Dan Steingart of City College taught a 2 hour introduction to batteries, we had 25+, standing room only after announcing it less than a week before. so I guess this is a hot topic! Watch our classes page for upcoming hands on battery workshops.
You can download the slides from Dan Steingert here:
ResistorBatteryTalkAugust2010
Wow. You almost never see a debate as good as the one below when it comes to copyright (indeed, when it comes to any topic). Most discussions about copyright flounder in the very definitions of terms: "Unauthorized copying is theft!" "No it's not!" "But they're stealing the money they never paid me!" "If they didn't agree to pay it to you, how can they steal it from you?". And so on.
That's why it's such a pleasure to see a debate about non-commercial restrictions in licensing where both sides have clearly thought deeply about the issues and are careful to stay intellectually honest even while disagreeing. Recently, author Cory Doctorow and animation artist Nina Paley conducted a long email exchange about the Creative Commons "noncommercial" licenses versus the Creator Endorsed Mark. Afterwards, Nina edited down their discussion and posted it, with Cory's permission. Both the discussion and the readers' comments afterwards are well worth a look. I wish all discussions could be like theirs.
blog.ninapaley.com/2010/09/01/paley-vs-doctorow
kfogel | QuestionCopyright.org | September 02, 2010 10:44 PM
NYC Resistor will be hosting a MakerBot build party today (Thursday, September 2nd) during craft night from 6 to 10 pm.
Calling all NYC MakerBot operators! We’re building a bot farm and we need your help! Today (Thursday, September 2nd) at NYC Resistor (map) we are throwing a build party. The goal: assemble three MakerBots in four hours. Drinks and snacks will be provided.
A bot farm is a group of MakerBots available to a group of people ready to print whatever is wished. We would love to print more of the great things popping up on Thingiverse, but here at the bot cave our machines are mostly used for developing future hardware and software. To increase the awesome we need to increase the number of bot hours available for printing. We need more bots and we need your help building them.
Everyone is encouraged to attend. There will be three or more kits for assembly. Just let us know you came for the build party and we’ll get you started on a task. If you’re thinking about buying a Cupcake CNC, this is a great opportunity to experience the build process. Feel free to bring your own MakerBot and work along with us. Several MakerBot employees will be in attendance, building bots and ready to help. We’re looking forward to seeing you there.
Charles Edward Pax | NYC Resistor | September 02, 2010 02:30 PM
nylug-announce August 2010 Archive | September 01, 2010 03:23 AM
In my endless attempt to explain what's wrong with Creative Commons' "non-commercial" and "no derivatives" restrictions, I came across this 2005 article by Benjamin Mako Hill:
Free Software's fundamental document is Richard Stallman's Free Software Definitions (FSD) [3]. At its core, the FSD lists four freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose;
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs;
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits;
...For the CC founders and many of CC's advocates, FOSS's success is a source of inspiration. However, despite CC's stated desire to learn from and build upon the example of the free software movement, CC sets no defined limits and promises no freedoms, no rights, and no fixed qualities. Free software's success is built upon an ethical position. CC sets no such standard.
This has led to a proliferation of harmful and incompatible CC-NC and CC-ND licensed works, mistakenly labeled "Free." Mako Hill points out that while Creative Commons pursued its goal of "Balance, compromise, and moderation," it failed to define or defend any core freedoms. Indeed, there seems to be no concern about what the "Free" in Free Culture means. To most it means, "slightly less restrictive than modern copyright." Even so, most CC licenses are more restrictive than pre-1970's copyright (because modern copyright's extended terms and more draconian punishments for infringements still apply).
Fortunately the Four Freedoms of Free Software easily apply to Culture:
- the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
- the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
- the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
- the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works
That's not so hard, is it?
Ironically I was arguing with Richard Stallman last month about the Free Software Foundation's use of -ND licenses on its cultural works. A film they sponsored, Patent Absurdity, has "no derivatives" restrictions even though it could be greatly improved by editing, and clips could be highly beneficial in other works. Freedom #4 FAIL. Even the FSF fails to apply the Four Freedoms to Culture!
Software IS culture. Many in the Free Software Movement draw a false distinction between "utility" and "aesthetics," claiming software is useful and culture is just pretty or entertaining. But you never know how a cultural work might prove useful to someone else down the line. If you treat it as non-useful, and restrict it to prevent other uses, then of course it won't be useful - you've restricted its utility through an unFree license.
The Free Software community needs to learn that Software is Culture. The Free Culture community needs to learn that Free is Free.
FREE. CULTURE. It’s not so hard.
Cross-posted from ninapaley.com.
ninapaley | QuestionCopyright.org | August 31, 2010 07:36 PM
So I’m back from a wonderful couple of days of hanging out with the Kickstarter team near the beach. I managed to rent a surfboard and catch a couple of waves too. During a margarita-induced what-if-session, someone encouraged me to try and auto-generate some blurbs from the Kickstarter homepage. These are typically 150-200 character descriptions of projects that our community team labors over and refreshes daily.
Since I had worked with Markov Chains for Dan Shiffman’s class “Programming A to Z” at ITP and had done two projects using them: ROBODRUDGE (autogenerated Matt Drudge Headlines) and The Rutabaga (an April Fools Joke that Google was attempting to compete with The Onion by using auto-generated news headlines), they seemed like an obvious place to start. I found Eric Hodel’s Markov Chain ruby code readily usable and went from there.
To give some background to Markov Chains: the basic principle is to use probability to auto-generate new sequences based off old patterns. Sometimes these sequences can be numerical, sometimes they’re musical, and sometimes they’re characters and words.
An example of exquisite corpse from Wikipedia.
Another way to think of Markov chains is as a computer’s attempt to play Equisite Corpse: it is fed a certain amount of existing information and then it attempts to extrapolate a similar pattern. A classic example is to feed a Markov Chain Engine Shakespeare; not only is it readily available in raw text and in the public domain, but Markov Chain generated Shakespeare looks strikingly similar to the real thing (thanks to Jim’s Random Notes for the work):
If they in thou, thy love, that old,
Thought, that which yet do the heat did excess
My love concord never saw my woeful taste
At ransoms you for that so unprovident:
For thereby beauty show’st I am fled,
Althoughts to the dead, that care
With should thus shall by their fair,
Where too much my jade,
Her loves, my heart.vs.
