The Democratic Development Revolution

No, I'm not going to talk about any obscure coding strategy to optimize programming among ubergeeks scattered around the world. I'm talking about what I consider a rel welcome revolution in the relation between the coders, who ultimately decide what we can and cannot do with our computers, ad we: the small people who can use a computer but cannot "do it ourselves" when it comes to adding a feature we need or removing something which pisses us off.

It all started with Dell, well I don't think they have been the first ones but it has been the moment when I have first met the phenomenon. If you visit this area of the Dell website you will find a sort of forum, where customers and would-be-customers alike can share their views, suggest their ideas and vote the ideas posted by everybody else. It is both useful for the company, which gets the feedback to improve his products in the right direction (aka make more money, we are not talking of philanthropy here), and for the users that have products more complying with what they really want instead of passively "suffering" the policies of the computer maker.
To get an idea of what this can do in the real world, consider that the idea of Ubuntu equipped Dell PCs came from IdeaStorm, and a year later all mayor PC makers are offering or planning Linux based machines and Linux boxes at wall-mart are sold out.

My second sighting of this approach was with The GIMP, the popular free image manipulation program which aims to challenge Photoshop (only aims for now, albeit I learned to love it as well as the costly Adobe counterpart). This site provides an analogue brainstorm idea, with the variant of the "picture submissions" that both emphasizes the commitment to the user community: even if the picture does not have to be made with GIMP this form of submission privileges photographers and graphic designers (that is users or potential users) keeping everybody else at bay. I have posted a submission myself, but was rejected because "not too clear" - and they were right, I'll elaborate better one of these days.

Finally today I have spent some time on the Ubuntu brainstorm, which was launched by Canonical, the company patronizing this Linux distribution. Like the Dell service, Ubuntu brainstorm implements a voting system so everybody can review the proposals of the others and concur to outline the ones which the community desires most.

I hope that more and more companies and developers will adopt this way of thinking, involving the base and hearing their needs instead of "bullet marketing" them trying to create needs they don't have (really, why would you strip a laptop of each and every useful feature just to slip it in an envelope! Btw there are envelope-fitting, full featured alternatives even if you have to pay for the difference).

I look forward to the next Windows brainstorm, I have a couple of visions to share with them ;)

That's steampunk... and I guess it steams pretty bad too!

I always tought of myself as a steampunk freak but never in my weirdest dreams I could have conceived the heat-driven-self-actuated-CPU-cooling-fan!

Via Engadget (they also have a fancy video!)

Slashdot It!

We got reviewed "Very good"!

Blogged is a very nice service, simple and straightforward. It works this way: you submit your blog indicating the category(es) and a short foreword. The blog is then inserted into a listing site visible to everybody and open to user reviews (requires log-in). Seems nice? It gets better: one initial review by the editors is assured! Well, mine scored an inital 7.2 out of 10, which for a start is not bad at all.

-_-' Obviously if you want to stop by and rise further that score you have my blessing.

Let's morph!

There's a little of buzz over the net lately about this "morph" concept device advertised by Nokia, some sort of massive nanotech applied to consumer electronics. I think i's little more than a joke for now, but I admit that the video below was a nice distraction... and I do envy those who are paid big bucks to come out with such ideas ;)



Slashdot It!

Encyclopedia Of Life, Genesis 7,2-3

A while ago I looked at the interesting mockup of a website collecting the catalogue of all living species: Encyclopedia of Life, a sort of Noha's Ark of the biological knowledge for both scientists and normal people. The project is ambitus but the underlying promise is amazing... well I was amazed at least, I even sent them a resume (No answer but I wasn't really expecting one ^_^).
I remember myself roaming the few demonstrative pages available at the time and thinking every moment "damn, why that link is still inactive!". Aside the scientifical value in fact (the project is intended also as a "bible of biological knowledge" for the scientific community), the whole thing is real fun! It was a while since I last saw such a nice divulgative resource. The kid in me was like mad, like wandering in the biggest zoo ever, always looking for the next animal led on by sheer curiosity.



