From the ABC’s 7:30 report, a good news story about the Broadband Revolution coming to Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. A fibre optic cable has be laid into Arnhem Land. This is great story in so many ways:
The technical hurdles that needed to be over come in laying cable in a harsh environment including under a crocodile infected river.
The positive social impact for education and health resulting from broadband.
How culturally sensitively the whole project was managed, with traditional owners from the local Aboriginal communities being consulted and involved in the project.
It’s a place to share your creative work with the Pool community and ABC producers – upload music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more. It’s a collaborative space where audiences become makers. – About Pool
One aspect of Pool that got my attention is the use of Creative Commons licences. It is great to see the ABC exposing Creative Commons, RSS feeds and the like to their audience. The, government funded, ABC and particular Radio National and Triple J, have often been early to embrace aspects of new media. Radio National were one of the first old media organisations to offer podcasts of their programs.
I, an Australian, discovered the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Pool via post on Boing Boing, a North American blog, by Cory Doctorow, who lives in the UK. The web is truely global medium.
I am a big fan of Radiohead, their album In Rainbows and cool uses of technology, so this is the kind of think I like. The video for “House of Cards” from In Rainbows was not shot with cameras in the traditional sense. 3D data was captured using lasers and then rendered to produce the video. Very Cool.
“The NSW Department of Education has put Microsoft on notice after it agreed to extend its software licensing agreement for just one year instead of renegotiating a new three-year contract.” — Prepares to deploy OpenOffice.org on 41000 PCs by end of 2008
Very interesting, I am big supported of the use of open source and open standards in education. The purpose of education should not be to teacher kids particular commercial software, it should be to teach kids how to use technology to empower them to learn. I look forward to further developments.
note: I am a casual employee of the NSW DET, my comments do not represent my employers, past. present or future.
This is kind of a follow up to my previous post on Green Computing. IT Conversations has posted a talk by Anthony Ravitz, Project Coordinator, Real Estate & Workplace Services, Google, about Google’s installation of photovoltaic cells on the roof of the Googleplex. Google’s significant size and wealth would allow them to be a leader and implement this type of project based purely environmental/ethical grounds, in the near future I hope to see many organisation around the world implementing similar projects and environmental, ethical and economic grounds.
The Science Show (Radio National, ABC Australia) recently broadcast Nicholas Negroponte’s address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. He spoke about the OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, being interested in both education and technology I have followed the OLPC project for some time, but this talk made me appreciate the project more from an educational and social perceptive rather than just a technological one. In my view then most important point of the whole talks concerned the economics of OLCP.
Negroponte:
“Then the biggest decision in retrospect that we made was to do it as a non-profit and everybody advised me the opposite.”
I see this as an example of how in a purely capitalist system some great things will never eventuate, I can see parallels with FLOSS here. Negroponte also speaks of how on the OLPC they used the rapid pace of technology advancement not to make a product with more feature but one at a lower price.
A transcript and mp3 (for a limited time) of the talk are available from the Science Show site, I highly recommend reading/listening. It is people who work on things like OLPC who change the world for the better.
From IT Conversations Phil Windley’s interview with Jeremy Faludi about Green Computing. I highly recommend listening to this. They address the environmental aspects of computing from the massive amount of power used by data centers to the chemicals used in the production of computing equipment.
Jeremy Faludi has written a 4 part article on green computing
The show was also the first time I had heard of The Green500 that ranks systems by MFLOPS/Watt. I am interested in both environment and tech issues so I have found the issues of Green Computing very interesting. Tech is so much part of the world, the impact this tech has on the environment is going to become more and more important in to the future.
Back in 1971, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (founders of Apple Computer Inc.) went into business to build ‘Blue Boxes’. A device that allowed free illegitimate phone calls by faking the signals used by AT&T (Apple’s exclusive network carrier). In the picture, you can see Steve Jobs with a ‘Blue Box’.
I have known for a long time of the Steves’ hacking of the phone system in the ’70s and the business they had in building Blue Boxes, but it only just dawned on me the irony that Steve Jobs is now trying to stop people from hacking their iPhones. I wonder if Steve Jobs can see this irony?
Apple have always tried to brand themselves as rebels, the crazy ones and computer for the creative types, with ad campaigns such as Think Different and the 1984 ad that launched the Mac. With Apple’s current stance on creative people wanting to hack their iPhones is seems that Apple has far more in common with Big Brother than the heroine of the 1984 ad.
Have a look at this revised version of Apple’s “crazy ones” ad on Engadget. The question is, do Apple want the the creative hacker types, the Steve Wozniaks of this world or the Crazy Ones, as their users?
When I watched the WWDC keynote found it interesting that when talking about how Safari on Windows would increase Safari’s share of the browser market, that Steve Jobs’ slide showed IE’s share staying static and Safari’s share increased at the cost of Firefox etc. Jeff Waugh’s post and flickr post got me thinking about this some more, so here are what I see as the logical consequences of Steve’s hope/prediction:
If every one on is using IE or Safari this implies that every one is using an OS that IE or Safari will run on: Windows or Mac: Every user of Linux (or other non Apple or MS OSs) will switch to Windows or Mac, and not user Firefox.
As a result of Apple releasing Safari for Windows, all Mac Firefox users will dump Firefox for Safari on the Mac OR switch to Windows.
The net effect will not result in any lose of browser share for IE. I would of thought that Windows user who have installed iTune for their iPod, but have never considered an alternative browser, may be Apple’s biggest potential market for Safari for Windows. Particularly if they bundle Safari with iTune, like they do with iTunes when you download Quicktime.
So why did Apple release Safari for Windows? Some have suggested that it has to do with ad revenue from the Google/Yahoo search bar, I think the primary reason is the iPhone. By releasing iTunes for Windows, Apple didn’t let the Mac’s low OS market share limit the sales of iPods. It seem that developer’s only way onto the iPhone is via Safari and Apple wants both Mac and Windows developers to developer for it.
That is why we now have Safari on Windows, but why did Steve’s slide show Safari taking market share from all other browser other then IE?
A lot of thought goes into every slide in a Steve Jobs keynote, there must be a reason for this slide. Could it be that Apple does not want to be seen as going after MS’s IE?
The only thing I know is that I will continue to using Firefox as my primary browser on all OSs.