I pulled down a document with a majority of the text that Kickstarter has used to blurb projects on the homepage. Below is a subset of an almost infinite list of hilarious and sometimes disturbing auto-generated project blurbs:
Most represent composites of parts from two or three different project blurbs, and I’ve also tried to remove the ones that weren’t modified at all (sometimes MCEs just spit out unmodified sentences). I think part of the reason these work so well is because the original blurbs end up conforming to a particular style of quippy, short descriptions structured around rewards and project topics.
nylug-announce August 2010 Archive | August 30, 2010 01:42 PM
We talk a lot about hardware here at BookLiberator, it is what we spend most of our time on after all, but it is time to shine a light on the software behind the scenes that turns our page images into beautifully produced “book” collections. That software comes in two parts, scantailor, written by Joseph Artsimovich and djvubind, written by strider1551 of DIYBookScanner.
Scantailor takes the page images from your camera’s memory card:
and turns them into nicely cropped, rotated, and white balanced images like this:
Djuvubind takes all of those individual images, stitches them together, and compresses that into a very tiny book in the djvu format. I have 1400 page academic books that are now pleasantly readable 10 MB files thanks to this combination of Scantailor and Djvubind.
All of this happens automatically. For each of those 1400 page books all I had to do was 1) rotate the first two pages, 2) hit “Go” for auto crop, 3) draw a box around the few pictures so that their full resolution would be preserved in the final output, 4) run djvubind.
Very simple, very easy. When djvubind, which is less than two weeks old, gets the last kinks out, it will be possible to use the same 4 steps to get a tiny book full of beautiful page images which also has a layer of OCR embedded for text searching.
For anyone who has been waiting to get into personal book scanning until the software develops, wait no more.
Crossposted with churchkey.org
I'm proud to announce that we now have a simple interface for editing and translating lessons on wikiotics.org! This is some great work by Jim that lets us get on with the fun part, making and playing with lessons.
If you have a minute, take a look at our example lesson (in English) and play around. The "edit" button at the top will let you change the text and pictures that are there, add new text and picture pairs, or rearrange the existing materials however you want.
That intro lesson already exists in Spanish and Chinese. If you know another language, just use the "copy" button at the top to move the English version to a new location, say "Portuguese_-_Introduction" and edit those English sentences away!
As always, have fun and please feel free to correct the existing translations, find more appropriate pictures for the sentences, add new material, or any other kind of tinkering you enjoy.
More information is available at our Contribute page and all our existing lessons are recorded in this handy list
Crossposted with drumbeat
I'm realizing that if I'm going to be a media wonk, I'm going to have to learn to navigate a new set of conferences and publication venues. At a colloquium this evening, Professors mentioned a few variables related to strategies for networking, creating panels, and filling the CV, as well as the following institutions. I'd like to annotate and order them according to relevance once I'm more informed.
Organizations
Journals
Disciplinary News
In addition, it's recommended that one join the ECCR mailist.
Given my interest in collaboration, I often enjoy hearing people's stories about their workplace. My friend Ann was telling me about a clever colleague who is concerned about making the best use of meeting time. Much like the Dave Chapelle comedy skit in which he has an Oscar award-like "wrap it up" box that plays music to signal time is up, her colleague distributed signs to the meeting participants. (Also reminding me of buzzword bingo.) The signs, with Ann's annotations, are as follows:
I expect this also has the potential to offend, but when I asked, Ann said that the signs were well received. When I worked at the W3C we used the IRC channel in a similar way sometimes. However, given that I am somewhat suspect of laptops at meetings, I am quite intrigued by this meat-space protocol.
Why, do you ask, am I suspect of laptops at meetings? I am sympathetic to the philosophy that if you are going to give your time to something, give it your full attention, or do something else. I know this is quite counter to the multi-tasking culture we are enmeshed in now, but I think it is effective. At the W3C, I don't think computer usage was an issue because we made effective use of our technological tools, and there is a culture, and set of personalities, that permitted people to say, quite brashly, is this discussion the best use of our time, what is the next agenda item, etc.?
Similarly, on the BBC version of The Office, when the petty and officious Gareth Keenan insists that Tim cannot raise an issue because it was not placed on the agenda, I was sympathetic -- evidence of what I jokingly refer to as my fascist-like tendencies in group dynamics. I have found a good way to encourage a useful meeting is to ensure that people are somewhat prepared and that the facilitator has a good sense of the issues at hand and how much time they will likely take to resolve.
What other interesting, funny, or effective folk meeting protocols are out there?
I am leaving for Ireland tonight, first to attend this Anthropology conference in Maynooth–a seemingly sleepy college town– and then on the 28th I head to Dublin to hang with a very good friend of mine. I plan on doing some travel and sightseeing in and around Dublin, so if anyone has any suggestions about what they love, love, love about Dublin (and anywhere within a few hours of Dublin), they are welcome. Dato is going to help me gather some Debian folks for an evening out as well, so I look forward to seeing anyone in town!
For anyone who has wondered whether patents actually help the economy, take a look at Facebook’s recent $40 million dollar purchase of 18 patents on social networking.
Let’s take a look at this situation for a moment. To start with, we should remember that Friendster was sold just last year for $37 million dollars, three million less than the patents alone have now sold for. We should also recognize that these patents are themselves little particles of nonsense. They are government granted monopolies on people making friends because, for instance, they have a friend in common. Friendster patented that. Essentially they took someone’s notebook from an Intro to Sociology class, scribbled “with a computer” in the margins next to each main idea, and sent it to the patent office as 18 different “inventions”.
Most importantly, we need to realize what $40 million is worth. Friendster was in independent operation from 2002 to 2009. That means the patents ended up generating almost $6 million dollars a year, more than then the entire company’s revenue for 2005 (other year’s numbers are harder to find but I’d welcome any pointers in the comments).
Given these facts, what was the economically rational thing for Friendster to do: run a large internet company providing services to 1.5+ million users, with all the server farms, bandwidth deals, administrators, marketers, executives, and developers entailed in running such an operation, or pay people to sit around all day and figure out how to add “with a computer” to novel ideas like “making friends”? One of those activities is generally considered economically productive, but it is the other, the nonsense factory model that ended up making more money.
If patents had never existed, Friendster would still have run their business, had their successes and failures, and passed on their techniques to the next generation of social network companies. Facebook, as one of those more successful companies, would still have $40 million dollars available for doing actual work like paying engineers to improve the features and capabilities of today’s social networking technologies, rather than having to pay their profits backwards in time to avoid being sued over nonsense. I don’t think it is nonsense to say that, in that world, we’d all be better off.
This is one of the best descriptions for utopia I have come across. You may not be able to reach it–and it is good to know this–but it can certainly inspire movement, action, and lead at times to a better, even if not perfect, world.
