OJR Tools of the Trade: Content Management for the Masses "Content Management for the Masses



You don't have to be rich to run a stalwart news site"

Solar Cooking Plans Solar Cooking Plans



I started making a solar cooker once but got busy and never finished it, but some of these look so simple that not even I could screw it up.

O'Reilly Network: Open Source Beyond Software [Aug. 01, 2000] How to copyleft your work

You can copyleft any kind of work that is recognized by copyright law, provided the work exists in machine-readable form (where identical copies can be made without harm to the original), and provided that you are its copyright holder. If you are the author of a work, then you automatically hold its copyright; you don't need to register your work with the copyright office.
The Design Science License is a generalized "copyleft" license that was designed to be used by the general public for such works.

Mac creators talk about Jobs, OS X at MacHack "After his company was approached by Apple to write documentation in a deal that fell through, Woz made an offer for Raskin's company and moved all of its employees over in 1978. Raskin worked on the Apple II and Apple III, but felt that these weren't products that would have a long life. Raskin said that he told Steve Jobs that he wanted to create a computer that started with the user and would support the user. Raskin claims that Jobs said the idea was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. After working on Jobs, the Macintosh project -- called bicycle for some time -- was born."

http://www.d.umn.edu/~jjacobs1/ong.html "Has an evolution in human consciousness been under way as a continuation of Ong's discussion of the interiorization of words and print? When a medium like hypertext meets late twentieth century readers and writers, will they make choices from lists of links and as a result know simultaneously a more open-ended and more interiorized experience of language and meaning? Will readers and writers experience an intensified "sequential processing and spatializing of the word?" Ong says yes." (136)

XML.com: Three Myths of XML [Jun. 13, 2001] The third is that technology, including XML, is more determinative of social relations and institutions than they are of it.

Articles, Essays, and Interviews by Michael Heim "The Feng Shui of Virtual Environments," presented at the VRST 2000 (ACM, SIGGRAPH) in Seoul, Korea, October 24, 2000

"We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a tradeoff. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself"

(Michael Heim, on the Black experience in cyberspace)



Wow. I want to write like that.

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occuring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statemens to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing dissappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also iplies a tradeoff. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

214:117) 05-FEB-2001 19:59 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)
"It seems to me that we should be a bit more cynical about the use of tools, because it doesn't appear evident that the most highminded of us get to use them. otherwise robert kennedy would be joined in the discussion.
first on heidegger. i agree 100%, and i am beginning to believe that there is no escape from this, especially in contemporary society. while it is curious to review what the big bang of dot com spending has done to liberate a large number of people from conventional industry and modes of production, the jury is still out on what will take root. imagine if you will the original genius of bluefly(?)'s collaborative filtering as a tool for building community, which is, as far as i know now only used at amazon.com for selling all of the wonderful materials available there. in other words, the application of the tool as envisioned by its originators has become commodified and becomes the proverbial 'hammer'. it is then refined for the single task that makes it a commercial success and ceases being the kind of tool which is potentially liberating.
to use another metaphor, everything that was napster will become, in the hands of the recording industry, a very narrow thing two years hence. and people will fail to appreciate what was so important about napster. the gnutellas of the world eventually fall into the hands of inventors and cranks and literally hacks. "

BBC News | EDUCATION | Text messages in war against truancy" Schools in London and Leicester are using mobile phone text messages to clamp on pupils who play truant.
Teachers will take the morning register on an internet phone, scrolling down a list of names on the screen.
If a pupil is absent, the teacher will press a key which triggers an automatic text message to his or her parents."

"Information doesn't want to be free. Information wants to be valuable." I first heard this gem from Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language. Like many other open-source software authors, from Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, to Tim Berners-Lee and his spiritual descendants at the Apache web server project, Larry discovered that one way to make his information (i.e., his software) more valuable was to make it free. Larry was thus able to increase its utility not only for himself (because others who took it up made changes and enhancements that he could use), but for everyone else who uses it, because as software becomes more ubiquitous it can be taken for granted as a foundation for further work. The Internet (based on freely available software including TCP/IP, BIND, Apache, Sendmail and so on) demonstrates clearly just how much value can be created by the distribution of freely available software.



Nonetheless, it is also clear that others, Bill Gates being the paramount example, have found that the best way to make their information valuable is to restrict access to it. No-one can question that Microsoft has created enormous value for itself and its shareholders, and even its critics should admit that Microsoft has been a key enabler of the ubiquitous personal computing on which so much of our modern business world depends.



What many people fail to realize is that both Larry Wall and Bill Gates have a great deal in common: as the crea

Consecration: A Law We Can Live With Consecration: A Law We Can Live With



Orson Scott Card at his snotty best!

PalmOS Flat-File Database PalmOS Flat-File Database

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