"bruce sterling" entries

Four short links: 6 January 2016

Four short links: 6 January 2016

Spherical Projection, Sterling's Future, GNU Radio, and End-to-End Design

  1. Science on a Sphere — for when you want to see global data visualised without 2-D projection distortion.
  2. Lebowsky and Sterling’s 2016 State of the WorldThese physical barriers will suffer the “Fukushima effect:” the dikes you built to resist the tsunami only hold those catastrophic waters in, once the almighty wave comes over the top. Also, the industrial complex you are trying to protect from natural disaster becomes the source of a secondary, artificial disaster. (via BoingBoing)
  3. GNU Radio Tools for Radio Wrangling/Spectrum Domination (YouTube) — DEFCON talk.
  4. End-to-End Arguments in System Design (PDF) — End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to choosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem. Because the communication subsystem is frequently specified before applications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be tempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary. Awareness of end-to-end arguments can help to reduce such temptations.
Four short links: 16 September 2014

Four short links: 16 September 2014

IoT Struggle, Embedded Tools, Download Accelerator, and Comms Smog

  1. The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things — a Bruce Sterling Kindle single, a powerfully-written challenge to the presumed-benevolent technology-pervaded universe that we label “the Internet of Things”. The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It’s an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost.
  2. mbeddra set of integrated and extensible languages for embedded software engineering, plus an IDE. It supports implementation, testing, verification and process aspects. It integrates with command-line build tools and integration servers, as well as file-based version control systems. Nice to see something beyond webdev getting tools love.
  3. Replace wget With axel — download accelerator, aka a parallel wget for situations where the fetched file has multiple servers.
  4. Photos From When Cables Crowded The Skies (io9) — the communication age’s equivalent of the industrial revolution’s smog.
Four short links: 10 February 2014

Four short links: 10 February 2014

Sterling Zings, Android Swings, Data Blings, and Visualized Things.

  1. Bruce Sterling at transmediale 2014 (YouTube) — “if it works, it’s already obsolete.” Sterling does a great job of capturing the current time: spies in your Internet, lost trust with the BigCos, the impermanence of status quo, the need to create. (via BoingBoing)
  2. No-one Should Fork Android (Ars Technica) — this article is bang on. Google Mobile Services (the Play functionality) is closed-source, what makes Android more than a bare-metal OS, and is where G is focusing its development. Google’s Android team treats openness like a bug and routes around it.
  3. Data Pipelines (Hakkalabs) — interesting overview of the data pipelines of Stripe, Tapad, Etsy, and Square.
  4. Visualising Salesforce Data in Minecraft — would almost make me look forward to using Salesforce. Almost.
Four short links: 19 April 2013

Four short links: 19 April 2013

Sterling on Disruption, Coding Crypto Fun, Distributed File System, and Asset Packaging

  1. Bruce Sterling on DisruptionIf more computation, and more networking, was going to make the world prosperous, we’d be living in a prosperous world. And we’re not. Obviously we’re living in a Depression. Slow first 25% but then it takes fire and burns with the heat of a thousand Sun Microsystems flaming out. You must read this now.
  2. The Matasano Crypto Challenges (Maciej Ceglowski) — To my delight, though, I was able to get through the entire sequence. It took diligence, coffee, and a lot of graph paper, but the problems were tractable. And having completed them, I’ve become convinced that anyone whose job it is to run a production website should try them, particularly if you have no experience with application security. Since the challenges aren’t really documented anywhere, I wanted to describe what they’re like in the hopes of persuading busy people to take the plunge.
  3. Tachyona fault tolerant distributed file system enabling reliable file sharing at memory-speed across cluster frameworks, such as Spark and MapReduce. Berkeley-licensed open source.
  4. Jammit (GitHub) — an industrial strength asset packaging library for Rails, providing both the CSS and JavaScript concatenation and compression that you’d expect, as well as YUI Compressor, Closure Compiler, and UglifyJS compatibility, ahead-of-time gzipping, built-in JavaScript template support, and optional Data-URI / MHTML image and font embedding. (via Joseph Misiti)
Four short links: 18 January 2013

Four short links: 18 January 2013

Audience Fragmentation, Default Passwords, Fabricated Data, and Javascript in Minecraft