Today that project is finally alive, I have read about it from a blog and I immediately hit the link, and... And I was not the only one. The site is down for excess of requests and I was redirected to the old mockup pages -_-'. Too bad but I will check later... And tomorrow... And the next week. If the real thing is one half of what I expect it will be worth the while. Check it yourselves!

Slashdot It!

All hail the Clockboard

You tought that after the Optimus Maximus and Optimus Tactus keyboards the folks at Art Lebedev could not revolutionize again the concept of "Top design"? You were wrong!

Have a look at this extraordinary concept, the very idea of time table won't be the same any more.
You crave this thing, don't you? Think it will never be yours? Wrong again, you can get one for a mere 200$... you still there?! Go getting one before it is sells out!

As far as I am concerned I'm not going to have one... I'll wait for the wirst version ;)

Via Ubergizmo.

Slashdot It!

Five reasons against the Thin Client revolution

I have read a popular Itlaian blog this morning which theorized a serious problem for the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, that would be the incapacity to comply with the growing shift towards the web of more and more applications which would shortly make local computing obsolete in favor of "Thin clients" devolving all the dirty job to super powerful remote servers.

... O_o' ...

The topic is seriously interesting, although I really fail to see how this would be a problem of a specific operating system, even more a specific distribution of it. I am a proud Ubuntu user and I really don't see the problem. If anything, from a user point of view, it seems to me that the web 2.0 integration is one of the fields where linux does shine! But let me put aside the polemics, this is not the point of my post.

The fact is that my inner man 1.0 completely disagrees with this vision in general for a variety of different reasons:

1. The mainframe-terminal architecture reminds me of '80 sci-fi movies à là Tron, but was overcome by the revolution of the personal computer, since then we have seen more and more powerful personal computers (alas, my handheld is orders of magnitude better than the computer that sent 3 men on the moon).

2. As pointed out by someone in the comments to the blog I have read, the network computer never broke out because a lot of tasks are just better accomplished on a local basis. The network shift is partly for tasks that are better accomplished over the web (for mobility, accessibility, sharing or whatever other advantage), and partly as a sort of "exploration". Being an entirely new field it is useful to test the web version of whatever comes to the developer's mind. Wether most of these services will still be there in five years I really don't know... perhaps many will have disappeared and others will be born that we cannot even think of today.

3. Personal computing demand grows faster than the web based services: five years ago I had a laptop with 5Gb of storage and it seemed a lot, now both my personal music collection and my photo folder, each exceed by far that limit (let us not speak of videos). Today an on line storage services offering 5Gb of space is considered just right, an it is, because it replies to very different needs than local storage (again mobility, social use, remote backup). The same discourse applies to more "processing dependent" uses, I am all in favour of Google Docs, which I use quite frequently, but I still need OpenOffice and I cannot see this situation changing too soon, same for The GIMP and any game I can think of (hehe, untill they will not come out with the falsh version of Urban Terror ^_^').

4. What about security? All hail the network, but the best way to sleep comfortable at night is always be to keep our little scary secrets offline!

5. A last tought from what I can remember of economics at the university: there is a growing cost for adding each unit of "processing power" to a machine, I guess it's called marginal cost. So If I can build a machine with power suitable for one user, a machine with enough power for two users would not cost the double but something more... and so on. Scale economies and technical progress can overturn this rule for a while, creating an exception, but I think that in the long run there is a limit to what even a 2.0 man needs and want, and the general rule will apply again.

That's it, and it is not a complete list... of course I might be wrong, but if I should bet my wage on thin clients with minimal local OSs or small powerhouses with the power of current supercomputers I'd surely go for the latter (after all I have recently read of some guys who built a TERAFLOP super computer just stacking some Playstation 3 and running Linux!).

Slashdot It!

One car to pollute them all

Things that can make me laugh so early in the morning are always welcome. Today I opened my feed reader and guess what? The car of my boss has been elected "meanest car of America" (by the environmental point of view of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy).
You know, during a working day it is never difficult to find an argument to balme your boss, but having it served before he even enters the office is something to celebrate!

