IMG_0513 Originally uploaded by poetrycomics *Yes I am still listening. And watching, too.
Bruce Sterling

ttp://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/new-hope-for-financial-economics-interview-with-bill-janeway/ Link: New Hope for Financial Economics: Interview with Bill Janeway | The Big Picture. The IRA: So Bill, you picked an interesting week to be back in New York. We actually started posting equity volatility numbers on our web...
Bruce Sterling

(((LONG NOW speakers. "Terms of biocontainment (Synthetic Biology debate). ))) "I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer," Drew Endy began. The first purpose is better understanding fundamental biological mechanisms through "learning by building." The toolkit of...
Bruce Sterling

(((From SANS.))) --Burmese Blogger Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison (November 12, 2008) A Burmese blogger was sentenced to 20 years and six months in prison for crimes against public tranquility and video and electronics laws offenses. Nay Myo Kyaw,...
Bruce Sterling

http://www.fantascienza.com/magazine/notizie/11632/ritorna-bruce-sterling-il-chiosco-in-libreria/ Link: Ritorna Bruce Sterling: Il chiosco in libreria ??? Fantascienza.com. "La collana Odissea Fantascienza compie trenta numeri con un romanzo di un grosso calibro: Bruce Sterling, fondatore del cyberpunk e guru della generazione internet."
Bruce Sterling

*Wow, looks like that dazzle-camouflage was done in Processing.

*Wow, looks like that dazzle-camouflage was done in Processing.
Bruce Sterling

http://blog.tomevslin.com/

Link: Fractals of Change.

By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country. (((?)))

One of the challenges facing the Federal Communications Commission and the new administration is how to deal with the fallout from the end of this venerable technology. It's gonna get ugly for some people – people who can't afford to do without communication – unless we're proactive about this problem.

Here's what's happening as you probably know. Young people don't bother with landlines (unless they live beyond cell coverage); they just use their mobile phones or Skype for voice communication. The slightly older set are buying cable's bundle of entertainment, Internet access, and VoIP. They cancel their landlines. People who have broadband access don't need the extra line they used to rent for their dial-up Internet access.

Verizon simply sold all of its copper plant in the three northern New England States to FairPoint. Verizon hadn't been investing in this plant and didn't want to put any more money in going forward. FairPoint, like Verizon and at&t, is losing access lines. In its latest financial results, it reported that access line equivalents are down 9.2% over the past year; total revenue is down as well.

In prime markets Verizon is replacing its copper infrastructure with fiber – one customer at a time; first are the most valuable customers but Verizon will move steadily down-market with its FiOS offer. FairPoint is making an impressive effort to add broadband access to areas where Verizon had not invested enough to make DSL work. FairPoint has also shown commendable willingness to move beyond traditional copper and use wireless to reach customers out of range of DSL. To compete with Cable's triple play, FairPoint has a loose bundle with DirecTV.

So look through the data points above to the trends. Revenue from POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is simply disappearing. The copper network is generating increasing revenue from DSL BUT cable appears to be winning the bandwidth war for Internet access and snaring the voice customers as well. Barring a technical breakthrough in the use of the copper infrastructure (one should NEVER bar a technical breakthrough), there are going to be less and less copper access lines in use. In the long term, this isn't a problem because there are better ways to communicate than over fixed copper wire. But we live now, not in the long term.

There are several public policy problems stemming from the decline of the copper network... (((yeah, I bet there are, probably including gangs of offshored Somalian pirates digging the stuff up to make leashes for the captured crews of Saudi supertankers.)))

http://blog.tomevslin.com/ Link: Fractals of Change. By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country. (((?))) One of the challenges facing the Federal Communications Commission and the new administration is how...
Bruce Sterling

*Hmmmm....

http://blog.unto.net/technology/mobile-devices-as-development-machines/

Link: Mobile devices as development machines » DeWitt Clinton.

Mobile devices as development machines

November 17th, 2008 by DeWitt Clinton

Tim O’Reilly tells the story of how Vic Gundotra, my manager at Google, came to the conclusion that the future of software lies somewhere in the intersection of mobile and cloud. Indeed it does, but I jokingly twittered back that we still need PCs — how else are we going to write our mobile and cloud apps?

