Tim Chou, “The End of Software”, Inside Digital Media, 2006/01/16 January 31, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: saas, software-as-a-service
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Maintaining a portfolio of software is not a trivial activity or expense.
In the future software-as-a-service may replace software-as-a-product.
John Kao, “Innovation Nation”, Principled Innovation, 2008/03/28 January 31, 2009
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The United States has a long history as a nation of innovation, which seems to have slipped.
… this book is about what America needs to do to as a country to rebuild its eroding innovation advantage, and it is a very important read for all association leaders.
One of the most interesting aspects of our conversation is around John’s belief that we need to reinvigorate America’s “innovation ethos.” In other words, we need to get clear as individual citizens and as a nation why innovation matters to us. As John explains during our interview, “If innovation is the answer, what is the question?” From my point of view, this is one of the most critical issues facing the association community.
When it comes to innovation, America faces considerable challenges going forward, not only from our own complacency, but from the proactive efforts of nations around the world to take their innovation leadership to another level. As John points out, associations have an important role to play in strengthening this critical element of our national competitiveness, but many organizations appear unwilling to embrace this opportunity. Going forward, then, association CEOs and boards of directors need to decide whether they and their organizations are going to be a part of the problem, or a part of the solution.
Principled Innovation LLC » P.I. Podcast: Interview with John Kao
Adam Cohen, “Retailers Taking to Facebook One Way or Another”, Marketing Edge, 2008/10/30 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: facebook, marketing
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Facebook isn’t just a social medium, it’s an opportunity for marketers.
Adam Cohen, author of the Thousand Cuts blog, a regular read of mine, led a study of retailers using Facebook pages. Cohen’s firm, Rosetta, monitored uses of Fan pages by major retailers overtime from May to September of 2008. A highlight from the piece:
“A September 2008 study by Rosetta (formerly Brulant) that focused on the top 100 online retailers in the US found that 59 had a fan page on Facebook, up from 30 in May 2008. Among the 29 who added Facebook pages since that time were Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, Kohl’s and Wal-Mart.” [....]
… in this Marketing Edge podcast how, in some cases, employees or customers may have already created a Fan page on Facebook without the permission of HQ or the Brand Manager. You’ll have to blame James Madison and Thomas Jefferson for their wacky free speech idea in part for this behavior. However, as you have seen with Barack Obama’s campaign the ultimate in retail, when consumers are energetic about your brand, it’s best to watch the energy and not shut the lights off.
Tim O’Reilly, interview by Dan Bricklin, Software Garden, 2005/08/01 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: architecture, open source, participation
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There’s more to open source than “free”.
An interview with Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media.
O’Reilly Media is a major publisher of computer books. It also hosts conferences on computer languages, Open Source, and Emerging Technologies. Tim discusses their policy for copying computer code examples in their books, their experience with copyable and online books and the effects of piracy, the value of the openness and the “architecture of participation”, where there’s value in the Open Source ecosystem, the balance between what you own and what you give away, and more.
Arthur I. Miller, “Einstein & Picasso: The Beauty that Causes Havoc”, Perimeter Institute, 2005/10/17 January 19, 2009
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Great historical figures may be remembered at the height of their fame, but they have the context of their times and contemporaries that shapes them.
Arthur I. Miller of University College London lectures on the startling similarities between the lives and great works of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso.
The most important scientist of the twentieth century, and its most important artist, went through their periods of greatest creativity almost simultaneously and under remarkably similar circumstances: Einstein’s special theory of relativity and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It turns out they were both working on the same problem: the nature of space and time and, more particularly, simultaneity. When they produced these astonishing works, Einstein and Picasso were not the distinguished elderly figures that later became so familiar: they were in their twenties, unknown, feisty, dirt-poor, and prone to getting into trouble.
This lecture is part of Einstein Fest at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada.
Jim Zemlin, “The New Era of Linux”, O’Reilly Media Ubuntu, 2007/07/22 January 19, 2009
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Linux has been more common on servers than on desktops, but Ubuntu is changing the perspective and approach for less-technical users.
Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation reflects on the end of the first stage of Linux and the beginning of a new era. He uses parodies of the popular Mac-PC television ads to contrast the internal and external view of Linux, and highlights the positive changes Ubuntu is making. The first stage of Linux was all about leveraging openness and a superior development methodology to create a competitive product. Hobbyists and companies have both contributed, and the rise of the internet has undermined the PC monopoly.
