""What price liberty? A copy of the Declaration of Independence that was printed in 1776 and discovered behind a $4 flea-market painting in 1989 was sold yesterday for $7.4 million, 23 percent more than Sotheby's highest preauction estimate and a record for a copy of the document.

It was also one of the highest prices paid for a document sold over the Internet.""

"The "Jazz" platform is a Java-based zooming user interface (ZUI) development toolkit. Applications implemented in Jazz can easily zoom, pan, and transform graphical and text objects organized into a scenegraph of hierarchical cameras, nodes and objects. The views offer smooth, animated transitions throughout an infinite plane of information. With Jazz's close integration with Java and Swing, all Jazz applications are platform independent and run in any browser with a Java 2 Run-time Engine (JRE)"

"In the future, Bederson says the Jazz Band also expects to see Jazz being used to rescue users from information overload, even where applications don't yet exist. For example, applications built on top of Jazz could maintain your surfing trail on the Web so you can find your way back; could organize your email and documents; and could help you find what you need through e-commerce storefronts or search engines."

Idea: a little Web-app or browser plug-in that follows me around while I'm surfing, caching pages along the way, either on my local machine or preferably somewhere on the Internet like X:drive (up to 100 Mb of online storage, free!), and then allowing me to search/sort those pages by keyword, date, domain, &c. That way, I'll never lose track of those bits of information that seem insignificant at the time, but which are important at some point down the road.

"Consumers have been putting up with bug-ridden software for one simple reason: They don't realize there is an alternative. And once they find out, commercial software vendors are going to lose a big slice of their business. Where's my evidence for this claim? History. I'm sure you've heard the famous Santayana quote: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (No, that's not a typo; it's Santayana the philosopher, not Santana the guitarist.) If you're looking for an example, I've got a doozy for you. According to Mark Minasi, author of a very fine book entitled The Software Conspiracy (McGraw-Hill, 2000), the U.S. commercial software industry is making exactly the same mistake that U.S. auto makers once made, and the results could prove catastrophic to the U.S. economy."

"Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke."

"One, many people don't realize we have one of the best telecommunications infrastructures in the country -- maybe the best, in terms of high-speed Internet access, digital switch networks, (and) fiber optics -- all the pieces that go to making a really good telecommunications infrastructure.

We have high-speed Internet access in towns of 2,000 people. I like to say that New Sweden, Maine has better Internet access than Manhattan. And that gives us a real opportunity for any kind of telecommunications-based businesses.

The second thing is we have great people. We have a very long tradition of a really good work ethic, going back 100 years, 150 years. Maine was one of the early pioneers of the Industrial Revolution -- textile mills, shoe factories -- and there's a carry-over work ethic that's really good."

"1.Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).
2.Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies).
3.Growth (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).
4.Community (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other; newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and sharing opinions).
5.Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if *other* people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed).
6.Finally:

1.Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).
OR
2.Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives contentedly ever after)."

"While the content of this issue will be familiar to longtime FEED readers -- a group of essays and conversations organized loosely around a theme, in this case the theme of the city -- we have decided to experiment more with the design and the technology of the special issue format, which means tinkering with the "user experience" of the issue, as they say in the software world. We wanted to make "Street Level" as fun to explore as it is to read (not unlike a city itself) -- and to make it a launching point for other urban explorations. "

"As California's tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the state's power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord."

"Computers consume about 13% of the nation's power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.

The Internet's borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.

To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ''server farms'' consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. "

""We are impressed to learn that your company patented the principle of the hyperlink in the mid-70s when people were still wearing kipper ties and flares...Congratulations!""

"The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. But a swarm is not merely a big crowd. The individuals in the swarm lose their identities. The computers that make up this global swarm will blend together into the seamless substance of the Cybersphere. Within the swarm, individual computers will be as anonymous as molecules of air.

