Filed under: blogging, economy, mobile
So it’s come to my attention that just about everyone on Twitter and Friend Feed has one thing to talk about anymore. That being the all powerful iPhone 3G edition. Personally, I have no desire to own one as they are just so expensive and it seems it all amounts to eye candy. The killer app for iPhone is…wait, I really don’t want a killer app on my phone thank you, I want to be able to call people and text, and possibly check my email. That is all I ask of a phone. However, in most of today’s tech savvy generation, that just makes me “stuck in the nineties” and obliterates any geek in me.
I am of the opinion that there are very interesting things happening other than the iPhone; things that are getting overlooked. For example, Verizon was in talks to buy out Alltel for $27 billion. That to me is horrifying, seeing as how Alltel services us down here in Hickville, Nowhere USA, where as when I came here on vacation my Verizon phone did not work at all. Verizon seems to be about supplying cities with service but neglects the country bumpkins in little towns all over the US. And with poor tact on the Customer Service end of things, I’m worried as to what is going to happen with my phone service. Will I have to make the switch back to Verizon, or will I have to go with the other mobile carrier in the area: AT&T?
Another interesting thing to me was the analysis of the latest cover of the New Yorker Magazine. Chris Farley, wrote on his blog possibly the best political/satirical wrap up of the cover and of the upcoming election. In part it says:
Rumors are circulated about Obama being a (gasp) Muslim. His middle name is Hussein, he must be related to Saddam Hussein. I think the humor is self explanatory. The New Yorker is mocking, and rightly so, the sheer stupidity of those who believe these rumors, as well as those who spread them maliciously.
I just about fell out of my chair when I read a twitter later on regarding this particular cover:
“The new yorker” is full of [expletive deleted] …. : /”
It just goes to show that some people regardless of their age can write and analyze politics on a level much higher than some of their peers. I have no desire to voice my opinions on politics, but it proves the point that the New Yorker may have done something unwise in releasing this particular cover. Too many will feel that it’s jabbing at Sen. Obama, completely missing the point of the whole article.
Lastly, Microsoft stocks fell last night 6%. Sales rose for them during the last fiscal year, but because many people are slow to adopt Vista (no wonder, I despise it) and Wall Street’s estimates were higher than Microsoft’s actual year end profit, stocks dropped. Sadly I failed to see whether or not their stock dropped on the day they discontinued XP, but in my opinion it seems likely that it would. XP was by far better than Vista, and should I ever need a new computer, I will just go for a Mac, seeing as how it seems like Vista is trying to be a knock-off edition. Perhaps it’s just the Unix lover in me, or maybe I’ve been using Linux far too long, but something about Microsoft going under in the not so distant future makes me smile.
Filed under: development, open source
So it seems I’m in a bit of a quandry: I write blog posts about SupraSphere, but we need development support. Now, how could I garner support by writing a post?
Well, as most know, I am completely obsessed with Ubuntu Linux. It’s very stable (including the bleeding edge beta for 8.04) and the ease of use is phenomenal. A few days ago I directed quite a number of people to this very blog from the Ubuntu forums. My thought was *maybe*, just maybe a developer would stumble upon my review of VirtualBox and have their interest piqued about the project. Much to my dismay, this did not unfold as I wished it had. That being said, my next step is announcing the project itself on the Ubuntu brainstorm. Why? If you’ve been following Suprablog, I’m sure you gather that we primarily use the Linux operating system, and to be specific, Ubuntu. Therefore, it’s natural that we would think of integration deep within Ubuntu as if boundaries didn’t exist.
So, why would SupraSphere and Linux make a good team? The truth is, SupraSphere could and should become a key piece of Ubuntu and the evolving Linux Desktop story. The reason is that it has key conceptual attributes that will allow Linux to innovate and leapfrog other approaches. These attributes are these four general areas: services-oriented desktop (web os/desktop), end-to-end security, database filesystem, and virtualization. We have Launchpad, which has incredible community support for a multitude of smaller projects. Now, imagine using Launchpad and SupraSphere hand in hand; improving in a top-notch security environment and being able to communicate and access information/documentaion in providing the best open source projects out there. Sounds like a dream come true for other developers, no?
