Since approximately, October 17, 2011, we’ve been a little bit more guarded about what is going on in our lab and perhaps a little less helpful or open to some of you. We’re sorry. Our University has decided, with no faculty involvement to change our consulting/engagement forms.

The change means that University of Washington is now claiming total ownership of intellectual property developed by facutly and students. Previously the project had been sharing its knowledge much more freely across an amazing breadth of efforts. These are the folks that figured out how to print 3D objects in wood and generally have been working with a variety of materials broader than most included concrete, glass and tea.

To benefit from their considerable experience now requires a consulting contract that may cost as much as $80K to $110K at a minimum. Several of the faculty are working to change the new policy. They are circulating a form letter in response to inquiries highlighting the situation and redirecting interested parties to other resources in the 3DP community.

I had the great pleasure of talking with one of the faculty working on Open3DP last Summer. The irony for me is that the conversation I had then informed me of the patent situation around powder bed 3DP technologies of which previously I had been largely ignorant. In a nutshell there are still considerable barriers in the form of intellectual property licensing keeping out all but the well financed commercial ventures or the most brazen academics and homebrew enthusiasts.

Sorry we’re not so Open lately, Open3DP (via BoingBoing)

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Imagine buying a car that locks you into one brand of fuel. A new BMW, for example, that only runs on BMW gas. There are plenty of BMW gas stations around, even a few in your neighborhood, so convenience isn’t an issue. But if one of those other gas stations offers a discount, a membership program, or some other attractive marketing campaign, you can’t participate. You’re locked in with the BMW gas stations.

This could never happen, right? Consumers are too smart to buy into something like this. Or are they? After all, isn’t that exactly what’s happening in the ebook world? You buy a dedicated ebook reader like a Kindle or a NOOK and you’re locked in to that company’s content. Part of this problem has to do with ebook formats (e.g., EPUB or Mobipocket) while another part of it stems from publisher insistence on the use of digital rights management (DRM).

Wikert goes on to re-visit the problems inherent in the current ebook market in a coherent and I think compelling fashion. It is worth noting that O’Reilly, who re-posted this piece from Publishers Weekly, is one of the few publisher from whom I regularly buy ebooks exactly because they support all the popular formats and have never used DRM.

I simply will not buy into another platform that has an intentional switching cost built in. I possess the technical experience and skills to exercise what I believe to be fair use in the form of personal copies and format shifting. That doesn’t change how I feel even if that means I still have to live with the limitations of paper books as an avid reader, both for pleasure and for my profession. I would love nothing more than to have my entire non-fiction library always at my fingertips with quick lookup and digital notes to add in my research, writing and other work.

It is more important to me to set a visible example and to keep pushing for a legitimate means to exert my preferences, especially with my purchasing dollar. If I buy DRM’ed or otherwise platform locked titles, I fear it sends the wrong message, that I find this situation acceptable when I clearly do not.

It’s time for a unified ebook format and the end of DRM, O’Reilly Radar

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Science fiction exposes: it can be hard to understand or even see upheaval when you’re in its midst. But just as a doctor will swab your throat and grow a sample of the flora she finds there in a petri dish until it’s large enough to identify, so too can a science fiction writer construct a petri dish of a world in which a single technology or idea can grow to fill it, providing a magnified look at something that was too small to be detected in situ.

The exposure he so beautifully explains is just one of the functions this genre of work can serve. I won’t spoil the most compelling argument, rather urging that you read the article, if you haven’t already. Cory’s keen insight here is why I recently praised his skill as an essayist, a facet of his work that I don’t think garners as near as much attention and credit as his oratory and fiction.

A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future, Locus Online

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I’m on the threshold now of rejecting this false idol, but for at least a little longer I have to cling to it to carry me through. I have a dream of starting some kind of open source movement for evolvable hardware and languages. The core philosophy would be that if your grandparents can’t use it out of the box to do something real (like do their taxes or call 911 when they fall down) then it fails. You should literally be able to tell it what you want it to do and it would do its darnedest to do a good job for you. Computers today are the opposite of that. They own you and bend you to their will. And I don’t think people fully realize how trapped we are within this aging infrastructure.

The post is rife with examples of how the status quo is an abysmal failure to all but those of a very hackish bent. Morris touches on why this is so, the industrialization of software and the subsequent urge to profit. If you can wade through the very down tone, I think there is a kernel of optimism–a call for a sea change in how computers work and work for us.

Morris isn’t alone in this view, keeping company with the likes of Jaron Lanier. This is not likely to be the last rant in this vein. I think he is a bit more pragmatic, though, highlighting PHP as an example of a step in the right direction. His point isn’t that PHP has a natural language based syntax or that it has syntax or semantics that mirror concepts and idioms with which non-programmers are familiar. Rather he suggests it for its more productive failure modes, that it makes a best effort on the easy stuff and doesn’t obscure breakages requiring more investigation.

