The Nexus One has landed: telecomms companies, beware!

Google sent me one of the unlocked developer Nexus One phones. It arrived today. And, in the wake of recent news about Verizon not after all carrying the Nexus, stimulated some interesting thoughts in my mind about where the cellphone market is going. The balance of power is changing fast in ways that are going… Continue reading The Nexus One has landed: telecomms companies, beware!

Penguicon!

For any of you who happen to be in Southeast Michigan or its environs, Cathy and I will be attending Penguicon from April 30th to May 2nd. A&D regular Ken Burnside will be there as well, sharing a room with us and hawking his excellent 3D space games – Attack Vector: Tactical, Squadron Strike and… Continue reading Penguicon!

Incentives to be Open

A correspondent pointed me at a paper by Carliss Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation, which builds on my papers in some interesting ways. Here’s one of the money quotes: Building on arguments of Ghosh (1998), Raymond (1999), and von Hippel and von… Continue reading Incentives to be Open

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Categorized as Software

Pandora’s Biases

Back in February I experimented with Pandora Radio and loved it…enough that I bought a subscription within a few days. It’s my background music now; I might never own an analog radio again. For a while I ran around telling all my friends about how Pandora was the greatest thing! since sliced bread! you should… Continue reading Pandora’s Biases

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Categorized as Music

IBM: Now trying to dig out…

IBM has issued another statement on the TurboHercules imbroglio. This one is reported by the Linux Foundation, but comes from Dan Frye. Dan Frye heads IBM’s Linux Technology Center and was actually at the top of my mental shortlist of likely voices of sanity over there. (Full disclosure: Dan kept me supplied with IBM Thinkpads… Continue reading IBM: Now trying to dig out…

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You have ascended

Redoubtable hacker Chip Salzenberg wrote me last night with the subject line “You have ascended”. I quote in full: Long time no chat. Hope you are well. In fact, I don’t have to hope, because I just read this in a book: Raymond in his brilliant The Cathedral and the Bazaar [2001] … That’s all… Continue reading You have ascended

IBM: Digging itself in deeper

Yesterday I blogged about the escalating dispute between IBM and TurboHercules SAS. I said, and will repeat now, that the central issue for the open-source community in this matter is not the antitrust allegations, but rather the fact that IBM has raised a patent threat alleging that Hercules violates its intellectual property. And especially, that… Continue reading IBM: Digging itself in deeper

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Categorized as Software

IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?

Sadly, Florian Mueller’s scream of outrage (IBM breaks the taboo and betrays its promise to the FOSS community is not an April Fool’s joke. IBM has done what it swore not to in 2005 – picked up the patent weapon and aimed it to block an open-source project. I was thoroughly briefed on this about… Continue reading IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?

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Abusing CIA for Fun and Profit

No, not the Central Intelligence Agency. I refer to CIA.vc, a nifty free service that monitors commits on open-source repositories in real time and echoes notifications to IRC. And not really abuse, either – rather, I just implemented a way to make it do something else useful. Others might consider doing likewise.

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Autotools must die

Me, on the GPSD mailing list: Once upon a time, I did not hate autotools. Yea verily, it was the morning of the world and all things (even autotools) seemed fresh and new). I’d say this innocence lasted until about, oh, 1995. But autotools was a kluge. And it did accrete kluges and crocks around… Continue reading Autotools must die

Victimology bites

Dr. Richard Friedman’s Sabotaging Success, but to What End?, published 2010-03-22 in the New York Times, is about an instantly recognizable pattern — people who sabotage themselves so they can feel like martyred victims of an uncaring world. The piece is insightful and even funny in a bleak sort of way, but as I read… Continue reading Victimology bites

In search of: FTL taxonomy

I’ve been troping again. This time I found and repaired the TV Tropes page on Faster Than Light Travel. It had previously made a distinction between three subtypes of FTL drive: “jump”, “warp”, and “shortcut”. The “shortcut” category was confused and confusing, and I’ve renamed it to “portal” and fixed the definitions of both “portal”… Continue reading In search of: FTL taxonomy

Social Security and the fiscal event horizon

The Ides of March, 2010 may be remembered as the day the entitlements crash began. Social Security liabilities exceed inflow, and SSA has begun tapping its vault full of Treasury bonds. “Too bad” (as the AP story notes) “the federal government already spent that money…”

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Categorized as Politics