Running SupraSphere is in fact like running a virtual desktop. It can store all of your files, bookmarks, rss feeds, contacts, and email all in one place, where you can search across them. It has extremely secure messaging and authentication (beyond SSH and SSL even). You can tag across all message types. You can search and view your desktop remotely. It’s the ideal system to fit in with the virtualization trends that are emerging. We already have four distinct and separate user interfaces that all share messaging protocols and the same data store: Eclipse RCP, plain servlet, RAP ajax UI, openlaszlo, and even a prototype XUL interface.
That said, there are of course problems. We don’t even have a .deb or .rpm packaged version of our system. While we have some connections within the Eclipse, Mozilla, Sun/Java, and Apache communities, we have little or no exposure within the the Linux ecosystem, especially within the Ubuntu community. We feel very strongly that if Ubuntu were to embrace the ideas within our project, it would put Ubuntu above and beyond any other distribution, and help lead the way to Linux Desktop bliss.
Please help. Now is the time. With Java and Linux becoming closer, with MySQL now a part of Sun, SupraSphere can tie in numerous different communities and projects, and propel the Linux desktop way ahead of the competition.
If you have experience with Linux (especially Ubuntu), Java, or Ajax, please contact us to volunteer your efforts.
Email us at: developers [at] suprasphere [dot] com
Filed under: review
So it seems I am a slave to Apple’s software. I’ve had my glorious 30GB iPod (in arctic white, no less) coming close to two years. In that time, my library went from a humble six cd collection to over 3,000 mp3s. However, my former laptop (aka Della) was bricked pretty much, so I reformatted and installed Ubuntu on it. My new laptop is a shiny Dell with Ubuntu factory installed, which made my day! Needless to say, iTunes does not function in Linux. Well, at least not yet.
I’ve tried Rhythmbox, I’ve tried Exaile, but only one program really seemed to work: Amarok. Sadly, it still pales in comparison with iTunes, especially with the new Last.fm server change. See, not only do I want to be able to sync my iPod, I also want to “scrobble” everything I listen to. Amarok recently quit scrobbling tracks, and even the Last.fm Linux client ceased working. So, in essence this started off as a weekend project just so I could get iTunes working again.
Low and behold, Lifehacker to the rescue! On Friday, there was a post waiting for me via RSS. *Light bulb*, “Run Windows Apps Seamlessly Inside Linux” was exactly what the doctor ordered. This article was featuring VirtualBox, which I had never heard of until now. Of it’s many features, it includes a ’seamless’ mode (to be discussed later) so it will run both OSs simultaneously. I’m deathly afraid of doing dual-boots on my laptop, so this seemed a viable fix.
So off to InnoTek, the awesome folks who built VirtualBox (who is now owned by Sun Microsystems apparently), I went. Although I am fully capable of grabbing things from the repositories, I decided to go with a .deb file right on the download page, currently hosed at Sun. It seemed like they had a version for every distro out there. After a very easy install, and a reboot for safe measure, I began.
My music collection is fairly large, it takes up about 22GB of space on my hard drive. So, using the wizard to create a virtual HD image was fairly simple. I went with a 34GB virtual drive, so I could easily transfer songs and still have space to work with. The whole process in setting up the drive took literally took about three minutes with setting up the RAM and disc space. Once that was done, I attempted to turn this new “computer” on, but I got a file permission error. To fix this I did:
$ gksudo nautilus
Going to the file that was required, I edited permissions, logged out of my computer, logged back in and booted the virtual drive. I had previously put my Windows XP Professional into my disc drive, and using the Devices>Mount CD-ROM, I performed a speedy install.