She’s on the horizon… I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking. — Eduardo Galeano
In early 2007 I attended a talk at Fordham Law School by William Barr, the former US Attorney General and current Verizon General Counsel and Executive Vice President. The premise of his talk was that regulation, of the network neutrality kind, would only hurt technological innovation in the broadband and Internet space.
A lot of has changed since then, and now that Google and Verizon have stuck a deal purportedly threatening the openness of the future of the web, I thought I’d revisit some of my thoughts from that night as well as muse about what this deal might mean and why its happening now.
During his lecture Barr attempted to point out that there had never been an instance of a telecommunications company violating the terms of network neutrality, so why would they begin now? Out of nowhere, from behind me, someone shouted “What about Madison River?” That person was Tim Wu, who I didn’t personally know at the time, but who would later become a friend of mine. Tim had interrupted Barr to remind him aboutMadison River where a local telecom had blocked VoIP connections for broadband subscribers because the telephone company didn’t want to compete with inexpensive internet telephony. It was precisely the kind of violation of network neutrality that Barr was claiming could never have happened. Barr dismissed Madison River as an isolated incident which didn’t represent the overall policy of non-discrimination by the telecom industry.
Later in the lecture, Barr tried to envision an industry closely regulated by the FCC in order to uphold network neutrality. This would be a world that Barr thought no one would want: innovation would peter out as businesses would face a high barrier of entry in the form of regulations. Conversely, if corporations had the opportunity to really invest in research and development without the fear of future regulatory action, then they might come up with services and tech that would be even better than TCP/IP. Barr believed that it was naive for us to blindly accept that TCP/IP was the best we were going to get for transferring data and communications over a network. Who is to say Verizon or AT&T couldn’t come up with a better protocol? TCP/IP has plenty of performance issues (real time synchronous voice communication was a huge challenge), so why not let Verizon innovate at the protocol level, and sure, maybe they’d prioritize some kind of traffic, but it would be for the benefit of technological innovation. Just think of all the potentially amazing applications they’d could come up with if the FCC just left the innovation to Verizon’s R&D lab instead of the open internet and the public?
Just say no to walled gardens.
During the question and answer period, I asked Barr why he thought that consumers wanted more walled gardens of content, and whether it was wise to assume the market was going to support another set of AOLs, Compuserves and Prodigys? He replied that of course they consumers wanted better content — video on handheld devices was going to be the future and the telecoms were going to be the only companies who could deliver it. I insisted that consumers only really want the internet in their pockets and that he was kidding himself if he thought a curated walled garden on a handset would be nearly as appealing as an actual functional web browser (something no mobile company had delivered yet).
In a sense we were both wrong and we were both right. Consumers did want mobile video on demand, but they also wanted the entire open web in a functional experience.
Prior to Barr’s lecture Verizon had announced a half-baked partnership with YouTube which would offer limited and selected versions of YouTube videos for watching on handheld devices. Then, a couple of months later, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone which would have even greater support for YouTube. Verizon was banking on curated portals inside hobbled handsets, and Apple had just bet the farm on the touchscreen and a mobile Safari browser. We know who won this battle. Does anyone ever talk about watching YouTube on their 3 year old cell phone any more? Does anyone even remember the partnership?
Why Verizon and none of the other telecoms never fully invested in a serious mobile browsing experience is best explained by their general hostility to the open web. The big telecoms have always loathed the net, whether it was manifest in an engineering snobbery towards the “dumbness” of TCP/IP or the fact that the net worked best when it treated their products not like products at all but like common utilities, something no company wants. So it has never been surprising that the telecommunications industry never bothered to create a real mobile browsing experience; they were too eager to strike Big Deals with Exclusive Providers of Proprietary Content than supply an actual connection to the open web.
Steve Jobs, to his credit, saw the opportunity to serve consumers what they really wanted, and he and Apple have since been handsomely rewarded for creating a mobile browsing experience worth using. Google’s choice to freely offer Android was a brilliant bit of strategy: all of the telecommunications firms and handset manufacturers were panicking and desperate to compete with Apple’s iPhone, so why not give supply them what they wanted?
So now Verizon and Google are making an uneasy deal behind the FCC’s back and trying to assuage the FCC and the public that they’re really doing it in the name of technological innovation. Think about all the applications that could exist if we didn’t have to rely on the Internet! Healthcare Monitoring! The Smart Grid! Advanced educational services! Incredible entertainment and gaming options! These are all ghosts of walled gardens past and there’s no reason to believe that a competitive startup can’t supply these exact services over the open web.
The wireless component of the Google/Verizon deal is the biggest wild card and the most controversial aspect of their joint policy proposal. The two companies argue that the principles of network neutrality shouldn’t apply in the wireless space. I couldn’t agree less. The telecoms have demonstrated very little capacity for innovation in the wireless space in the last 15 years (why is it so hard to develop SMS applications? why is Google voice such a pain to reconfigure as my voicemail? etc.), so why would we trust them now?
Ultimately, why shouldn’t the principles of common carriage and network neutrality apply to the wireless space? Because its too difficult? Too expensive? I don’t buy it. What the wireless space needs now is faster and cheaper TCP/IP service and a more open application infrastructure. Negotiating one off deals for new channels and services will only remind us of Compuserve circa 1999.
Lessig, Crawford and Wu have a good post about the proposal, but also read Jonathan Zittrain’s thoughts on it here too.
If you were going to build your own diy manufacturing facility for making almost anything, what would you have in it? Here's my list!
Ok, so the total comes to $5459! Yarr! That is a super cheap and fabulous laboratory!
If I was in a hurry, I'd probably get an Epilog Zing laser instead of wait for the lasersaur, although once the lasersaur arrives on the market it's going to open up laser cutting for the masses.
I believe you can make almost anything with the above stuff. And so I throw down the challenge! What changes would you make to this list! What would you add to the DIY Fablab list? What are the cheapest options that offer the biggest opportunities for creativity? I challenge you to make your own list filled with the most powerful inexpensive tools for your own fabulous laboratory! What would you add/change?
Photo: Tesla... just chilling and reading a book with a tesla coil in his workshop. I should probably add one of those to the list, right?
I was in Detroit for Maker Faire and my buddy Jeff Sturges gave me a tour of Detroit. There is creativity, resourcefulness and great things happening. There's also poverty, 40% unemployment and 20% of the folks there graduate high school. It's a place ripe for change and the people who are there building up infrastructure for awesome are doing some really interesting things like starting farms on abandoned city blocks.
