conflux
SatireWire
Enron Admits It's Really Argentina
"On the brink of collapse due to gross mismanagement and insurmountable debt, energy company Enron today confessed to what many observers had long suspected: it is actually Argentina.
Congressional leaders, who have called for an investigation into the biggest corporate failure in U.S. history , immediately dismissed Enron's claim, but Argentinians weren't so sure. "The shady deals. The crazy debt. I knew there was something familiar about those guys," said Banco del Argentina director Ernesto Caballo."
7:40 PM 0 comments
The New York Times Free Music Service Is Expected to Surpass Napster [requires 'free' registration]
"Data to be released next week is expected to show that the number of people exchanging music simultaneously on the most popular free service, a network called Fast Track, which is based in Amsterdam, now exceeds the use of Napster at its peak.
Webnoize, a research firm, said it expected the figures to show that the number of people typically logged on to Fast Track surpassed 1.57 million; that was the peak level of popularity enjoyed in February this year by Napster, the pioneering free music service that shut down after being sued by the record labels, which accused it of abetting copyright infringement."
"A Dutch court on Thursday ordered file-swapping software maker Kazaa to prevent people using its product from engaging in copyright infringement or face thousands of dollars in fines."
""We don't know how the judge wants us to stop copyright infringement," Kazaa attorney Christiaan Alberdinck Thijm told CNET News.com's affiliate in the Netherlands on Thursday. "We feel as if the judge didn't put much time and effort into this part of the verdict.""
redux [09.21.01]
"Droves of Napster clones are proving that it's still cheap and easy to create file-swapping services under the nose of the entertainment industry--but such ventures promise mostly high risks and little pay for the people behind them.
Even as the U.S. courts have effectively shut down file-trading giant Napster, numerous would-be replacements have taken root. Most hope to avoid legal entanglements and eventually profit on the immense popularity of services that offer free access to popular music, videos and other files."
"Although consumers continue to flock to peer-to-peer services, it's unclear whether large numbers will ever translate into large profits."
"As the major record labels prepare to roll out online subscription services, a new report suggests young people are not yet ready to pay to download music from the internet.
Researchers found that 62% would continue to access MP3 music files for free and had no plans to stop."
redux [07.24.01]
"NPR's John McChesney reports on the new generation of file-sharing companies that has sprung up on the internet in the wake of the federal ruling shutting down Napster. These new services are rapidly gaining an online audience and may prove a whole new challenge to the music companies that want them out of business. (5:31-6:20)"
""In some respects, this brings the labels back to square one," Mooradian said.
One label executive agreed, saying, "I fear we're getting into a game of whack-a-mole, where we sue Napster, then we sue Aimster and so on and so on."
"If (the labels) killed Napster -- and that's 'if,'" said Johnny Deep, CEO of Aimster, "they killed their only chance of a viable online strategy. Napster was easy enough to use, and there was loyalty and confidence in the brand. That's something the labels can't recreate, even if they spend a hundred million.""
redux [07.20.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"The record industry's largely successful effort to cripple Napster, the online music site turned social phenomenon, has left it facing something potentially worse: a new generation of music-swapping sites, more numerous and much harder to police.
Figures to be released today show that a precipitous drop in Napster's traffic over the last several weeks has been paralleled by marked growth in more than half a dozen less centralized services. Those services, some of them based overseas, not only welcome millions of Napster refugees, but also complicate matters for the industry by scattering a once-concentrated audience, and relying on technology that may be insulated from legal attack."
"It didn't have to be this way, of course. The music industry has had the opportunity for several years now to begin offering reasonably priced access to comprehensive catalogs of digital music across the Internet, sweetened with special premium additions for fans willing to pay even more. Such a service could satisfy the hunger of millions of people for ready access to new and old music while preserving a reasonable income for the artists who make that music. Fear has stayed the industry's hand -- fear that today's unconscionably high CD prices can't be sustained; fear that the many layers of middlemen in today's industry might find themselves out of jobs; fear that the superstar system couldn't survive such a change; fear of the unknown.
