While not often disagreeing with Groklaw, I did have a concern with this piece on open standards and disaster relief. While agreeing with the general gist — that proprietary standards can hinder relief efforts and that open platforms can maximize the number of people helped — the problem of interconnecting communications services is not generally an open standards problem. It is an open spectrum problem — and one we could solve today.
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Martin Misses an Opportunity
If you’re going to shake up the FCC’s open meeting by focusing on Katrina and moving to Bell South’s emergency HQ, why couldn’t Martin have focused a little bit on the future? Rather than looking at the way in which technology changed relief, Martin summoned the usual industry suspects who, unsurprisingly, explained to the FCC why they need regulatory goodies to better serve the public. Perhaps the Chairman can be persuaded to hold another meeting or forum a month or two down the road to look at where we should go, not where we’ve been.
My Thoughts Exactly:
We gotta get out of this place
(John here, chanelling Gary)
Scientists say that there may be life on the moons of Saturn. Hey, I’m just about ready to consider relocating. I wonder if I should bring my old Atari equipment?
My Thoughts Exactly:
Impeach Bush
For lying to Congress, for condoning treason in the White House, for kidnap and murder in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Impeach the whole lot of them while we still have a country to save.
Impeach them.
John Sundman
Founder and domain owner of Wetmachine
(I speak for myself only and not necessarly for the other active Wetmachiners who blog on this site.)
My Thoughts Exactly:
Katrina: Mass murder or merely depraved indifference?
I have been working on a long essay about New Orleans and may be I’ll finish it up and post it some day. Although that seems like a rather paltry contribution to make to the effort of cleaning up the wreckage. Better that I spent my time doing something concrete, as Harold has been doing. So I’m going to see about helping with housing some of the evacuees who have been sent to Otis Military Reservation.
But even as the nation goes about the business of trying to heal this ghastly wound, we need to forthrightly investigate and find out what happened. There have been news reports that Bush was briefed by Max Mayfield, head of the Hurricane Warning Center, last Sunday night, August 28.
If that is true, and I see no reason to think that it isn’t, then we have for a president either a catastrophically incompetent human zero, or a sociopathic criminal willing to let die tens of thousands of his fellow citizens out of mere petulance. My money is on the latter.
For, after hearing what the National Hurricane Center had to say, anyone who was neither a zero nor a sociopath would have done all that he could have to urge people to leave, ensure that they had the means to leave, and prepare for immediate rescue operations the moment the storm had left the region. Bush did none of these things.
What I want to know is, did Bush refuse to send help to New Orleans in order to spite the Democrat governor (who refused to cede jurisdiction)? That is my reading of the tea leaves, and it nauseates and terrifies me. Bush’s Katrina ploy is looking more and more like a political action from the Saddam Hussein or Hafez Assad playbook.
The congress of the United States has no higher duty right now than to investigate this matter. I hope I’m wrong about Bush’s motives, but God help us all if I’m right.
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Fighting to Help Katrina Victims — wireless
It has been the sort of comedy of bureaucracy that would make you laugh if it didn’t make you cry. We have real heroes in action on the ground, and volunteers in holding patterns, and a road to Hell paved with real great intentions.
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
URGENT: TECH EQUIPMENT AND VOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR KATRINA VICTIMS
Please distribute this broadly.
At 2 p.m., I participated in a conference call hosted by the FCC Chief of Staff on how network operators providing service with license exempt spectrum can assist in re-establishing critical voice, data and video service in areas devestated by Katrina.
Part-15.org is taking
the lead in organizing volunteers and donations of equipment from individuals,
WISPs and community wireless networks. Companies such as Cisco and Intel are
also heavily involved.
THERE IS AN URGENT NEED FOR DONATIONS OF EQUIPMENT AND VOLUNTEERS FROM THE TECH
COMMUNITY WILLING TO TRAVEL TO THE AREA EFFECTED BY KATRINA. Interested parties
can volunteer or describe contributions through www.part-15.org (there is a link
on the front page).
There is freely available software and instructions on how to convert a computer and wireless router into a mesh network node from the Champaign Urbana Wireless Network. Their website is http://www.cuwireless.net/
The FCC will remain open throughout the holiday weekend to address the crisis. Coordination efforts are ongoing, but part-15.org hopes to have a preliminary asset list for coordination with federal authorities by Noon Saturday 9/3/05. It would therefore be enormously helpful to hear from people who can donate equipment or time, even if they cannot provide the equipment or time until a later date.
Harold Feld
Senior VP
Media Access Project
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Some Domain Name News
Every now and again I still dabble in DNS. Two recent developments are worthy of note here. First, the Fourth Circuit reached the right decision in the fight over the jerryfalwell.com website. After nearly ten years of bad decisions by ignorant judges, it is good to see some common sense coming into play. Too bad it is too late to help my former comrade in arms Mike Doughney and his Peta.Org website.
Second item makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Turns out U.S. domination of ICANN is o.k. as long as the US works to keep pornography out of the DNS. Turns out love (of a sort) will bring us together . . . .
My Thoughts Exactly:
Croquet and OpenLaszlo: Plans for World Domination
Howard Stearns’s post, below, about How Croquet will Take Over the Universe (Bwah-hah-hah) got me thinking about OpenLaszlo and our own plans to take over the, um, er, well, our plans for success.
Laszlo Systems, Inc, signs my paycheck, but 90% of what I do for that check is related to OpenLaszlo, the “Rich Internet Application” platform that is given away for free. Just as Howard suggests, Laszlo Systems makes its money by selling applications and services on top of the platform, not from selling the platform itself. Laszlo Mail is the first such product, and others are under development. The OpenLaszlo platform, which Laszlo Systems Inc subsidizes to the tune of several full-time developers and one full-time documentation guy, generates exactly zero dollars for the company.
Laszlo Systems, Inc, is a startup in which I have a relative pantload of stock options. So I want Laszlo Systems, Inc, to succeed, which means that Laszlo has to convince deep-pocketed customers to buy Laszlo applications. In order for Laszlo applications to be acceptable to potential customers, the customers must be convinced that the underlying technology is sound and that it will be around for the long haul. That implies that OpenLaszlo must be seen to be thriving. There must exist a rich ecology of corporations that have a financial interest in keeping OpenLaszlo healthy.
Trust is the substrate upon which the open source ecology can grow. The best way to ensure that trust, of course, it to make OpenLaszlo really, truly open; to make it abundantly clear to potential developers that Laszlo Systems is not self-dealing, not trying to control the platform for its own benefit.
Laszlo is the fourth startup I’ve worked at. I ain’t rich yet, and I ain’t getting any younger. So I want *this* to be the one we get right. Wetmachiners Howard, Gary and I all worked for, and got virtually incinerated by, Curl, which, like Laszlo and Croquet, developed a potentially web-transforming technology. Alas for us, Curl screwed the pooch, as they say; it pissed away all the opportunity that that technology could have given them (us) by messing up this fundamental process that Howard wrote about.
Inventing the Future:
Of UI and Narratives
There were some comments to a previous entry that I thought were worth calling attention to all by themselves. The general theme of these was that of user interface and how the role of media in storytelling can inform the design of new UI paradigms. Highly appropriate for Brie.
So I’m moving those comments here. I want to keep the original page for the my attempt to define the heart of Croquet independently of UI, applications, and software distributions.
