Computerjoe Stuck Together

A few weeks ago, Eric Goldstein, CEO of Clipmarks, invited me to his new website: Amplify. Amplify allows users to share clippings (like excerpts of text or images) much like Clipmarks, but encourages its users to comment on it and then the combined commentary and clipping are displayed together on a blog.

The uses are interesting. Amplify is a good way to quickly express an opinion on a topical issue and to share lesser known news stories. These can then be posted to Twitter, del.icio.us and/or Clipmarks through the site: maximising exposure.

The site also has a social element. You can comment on others posts and allow others to post on your ‘cliplog’, so many are ground cliplogs for specific projects etc.

WordPress MU is used so when you log-in, you face a familiar WordPress admin interface and you manage comments and users in the same fashion you manage WordPress users.

I like Amplify because it allows me to easily run a political blog (which can be seen here). I can clip stories that I want to share or discuss and write a minimal amount of opinion, but sufficiently communicate my viewpoint. I’ve even had a few complete strangers comment on my clips, and they’ve then retweeted them! It also displays retweets on the clipblog under comments.

Amplify allows users to log-in through Twitter’s OAUTH or to get their own account. Amplify, like Clipmarks, is well worth a look and is actually a really enjoyable but easy form of blogging.

I often blog about Wikipedia, but I have recently started to contribute to Wikinews. One thing that immediately struck me was that Wikinews’ community was much warmer than Wikipedia’s, but naturally it is much smaller.

As communities grow larger, generally more disputes arise. As more disputes arise, ways in which to resolve them must develop.

With thousands of active (and highly vocal) editors, Wikipedia finds itself with a plethora of arguments.

Wikipedia’s dispute resolution process can be described as notoriously bureaucratic. There’s requests for comments, third opinions, a mediation cabal, a mediation committee and an arbitration committee. Complex, don’t you think? The arbitration committee is the highest source of authority on Wikipedia (bar Jimbo Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation Board, who barely ever give an opinion). They are currently dealing with 14 cases I believe, and remember these are only the most severe/important disputes on the entire encyclopedia.

Wikinews, a community with only 50 admins, also has an Arbitration Committee with a similar role. They, however, have only fully dealt with 2 cases since 2006. In fact, the last case they had to decide whether or not they would take on was back in 2008, when they made a proposal to abolish the committee. One editor described it as ‘nothing but bureaucracy… with exactly zero point’, as there’s so few disputes.

So, bigger communities argue more. Smaller communities like Wikinews seem to have no major feuds inside them and all of their users are working towards a common goal, whilst in Wikipedia I feel that different editors want different things out of the project.

Working in a small community is much more rewarding than working in a large community with a lot of in-fighting. Things are also done quicker; I know Wikipedia can take several years to tidy up articles whilst on Wikinews, they’re fixed in hours.

Roger Andre is doing some guest posts on Webby’s World. He’s doing a few posts about future tech. He also writes on ZDNet UK.

Just imagine it for a moment. The advent of quantum computing and what that really means. Two particles aware of and connected to each other with a kind of super string or maybe a bouncy multi dimensional-celestial web. What we’re really looking at is the ability to have a CPU that could have many different components in many different locations, each reflecting what the other does or acting as independent components.

They will be capable of faster than light communication and if much of quantum theory turns out to be correct you could just construct your platform here on earth and have mirror constructions using connected particles looking after themselves in remote spatial locations.

Quantum theory also implies that these machines may not work correctly without a conscious observer. If we ever design and make one of these computers maybe it would be best that they don’t work on their own, at least not at first. We may come to a point when we reach a certain level of maturity in evolution. Right now we are still at the level of banging rocks together even if it is at light speed.

You then end up with a way of collecting data from far flung regions of the universe or more locally in our own galaxy or solar system. No probes no space craft, at least not if you want to quickly collect data from the chilly methane (and possibly water) seas of Europa. Very handy for learning about any physical or chemical challenges before trying to send a manned mission into unknown territory.

