Dullroar

Dare to compare my December '03 weblog entry covering an essay by Reed Hundt about broadband in the U.S. with a Slashdot story today about the same essay. The person who submitted the article to Slashdot seems to have magically arrived at almost precisely the same blurb about the essay that I used a couple months earlier. Mostly, I'm just happy to have a little validation of my blurb-writing skills, but I would have liked some credit. The copyright on this site allows anyone to use any of my material, but requires attribution.

What makes this incident particularly precious (well, coincidental anyway) is that this afternoon, I led a discussion in a seminar using a set of powerpoint slides that someone mistakenly left out on a public web server. I found them through a Google search, and they were just the thing for the seminar, but I should have asked the author for permission to use them. So yeah, I'm a big hypocrite, what can you do?

Posted by Andy at 10:22 PM | Permalink

Cause, you know, that AOL/TimeWarner thing worked out so well. Here's the NY Times article.

Posted by Andy at 09:52 AM | Permalink

Thanks to Doc Searls for linking to this essay by Douglas Adams, which is absolutely sublime. I quote:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

And he goes on to put the Internet in context as something we don't understand, and perhaps won't understand until some people grow up with it as a fact of life rather than the cool new thing. I'm only 29, but that just makes me feel old.

Posted by Andy at 12:10 PM | Permalink

Maltese dog breeders of quality pet and show Maltese puppies is a creepy web site about a kind of tiny, harmless dog. Tonight when I go to sleep, I'm going to see a tiny maltese marching inexorably toward me. (Shudder).

Also, scroll down for such notable quotables as "Many thanks to David Fitzpatrick for his gentle and loving handling."

Posted by Andy at 10:34 PM | Permalink

So here we are in the age of social networking, and we're all publishing profiles of ourselves (say, on Friendster or wherever) that give complete strangers a pretty good idea of our likes, dislikes, habits, friends, etc. Talk about stalker-bait. So people use pseudonyms and obfuscation to keep their Internet stalkers and their real-world stalkers separate.

But people still want their friends to be able to recognize them. Some include pictures in their profile that only show a bit of themselves. The pics give enough detail that friends know who it is, but everyone else just sees an almost random image. It's a sort of authentication, but targeted at a very specific set of people: those who know us well in real life.

As we contemplate publishing even more information about ourselves (e.g. location awareness), we're either going to have to give up on keeping our various identities (real and Internet, business and personal) separate, or else social networking services are going to have to provide a more general, effective way of managing our identities than authentication-by-picture.

Posted by Andy at 02:05 PM | Permalink

In this essay, Reed Hundt talks about building a 10 to 100 Mbps network for every household in the U.S. He makes a great case for why it should be done and how we can pay for it.

What's interesting about this piece is that Hundt advocates a new approach to universal service. Instead of giving away broadcast spectrum (for HDTV) and maintaining (ancient, inflexible) phone lines, we should spend money on building out a next generation fiber network to every household, and run both HDTV and phone over that network. Then we can stop funding the phone network (which is pretty much maxed out anyway) and sell off the HDTV spectrum for 10s of billions of dollars.

I think it's a great vision, because a single, public network is a huge win for the same reasons that cities decided to only keep a single set of electric lines or a single set of gas lines. After all, you know something's wrong when Verizon is able to actively screw its competitors because it owns the phone lines. Last I checked, Verizon was selling DSL to end-users for $35 per month while it was selling DSL wholesale to its competitors for $40 per month. A publicly-owned network could fix that.

Posted by Andy at 03:07 PM | Permalink

A round-up of candidate blogs:
Clark
Dean
Edwards
Gephardt
Kerry
Kucinich
Lieberman
Moseley Braun (no blog found, so here's the campaign web site)
Sharpton (no blog found, so here's the campaign web site)

I'll leave it up to you whether a blog written just for the publicity is still a blog.

Posted by Andy at 12:31 PM | Permalink

The 100x100 Network is a new project I'm part of at CMU. The goal is to build a network capable of delivering 100 times more bandwidth than most DSL or cable modems currently deliver. Among the challenges is figuring out what people would use all that bandwidth for.

Posted by Andy at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

TikiWiki seems like one of the best open source wikis. I do wish the docs and ui were a little cleaner, though.

Posted by Andy at 12:07 AM | Permalink