- Blog
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Problems with Azeem’s BPL idea
Azeem’s BPL idea will encounter many obstacles on its way to the mainstream: 1. How far downstream does the BPL go? If you require content and app developers to embed the BPL in all derivitive product (as the pure GPL requires), there is no limit. This will alienate businesses who don’t want their work to…
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Redefining ‘Public Service’ at BBCi
Azeem thinks we should try to apply open source thinking to the BBC. He thinks the Beeb’s online content and code should be freely published under the GPL – the radical constitution of the copyleft movement. The effect of this – if it worked – would be to bring into being a thriving new ‘creative…
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W3C Web Services standards
Werbach links to the W3C’s draft web services standards.
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Motorists out of control
Catherine Bennett, in The Guardian, asks “who dares to stand up to the motorists?” The motoring lobby had been protesting, like so many schoolboys banned from baking their conkers, that concealed speed cameras were a rotten swizz. Or, as the AA put it, “unfair”. The Sun said they were “sneaky”. They did not, drivers complained,…
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Making of the Macintosh
I’ve used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they’re pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of grim, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase is like me: old gits with hair growing out of their ears. We’re stuck in our ways and we can’t change now so that’s that.…
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Bioinformatics links
From an overview in last week’s New Scientist:Cytoscape, National Center for Biotechnology Information (US), European Bioinformatics Institute, Gene Ontology Consortium, Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium, The Center for Advancement of Genomics
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Proof for posterity
Via warmbrain and Karlin Lillington I learn about a marvelous idea from supporters of Project Gutenberg: Distributed Proofreaders. It’s got to be worth a few minutes of your day to proof a page or two of OCR output for the utterly worthy archive of out-of-copyright literature (whose collection is receding into the past as fast…
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Mememap
Er… Something tells me I’m a bit slow off the mark here but this mindmap of current memes looks pretty useful. I was just struggling to name the ‘space’ described by the map but, of course, the map pretty much takes care of that itself and, like all good maps, is irreducible. So I won’t…
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Grocery heroes
The people at Ocado seem to have got it about right. With the help of a substantial investment from Waitrose, they’ve built a home delivery service that doesn’t require you to know exactly how to spell ‘brocolli’, that delivers for nothing if you spend over £75, that allows you to book slots in one hour…
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Better Booth
Thanks to Quinquireme, for a much better and more searchable Charles Booth site at the LSE (I mean better than the one I used the other day)