Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Fábio Caparica:

Jean Boechat wrote:

Este texto é uma pérola.

Uma pérola conceitual que vai muito além do mundo do controle. Do mundo governamental ou dos negócios.

E é uma pérola que a gente sempre sabe que existe. E que precisamos lembrar sempre dela. Adorei.

Olá Jean…

Vc resumiu o que estava no meu pensamento.

“O texto é uma pérola conceitual”

Como já dizia o Tupy…

“A revolução não será televisionada…”

Recently, Apple started supplying some software in a new form. Although you download an apparently normal .dmg file, clicking on it doesn’t mount the disk image as usual – instead, files from the image are copied to the download folder, the image is dismounted and moved to the trash.

At first I thought this unwelcome, overly helpful, and even disquieting – are they executing a script and can this be used as a vehicle for virii and trojans?

However, Apple just published a note about how these files work, and how to create them yourself. No scripts are involved, so that’s one worry less.

Posted by Daniel Pádua:
O valor deste texto incrível está na simplicidade, clareza e concisão com que eles resumem o que sentimos no dia-a-dia da Internet.

Se falar o óbvio de maneira simples já é um desafio, abordá-lo com uma profundidade tão grande é mesmo coisa de gênio.

Que tal um weblog para listar e comentar sites, ferramentas e serviços que seguem a linha ‘Mundo de Pontas’ de pensar?

Aloha.

Posted by Jean Boechat:
Este texto é uma pérola.

Uma pérola conceitual que vai muito além do mundo do controle. Do mundo governamental ou dos negócios.

E é uma pérola que a gente sempre sabe que existe. E que precisamos lembrar sempre dela. Adorei.

Posted by cava:
Entendo que muitos dos erros cometidos por legisladores fazem parte de um unico sentimento protecionista. Alias, muito comum no territorio americano.

Percebemos isso ao ver os mesmos defendendo penas muito leves para uma empresa que feriu as leis anti-truste ou tambem vendo os mesmos tentando “proteger” o mercado fonografico ou cinematografico.

Tambem e’ o que vimos a pouco com a questao dos direitos autorais do Mickey e sua turma. O simples fato destes personagens movimentarem milhoes e a possibilidade da liberacao causar estrago e encadear uma crise foi suficiente para encorajar o poder judiciario e legislativo a cometer novo erro.

Sempre foi assim e com apos a crise de 11 de setembro, o sentimento piorou. O medo de um colapso na economia iniciado por uma grande empresa (ou um mercado especifico como o fonografico) em crise, tem como consequencia tais erros que, ao meu ver, estao apenas adiando e aumentando o prejuizo futuro.

Doc Searls and David Weinberger, co-authors of the classic Cluetrain Manifesto, did it again with World of Ends. In less than a day this article climbed to the #1 spot on indexes such as TechnoRati and DayPop. Hundreds of weblogs are already linking to it, and in a couple of days major news sites should follow.

I’ve posted a translation into Brazilian Portuguese. This was written in a hurry, so I make no claims of elegance or fidelity; both will hopefully be added during the following days. Please post comments over there if you see an error, or know a better translation for some phrase or word.

Update: Doc Searls has linked to this post and my translation. David Weinberger has posted several interesting comments he received from readers. Tim Moors published a technical paper about end-to-end design which concludes that although implementing functions at the network edge is often useful, certain others (like routing and congestion control) should not be edge-implemented. Richard Bennett calls the article a cluetrainish hallucination. BurningBird thinks the article oversimplifies the issues. Marc Canter comments at length, a must read. There are tons of other links – unfortunately TechnoRati seems to be down at the moment.

Tim Bray is wondering if it would be better to drop the charging circuit from a laptop:

So if this laptop came with two batteries, and an external battery charger that charged faster than the computer ran the batteries down, I could routinely work without having anything plugged in. Also, the laptop wouldn’t have to include the battery-charge circuit, which might allow it to be simpler and lighter.

Anybody who has a small laptop is already carrying around one extra box, namely the power supply adapter, and most of us also carry around an extra battery. Why not make the two of these into a single extra box?

…Are there any Electrical Engineers out there with an educated opinion as to whether losing the charging circuit would make the laptop noticeably smaller and lighter?