We stand today at the brink of a cyborg revolution. We’ve been implanting little machines (e.g. pacemakers) in people to improve on their natural states for a while now, but more and more the machines keep shrinking and their uses keep growing. Every day, more and more people are becoming less and less human.
This is exciting!
It’s also scary. There are two main ways to make software: You can go closed source and get code riddled with bugs because only a few people ever saw any given section of code. Or you can write your code in the open source way, which has proven to reliably generate the most robust software around. I don’t know about you, but I’d want my pacemaker to be described by words like “robust” and “reliable” rather than “bug-riddled”.
The cyborg revolution is just beginning. It started with remedial implantable medical devices and minor (cosmetic) enhancements, but real enhancements like cochlear implants are here and poised to explode. As the chips gets smaller and faster, we’re going to keep finding new ways to stick them inside people. You can read more about why the coming golden age of cyborg tech needs to be open and free in an article by Karen Sandler of SFLC, who is a cyborg herself and knows what she’s talking about.
Gale Brewer, Former Chair of the New York City Council Committee on Technology will be speaking at Debian Day on Sunday, August 1 at 4PM. Gale has been a great friend to those of us who prize freedom in technology, and has used her office to do things like pressure the city to release governmental data and preserve net neutrality. She’s going to give us the view from the trenches, and I’m excited to hear what she has to say.
If you want to hear her speak, come to Debian Day. Registration is free.
Ian and I demoed our design-complete prototype for Forbes, and they did a good writeup on the device. This will help get the word out. Tell your friends, warn your enemies: Book Liberator is coming, and it will scan your books!
Last week I attended the second half of the US Social Forum – not exactly a conference, but more of a convergence or a process, where 20,000 people gathered in Detroit to build coalitions, alliances, and movements. The World Social Forum began as a response to the World Economic Forum – Why should the power elite be the only ones planning humanity’s future?!?
The USSF web site and the People’s Media Center (made possible by some righteous radical techies, the Design Action Collective, riseup.net, and May First/People Link) should give you a flavor of what the event was all about. But, be aware that the streaming video and social media barely scratches the surface of the experience.
The forum is organized around 2-hour long workshops, and over 100, 4-hour long People’s Movement Assembly’s. The sessions were in depth and quite intensive. The format is designed to encourage small group interactions and for people to connect and get to know each other.
The assemblies were geared around crafting resolutions and actions – I attended parts of the transformative justice and healing PMA, and it was really well facilitated. During the closing ceremony the assemblies synthesized their resolutions, scheduled actions, and asked for commitments of solidarity around their issues. I don’t think that this forum represents the Left’s answer to the Tea Party, but I did gain a much better appreciation for the scope of issues comprising The Agenda(s). And, considering that anyone passionate about an issue was welcome to participate, the assemblies offered an authentic glimpse into everyone’s priorities. It felt like a determined effort to take things into account, and put them in order.
Here are some of the resolutions that emerged from the Progressive Techie Congress Principles and the Transformative Justice and Healing assembly.
Collective Liberation and Radical Mental Health
The main draw for me to the conference were the Icarus Project workshops and the convergence of Icaristas, in person. We took over and transformed a house in a Detroit suburb, and mad dreaming and plotting ensued. The place was quickly transformed into a safe space for people to brilliantly navigate the madness of the forums, and it was quite amazing to spend quality time, face to face, with friends and allies. I gravitated to the heath tracks, taking up issue of self-care, mutual aid, and wellness. I also caught some great music, ate some amazing homemade food (and not bombs), visited some incredible collective living spaces, and was pretty inspired by everyone who cared and showed up.
This Icarus workshop I attended (there was another that I missed, plus a screening of Crooked Beauty) was eagerly anticipated and well attended – the participants were open and receptive to the core messages, and there was a palpable desire to embrace these issues locally. The session leaders shared their personal stories and modeled peer-support as we broke into groups (photos, highlight reel to be posted shortly). People shared details of their individual and organizational neuro-diversity and how dysfunctional feedback loops undermine many organizing efforts. The relationship between personal and collective liberation emerged from the workshop and will travel far beyond Detroit’s (shrinking) city limits.
Detroit is pretty beat up – we stayed two blocks away from a refinery that belched flames into the night sky – but there are some wonderful people and projects that were really cool to experience. It’s also the only city I have ever been to that has a monument to organized labor.
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution – Emma Goldman, Radical Feminist
jonah | Alchemical Musings » freeculture | July 06, 2010 05:39 AM
Go see Jessica Ferris’s “Missing” in San Francisco on July 10th. Stop thinking — there is no decision to make. Just do it. Buy tickets. Tell your friends. Then show up. It’s that easy.
I saw Jessica perform in San Francisco a few years ago and it was mesmerizing. And that was for a show that she didn’t even particularly try to push. Now for Missing, she’s pulling out all the stops: in her 10 reasons to see “Missing” on July 10th, she outright commands her fans — of whom I am one — to rally, saying “this show is worth it”.
This smartly-constructed dark comedy is a mix of autobiography, physical theater, and social commentary. Says one audience reviewer: “I felt stimulated and energized by such a smart, quick, complex piece.” Says another, “It’s hilarious to the point of tears, touching, and close to the bone. How can she make me laugh till I cry telling such a dark story?”
The heart of the show is Ferris’s search for the truth about her father, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was two years old. She portrays the many members of her family who tell their versions of the story of his disappearance. …
Here’s that tickets link again.
These two quotes from the June 10th New York Times beg for juxtaposition:
The first is from the article about the oldest leather shoe ever discovered:
…an Armenian doctoral student, Diana Zardaryan, noticed a small pit of weeds. Reaching down, she touched two sheep horns, then an upside-down broken bowl. Under that was what felt like “an ear of a cow,” she said. “But when I took it out, I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s a shoe. To find a shoe has always been my dream.’”
The second is from Hidden Misery: A Glimpse Into North Korea, which draws on interviews with North Koreans who have escaped what may be the most isolated, oppressive country on the planet. One of the article’s sources is the wife of an official in the ruling Worker’s Party (for obvious reasons, no other identifying information is given):
Those North Koreans who have never crossed the border have no way to make sense of their tribulations. There is no Internet. Television and radio receivers are soldered to government channels. Even the party offical’s wife lacks a telephone and mourns her lack of contact with the outside world. Her first question to a foreigner was “Am I pretty?”