Whether you agree with PHP specifically or not, it is worth considering it as an example of the model he is proposing–languages and tools that are more focused on outcomes than abstract design principles or idealized syntax. The emphasis of getting out of the way of doing useful things ultimately sets apart this rant from a crowd of voices raising many of the same critiques of the state of the art.

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The first problem with forcing Reader users to shift over to Plus is that it brings many more people directly into conflict with the much debated real name policy for the search giant’s shiny new social network. Feed reading and curation is often closely associated with blogging, an activity that has a long and respected tradition (despite the occasional conspicuous failure) of anonymous and pseudonymous authorship. Many such users previously had an easier time following Google’s own advice to not use Plus if they are not in a position to use a real or common name.

This leads to the second problem with Google’s stance on not just this change, but now a couple of recent policies. Namely they have been espousing the view that if you don’t like how they run their services, you can export your data and use some other tool. Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb takes a pretty dim view of that recommendation, reasoning that the popularity of Reader has killed off the alternatives.

I agree only in so far as if you want a feed reader that is accessible from multiple machines, remembering the state of what you have or have not read and offers the ability to directly curate items from the reader, as opposed to using a blog or tumblr, then Google’s stance is indeed incredibly disingenuous.

The optimist in me, however, hopes that Google’s ham-fisting of Reader shakes enough free software and open source developers loose from their complacency to quickly spin up some compelling alternatives. I think there is some serious low hanging fruit here in the form of bridging between the feed reading capabilities in Mozilla’s Thunderbird and their Sync service, a secure and extensible means of sharing state between multiple instances.

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When I was in college, access to and usage of the limited number of Unix workstations on campus were of mythic proportions. All of my friends and my co-workers within the school’s Technology Services enjoyed noodling around with PCs of different strips. Gaining entrance to the access-limited Unix labs and setting at the quietly humming machines with their remarkably large and high resolution displays for that time was something else altogether.

Those machines in no way felt like toys. To a one they were all networked together and connected via fast links to the Internet. What you had to bash and cobble together on your own PC to get barely functioning was a given in terms of horse power and network connectivity with these machines.

That sense of awe, the invitation to explore that is woven into my earliest experiences of Unix deeply informs my relationship with Linux, its spiritual descendant. I still experience a subtle frisson of delight when exercising root privileges on any of my Linux boxen for the way it takes me back to those almost furtive trips into the Unix labs at school.

The C programming language holds a similar place in my personal pantheon. Almost every programming language with which I have more than a passing fluency can be described as C-like. I have only worked directly with C for limited stints over the years, experiences too few and far between to transform the experience from mysterious into the quotidian. I realize that rationally it is a bit silly but just the age and application of C seem to beg a certain veneration that few if any subsequent languages have yet to achieve.

The contrast between the coverage of Jobs’ passing and Ritchie’s is pretty extreme. The temptation to read much into the difference is great but I think easily explained. By all accounts Ritchie was a very quiet and private person. Unlike Jobs, you don’t have to have a sense of Ritchie’s personality to appreciate his contribution to modern computing. The technical merits of C, Unix and his collaboration with Kernighan in the form of The C Programming Language, or simply K&R, speak for themselves.

If you are unfamiliar with Dennis Ritchie’s work, Joe “zonker” Brockmeier posted an excellent recollection at ReadWriteWeb.

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We’re in a multi-browser market. Competitors try (some harder than others, pace Alex Russell’s latest blog post) to work together in standards bodies. This does not necessarily mean everything takes too long (Dart didn’t take a month or a year — it has been going longer than that, in secret).

[...]

Dart goes the wrong way and is likely to bounce off other browsers. It is therefore anti-open-web in my book. “The end justifies the means” slaves will say “but but but it’ll eventually force things to get better”. Maybe it will, but at high cost. More likely, it won’t, and we’ll have two problems (Dart and JS).

Honestly, I am a little sick of the hubris that accompanies decisions like this. I’ve explained my admiration for Mozilla repeatedly before as an increasingly necessary counterbalance to Google’s now established pattern of eschewing community developed open standards in favor of its own efforts. Chrome instead of Firefox, Web-M instead of Theora, Plus instead of a federated social network approach using ActivityStreams, OStatus, etc.

In the interest of disclosure, and fairness, I collaborate daily with folks at Google. They do much that is needful and even admirable. In this one area, however, I think there needs to be more forcefully and clearly asked questions each succesive time Google charts its own way, often at the expense of the open web community.

Brendan Eich on Hacker News, via @gnat

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In one of his most recent blog posts, he looks at how we as web surfers find the interesting flotsam that is so enjoyable to share.