The industry's paralysis is a tragedy for anyone who believes that artists should be compensated for their work as well as for anyone who loves music, period. But it's clear that the record labels would rather sue than find a sensible rapprochement with the new world of digital distribution."
"You've seen the headlines about Napster's imminent shutdown and then putative resuscitation by an 11th-hour deal with three major labels. It seemed like a crushing blow: After months of half-hearted compliance with the filtering system ordered by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, Napster finally caved. Not that we're taking sides, but there's still plenty of downloadable music on the Net. For comparison's sake, we searched each service for certain songs and performers. We chose British rockers Radiohead since they're the closest thing we have to an official band of the Net, thanks to the famed Instant Messaging Radiohead Bot. And we picked Prince because, well, unlike many Internet execs, he's still partying like it's 1999."
redux [09.21.00]
"It is pointless for music companies to try to outlaw Napster-like file sharing with expensive lawsuits, according to a report published today by Forrester Research."
"The music giants would do better to steal back their markets by offering quality alternatives to pirating software, it claims.
According to Forrester, music publishers stand to lose as much as $3.1bn by 2005 as online music piracy increases. "You have to beat pirates at their own game, otherwise record companies could sustain large losses," said Eric Scheirer, analyst at Forrester and author of the report.
Peter Beverley, vice chairman at Magex, Natwest's Digital Rights Management (DRM) business, added: "The legal process on its own won't solve the piracy problem and nor will digital management technology. Instead you need to offer products that are worth having."redux [05.02.00]
""The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway.
There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers.
And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."
8:53 PM 0 comments
Darwin
Calling a Spade a Strategy
"A friend in the consulting business sends a note to assure me that his efforts are “further than expected on our top down estimate, which will make it much easier to identify gaps during our bottom up planning.” I’m relieved. At least, I think I’m relieved. It’s hard to tell if the identification of gaps during bottom up planning is goods news or bad news. And that, I suspect, is the point. Chalk up another victory for buanguage, the business-language of the modern manager.
Every culture manufactures its own language. Drug dealers, seventh-graders, physicians, they all have their secret handshakes and codes, intended in most cases to let others know that they are members of the club. But few cultures have poured it on thicker than have the enlightened business consultants and managers working in the age of innovation, agility, change agents, paradigm shifts and lots of other words whose recently innovated meaning has never been clear to me."
redux [11.13.00]
"The weather in the tech sector is changing, and so are the words we choose to describe it."
"''People were using the language of revolution over the past few years: `We're going to change the way you do business.' Now, a lot of the most visionary talk about technology has disappeared, in part because a lot of the magazines that carried it don't exist anymore. There's a sense that hype itself engenders a kind of suspicion, and people are a little bit more skeptical.''
So how is tech talk different today?"
redux [07.13.00]
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the "90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May."
""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers - not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."
Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."
"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."
redux [04.21.00]
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."
"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."
10:03 PM 0 comments
MIT Technology Review
Unwiring the Web
"It’s an increasingly common scene: a telecommuter perched on a park bench, pecking away at a laptop. But a peek over her shoulder reveals a more startling sight: she’s surfing the Web, outdoors and cable free.
Anywhere, anytime Internet access is gaining ground across the United States as wireless networks owned and run by their users spring up in more cities each month—25 at last count."
"Imagine the scenario: you get together with the occupants of your block (be it a block of flats or group of homes). You decide to buy one Internet connection for the entire block. You hook a broadband cable or ADSL modem up to a Wi-Fi access point, and presto: everybody within 100 metres of the access point has high-speed Internet access for virtually nothing. You can split the cost of the Internet access - divided among 20 or 30 people the cost is negligible, maybe a few dollars per person per month. What's more, you can communicate within this community quickly and easily. You could even set up community network printers and scanners and the like.
It may sound far-fetched, but in fact with Wi-Fi it is very easy to do. The difficult part would be maintaining access control so only the people who paid could access the Net connection."
