This is so cool!

Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Powers Of 10: Interactive Java Tutorial : View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons. [from: JB Ecademy]

Auto-aggregating RSS from Blogrolls
A request to anyone who runs a Blogroll management system or code. eg Blogrolling.com, bloglines.com, Typepad.

When a new site is added to the blogroll, use RSS Auto-discovery to capture the corresponding RSS feed. From this, generate three things.

1. An aggregated html view of the feeds
2. An OPML list of the feeds
3. A single composite RSS feed of all the items.

A lazyweb request

The real cost of offshore outsourcing : THERE APPEARS to be a general assumption that dramatic savings can be made by sending software development to countries where IT salaries are 10% or 20% of similar IT professionals in the USA or Europe. That assumption is quite invalid according to those who have tried it, in fact they claim that savings rarely reach 30% and it can take years before even that level of savings materialise. According to them, a multitude of other costs, beyond the obvious cost of salaries, are often forgotten when considering sending work offshore.

So remember Stubbs, keep it local. [from: JB Ecademy]

Slashdot | Spain, Morocco To Build Undersea Rail Tunnels

The immediate question this brings to mind is when Morocco will join the EU. I happen to think this would be a *good* thing. I'm all for extending the EU to N Africa round both ends of the Med. [from: JB Ecademy]

David Weinberger: The Dean Campaign and the Internet (IT Conversation)

I can highly recommend these interviews. Doug has got a whole range of experts talking for 20 minutes or so and is then streaming the interviews over the web. It's like having a radio program specialising in Net Gurus. That makes it a great example of the democratising nature of the web. [from: JB Ecademy]

Mobitopia reports on GNER on train Wifi All Change to WiFi, Please, All Change... Looks like it almost works.

There's some good stuff on Mobitopia so I've added it to Dailenews. [from: JB Wifi]

iStumbler is a netstumbler clone for Macintosh. They've got one good suggestion which is that if you deliberately open your access point to the public add ".public" on the end of the SSID. This seems like a good plan to me. Please note though that their recommendations include:- get a good dsl provider which permits bandwidth sharing I'd hate for anyone to get into trouble with BT or NTL because they shared their bandwidth outside the ISP's T&Cs. [from: JB Wifi]

Spam to email ratio soars in 2003 : MessageLabs expects that by next April about 70% of email traffic will be spam.

Email is terminally broken. So what next? [from: JB Ecademy]

del.icio.us. A social bookmark manager. With an especially tasty RSS feed. [from: JB Ecademy]

Wifi Planet has got a tutorial on implementing the NoCatAuth Gateway Server (via dailywireless)

Now aybe we can get all this packaged as a consumer friendly add on to a commercial AP. Like the Linksys WRT54G. I'm convinced that this is the way to go to do deliberate and controlled broadband sharing. Shame it's so hard. [from: JB Wifi]

Daily Wireless - Barbie's Wireless VideoCam The mind boggles! Now that Jennicam is going, has anyone got barbiecam.com? [from: JB Wifi]

Business week - U.S. Programmers at Overseas Salaries. I'm not sure I should even be pronmoting this idea as it feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Whatever, the story is about a startup who could potentially halve their programming costs by using offshore (India) programers. Instead he offered the work at the same rate to US programmers and was flooded with quality applications from out of work programmers. Two of the contractors have now become full time employees at normal US rates so the story does have a happy ending.

There's some serious implications here.

First is that the lack of hassle of using onsite or at least onshore contractors is worth a signififcant amount. So the savings from going offshore need to be large for it to be justifiable.

And second is that we're rapidly heading into a global employment market if we haven't already. Which means Western salaries dropping to match offshore salaries without the same drop in cost of living. That has serious consequences for global economics. And a lot of personal pain. This is one of the drivers behind the current US (and UK) decline of the middle class. [from: JB Ecademy]

The focus so far on public hotspot access has been all about a client (laptop) getting access outwards to the internet. Indeed some hotspot vendors have gone to lengths to restrict the laptop's vision of other clients connected to the same AP. Is anyone doing any work on software and facilities that are deliberately aimed at getting hotspot connected machines to talk to each other? Since they're all on the same local WLAN, it should be possible to share disks, printers, run multi-user games, remote control presentations, check presence and so on.