Indeed, we clearly have an appetite for knowing how and where people found stuff. Every time someone creates a new tool for publishing online — blogs, status updates, social networks, you name it — users on a grassroots level immediately create conventions for elaborately backlinking and @crediting where they got stuff from. It’s partly reputational, but it also betrays the fact that we seriously enjoy associational thinking and finding.

I love how he dovetails this with some of the amazingly prescient work of Vannevar Bush. It also meshes well with Dan Gillmor’s recent call to those of us who aggregate and curates stories to dig deeper to expose the original and correct attribution for the work going into these fantastic nuggets of interest.

In his comments on Thompson’s post, Cory Doctorow teases out the call for help in enhancing or building tools to get at these trails used to find and associate content. Personally, I rely almost exclusively on RSS so usually have little trouble clarifying the original sources on anything I read. Regardless, I understand the need and the challenge. Had I any time to spare, this would be a fantastic weekend project, a good excuse to build some stronger skills in web browser extension development.

Whether you can help with the call to build better or even any tools that tackle this engrossing problem, the article is well worth a read.

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex, collision detection

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Dumpster Drive is a file-sharing application that recycles digital files. Using dumpster diving as a model for recirculating unwanted objects, Dumpster Drive allows others to dig through files that you delete on your computer in a passive file-sharing network. Instead of simply erasing data from your computer, the software allows users to extend the lifecycle of their unwanted files and pass them on to others.

The application is only available for Mac. Reading around the site answered my only other question. It does not replace your existing Trash folder at all, rather it provides an additional target. Otherwise I had nightmare images of all kinds of unintentional and embarrassing sharing taking place.

Dumpster Drive, via Slashdot

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jsmad isn’t a front end, though. Digging into the story a bit more, it is actually a native decoder for several variations of the MP3 format that runs entirely in JavaScript. It has more in common, then, with the the recent x86 emulator and several game emulators that have been ported or written from scratch to execute in the browser without using any plugins or any special multimedia capabilities.

Porting notes

Obviously, porting low-level C code to Javascript isn’t an easy task. Some things had to be adapted pretty heavily. jsmad is not the result of an automatic translation – all 15K+ lines of code were translated by hand by @nddrylliog and @jensnockert during MusicHackDay Berlin. Then, @mgeorgi helped us a lot with the debugging process, and @antoinem did the design of the demo during MusicHackDay Barcelona.

It performs well enough to decode and play MP3s in realtime on Firefox on modern computers, although if you do lots of things at once, Firefox might forget at all about scheduled tasks and let the soundcard underflow. There is a rescue mechanism for that in the demo, which works most of the time.

There is a fully capable demo, written in a very brief amount of time as part of the Music Hackday. I ran into a couple of issues with playback but outside of that, the experience is entirely comparable with the usual Flash players.

If it is possible to run a fixed point, compute and data intensive decoder like this with nothing more than the browser’s JavaScript engine, I have to imagine it should also be possible to port many of the open formats, like Ogg Vorbis and Flac. As a podcaster, the possibilities here are very alluring. jsmad is free software, available under the GPL v2 so it isn’t unreasonable to expect as interest increases, so should performance, accuracy and stability.

JavaScript decoder lets MP3s play in Firefox without Flash, Geek.com via Slashdot

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On June 2, 2011, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that revealed various concepts behind a newly advanced next generation camera system that could employ infrared technology. On one side, the new system would go a long way in assisting the music and movie industries by automatically disabling camera functions when trying to photograph or film a movie or concert. On the other hand, the new system could turn your iOS device into a kind of automated tour guide for museums or cityscapes as well as eventually being an auto retail clerk providing customers with price, availability and product information. The technology behind Apple’s patent application holds a lot of potential.

Cory over at BoingBoing linked to some of the coverage of this Patently Apple scoop around this patent application that emphasized the negative application. I think that emphasis is warranted, given that the positive scenario of providing context or location aware capabilities is already well doable with existing, deployed technologies like GPS, Bluetooth, AR, and most recently NFC. It hardly seems like we need an IR based technology for that end, leaving the more chilling implication of allowing venue owners and rights holders to reach into and affect the operation of your device, against your wishes.

Apple working on a Sophisticated Infrared System for iOS Cameras, Patently Apple (via BoingBoing)

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At first, the lack of the Android Market was my biggest complaint, followed by the crummy resistive touch screen. Over time, those two complaints have swapped places. A bit of hacking got the Market onto the device and only occasionally does it present problems, mostly around major firmware updates from Archos. The screen, however, has not worn well and continues to get worse and worse.

There is a broad strip down the righthand side of the screen that no longer reliably works. If I re-calibrate the touch screen, it will work for a few minutes before it settles into its usual semi-functional state. If it was just an inoperable chunk of the screen, rotating would mostly overcome it at the expense of some small hassle. The problem is the accuracy on the rest of the screen is absolutely abysmal. All the way over to the left, it is pretty much spot on but the further to the right you touch, the worse it gets, registering touches as offset increasingly to the left. I am convinced the non-working portion of the display is part of this mis-registration, that the offset just gets so large you’d have to tap beyond the physical boundary of the screen to register successfully.