But in truth we hardly need the heavyweight hardware under our desks to develop software even today. If anything, with a ubiquitous network connection (wifi where available, 3G where it is not), most of the heavy lifting can and should be run on compiler farms, not the desktop.

My own development workflow typically involves ssh’ing into a virtual instance from whatever client I’m on (a desktop, a laptop, etc) and running on a distributed compute cluster. (((Oh.)))

Depending on the task at hand even a full graphical IDE can be run remotely over technologies like NX. Or if you’re like me, ssh, screen, and emacs are all you need. And I believe we may even be headed for an era when the IDEs themselves are hosted applications, following the pattern established by email, text editors, and other traditional desktop applications.

So will this mean you can forgo the PC even for software development? Perhaps it does. Looking back, here were the specs on my first personal Linux box, as pieced together in 1994:

Dell Dimension Intel Pentium @ 133 MHz 256MB RAM 1GB HDD 28.8 kbps modem Slackware 2.0 Linux kernel 1.1.18 17″ Dell Trinitron CRT Monitor @ 1024×768

I used this machine throughout my time as a CS undergrad, including the time off I took to write software for one of the first web companies (tripod.com).

By way of comparison, I now carry a HTC G1 device running Android:

HTC G1 Qualcomm MSM7201A @ 528 MHz 192 MB RAM / 256 MB ROM 1GB SSD 3G HSPA/WCDMA, GSM/GPRS/EDGE 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 Android RC30 Linux kernel 2.6.25 3.2″ screen @ 320 x 480

These stats are telling: (((oh yeah, you bet:))) The mobile devices in our pockets are more powerful and more connected in every way than the desktop machines we used to build the first generation of the web.

If we can just bridge the peripheral gap and get high resolution external displays, then there is truly nothing stopping us from forgoing the desktop completely in favor of a completely distributed development environment. (((Where's the @#$$@%& KEYBOARD? Your grandparents used QWERTY and your GRANDCHILDREN will also use QWERTY, you heretic!)))

*Hmmmm.... http://blog.unto.net/technology/mobile-devices-as-development-machines/ Link: Mobile devices as development machines ?? DeWitt Clinton. Mobile devices as development machines November 17th, 2008 by DeWitt Clinton Tim O???Reilly tells the story of how Vic Gundotra, my manager at Google, came to the conclusion that...
Bruce Sterling

*Hey, I'd go.

Theirs is a wild, unsettling world that splits off parallel versions of itself, a hope and the dashing of that hope, a balancing act that hovers between being lost and found. —Meghan Boody, 2008

Rick Wester Fine Art is very pleased to announce the inaugural one-person exhibition in its series RWFA PICTURE PROJECTS at 511 West 25th Street. Meghan Boody: The Lighthouse And How She Got There is the artist's first solo exhibition in New York since 2000. It continues her exploration into invented worlds traversed by young girls finding themselves in strange lands without maps, guides or protection, and who are eventually transformed by their journeys. While implied threats are omnipresent, Boody's protagonists are vulnerable but plucky, unafraid and invincible.

Accompanying the photographs will be a selection from the artist's project Glass Worlds. These are comprised of precariously stacked animal figures and miniatures residing under glass domes. Glass Worlds provides an antidote to Lighthouse, offering up microcosms set aside from the real world and the ravages of nature that are otherwise ready to topple over at the slightest breath of wind.

Meghan Boody: The Lighthouse And How She Got There opens November 6 and continues through December 6, 2008. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10-6pm, Saturday 11-6pm.

Jehsong Baak: Là ou Ailleurs, opens December 11 and continues through January 24, 2009.

Image Credit: I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, 2007 (detail) Fujiflex print, 58 x 78 inches, edition of 5

511 West 25th Street Suite 205 New York NY 10001 | + (917) 348-8485 | rwfa@rickwesterfineart.com | rickwesterfineart.com

*Hey, I'd go. Theirs is a wild, unsettling world that splits off parallel versions of itself, a hope and the dashing of that hope, a balancing act that hovers between being lost and found. ???Meghan Boody, 2008 Rick Wester Fine...
Bruce Sterling

http://www.boym.com/blog/2008/10/extinct-products-from-soviet-state.html

Link: Oh Boym: Extinct: Products from the Soviet State Store.