"Wireless hotspots using public access local area networks in airports, hotels and even on Japanese trains may face temporary problems like the rest of the telecoms industry. But the mid-term predictions are for massive growth. And as Clive Couldwell point outs, they will not only be an increasing threat to mobile operators but also provide plenty of opportunity for fixed-line operators and isps to add some mobile services cheaply."
"Mobile operators should certainly be worried. The combination of no licence fees - because they operate in the unlicenced 2.4 ghz band - relatively cheap and easy installation, a wide and growing potential customer base and high-speed connectivity - offering data rates of up to 11 mbps to wireless-enabled laptops or handhelds within 50 metres of any access point - means that these wireless hotspots will spread ever faster across the world."
"Fast Internet access over small wireless networks in restaurants, hotels and airports will soon start hurting telecommunications operators, a new survey found Monday.
More than 20 million Europeans will use some 90,000 open Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) by 2006, market research group Analysys said. Today there are up to 20,000 WLAN users, most in the United States."
redux [08.26.01]
"AN UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT to deploy free wireless access zones in metropolitan areas is taking hold. If it turns out to be successful, wireless network operators may be fighting against a grounds-up movement that could undermine their multibillion-dollar campaign to offer next-generation 3G (third-generation) wireless services in major metro areas.
The movement, called by some the "parasitic grid" and by others more simply the "free metro wireless data network," has already installed itself in New York; San Francisco; Seattle; Aspen, Colo., Portland, Ore., British Columbia; and London."
redux [04.14.01]
"Permit me to throw a stick of dynamite in the room: Third generation, or 3G , wireless is dead before it was even born. And after billions wasted on 3G, it's going to be replaced by free wireless local area networks, or LANs.
A technology that the cell-phone industry is spending untold billions on, 3G promises to deliver high-speed data precisely where you don't need it -- on your phone. On the other hand, homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and hotels are building out cheap and grass-roots wireless local area networks that deliver even higher-speed access where you do need it -- your personal digital assistant and your laptop."
redux [09.09.01]
"Burton subscribes to the term "Open Network Access Point," believing the scale that could be achieved by widespread adoption of wireless access point would be amazing.
But as with many stories, there is a dark side. Both Burton and Pozer agree individual providers of these access points, which can cost as little as $150, must be aware of the legal implications."
""The Internet has always been revolutionary," Burton said. "What you're seeing now is the old school revolting.""
"That was funny. I laughed and laughed. It doesn't feel very parasitic every month when I pay my DSL bill. There's nothing parasitic about a community network. The bandwidth is paid for. People are taking their existing connections and letting other people share it. There's nothing new.
I think what has people scared is that, as I know and others know, bandwidth is significantly oversold. If everybody wanted to request their 384 kilobits or their 1.5 Mbps at the same time, you'd have the same thing happening that you had in the twenties with the run on the banks. The infrastructure can't support it, even though it's sold as such. I think that's where the fear is coming from on the telco side."
redux [08.15.01]
""This is why I love New York," says Anthony Townsend, standing in the middle of Washington Square Park, holding his laptop computer like a butler's tray and scanning the adult playground the place becomes on hot summer evenings. Where else, he asks, can you walk around with a computer, surf the Web, and go utterly unnoticed?
As if to prove his invisibility, or perhaps to demonstrate that he belongs, he hoists his machine like some digital prayerbook and begins chanting: "Jesus! Jesus! Thank you!"
No one - not the guy playing the Ramones on acoustic guitar, not the tonguing teenage lovers - notices this modern miracle worker or the cybernet he has cast around them. Along with some 30 other volunteers in a group called NYCwireless, Townsend's on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones: small areas, often called free networks, where people can tap into high-speed connections, without cables or phone lines, at no cost"
redux [12.10.00]
"With its meticulously preserved rows of army barracks and offices, San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood gives off the illusion that it's still the 1800s, when it was a bustling spit-and-shine military base.
The wireless Internet antennas sprouting everywhere suggest something else: Today's civilian community is home to a very unregimented attempt to build a homemade wireless Web that seeks to rival the expensive plans of telecommunication conglomerates and other corporations."