What we’re talking about here is a kind of real sub space communication, a way of tapping the web that may just lay one or two levels removed from the frequency spectrum of our senses and indeed our extended senses (meaning instrumentation). Perhaps we’ll find a whole new everywhere kind of frequency bed. This bed would need very little energy to vibrate in sequences of ones and zeros assuming we’re still restricted to those.

How would the cross over point work? There would have to be some kind of intermediary between the large physical pre input process and the slightly removed quantum aspect of information organization and data processing/gathering function required on the micro levels where the very solid matter that we interact with becomes more wispy and then non tangible.

This is where we’d have special molecular bots (nano becomes a tiring word if over used) working as the interface between solid and wispy matter, able to pass through and feed back the relevant data. If any of the above is possible we would be faced with the prospect of as good as infinite computing power connected to a default universal networking system.

Of course, how would you pair up the particals required for the job? Well as with so much of our technology already, it seems as though nature will have done all the hard work for us. All (big understatement) we will will have to do is find the relevent partical on this side of the universe and then learn to find out where its counterpart lies.

A seemingly daunting task, but with a heafty dose of super computing power to hand it might, just might be possible. I also hope that if we can reach that level of maturity we’ll find a way to partical pair between star that end and powergrid this end. Devices could appear with their own ability to draw just the right amount of power for their needs, from stars unimaginable distances
away from us.

© Roger Andre 2009

Roger Andre is doing some guest posts on Webby’s World. He’s doing a few posts about future tech. He also writes on ZDNet UK.

Are we approaching a point when machines may wake up and become self or seemingly self aware? Vernor Vinge in 1993 seemed to think so.

He refered to this event as the “technological singularity”. The point is that with machines being made to design machines, they will be able to do this a lot faster than we can, eventually reaching that magic point of human inteligence and then beyond.

If I may throw in my own two cents worth here, we may find that AI hungers for knowledge to the point of analyzing the physics and chemistry it finds itself surrounded in and organising the matter to its own artificial preferences. The details of this theory can be found in the article by Vernor Vinge. If we want to avoid disasters such as AI becoming to big for it’s boots, then we need to hardwire into machines that they must always ask humans for permision when they want to patch themselves together.

This concern arises from the fact; that as machines/computers are used to design other machines/computers, at some point this process may begin to spiral out of control, aided by those humans who are capable of learning the complex ways of fusing chips to neurons and optic nerves etc. and combined with genetic manipulation and control. It’s possibly only a matter of time until we end up with a situation where machines start trying to give naive post graduates advice on what’s best.

Of course it would be easy to think that this is just pure science fiction but just consider what can happen if vast networks of machines that are capable of aquiring knowledge start to meld with biological systems. At the moment, we are dealing with Moore’s law, which may or may not have a natural limit depending on the point of view you subscribe to. If we move on to other forms of computing, which I believe is inevitable then the sky (read cloud) really is not the limit as computing power could become trans-dimensional. It seems likely that as much as we may find moving away from transistors difficult it would be no problem for a machine designed by machines from past generations to figure out. We really don’t know whats around the corner.

Of course the growth of “sky net” (yes I did just say that) and the “rise of the machines” (and that) will be aided by us curious humans, it couldn’t happen on its own. At least not yet. So as far fetched as this may seem, now is the time to introduce failsafes and manual overrides as it were. If those pesky people keep trying to infect systems with viruses and other nasties, this may have the effect of “upseting” networks that are becoming self aware and causing great danger for humanity.

© Roger Andre 2009

I stumbled across an interesting open letter on Wikipedia today, in which Larry Sanger claimed that Jimbo Wales co-founded Wikipedia with him, rather than being the sole founder. n.b. this letter may no longer appear on the current version of the page, as there are several editors constantly removing it. Larry Sanger has mirrored it on his project’s blog.

The argument is very long and complex, and requires a lot of explanation and opinion, but I am often puzzled as to why Jimbo Wales receives so much credit for Wikipedia.