As you might imagine, typing on the soft keyboard with this idiosyncratic touch screen is an exercise in frustration. More often than not, after the third word of a message or update, I want to hurl the accursed devices into the nearest hard surface as hard as I possibly can. I try to avoid any applications now that require any typing, resigning myself to media consumption. You’d think that would alleviate the frustration with the damn thing a bit but not hardly.

Just reliably hitting the play, pause and next buttons often is an utter crap shoot. A miss can result in sending me back to the home screen or bouncing around to another podcast episode or track. Usually I have to rotate the thing around repeatedly to get the most reliable, left most edge to line up with the buttons I need. The amount of effort involved just to keep up with my podcasts and occasionally listen to some music when I am reading on my morning train ride is tiresome to say the least.

To add insult to injury, I finally installed a firmware updated from Archos that I’ve been avoiding for weeks. I was uncertain whether it would undo my Market hack, hence my hesitation. My (undeserved) that the update might improve the screen operation finally overcame my reluctance and yesterday I installed the patch. Not only did it do absolutely nothing to alleviate my existing woes, now it has introduced a new glitch. Whenever the screen automatically shuts off to help manage battery life, media playback goes out the window. I have disabled the auto shut off just so I can continue to listen to podcasts, otherwise that app would be utterly unusable. I also realize this may be a worsening of an existing bug that was interfering with some music files that previously had been glitchy. Leaving the screen on while using the built-in music player actually seems to work better on files I thought were just mis-encoded or had some metadata that was culpable.

Heck of a workaround, risk destroying my battery life or weird series of app activations and utilization as a result of the MID floating around my pocket with its screen on or give up on the core reason I bought the stupid thing in the first place.

So what to do? The gadget is still within its warranty but I am not optimistic about the vendor’s ability to address any of my complaints. I am also loathe to give up even a brain damaged media player for the duration it would take to get it repaired or replaced. I struggle enough to keep up with podcasts as it is.

I looked around a bit online today for a possible replacement. In short, there really are none. I could get a simpler, non-Android media player. There are several that work well with Linux. Even if I set aside how deeply habituated I am to having Internet access with me constantly, I cannot imagine going back to a device that has to be routinely synchronized with a computer. Of the other Android powered devices that are not phones, the vast majority of them are full sized tablets. For reasons I may discuss in some other post, I don’t want anything larger than my shirt pocket. Besides, judging by customer reviews of at least one WiFi only version of a popular seven inch tablet, the device makers often hobble the non-cell modem equipped tablets as a subtle and irritating prod towards the more lucrative versions.

Samsung has released an interesting media player that bears some passing resemblance to its popular Galaxy line of phones. It has not reached the US though and reviews so far have been mixed. I am not convinced it would be a worthwhile purchase.

As a last resort, I’ve looked into unlocked smart phones. A could see carrying around a Nexus S or some Galaxy based phone but haven’t been able to find any discussions about how reasonable it is to leave such a device unactivated. All the posts and forum threads I’ve found assume you’ll pop a SIM in from some carrier or another and start using it as a regular phone, voice + data plan and all.

I even considered biting the bullet and getting an Android smartphone with a plan of some kind. I can’t get past the fact that any contract option still costs more each month than I am willing to pay considering how lightly I’ll use the minutes and bandwidth. See my comments on access to WiFi and my ingrained aversion to mobile telephony. There are now Android phones available with pay as you go plans which could be a reasonable upgrade to the 2G dumb phone I still carry for when I absolutely, positively have to make or receive a mobile call. Of course none of the smart phones on offer with that option are ones for which I actually would pay good money.

Am I being unreasonable? Is there an option I haven’t considered to get an Android powered, small form factor media player and Internet device? If you have an answer to the latter, I sure would like to hear about it in the comments. Or if you can clarify how well an unactivated phone might work, I’d like to hear that too.

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I appreciate that Cory is drawing attention to some of the better considered and researched discussions of Bitcoin, like this post by Edward Z. Yang. In it he works through how the hardwiring of SHA-256 will at some point force a transition to a successor currency and how a decentralized scheme for doing so will falter compared to a centrally managed one.

At this point, we’ll take a short detour into the mooncake black market, a fascinating “currency” in China that has many similar properties to an obsolescing Bitcoin. The premise behind this market is that, while giving cash bribes are illegal, giving moon cake vouchers are not. Thus, someone looking to bribe someone can simply “gift” them a moon cake voucher, which is then sold on the black market to be converted back into cash.

