Talked to Guan about arranging a weekend soon to sit together in Copenhagen and hack on the OpenACS blogger, adding new features and making it slicker.
Who wants to join?
We talked about the weekend Dec 13-14, but I wouldn’t be able to make it before Saturday at about 1-2PM. Alternatively Jan 10-11 or 17-18?
Just saw EtherPEG on Guan’s laptop. Sniffs JPEGs and GIFs from all WiFi connections within range and displays them. See also O’Reilly writeup.
Note to self: OpenACS weblogger needs social networking tools … (I’m at Blogforum)
In Hamburg fixing OpenACS bugs with Malte, Timo, Dirk, Gert, Vanessa, Joel, and Peter :)
An interesting thoguht with no real point from Jon Udell, Thought-provoking, nonetheless, that you can still run VisiCalc on Windows XP. It’s like a small piece of software archeology, remeniscent of the Commodore 64 emulator for PCs that lets me play my beloved Boulder Dash from back then.
We could add the positive effect on the economy by preventing monopolies. Open source software is by nature pro-competition, non-monopolist.
Neuroeconomics now shows how people do not act rationally in the narrow economic rationality sense. Rather, we trust each other, and that trust causes us to be better off, collectively, than we would’ve been not trusting each other.
This to me explains very precisely why open source software works in practice. Frequently, when I tell people about the economics of open source software, people ask “but why don’t people just take the software and use it and never give anything back?” In practice, some people do this, of course. But enough people want a trustful collaboration that leaves everybody better off, and that’s what makes open source software work as an economic reality.
To select a specific product you have to hover the mouse over the PRODUCTS link to unfold a categorized dropdown list.If You for one reason or another do not see a dropdown list, you are adviced to use the OVERVIEW link.
AskTog: D’ohLT #2: Security D’ohLTs.
Excessive security can not only turn your financial and medical information into an open book, it can actually kill you.Fifteen years ago, the approved method for gaining possession of a vehicle other than your own was to wait for the owner to wander off, then jimmy the door and hammer a screwdriver into the ignition. Bowing to auto-insurance industry pressure, auto makers have removed that option in many high-end cars, which are no longer practical to steal.
This has made the insurance companies very happy, but, unfortunately, it is getting a lot of their clients killed, since high-end cars are no longer being taken when the owners are away, but when the owners are there, car keys in hand.
Doh!
Also by way of Clay Shirky, but written by Danny O’Brien:
On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.This is why, incidentally, why people hate blogs so much. My God, people say, how can Livejournallers be so self-obsessed? Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won’t they all shut up?
The answer why they won’t shut up is – they’re not talking to you. They’re talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google. They’re having a bad day. They’re writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you’re standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who’s obsessed now?
Helps explain why politicians are so annoying to listen to, why I get so frustrated when we lambast our politicians for making off-hand remarks in “private” conversations, what happens when we reach for the telephone after having been on the phone with someone to check that it isn’t still off the hook.
Clay Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. Once again, Clay demonstrates why he’s my favorite technology critic.
The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people’s understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic.
...
Consider the following, from the W3C’s own site:
Q: How do you buy a book over the Semantic Web?This example sets the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.A: You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want. You add information to the Semantic Web saying that you accept the offer and giving details (your name, shipping address, credit card information, etc). Of course you add it (1) with access control so only you and seller can see it, and (2) you store it in a place where the seller can easily get it, perhaps the seller’s own server, (3) you notify the seller about it. You wait or query for confirmation that the seller has received your acceptance, and perhaps (later) for shipping information, etc. [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/semweb/] One doubts Jeff Bezos is losing sleep.
Note the company we’re in :)
There you go, Dalager. And here, about 2/3rds down the page. Actually, there are a few complete sites on the topic (1, 2). I couldn’t find any video clips, though. But there’s clearly a lot more to it than I thought.
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