"If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn't that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination. The "site" is like a military unit in the field, the general moving with his troops (or like a hockey team in constant swarming motion). (We used essentially this technique to build the first tuple space implementations. They seemed to depend on a shared server, but the server was an illusion; there was no server, just a swarm of clients.) Could Amazon.com be an itinerant horde instead of a fixed Central Command Post? Yes. "

"This article takes you on a comprehensive tour of Object RPC technology to help you understand the foundations of SOAP and the ways it overcomes many of the limitations of existing technologies, including DCOM and CORBA. This is followed by a detailed treatment of the SOAP encoding rules with a focus on how SOAP maps onto existing ORPC concepts. "

""If [DSSAgent] is enabled, it communicates with our servers to let them know that a particular product has been installed and retrieves JPEG images for that product if any exist," explains Galdin. "This allows us to provide our customers with additional content for the products they have purchased, communicate product fixes, etc. To this end, it connects to the server and sends the product SKU number, last time a connection was made and if any downloads are in progress. Based on that information the server decides whether to send a JPEG image or not.""

"I want to work with people who believe in music and art and passion. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg. I'm leaving the major label system and there are hundreds of artists who are going to follow me. There's an unbelievable opportunity for new companies that dare to get it right.

How can anyone defend the current system when it fails to deliver music to so many potential fans? That only expects of itself a "5 percent success rate" a year? The status quo gives us a boring culture. In a society of over 300 million people, only 30 new artists a year sell a million records. By any measure, that's a huge failure."

"Since I've basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I'm not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made album sounds great. And I don't care what anyone says about digital recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do."

"The new survey, by market research firm Yankelovich Partners, says 66% of all consumers said that listening to a song online has at least once prompted them to later buy a CD or cassette featuring the song. The survey included 16,903 people age 13 through 39 who buy and listen to some music. "

"A journalist friend recently emailed a startling revelation. "I was looking for some deeper meaning in the last two major virus assaults," he wrote. "Each one has seven letters and three vowels, and if you rearrange the letters, MELISSA and LOVE BUG spell: BIG VOLUME SALES."

"I would like to be able to say with confidence that we've all learned a number of lessons and that the next virus will be barely a blip on the computer security radar. It would be nice to see more email clients and operating systems come up with more protection for the end user. Despite Melissa and the Love Bug tearing through the Internet and showing us twice that we have some lessons to learn, we're still vulnerable in the two areas that the Love Bug used to propogate itself: shoddy, insecure software and human nature."

"There are enormous implications in this shift for the open source and free software community. For example, I've tried to get Richard Stallman to realize that the GPL loses its teeth in a world where developers no longer need to distribute software in order for users to make use of it. A hosted web application could be built entirely with GPL'd software, and yet have no requirement that the source code be released, since the application itself is never distributed, and distribution is what triggers the GPL's source code availability clause."

"And in nearly every focus group, a top choice to be part of that board was Gates, the Microsoft Corp. chairman.

Although most groups said the United Nations should be involved, few wanted any other government representation. But many of the older women thought the church or a theologian should be involved, "someone with morals."

"I think we should put Oprah on there," said one middle-aged woman in Omaha. "She has a lot of pull. She'd be pulling for all of us. She has a loud voice with good morals. She's always for the underdog.""

"Quite some time ago, PCPs such as Rolling Stone Magazine and (surprise!) America Online approached the top management at ODP and suggested that it would be a good deal all around if the PCPs could manage their own site listings within ODP. After all, many ODP editors were also Web site owners who managed their own listings. The difference was that the ODP editors had to work their way up through the ranks whereas PCPs were given the proverbial key to the Emerald City from day one. To add fuel to the fire, many trustworthy volunteer editors were "counseled" for deleting or modifying inappropriate listings that had been added to ODP by PCP editors."

"Lack of representativeness and lack of transparency. Unlike the federal bureaucracy in a democratic nation, you don't precisely know what the criteria for acceptance are. Criteria for progress through the ranks is similarly unknown. The Open Directory's procedures for accepting new editors or accepting site submissions are no more open or transparent than they are at private companies like Yahoo or Looksmart.