  1. Bruce Sterling InterviewIt changed my work profoundly when I realized I could talk to a global audience on the Internet, although I was legally limited from doing that by national publishing systems. The lack of any global book market has much reduced my interest in publishing books. National systems don’t “publish” me, but rather conceal me. This especially happens to writers outside the Anglophone market, but I know a lot of them, and I’ve become sensitized to their issues. It’s one of the general issues of globalization.
  2. bAdmin — database of default usernames and passwords for popular software. (via Reddit /r/netsec)
  3. Just Post It: The Lesson from Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone (Uri Simonsohn) — I argue that requiring authors to post the raw data supporting their published results has, among many other benefits, that of making fraud much less likely to go undetected. I illustrate this point by describing two cases of fraud I identified exclusively through statistical analysis of reported means and standard deviations. Analyses of the raw data behind these provided invaluable confirmation of the initial suspicions, ruling out benign explanations (e.g., reporting errors, unusual distributions), identifying additional signs of fabrication, and also ruling out one of the suspected fraudster’s explanations for his anomalous results. (via The Atlantic)
  4. ScriptCraft — Javascript in Minecraft. Important because All The Kids play Minecraft. (via Javascript Weekly)
Four short links: 14 January 2013

Four short links: 14 January 2013

Open Source Metrics, BitTorrent to TV, Tumblr Value, and Variable Fiction

  1. Open Source MetricsTalking about the health of the project based on a single metric is meaningless. It is definitely a waste of time to talk about the health of a project based on metrics like number of software downloads and mailing list activities. Amen!
  2. BitTorrent To Your TVThe first ever certified BitTorrent Android box goes on sale today, allowing users to stream files downloaded with uTorrent wirelessly to their television. The new set-top box supports playback of all popular video formats and can also download torrents by itself, fully anonymously if needed. (via Andy Baio)
  3. Tumblr URL Culture — the FOO.tumblr.com namespace is scarce and there’s non-financial speculation. People hoard and trade URLs, whose value is that they say “I’m cool and quirky”. I’m interested because it’s a weird largely-invisible Internet barter economy. Here’s a rant against it. (via Beta Knowledge)
  4. Design-Fiction Slider Bar of Disbelief (Bruce Sterling) — I love the list as much as the diagram. He lays out a sliding scale from “objective reality” to “holy relics” and positions black propaganda, 419 frauds, design pitches, user feedback, and software code on that scale (among many other things). Bruce is an avuncular Loki, pulling you aside and messing with your head for your own good.
Four short links: 31 December 2012

Four short links: 31 December 2012

Vanishing Landlines, Factory Help, Spectral Analyzer, and the State of the World

  1. Wireless Substitution (BoingBoing, CDC) — very nice graph showing the decline in landlines/growth in wireless.
  2. Maker’s RowOur mission is to make the manufacturing process simple to understand and easy to access. From large corporations to first time designers, we are providing unparalleled access to industry-specific factories and suppliers across the United States.
  3. mySight (GitHub) — myspectral.com Spectruino analyzer for light spectra in UV/VIS/NIR.
  4. State of the World (Bruce Sterling, John Lebkowsky) — always a delight. Come 2013, I think it’s time for people in and around the “music industry” to stop blaming themselves, and thinking their situation is somehow special. Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody. Nobody was or is really much better at “digital transition” than musicians were and are. If you’re superb at digitalization, that’s no great solution either. You just have to auto-disrupt and re-invent yourself over and over and over again.
Four short links: 23 December 2010

Four short links: 23 December 2010

Illusion of Government, Sterling on Wikileaks, Useful AR, and Real World Programming

  1. There Is No Such Thing as the Government — absolutely spot on there is no spoon moment for government. And that matters. It matters because once you recognise that fact, you can start to do things differently. People do, of course, recognise it at the level of caricature I have described here and nobody will admit to believing that they can get things done simply by pulling the levers of power. But inactions speak louder than words and the myth of the lever is harder to eradicate than any of us like to admit.
  2. The Blast Shack (Webstock) — Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks. No hacker story is more common than this. The ingenuity poured into the machinery is meaningless. The personal connections are treacherous. Welcome to the real world. No army can permit this kind of behavior and remain a functional army; so Manning is in solitary confinement and he is going to be court-martialled. With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He only has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people.
  3. Word Lens — finally, useful AR: it replaces foreign language text with translations.
  4. Staging Servers, Source Control, Deploy Workflows, and Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You — this guy has a point: when you emerge from programming school, you’re unlikely to have touched this kind of real-world programming.