“It’s the 21st century, there’s not going to be a year in which it’s harder to copy than this year; there’s not going to be a day in which it’s harder to copy than this day; from now on. Right? If copying gets harder, it’s because of a nuclear holocaust. There’s nothing else that’s going to make copying harder from now on. And so, if your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you’re fundamentally not making art for the 21st century. It might be quaint, it might be interesting, but it’s not particularly contemporary to produce art that demands these constraints from a bygone era. You might as well be writing 15-hour Ring Cycle knock-offs and hoping that they’ll be performed at the local opera. I mean, yes, there’s a tiny market for that, but it’s hardly what you’d call contemporary art.”

This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title Who is this thing for?. Thanks for informative article

At first I was like “aww, someone liked my post, how precious!” But the suspicion followed pretty quickly, and I started to think, wait, what post was that exactly? And I went back to look at it, and I realized: this is spam. The spambot just took a random post, pulled out the title, and posted this complimentary, totally vacuous thing. It’s useless, but it gets the person’s URL on my site, which increases their standing in Google.

Sneaky.

It’s amazing to me how often this happens… that spam is totally indistinguishable from a regular old useless comment. But it’s often.

and it was like bleep bleep bleepbleepbeep, and then, like, half of my paper was gone (Video)

For some reason, life has been playing little jokes on me all week. I don’t think there could’ve been more little disasters in my presentation in Computational Modeling. First, my laptop wouldn’t project. Then my thumbdrive was formatted incorrectly so I couldn’t transfer my presentation to the TA’s computer. Also, my internet was down (I would learn later that I accidentally hit a wifi kill switch on the bottom of my laptop) so I couldn’t transfer files that way. I ended up giving the presentation without projection, turning my laptop around periodically to show off figures.Awesome.

Right now I’m trying to finish my sociology paper. I was using Zoho Writer to write it, but somehow Zoho lost pretty much all of my notes as I was about to start turning them into a paper. So now I’m writing the paper directly from the original sources. And I’m using OpenOffice.

But just now, I think OpenOffice crashed without me realizing it. I opened my paper, thinking I had just saved and closed. And those little autorecover dialogs popped up, and I was like “weird, I didn’t see a crash. Whatever.” and clicked cancel a few times without reading the dialogs carefully.

Only to see that the version on disk was one. single. paragraph.

Awesome.

Life is like a ball pit. You can’t really get from point A to point B very fast. And even if you do, it’s not really the fun way to play. Best is to see who’s nearby, make a friend, throw some balls at their head and laugh at the absurdity.

But I’m getting a little scared. Google building a great, functional platform that’s going to entice a lot of people to spend the bulk of their time in Google software. But when we use Google products, we have no control over the software we’re using. We can’t change it. We can’t even prevent it from changing. Google has the keys to the car.

As a free software advocate, that’s scary.

As a user, it should be scary too. Yes, Google seems altruistic enough, but the fact is, they have interests. Often their interests align with the interests of many users, but what if you’re in the 5% whose interests are not being served? Your only option is to choose another product. Maybe find something from Yahoo or Microsoft.

But that’s not good enough for me.

And that’s why Forkolator is still important, even in the face of Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly and Google Mashup Editor. Forkolator is about giving people total control over the software they use, and encouraging uninhibited exploration of possibilities. Microsoft actively constrains our freedom to change our software. At best, Google is granting us a few limited freedoms because they’ve deemed those freedoms useful to some large segment of their user base. And because in this case, GME drives more traffic to their services.

Despite this minor detour towards proprietary software, I really believe the future of software is total Freedom. But for that to be true, we need to build infrastructure to compete with Google and we need to do it fast.

Until today, cellular phones as a whole have been among the worst designed pieces of equipment ever made. The culture amongst phone companies was one that rewarded impressive-sounding features and sexy enclosures, not ease of use and life-altering applications. Phones are a pain in the ass.

That’s why the Apple iPhone has been so highly anticipated. Everyone knew Apple was going to do it right.

And they did. Today Apple announced their first cell phone. I don’t need to gush about all the great design points, because their web site does a wonderful job of that. I’ll just point out one detail, hidden deep in their pages:

The [iPhone's] proximity sensor detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away.

There are a lot of things in the iPhone that we talked about at IU in Design Club: easy access to the address book, touch screen interaction with minimum “clicking”, and so-on. But I’m not sure I ever would’ve thought of a proximity sensor for this purpose. It’s just great thinking on Apple’s part.

The surreal part of this is that it’s something I’ve known was going to happen for a long time. Not the Apple phone specifically, but that someone was going to sit down and actually design a phone that was made to be used by human beings. And it’s been years and years, and no one–not Nokia, not Samsung, not Motorola–stepped up to the plate. I was beginning to think it wasn’t going to happen.

And now it has. Crazy.

Go ahead, click the link. Browse through a the first few pages. Keep going. Notice anything funny?

That’s right, someone’s nicely manicured thumb has been immortalized for the ages. 100 times. Helps you remember all the humanity that makes our technology hum along.