""I use it in bed, at the cafe, in the car, on the grassy fields," says Brewster Kahle, a 40-year-old high-tech entrepreneur who lives and works in the area. "I'm living a wireless existence."
"Matt Westervelt and three of his friends had tinkering on their minds when they started building their own high-speed wireless network in June. Climbing on the roofs of their Seattle homes, building antennas and trying to make them work with Ethernet protocols sounded like fun. Plus, if the whole shebang actually worked, they figured they'd be able to access their home computer files from the local cafe, play Net-based games while sitting on each other's couches and stream video onto their personal data assistants -- all at speeds of up to 11 megabits per second, far faster than what cellphone operators or other wireless providers offered."
"Call it "the free-network movement" -- a bubbled-up-from-the-underground effort to spread high-bandwidth wireless connectivity everywhere."
11:33 PM 0 comments
New Scientist
Internet users more chic than geek
"Far from being friendless "nerds", internet users lead more sociable lives than non-surfers, according to new research in the UK.
A survey of 2500 randomly selected Britons revealed that internet users are more likely to belong to a community group, voluntary organisation or to go to church regularly. They also tend to be better paid and more educated than non-users.
There is a huge divide between those who surf and those who don't, says Andrew Oswald at Warwick University, who carried out the study. But contrary to popular opinion surfers are not slouched over their computer all day, he says: "They simply watch less television."
redux [08.09.01]
"As with the re-examination of first HomeNet families, the study of the "new" newcomers found Internet use was linked to more social involvement and psychological well-being. Kraut noted a "rich get richer" effect, where the Net appears to amplify one's innate social tendencies. Those who were extroverts were more likely than their introverted brethren to leverage the new medium to make more friends.
What is to account for this stunning turnabout? My guess is that what changed in the intervening years is the Net itself. It has more social tools, more avenues for personal connections, -- more of everything people need in order to thrive."
redux [07.23.01]
"Using the Internet at home doesn't make people more depressed and lonely after all.
A new, longer follow-up from a study that linked Web use to poor mental health -- heavily publicized three years ago -- shows that most bad effects have disappeared.
"Either the Internet has changed, or people have learned to use it more constructively, or both," says the study leader, psychologist Robert Kraut of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh."
redux [06.21.01]
"The Internet is the telephone, television, game console, and radio wrapped up in one for most teenagers and that means it has become a major "player" in many American families. Teens go online to chat with their friends, kill boredom, see the wider world, and follow the latest trends. Many enjoy doing all those things at the same time during their online sessions. Multitasking is their way of life. And the emotional hallmark of that life is the enthusiasm for the new ways the Internet lets them connect with friends, expand their social networks, explore their identities, and learn new things."
redux [10.25.00]
"I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it's a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.
Haven't you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you've never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren't in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your ... faith?
Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?
Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place."
redux [02.21.00]
"In assessing the impact of the Internet, the question is not whether it replaces (fully or partly) some other forms of communication and social contact. Because the Internet adds its own new forms of communication and social contact. For example, people may well attend fewer meetings and events outside the house and yet feel connected to a community of others who "meet" on a much more regular basis online.
The question is whether the new lifestyle is enjoyable and whether it nourishes humans or causes them damage. There is certainly a risk that some people get overly caught up in chat rooms and role playing, but a different kind of study is needed to assess this problem."
11:23 PM 0 comments
Scientific American
The First Human Cloned Embryo
"THEY WERE SUCH TINY DOTS, YET THEY HELD SUCH immense promise. After months of trying, on October 13, 2001, we came into our laboratory at Advanced Cell Technology to see under the microscope what we’d been striving for—little balls of dividing cells not even visible to the naked eye. Insignificant as they appeared, the specks were precious because they were, to our knowledge, the first human embryos produced using the technique of nuclear transplantation, otherwise known as cloning."
"A United States company says it has created a human embryo clone.
