These are the stories I was going to discuss in tonight’s show until I decided it was too late to finish my preparations. I’ve condensed my thoughts on the couple that I did have fleshed out notes and added some quick thoughts to the other two stories.
- A “photon machine gun” could improve scale of quantum computers
This is some very early theoretical work that could overcome one of the current limits of quantum computers, the register size. By shining light on a specially prepared quantum dot, these researchers believe they can produce chains of entangled photons between twelve and twenty particles in size. - A not-for-profit model to a micro blogging infrastructure
Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center points to a WP op-ed by Bo Peabody where he offers some thoughts on why it simply may not be possible to commercialize social networks. In discussing this with some friends, recently, I tend to think that the quality of ubiquity may actually chart out more of a continuum, that the more ubiquitous and unpredictable information in a tool, the harder advertising will be as Bo suggests but that there are examples backing off from that where ads can be made attractive to sponsors. - Using machine intelligence to compose music
At Ars Jacqui Cheung describes some fascinating research being done by David Cope at UCSD. I particularly enjoy how Cope was inspired to come from another discipline, music, into machine intelligence. He seems to bring some unique and useful perspectives with him as a consequence. - Open source not welcome in Palm app store
This story was actually covered a variety of places over the course of last week. jwz has been presented with a series of nonsensical conditions and policies making it impractical for him to distribute the ports of some of his existing work to WebOS. Between this story and the problems between Google and cyanogen over his Android distribution, it is looking like none of the major commercial smart phone platforms are very open source friendly, despite predictions around Android and WebOS at the outset. At least we still have some other options, like Maemo.
There are already open source apps in the Pre’s App Catalog which do
publish source elsewhere (with permission), and there’s an alternative
distribution channel with an active homebrew community (developers and
users), acknowledged and even spoken warmly of by Palm; some apps have
“graduated” from Homebrew to the App Catalog. I agree the situation
is a bit ambiguous, but they’ve increased staff to deal with app submissions
and developer relations, and details are still being worked out.
I think the Slashdot/ITWire story swallows JWZ’s account rather
uncritically. Palm is working through a backlog of app submissions,
and I guess somehow his tip calculator (sans decimal points) and Dali
clock just weren’t prioritized as much as he would have liked, perhaps
in part given his objection to their Paypal contact verification
requirement. When a new hire at Palm tried to contact him to discuss
his concerns, JWZ’s response [on Twitter] was
– Hide quoted text –
“@bgalbs no, I have no interest in wasting my time talking on the
phone over this. just post my apps already. what more is there to
say?”
Even so, the Palm employee’s blog post about the incident says
“We obviously goofed in how we communicated with Jamie, and Dion and I
take some of the blame here as our staff had been waiting for us to
come on-board to get to some of these items.”
For those interested, PreCentral (the indie host of the homebrew
community) goes into the nuances:
http://www.precentral.net/submitting-palms-app-catalog-how-difficult-it
…whoops, and I’m already out of date! Check out exciting new announcements from Palm:
http://bit.ly/qXj5J — Palm will provide review-free URL for developers to distribute through (if they don’t want to use the App Catalog). Waiving developer fee if it’s open source. Opening up all its analytical data to any developer who wants to access it! Whoo hoo!
*sigh* somehow my last paragraph got moved up to become the second paragraph when I posted the comment, but I think the gist of what I was saying comes through, even if the flow is off.
I attempted to fix your original comment. I see where that last remark actually got inserted just before the end of the first paragraph. Hopefully my edit restores it to something closer to what you meant to post.