by achieving an improved overall performance of 53.0 teraflops, an 18.5 percent increase in efficiency from last year's performance.
(Via Technocrat.)
Blige, I thought, Mikey's seen the light:In a speech today at the Consumer Electronics Show here, Mr. Dell urged the electronics industry to foster the planting of trees in order to offset the impact of their devices’ energy consumption on the environment.
Bless yer, guvnor, you're a gent.
Oh, but wait:He said Dell, the computer company he founded, would begin a program called “Plant a Tree for Me,” asking customers to donate $2 for every notebook computer they buy and $6 for every desktop PC. The money would be given to the Conservation Fund and the Carbonfund, two nonprofit groups that promote ways to reduce or offset carbon emissions, to buy and plant trees.
...
Dell intends to cover the administrative costs of the program. Mr. Dell was not able to estimate those costs.
I see: Mike Dell thinks planting trees to offset the energy that computers consume is such a great idea he's asking his customers to pay for it. Of course, it's not that Dell's company causes any damage to the environment independent of the energy its computers use.
But there again, I suppose poor old Mikey couldn't really afford to put his hand in his own pocket since he is getting a bit short of a bob or two, now that he's down to his last $17 billion.
Who is this Steve Jobs whereof they speak? I just don't get the mindless adulation of this person (try reading "The Journey is the Reward" to get some perspective).
Take the iPhone: a large mobile phone that has the whizzo idea of making the screen - the most vulnerable part - cover the entire surface, so that it will get scratched to kingdom come in about a week in most people's pockets (remember the iPod Nano saga?).
I suppose it will drive a huge aftermarket in phone protectors: maybe all the Jobs fanboys sell third-party add-ons to his products.
More signs of the times:Disney CEO Bob Iger showed off the revamped Disney.com during his CES keynote yesterday, but there was little "hard news" on offer—except for the announcement that Disney is bringing its hottest properties into the virtual realm. Iger announced that the company would launch a massively multiplayer Pirates of the Caribbean later this year.
And
James Cameron, the director whose “Titanic” set a record for ticket sales around the world, will join 20th Century Fox in tackling a similarly ambitious and costly film, “Avatar,” which will test new technologies on a scale unseen before in Hollywood, the studio and the filmmaker said on Monday.
...
The film, with a budget of about $200 million, is an original science fiction story that will be shown in 3D even in conventional theaters. The plot pits a human army against an alien army on a distant planet, bringing live actors and digital technology together to make a large cast of virtual creatures who convey emotion as authentically as humans.
It seems hard to believe, but if Peter Suber, Mr Open Access, says so, it must be true:Open Access Research is a new peer-reviewed OA journal sponsored by the Georgia State University Library. It's the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to OA itself.
News that the US's official eavesdropper, the National Security Agency, has had a hand in Vista is going to go down really well with the governments of China, Russia, India, etc. etc.: For the first time, the giant software maker is acknowledging the help of the secretive agency, better known for eavesdropping on foreign officials and, more recently, U.S. citizens as part of the Bush administration's effort to combat terrorism. The agency said it has helped in the development of the security of Microsoft's new operating system -- the brains of a computer -- to protect it from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers.
Interestingly:Novell, which sells a Linux-based operating system, also works with government agencies on software security issues, spokesman Bruce Lowry said in an e-mail, "but we're not in a position to go into specifics of the who, what, when types of questions."
But at least you can look at the code to find out what they did - unlike with Vista.... (Via The Inquirer.)
I wrote recently about the goings-on at the Council of the European Union, and their strange reason for not supporting GNU/Linux users. But now, it seems, everything has been explained:The European Union has blamed a translation mistake for its claim that it cannot legally support Linux.
Oh, that's OK, then. But, er, what exactly happened?A spokesman for the Council of the EU, the Union's representative body, told ZDNet UK: "It was originally written in French, and the French version has no such statement. So it is a mistake."