The problem with mooncake vouchers, which must be converted into actual cakes at the Autumn Festival, is the same as the method for a decentralized transition from Bitcoin to a notional successor. At some point, the bottom falls out of the market as fewer and fewer buyers remain willing to purchase the quickly obsolescing cash.

Yang admits this all assumes Bitcoin has the staying power to make it to the point where SHA-256 is broken and needs replacing. Given how quickly MD5 was thoroughly defeated and practical attacks were demonstrated against SHA-1, it isn’t an unreasonable question to ponder even if the currency has a short lifespan.

Bitcoin is not decentralized, Inside T5 via BoingBoing

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There is far more information at the challenge page, including both instructions and most critically a legal FAQ. If you are going to run a relay, whether or not you will do so as an exit relay, you need to be aware of the legal issues inherent in doing so. The FAQ is a good resource to that end and even links to a list of ISPs that are known tolerant of and prohibiting Tor relays around the world.

Tor Challenge, EFF

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The latest port is offered as an HTML5 demonstrator through the Mozilla Developer Network. It is pretty impressive, another strong testament to how far the browser has come. When I tried it game ran incredibly smoothly. My work machine made a bit of a hash of the sound but not enough to detract from the fond stroll down memory lane.

WebGL is not a requirement, the browser version only uses the audio and Canvas APIs exercised with the browser lingua franca, JavaScript. Slashdot, who linked to the demo, had a few more details about it.

The translation was accomplished using Emscripten, a Javascript backend for LLVM. As per the GPL, full source code is available.

Doom Ported To the Web, Slashdot

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Fabrice Bellard, the initiator of the QEMU emulator, wrote a PC emulator in JavaScript. You can now boot Linux in your browser, provided it is recent enough (Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 are reported to work).

Reading through the comments, Fabrice’s other accomplishments are equally astounding.

Given that this is an emulator, the possibilities are quite a bit more interesting than a direct port. Other less resource intensive operating systems could likely be made to work. I’ve been having a lively discussion with @codeshaman and @choochus on Twitter about the possibilities of coupling this with some sort of JavaScript accessible storage to make a lightweight working environment. I especially like the idea of doing so with a portable version of Firefox on a thumb drive.

The H Open has quite a few more details on the project.

French hacker Fabrice Bellard has demonstrated how JavaScript can do much more than simply animate web sites and process server data by creating a PC emulator written in the scripting language. JS/Linux emulates a 32-bit x86 compatible CPU, a programmable interrupt controller, a programmable interrupt timer and a serial port – taking just over 90 KB to do so. It lacks a mathematical co-processor and MMX commands, making it roughly on a par with a 486-compatible x86 CPU without FPU. It can, however, be used to run older Linux kernels (2.6.20), as they include an FPU emulator.

They also list more of Bellard’s considerable litany of clever hacks.

Boot Linux In Your Browser, Slashdot

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Yesterday Michael posted a very quick recap of the event. I thought I’d take a few moments to expand on the bare skeletion he lays out, the two panels focusing first on the various actors in the space and on questions posed and possible paths forward in the policy space then the open demonstrations from makers, educators, innovators and established companies. (You can also look at the tweets from the event, I tried to do my best despite a decrepit laptop battery and an extremely finicky touch screen on my notaphone.)

In the meet the makers panel I was surprised to see representatives from established commercial players. That says more about my bias, being most interested in the open source projects trying to make 3D printing accessible and the small innovators focusing much more on the personal scale than even on the smallest scale industrial applications. The story told by 3D Systems and ExOne in some ways is more concerning despite their obvious commercial success. 3D Systems has been bogged down in frivolous lawsuit and both reported an easier time in markets abroad than locally. The conversation did not progress much beyond the frustration at lack of growth, however, to more specific concerns. I also found it hard to muster too much sympathy as these are the very companies that are entirely ignoring people like me who would like nothing more than to purchase a packaged, easy to use 3D printer to place on my desktop and just start making things. However, if those with the most means are struggling to progress, what hope is there for the mere enthusiasts?

The second panel, moderated by Nate Anderson from Ars Technica, in many ways book ended the policy space. Michael Weinberg continued to endorse a view of allowing norms to evolve first before considering any kind of regulation. Melba Kruman coauthored a report on personal fabrication and drew on some interesting ideas from it for models of regulation. She was intensely optimistic which I wanted to be infectious. In reality a lot of what she said I found a bit naive in terms of how notions like micro-patents might work out. Mostly she espoused a view that we, those concerned about open access, have learned hard lessons from bad policy like the DMCA. The problem with that is so have the incumbents hence further reaches like ACTA, TPP and COICA. If we want open access in this space, we have to actively defend it, as much as that runs the risk of having concerns over intellectual monopoly drive much of the discussion rather than allowing focus to sit on innovation. Striking the right balance in that defense will be no easy challenge as my own seeming contradictory views on regulation vs. formalities suggests.