Slashdot It!

Roots of social networking

My friends know that I am not exactly a big fan of hard-core social networking but this one is funny, weird and perhaps a bit scary.

the guys at Botanicalls have published a DIY guide to wire your apartment plants so that they can post their status and opinions about you on Twitter -_-'.

I said scary because I know that, if my plants were given the possibility to speak about me, I would probably be arrested for mistreatments. Whatch out fellows without any green thumb... the revenge of the plants is near!

P.S. On second tought this sets the apartment plants head and shoulder above many people I know when it comes to computers ;)

Slashdot It!

Prius inter pares?

I was watching a nice podcast saturday morning, a clip from National Geografic Podcast (which by the way I reccommend to anyone as they are very short clips but full of neat stimuli). Among other things it showed an Arizona guy who modded his Toyota Prius into a plug-in hybrid, that is a car that runs both on conventional fuel and electricity AND can be recharged plugging it to the grid. The guy in the video stated that he could pass from 45 miles per gallon (that is about 20 Km/l) to 100 miles per gallon (about 50 km/l), so the first thing i tought was "neat!"... but then I actually did some math and a bit of my admiration for the Prius wore off.

Let's not be rush, I am still all in favour of hybrid cars and if I had a lot of bucks I'd surely get a Prius and perhaps I'd hack it to plug-in. What made me wonder is that 45 miles per gallon is already the fuel consumption of my current car, a very ordinary Fiat Punto with a little-yet-brilliant 1.3 turbocharged diesel engine. So what's the point of paying 26.000 Euros (that's almost 40k dollars!) and lugging around a load of chemicals which I seriously doubt are all that environmet-friendly?
Well, it must be said that the two cars I am talking about sit in very different categories (high-end sedan vs. mid-level compact), so I'm not going to pull further my comparison, but still I can't help thinking that all the benefit of the hybrid drive is merely wasted to carry around the extra weight, plus for my dayly commute and the occasional little trip the Punto is already too big: why drive in a 4 passengers car when I never have more than one passenger? Yet for some reason 2 seat cars are all either super sporty cars or however they cost and drink as much as four seaters (somebody said Smart?).

I have stated at the beginning of the post that I am still in favour of such cars and I'd still buy one if I could, I've got a series of reasons for that:

• I think that reseach will lead to significant achievements in this directions, but in order to do this the market has to support the effort showing that the demand for "green" cars do exist and is profitable for the manufacturers (Listen up GM!). The DIY plug-in hacks in the garages of many amateurs and the plans for version featuring a solar panel are clear signs to me.
  
• Driving a Prius would broadcast a positive message to everybody in town, it is the best andidote I can tink to the spreading SUV epidemy: "look, I'm cool, I care for the environment and I don't need to drive a truck to demonstrate that I can please my lady" (no offense meant for those who drive real trucks, my grandpa did it and I have a great respect for the category).
• It still is a high end sedan with the fuel consumptions of a tiny economy car, and I like the design (though I must say I'm the only among my friends who does).

This said, I have to report that the same Smart website I already quoted above, is now showing an intersting picture of a Smart with "micro hybrid drive". Is it the answer to my prayers? I'll check it in my next coffee-break and we'll see.

Edit. As I feared the Hybrid Smart is a nice commercial move: The "Micro Hybrid Drive" is not hybrid at all, instead it just turn on and off the conventional internal combustion engine to optimize the engine use. It is a welcome move, and surely a nice idea, but to call it hybrid is just false. Moreover, even with this misleadingly named trick all the models available from the website but one (the 33 kW diesel common rail, which achieves the admirable goal of 3o Km/l) consume more than my current Fiat Punto, which is twice as big and heavy. So not only the revolution has not arrived yet, but I would also question the good faith of the manufacturer's commercial strategy. Too bad :(

Slashdot It!