Although this is not the first time such a claim has been made, it is the first time a research institute with an established track record in the use of cloning and other novel cell technologies has come forward with the announcement."
redux [02.04.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"After stuffing every cow egg with its little spud of human DNA, Sawyer prepares the next step. She gives the cells a zap of 120 volts. The jolt of electricity effectively fuses man and beast into a single biological fate. After one final step, this . . . this thing will believe it has been fertilized and, if all goes well, begin cleaving, or dividing, in the bubbling, momentous arithmetic of life lifting off the pad: 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells, 16 cells, 32 cells --"
redux [04.27.00]
"Although there hasn't been any shortage of stories on genes in the press, public dialogue hasn't even begun to seriously consider how radically genetic technologies will alter human life and society — and probably all much sooner than we think."
"My bet is that feasible technologies to retool human life will put us face to face with the basic dilemma of deciding what it means to be human within two decades."
redux [05.23.01]
"In the past month, a coterie of prominent naysayers have strongly condemned a new biomedical advance as going dangerously beyond what they regard as the ethical pale. While shrouded in the usual mystifying and hyperbolic rhetoric--we're creating Aldous Huxley's Brave New World! say critics--such attacks on what most people view as progress are instructive. The critics argue that science and medicine are advancing at a rate that far outstrips our ability to make wise and informed decisions. The only proper course of action, they say, is to stop what we're doing immediately.
This point of view packs a certain emotional wallop, but it is based on a completely mistaken understanding of how societies actually develop and adopt new technologies. History has repeatedly demonstrated that, far from promiscuously embracing every new scientific and medical procedure that comes along, societies incorporate them gradually and incrementally--and while working out important practical and ethical concerns."
redux [08.28.00]
"In a recent Wired magazine article, Bill Joy argued that the consequences of research on robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology may lead to “knowledge-enabled mass destruction...hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.” His medicine: “relinquishment...by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” I don’t buy it.
What troubles me with this argument is the arrogant notion that human logic can anticipate the effects of intended or unintended acts, and the more arrogant notion that human reasoning can determine the course of the universe"
"I suggest we broaden our perspective to the fullness of our humanity, which besides reason includes feelings and beliefs. Sometimes, as we drive the car of scientific and technological progress, we’ll veer because our reason says so. At other times we’ll follow our feelings, or we’ll be guided by faith. Most of the time, we’ll steer with all three of these human forces guiding us in concert, as they have guided human actions for thousands of years. As we do so, we should stay vigilant, ready to stop, when danger is imminent, using our full humanity to make that determination. If we do so, our turning point will be very different from where it may seem today, based on early rational assessments...that have failed us so often. Let us have faith in ourselves, our fellow human beings and our universe. And let’s keep in mind that our car is not the only moving thing out there."
10:16 PM 0 comments
The Christian Science Monitor
Four different approaches to e-publishing
"While the concept of e-publishing (as most people think of the term; in the strictest sense, everything on the Web could qualify as e-publishing) hasn't exactly set the world on fire, it is still the 'early days.' And like so many things on the Web, is still sorting out its proper place and 'mode of delivery.' The following sites reveal four different approaches to e-publishing - and whether through odd coincidence or 'environmental compulsion,' each one parallels a familiar method of software distribution."
"I've been listening to online-news people talk about it with much interest ever since I was laid off 6 months ago as the managing editor of a regional news site for an Internet Industry portal. Most of the old pros say it won't work. The consultants say about the same thing. The Suits? Well, they just don't say.
Yet, people have paid for print newspapers for ages and they don't seem to mind. So what's so different about online-news?
At this point, I think that online-news users have to pay, it's as simple as that."
"The Web's great free-for-all is coming to a sudden, sharp end. Under today's market conditions, Web companies can no longer expect to sustain themselves by losing ever-larger sums of money to gain ever-larger slices of market share. As more traditional business yardsticks take hold, many companies face the difficult decision to charge for some of their online content and services—and users have begun to accept that they can no longer get everything they want or love for free.