"Soviet consumer products always reminded me of weeds. Cheap, anonymous, notorious for their clunky robust look, they proliferated in great numbers at all levels of Soviet society. Like the Soviet State itself, it seemed they were destined to live forever.

"Once Russia turned capitalist in the early 1990s, it was only a matter of time before “the weeds” got cleared out. Presently, most Soviet products are extinct, or at least endangered...

(((Exercise for the reader -- go out in your neighborhood, try to find some American consumer products not manufactured in China.)))

http://www.boym.com/blog/2008/10/extinct-products-from-soviet-state.html Link: Oh Boym: Extinct: Products from the Soviet State Store. "Soviet consumer products always reminded me of weeds. Cheap, anonymous, notorious for their clunky robust look, they proliferated in great numbers at all levels of Soviet society. Like the...
Bruce Sterling

*I knew perfectly well that he was going to do this, but actually watching him do it in real life is just kinda awesome.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,590276,00.html

Link: In Sarkozy's Shadow: A Facelift for France's Socialists - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International.

(...)

Ideologically trapped between the siren calls of the radical left and the liberal appeals of the "Democratic Movement" of centrist François Bayrou, the Socialists are in a deep identity crisis. Not even the financial crisis and ensuing economic downturn have awakened the party foot soldiers. In fact, Sarkozy has even managed to poach the slogans of the left. <---------

While the president considers the partial nationalization of banks, promises subsidized jobs and announces his plan to "reshape capitalism," the opposition is paralyzed, isolated and out of touch.

To make matters worse, because the party's center has grown silent, the heavyweights are taking every opportunity to draw attention to themselves. But instead of a clear course, the air has been filled with contradictory statements and proposals. "The comrades are fed up with constant strife," says one prominent Paris Socialist....

((("Anyone but Segolene." It's pathetic.))) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5162690.ece

(((Meanwhile, Sarkozy in Washington:)))

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97035563

(((Moronic French right still doesn't get what Sarkozy is doing. They're bewildered. No wonder the guy steals their oxygen. He's without a peer-competitor in either party.)))

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5162679.ece

"Bewildered supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right French president, are wondering what to do. Should they blame the global financial crisis or the influence of Carla Bruni, his glamorous wife, for what sounds like a lurch to the political left?

Rarely does a day pass without “Sarko” displaying signs of an ideological rethink. He has attacked “fat cats” and the “dictatorship of the market”. He declared that “laissez-faire capitalism is over” and has called for a cap on executive pay and an end to “golden parachutes”.

"The transformation is striking given that Sarkozy, famed for his “zero tolerance” policing as interior minister, was once derided on the left as a dangerous right-winger..."

(((This guy's spreading the media-decline mayhem so evenly that one has to wonder if ALL forms of "media" will vanish. Blogosphere dies... okay, but also local TV, network TV, newspapers, online advertising... movies not looking any too great, obviously, recorded music on the ropes... why do we even HAVE "media"? Maybe we should just glance at our inner eyelids and find a used Chinese car through the everyware.)))

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4623

Link: Don’t Blame the Journalism  | American Journalism Review.

When the obituaries are written for America's newspapers, count on journalists to indict themselves in their own demise. You've heard it before, from a thousand bloggers and roundtable know-it-alls: We were too slow to adapt, too complacent, too yoked to our tried-and-true editorial traditions and formulas. We could have saved ourselves, goes the refrain, if only we had been more creative and aggressive and less risk averse.

To which I can only reply: Oh, please.

As newspapers shuffle toward the twilight, I'm increasingly convinced that the news has been the least of the newspaper industry's problems. Newspapers are in trouble for reasons that have almost nothing to do with newspaper journalism, and everything to do with the newspaper business. Even a paper stocked with the world's finest editorial minds wouldn't have a fighting chance against the economic and technological forces arrayed against the business. The critics have it exactly backward: Journalists and journalism are the victims, not the cause, of the industry's shaken state. (...)

