Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to my talented coworker finagler!!! Have a great one!!

Today's walk

Today's walk was at something closer to speed, though I backed off considerably after it started hurting. Unlike yesterday, which was more of a "I can keep this pace up as long as I want" day, today was more like "well, it doesn't hurt as much anymore; let's see if I can keep going". I walked to the pond but skipped the hill to spare my left ankle -- the road is severely crowned, and it hurts. Went around the pond five or six times -- I lost count.

Stats: time: 59:13; avg: 123; max: 146.

Infinite Storage for Music

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Infinite Storage for Music

Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity.

This is a simple consequence of Moore’s Law which, in one of its variants, holds that the amount of data storage available at a fixed size and price roughly doubles every eighteen months. Extrapolate that trend and, depending on your precise assumptions, you’ll find the magic date falls somewhere between 2011 and 2019. From then on, storage capacity might as well be infinite, at least as far as music is concerned.

This has at least two important consequences. First, it strains even further the economics of the traditional music business. The gap between the number of songs you might want to listen to, and the number you’re willing and able to pay a dollar each to buy, is growing ever wider. In a world of infinite storage you’ll be able to keep around a huge amount of music that is potentially interesting but not worth a dollar (or even a dime) to you yet. So why not pay a flat fee to buy access to everything?

Second, infinite storage will enable new ways of building filesharing technologies, which will be much harder for copyright owners to fight.

Discuss.

I just realized I need a Klein bottle icon.

Distributed communities via distributed RCS

Online communities, offline? | LinuxWorld Community

How does working offline, and moving data to the edge, apply to the idea of an "online community"?

What if the idea of membership was not defined by whether a server somewhere has your email address and password on it, but by whether the other members of the group know to pull from you, using a distributed revision control system?

To join a group, you would get the URL for someone else's repository, clone it, edit, add a user page that contains a URL for your own repository, and ask someone to pull. Groups that wanted to automate joining could run "pull bots", and groups that didn't could require out-of-group introductions, or require one user to "sponsor" another by linking to the new user's repository URL from his or her user page.

Then, to participate in conversations, first pull from the other members of the group and merge. At the simplest, use Ikiwiki to build an RSS view of the latest messages. Or use software that gives you a newsreader-like interface. Write your own messages, commit, and push where you're allowed to or wait for others to pull. Repository URLs could be stored inside the community archives, as sponsorship links or bot-maintained pages. Some could be .onion URLs to let users participate pesudonymously and free them from having to get conventional hosting.