Sure, the Web continues to offer a vast, unprecedented array of gratismaterial. But professionally produced sites need to pay their bills, and relying on advertising alone is a risky proposition in an economic slump. As senior vice president of editorial operations for Salon.com , I've become very familiar with these realities. For content sites like Salon.com, charging for subscriptions—once considered anathema on the Web—is now an essential move for survival."
11:06 AM 0 comments
Cooking With Bigfoot
Thanksgiving celebration
"A heartwarming Thanksgiving celebration with authentic Native American chief Cooks With Jello."
9:34 AM 0 comments
News.Com
Open-source approach fades in tough times
"The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump."
"Where is our business model if everyone else can copy it?" asked Holger Dyroff, former CEO and now director of sales for Linux software seller SuSE. "The question is where we can make money now. Nobody cared about profitability two years ago."
"The new thinking often involves a proprietary product that has been built on top of an open-source foundation--a situation that could be considered the best, or worst, of both worlds."
winterspeak.com Interview with Sleepycat President and CEO, Michael Olson"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."
"I love open source. I love what it stands for and I love the fact that as a connected society we've perfected the concepts surrounding 'division of labor' to such a degree that we're now afforded both the luxuries and opportunity to do what we want for the sheer enjoyment of it, even if that means coding into the wee hours of the night! I love business, I love creating them and working with people to run and fine-tune them. I especially love making money, whether it be for business, myself or others. Money has afforded me the freedom to pursue my other passions in life: travel, thinking, writing, creating and oh yea, partying! Most of all, I love it when I get to put all my loves together... all at the same time!
Must all mis amores live separate lives? Can't they just get along? I think they can. I think they will."
"Software pioneer and MIT research affiliate Richard M. Stallman has been named as a co-winner of the 2001 Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being."
"Stallman has been recognized for his work leading the GNU operating system development project, and for starting the free software movement. GNU is an acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix,” a reference to the fact that the popular Linux operating systems actually operate off of GNU."
"Stallman hopes that software companies will eventually shift their source of income to custom software, support, and custom installations rather than proprietary software. “It is not impossible to make money from free software,” Stallman said."
"On November 5, 2001, IBM announced its donation of $40 million worth of tools to the Eclipse project. Eclipse, a fully functional software development environment that is written in Java, and that runs on both Linux and Windows, is intended to solve many of the problems of tool interoperability faced by developers of conventional tools."
"As analysts from the Hurwitz Group concluded, the move is consistent with IBM's commitment to Linux and growing tradition of incorporating open source code into its product lines: "With its experience with the open source application server Apache, and the Linux operating system, it makes sense that IBM would now move to provide the developer community with an open source development platform. The challenge for IBM and the Eclipse organization will be to draw strong and broad tool-vendor support to advance the platform, and to demonstrate that it is truly an open platform that enables straightforward tool integration to make it worthwhile for organizations to adopt. In addition, Eclipse needs to capture and enlist the efforts of the developer community at large, to test and refine the platform and add their innovation."
"This paper analyzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon. We first explode some prevalent myths about the funding of program development and the price structure of software. We present a game-theory analysis of the stability of open-source cooperation. We present nine models for sustainable funding of open-source development; two non-profit, seven for-profit. We continue to develop a qualitative theory of when it is economically rational to be closed. We then examine some novel additional mechanisms the market is now inventing to fund for-profit open-source development, including the reinvention of the patronage system and task markets. We conclude with some tentative predictions of the future."
redux [04.02.00]
" Open source is good for business. Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better. As you get further up the application stack, those two groups become disjointed...so the software that checks you into a hospital will never be open source because the people who care about that can't write software."
10:42 PM 0 comments
MIT Technology Review
Will Spyware Work?
"For several decades, electronic systems have been quietly put in place to intercept satellite communications, tap phone calls, monitor e-mail and Web traffic and then turn this massive flow of information into intelligence reports for U.S. leaders and investigative aids for law enforcement. Yet despite the $30 billion invested in them, and all the secrecy afforded them, government information technologies still could not connect the proverbial dots of the World Trade Center plot. "Obviously, there were intelligence failures on a number of levels," says Barry Posen, a defense policy analyst with MIT's Center for International Studies.