What is the cause of my puzzlement? Is it Larry Sanger’s disputed role in its foundation? No, it is not. The reason that I am often puzzled is that Jimbo Wales is not really the person we should be thanking for this amazing resource, instead we should be thanking the thousands of editors who voluntarily spend their time maintaining, expanding, correcting and check it.

Jimbo Wales has made a total of 4429 edits to date from when Wikipedia was formed. Editors like me have made more edits (although mine were often very minor) and, to be honest, most active editors will have. Perhaps the idea of a wiki encyclopedia was his, or Larry Sanger’s, but the work has not mainly been put in by them. Still, they are the ones with whom the media are interested.

ReadWriteWeb suggested editors should get paid. I, and most editors, would disagree. We, just like Larry Sanger, want credit. The benevolent dictator is not the only person who warrants it.

Mac users have the benefit of being easily able to back-up their files with Time Machine, but it can even prove a chore for us to connect our Mac to an external hard disk. Time Capsule provides an alternative, as users can back their files up by WiFi, but this is an expensive product.

Online back-up services hold a number of advantages over backing up files locally. For example, data is safer with them, as an external hard disk could easily be destroyed. It also allows portability; laptop users can effectively back up their data anywhere as they don’t have to carry around a spare hard disk!

Several online back-up services exist, but the two largest are Carbonite and Mozy. I recently bought a year’s subscription to Carbonite and in this article I shall review it.

Carbonite is an incremental remote back-up solution, available for Windows and OS X. Basically, after an initial back-up, any new or modified data is uploaded to their servers and backed up. This means only data that must be uploaded is, instead of all data being uploaded again.

Carbonite allow you to back-up any files, except Applications. Free trial users can’t back up their music or movie library, but paid customers can back photos, films, documents and music up. At the moment, I have backed up everything except my music library, because that will take some time to upload.

Users can upload an unlimited amount of data to their servers, where it is encrypted.

It takes quite some time to upload your files. I had to leave my computer on over a few nights to upload 5GiB of data, but I expect this is due to my Internet connection rather than Carbonite. I did experience a few problems though: it doesn’t automatically configure my firewall or ports. The lack of documentation resulted in my having to speak to their customer service, who readily provided me with a solution. They were slightly abrupt but got to the root of the problem.

I will share a few of these solutions for Mac users:

1. Allow ‘/Library/Application Support/Carbonite/CarboniteDaemon.app’ to receive incoming connections (the log is in the same folder)
2. Forward ports 25, 53, 80 and 443 to your machine
3. Ensure no folders which are constantly being written to, like cache folders, are included in the back-up

Users control Carbonite through a prefpane in OS X. This preference pane allows users to see how much data is left to be backed up, allows them to exclude data from the back up and allows them to restore files. I would like there to be a few more options in this pane, such as the ability to see the file currently being uploaded and access the log. The icons of the Mac folders are also outdated.

An interesting features of Carbonite is that users can access their uploaded files anywhere, such as their office or at family’s. This effectively allows Carbonite to act as Remote Access.

Restoring files is as simple as simply selecting the file and the location to which you would like it restored.

So, down to the details. Carbonite is $55 a year, however Subscription.com (who provided the software for me to review) offer a Carbonite offer code for a 20% discount. This is remarkably simple to apply: one simply has to go to Carbonite through their website, it is simply one extra click to save $11! I have gone through this process and it is remarkably simple. Subscription.com also offer codes or similar click-throughs to offer discounts on everything from antivirus software to newspapers to magazines!

On small blogs such as this, comments generally remain related to the blog post. A humorous video by Barely Political strengthened my view, though, that on social networking sites like YouTube, they often end up being completed unrelated to the topic of the video.

I hate YouTube comments. Find me one decent one. They are generally a series of curse words in an incoherent sentence, resembling ‘you suck’. If not that, they’ll just be about the number of views (’how does a laughing baby get 79 mill views?’). On a blog, people would not go to the hassle of writing comments which have no meaning.

