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Thursday, May 08, 2003
| Victory over spam? |
| John Udell says that SpamBayes does a good enough filtering job to allow him to declare victory over spam. I'm skeptical, though I've had relatively good results with PopFile's Bayesian filter and I'm sure its algorithms can be improved upon. I plan to try SpamBayes as soon as I can; for now, it's only available as an Outlook plugin or by using the CVS binaries, which I don't want to deal with.
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| Millennial Net -- low-cost ad hoc wireless sensor networks. At first glance, this looks like a competitor to Ember, which also came out of MIT. (Via Jeremy Allaire)
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| Dave Winer on Decentralization |
| Scripting News: "We talked about decentralization and followed where it led. The end of monoculture. Everything points to it. Why? Distribution of culture used to be expensive, decentralization (ie the Internet) has made it virtually free, esp when done on a small scale."
Dave hits the nail on the head. Decentralization is the theme of Supernova because it's such a fundamental driver of the important social, economic, and technological changes we're going through.
Like any epochal change, the details get more nuanced, and thus more interesting, the more you consider them. In this case, it's true that decentralization and cheap global distribution of information breaks down monocultures, but it can also overwhelm local cultures that were protected by their isolation. Satellite distribution lowered the cost of beaming US movies and TV everywhere, thus creating a dominant US media.
It cuts both ways. As distribution has gotten even cheaper, the same trends have allowed Japanese cultural artifaces such as Pokemon to dominate America. The Net gives local and independent content creators the ability to compete against the domainant corporate media, not by building walls but by leveling the playing field. And just around the corner is the greater leveler of all: ubiquitous unlicensed wireless communications.
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| Baby steps toward home media nirvana |
| EE Times: Microsoft R&D efforts seek to bolster home networks. (Via Marc Canter, who saw it on a couple other blogs)
Microsoft is taking on the second-order challenges to make networked digital home media a reality. Not just linking up the devices, but coordinating the assets (movies, songs, etc.) stored on them. It's one thing Steve Perlman's Rearden Steel box did on its own platform. Ultimately, the standards need to transcend the boxes.
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| Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband for home media |
| The ultra-wideband community is looking to position UWB as the dominant technology for moving media streams between devices in the home by making it into "wireless Firewire" (Firewireless?). UWB has some characteristics (including high bandwidth and low power) that may make it better than WiFi variants for these uses. It's quite possible that four classes of unlicensed wireless technology will all thrive -- WiFi, UWB (aka WiMedia), Bluetooth, and WiMax (802.16) -- though Bluetooth may be the odd standard out.
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BLOGS OF INTEREST
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