Every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there's a star. Not a person but a country. One country impresses the gathering of global leaders because of a particularly smart Finance minister or a compelling tale of reform or even a glamorous gala. This year there was no contest. In the decade that I've been going to Davos, no country has captured the imagination of the conference and dominated the conversation as India in 2006.
Label: India Calling
Some very intesting comments at ArsTechnica:
The total cost of Peter Jackson's King Kong was somewhere north of US$200 million. That's quite a bit, but such big-budget blockbusters are rare, and you can make and market a Hollywood movie for well under half that figure. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain had a production budget of only US$14 million.
In the tech industry, the price of a new fab is currently around US$5 billion, a price that puts such facilities out of reach for all but the biggest players like Intel and IBM. Still, that's 25 King Kongs, or over 350 Brokeback Mountains, or 1,000 five million dollar episodes of a big-budget HBO series like Rome or The Sopranos. My point is that, for even just half the price of a single 65nm fab, the tech industry could buy a few small studios and just start throwing tons of free content at the world. Or, for the full price of a fab, they could fund almost a decade worth of low- and medium-budget content to give away as an inducement for people to buy hardware.
Intel, IBM, and other tech companies with large investments in Linux know full well that you can sell a lot of hardware by giving away the software. Why not give away the content too? How many dollars worth of media center, home networking, and home network attached storage hardware could you sell if consumers knew that there were terabytes of free, unencumbered, high-definition, processor-intensive, storage-hungry, bandwidth burning, digital content awaiting them on the Internetâcontent that they could copy, share, and shuffle around among as many newly purchased media devices as they like?
But there is one serious problem with this, content industry may be very small but not the telecom industry, which is 15 times as big acoording to this article. Hollywood is just the vamp, the real villians are telecom companies.
Ayesha submitted Attacking Islam as a paper in her college sometime back. For some background, she is studying in Rizvi collage which has quite a significant proportion of Muslims, and she was compelled to write this after she attended some panel debate of sorts on Muslims and how people perceive them, I guess it was titled should they be kicked out of the country or something like that.
Label: India Calling
I am a fan of the idea ning stands for, but have found them lacking in what I consider very important aspect.
Here is my roughly what is going on in my mind:
Data belongs to users.
... but managed by original application.
In this scenario, the application that created the data is the "manager" of that data. Each data has a manager_id which is set to the creator.
Remove the concept of local vs cross application queries and everything is ning query so to say.
Lets say I, am trying to create an application MyAjaxBookshelf based on data of Bookshelf. I get immediate read access to the data.
How about write operations: MyAjaxBookshelf does not know if the data was created using it only or by Bookshelf. When it tries to modify the data created/managed by some other application, ning intercepts this call.
Ning prompts the user:
MyAjaxBookShelf is trying modify data which was created by Bookshelf and owned by you, here is the page on bookshelf that talks about its data compatibility with other applications, and this perticular page is about what Bookshelf developers think about MyAjaxBookShelf.
FYI: This operation was allowed by 927 users and rejected by 32 users so far. Last 5 operations are [ADAAA].
Do you want to allow this?
( o) Yes,
( ) No,
( ) Yes but please make checkpoint first.
[X] remember my answer for every data write access by MyAjaxBookshelf when it is owned by Bookshelf
[X] remember my answer for every data write access by MyAjaxBookshelf
[X] remember my answer for any foreign app data write access when it is managed by Bookshelf
What do you think ning?
Om says ning is coming back. TechCrunch called them dead, they say:
The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything evolve as better and better stuff gets built, which in turn is used to build even better stuff. Ning leverages the platform by aggregating the applications and selling advertising and premium tools/features.
Which is so wrong. In my previous post about ning, I said "What good is reusing code if you can not reuse the data?". Imagine Whats Cuter; on their winners page they have listed 50 pages of winners, with each page containing 10 results, which means there already have been atleast 500 contests. This is also ning's most popular application, which means I am thinking probably thousands of users are using it already.
Now I read www.ning.com which says step 2 "Follow the Clone this App button to clone and customize your app. It's that easy.", yes it is that easy but if I did it would I get to work with those images that has already been uploaded, those votes that has already been casted? or would I be expecting suddenly those thousands of users will on day one move to my new application and stop using the previous one. When they are saying "clone" what they mean is "fork", and this is what wikipedia has to say about forking in open source:
The term is particularly used in free or open source software, when a schism occurs because of different goals or personality clashes. In a fork of this type, both parties inherit identical intellectual rights but typically only the larger group, or that containing the original architect, will retain the full original name and its associated social capital. Thus there is a reputation penalty associated with forking.