Otherwise, comments erupt into an irrelevant political debate, as they often did in the run-up to the 2008 American presidential elections. If not that, they will become racist. I admit on occasion I respond to ones I strongly disagree with, but only if my political views are antithetical to someone elses and only if the video is about the issue.

It’s too easy to write a meaningless sentence and then to submit it. The result is people post things without thinking their argument through or even proof-reading what they’ve written. If voting held a more important role on the site, completely useless and idiotic comments would never be have to be seen again. There’s another explanation, which is quite cynical but quite likely to be true: I suspect that many people leave pointless YouTube comments in a pathetic attempt to drive people to their profiles.

I am a big fan of Wikipedia and for some reason, I chuckle everytime I read the media report about it. The old media appear to often have a negative bias towards the Internet, seeing it as a threat and a corrupter of morals. However, coverage of Wikipedia is always particularly negative.

Amazingly, The Observer deemed it newsworthy to report that Wikipedia had been edited to show Robert Kilroy-Silk (a controversial British MEP) was a member of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Whilst libel is definitely an issue and is wrong, most instances of blatant vandalism like this are fixed in minutes, if not seconds! That, though, doesn’t make a captivating headline or read!

Reporting on Wikipedia’s inaccuracies, libel and vandalism is old news. By now, the public should have realised that ‘WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY’ (to quote their disclaimer). It’s perfectly easy for any journalist to find lies or vandalism on Wikipedia articles through purely clicking on the ‘history’ link on the article and seeing which edits have been reverted.

I found everything from local newspapers to major national news stories criticising Wikipedia (or information within it).

I hope the media begin to move away from blaming Wikipedia and begin to blame the editors who make the misleading edits. People, children and adults, still find it amusing to vandalise articles and it seems to even be considered acceptable amongst the populace.

The beauty of the whole matter is that despite the fact the media criticise Wikipedia’s reliability, they use it for quick research and occasionally even quote it as some sort of definitive resource!

Obama grasps IT; his vice president clearly doesn’t grasp it. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, doesn’t either; his ministerial colleague, Tom Watson, does.

Like the public, many politicians seem to be very unfamiliar and uncomfortable with computers. They see computers as some evil, corrupting force, despite the fact they should be using them for a significant amount of their time.

It always scares me when I hear politicians, or senior civil servants, make idiotic remarks about computers or the series of tubes. Why does it scare me? These people are responsible for formulating governmental IT policy, yet they clearly have no knowledge about them. There is a general fear, amongst politicians and the public, of learning new skills. Why else has it taken until 2009 for the UK government to give its blessing to OSS?

In the UK, our National Health Service’s IT programme is years behind deadlines and costs taxpayers billions. I suspect many of the civil servants involved have minimal technical knowledge. In my opinion, governments need to use true technical experts. Not expensive consultants from organisations which just puppet Microsoft!

On the other hand, politicians are beginning to capitalise on the Internet. All major British political parties, for example, have Twitter and Facebook accounts and Twitter and Facebook arguably played an essential role in Obama’s campaign. Some politicians maintain their own website, but I suspect many simply use ghostwriters.

I hope politicians and civil servants become more tech literate. With any luck, billions of pounds of taxpayers money will be saved.

What is public sector IT like for you?

When using Mac or Linux, I often find myself stumbling upon features which I just find ‘nice’.

I love the built-in support for VNC. On Mac, it is as simple as waiting for the remote computer, providing it’s on a local Bonjour one, to appear in Finder. And enabling it is a checking a box in the Sharing preference pane. (connecting to a non-local machine is done through going to Connect to Server in Finder and prefixing the computer’s location with vnc://). Support varies by distro for Linux, but generally the service is pre-installed.