In the past, I did some design of battery-charging circuits for portable embedded systems, and in the specific case of laptops I’d say there’d be no savings. My current iBook/600 has a built-in charging circuit but no extra battery to keep things working while swapping batteries. (Previous PowerBooks used to have such a battery.) In my opinion such a battery would be at least as expensive, and use up as much space and weight as the charging circuit. And I find it faster to just plug in a charger whenever my battery goes low, rather than put the laptop to sleep, take a battery out, and plug in a new one…

Other options would be to have the external power supply also have a socket for charging an extra battery (upside: one less box to carry; downside: larger & expensive charger, more connectors, wasted space for people who don’t have an extra battery) or to have parts of the charging circuit built into the battery itself so you can cascade several batteries (upside: more flexibility, simpler charger; downside: more expensive batteries, still need a backup battery inside the laptop).

I think we’ll see some better laptop solutions in a couple of years. Once OLED screens and better polymer batteries come onto the market, we’ll have thinner screens and smaller power requirements. The battery will be a thin slate mounted behind the screen; you’ll get better heat dissipation too and the ability to slap on several batteries if necessary.

M. at the excellent Whuffie website comments on my recent post:

Following a trackback, I found this post by mac software developer Rainer Brockerhoff…

It appears that he sees links as a form of Whuffie, “hey ‘huckleberry thats a mighty large blogroll your hefting theya”. His large list of links gets him a ranking of 108th most prolific linkers at The Blogging Ecosystem.

…To borrow from wordsmith Tim Oren at Due Diligence : I am not sure if blogrolls are “fungible”. Meaning it is not a goods or commodities that is freely exchangeable. Really anyone could just take an entire top 500 (of 101,617) links and blogroll them onto a page. This would likely build some traffic.

I hasten to add that my primary intent in publishing my blogroll wasn’t to attract traffic as such; after all, it’s the actual list of feeds I’m reading, and therefore of interest to whoever analyses such connections.. When I said:

In the neverending quest for whuffie… I was checking who’s linking to me…

this was partly tongue-in-cheek. Appearing on someone’s blogroll is of course flattering per se; readers are always welcome. But of course current link-counting schemes such as TechnoRati don’t yet map accurately to real Whuffie.

M. goes on to say:

But to me when I scope a blogs ‘linkum, I expect it to have some relevance to the content. I especially like when they categorize or define the hyperlinks. My blogroll is a small list of blogs that I regularly visit and that seem to share some of the interests that I have.

…While, I try not to blog about blogging as too many sites exercise this masturbatory behavior, I think the idea of social networking and it’s complex application in the blogosphere is worthy of study. Check out this cool graph and indepth study from Ross Mayfield’s Blog.

Although my NetNewsWire subscription list uses groups to further categorize the subscriptions, unfortunately this is not reflected in the exported .opml file, which I’m mechanically converting to the form seen on the left. It would be very interesting to define standard keywords to add such value judgments to .opml files, and have everybody’s site reference those files in a <link> tag.

Ross Mayfield’s article is indeed very interesting and I had skimmed it (and some related ones) previously when the “power law” discussion came up. He says that “not all links are created equal”. I agree; first of all, blogroll links are more valuable than casual one-off references, as they represent people who read me every day. Also if someone whose weblog I read regularly, and whose opinions I respect, links to me, I feel more flattered than if it’s some random unknown… and of course, a casual link may even express disapproval of whatever I wrote, which should count as negative, not positive, Whuffie.

If I understand Mayfield’s articles correctly, he’s saying that simple non-weighted link counts chart “political networks”, which have power-law behavior. On the other hand, if links are weighted to properly show the make-up of “social networks”, a bell-curve distribution should show up, with a maximum network size of 150 people (that being, supposedly, the maximum number of people one can interact with on a daily basis without frying one’s neurons). Meg speculates that weblogging tools may possibly help us to go beyond the 150-person limit. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, 150 people were invited to Joi Ito‘s recent weblog party, and he rebuilt his blogroll afterwards to reflect that.

The whole Whuffie, group-forming, reputation-rating, community-forming, socializing-at-a-distance thing is fascinating. Writing this post yielded dozens of interesting references, which I’ll read and analyze later…