As I typed "Printers", I wondered why there's never a printer a public hotspots. I've already had a time when it would have been handy to be able to print a paper downstairs at Cafe Grandprix. [from: JB Wifi]

Mozilla Thunderbird V 0.4 has been released. This email an news client is looking better and better. Even tough it's only 0.4, it's impressively stable.

If you absolutely must have a calendar as well before you can switch from Outlook, try the Mozilla Calendar project.

And of course there's Firebird as well for browsing. [from: JB Ecademy]

10 hottest wireless applications for 2004

1. Multimedia messaging
2. Voice over WLAN
3. Localized content
4. Multicasting
5. Group press-to-talk
6. Remote networking
7. Wireless printing
8. Mobile blogging
9. Mobile community services
10. Industrial productivity

IMHO they missed one. P2P comms. That's Phone 2 Phone comms. We're seeing the first inkling of this in Bluejacking. Now if my phone has Bluetooth, and maybe Wifi, why shouldn't it connect direct to phones that are physically close to share music, ringtones, games and act as a walkie-talkie? Conceivably some of these functions could also work via GSM/GPRS/CDMA/3G. There's a prize here to the first phone manufacturer that starts building this stuff in even if it does impact the carrier's revenues. [from: JB Ecademy]

Slyck News - Sharman Exterminating Kazaa Lite K

Ah, the horror, the horror... I can't even begin to express the irony of this. Sharman Networks, which is the commercial arm of the Kazaa file sharing network, has used the DMCA to force the Kazaa Lite program off the web. Using a ridiculously powerful Copyright protection law (for the protection of dinosaurs from small mammals) to protect a program who's sole purpose is the circumvention of copyright.

For those who don't know KazaaLite was a hacked copy that eliminated all the spyware. It looks as though KazaaLite is now dead. While it still works for the moment we can expect Sharman to increasingly isolate it via upgrades to the main program and network protocols. Personally, Kazaa is so laden with Spyware that I won't use it on it's own so I've just downloaded DietK that appears to do a least some of what KazaaLite used to do. We'll see.

I think the net effect of this will be to increasingly fragment the music sharing networks. It won't go away but each one will be smaller and less effective. Looked at like that this action looks counter productive. But then Sharman has shareholders and investors just like the music companies. [from: JB Ecademy]

mbites - The Big Bluejack Heist at Waterloo This is a fairly balanced story about the practice of bluejacking or using bluetooth to send messages between phones. What interests me about this is the possibilities for phone to phone communications. It wouldn't be hard for phone manufacturers to start building in features for P2P Phone to Phone communication. Everything from swapping ring tones, MP3s, multi-user gaming to walkie talkie direct voice comms. Bluetooth is one way of doing this but at least some of it could use the normal GSM and GPRS channels or even WiFi for Wifi/GSM/Bluetooth enabled PDAs. The downside is obviously that it would affect revenue for the carriers and some of those swaps are dubious from a copyright point of view. But technologically this shouldn't be hard. [from: JB Wifi]

Esther Dyson on Social Networks Worth reading. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's an idea. Schedule a time when your club will collectively join the Ecademy chat channel and meet online.

Ecademy chat, irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy [from: JB Ecademy]

Two links I've been meaning to post.

3 styles of ethics. This is a paper on the three styles of ethics. Information, Commercial, Guardian. The Information ethic is the one that says information wants to be free" and values cooperation above personal gain. Commercial ethics are appropriate for business and trade, which seek to increase value to all parties involved. Money is the lifeblood of commerce. Innovation and efficiency are more useful than tradition, and the use of force is severely frowned on. Guardian or Government ethics are appropriate for governments and police forces, organizations that defend laws and land. In such a group, betrayal can cause disaster; force is frequently necessary; tradition is valuable; and loyalty is more important than money. In short, Information - Spread Innovation, Commercial - Improve the Status Quo, Guardian - Maintain the Status Quo.

The problems come when one set of ethical values are applied to a situation that is normally handled by another and this goes some way to explian the constant tension between the three areas

The second link is to The Political Compass. This is an attempt to change our view of politics by adding a second axis to the normal left-right, communist-capitalist axis. The second dimension is Authoritarian-Libertarian. Hence they've added a social scale to the normal economic scale. This gives a new look onto some traditional problems. In particular Fascism can be seen to be an extreme authoritarian position that can be either left or right wing . [from: JB Ecademy]