I love how I can mount SFTP and FTP shares in Nautilus under Ubuntu and in Finder on OS X. Unfortunately, support on OS X is read only. Whilst Windows has limited support for FTP and WebDAV etc, I personally find it very cumbersome and not nice to play with at all. I’d happily use Nautilus to put files onto my website; but on Windows I’d have to use Filezilla!

Faces in iLife 09 is great. Whilst there are better commercial (and probably free) options, it is just nice that is there. But it doesn’t intrude, whilst in Windows it no doubt would somehow majestically stand out to make it obvious that such a nice gimmick is included!

Desktop search is nice. I don’t think Windows Search can compare with Spotlight or Beagle. On Windows, I’d probably download Google Desktop Search. But no need on Mac or Ubuntu, as they’re already there.

I also love the simplicity of Linux commands like dd. On Windows, you’d need something like Acronis to do the same job, just much worse!

So, bringing on the flame war. What do you like in your operating system which isn’t in others?

Blogs are generally single author affairs, where the webmaster, marketer, writer and editor are one and the same. Perhaps this is something most associated with blogging, but I’m beginning to question whether it’s a good thing.

Maintaining a blog is a lot of work; you have not only to write but design, market, upgrade software, deal with email and moderate comments. A lot of work, is it not?

Blogging should be about posting; not designing and tiresome maintenance. So I’m finding my spell at gHacks pretty enjoyable; my posts may not be very frequent, but it feels like much less of a chore to write them as I know I don’t have to trawl through pages of maintenance when I open WordPress. I can post without worrying. That’s what blogging’s about.

Whilst creativity may feel somewhat lower, as one is concerned about editorial control, it (in a way) requires much less effort to write on someone else’s blog than your own.

Perhaps some hosted blogging solutions take the hassle out of maintenance, but marketing and negotiating advertising is still up to the blogger. That is not a stressless process, rest assured!

The question is, is it better to have a lesser workload or more control over content?

Remember the Venice Project? Back in 2006 people were sure this mysterious IPTV solution would ‘kill YouTube’ and even Om Malik wanted an invitation. So, what happened to it? It was released as Joost – a service which offers quite high definition video but still lacks major shows (their offering primarily being a few series of Babylon 5 and Peep Show in the UK) and more often than not has content already available on other sites. They even abandoned their desktop P2P-based approach to taking a more accessible streaming Flash browser video one. Joost definitely is not one of the greatest Web 2.0 services like many expected it to be!

Perhaps you recall ‘Citizendium‘, a wiki encyclopedia which unlike Wikipedia had strict editing controls. The site was co-founded by Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger. Despite coverage from major news outlets (from newspapers to tech blogs), Citizendium has failed to ever seem to reach a reasonable size: only 9217 articles in over 2 years. That’s roughly the size of Wikipedia… in Chuvash (a language spoken in a small Russian republic!).

What about coComment? The service in many respects seems to have been usurped by Disqus etc. yet coComment’s aim of unifying fragmented conversation has still gone unachieved. coComment used to be extremely popular, but now I do not know any blogs, nor bloggers, who use it.

Another example is AllPeers. AllPeers was basically a service which allows people to set up ‘private’ P2P networks so friends etc can share files. This was all done through a Firefox plugin. Demand for invites was high, but it has now shut down despite its old popularity!

Web 2.0 was the era of “hype”. This often led to disillusionment and disappointment, but we should not forget the success stories… I know people through this blog who have made a small fortune.

I use about 3 or 4 forums, but to check my activity I have to go on each individually. Someone can’t browse my posts at one forum on another. I can’t browse someone’s posts on one forum on another. There isn’t a shared log-in. It’s a bit silly.

The fact every forum is so contained in itself definitely creates community, but from a social point of view linking them together more would surely be beneficial.

Linking them together would have several advantages: users could find other forums, friendships could be maintained across forums and it’d be much better than having to Google someone and then guess if it’s the same person.

It’s amazing sites like Disqus haven’t existed for years for forums!

A brief post, I know, but I’m sure there’ll be lots of opinions. Why hasn’t Web 2.0 hit forums yet?