Tech Magic

I want to devote my first (real) post to the very reason of my blogging. My next posts will be far less philosophical than this one, like in a tale I'm just giving the "falvour" of the setting. WARNING: long post, VERY long post. As the neat quote below the blog title says there are very strong points of contact between what magic and technology are. This is not a matter of how things work (obviously), but rather a matter of how things are percieved and related one to the other.

Why Leonardo? Read on...

Anyone who has ever rolled a dice at D&D or the likes perhaps can already figure out what I am talking about, and this is a problem. It is a problem because the parallelism between magic and tech is involving instead of evolving. At the beginning of western civilization pre-scientific and magic knowledge were one like in alchemy, then, slowly but unerringly, their paths forked in a curious way. Magic was mainly discarded, freeing mankind from the burden of superstition but tossing away also part of what good was in those beliefs. The eve of a golden age of illuminated consciousness for all? Only partly. As the scientifical knowledge became broader and broader more and more commonners started to understand the mechanics of the universe around them and most important of all, they started to care about it and to struggle for knowledge wether for the goods it brought or for knowledge shake alone. It was the gilded age of Robinson Crusoe, the westener bourgeous man who knew enough of everything and knew how to use it to bend nature at his wills. But the dream of omniscience was just a short illusion. Soon the broadening and deepening of scientifical kowledge was so vast to prevent anybody from handling but a small discipline in his life, leaving him totally unaware of the rest. After all it was Leonardo da Vinci himself to say that "Intensive Knowledge can be attempted by humans but Extensive Knowledge is God's prerogative"... kind of weird from the man whose interests spaced from politics to aerodinamics to anathomy, or was it just the senile wisdom of a man forced to part from all his unfinished works? The end of the story? You wish! There was an even sadder consequence in this story, perhaps the saddest of all: people slowly stopped caring about it all. They started to have all they needed without any encouragement to think to what lays behind it. Today people takes for granted whatever is thrown at them in a shiny package and tech has slowly filled the gap that superstition left open and that nothing could really fill, not the consumerism alone, nor comunism, nor religion which is perhaps the most eminent victim of this process (no judgement intended, I'm merely stating what I see). This is what I mean when I say that contemporary parallelisms between magic and technology has more to do with cheap fantasy visions (God bless cheap fantasy, but this is not the point) than with late '700 illuminated mystic theories to explain everything and reach a new level of enlightenment for mankind. This is grim. If you are not tyred of all my babbling, let me split the thing to better explain myself. Think of the clichet cheap fantasy setting (if none comes to your mind you are a blessed one but you don't know what you are missing). Now follow me trough some basic assumption about magic in this fictionary world and then about tech in our world and see if the two things make sense or not.

Magic is powerful, magic can do almost anything or at least this is what commoners think about it. Thech is powerful, with tech you can do almost anything or at least this is what commoners think about it, if you cannot do it now perhaps you will be able to do it in the futures, or your sons will.

Magic is difficult, you have to devote your entire life to it to master one aspect of its powers. Tech is difficult, you have to study your entire life to master one disicpline and keep up to date.

Magic is for few initiates organized in guilds, an elitarian organization of people who tend to influence the rest of the world with their powers and to keep closely the secret tomes of knowledge. Tech is understood by a few engineers hired by corporations, an elitarian organization of people who tend to influence the world with their products and defends his achievements with copiright and lawyers.

Magic in his highest form consumes the soul of the mage as it overthrows the very foundations of the natural world. Tech at its highest level poses serious moral dilemmas as it breaks the boundaries of what is right to do and what is possible to do.

Shall I go on? Mmm, better not, my point should be clear by now. Ok folks, thanks for your patience reading until now. That's it, I am not an engineer (nor a mage) so this blog will be about tech, geekeries, free software, toys and stuff like that... but with a pronounced man 1.0 flavour. Enjoy!


Slashdot It!

Test Post

Goodday Folks,

This is my first post. I't just a random babbling, just to see how it turns out and such.
Stay tuned for some actual content.

Keep in touch.