Incentive for corruption and excessive categorization of low-quality sites.Yahoo and Looksmart (presumably "closed shops") have employees performing similar functions to the Open Directory Category Editors. Think about this. Looking at it from the point of view of organizational sociology (yes, I must), the underlying reality is that these three are all organizations with rules and structures whose main output is the opinionated categorization, and importantly, rejection, of a vast number of submissions of web sites and Internet content. The key difference seems to be that dmoz category editors aren't paid. What is the likely result of this? Think about the analogy of a country whose bureaucrats are poorly compensated. Any textbook can give you examples. All moralizing aside, extremely low pay creates an incentive for the postal inspector or the traffic cop to engage in petty forms of corruption. What's my city health inspector's incentive to REALLY crack down on all the bug-infested restaurants downtown? And what might motivate a dmoz category editor to prevent their buddies' lower quality sites from getting one or even several listings? And are they likely to think about the whole mess all fits together, or is that someone else's problem? In fact, there are considerable incentives in volunteer directories to pump up one's numbers of site submissions, since that is the key criterion for advancement through the ranks. The web's best resources, therefore, are impossible to find, buried under a mountain of minutiae.

The "open" directory is owned by a $300 billion company. Most importantly -- and I hate to bring this to the attention of the self-governing republic of dmoz -- the relatively benevolent overseer of its operations, Netscape, was acquired by AOL, which recently merged with Time Warner, creating a $300 billion behemoth. To repeat: the Open Directory Project is owned by AOL Time Warner. The "project" now has marketing executives assigned to it, though you won't see that openly admitted on the "About us" page. AOL Time Warner: a bastion of openness? Quite the opposite. AOL loves to be proprietary. It dislikes the "open" Internet, but just now it probably wants as much PR as it can get which juxtaposes the word "open" with "AOL." This could help a lot in smoothing things by the regulators. Fair enough. But when that's all done with, AOL, how about some truth in advertising?"

"...criticisms fall into at least five categories:

WAP is designed to further the economic interests of the cellular carriers, the handset manufacturers, and sellers of WAP gateways.

The developers of WAP and WML, Phone.com and the WAP Forum, failed to use the collaborative process within the W3C and rushed ahead on their own agenda.

The protocol is flexible enough to allow different implementations on different handsets and browser clients, meaning a dramatic increase in the number of interfaces that web developers will have to design for and serve to.

It is only a temporary fix, a stop-gap measure for the few years until more processing power and wider bandwidth (G3 networks).

An incompatibility between wireless and Net security protocols exposes encrypted transactions in the middle of their journey, making the system risky for secure transactions like bill paying or banking."

"Mobile data is a compelling concept. The idea of being cut free from wires and being able to access information in various shapes and forms is hugely attractive. Being able to make use of the mobile phone companys' billing systems to allow for online purchasing is an awesome opportunity. There can be hardly any doubt that somehow, somewhere, somebody will figure out how to do it right, but on the evidence to date, WAP/WML is not the answer. Let's hope that after this poor start the industry will get its act together better and start thinking from the consumers' point of view, not its own."

"Some 86.5 percent of respondents said that WAP services were too slow, while 85.5 percent complained about the price. There are too few services to make WAP attractive, according to 83.3 percent of those surveyed."

"Yesterday's Wall Street Journal Europe had a fascinating piece on the strategy telecoms companies are following with WAP. They are "locking" their phones so that you can only access their portal, or even in some cases only access sites that have agreements with them. Have these people learned nothing from the Web?

Fortunately, mobile Internet company Wappup took France Telecom to court on this issue. The French courts ruled yesterday that France Telecom would have to unlock its phones -- but only at users' request! (Incidentally, it doesn't look like Wappup understands the Web either -- access to anything but the home page of their site, which is not very informative, requires a username and password. They do, however, have a link to the text of the French court decision, in French, bien sur.)

There are a number of issues here. First, trying to partition the Web is wrong and futile. As Dave Winer points out in Scripting News, if you aren't getting the whole Web, you're not getting the Web. Second, trying to confine users to a preplanned network not only loses the richness of the Web, it will terminally frustrate many users. If you've ever tried a WAP phone, the interface is already a huge constraint. The telecom giants may -- with their misguided portal strategy -- have found a way to kill WAP off once and for all.