Now that it is apparent that these supposedly all-seeing government systems are not all-knowing, how can we ascertain that they work at all?"
"There is no doubt that America now confronts an extraordinary threat and that, as America's closest ally, Britain also has cause to fear. The terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks were ruthless, implacable and shrewd. It must be assumed that more attacks are possible. Faced with this, extraordinary measures are justified. A loss of privacy and more intrusive security seem inevitable. Tougher banking rules, closer co-operation between intelligence and police forces, and more monitoring of communications may be unwelcome, but they are necessary to track terrorists.
Still, it is essential that any new police powers be as limited as possible, and that the rival claims of liberty be taken seriously—even in the face of shadowy enemies. Striking this balance is bound to be tricky. Unfortunately, both governments are already failing in obvious ways to get the balance right."
redux [11.14.01]
"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS “watch list” — and being hunted by the FBI — when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar’s suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn’t already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built — it’s called Golden Shield, and it’s been designed by the Chinese Communist Party’s police agency to control Chinese citizens."
"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."
But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield’s tactics."
redux [11.10.01]
""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.
Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."
"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"
redux [10.04.01]
"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."
redux [10.12.01]
"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."
"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."
[requires 'free' registration]
"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."
redux [09.27.01]
"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"
"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."
"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"
"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"
redux [02.15.01]
"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?
A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""
8:54 AM 0 comments
CMSWatch
The Case for Personal Web Publishing
"Inside of corporations a weblog can be used in a knowledge management or market intelligence function. Every work group seems to have someone on the team who just sends links around via email to all the other people he or she works with. In an environment like that if you give them a weblog and all the sudden the resources start really working for you. Pretty soon everyone wants a weblog to share a resource they found and to annotate useful ways in which that resource can be used by the team."
"A smart company wants to have an employee who's immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever's going on inside your culture -- they're not making you any money by doing that. It's better to have people write publicly."
redux [11.05.01]
"One of the major problems with expert communities, according to Snowden, is that they train behaviour and prevent innovation. Encouraging multiple informal communities throughout the company is a critical step toward innovation, he said.
"Identify people with like interests and pull them together. Allow people to cluster and form communities, then reinforce the ones you want." Snowden said. "Informal communities keep organisations together and make things work.""
redux [10.17.01]
"One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value."
"But what if the two - blogging and KM - got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise?"
redux [07.16.01]
"A recent study by market-research firm Gartner Group suggests companies that proactively manage intellectual assets stand to make more profit than those that don't."
"Harry Bruce, associate dean of the University of Washington's Information School, said knowledge sharing is important because information has value in and of itself in our society."
""Clearly, we're increasingly becoming aware of the complexities of trying to share and transfer information and expertise within organizations and between organizations," he said."
"People constantly exchange information, the raw material of knowledge, with co-workers, business partners and customers... but they do it using personal, unstructured tools such as email. Wouldn't it be nice if companies could benefit from their own collective intelligence? Despite this appealing premise, years of knowledge management (KM) implementations have produced mixed results."
"The fundamental problem is philosophical. KM suffers from the hubris of modernism: the belief we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. It's time for postmodern knowledge management."
"Postmodern KM avoids the deterministic view of knowledge that worked at cross-purposes with human nature. Instead, it operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them. In the end, postmodern knowledge management isn't about management at all, because management implies external control. The goal of postmodern KM is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people."
redux [06.12.01]
"Within IBM, there's an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.
In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."
"Yes, knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called knowledge management, and why is it so important to each and every one of us? The following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions. As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not."
redux [05.28.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
""Intuitively, people feel there should be immense value in knowledge sharing, but no one has gotten their arms around how you do it in a large organization and how you measure its effect," said Steven L. Telleen, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.
""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."
