"There's a broader range of [computing] things, and they don't all have to be based on CMOS and gates," the technology that underlies today's microprocessors, he said. "Systems out there in nature are already doing computations as complex as the ones that correspond to human intelligence."

The study found that young Americans were the least likely among their counterparts to know that Afghanistan is where the Taliban and al Qaeda were based. Less than half the Americans could identify France, the United Kingdom or Japan on a world map. Fewer than two in three could find China on a map of the Middle East/Asia, and more than half—56 percent—were unable to locate India, home to 17 percent of people on Earth. Just half of young Americans could find New York, one of the nation's most populous states.

"You don't hear any more of, 'Hey, we did something creative and we turned a profit, how about that?' Everywhere we look, we want to make the most money possible. This is a dangerous, corrupt notion. That's where you see the advent of programming on the radio, and radio research, all these silly things. That has made pop music what it is today. Everything -- morals, truth -- is all going out the window in favor of profit.

"I don't think it's a good attitude in your life to feel that you have to be rich to have self-esteem. You know, I saw a billboard in New York I wish I had photographed. It was for the TNN network. It said three words against a patriotic background of red, white and blue - BIGGER, YOUNGER, RICHER. Now, I find that fascinating: 'Bigger, younger, richer.' This whole idea of being wealthy has gone too far. I never ride in a limousine, you know. I feel gross if I get in a limousine. One good thing about the Sixties was it sort of was the opposite back then. You looked silly trying to appear rich."

If we improved all the intranets in the world to the usability level achieved by the best 25% in our study, the world economy would save $311,294,070,513 per year for the sixteen test tasks alone. Adding the likely savings from company-specific tasks leads us to an estimated $600 billion in total annual productivity improvements. This level of intranet productivity is a modest goal; we could realistically achieve it with an investment of about $31 billion per year in intranet usability.

Assuming further usability improvements -- up to the very best level we found for each study task -- could save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year when we include estimated improvements in company-specific tasks.

By total coincidence one week in 199? i was fooling with 3 or 4 books and in those books i kept running into the word "essence." And the funny thing for me was that one was a Negritude Anthology and the other was a book about Heidegger. The other was a book on Baraka's Black Nationalist phase. So i thought it was trippy that blacks got to talk about their "essence" and it was ok (empowering) but when germans talked about it it was scary. I then got to thinking about how Heidegger fucked up by thinking Hitler was somehow gonna wake the Volk up to what their essence was all about. And then I thought about how thats exactly what a "strong black leader" in the 60's was sposed to do.

Then, in the middle of a load of depressing thoughts about the dubious nature of man/womankind, i thought it would simply be funny if Martin Heidegger, in the middle of one of his lectures at Freiburg, accidentally time travelled into early 60's Harlem and found himself, in full-on lederhosen, on a corner soap box talking about essence.

I dont think the song is anywhere as good as the daydream that inspired it. But thats it.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 11/9/2002 05:11:21 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Open Source Initiative OSI - Doc7:Halloween Documents

Trick or treat! In the latest Halloween doc, Eric Raymond analyzes an internal Microsoft memo which says, bottom line, that Open Source is competition. You know, that capitalist thing where innovators can eat your lunch. You remember that, Bill? It's like what you and yours did to your competitors. [Link]

Closing, those who are familiar with OSS and Linux are favorably predisposed towards them. Linking this work with other on-point research, we can assume that in the majority of cases this reported 'favorability' is more emotional than it is rational. Given this context, we should not expect rational arguments focused on undermining support for OSS, Linux and the GPL to perform well. In the short term, then, Microsoft should avoid criticizing OSS and Linux directly, continue to develop and aim to eventually win the TCO argument, and focus on delivering positive Shared Source messages that contain transparent, audience specific proof points.

{So they're going to try to beat us up on total cost of ownership! Well, it was all pretty sane up to that point; it's nice to know our opponents are still smoking crack about some key issues. Or have they simply escaped noticing that the worst customer revolt they're dealing with is over the TCO implications of the new XP licensing scheme?}

posted by jon lebkowsky on 11/6/2002 07:47:11 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Monday, November 04, 2002
Smart Mobs reviewed by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow, feet planted firmly in today's future, reviews Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs, which explores the new adhocratic nodal multiverse still emerging, now through a proliferation of wireless communication devices. [Link]

Smart Mobs are packet-switched. Howard's book teases this out admirably. Packet-switched means that you're not reliable, you're not in control, you're not deterministic. Victorians of a certain bent adopted a fatalistic view of the universe as an utterly predictable billiard-table whose balls were set in motion by the Supreme First Mover. Smart Mobs live in an evolutionary hothouse that has more in common with the randomwalking properties of colony animals than with the military discipline of yestercenturies revolutions, cartels and governments.

Japanese schoolgirls and Finnish teenagers and Filipino citizenry and bloggers and warchalking gangs are all views into a packet-switched future. As usual, Howard has nailed the ethic, the feeling and the lightspeed futuristic frisson that he hammered in with Virtual Community and his other books, revealing the way that the world has already changed before any of us have even noticed.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 11/4/2002 07:20:50 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Saturday, November 02, 2002
Quantum Urban Myth?

From usenet: This post speculates whether a couple of papers on quantum physics were created as a hoax by a couple of science fiction authors who took time to master physics jargon, then created the papers as a kind of poetry in that peculiar lingo. Example: "We propose hereafter that the signature of the Space-Time metric (+++-) is not anymore frozen at the Planck scale and presents quantum fluctuations (++++/-) until 0 scale where it becomes Euclidean (++++). (i) At the albraic level we suggest an oscillation path (3,1) (4,0) excluding (2,2). We built the quotient topological space describing the superposition of the Lorentzian and the Riemanian metrics. In terms of quantum groups we evidence a relation between q-deformation and deformation of the signature...." [Link]

The journal articles make for rather strange reading (you can easily get ahold of them, because they are appended to the PDF files containing the theses). Some parts almost seem to make sense, but the more carefully you read them, the less sense they make.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 11/2/2002 06:48:27 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Friday, November 01, 2002
Ricardo Bello ponders Venezuela's Cyborg Festival

Following the first phase of Venezuela's Cyborg Festival, the brilliant (and hard working!) Ricardo Bello, one of its organizers, ponders the lessons of phase one. [Link]

What I thought to be an excellent art website, was a communication one, and viceversa. It all belong to one category: the ability to communicate; one urge, the will to power in the Nietzschean sense, the will to create and express yourself and get in touch with others, no restrain whatsoever unless it refers to your technical ability. I just finished Thomas L. Friedman´s new book: Longitudes and Attitudes. Exploring the World After September 11, and he is right in several ways. The end of the Cold War opened the door to a globalization system build around three balances that affect one another, and one of them, the newest and most radical of all, is the balance between individuals and nation-states.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 11/1/2002 04:16:43 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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European Commission and Open Source

The European Commission is funding a study to determine the issues of migrating to Linux and Open Source technology. (Via ). [Link]

Microsoft's recently introduced licensing changes have added weight to this concern but Bleasdale said an even bigger issue was the rate of change that Microsoft is imposing on customers, and many are struggling to deal with it. This calls for a major rethink in computing architecture, such as West Yorkshire Police have embraced, he added.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 11/1/2002 06:17:40 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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