About a half hour later, I rebooted the XP virtual drive, and installed the seamless feature. Then, I opened IE, and grabbed the Firefox 3 Beta 4, and installed that. After I set that up to be my default browser, I installed all my staple programs: AIM, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, iTunes, and the Last.fm client. Then I shut down the drive.
While still in VirtualBox, I set up a shared directory/folder. I wanted to drag things from my “home” folder to my desktop in xp. This in and of itself was an easy task, but after I set it up, I had no idea what to do next. In the article it explained that I had to run cmd in XP, and enter this command:
net use x: \\vboxsvr\’sharename’
The sharename would be whatever you so chose, so that was easy to change. Then I simply went to My Computer and went to the shared network drive, (which was the directory I just mounted) and dragged my entire music directory over to my iTunes folder.
Getting iTunes to actually work was a bear, due to mapping of the USB drives. I found this site linked on the Wikipedia article: Get USB devices mounted on your Virtualbox XP machine in Gutsy. So thanks to the nice people there, and following their well-defined instructions, I was able to get iTunes working.
Wait! Problem! Honestly, I don’t understand why this was happening, or even really how to fix it. I kept getting these horrible write error messages from our good friend Windows XP. Sadly, I didn’t get a screenshot of it, but roughly it said “Write Delay Error: File [insert iPod file here] not written due to a network or hardware malfunction. Please save this file elsewhere.” *Sigh* Oh no. What did I do to compensate for it? I spent roughly 13 hours doing nothing else than transferring little more than 50 songs, disconnecting, waiting for a reconnect, and transferring 50 more. Instead of running in the really nice ’seamless’ mode, I opted for the full-screen mode with as little background tasks running in Ubuntu as possible.
Aside from my horrific iPod/iTunes experience, everything else seems to work fine. Well, to clarify, Yahoo messenger doesn’t transfer files all the time, only when it wants to. Web-camming leaves something to be desired, as it occasionally freezes or all-together disconnects, and I know it’s not my internet connection. And this whole ’seamless’ thing? Well, in very plain words, it enables you to run [insert OS here] directly on top of your current OS, sans the pretty desktop picture. That’s about it. Oh yeah, and iTunes cover flow doesn’t work. :(
On another, much more cheerful note, SupraSphere is available for different OSs, so I grabbed the latest build for Windows, and decided to log in in both the Linux build and the Windows build. Here’s a little treat! :)
I have to say though, this instills in me more that I love Ubuntu Linux, more than Mac OSX, Microsoft products in general, and everything in between. It just runs smoother, and I earnestly hope that someone at Apple will read this and move iTunes over to Linux!
Andria’s Score: ★★★☆☆
Filed under: cloud, economy, sphere
I had an interesting meeting couple of days ago with Andy Lippmann of the MIT Media Lab. He had a hard time seeing the connection between the idea of a secure, private, “personal cloud” and currency, so I figure I have a lot of work to do if someone so esteemed as Dr. Lippmann does not see the connection as obviously and clearly as I do.
First off, there are different connotations of currency, many of which have nothing to do with quantification and numerical accounting, particularly in traditionally understood units and/or denominations. Most people have heard of the concepts of “social capital” or “political capital”, for example. In considering different ideas around currency, there is also a question as to whether currencies are “convertible” into dollars or exchangeable into other forms of currency in other communities and networks beyond those in which they originate. As an example, many people have heard of “Linden Dollars” from the video game “Second Life”, which do have an implicit conversion rate to US dollars. Compare them to World of Warcraft Gold, which, while it used to be purchasable on eBay before eBay explicitly banned the practice, has no implicitly set conversion rate.
Because of my background, I have a fairly good grasp of traditional money and how it works as a system. Most people know that SupraSphere has several installations in some financial services institutions, particularly hedge funds. This has afforded me a pretty in-depth look at how the financial system functions and how people who trade stocks and focus fanatically on increasing the amount of money they have actually think.