11:32 PM 0 comments
MIT Technology Review
The 2001 Corporate R&D Scorecard
"Balancing an increased market focus—and closer ties to customers—with the pursuit of world-class science is now the trick for many corporate R&D groups. Gone forever are the days when large industrial labs churned out scientific papers and conducted long-term research far removed from business pressures. But while R&D groups have clearly gotten more business friendly over the last decade, they are also feeling pressures to come up with tomorrow's high-growth opportunities.
Indeed, industrial-R&D expert Richard Rosenbloom, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, is convinced that most high-tech firms—especially in the information technology sector—"still aren't doing enough to invest in the future technologies that will be the next big revolutionary business. They've been experimenting with new venture units, spinoffs, joint ventures and the like, but I don't know of a single big corporation that has a track record that is exceptional in any of those initiatives.""
redux [10.18.01]
"Corporate research labs have traditionally been called too narrowly focused, existing solely to turn a profit. Also, the argument goes, corporate labs don't have the broad mandate or intellectual freedom of university labs to delve into what might be considered "far-out" concepts, otherwise known as "disruptive technologies.""
"To the chagrin of pure-research advocates, corporate labs are now more willing to look at 'far-out' science - if it has possible practical applications.
redux [08.16.01]
"Bell Labs invented the transistor, the laser, and Unix, but it never invented a way for its parent, Ma Bell, to cash in. Xerox (XRX ) PARC presented the world with laser printers, Ethernet computer networking, and the point-and-click interface; the world capitalized on the technology.
Lucent (LU), Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Eastman Kodak (EK ) also employ brilliant scientists who win patents for big discoveries. But like the other storied R&D operations in corporate America, they have succeeded far better at R than at D. "We invented everything and developed nothing," laments Xerox PARC's founder, Jack Goldman.
Then there's IBM Research."
redux [05.30.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Bell Labs and its parent company, Lucent Technologies, are still giants of innovation despite recent management fumbles and business failures, many industry experts say.
"Their technology strength is four or five times" that of Alcatel , the French electronics giant that was trying to acquire Lucent, said Francis Narin, president of CHI Research of Haddon Heights, N.J., which tracks companies' inventiveness by analyzing their United States patent portfolios and by tallying how often other companies rely on them."
"But for decades, critics have called Lucent and its predecessors slow in turning the bright ideas into market-leading products that produce a steady flow of revenue."
redux [03.28.00]
"Transmitting a pulse of light faster than the speed of light is the kind of mind-bending, prestige-building discovery that the NEC Research Institute (NECI) was built to produce. So when Lijun Wang actually performed that astonishing feat last year, no one seemed to care that commercial application of his research is probably many years in the future. The kudos from the scientific community and terrific publicity were justification enough. But with parent company NEC struggling to boost profits, that kind of payoff may no longer be sufficient."
redux [03.21.00]
"Xerox' woes might seem to provide evidence that there's something wrong with the U.S. system of corporate R&D. That's not the case. Innovation is rife in the U.S., from industrial labs to contract research outfits and Silicon Valley startups. Says Martin N. Baily, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers: "We've been able to generate a fertile breeding ground because we have a range of funding mechanisms."
Start with the corporate labs, which once resembled ivory towers. Today, their PhDs are getting their hands dirty on real-world customer problems. But ''Xerox has been relatively slow'' to latch on to that trend, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Rebecca M. Henderson, an expert on corporate R&D.
Companies that get more pragmatic about research aren't dropping the "R" to do more "D.""
10:46 PM 0 comments
BusinessWeek
Researchers Probe Dark and Murky Net
"Broadband customers and U.S. military systems are the most common victims of an online phenomenon researchers have dubbed "dark address space," which leaves some 100 million hosts completely unreachable from portions of the Internet.
For a variety of reasons ranging from contract disputes among network operators to simple router misconfiguration, over five percent of the Internet's routable address space lacks global connectivity, according to the results of a three-year study by researchers at Massachusetts-based Arbor Networks, to be released Tuesday.
"Popular belief holds that the Internet represents a completely connected graph," says Craig Labovitz, Arbor Networks' director of network architecture. "It turns out that's just not true.""