EducationGuardian – Darkness at noon: “The university has embraced the fallacy of arguing that if Latin America cannot be understood without an understanding of the United States, therefore the United States cannot be understood without the study of Latin America. The first may be true, the second is manifestly false.”
China’s average GDP to exceed 1000 US dollars At current growth rates this would mean that a supposedly communist country could have a larger economy than the US within 30 years.
BBC Radio is to air John Cage’s 4’33”. It could also air Mike Batt’s identical piece a result of which, Cage’s estate successfully sued for copyright infringement, the reason being that both pieces consist entirely of silence. For those that miss it, the same piece will be shown on BBC TV later.
Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, explores what happened after the Civil War, a time when the Republicans were liberal and the Democrats conservative.
Aaron Swartz: “Libraries and video stores (neither of which pay per rental) hurt sales too. Is it unethical to use them?” The library angle is interesting. If one applies the current logic of the RIAA stance to libraries then if libraries were to lend digital information, this would be indistinguishable from filesharing and therefore illegal. Most rational people think that libraries are a good thing, yet they cannot logically exist in a world of digital content governed by traditional attitudes to content distribution. As more information becomes available in digital form then a library can clearly offer better services such as online delivery. A library becomes a more exciting and valuable community resource. So is it really conceivable that as media like CDs go the way of 8 tracks that libraries will be forced with a choice to become repositories of information stored on obsolete media, or exist underground as…
1. Enterprise software backlash. After being a temporarily fashionable haven from the dotcom collapse, enterprise software takes a beating 2. Hybrid social networking and blogging services emerge 3. VOIP makes the music industry
Have been trying out the Vonage softphone with some success. My Laptop (IBM T40), like most, has built in speakers and microphone, and I don’t want to have to bother with a headset. The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of controlling the echo that the person I am calling hears when the mic. picks up the sound of their own voice from the laptop speakers feeding back into it. I can’t find any third party, echo cancelling, software to turn the laptop into a decent hands free phone. Another question that springs to mind is why the softphone software is better than the reliability and ease of use of voice conversations via an IM client – why are these so unreliable? In general it seems that IM clients switch to peer-to-peer when dealing with file transfers or voice and this is often screwy, but there…
Business Plan Archive is a repository of business plans and information about failed .com companies – a sort of intellectual anti-matter I guess, but fascinating reading nonetheless. My personal favorite that I’d forgotten about: Zap.com Portal that makes fish oil
Salesforce.com files for IPO After ditching its Salesforce.com rival, Sales.com, Siebel is now doing a complete U-turn with its own Salesforce-like ASP tool. Call me old-fashioned but most Enterprise software seems to suck. When will it go the way of mainframe computers? The whole notion of spending millions for software that is ‘bespoke’ tailored to your needs, but requires you to do that tailoring yourself for more millions, based on a Return On Investment that has a minus sign in front of it, seems like, well, old-fashioned. The tool I am using to write this is a more elegant solution to web publishing than the raft of Jurassic CMS systems that are waiting for an enormous meteorite to hit them. ASP software is a car and enterprise software is a steam train. When the .com bubble burst people tried to make steam driven cars out of the remnants and that…
Anniversary of first flight – Dec. 17, 2003 Exactly 100 years ago today: flying made possible. This year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 1350mph Next year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 650mph Computers, the Net, telephones and air travel all make the world a smaller place, but exactly 100 years after the invention of flight that is no longer the case. Moore’s law applied to computing and the spread of the net, arguably shows the world shrinking by half its size every year and a half. For travel, the plane shrank the apparent size of the earth to one tenth over 50 years, it then shrank by half again over the next 20 years; 20 years later it shrank by another half with supersonic passenger travel. This year it didn’t merely stop shrinking, but it doubled in size.
RSS, or more generally, web based syndication, appears to be hitting critical mass, but where is the money? Despite the promise of metadata enriched syndicated content, RSS is usually no more than a way to syndicate a link and a headline. No large publisher will syndicate their full content in RSS because they would lose traffic and therefore, money. Without full content no aggregator can add much value by categorizing and filtering infomation, so no purely RSS based aggregator can make much money. Despite all of the interest around web based syndication, people like Lexis Nexis will still make all the money unless this problem is solved. The solution that gives publishers traffic and allows aggregators to add value is to syndicate full content in such a way that it can be searched or categorized, but people still have to go to read the article on the publisher’s site. All…