Now that Linux has matured, its second stage will be a battle between openness and opposing closed platforms. The openness that characterizes Linux and other open source projects produces faster releases that closed platforms can’t compete with. The proprietary platforms’ strengths are control over internal standards and huge amounts of money that can fund marketing for their products and negative publicity for competitors.
IT Conversations | O’Reilly Media Ubuntu Live | Jim Zemlin (Free Podcast)
Joel Spolsky, Software Garden, 2005/05/19 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: copyright, open source
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In the earlier days of open source, developers had to figure out how to navigate the variety of licenses.
Interview with Joel Spolsky, software developer, author, blogger, and software entrepreneur. Discussions about developers keeping track of where their code comes from and watching out for GPL code that shouldn’t be there, why developers who read Slashdot and Eric Raymond are more likely to be at least somewhat aware of copyright issues than their managers who don’t, differences between Windows and Unix when it comes to combining code (especially back in the days when the GPL was written), access to Microsoft source code, economics of Open Source, and more.
Grady Booch, “Software archaeology”, ACM OOPSLA, 2008/09/20 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: booch, engineering, history, software
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For most people in the modern industrial world, computer software is an everyday thing. In the grand scheme, though, software has been a relatively new advent.
As chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research, Grady Booch has taken the ambitious and important task of chronicling and recording software architectures to make them available for future generations.
Grady argues that while software, in a relatively short span of time, has changed the world for the better, we have little lasting detail information of the software of the past. For instance, does the Lotus division of IBM still has the details on the architecture and source code for the original 123 spreadsheet software? The same questions could be asked of many important other software, e.g., Windows, Word, Linux, Mac OS, Acrobat, Mosaic, LaTeX, and so on.
Grady relates this quest for documenting software architectures with archeological digging, such as the ones done in Egypt to learn about the technologies, science, and thoughts of past civilizations. He also introduces one of the this year’s OOPSLA keynote, Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist by training who will discuss his craft and what computer scientists and engineers can learn from archeology.
Finally, Grady gives advices and shares insights with junior engineers and scientists on what has made his career so prolific and successful. He talks about his many many books and what subjects he chooses to read next as he and his wife increase their personal library.
Tim O’Reilly and Bruce Chizen, “The Future of Rich Online Documents”, O’Reilly Media Tools of Change Conference, 2007/06/19 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: adobe, air, ebooks
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Paper isn’t going away, but work on digital substitutes continues.
The need for immediacy has been a major factor in changing publishing. The amount of people who want to publish and the number of platforms they want to publish on has increased exponentially. The good old days of desktop and paper publishing are history, as products like Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe AIR convert the old way of publishing from print to electronic. Bruce Chizen prophesies that in a period of five to fifteen years electronic publishing will basically replace print.
Adobe Digital Editions is a rich Internet application which introduced a new way to read eBooks. It is based on the new Adobe AIR, a cross-OS runtime environment which handles XHTML, Flash, and PDF content and also supports AJAX. Like it’s predecessors, Adobe AIR content and applications can be viewed in a web browser, but can also run as stand-alone applications outside of the browser. It also gives the ability to work offline.
This conversation between Tim O’Reilly and Bruce Chizen at the Tools of Change Conference 2007 is an exciting listen for anyone wanting to know more about the revolution in publishing along with Adobe’s product plans.
Edward Burtynsky, “The 10,000-year Gallery”, Long Now Foundation, 2008/07/28 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: art, clock, long now
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While planning for the 10,000 year clock, the challenge of durable art takes on new meaning.
Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past.
Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, “because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos.”But photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn’t work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called “carbon transfer print.” It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone—the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany—and the black ink is carbon.
The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Edward Burtynsky, “The 10,000-year Gallery”
Marten Mickos, interview by Dan Bricklin, Software Garden, 2005/07/13 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: licensing, mysql, open source
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MySQL was unique in having a open source and commercial dual license structure.
An interview with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB.
