Potato I have

I’d seen mention of the $100 laptop project but never thought much past the lowered economic barrier part; reading this Wired interview with Negroponte, it’s much more interesting than that.

From this BB post, I found this Clive Thompson entry; the pencil and the mathland analogies are important ones.

The open-source aspect is very interesting too: OSS is already a pretty low-barrier world, what happens when you remove the hardware part? Not only will OSS be used (assuming this takes off) by millions of kids, any of them with any technical inclination will be carrying around their own OSS “mathland” with them. Among other things, Negroponte suggests this will push OSS desktop mainstream.

(via boingboing)

France was late to the internet, partly due to an already established online services network called Minitel. But lately it seems they’ve become quite a leader, at least in high-bandwidth offerings. My DSL provider’s plan is 30€/month and includes a connection of up to 20Mbit (in practice I get about 10Mbit), a VoIP solution that has free unlimited calls in France and is about 1.80€/hour to California, and >200 TV channels (>80 free, including the new digital-over-airwaves channels). The satellite content providers are now delivering over DSL too. Stability and service are not rock-solid — and they’ve been downright nightmarish for some — but I’ve had a pretty good experience overall. Connection-only, high-bandwidth (20Mbit) offerings are about 15€/month, from multiple providers.

My provider has been aggressive with new services, and I especially like this free one; it’s based on the free and open-source (GNU GPL) VLC media player project, and means I can stream video from any computer on my LAN (Mac and PCs for me, but most OSes are supported) to my TV without any additional hardware. No computer in the living room. DVDs, mpgs, etc all presented as playlists which can be selected with the TV remote. Well, any multimedia can be streamed, but video is the interesting one for me.

I’ve found PersonalWiki a good way to keep a lot of information that was previously distributed in text files, outlook, jabber histories, etc. It’s a single, low-friction, hypertext place, with lots of good search capabilities, and my implementation is based on a free and open solution with a great support community (MoinMoin).

Now that I’ve got MultipleDesktops working smoothly for simple things using Subversion, the obvious question is can I use it to keep my PersonalWiki synchronized across machines as well?

Yes, and I’m rather happy with the result; see this experience paper for details (a wiki page at MoinMoin itself).

I’m probably mentioning Wikipedia too often, but my previous post about the semantic web offers an interesting comparison. The Forbes article and the Wikipedia entry are both approximately 1200 words, and the former is perhaps a better non-technical introduction, but I’m vastly more satisfied with the latter.

Why? The Wikipedia entry:

• has had an awful lot of editing, by many people
• has an ongoing discussion to improve the entry; anyone who can read the entry can participate
• being hypertext, directly links all of its numerous internal and external references
• also links its ‘Knowledge representation’ category, which has another 37 now 44 topically-related entries

The one is a feature article, the other an encyclopedia entry, they’re not the same thing, but it seems to me a good illustration of the different authoring processes and results.

Tim Bray considers unswitching (from Apple, rather than to it); the issues he mentions include lack of corporate transparency (he uses the word ‘infofascism’), mediocre laptop, and inability to run Sun products.

Since my personal ‘tecosystem’ could always use a little more diversity, I’m not wanting to switch but to add an Apple. In this light, Tim’s post doesn’t make me pause, but I’ll dig for other unswitch stories out of curiosity. Price is the classic complaint, but the transparency issue Tim gripes about is an interesting Apple vulnerability.

I’m still a bit undecided about where to enter the Mac line, and I don’t need this kind of distraction in the next few months, so it will be Summer before I bite, if ever. That comfortably accommodates Tiger even if the rumor is really a rumor, and not a crack of light that somehow slipped out of the box.

A friend just asked in jabber what I am up to, and I said “I’m reading a history of wikipedia.” The project started in 2001, and already

the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.

(via robotwisdom; seeing Jorn Barger filtering links again after a year and a half away is the best thing that’s happened to me today)

(more…)

Clemens Vasters has a good thread on declaration conventions for serialization in indigo. My two centimes here.

The Register reports the buy, and now we wait for positioning with sharepoint. MS’s Jeff Raikes and Groove’s Ray Ozzie (to be MS’s 3rd CTO) discuss a bit, in Q/A format press release. Groove is about decentralization:

PressPass: How will Groove complement Microsoft’s current collaboration offerings?
[…]
Ray Ozzie: Microsoft’s current collaboration products and Groove build on each other’s strengths. Distributed teams can use Groove to create ad-hoc workspaces that reside on team members’ PCs and later have the documents, plans and other workspace content published to a managed SharePoint Web Portal. Or an individual can bring content from a SharePoint site into a Groove workspace on his or her laptop — in order to work on that content with others, to automatically and securely synchronize it between home and work computers, or just to stay productive when temporarily disconnected from the network

Which is consistent with my personal usage of sharepoint as primarily a backing store.

Groove’s folder synchronization briefly caught my attention: I don’t yet have a good solution for multiple desktops and to this point I’m most interested in Fowler’s subversion approach. Groove brings “chat, presence, and notifications” to folder synch, and claims to do security and firewall in a transparent way, but the first bit is far from my synch needs and of course it is all MS only. The marketing materials are slick, of course.

As for my own collaboration, I’m currently running a wiki experiment (our org is very enamored with sharepoint), and couldn’t be happier so far. Otherwise, it’s just classic jabber, outlook mail and calendar, phone and netmeeting.

All of them. I like this approach, and my ripping will probably do this from now on. Saves me trying to figure out all the encoding choices at rip time–I can have large AND small files, and easily apply whatever encoders or listening experience I have tomorrow.

Something interesting from Sun: their looking glass 3D desktop project. There are some screenshots and a demo video.

This is a major break in desktop presentation, but will it be more than a toy? If I have 30 windows open (as I often do) will I be better off with them on edge than I am with my virtual desktop manager? I was reminded of the greek memorization technique where you physically place stuff in a personal, well-developed mental space like a house that you can move through. What if your 2D desktop were a similar 3D space personalized in whatever way you wanted (or a collection of these 3D profiles)? While the icons and windows were 3D, the desktop itself was conspicuously not, aside from some ability to “panorame” around a bit; why not a more 3D-navigable desktop?

It seems to be potentially a big deal, which brings me to another reaction I had to the demo (obvious, and the Sun presenter bludgeoned us with it of course): wouldn’t we see a lot more innovation with something like this from the open communities, rather than from a single very large company (albeit with enormous resources)? This is all built on java and linux (well, solaris too if you want). Not yet open source, but from the project FAQ:

Sun believes that tapping into the creative and open community of people working on Java will drive innovation. We are evaluating the role of open source development for this project.

Postscript: Sun will be GPL’ing looking glass today. Let’s see where it goes.