In both panels there were tons of parallels drawn to the earliest days of personal computing. I think that is a constructive model. I am concerned though that the regulatory and policy clime has permanently shifted. As much as I agree with Weinberg’s hope we can watch where the grass goes bare before laying the sidewalk, I simply don’t think we can afford to. Those threatened by the vast potential of 3D fabrication at all scales are simply too savvy to sit still while we dial the right balance in between incentives for progress and open access for the public interest. I suppose the unasked question is what are the possible unintended consequences if we get the defense of the technology wrong?

I am very glad that Michael and Public Knowledge are actively pursuing these conversations, regardless of how my own personal cynicism may temper my view of the general optimism held by others.

During the open portion of the afternoon, where various demonstrations were running, I spent a lot of time talking to the hackers, the makers and the educators. In particular in talking to Mark Ganter of open3dp I learned that intellectual monopoly on printed objects is not the only policy concern here as much as that was the major focus of the day. There is an excellent post on the open3dp site that explains quite clearly how the dominant academic regime for monetizing research has largely stifled certain forms of 3D printing. Spending so much time listening to him detail how constrained his work has been undoubtedly further tempered my enthusiasm. It is a shame really as even as hobbled as the homebrew and education communities may be, they are still doing some staggeringly cool stuff.

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YouTube is announcing this afternoon that all videos uploaded to the site are now saved in WebM format, as well as other supported formats including Adobe Flash. 30% of the YouTube archives, making up 99% of the views, is now available in WebM as well and the full archives are being put in the new format as we speak.

Kirkpatrick also explains how the format has been progressing to address some of the technical criticisms around its quality and performance. It should only be a matter of time before both Chrome and Firefox pick up these changes as both now support rolling release models rather than infequent, monolithic updates.

I am glad to see Google shift direction after its initial reluctance to use the open codec as the default for YouTube. Such deep support from one of, if not the most, popular video sites on the web may prove a watershed in the adoption of WebM as a de facto standard for online video. I don’t expect the MPEG-LA to take this lightly.

YouTube Now Saves All Videos in Open Format WebM, ReadWriteWeb

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an emulation of bare metal where you run an appliance (which you may need to build up yourself) combining an operating system, application, and related services such as DNS, firewall, and a database.

VMWare’s existing offers already fit into this space as does AWS. As he points out, the platform space is far less standardized, so CloudFoundry could help catalyze better portability between providers who offer support for different frameworks, like some of the ones mentioned in the announcement (e.g. Spring, Node.js).

CloudFoundry is not directly comparable to the minimal emulation offerings from the likes of OpenStack and Amazon but rather is more comparable to Google App Engine though apparently more committed to offering frameworks as is rather than versions tweaked to work with unusual or non-standard components, like Google’s Big Table. The promise in supporting existing components as is lies in fostering the same sort of portability that has been improving in the infrastructure space.

Oram’s piece doesn’t clarify where and how CloudFoundry will be open beyond offering support on day one for any number of open source platform pieces. All the same, if you’ve been struggling to make sense of the not entirely clear terminology, his post is well worth a read.

What VMware’s Cloud Foundry announcement is about, O’Reilly Radar

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Ubuntu 8.04 (released in April of 2008) is a long time support release which means Canonical has committed to keeping it patched for three years. The H Security notes that the clock is about to expire for this release, code named Hardy Heron. If you have any aging systems still using this ultra stable release, it is time to finally upgrade it to a newer LTS release. Come May, Heron will no longer receive updates.

Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 LTS approaches end of life, The H Security

Regular, non-LTS releases are supported for 18 months, half as long as the long term cycle. Canonical has another version, according to Linux Journal, 9.10 that is come up on its end of life. According to the article, the recommended upgrade target is the current LTS version, 10.4.

Canonical To Drop Support For Ubuntu 9.10, Linux Journal

Since Ubuntu hits a new version every 6 months, it is possible to stay ahead of obsolescence without always having to run the latest and greatest which for many software packages, let alone full Linux distros, often require a bit of shakedown before proving trustworthy.

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On April 28th at 3D/DC, the 3D printing community will descend on Washington, DC to show policymakers what they are up to. Panels will introduce the 3D printing community to the DC policy community, and explore some of the policy issues that this disruptive technology will implicate. During a demonstration phase, you will be able to see this technology in action first hand, and speak one-on-one with people and companies on the cutting edge.

I will be there, for the new day job no less. The event is free and open to the public but does require an RSVP.

3D/DC: 3D Printing Comes to the Nation’s Capitol, Public Knowledge

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GNU Free Call sort of combines the two, building on the existing GNU SIP Witch project.