MySQL is a very popular database that is released under a “dual license” approach that includes the GPL as well as a proprietary one. Marten discusses the differences between the two licenses and the issue of deciding which to use. He also talks about business models, ensuring ownership of copyrights in an Open Source project and in general, software patents, the fact that about 40% of MySQL’s active installations are on Windows computers, various segmentations of their market with respect to different licenses, and whether an Open Source-based ISV can make a reasonable amount of money in the eyes of investors.
Daniel Suarez, “Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality”, Longnow Foundation, 2008/08/08 January 19, 2009
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Interacting with computer bots — instead of with human beings — is becoming more and more common.
Bots are proliferating because they are so very useful. Businesses rely on them to automate essential processes, and of course bots running on zombie computers are responsible for the tsunami of spam and malware plaguing Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, bots will be the majority users of the Net by 2010.
We are visible to bots even when we are not at our computers. Next time you are on a downtown street, contemplate the bot-controlled video cameras watching you, or the bots tracking your cellphone and sniffing at your Bluetooth-enabled gizmos. We walk through a gauntlet of bot-controlled sensors every time we step into a public space and the sensors are proliferating.
Bots are at best narrow AI, nothing that would make a cleric remotely nervous. But they would scare the hell out of epidemiologists who understand that parasites don’t need to be smart to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Internet and the complex of processing, storage and sensors linked to it is growing exponentially, creating a vast new ecology for bots to roam in. Bots aren’t evolving on their own — yet.
Left unchecked, bots will trap the human race because the automation they enable will make it possible for a few people to run humanity while the rest of us are unable to make decisions of any consequence. Bots are thus vectors for despotism, with the potential to create a world where only a small group of people understand how society works. In the worst case, the controls over bots disappear — for example, the only person who knows the password to a corporate bot dies– and the bots become autonomous.
The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Daniel Suarez, “Daemon: Bot-Mediated Reality”
Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell, “Canada: Nation Or Notion”, Ideas, CBC Radio, 2008/04/14 January 19, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: canadian, gladwell, gopnik, identity
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Two Canadian-born journalists living in New York debate what it means to be Canadian.
Do we need a common identity to be a modern nation? Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell, both staff writers at The New Yorker, battle it out with wit and humour in a debate moderated by Maclean’s national editor, Andrew Coyne.
Lawrence Rosen, “Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law”, Software Garden, 2005/05/23 January 13, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: intellectual property, licensing, open source
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Licensing isn’t all there is to open source, but it does provide a context in which software development occurs.
Larry has served as the general counsel and secretary of the Open Source Initiative, authored the book “Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law”, and advises Black Duck Software and SpikeSource, Inc. We discussed the “based upon” language in the GPL and derivative works for about 15 minutes, then indemnification, due diligence in mergers and acquisitions (Open Source and proprietary), audits, attorney/client privilege, the effects of Open Source and Open Standards on policies about patents, and more.
Steven D. Levitt, “Freakonomics”, Colorado College, 2006/05/02 January 10, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: economics, freakonomics, levitt
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Behind the Freakonomics book, there’s two stories: one on how a journalist came to coauthor the work, and a second on an economics researcher regularly visiting drug gangs to understand how they work. Both stories are entertaining.
Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the New York Times best seller “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” will discuss his book. Levitt’s lecture will show how basic economic principles apply to the behavior of a diverse range of groups, from sumo wrestlers to the Klu Klux Klan, from drug dealers to schoolteachers to unwed mothers. Levitt is a professor at the University of Chicago.
Linda Hamel, Software Garden, 2005/05/19 January 6, 2009
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: hamel, licensing, massachusetts, open source
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Open source licensing can be complicated. In the public sector, a lot of issues have been considered and worked out. Dan Bricklin interviews Linda Hamel.
… an interview with Commonwealth of Massachusetts Information Technology Division General Counsel Linda Hamel.
For over 30 minutes she discusses her experience as a lawyer of the Commonwealth’s move to encourage the use of Open Source in the mix of software they buy and commission. She talks about how government entities, like the State, have a different risk profile when it comes to Open Source than many commercial entities. She goes over some of her own learning experiences. [....]
Linda ends with: “…[with respect to Open Source Licensing] the culture is reflected in the legal documents and if you don’t understand the culture it’s going to be very hard for you to understand the legal documents.”
Linda has posted a lot of useful material on the ITD website, www.mass.gov/itd, especially in the “Policies, Standards & Legal” section.
Software Garden: New podcast from Software Garden – Linda Hamel