Everyone knows that money makes the world go round and is the bottom line. This is why I have been so fascinated by it. It’s more pervasive and prevalent, by far, than any single other psychological construct in the world. As a mindset, it far surpasses both television and organized religion combined in its ability to generate a unified and homogenized world view. So, having grown up in a fairly socially conscious and idealistic family, I was drawn to thinking of the structure and design of money as a particularly fun and challenging lever to pull in terms of changing the world. If there were one single underlying construct where changing its definition would have the single most substantial effect on the world, it would clearly be with money itself.
That said, banking and financial systems themselves are at the core actually very simple accounting systems that only really become complex by how people try to game them, all under the guise of “creating efficiencies”. You deduct from one place, you add to another. Transferring funds is really not that complicated a process. The overall point is that as it becomes more and more the case that money exists primarily a digital phenomenon consisting of overlapping interactions of accounts (in some ways actually a “social network”), how complex is banking really that people can’t have direct control over the overall process of issuing and managing currency? The most important thing to think of in this case is the creation/issuance of money and its underlying definition and value, which is already assumed when you get into the accounting stage. However, if people have their own set of servers (spheres) that can create intersecting relationships with other spheres (accounts), we might very well be able to enter into an era of “open source money”.
Before I get into specifics about how SupraSphere can help to “open source money”, I will provide some more perspective on my background for more context. I have long been a fan of free software, ever since I first compiled a Linux kernel on an old 386 at the Shiva Corporation in high school in the early 90’s. This was before Windows for Workgroups even, where DOS still ruled the roost and where Microsoft was just starting to enter the world of GUIs that Apple Macs had been in for 10 years prior. I had a simple thought. If DOS was more popular than Macs because it was more open, easier to tinker with and fix despite being ridiculously harder to use, then Linux would eventually be more popular than DOS for the same reason, which I incidentally think also applies to Windows NT.
While I loved Linux and tried to install it everywhere I could, my father absolutely hated how I couldn’t see that DOS and Windows were more important for business and that I was investing so much time in a hobbled platform with pretty much no important or critical applications. In fact, if you ask my two younger brothers, they would attest to how much my distaste for the Windows platform actually hurt my relationship with my father who would spend hours trying to lecture me into using Windows. The smart money went with Microsoft, but I didn’t care. It was too late. I had bought into this whole “freedom and openness” thing and was still a bit too isolated from the real world of bills and mortgages to think that I was potentially compromising my future earnings.
Instead, I started to think even more abstractly in terms of currency, value, and exchange. I thought it was really spectacular that GNU/Linux, when considered together, represents the largest collaborative engineering project ever undertaken by humanity, and was being built at the time mostly by volunteers who believed in a common cause of creating a better system than Windows. I know Linus has said that he has never wanted to destroy Windows and instead only focuses on making Linux better, but those of us who adopted Linux as a platform were drawn to a common cause that there simply had to be something better than Windows (particularly because we were the ones who had to fix it for all of our friends and family), not to mention that we hated the idea in principle of a company’s making computers intentionally incompatible or hard to work with, given how hard in general it is to get them to work right in the first place.
So GNU/Linux is a system comprising attributes of emergence, self-governance, anarchy, evolution, openness, freedom, and now with some Ubuntu thrown in. But, there is no real business model for it. There are some awkward ways for businesses to make money off of it, usually involving support and customization, but those have their own problems. Imagine instead if the profit motive could be directly aligned and intertwined with open source software production.
Another area that has no proper business model is digital music. Despite the success of iTunes, I have never bought a single song on it. I hate the idea that I could lose access to what I have paid thousands of dollars for just for moving to a different computer, not to mention that it doesn’t even run on Linux. My mother can’t use it in Hong Kong and many people don’t have access to it around the world. Why would I endorse such a thing as the “proper” solution to how music should be considered in the digital Internet age? Not to mention, I have used better systems, such as AllofMP3 and OINK, which were both actually better than Napster ever was, IMHO.
