Tekniken på internet

Toksnyggt. Innehålls- och presentationsmässigt. Dagsaktuellt.Står alla våra beslutsfattare stadigt på dessa grunder?

I use a Macbook as my main machine. Also have a Mac in the basement to to heavy lifting of photo editing. And the kitchen-computer is a Mac. But there is also a Vista box down there in the basement that still holds many years of windows formatted data. And an Ubuntu laptop. And my son’s got a Linux box with Tuxpaint, too.

Most of these computers don’t move around much but the Macbook occasionally (daily!) travells to work. And sometimes I need to share files in smaller contexts, such as when working with Teldok20 or with my choir. Or when visiting my folks to patch their computer.

Nothing large, no enterprise requirements. Simple file sharing. In some of these scenarios, some of the time, it would be swell to have seamless cloud storage. It seems, according to Ars, that dropbox delivers. I am going to try. Macbook and Linux laptop are up, and an invitation is sent out to one trusted sceptical friend. Would he rather that we use  ‘da drupal’? Ars has an answer to why Dropbox might be a better alternative. I don' know yet.

The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte

Wow. So many take-aways from the interview with this gentleman who is in charge of open source and open standards at Sun.

“How did it happen that we got proprietary software in the first place? It was an unintended consequence. IBM had to start witholding source code in order to comply with the court’s consent decree.” (Anti-trust suit brought in 1969, verdict in 1983.)

“When you create a system, you inevitably create the game that plays it.”

“How do you monetize in the open source world? You charge at the point where the user finds value, rather than at the promise of value, which is the old proprietary model.” (For this particular quote, 28 minutes into the 70 minutes long interview.)

But mostly Simon, Leo and Randall talk on the issues of transparency, privacy, secrecy and the inevitalble coming of communities around Open Source.

I will edit this post, or follow up with more posts on this tremendously important topic, as soon as I’ve found time to dig deeper into Sinom’s writings and doings.

/peter

Unthinkable Futures

• Computer screens (both CRT and flat screens) are found to be dangerous to the health. Working at a computer is viewed as a toxic job. 

I used to work at a management consaltancy (Sifo Management Group - SMG - folded in 2003) specializing in scenario planning. Scenario planning was born in Silicon Valley and Eno/Kelly were often part of the creative team. In this article Kelly re-publishes an excercise in challanging probabilities:

This list of unthinkable futures -- probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking -- was published 15 years ago in the Summer, 1993  issue of Whole Earth Review. Our intent was less  to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual future would be. 

Social Graph API: One small step for Google, one giant step for the Internet Operating System

 But a real platform service makes it possible for developers to do things entirely outside the realm of the originating provider's application. Unlike OpenSocial, which I found disappointing, the Google Social Graph API is a game-changing play in the social networking space. It's a huge step towards open standards and a level playing field in smart social apps, and exposes Google's data and infrastructure in a subtle and powerful way. I can't wait to see what comes next!

Pat MethenyI’ve only sat in line waiting for Good tickets a few times, and every time it was when Pat came to town. On his homepage he gives us a podcast with the inside word on all of his records to date. Terrific. Why don’t more musicians do this?