Inventing the Future: Secure Persistent Objects, Take 0

From the day I first read about Croquet, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the secure, persistent object model. Building applications — or even understanding what applications can be built — depends on this model, which is still under development by the Croquet architects. Four months later, I’m still pretty lost.

I’m most interested in how the pieces fit together, and the abilities afforded by that configuration. Alas, I’m not clever enough to understand and express this entirely in the abstract. The more specific I get in components and abilities, the more specific I need to be as to a plausible way of implementing it. Otherwise, I get lost. I hope (unrealistically?) that no one takes this as a proposal. In fact, I’d be perfectly happy if the same abilities were achieved for Croquet with different implementations. I’d even be ok with a different set of abilities, as long as I understood what and why they were. But I gotta start somewhere. This is public because I would like help in improving my understanding, and also because my blog is from me personally. It does not represent anything from U.Wisconsin or the Croquet architects. Maybe by putting even wrong stuff into print, we can clear up misconceptions.

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TotSF: The Wireless Circle Jerk

Sascha Meinrath has this blog posting on how Motorola’s acquisition of MeshNetworks is a prime example of corporate welfare gone wild. Of course, in D.C., we call this “the circle of life”. Taxpayers, however, may see it as the Circle of Jerk.

It is unclear to me if Motorola, one of the fiercest foes of expanding unlicensed access, is simply trying to take out a competitor or hedge a bet. I do not expect their filings to change — in fact,I expect them to leverage MeshNetworks as a means of undermining manufacturing comments from folks like Tropos. OTOH, FCC staff are not stupid, and understand how industry filings work.

Stay tuned . . .

New Unlicensed Wireless Blog

Those interested in the unlicensed revolution should tune into a new blog wireless unleashed. The four contributors: Kevin Werebach, Andrew Odlyzko, David Isenberg, and Clay Shirky are among the most articulate and visionary writers about spectrum issues today. The blog covers a wide range of issues from the technical to the legal to the philosophical. I’ve put it on my morning favorites list, and I hope you do too.

Wetmachine so far

Half a year (or so) ago I decided to get serious about livening up my Wetmachine website. Wetmachine had been around since October 1999, but I had only updated it a few times. I wanted to transform it into a site that people would come back to. A blog of some kind was clearly in order.

Knowing that it would be a drag, not to mention probably impossible, to singlehandedly make Wetmachine sufficiently compelling to warrant return visits, I invited some friends to play along. About three months ago we made the switch to blog format. Read on for some brief musings on the experiment so far.

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