Steve Jobs posted his “Thoughts on Flash” today to explain why Apple has excluded Flash from its mobile devices. Most of the points are right on. Jobs, an awkward champion for open standards, points out that Flash is an undesirable platform because it is closed, buggy, inefficient, and will soon be irrelevant to video on the web. He also argues that many existing Flash applications are ill-suited to mobile devices and would require redesign to work on touch-controlled devices. All of these are excellent reasons to reject Flash.
But Jobs then goes on to justify excluding applications developed in Flash CS5 and other cross-platform development tools from Apple’s mobile devices. In short, he argues that because cross-platform tools are likely to target or optimize for only features that appear on all platforms, users of any given platform will get a suboptimal user experience.
There is truth to this argument, of course. If a developer writes an app in Appcelerator, compiles it to native code for iPhone and Android, and deploys as-is, the app will have issues. It’s difficult to translate code efficiently from one form into another—compilers are a whole discipline within computer science for a reason—and the code is likely to end up overly verbose. If Appcelerator doesn’t support a particular feature of a target platform, the developer has to choose between leaving it out or forking the code and giving up the benefit of further cross-platform development.
So a lazy developer deploying cross-platform may produce an inefficient app that doesn’t take full advantage of the platform. But developers do that anyway. Cross-platform tools aside, there’s loads of crappy Objective C and Java code out there. And Apple doesn’t have to ban the tools to protect users from a bad experience—it controls the App Store and can weed out apps that perform poorly as a result of bad coding practices. It already does, or claims to, and nonetheless it’s accepted a number of apps built with cross-platform tools. And even if Apple doesn’t reject the bad apps, users will.
Good developers know better, and will use cross-platform tools to kickstart the development practice, but refactor and optimize the output to target specific devices. They’ll do this because it doesn’t pay to distribute apps that perform poorly and lag behind the feature-set of all the other apps.
So fewer problem apps will reach users than Steve lets on, and the effect of the few that slip by will be minimal. Moreover, the cross-platform development tools are in their infancy. Appcelerator’s only been around for a year and a half, PhoneGap only slightly longer, and Adobe’s CS5 just launched this month. Cross-platform compilation is hard to get right, and takes time to optimize. The tools will improve over time, as will their support for native features (which would no doubt improve much faster if Apple opened the APIs to new features prior to launching them)—the viability of the tools in the marketplace depends upon it.
But outlawing cross-platform tools has never been about protecting user experience. It’s about stifling competition and limiting options for developers. If developers can’t target multiple platforms at once, right now their best bet is to target the iPhone, because it has the largest installed user base. So Apple will keep the cost of simultaneous deployment as high as possible for as long as possible. And if it can chain developers to the iConomy in the name of user experience, all the better for its benevolent monopolist image. But we shouldn’t let them.
I’m convinced that every Django developer has struggled with how to present DateTime fields to users. We all know and love the widgets used in the Django admin, and emboldened by the Django developers,1 every new developer tries to just use those. But each one discovers quickly that it’s not that simple — you have to link in CSS from the admin site that will screw with your layout, and even after you get it working on your test site, it will not deploy correctly to production. So let me begin by saying:
Do not use the Django admin’s DateTime widget.
I spent the weekend working out how to do a split DateTime widget properly, and I’m pretty happy with the result, so I’ll share it here. It uses a text field with a jQuery UI calendar picker for the date, and a simple widget for the time. Here’s what it looks like:
And here’s the code:
fields.py
from time import strptime, strftime
from django import forms
from django.db import models
from django.forms import fields
from conflux.widgets import JqSplitDateTimeWidget
class JqSplitDateTimeField(fields.MultiValueField):
widget = JqSplitDateTimeWidget
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
"""
Have to pass a list of field types to the constructor, else we
won't get any data to our compress method.
"""
all_fields = (
fields.CharField(max_length=10),
fields.CharField(max_length=2),
fields.CharField(max_length=2),
fields.ChoiceField(choices=[('AM','AM'),('PM','PM')])
)
super(JqSplitDateTimeField, self).__init__(all_fields, *args, **kwargs)
def compress(self, data_list):
"""
Takes the values from the MultiWidget and passes them as a
list to this function. This function needs to compress the
list into a single object to save.
"""
if data_list:
if not (data_list[0] and data_list[1] and data_list[2] and data_list[3]):
raise forms.ValidationError("Field is missing data.")
input_time = strptime("%s:%s %s"%(data_list[1], data_list[2], data_list[3]), "%I:%M %p")
datetime_string = "%s %s" % (data_list[0], strftime('%H:%M', input_time))
print "Datetime: %s"%datetime_string
return datetime_string
return None
widgets.py
from django import forms
from django.db import models
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.forms.widgets import Select, MultiWidget, DateInput, TextInput
from time import strftime
class JqSplitDateTimeWidget(MultiWidget):
def __init__(self, attrs=None, date_format=None, time_format=None):
date_class = attrs['date_class']
time_class = attrs['time_class']
del attrs['date_class']
del attrs['time_class']
time_attrs = attrs.copy()
time_attrs['class'] = time_class
date_attrs = attrs.copy()
date_attrs['class'] = date_class
widgets = (DateInput(attrs=date_attrs, format=date_format),
TextInput(attrs=time_attrs), TextInput(attrs=time_attrs),
Select(attrs=attrs, choices=[('AM','AM'),('PM','PM')]))
super(JqSplitDateTimeWidget, self).__init__(widgets, attrs)
def decompress(self, value):
if value:
d = strftime("%Y-%m-%d", value.timetuple())
hour = strftime("%I", value.timetuple())
minute = strftime("%M", value.timetuple())
meridian = strftime("%p", value.timetuple())
return (d, hour, minute, meridian)
else:
return (None, None, None, None)
def format_output(self, rendered_widgets):
"""
Given a list of rendered widgets (as strings), it inserts an HTML
linebreak between them.
Returns a Unicode string representing the HTML for the whole lot.
