Esthr just pointed to a cool idea: Barcode Wikipedia.
Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi is a long and wrenching piece about the OLPC project by Ivan Krstic. Just one man’s take, but Ivan’s been a strong advocate for the OLPC’s highest purposes. Performer too.
Some pushback from Taran Rampersad. Also this from Tom Hoffman. (And privately from some people.)
For what it’s worth, I’ve loved the ambitions of the OLPC program from the beginning, even if I thought they were crazy to start in 5th gear by rolling a zillion laptops out to 3rd world countries, too many of which are run by dictatorships that could be bought by actual vendors.
Still. Ordinary laptops have been stale for a long time.
Even if they crater, they’ve blazed a worthy trail along the way.
Not seeing large amounts yet on Technorati or Google Blogsearch. One Flickr shot so far, tagged iiw2008. Unfortunately, iiw tags also pertain to other stuff.
Andy Carvin & NPR crew get kicked out of a public place for taking pictures with a weird (but way cool) camera.
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, which has recently resorted to what Joe Klein calls a “paste-on populism”, has been reduced, even with her West Virginia victory, to a Monty Python sketch.
If you’re busy thinking business is war, you may miss the fact that you still haven’t been killed on the job.
That’s one line from Rebuilding the software industry, one word at a time, written more than seven years ago for Kuro5hin, which is still, commendably, around. Just ran across it again now. Hadn’t read it in years. Holds up pretty well.
Very nice to discover, via many excellent comments on a Flikr fotoset, that the Minuteman Bikeway has a blog.
Here’s the beginning. Good story.
One of the worst effects of the Reagan Revolution was a near-complete loss of conscious caring about public infrastructure in the U.S. Most capital-intensive essentially public projects with no Wall Street box office were neglected. For decades.
I’m reminded of this by On the pot-holed highway to hell, by John Gapper in the Financial Times. It begins,
| If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route. |
| That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness... |
| There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two. |
| First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough - broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year. |
| Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better. |
| Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s as it built the interstate highway system - at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record. |
Will this be an issue in the upcoming election? Barack Obama lists 21 issues in a pull-down menu. One of those is “additional issues“. There are six of those. Last on the list is “transportation“. Its entire text says “As our society becomes more mobile and interconnected, the need for 21st-century transportation networks has never been greater. However, too many of our nation’s railways, highways, bridges, airports, and neighborhood streets are slowly decaying due to lack of investment and strategic long-term planning. Barack Obama believes that America’s long-term competitiveness depends on the stability of our critical infrastructure. As president, Obama will make strengthening our transportation systems, including our roads and bridges, a top priority.” But there is a .pdf of the full plan. Argue with it if you like, but at least he has one.
John McCain lists 13 issues in his pull-down Issues menu. None of them cover this stuff, near as I can tell.
VRM is starting to pick up steam just in time for IIW this week. For details, follow the links from Mine! and A nice unpacking of VRM. And thanks to Adriana Lukas, Eve Maler, Alec Muffett, Ben Laurie and Joe Andrieu (along with currently uncredited others) for getting many conversational as well as developmental box cars packed and rolling.
It’s great to see what I saw coming in 2003 finally start to take off.
I’ve long believed that the crossover from the Industrial Age to the Information Age will be marked by an awakening to the need by customers to control their own selves, rather than to remain subordinated to the controlling interests of companies. Same thing with citizens and governments.
Cluetrain, for me at least, was about that.
So now user freedom is at issue again, this time in the context of “social networking”, which in the current popular sense happens almost entirely inside company walled gardens. Some companies are larger than others, and some gardens have openings in their hedges for “federation” of user data, at the latter’s grace. But your data is still theirs, pretty much. That’s how it plays in the media, and probably in the minds of most of the companies involved as well.
So I just wrote about where I think this is going, in Who controls your data, over at Linux Journal. See what ya think.