Instead of using any central provider or server, this enables multiple endpoints to find each other and connect. The announcement claims that acting as a self organising meshed calling network, without any central control, the system will continue to operate even if major parts of the network have been isolated. The project is being coordinated by Haakon Eriksen (haakon.eriksen@far.no) and architected by David Sugar (dyfet@gnu.org).

With the recent end-of-life for Gizmo5, I am very keenly interested to see this project succeed.

GNU Free Call starts development, aims to be a Skype alternative, The H Open

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In sharing this bill of rights in its entirety (it is released under a CC0 license), Audrey Watters at ReadWriteWeb is far more conservative than we should be, still wondering if DRM is a necessary evil. It is the only mechanism that publishers and other content distributors have earnestly tried, I don’t think that qualifies it as the sum total of the question we should be considering in response to Houghton-Jan’s thoughts. As Watters and other contributors to RWW have explored recently, making libraries viable in the post-network, post-digital era without imploding the sources of sustained creation on which they rely is a complex challenge. The responses should be equally as sophisticated not the sheer monotonous monopole that is DRM.

Cory over at BoingBoing is understandably more supportive. It is Doctorow’s Law, after all, that cautions author’s against acceding to DRM as being against their best interests. He also is responsible for some of the kinds of experimentation that really is required to meet the tough challenges publishing and libraries face. Doctorow manages to embrace the network and digital formats by giving his work away yet at the same time supporting both his publisher and libraries. The latter is done through the simple but effective program where he connects readers who are entirely satisfied with his free editions yet want to support his work with libraries and schools that can benefit from the donation of print copies.

(I also agree with Cory that “reader” is a more poetic and apt label than the rather pedestrian word, “user”.)

I do not think it is any coincidence that the bill of rights follows very closely in the spirit of the four freedoms of Free Software. Indulging the CC0 license of the original, I’ve re-posted the entirety after the link and attribution, below.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights, Librarian in Black

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

• the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
• the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
• the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
• the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

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Today, Mike Loukides at O’Reilly Radar had a thoughtful piece that has me re-considering. He seems to also be uninterested in Watson’s ability to come up with a single correct response. However, in digging into the processing behind arriving at that datum, he suggests some interesting possibilities.

The next level down in Watson’s analysis is even more interesting. The confidence level assigned to each answer comes from how well the answer matched various sources of information. Possible answers are scored against a number of data sources; these scores are weighted and combined to form the final confidence rating. If exposed to the human users, the scoring process completely changes the kind of relationship we can have with machines. An answer is one thing; a series of alternate answers is something more; but when you’re looking at the reasons behind the answers, you’re finally getting at the heart of intelligence. I’m not going to talk about the Turing Test. But I am suggesting that, when you have the reasons for the alternative answers in hand, you’re suddenly looking at the possibility of a meaningful conversation between human and machine.

Read the rest of the article, he gives some fairly compelling examples and practical applications. I can already see some aspects beyond what he considers, such as helping to map out authority and trust, interactively, for various information sources, a task that is often just too imposing for the casual reader browsing around.

Watson and the future of machine learning, O’Reilly Radar

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First is a usable body guitar ready for strings and pickups straight out of the printer. The video is well worth the watch as I doubt you’d realize this was anything other than an interesting looking guitar if you didn’t know it was fabbed up by a 3D printing enthusiast.

Zoybar TOR from Kevin Holmes on Vimeo.

3D printed guitar is fully rockin’, BoingBoing

If you are not lucky enough to possess a home 3D printer yet, the good news is i.materialize is running a special for the next four weeks. Anything you order in that time will qualify for free shipping.

Free shipping on 3D prints for four weeks, BoingBoing

The final story is news that the 3DP Team at the University of Washington’s Solheim Rapid Prototyping Laboratory have made some impressive incremental progress towards the dream of fully self replicating fabricators. In this instance, they’ve cloned all of the parts needed to assemble a variant on the venerable RepRap, Prusa, one of the more accessible versions in terms of ease of assembly. Better yet, using the freely shared fruits of their efforts it is possible to pull off this trick in just thirty minutes.

3D printer that prints itself gets closer to reality, BoingBoing

I have to thank my fellow 3D printing enthusiast, Cory Doctorow, for posting all of these stories today.

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Some of Mozilla’s key technical priorities include improving responsiveness, integrating social sharing, refining the user interface, supporting 64-bit Windows and Android tablet form factors, finally delivering process isolation for tabs, and supporting emerging standards like CSS 3D transforms and WebSockets. In terms of features, Mozilla’s 2011 roadmap is compelling and achievable. There is room for skepticism, however, about the organization’s new release management strategy. Instead of aiming to roll all of this functionality out in a major release next year, Mozilla intends to push it out to users incrementally, using a series of three releases after the upcoming launch of Firefox 4.

I am slightly less skeptical. Mozilla has some experience with this sort of incremental, rolling release for smaller features as part of their beta process. Admittedly, the scale is smaller and the target quality isn’t the same but I think it is an incremental difference rather than a qualitative one.