"""
return "Date: %s<br/>Time: %s:%s %s" % (rendered_widgets[0], rendered_widgets[1],
rendered_widgets[2], rendered_widgets[3])
class Media:
css = {
}
js = (
"js/jqsplitdatetime.js",
)
/media/js/jqsplitdatetime.js
$(function() {
$(".datepicker").datepicker({ dateFormat: 'yy-mm-dd' });
});
To use the field in a form, put something like the following into your form definition:
some_date_field = JqSplitDateTimeField(widget=JqSplitDateTimeWidget(attrs={'date_class':'datepicker','time_class':'timepicker'})
Finally, you need to put the jQuery UI code somewhere. Go get a custom jQuery UI package (I used all of UI Core and Interactions, the Datepicker widget, and Effects Core — your may want more or less depending on where else you’re using JQuery and JQuery UI), put the necessary files (the jQuery UI css and js, the jQuery js) somewhere accessible to your form. I’m using jQuery UI throughout my site, so I’ve got them in my base.html:
<link type="text/css" href="/media/css/ui-conflux/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css" rel="Stylesheet" />
<script src="/media/js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/media/js/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
But if you only need jQuery UI for this form, it might make sense to put these in the media class of the JqSplitDateTimeWidget along with jqsplitdatetime.js:
class Media:
css = {
"css/ui-custom/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css"
}
js = (
"js/jqsplitdatetime.js",
"js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js",
"js/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.min.js",
)
A couple of caveats: this widget is not currently very customizable/internationalizable. It only deals with 12-hour time and I should probably pass the date format in as an argument. But it does the trick for what I need, and what a lot of U.S. developers will need, and these things are easily added (I’d love a patch!).
This Monday, March 22nd, we will be hosting Asheesh Laroia and Parker Phinney as they come and talk about the new start-up OpenHatch.org, an “open source involvement engine.” Both Asheesh and Parker are long-time members and active participants in Students for Free Culture, and this new project looks very exciting. They’ll be on their way back from LibrePlanet in Cambridge, so in addition to their experiences starting and working at a start-up and open source business, they will probably bring exciting news from the world of free software.
The details again:
Asheesh Laroia and Parker Phinney from OpenHatch.org
8pm, Monday, March 22
Kimmel 904
Earlier today, the Mozilla Foundation announced its process for revising MPL 1.1, in a public comment-driven process lasting until the fall.
I like their process announcement, which proposes a reasonable schedule and workflow. The Foundation has clearly studied the GPLv3 process, and has drawn good conclusions about what worked for us, and what will work better for them if done differently. They’re using Co-ment, the wonderful Web-based text annotation system designed and implemented by Philippe Aigrain and his colleagues at Sopinspace in Paris. They helped us design the Stet system we used for GPLv3, and they’ve gone far beyond it with Co-ment.
The MPL has been an influential free software license, but I agree with the unstated proposition of the Mozilla Foundation that it’s now showing its age. I think this is precisely the right time to be doing the revision, and I wish the Mozilla folks a smooth, thoughtful, and successful process. I hope everyone who cares about the health of Web, and about free software licensing, will register and get involved. SFLC and I will be doing whatever we can to help. And I sure look forward to being an insignificant minor player this time around…
This is just a reminder (or a notice) that this Friday, March 5, we will be screening the new documentary “Copyright Criminals” in room 109 of Warren Weaver Hall. This screening is free and open to the public, and – according to FC @ NYU’s president Parker – “the movie is really great. You may know it as a follow-up of sorts to the fantastic film “Freedom of Expression” which we screened a while back, which was also made by Kembrew McCleod.”
There will be a Q&A session after the screening with Mr. McCleod and the legendary remixer Steve “Steinski” Stein.
Once more with the details:
Free public screening of Copyright Criminals by Kembrew McCleod, with Q&A with McCleod and Steinski
7pm, Friday, March 5
Warren Weaver Hall, rm 109
251 Mercer Street (at 4th)
And for more information about the film: http://www.copyrightcriminals.com/
Hope to see you all there!
Readers in New York may be interested in attending a presentation of “Collaborative Futures”, a text composed over a week in January by six writers, myself included, and published as book for the Transmediale festival in Berlin. Mushon Zer Aviv and Michael Mandiberg will present the book, and Stephen Kovats, who commissioned the work for Transmediale, will also be present. The event is hosted by Upgrade! New York and will take place at Eyebeam (540 W21st Street) this Thursday at 7.30 pm There’s even a live video stream!
Given the result has attracted a bit of attention, I’d like to add a couple of impressions about both the process of working together, and the future (if any) of the resulting book.
Booksprinting
Much has been made of the accelerated pace of the books production. When I arrived on the monday morning, the only participant known to me was the facilitator, Adam Hyde. Thus the first day was spent introducing ourselves and making notes – basically teasing out a shared language and framework within which to work. Although we had assembled a basic outline by late that night, in reality the structure was revised right to the end. The following morning we sat down to write but the patter of the keyboard was constantly punctuated by conversation, negotiation and clarification.
Negotiation in this context requires willingness and good faith, qualities which were happily in plentiful supply. I wondered also if the freshness of our acquaintance may have been a help: sometimes working with people we know well can elicit competitiveness and oversensitivity. Amidst all of this there is a physical aspect: long days spent together nourishes trust, while the shadow of an imminent deadline instills an urgency that encourages compromise for the sake of completing the task.
The irony of being asked to sign the book was not lost on Marta Peirano and I...
This obviously modified what we would have otherwise written individually, but also enabled each person to work on the others’ outputs sensitively. Most sections were initially drafted by one person, others would then edit, add and rephrase where necessary. Being able to discuss and tease points out together provided a means to grasp the acceptable extent to which one could revise other people’s contributions – to refine for clarity, whilst leaving the ‘thrust’ of their sense intact. Here we encounter an issue that arises repeatedly in collaboration: the need for a framework which functions at the level of the collective whilst enabling individual initiative within its own boundaries.
The result entailed an interesting modification to the relationship with the act of writing. The romantic theory of authorship places enormous weight on the concept of expression as inhering to the personality of the writer, insisting that from their inherent subjectivity comes forth a uniqueness which makes it uniquely their property. Whilst I never adhered to this school of thought, it was nonetheless interesting to live its practical contradiction. Writing together in this manner displaces the connection between the individual and the text, as some ‘pure product of the self’, but relocates it to an identification with the subject matter and the methodology employed to elaborate it – peculiarly appropriate for a book about collaboration. On this point it’s safe to say that none of those involved in writing the book would stand 100% behind its contents, whilst nonetheless insisting on the value of the endeavour.
Overall I think what we ended up with is useful overview with some good insights. Those expert in the areas won’t find much that is really fresh, but writing like this leaves no time for original research, but rather leveraging what we already know and trying to fit it into a coherent framework. Regarding its deficiencies: if you care enough to be bothered, please help to remedy them, sign up to booki.cc and get cracking!
Possible Futures…
Other books written under the auspices of FlossManuals focus on technical subject matter, making the question of their upkeep relatively straightforward: as the field progresses, or new functionalities are added to a software, the book can be updated to reflect that. Given the conceptual nature of our subject, a roadmap for revision and maintenance seems trickier, but the chance to solicit new contributions makes me think it worthwhile.
