Liudvikas Bukys

Lawrence Lessig:

• CIO Insight: Service Calls:
  

  If there were a Nobel Prize awarded for business innovation, I’d nominate the person who first thought of giving customers at convenience stores their purchases for free if the cashier didn’t offer a receipt. Convenience stores are famously vulnerable to rogue cashiers who don’t record sales. By drafting customers to police cashiers, convenience stores get an inexpensive but effective surveillance system.

• Lessig Blog:
  the freedom to tape?

  But I wonder: When you get a recording while on hold that says, “Calls may be monitored to assure quality assurance,” doesn’t the passive voice already authorize you, the customer, to tape as well?

Another application and implication of the Memex. Remember
Ed Felten’s article.

Naval Ravikant (VentureBlog): The New Platforms:

One of the nice things about being in the venture business is that one gets a large number of data points on what the innovative Independent Software Vendors are up to. In particular, it’s interesting to watch what platforms they are developing on, as it is a leading indicator of which one the next killer app might pop up on. Circa 1995, if you were writing mass-market software, you were writing for Windows (client) or Unix (server). Circa 1998, if you were writing software, the server side was Solaris / Unix and the client side was the web browser.

Today, most of the innovative apps are breaking out on many different platforms…

…
Predictions – Most killer apps will emerge first via web-based GUIs (client side) unless they involve 3D graphics or heavy filesharing, in which case they’re Win32 apps. Server-side killer apps will more easily emerge on Linux than on Windows. Some of the more interesting consumer-facing server apps are emerging just as quickly on Linux as on Windows (PVRs, online photo albums, music jukeboxes).
Fear the Penguin, indeed.

Jan Gray (Microsoft): Writing Faster Managed Code: Know What Things Cost

MIT Technology Review:
Spam Wars

Marty Roesch (Snort) dismisses the

“IDS is dead” message of Gartner analysts. Here’s the middle ground: Making the transition from potentially useful to really useful is hard, and requires lots of dedicated effort and talent. Most IDS deployments are fig leaves, buying some product because it
seemed like the right thing to do, but without committing the resources to keep it alive. Failure to actually make use of the data spewing out of it makes it a bad investment. Yes, the technology is improving, producing data that is more to-the-point. However, non-serious deployers are likely to maintain equilibrium by putting even less work into using the system.

Ed Felten illustrates the persistence-of-information issues raised by Memex, DARPA’s LifeLog, journalists, bloggers, expectations of privacy, and the incentives of individuals, in
Freedom to Tinker: Privacy, Blogging, and Conflict of Interest

Alan Kay’s talk at O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003

Richards J Heuer, Jr.:
Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
«We tend to perceive what we expect to perceive.»

konspire2b is
a sender-oriented push P2P content distribution system.
Blogs will need to do something like this to scale distribution of RSS files; polling for RSS updates is not sustainable.
The authors recently posted
comparisons to Gnutella, Freenet, and BitTorrent (received-oriented pull content distributioin systems).

[via Slashdot | A Blog With Unlimited Bandwidth (Beta 1.2)]

Phil Wainewright:

• Tale of Two ITs:
  

  The problem here is that there are two separate information technologies today, just as in the early years of the last century there were two forms of transportation. In making that assertion, I am of course alluding to another HBR article, Marketing Myopia, by Theodore Levitt, which first appeared in July 1960. Levitt’s article made the seminal observation that the railroad companies declined “because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business.”

  Today, the IT industry is led, and has its agenda set, by companies who believe themselves to be in the enterprise-scale software business. What they don’t yet realize (or perhaps are helpless to do anything about — see Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, by Bower and Christensen, HBR January 1995) is that actually they’re in the distributed process automation business. If they and their customers don’t adjust rapidly to their new market environment, their destiny will be to end up as a minor footnote in a future article in HBR about the astonishing decline of the one-time giants of our present-day IT industry.

• The end of software:

  Consolidation means contraction. When five leading firms propose mergers in the same week, the prognosis for the enterprise software industry looks dire. Especially when in the same week, the most vocal exponent of their nemesis took a bold new step into their universe.