Several of the items on the roadmap are also already under active development. Slating them for 2011, to specific releases draws a line in the sand. Not all of the development work is going to be from a standing start, rather it is being pressured to get to a finished and releasable state. I’ve written repeatedly about full multiprocess support in Firefox and this set of priorities may be the kick in the pants needed to finally land it.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Paul’s reasoning. He makes a good case for the benefits, mostly in the form of staying competitive and in better tune with the rapidly evolving standards space, as well as the challenges. He has more insight into Mozilla’s internal makeup and Firefox’s codebase. I suspect Mozilla will settle on the six month cycle he suggests but suspect it may need to reach farther in order to hit that stride. Undoubtedly there are bits of institutional inertia and other internal pressures prompting such aggressive planning.

Is Mozilla’s 2011 roadmap unrealistically ambitious? Ars Technica

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“[The FUIs] look fantastic when you see them in the theater, but a lot of that is actually grounded in reality — stuff that’s not mainstream yet, that I’ve been researching and experimenting with.” Case in point: Coleran’s design for a near-future music player in Children of Men looks uncannily similar to iTunes’s “Coverflow” interface, which came out nine months later.

As it turns out, his experience includes both real world design as well as the more fantastical work that has appeared on screen. That mixture of the visionary with the practical no doubt factored into his being hired by Bonfire Labs.

But he says Bonfire hired him to be more of a “visual concept designer” for their interactive and advertising clients — sort of a Syd Mead for UIs, “looking at the bigger picture rather than the detail of individual buttons,” says Coleran. “My background from the film work, plus my experience in engineering, electronics, and graphic design, sort of fits with these interactive projects. There’s an element of futurism, where you can play the ‘what ifs’ out to their logical conclusions. Not just for the sake of it, but if you know the rules, you can break them to get something better.”

Read on for his thoughts on the distinct challenges presented by movie UIs and ones, no matter how speculative, that are intended for the real world. If only Canonical or RedHat had snapped him up. Can you imagine what a “Syd Mead for UIs” could do to revolutionize Linux on all kinds of devices?

A master of science fiction movie gadgets moves over to the real world, io9

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The point of the Slashdot post, however, is to note that BitCoins have grown in value to the point where the most common exchanges now hover right around the one-to-one rate with US Dollars.

Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity, Slashdot

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Stephenson clearly illuminates some of the sticking points of technological progress, in particular path dependency and lock-in, with his accustomed flair. His examples, much like in his seminal “In the Beginning Was the Command Line…” essay, are unexpected but all the more apt for their unusual juxtaposition with his main thrust.

The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.

He maintains this is not an outlier, hinting at a similar trajectory from whaling for lamp oil through to our modern dependence on petroleum. He leaves the second example much more to the reader’s imagination but it doesn’t take much mental muscle to connect the dots he quickly sketches out.

He does an equally enjoyable job of explaining how and why we are locked into the raft of rocket centered technologies at the heart of the narrow band of commercially feasible space ventures. I enjoy that he relates it to being trapped in a local optimum for a hill climbing algorithm. Well worth giving the whole thing a read, bearing in mind that Stephenson has recently been advising entrants into the burgeoning private sector space targeting ventures.

The implication is pretty clear in terms of general lessons for innovation. The sheer scale of economic forces within the space industries is immense, as are the risks. In lower risk spaces, these historical trend lines should better serve to steer clear of the kind of innovation stalling phenomena that have put notional jet packs ever out of our reach.

Space Stasis, Slate

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… there is an important distinction between the graphene transistors that we demonstrated, and the transistors used in a CPU. Unlike silicon, ‘graphene does not have an energy gap, and therefore, graphene cannot be “switched off,” resulting in a small on/off ratio.

The quote is from an as of yet unpublished interview. It isn’t clear if the lack of an energy gap is a quality of graphene as a material or the current way transistors are constructed from it. Given the direct comparisons to silicon, I infer the former. If it were the latter, then the possibility would remain that a different approach could overcome this critical obstacle.

The article goes on to share some more optimistic thoughts from Yu-Ming on plenty of interesting applications within computer chips for graphene. A further quote from Mike Mayberry, Intel’s director of component research, suggests this all may still be theoretical, that more experimentation may be required before we can so confidently declare the practical limits of the material.

Graphene offers considerable advantage over silicon, a few are mentioned in the bit-tech article. I’ve discussed many of them in past posts here and on the podcast. It is intriguing to imagine graphene’s further use in computing, even replacing many of the materials in use today. Mayberry’s quote reminds us of how wide the gap is between such speculation and even tomorrow’s technology just in terms of what we know about silicon and don’t know about graphene.

Graphene Won’t Replace Silicon In CPUs, Says IBM, Slashdot

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