1. The opening section outlines some assumptions and sets out the limitations of the subject we address. Collaboration is an infinitely extendible concept, and we ended up focussing on mostly large online collaborations. How it pertains to art, political movements and a more traditionally conceived notion of economic activity were put aside. Training the gaze on these areas, examining their specificities and distinguishing them from one another might be one worthwhile approach.
The rest of this section is dedicated to the motivations of participants and how the decision-making process is structured. Given the wide variety of collaborations out there, this is just a fragment and much could be added and/or qualified. We were not fully satisfied with the placing of process here in terms of the overall structure, but couldn’t come up with a convincing alternative either…
2. Next we attempted to distinguish collaboration from apparently similar phenomena such as sharing or aggregation. We also propose a set of criteria to place interactions on a continuum corresponding to degrees of participation, and offer some examples.
3. Following this, there is a section titled ‘Edge Cases’. For my money, this is the part most amenable to expansion. First of all because it needs it: there are too few case studies! Secondly because anyone interested in this subject has their pet examples, and there isn’t just one way of dealing with knotty topics like ‘ownership’, ‘attribution’ and ‘decision-making’. Additional descriptions of communities together with a problem they faced, or successfully overcome, would fit very neatly here. ultimately I think this section could function as a form of scrapbook, where snapshots of positive and negative experiences can be memorized.
4. We closed with ‘Futures’, where we speculate on how these forms of production may transform realms so far less affected, and on the wider issue of what forms of individual and group identify may be prefigured in what we observe at the moment online. This would be the place to let oneself go with futurology, utopian projects and experimental proposals.
Biella passed this flyer around on the Debian-NYC mailing list. If you are in New York City this Friday, you won't want to miss this Eben Moglen's talk.
If you can't see the embedded object, go here or to this post's permalink.
David Moreno | Stereonaut! » nyc | February 02, 2010 05:55 PM
Last week I participated in an extreme booksprint on the theme ‘Collaborative Futures’, commissioned by Transmediale for their festival which begins in Berlin on tuesday.
For five days I saw almost no-one other than my collaborators, Adam Hyde, Marta Peirano, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michael Mandiberg, Mike Linksvayer and Aleksandar Erkalovic.
Twelve to fourteen hour days were standard, as we drove ourselves to establish some common ground. The result is a 140 page book which will be ready for distribution at the festival this week.
Lots more on this later, but the photo above was taken during the initial organization of our ideas at the end of the first day.
Today I attended a barcamp-style CrisisCamp in NYC where volunteers from around the world gathered physically and virtually to brainstorm, organize, coordinate, and work to help alleviate the suffering in Haiti (CNN CrisisCamp coverage). When people talk about crowdsourcing relief to this disaster, CrisisCamps around the country helped assemble the the sources (and faces) in these mysterious crowds.
Self-Organized Collaborative Production and Action
It was amazing to see these strangers converge, congregating around the familiar communication modalities of wikis, mailing lists, irc, and now twitter and google wave. While these torrential rivers of information are overwhelming, some subcultures are developing strategies for managing and synthesizing these flows. A main organizing hub is http://crisiscommons.org/ , and the hashtags #cchaiti and #haiti are being used to ‘tag’ disparate social media around these efforts.
Today’s NYC event drew over a dozen people, techies, community organizers, students, Hatians, UN reps, librarians, union workers, journalists, and beyond. I have been closely following ushahidi/swiftapp project, and their http://haiti.ushahidi.com collaborative filtering curation strategy is in full swing. Open Street Maps is proving to be an essential piece of infrastructure around mapping data, and the New York Public Library has rescheduled the launch of their amazing new map rectifying tool to help make sense of Hatian geography – shockingly, there are very few maps of Haiti, and their collection might significantly help when overlaid on satellite imagery. This can assist relief workers who need to know what neighborhoods are called, and which buildings were where, etc. If you are familiar with Hatian geography, you can help rectify maps here.
The Sahana Disaster Management Project is also looking for python developers to help scale their software.
Strategically, I was struck by the asymmetry of information flows. Many of the efforts seemed to focused on collecting Hatian data, and representing it to Americans and NGOs working on the ground in Haiti. But, not too many Hatians have iphones…
There seems to be very little focus on creating flows of information back into Haiti – information from the outside world directed to Haitians, or, on creating infrastructure for Hatians to communicate with each other. Beyond that, I am not aware of any coordinated efforts to establish non-corporate-mediated, 2-or-more-way channels of information between Hatians and Hatians in the diaspora.
I was reminded of the recent Iranian uprising. A wonderful moment of microblogging glory, although few Americans appreciated how the Iranians were able to receive lifelines of information from outside of Iran (like where to find proxy servers), and were also using the platform to communicate with each other, within Iran.
I was struck by what an important role traditional mass broadcast media might play in a crisis situation. People on the ground need information, desperately. They need to know which symbols indicate that a house has already been searched, where the next food/water/medicine drop will be, and that the biscuits are good, and not expired. They also need entertainment, and news -
à la Good Morning Vietnam. And messages of consolation, emotional support, solidarity, and even song and laughter. Maybe even Bryant Park style movie nights.
Electricity and ISPs are largely down. There are trickles of bandwidth available, and some Hatians have made it onto facebook and cellphones.
So, what could a hybrid, analog-digital network look like? Low-power FM? High-speed copy machines? Blackboards?
It’s actually not that hard to imagine a hybrid network, composed of people, FM radio, blackboards, printing presses, portable video projectors, cell phones, SMS, and Internet. Really, whatever is available.
The Earth Institute and UNICEF Innovation has been deploying RapidSMS on the ground in Africa, and they are working in villages where a single cell phone operator brokers vital information to a blackboard in the town square, transforming a cell phone into a mass broadcast device. Reminiscent of the Wall Newspapers in communist russia.
And if there were a low power FM Radio station set up, the DJ could presumably retransmit messages coming in over the Internet or the cell phones (kinda the reverse of the activist who retransmitted police scanner transmissions over Twitter at the G20 summit protests).
Hatians would know that if they needed to get a message out to a loved one in Haiti, they could get to the radio station and it might be transmitted, back into local community. Messages would travel over human and technological networks, routed intelligently by humans where technology leaves off.