Hm: the statement didn't exist, and then a "translation error" made it come into existence? How odd. But wait, there's more:The spokesman explained that the service was only fully launched in September, and there was a need to get the service up and running, even if that meant not supporting all operating systems. He also said there was a cost, and complexity, of supporting additional operating systems such as Linux. And he added: "If we change, it is not only for Linux, we would have to open up to all open sources."
Now, hang on a minute: supporting GNU/Linux just means making RealAudio feeds available, since these can be played by open source systems as well as on proprietary systems. That's one more format, not an infinitude of "open sources" - just like many Web sites provide.
This is beginning to get fishier than the EU's fisheries policy....
One of the most important shifts in science at the moment is towards dealing with the digital deluge. Whether in the field of genomics, particle physics or astronomy, science is starting to produce data in not just gigabytes, or even terabytes, but petabytes, exabytes and beyond (zettabytes, yottabytes, etc.).
Take the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for starters:The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a proposed ground-based 8.4-meter, 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night. In a relentless campaign of 15 second exposures, LSST will cover the available sky every three nights, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The superb images from the LSST will also be used to trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the distortions in their shapes produced by lumps of Dark Matter, providing multiple tests of the mysterious Dark Energy.
How much data?Over 30 thousand gigabytes (30TB) of images will be generated every night during the decade-long LSST sky survey.
Or for those of you without calculators, that's 10x365x30x1,000,000,000,000 bytes, roughly 100 petabytes. And where there's data, there's also information; and where there's information...there's Google:Google has joined a group of nineteen universities and national labs that are building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
...
"Partnering with Google will significantly enhance our ability to convert LSST data to knowledge," said University of California, Davis, Professor and LSST Director J. Anthony Tyson. "LSST will change the way we observe the universe by mapping the visible sky deeply, rapidly, and continuously. It will open entirely new windows on our universe, yielding discoveries in a variety of areas of astronomy and fundamental physics. Innovations in data management will play a central role."
(Via C|net.)
If, like me, you're a fan of PubMed Central, and you live in Europe, here's some good news: UK PubMed Central has just opened, providing a local mirror. And if you're not yet a fan, do take a look at the large and growing holdings of biomedical titles, many of them fully open access. Here's what the press release says:Initially UKPMC mirrors the American PubMed Central database (hosted by the NCBI at NIH). From today, UK scientists will also be able to submit their research outputs for inclusion in UKPMC. Through 2007, and beyond, the partners will develop innovative tools for UKPMC to further support biomedical research. In this way, UKPMC will grow into a unique online resource representing the UK’s biomedical research output.
(Via Open Access News.)
Fantastic news: Linden Lab has released the source code for the Second Life client under the GNU GPL v2. Nice historical context, too:In 1993, NCSA released their liberally licensed, but proprietary, Mosaic 2.0 browser with support for inline images arguably heralding the start of the web as we know it today. In an act of either acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation, Netscape Communications released the bulk of the Netscape Communicator code base to form the foundation of projects as Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.
We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.
Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.
This is a great move by the Lindens, and a major step towards an open, standards-based virtual world. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. Sad, though, to see the deeply ignorant comments on the Linden Lab blog post lamenting this move because of the increased griefing they claim it will cause - as if security by obscurity ever worked.
Coders of the (virtual) world, unite!
People often ask: "but what's Second Life for?" Maybe this is the answer:IBM, which recently set up a business group to explore possibilities in virtual worlds — and earmarked millions of dollars for the effort — is now bringing mega-retailer Sears to the virtual world of Second Life in a project to be announced today, 8 January, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
...
each of the floors will present different possibilities for taking advantage of a 3D online world like Second Life for showing off Sears products and giving consumers more functionality than they could get from a flat Web page.
...
The plan is to allow a customer to import their own kitchen design to the virtual space, fit it out with Sears products, and be able to move around in it as they would a real kitchen in order to get a feel for how the products would work in their kitchen at home.
Visionary stuff indeed.
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