So they have made "try to kill this project that I like so much" the easiest operation and somehow fooled themselves into thinking it is a good thing.
This is the most important thing you should be looking for in the revised ning, if they don't do it this time, they will repeat their previous failure story.
I ran into this article from conservative Paul Craig Roberts. Despite the growing excuses, I believe it spells out a few interesting bits.
Americans have forgotten what it takes to remain free. Instead, every ideology, every group is determined to use government to advance its agenda. As the government's power grows, the people are eclipsed.
We have reached a point where the Bush administration is determined to totally eclipse the people. Bewitched by neoconservatives and lustful for power, the Bush administration and the Republican Party are aligning themselves firmly against the American people. Their first victims, of course, were the true conservatives. Having eliminated internal opposition, the Bush administration is now using blackmail obtained through illegal spying on American citizens to silence the media and the opposition party.
[...]
Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.
The years of illegal spying have given the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous affairs broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.
(Emphasis added)
In particular I like his point about the no-fly list. It always felt dumb to have the no-fly list in the first place and all of the side effects we have heard from it are the result of this dumbness. Maybe it was naivete on my part, but this makes sense:
Consider the no-fly list. This list has no purpose whatsoever but to harass and disrupt the livelihoods of Bush's critics. If a known terrorist were to show up at check-in, he would be arrested and taken into custody, not told that he could not fly. What sense does it make to tell someone who is not subject to arrest and who has cleared screening that he or she cannot fly? How is this person any more dangerous than any other passenger?This is priceless:
If Senator Ted Kennedy, a famous senator with two martyred brothers, can be put on a no-fly list, as he was for several weeks, anyone can be put on the list. The list has no accountability. People on the list cannot even find out why they are on the list. There is no recourse, no procedure for correcting mistakes.I am certain that there are more Bush critics on the list than there are terrorists. According to reports, the list now comprises 80,000 names! This number must greatly dwarf the total number of terrorists in the world and certainly the number of known terrorists.
He has a follow up article, on the State of The Union, focusing in particular on the economy bits here.
On that note, Bilmes and Stiglitz claim that the actual cost of the Iraq war will end up being between one and two trillion dollars.
In the meantime there is a Sundance short that makes fun at the actual state of the economy. I found it entertaining, but it might not be appreciated by everyone (sorry, requires an updated Flash): here.
Update: Robert's second article goes well with the previous video link:
[...] The US trade deficit in ATP now exceeds the US surplus in Intellectual Property licenses and fees. The US no longer earns enough from high tech to cover any part of its import bill for oil, autos, or clothing.
This is an astonishing development. The US "superpower" is dependent on China for advanced technology products and is dependent on Asia to finance its massive deficits and foreign wars. In view of the rapid collapse of US economic potential, my prediction in January 2004 that the US would be a third world economy in 20 years was optimistic. Another five years like the last, and little will be left.
By Miguel de Icaza.
Label: Security n Privacy
Reuben Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 â December 7, 1970) was a cofounder and first president of the National Cartoonists Society. He is one of the most famous cartoonists in history. He earned lasting fame for his "Rube Goldberg machines"âdevices that are exceedingly complex and perform very simple tasks in a very indirect and convoluted way. He was posthumously awarded the National Cartoonist Society Gold Key Award in 1980.
Check out his gallery of cartoons.
Label: Humor
HOW MUCH DO PEOPLE USE GOOGLE TO LOOK FOR PORN?
PAGE: It's a small, single-digit percentage.
Label: Google
I do not want to fall into controversy, but I would like to ask the protesters in Delhi and elsewhere, what exactly they want India to do? Nuke that country? Where would you stop? You have already killed people and burnt buildings in protest, so I think it is justified by you, so how many more should be killed and burned?
Label: India Calling
Google realized the little point I was talking about, here is their statement to Human Rights Caucus:
At the same time, the launch of Google.cn did not in any way alter the availability of the uncensored Chinese-language version of Google.com, which Google provides globally to all Internet users without restriction.
Censorship is not censorship unless you started censoring anything.
Label: Google
