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Excerpted from Slavoj Zizek: “Users today access programs and software maintained far away in climate-controlled rooms housing thousands of computers. To quote from a propaganda-text on cloud computing: “Details are abstracted from consumers, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ that supports them.” There are two tell-tale words here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, a system which is by definition hidden from the end-user. The paradox is thus that, as the new gadget (smartphone or tiny portable) I hold in my hand becomes increasingly personalized, easy to use, “transparent” in its functioning, the more the entire set-up has to rely on the work being done elsewhere, on the vast circuit of machines which coordinate the user’s experience.
Slavoj Zizek on cloud computing as corporate enclosure of the ‘general intellect’
Understanding the Fourier transform » #AltDevBlogADay
Yes, I realize that after reading the title of this post, 99% of potential readers just kept scrolling. So to the few of you who clicked on it, welcome! Don’t worry, this won’t take long. A very long time ago, I was curious how to detect the strength of the bass and treble in music, in order to synchronize some graphical effects. I had no idea how to do such a thing, so I tried to figure it out, but I didn’t get very far. Eventually I learned that I needed something called a Fourier transform , so I took a trip to the library and looked it up (which is what we had to do back in those days).
I wrote a first version of this posting on consistency models about a year ago, but I was never happy with it as it was written in haste and the topic is important enough to receive a more thorough treatment. ACM Queue asked me to revise it for use in their magazine and I took the opportunity to improve the article. This is that new version. Eventually Consistent - Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability.
Eventually Consistent - Revisited - All Things Distributed
Age of the Algorithm
Content farms depend heavily on search engines for traffic. Photograph by Marc Rimmer. SOUTH BEND , Ind.Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Techno-optimism
‘‘Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?’’ It’s a question I get asked so often that I have a little canned response I can rattle off without thinking: ‘‘In order to be an activist, you have to be both: pessimistic enough to believe that things will get worse if left unchecked, optimistic enough to believe that if you take action, the worst can be prevented.’’ But there’s more to it than that.
Dear Mr. Harris, I respect your article and would love to talk more. I'm of the opinion though that CL is far more complex that you paint it, and that there are some flaws in your argument. You immediately criticize the CL mob -ie everyone in the world-, yet provide no way for your readers to not fall into the same technical/biased traps which you claim are unfair.
Mob-sourcing: the prejudice of crowds | ZDNet
Valdis Krebs , chief scientist and founder of ORGNET.COM , and a participant in #ideachat created the first network map of a Twitter Chat: This is a network map of the almost 1000 tweets during the #ideachat 1 hour session in November 2010. Individual participants in the chat are shown as purple nodes and the "whole group" is shown as the large green circular node. If someone tweeted to everyone in the group, at least twice in the session, an arrow would be drawn from their node to the big green node. People who tweeted to each other [@ messages or RTs], at least twice in the 1 hour session, will have arrows drawn from the tweeter node to the subject node. @blogbrevity @cocreatr indicates that they both sent 2 or more tweets to each other during the session.
Tummeling & the Twitter Chat: A Network Map of #IDEACHAT by ORGNET.COM - blogbrevity's posterous
Network Weaving
What is the difference between movements, coalitions and networks and how does each relate to the others? Which one makes sense for what kind of situation? Movements The term movement has been used for more than a century to describe the dynamic process by which broad moral issues bubble up and – when successful – change the way people think and act. The right of women to vote generated a powerful movement that not only led to the 20th Amendment but also succeeded in convincing virtually everyone that women were as capable as men of participating in the election process.
Sunday Post on Crypto, Trust, and Political Action on the Web — Outsourced to David P. Reed « The Inverse Square Blog
I’m a lurker (mostly) on a listserv for MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media (C4), which pops up some fascinating discussions about news, social networking, and political life on and through the web. Recently, there was a flurry of posts on the announcement from the Haystack that work on the system designed to encrypt and obscure the source of internet communications in Iran had halted. That announcement was followed by the effective end of the project, which had aimed at providing political dissidents secure ways to communicate. That sequence of events led to considerable back and forth among the C4 community, in part looking at the perennial problem of hype in the tech/software world outpacing reality.
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Viral Ideas are grassroots innovations that start at the edges of networks and industries, take only small investments to begin, yet build through social and technical opportunism to swamp entrenched, vertically integrated companies. True virality scales without bound, entails small startup costs, and grows in power with adoption. Spreadsheets are an example: they came from an apartment, began on the Apple II, and each new user refined them for others. Viral Spaces research is about places where people communicate, both at a distance and locally, with each other. We develop technologies of connection.
...a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using Croquet, software developers can create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations. Croquet SDK 1.0 Beta is available! This open source release of the software developers kit makes it possible for experienced software developers to work with Croquet. It is the first complete release of the Croquet technology and marks a significant event for those interested in developing powerful collaborative applications.
The Croquet Project
Barbara van Schewick posted a really thoughtful analysis about how about application-specific vs. application-agnostic discrimination directly affects innovation, and looks at an actual example of a Silicon Valley startup. I think her points are right on, and I strongly support the rationale for resisting “application-specific” discrimination. In fact, Barbara’s point is the key to the whole debate.
dpr
Dr. David P. Reed enjoys architecting the information space in which people, groups and organizations interact. He is well known as a pioneer in the design and construction of the Internet protocols, distributed data storage, and PC software systems and applications. He is co-inventor of the end-to-end argument , often called the fundamental architectural principle of the Internet. Recently, he discovered Reed's Law , a scaling law for group-forming network architectures.
David P. Reed Biography
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » MondoNet, a global wireless mesh network
A team from Rutgers University is trying to create the next generation version of the Internet, dubbed MondoNet, based on a global mesh of wireless access points that would be resistant to surveillance and state censorship and control. The head of the project, Aram Sinnreich, is an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information. He talks about why we need a different internet and how MondoNet is likely to work to change things, at a TEDx talk at USC recently. Here is a link to the video.Arts and Culture - Jonathan Shapiro on ‘The Tyranny of Dead Ideas’
His ambitious new book, “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity,” has more intriguing proposals packed into it than might be found in a month of congressional debates. Whatever the book lacks in deep analysis, it more than makes up for in intellectual honesty and courage. Miller acknowledges that our problems are vast and systemic and, thus, the solutions will not come in half measures. Yet most refuse to admit it. “America’s economy is about to face its most severe test in nearly a century … [yet] our business and political leaders are doing next to nothing to prepare us to cope with what lies ahead,” Miller writes.Biological Meme
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