January 2010
30 posts
Bill Gates Funding Geoengineering Research →
A couple of days ago I logged a quote from a recent blog post of his, but this shows it’s not just talk!
Stephen Fry: iPad About →
I’m not sure if I care much for the iPad, but it’s been ages since Fry blogged and it’s a most entertaining read. He’s almost convinced me that I should reconsider…
Simon Willison: World Government Data →
The fellows at The Guardian just keep churning out useful tools. Rather than complaining about how old journalism is hurting in our changing world, they’re pro-actively finding out how new journalism might work. I’m a fan.
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Lessig: For The Love Of Culture →
You’ll need to pretend you still have the attention span you had ten years ago to read this one, but it’s worth it. Quick preview:
The problem that we are confronting is the result of a law that has been rendered hopelessly out-of-date by new technologies. The solution is a re-crafting of that law to achieve its estimable objective—incentives to authors—without becoming...
Dodging Flash, and H.264
There’s a somewhat verbose essay over at Daring Fireball on Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the iPhone. If you’ve ever properly hated a Flash plugin on whatever OS before, you’ve already thought a lot of what the post has to say.
In addition, Gruber notes that Apple have clear business motives to try and rid themselves of the Flash platform. But regardless of their...
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Ross Anderson: How online card security fails →
Prof Anderson calls out the credit-card companies for the terrible (and terribly obvious) flaws in the 3DS system (“Verified by Visa”), and points out that it wouldn’t have been all too expensive to get it right. Via sybreon.
“The patent product brings financial derivatives to mind.”
– Andrew Grove, quoted by Venkatesh Hariharan
“All the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to...”
– Bill Gates on reducing CO2 emissions
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Climate uncertainties and the problems... →
I won’t summarise this one here, or you’d end up with a summary of a summary.
“An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and...”
– Bruce Schneier
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Christopher Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 →
Via wzzrd:
MP3 and GIF both prove that if you allow liberal licensing early in a technology’s lifespan, network effects create much more value down the road when you can change licenses to capture value created by delivering images and data in those formats. Basically wait for everyone to start using it and then make everyone pay down the road. (Three words: unpredictable business costs.)
I...
Richard Stallman on The Setup →
I am using a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. This is my only computer, and I use it all the time. […]
Wow. Really?
I would ideally like to have a machine with the speed and memory of a laptop, and the display size of a laptop too, combined with the same freedom that I have now on the Yeelong. Until I can have them both, freedom is my priority....
ESR: Are political parties obsolete? →
Apps that phone home
This (via) is, uhm, telling:
Using Flurry Analytics, the company identified approximately 50 devices that match the characteristics of Apple’s rumored tablet device. Because Flurry could reliably “place” these devices geographically on Apple’s Cupertino campus, we have a fair level of confidence that we are observing a group of pre-release tablets in testing. Testing of...
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The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence →
Ted Ts’o highlights an idea that has long appealed to me: sell software with a free license that kicks in at an agreed time in the future.
Clay Shirky: The shock of inclusion →
The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the...
“Traditional universities will survive insofar as they offer mentoring and...”
– Lord Rees: A Level Playing Field
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Newsbeuter and Google Reader lock-in
Zed Shaw likes newsbeuter, and rightly so: it’s indeed as fast to work with as mutt (unless you have a mutt with a hacked-in side-bar, that is). The complex multi-pane setup that Google Reader has doesn’t make sense: while I’m reading what you wrote, I don’t need a list of every other new post you wrote, let alone a list of everything everybody else just wrote. It’s...
Ted Ts'o: Proud to be a Googler →
Apparently Ts’o has left IBM…
Jonathan Zittrain: Google takes on China →
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“If, as an engineer focused on solving a problem, I happened to come up with an...”
– USV: We need an independent invention defense
“…the image of Europe the economic failure is so ingrained on the right...”
– Paul Krugman: European decline
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“Assuming conservation of the power-law exponent, adding large numbers of...”
– “Mutant_Dog” in comments on A world of hits (The Economist) (via and via)
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Yehuda Katz: The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open... →
Interesting discussion on OSS licensing; high quality comments with some good links, too.
Back to Tumblr
… because Google Reader’s Shared Items is just too eye-blindingly ugly (and not nearly as flexible).
I had kind of forgotten how much I like Tumblr: apart from the looks, there’s posting per bookmarklet or per email, markdown support, javascript support - beats Wordpress.com for me.
The platform is, of course, not quite as open as WP, which is what put me off before. But with...
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“Advanced users should not put up with having to hack their own device. Some may...”
– cool900: Comparing Freedom on Maemo and Android
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The isolate utility [LWN.net] →
This utility, isolate, runs processes in a chroot-ed environment,
with constrained resource limits, as a random UID, and with
limited access to the X server.
Sure piques my interest.
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bup 0.01: It backs things up →
… rolling checksum algorithm … packfile format from git … data is “automagically” shared between incremental backups … even if the backups are made from two different computers that don’t even know about each other … incremental backup acts as if it’s a full backup … written in python …
Getting excited yet?
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“Until Google open sources what really matters – their search ranking algorithm –...”
– Chris Dixon
“…smart business should be practiced like smart chess: you should make...”
– Chris Dixon: What’s strategic for Google?