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Category: General (Page 45 of 135)

sunsite and PlanetFest 97

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In 1997, we landed on Mars and sunsite was there at the Planetary Society’s PlanetFest 97. Sally discovered this YouTube clip from PlanetFest:

On July 5, 1997, Dan Goldin officially commemorated the Pathfinder Lander as Carl Sagan Station at Planetfest ’97 in Pasadena, California. On behalf of the Sagan and Druyan families, Ann Druyan spoke to the event’s attendees to express her gratitude

The NYTimes has a great write-up on Sagan and Druyan ten years later in today’s Science section.

Whilst at PlanetFest, we met John Graham, whose technology we’re using right now for the GrindCam!

Help us plan for the 15th Year of ibiblio/sunsite here (blog) and here (wiki)

Republicans Invented the Internet – Lessig

In a recent talk at the John Podesta-led Center for American Progress, Larry Lessig revealed several previously unnoticed secrets of the Internet’s origins.

First that the Net began in 1984 driven by three important policy changes (not by the introduction of the MacIntosh as I would have guessed ;->). All of these policy changes are products of Republican actions according to Lessig (once a Republican himself).

  1. Packet switched networks with guarantied network neutrality. (as part of the AT&T break up).
  2. Manufacturing limited (or no) liability for copying in Sony vs Universal which gave us the Consumer Electronics industry.
  3. Release of experimental radio spectrum which gave us WiFi.

There is of course more. All 39 minutes are captured on video and remixed nicely by the Center for American Progress‘s Carl Malamud and hosted at Archive.org. Great show well done.

Note: Unmentioned by Lessig is the decidedly unRepublican but signal event of 1984 — Richard Stallman began work in GNU Emacs and the word “Copyleft” was coined. (Stallman writes “In 1984 or 1985, Don Hopkins (a very imaginative fellow) mailed me a letter. On the envelope he had written several amusing sayings, including this one: “Copyleft–all rights reversed.” I used the word “copyleft” to name the distribution concept I was developing at the time.”)

My Representative – David Price

I was delighted today to get to talk a little with my Congressman, David Price, who has been a strong supporter of Network Neutrality and an opponent of Media Concentration.

David is highly clued on the issues and has made common cause with some unusual, for him, bedfellows such are the National Rifle Association and Focus on the Family. Not so unusual as voices that would be marginalized or excluded by the lack of Network Neutrality or the further increase of Media Ownership Concentration are at all parts of the political spectrum.

Plan the 15th year of ibiblio/sunsite

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October 31, 2007 will be the 15th anniversary of the first public demo of sunsite.unc.edu at Educom in Baltimore. Yes there was a server named sunsite in place as early as May 1992 but our big debut and announcement was in October.

As some of you will remember, that announcement coincided with the complete and literal frying of the campus internet connectivity and if not for Judd Knott’s quick thinking there would have been no demo at all.

After the pipes — steam and water — broke above the routers and boiled the damn things like plastic and silicon lobsters, Judd had our server and disks driven out the MCNC and reconfigured so the demo could go on.

Now we’re back with servers at MCNC…

I’m asking you to help us think of ways that we can celebrate those 15 years. Some of the ideas might be related to raising funds, some related to raising our profile internationally, some related to raising support, and some to raising a bit of anniversary hell even.

Please add to the 15 year wiki and/or send me your ideas or leave comments here.

The Dollars and Cents of Place

In the South, the American South, the Southern part of Eastern North America, all the writers and such keep talking about having a strong sense of place.

Pascal Zachary, whose bio of Vannevar Bush I highly recommend, opines in today’s New York Times on why Silicon Valley, where he lives and writes, is the home of dollars and cents. His claim is that innovation is all about place and he cites some good examples.

There are of course counter examples all over. But the companies we think of when we think of the net are largely in Silicon Valley.

How can a lil ole epicenter of biotech, software and other innovations like RDU compete?

Brit Top 10 to be all Beatles?

What songs/singles are the Top 10 best sellers in the UK? With the new attention to music downloads changing the list, we now have unsigned bands like Koopa in the Top 40 and moving up.

More interestingly, if the Beatles catalog is made available for download in the next few weeks as is expected, the Beatles could completely dominate the charts possibly taking all of the Top 10 slots (reported on BBC here).

BTW: Koopa releases four versions of their song,“Blag Steal and Borrow,” on their website — regular, acoutic, live and remix — only about a minute of each tho.

Carrboro Commons latest edition

UNC Journalism students working with Jock Lauterer and Andy Bectel have just released the latest edition of the hyperlocal news site/paper Carrboro Commons. Looks and reads great.

I do wonder tho: Why editions? The direction of online news is always breaking news and constant updates — not editions. And the Commons format easily allows for that; it is afterall is said and done a hyperlocal blog. And that’s a good and powerful thing.

Feb 20 – 23 Tiemann, Copeland, Doctorow, Nan Lin

We have a big week of speakers coming up soon. Here’s a quick rundown:

At the upcoming Fred Kilgour Fest, Open Source Initiative President Michael Tiemann will be one of the speakers — Tuesday February 20.

February 22 – Blogads founder Henry Copeland will be visiting my class at 11 am. Cory Doctorow will be speaking at 2 pm.

February 23 – Social Capital and Social Networking theorist, Nan Lin (whose books I’ve used for some years now) will be speaking at about 2:30 (more on this in a later post).

Nobelist Stiglitz at Duke Feb 16th

Now that Duke basketball fantasies have been shattered, it’ll be good to go over there next week and hear Nobel prizewinner (2001 Nobel Prize in Economics) Joseph Stiglitz (who teaches at Columbia) give the the sixth annual Meredith and Kip Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property.

Who: Joseph Stiglitz
What: “The Economic Foundations of Intellectual Property”
When: Noon:15 pm, Friday February 16
Where: Duke Law School, Room 3041

With Second Life, I’ve already cloned myself (as Said Goodnight) so yes I can be two places at one.

(Thanks to Jennifer Jenkins for the alert)

Democratizing Music?

Yesterday in class, we discussed chapters in Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation.

Holly asked: Using an example relevant to the present day music industry status, do you think that Apple Inc. would benefit more from the iTunes/iPod industry financially by making it free or open source software instead of the highly restricted software that it currently employs?

Steve Jobs was releasing his answer to this question during our class! Here it is from the Apple site.

Briefly. Apple does DRM on iTunes because the music companies demand it. People who buy the music hate the restrictions. People who buy iPods hate the restrictions. Steve says the restrictions don’t work anyway. Maybe things will get fixed in Europe.

FakeSteveJobs
has the window into RealSteveJobs mind on this in his essay on the essay “Thoughts on ‘Thoughts on Music'”— and he is a much funnier writer.

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