Given the huge sums telecom groups are spending on the promised land of third-generation mobile services, they can perhaps leap over the constraints of WAP."

"Total Recall works by tracking your browsing session in a file saved on your local hard drive. When you restart Mozilla after a browser crash (or even an operating system crash), the windows that were open before the crash will be displayed to you in a pulldown menu that will allow you to return to one or all of the pages you were viewing."

"A generation ago the kind of students who entered science fairs were considered nerds -- preternaturally bright kids whose ardent intellects, moire-patterned wardrobes and clueless social instincts put them outside the adolescent mainstream. Geeks still roam the halls of American high schools -- and of Midwood, for that matter -- but many of Midwood's Intel kids move comfortably in the newly respectable mainstream, where being scientifically astute has a certain cachet. They inhabit an area of cultural endeavor that -- coming a quarter-century after the birth of biotechnology and personal computers and, yes, the rise of Nasdaq -- is now seen not only as intellectually precocious but also, suddenly, improbably, as positioned in a fast lane pointed toward wealth, creature comforts and the freedom to choose what to make of one's life. "

"The key to interacting with your geek is to learn to speak his or her language, she explains -- defining personal improvements as "upgrades" and bad habits as "nonproductive feedback loops." It's simply a matter of using the right encouragement. Don't tell him he needs to get some exercise and lose some weight; tell him that he will be better prepared for all-night Doom marathons if he is in better physical shape. It's all about becoming more "efficient.""

"...many musicians have discovered, as the Grateful Dead did, that the best way to make money from music is to give it away. While scarcity may increase the value of physical goods, such as CD's, the opposite applies to information. In a dematerialized information economy, there is an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value. If your work is good, allowing what you've done to self-replicate freely increases demand for what you haven't done yet, whether by live performances or by charging online for the download of new work.

For these, and far more reasons than I can state here, I'm convinced that the traditional music business is finished. Napster and other environments like it will polish off the likes of BMG and Tower Records within five years."

"...the Volvo S40 ad campaign's use of the Minutemen's "Love Dance" seems designed to impress only those who already have the record. Unlike other Minutemen songs, "Love Dance" -- an instrumental ­- is lovely enough to pass for a jingle. The shock comes exclusively from the seeing it embedded in such a strange context. Aggressively independent (they recorded exclusively for Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn's SST label), and unapologetically leftist (bassist Mike Watt does a wicked Castro impersonation), the band's oeuvre consists largely of pointed anti-capitalist anthems: "Let the products sell themselves/Fuck advertising and commercial psychology" they sing elsewhere on the record from which "Love Dance" was plucked."

"Imagine a network of a million hosts (a small subset of all webservers). Each of these is running a gnutella-based search-engine. On one of the servers is an interface to search the network for some information. The query is forwarded onto the overlay network, to say 10 nodes at each node, assuming some mechanism is in place to avoid loops. if the network is well interconnected, it will take about 5-6 hops to reach an edge of the cloud (probably a couple of times more to reach all the nodes). As soon as the first nodes get the search-request, they send back results, say limited to the first 5-10 most significant hits. Each reply has a number of tuples consisting of (URLs, a description and an indication of how close the match is and a timestamp and probably some more), maybe 1-2 kB per reply. Say 10% of servers have a match, then 100000 hosts will at some point send back results.

I calculate, roughly a 100 MB of results will be arriving at the searching node within a few minutes, if it can process the dataflow.

This is only one search, both the searching nodes and the servers will have to deal with a lot of searches if you look at other search-engines as a comparison. "

"...most importantly, it sucks bandwidth. I can easily see how network admins will want to outlaw this beast, if they can. For my evening of experimentation, I downloaded a total of 65 MBytes of files, while my total incoming consumed bandwidth was 365 MBytes, and my upstream bandwidth was 755 MBytes. Yes, really -- all that, in a measly five hours."