Category — General

Soon to be the Software-Developing World. Dan Gillmor is back from Africa with a column on Open source in the developing world. Here's the conclusion: …this may be one arena where Microsoft simply can't compete, fairly or not. Barring a dramatic change in attitude, product and price from the world's largest software company, open source is plainly the way developing nations should move. They literally can't afford to do otherwise…. [Joho the Blog]

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I'm very much surprised that we don't see more coverage of the internationalization of the software industry. Not in the job migration, but in the job growth and job specialization. having 1000 programmers that are willing to work on a project is not super-common, but it is more common than it once was, and with national projects, it might get even more common…..

AoIR now has a Cafepress store, nifty. Some fun swag.

Innovating in a Connected World.

I recently read Bhaskar Chakravorti's book “The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World.” There is an interview with him in Ubiquity [link via Viswanath Gondi]. A few quotes:
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BloggerCon IRC details. I just posted BloggerCon IRC details over at the BloggerCon 2003 Weblog.

This includes a link to my experimental simple OS X IRC client written in Python & PyObjC. (Currently it's so simple it only lets you into #bloggercon…) [Epeus' epigone]

Keynote vs. the Web. I see that Sam Ruby has posted his excellent slide set from the Seybold show; they are about as thorough and concentrated an introduction to the syndication universe as anything I䴜ve seen anywhere. I won䴜t be posting either my slides or those by Bill Humphries, because Keynote won䴜t let me. That䴜s kind of a pity; Bill had a storyboard-style session showing how you actually do this stuff, with tons of screenshots of getting the job done in Radio, Moveable Type, Blogger, and so on. I had provided a sermon on Why You Should Care about RSS with lots of cute pictures, and a historical overview of the road from the roots of syndication through to the Atom project. But as near as I can tell, there䴜s no way to export from Keynote to HTML. It䴜ll do PDF but there is just no way I am gonna post a 6.7MB chunk of dumb electronic paper. Hrumph. [ongoing]

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keynote lets you export to pdf and export to quicktime, either of which is preferable to the web for most presentations… keynote documents are xml though…. schema is here so it really is not so much of an issue of “it doesn't” as “no one has made it” there is a keynote tools group at opendarwin

is IT really a solution to poverty?. [infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information]

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another good question from mentor….

IT cannot solve anything. People create poverty, not technologies, access to technologies and/or usage of technologies cannot as such change anything, though inarguably it can raise the standard of living, but that usually means only that a segment of the population has increased earning capacity, it may even mean that the poor are relatively more poor than they were before the technology acquisition. This is not to say technologies don't help, but it is to say that they are not a simple solution to a complex problem, and poverty is complex.

[Andrew sez No, That's Not Gibberish.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch.... Aoccdrnig to
rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr
the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and
lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you
can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. [David Harris' Science & Literature]

Scary thing is, it looks like that's right. Wow.

[A blog doesn't need a clever name]

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well i can read it, that's for sure… strange how this faculty of mind works

Thing to worry about #132. Super Volcano – Not to worry thought, we know the right solution: tax cuts for upper income brackets and the distruction of the welfare state…. [Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm]

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this is the sort of massive natural disaster that i can't bring myself to worry about in a serious way…. if it happens, millions, perhaps over years billions die, and probably i'll be one of them, but you know so will most people i know, and probably most of the things they like, so it will be cultural devastation as much as anything, but with everything or nearly everything gone that i care about, what's left is just to live out life and do what you can when you can, etc. and if it happens, that's what you'll do, cause there's not much else to be done.

this is an interesting little site that lets you look at market demographics for zip codes, though some zip codes are not present in it. notably 17731, eagles mere, pa.

China's High-Tech Standards.

Ninad points to a WSJ article which discusses how China is wanting to set its own standards for Mobile-3G, digital TV and DVD technologies.

Ninad's analysis of the reasons:

(1) It places China at equal footing with some of the western nations (US, UK & Scandinavian) and Japan, in developing new technology rather than copying it by paying a higher licensing fee.
(2) It lowers the cost of indigenously made Chinese electronics for local consumption and increases the rate of mass market adoption since China controls the standard
(3) Potential revenue opportunity through licensing the standard outside China

Adds WSJ: “China's drive to create new standards in high technology is part of its broader desire to claim equal footing with the world's top economic powers…By creating homegrown technical standards, China is trying to increase the use of Chinese innovations world-wide. And it is using its own large domestic market to help speed up their adoption. By requiring these standards to be used on technical products in China, international companies that want access to that market are forced to make products that use them.”

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more great info from emergic. china is one of the most interesting areas to study in technology adoption right now i think