I think in both cases, GNU/Linux (and other open source systems, including suprasphere) and digital music, we need to think differently about money itself in order to come up with a solution to the problem of how artists will get paid and how to ensure freedom while still being able to make money on software. The key is to think of “creating money” instead of “making money”. Given that two gigantic forces are on a collision course, the financial system on the one hand, and the Internet, which comprises digitally distributed music and video, collaboratively developed free software, the web (both 2.0 and 3.0) ;) on the other, which would you bet will come out on top?
The truth is that the transactional efficiencies and network externalities of the web put the entire financial system to shame. There were hints of this back in the web 1.0 bubble days of the “new economy”. People thought that Internet companies didn’t need to conform to old concepts of “revenue”, “profit”, and “cost of goods sold”. Eyeballs were the new currency of the day. Well, I don’t think it’s as far from what the truth could be, assuming that people allow that the nature of money itself (as opposed to just the application of it) can actually be changed. Even as people talk about a new bubble, and people wonder how companies like Facebook will ever live up to their valuation, I think we can take steps to move the entire financial system on to the architecture of the Internet and the Web, and make it open source on top of it!
In fact, I have numerous times heard the semantic web referred to as an “information bus” (TechnicaLee Speaking), and we are starting to see the convergence of the semantic web and the activities of general financial services companies such as with Reuters Calais. What else is the financial system but a global information bus? Why else would financial services companies want to integrate instant messaging into the kernel of an operating system?
Even as suprasphere contains pretty amazing technology and is a very unique and innovative application, we are not proposing as a vision something that isn’t already happening. Instead, we are trying to suggest clearly what it all adds up to, and certainly hope that suprasphere serves as a reference point outside of just giving us some credibility to suggest this broader vision.
So, here we go. What if, each time an individual or group invents a new concept in a unique semantic namespace, a currency (stock) account for that unique new namespace was also simultaneously created? Such a namespace could represent a new music album, website, Linux module, or just about any project. As other people linked to that unique namespace, downloaded from that namespace, collaborated around that namespace, the stock of of that entity would automatically rise as more people used it and interacted with it. The more interest in the creative output of the group responsible for the project, the more interest would accrue in their account. This even has analogies in the “peer to patent” proposal for how to reform the patent system.
So as currency accumulates in an account/sphere, it can be spent just like with “normal money”, but every time it gets spent (on things like clothes, food, cars, etc.), it must get spent as a proportion of the interest and the principal. As soon as the principal is gone, it can no longer accrue interest. Perhaps if it’s invested in somebody else’s sphere as both interest and principal, it can accrue interest on both. There might be an expiration point where after accumulating interest for so long, the namespace itself becomes public domain.
Or not. That was my freestyle idea of how it might work, but the exact model and details are truly open for debate and dialog, which should at the very least feel exceptionally empowering in and of itself. At this point the details of how the system can work are not as important as achieving consensus around the overall premise, where we can start to set in motion the conditions where the exact attributes can emerge and evolve. Just like the financial system (and the credit system for that matter), one can’t design and manage it centrally in a command-and-control fashion, but we can set in motion the idea that people can be in true control over their own bank account and concept of “net worth” and allow a new system to emerge in true chaordic fashion.
I realize that this is in many respects a crazy idea. I have not only been thinking and talking along these lines for a long time, but also working extremely hard each and every day to help bring this about. However, every day that goes forward the greater the intellectual risk as I spend more social capital to keep the dialog open and the greater the possibility that someday I will wake up bankrupt, not just in my bank account but in the lack of people who care enough even to have a conversation about these concepts. I have sacrificed many, many years pursuing this core idea, and ask that you forgive the raw and unbaked nature of my presentation, and instead of only finding fault and poking holes and dismissing this outright, please give it a chance. We are at a tricky time in the world, with crises and problems of seemingly insurmountable proportion everywhere we look, and as a result I think we deserve the right to think openly and freely about the nature of money, and seize the opportunity to fashion it along lines that will support each of our grandest goals and ambitions.
Posted on July 17th, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
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