...more recent posts
More 1 megapixel + digital camera phones coming (in Japan.) This is my latest fetish. I cannot wait for these to hit here in the U.S.
Here's what I'd do about the bandwidth problem. First, the phone has to have a lot of memory. At least a gigabyte. And no SD or memorystick please. Either give us a real hard drive (a la the iPod) or a CF type II slot (for a microdrive, or a just a big CF card.)
Store the pictures locally at highest resolution. At the same time, scale down a copy to a user preset pixel size / resolution (I'd set my camera to scale pictures down to 500 pixels wide at around 70% jpeg quality) and send the reduced photo wireless to either a user specified server, or to a teleco server. Use open standards for these transactions (FTP I guess. Or Webdav?) Possibly have a second size/resolution preset at an even greater reduction for use when sending to someone else's phone.
The phone should also have bluetooth so that the full resolution pictures will be synced with your main computer whenever you are within range (which could be almost all the time if you have a laptop.)
With your help, Dan Gilmore is writing a book.
Dear Readers:This is one of those ideas that sounds cool, but in the wrong hands could turn into something more like a marketing gimmick than a valid strategy for book writing. But I think Dan is the man for this job, and I'm very curious to see what comes of this close to my heart topic.
I'm working on a book, and invite you to be part of it.
The book will explore the intersection of technology and journalism. The working title is "Making the News" -- reflecting a central point of this project, namely that today's (and tomorrow's) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person's grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage.
I'm doing the typical research: reading, interviewing, thinking, organizing, etc. I think I know a lot already about this subject. Naturally, I also am aware that I could know a lot more. So let's practice what I preach.
To that end, I hope you will become a part of this book, too. You can start by reading the outline below. My publisher, O'Reilly & Associates, agreed that this was a good idea.
The Phaistos Disk. "It's beautiful, it's a mystery, and it's very old; what's not to like?"
Long super geeky backgrounder on implementing VisiCalc, the program that fueled the personal computer revolution.
The strange story of a guy, an accordian, a weblog, and a girl who wasn't who she said she was. Not sure what the moral of this story is. Sort of unsettling on many fronts. And he doesn't even consider the weirdest possibility: maybe she really did prove P = NP, and now the world will never know.
This came up in his blog, but it seemed to me at the time like things had been worked out, and it wasn't that big of a deal. Now wired has an article about the agonist plagiarizing many of his battle updates from a pay newsletter put out by Stratfor. Wired says:
Some of the information was attributed to news outlets and other sources, but much of it was unsourced, particularly the almost real-time combat information presumably gleaned from a string of high-level sources worldwide....I never had the sense that he had a "string of high-level sources worldwide" but I guess that doesn't absolve him. Still, I think he provided a valuable (if slightly illegal) service. He distilled the news at a time when this was very difficult to do. Obviously he couldn't source the Stratfor stuff, because it was a paid service.
The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor.
I guess you could object that he shouldn't have used the Stratfor stuff at all. Fair enough. I'm just saying that a lot of people wanted to know what was going on, and he provided that information. I put his wrong doing in the same camp as running a gnutella client. In other words: wrong, but it's not going to stop me from using such a fine service.
I'm going to attempt to transition away from my 100% depressing all war coverage. Not sure how it will go.
In any case, here's the April 3rd status report from the Chandler team. Because you know, what a war mongering empire really needs is a good open source PIM.
OK, it's not going so well yet. Give me some time.
Environy is making buttons. I like this one especially:
N.Y. Times article (super annoying registration required - you can use fmhreader / fmhreader for name / password) on military training using computer simulation.
One notion involves a scenario quite literally torn from the pages of a science fiction novel, in which a virtual training system becomes the actual means of waging war. "Ender's Game," a cult classic by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of a group of young soldiers battling aliens in a video game. In the end, they emerge to find that their victory has saved humankind, and that it was not a game.
" 'Ender's Game' has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Fla., which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions."
Bruce Sterling on Poindexter, the Contras, and al Qaeda.