Author Archives: paolo

Terrific GapMinder talk: preconcepts and myth about development, visualized!

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I highly recommend you to watch the presentation Hans Rosling gave at TED. It is inspiring and passionate, funny and moving, it is the kind of presentation I would like to be able to give, one day. I suggest you to download the file (zipped MP4) and watch it full screen (I did it already at least 5 times!) or just click on the play button here below.

Rosling is founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. In this presentation, with the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. [Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:34] (from TED blog).
If you want to create yourself graphs like the ones you saw in the video, you can do it with the GapMinder tool (hosted by Google). Explore the data and find even more preconcepts you hold.
[via bruno [via ethan]]

Links for 2007 01 22

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World Social Forum 2007 WebTV

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My friends of Ymir are currently in Nairobi (Kenya) operating the WebTV of the World Social Forum 2007. Thanks to their work, it is possible to get an idea of what is going on in Nairobi.
The original idea was to broadcast the entire Forum live but they are having great problems in getting an ASDL connections, even if all the agreements were ready before they left for Nairobi. So at the moment you can watch a lot of recorded interviews. They are still working for getting an ASDL connection or more. And don’t worry, most of the videos are in English and just a few are in Italian. It is a pity they decided to use QuickTime format so that I’m having troubles watching the video on my Ubuntu Linux box but, as I said, they had more basic problems to think about until now such as the connection. So, don’t wait, go to www.worldsocialforum.tv.
[via Trentino Cooperazione]

Links for 2007 01 18

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Links for 2007 01 17

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Apple products will be 100% recyclable

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Maybe you have missed the part of Steve Jobs speech in which he announces that all Apple products will be 100% recyclable and Apple will take back no longer wanted products so that they don’t get dumped in Asia as e-waste poisoning people and lands. If you have missed this part, press the play button in the video below or go to the youtube page.

GP is simply great! [via Houtlog]

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“Cosa e’ Software Libero” explained with videos of Stallman

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richard stallmanGreat explanation (in Italian!) of what is Free Software by Robin Good. It contains also videos of Stallman (both on Youtube and in non-proprietary format OGG) interviewed by Robin. Looking at the first video, I wondered “how many times Stallman repeated the mantra <Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program for any purpose (…), Freedom 1 is the freedom (…)> (This is of course what he repeated precisely also when he came in Trento).
More than 1 million times? I guess this is what happens when you are so ahead in time than your fellow citizens, Stallman started to speak about these concepts in the 70s and he still has to repeat them precisely the same after more than 30 years! I guess it is very boring for him. Luckily enough for Richard, Robin also asked him “Qual è il ricordo più bello del tuo soggiorno a Roma?” (What is the best memory of your staying in Rome?”) and the answer is … well, go see the videos.
Richard speaks in English but in the blog post there is the translation in Italian, so it is also a good excuse to learn a bit of my wonderful language. ;-)
[via gnuvox] [photo curtesy of guadalinex]

Second Life source code now as Free Software!

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Just yesterday I was watching the YouTube video in which Ethan Zuckerman argues with Charles Nesson about Second Life. Charles Nesson is William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and he started an Harvard course inside Second Life. Ethan contested the fact that Charles in this way is creating “Intellectual value” that is locked in a proprietary platform where he is not able to get it back, and that with his reputation is giving a lot of visibility to Second Life in exchange for nothing and urged Charles to embrace open source alternatives, such as OpenCroquet.
At the end of the video Charles committed sepukku and this is a pity because this was not needed … it is in fact news of today that Second Life released its source code under a GPL licence, hence making it Free Software. The title of the post on Second Life’s blog announcing the huge news is particularly appropriated as well “Embracing the Inevitable“.
So now we have this great Second Life world that is Free (as in Freedom), we will soon have Ryzom Free, we now just wait for World of WarCraft to not wait until they are desperate to embrace the inevitable, and Free their source code: the inevitable is that PlaneShift or some other MMORPG already released under GPL will make World of WarCraft desperate.
“May you live in interesting times”, well, are we not? Is there anyone out there able to forecast what will happen in 1 or 5 years of Second Life now that its code is liberated? I doubt it. We live in really interesting times.

UPDATE: thanks to a comment by Francesco, I now know that Ryzom.org offer to buy the source code of Ryzom and make it free was not accepted since there were bigger monetary offers. I guess they will have to embrace the inevitable as well, sooner or later. Sooner would have been better for everyone.

UPDATE #2: I blogged too quickly and too enthusiastically the news. The points made by Ethan in his post are totally correct: LindenLab just released the code of the client (in some sense hoping to outsource the development to the Free Software community, while they maintain the code of the server absolutely proprietary and hence I cannot run my SL universe (as Francesco notes as well in the comments). Anyway I still think it is a positive news. For example now that the client code is available it would be easier to start from scratch a compatible server on SourceForge (or am I wrong again?), anyway go read the points made by Ethan because they are much deeper and more interesting than mine!

Links for 2007 01 05

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