The problem has little to do with the reporting, packaging and selling of information. It's much bigger than that. The gravest threats include the flight of classified advertisers, the deterioration of retail advertising and the indebtedness of newspaper owners. Wrap all these factors together and you've set in motion the kind of slash-and-burn tactics that will hasten, not forestall, the end.

For decades, newspapers enjoyed what economists call a "scarcity" advantage. In most cities, there was only one outfit that could profitably collect, print and distribute the day's news, and it could raise prices even as it delivered fewer readers each year. Indeed, monopoly daily newspapers enjoyed enormous profit margins – sometimes as much as 25 percent or more – until very recently. But the scarcity advantage has faded; the Internet has essentially handed a free printing press and a distribution network to anyone with a computer.

The real revelation of the Internet is not what it has done to newspaper readership – it has in fact expanded it – but how it has sapped newspapers' economic lifeblood. The most serious erosion has occurred in classified advertising, which once made up more than 40 percent of a newspaper's revenues and more than half its profits. Classified advertisers didn't desert newspapers because they disliked our political coverage or our sports sections, but because they had alternatives. Craigslist and eBay and dozens of other low-cost and no-cost classified sites began gobbling newspapers' market share a few years ago. What they didn't wipe out, the tanking economy did. During the first half of 2008, print classified advertising nosedived more than 25 percent, as withering job, real-estate and auto listings erased $1.8 billion in revenue from newspaper companies' books. Newspapers have been uniquely hurt – television never had classifieds to lose.

Similarly, the disappearance of local chain stores over the past two decades has fallen like a series of hammer blows on newspapers. In my city, the names of the dearly departed included such homegrown advertisers as Hechinger hardware stores, Trak Auto Parts, Crown Books, Dart Drug, Peoples Drug, Raleigh's clothing stores and the department stores Woodward & Lothrop, Garfinckel's and Hecht's. TV lost some of these advertisers, too, but has gained the likes of Wal-Mart and other big-box outlets, which tend to buy airtime, not newspaper space.

Newspapers that were hoping to be rescued by their online ad businesses woke up to a sobering reality in mid-2007. By then, it was becoming clear that online advertising wasn't growing fast enough to make up for the rapid disappearance of print ads (see "Online Salvation?" December 2007/January 2008). In fact, at the moment, online ads aren't growing at all. Sales at newspaper Web sites fell 2.4 percent in the second quarter of 2008. This may be as ominous a development as the meltdown of print. Online newspaper revenues had grown smartly in every quarter since the Newspaper Association of America began tracking them in 2003. No longer.

There's still much that many newspapers can do to improve their Web sites: adding Twitter feeds, social networking applications, Google map mashups (maps over-laid with data), on-demand mobile information and, of course, more video. All good. But let's not kid ourselves. The online business model is still uncertain, at best....

(((Market glutted with dying newspaper properties, no self-indulgent zillionaires left to buy them...)))

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4615

(((This guy's spreading the media-decline mayhem so evenly that one has to wonder if ALL forms of "media" will vanish. Blogosphere dies... okay, but also local TV, network TV, newspapers, online advertising... movies not looking any too great, obviously, recorded...
Bruce Sterling

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/11/who_killed_the.php

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Who killed the blogosphere?.

Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there's good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there's still a "blogosphere." That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

And that's why there's so much angst today among the blogging set. As The Economist observes in its new issue, "Blogging has entered the mainstream, which - as with every new medium in history - looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death."...

(((Furthermore, it would appear that my humble one-man old-skool surfblog here has outlasted 94 percent of all blogs ever founded...)))

"It's no surprise, then, that the vast majority of blogs have been abandoned. Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent "state of the blogosphere" study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. Now, as longtime blogger Tim Bray notes, 7.4 million and 1.5 million are still sizable numbers, but they're a whole lot lower than we've been led to believe. "I find those numbers shockingly low," writes Bray; "clearly, blogging isn’t as widespread as we thought." Call it the Long Curtail: For the lion's share of bloggers, the rewards just aren't worth the effort.

"Back in 2005, I argued that the closest historical precedent for blogging was amateur radio. The example has become, if anything, more salient since then...."

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/11/who_killed_the.php Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Who killed the blogosphere?. Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now...
Bruce Sterling