What would the programming on this radio station look like? They could have hourly news and announcements, read out community messages submitted by listeners, convey messages of condolences and support from the outside world, play music, pray, talk radio, “call in” shows, anything really. Most importantly, this radio would be locally produced, with the local community deciding what to play. There was a precedent for local radio, KAMP, in the astrodome stadium after Katrina. The station was set up with the help of the fantastic Prometheus Radio Project volunteers, though authorities tried to shut down the “pirate” lifeline.
Turning Messages in Bottles into Skywriting
Today I met someone who is working with local Haitian communities in NYC. We are both very concerned with CNN dominated the coverage, frittering away their 24/7 news coverage on looping segments, and circling like vultures waiting for violence to erupt. We have to understand the danger of a single story.
We were both very interested in creating alternate channels of communication for Hatians to speak for themselves, and engage in dialogue with their relatives in the diaspora.
Here is one project we could run over the kind of hybrid analog-digital/human-machine sneakernet described above.
Hatians could send video messages in a bottle. The community here could gather to watch and reply to those videos. Say the videos and the replies were limited to 3 minutes each. The original message and the reply could be bundled and sent back to Haiti – not unlike sending a letter before the postage service – you would give it to someone heading to the recipient’s town.
Initially, a few flip cameras on the ground in Haiti, with the video transmitted home over the Internet, or even back to the states by sending the memory cards home with a courier. Eventually, when bandwidth begins to open up, we might be able to imagine a live, synchronous, stream. But, before then, we can imagine ansynchronous video messages being sent back and forth, between Haiti an Haitian communities in the diaspora.
On the Hatian end, the replies could be projected and played back to groups gathered around projectors at night. On our end, distribution is trivial, but the message might easily get to the precise person it was intended for through community social networks. A Haitian could send a video message in a bottle to Brooklyn, and it would not take long for their relatives to know they were safe. Replies could include message of hope, compassion, and support.
Most importantly, independent lines of communications could be opened. As a secondary benefit, if the messages were disseminated publicly (say, on you tube), secondary waves of help could create journalistic highlights, extract crucial data to feed the informatics systems (sourced to the originating testimony), and we could start hearing each others voices.
At the moment, our aid feels like we are tossing a homeless person a few dollars while averting our gaze, when what they really need is for us to look them in the eye, recognize their humanity, and have a conversation with them. We are electronically strip searching the people of Haiti, when (forgive the Avatar reference) we need to see each other.
A few closing thoughts to this already rambling post.
I attended the event for many reasons including:
The importance of mass media in creating a sense of (imagined) community is well theorized in communications studies. Haiti’s physical infrastructure is shattered, but we can very quickly reconstruct its communications infrastructure and help them reconstitute their sense of identity and community.
Cultural theorists have criticized the pacifying power of mass media – but the UN is forecasting a sharp increase in violence, riots and rape – if ever there was a time to distract and pacify the populace – or should I say, provide them with a constructive channel for them to express and vent their energies?
If we want to turn this disaster porn on its head, we should just give Hatians the IP rights to all the images pouring out of their country now. The profits would be enough to rebuild the country 10-times over.
The life saving importance of information should not be underestimated – The only thing more important than food, water, or medicine is hope.
Update: This brain[storm/dump] has now been transformed into an actual project proposal at the Crisis Commons wiki – The Open Solace Haiti Project , whose first priority is the Haitian Video Postcard Exchange Network.
[Special thanks to Mar Cabra and Rasmus Nielen for being a sounding board for some of these scattered ideas, John Durham Peters, whose brilliant thought broadcasts on Broadcasting and Schizophrenia induced my thinking, and Levanah and Stan Tenen and the work of the Meru Foundation whose spiritual teachings helped shape these ideas.]
jonah | Alchemical Musings » freeculture | January 17, 2010 06:07 AM
I spent last Thursday and Friday in Brussels, attending the European Commission’s Oral Hearing in the competition investigation of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. The proceedings at the Oral Hearing were confidential; I cannot write about the presentations made there by others. I can, however, summarize the three points I made during my brief presentation on Friday; my previous written submission to the commission is already available. I want to explain what I said and where I think we stand now that the Oral Hearing is over.
Our tenth season continues next Tuesday night:
Perl Seminar New York
Tuesday Nov 17 2009
6:15 – 8:15 pm
NYPC User Group
481 8th Ave (Ramada New Yorker Hotel, West 34 St)
Suite 550
Main Topic: Perrin Harkins: "Choosing a Web Architecture for Perl"
Perl Seminar NY is once again pleased to welcome Apache expert and veteran Open Source contributor Perrin Harkins to speak at our meeting.
In the past few years, many new web proxy servers have come onto the scene with new performance promises and features. Servers based on non-blocking I/O bring claims of greatly improved performance. At the same time, FastCGI has become more widely used, giving people a possible alternative to mod_perl. Perrin's talk will help you choose the right architecture for your project by presenting a useful set of benchmarks and a comparison of strong points and key features.
Hope to see you on Tuesday November 17.
Jim Keenan
Moderator
David Moreno | Stereonaut! » nyc | November 16, 2009 07:32 PM
Welcome to GNOME Blogs. If you are the owner of this brand new blog, you can start posting right now!
A quantum computer is, roughly, a device that can prepare a quantum system in a known state, manipulate it in a way that maintains its quantum coherence, and extract some useful information.
What makes a quantum computer so different from a classical computer?
After all, the computer on my desk operates according to the laws of quantum mechanics, doesn't it? Indeed, the entire world operates according to the laws of quantum mechanics, and a classical computer is no exception. And semiconductors, the materials that computer processors are made of, can only be understood with the help of quantum mechanics.
So what really does it mean to say that a certain type of machine is a quantum computer, while the computer on my desk is not?
A quantum computer's means of storing and processing information must be in quantum states.
Jim Garrison (jim@jimgarrison.org) | jimgarrison.org thoughts | September 08, 2009 09:00 PM
...to my new blog.
Throughout the next several posts, I plan to consider a seemingly simple question: If at some point in the future we are able to build one or more quantum computers, how might our individual freedoms be affected?
Given my background working with the free software movement, it should come as no surprise that I believe that we, as human beings, ought to be in control of the technology we allow into our personal lives. And I optimistically believe that in time, the vast majority of people will come to understand that our ability to control our collective destiny rests on our ability to keep the power of technology in the hands of the people who use it, not the corporations who develop and distribute it.
I expect that most readers of this blog will already be familiar with these ideas, so I will take them as a starting point for the coming discussion, as we jump right in to the idea of quantum computing.
Jim Garrison (jim@jimgarrison.org) | jimgarrison.org thoughts | May 07, 2009 07:30 AM
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