A variety of legends have grown up around Bill Gates’ brief career at Harvard. (He dropped out halfway through and co-founded Microsoft). On Tuesday night, during an interview at the “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Mr. Gates regaled the audience with his strategy of not bothering to attend classes and then catching up in a single intense burst during a separate reading period at the end of the term.
On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, himself a Harvard dropout, appeared to one-up Mr. Gates. Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that he had also skipped classes, in particular avoiding “Art in the Time of Augustus.”
When it came time for the end-of-term study period, he was too busy building the prototype of Facebook to bother to do the reading. So in an inspired last-minute save, he built a Web site with all of the important paintings and room for annotation. He then sent an e-mail to the students taking the class offering it up as a community resource.
In a half an hour, the perfect study guide had self-assembled on the Web. Mr. Zuckerberg noted that he passed the course, but he couldn’t remember the grade he received.
Interesting comment in response to Darren Waters’s post about Windows 7.
I would hesitate to call Vista a failure. A lot has been made of a perceived poor uptake by businesses but it’s worth pointing out that in early 2005 – four years or so into XP’s lifecycle – only 40% of companies were running it, the majority of the rest were using 98, 2000 or NT. In it’s first year XP was only installed on 10%.
Personally I think the hype around Vista has created a perception that isn’t supported by reality – it is selling well both to individuals and customers and it’s actually a pretty good OS. Businesses won’t move to Vista until there’s a compelling reason to do so, which was the same for XP.
Perhaps Vista can be considered a victim of XP’s success rather than a failure in its own right?
Darren wrote:
the biggest question about this public demo of Windows 7 is: what harm will its promise do to sales of Vista?
I just received an interesting note about Windows 7 from the Microsoft PR team. In it, it states: “Microsoft absolutely recommends customers deploy Windows Vista today.”
In other words, Microsoft are telling XP customers not to wait for Windows 7 but to grab Vista now.
Despite issuing more 140 million licenses for Vista worldwide, it’s seen by many as a failure.
I sent Mr. Bender an e-mail, asking him why he left. He replied that he decided his efforts to advance the cause of open-source learning software “would have more impact from outside of O.L.P.C. than from within.”
I also asked Mr. Negroponte about Mr. Bender’s departure, and he called it “a huge loss.” Mr. Negroponte said that, in his view, some people had come to see open-source software as an end of the project instead of a means. “I think some people, including Walter, became much too fundamental about open source,” he said.
After the article was published May 16, Mr. Bender sent a letter to the Times, taking issue with Mr. Negroponte’s comment and elaborating on his own views: “Mr. Negroponte is wrong when he asserts that I am a free and open-source (FOSS) fundamentalist. I am a learning fundamentalist.”
I talked to Mr. Bender last Friday to discuss his views at more length and give them a broader airing.
“Microsoft stepping in is the symptom, not the disease,” he said in the interview. The issue, in his view, is whether the tools that bring computing to children are “agnostic on learning” or “take a position on learning.”
“O.L.P.C. has become implicitly agnostic about learning,” he said. The project’s focus, he said, is on bringing low-cost laptop computers to children around the world. “It’s a great goal, but it’s not my goal,” he said.
So what is Bender’s goal? The answer is the “constructionist” learning model derived from the work of Jean Piaget and the practical research of his intellectual descendants like Seymour Papert, the M.I.T. computer scientist, educator and inventor of the Logo programming language.
Constructionist pedadogy holds that people learn best by building things — solving problems by “constructing” answers as active agents — instead of by being passive recipients of facts and received knowledge.
Lohr goes on to say that Bender
thinks the collaborative, interactive learning environment embodied by Sugar could be “a game changer in how technology and education collide.” He says he wants to see the Sugar software run on many different kinds of hardware and software platforms, even on Windows, if the Sugar experience is not sacrificed.
Could this be the first time anything interesting has ever emerged from the Eurovision Song Contest? Martin Weller has been musing about it — as was Darren Waters a few days ago.
Martin writes:
I started to watch it, but put a DVD on, then when I looked at Twitter it was awash with Eurovision comments. It struck me that Eurovision was in many ways the perfect Twitter event. It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too.
This reminded me of something I read years ago which made a great impression at the time. It was a fantasy. Imagine you’re hovering high above the earth some hot summer night. You can see into millions of homes. A big networked TV show is being broadcast — the kind of thing that used to attract tens of millions of viewers. In each household it’s been watched by one of more silent, passive viewers. The show is crap, and every one of those viewers knows that, really. But still they watch in silence.
And then someone shouts “Hey! This is crap!” And because it’s a hot summer night and it’s a fantasy, his words carry long distances. Other viewers hear them. And then they begin to shout “Yeah, it is crap. Why are we watching this garbage?” And other words to that effect. Viewers are communicating with one another, and suddenly the world has changed.
When I read that, I remember thinking that it constituted a great metaphor for the change from a media ecosystem dominated by push technology (aka broadcast TV) to something much more complex and interactive. An ecosystem in which big companies can no longer dictate the public conversation the way they used to. A much more interesting space.
This morning I spent a while searching for the post that had triggered these thoughts. Initially, I guessed that it must have come from the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I’ve jut re-read it at high speed and it isn’t there. No matter. It’s the thought that counts.
Later: Bill Thompson emails to say that my recollection
sounds like Network, the 1976 film with Peter Finch as the news anchor who gets everyone to go to the window and shout ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more’. Directed by Sidney Lumet.
He’s probably right. Funny how memory plays tricks on one. I could have sworn that it was something I’d read. But, courtesy of YouTube, here it is:
This is the smallest camcorder I’ve worked with so far. Big question: are the design compromises implicit in it the right ones? Will report in due course.
A TOP-SECRET DEAL being ironed out by G8 nations will give the Music and film industry a state-paid force of copyright cops with the same powers of customs officials.
The copyright police can seize your mp3 player or laptop to see if it contains pirated content and can order ISPs to turn over personal data without the need for proof.
G8 members, at the request of those wonderful examples of humanity at the RIAA, are agreeing to turn tax-payer paid customs officers into boot boys for the record and music business.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), will be discussed at the next G8 meeting in Tokyo, in July.
The Ottawa Citizen claims that the moves are part of a package of laws to govern private copying and copyright laws.
When you arrive in the country the copyright police would be given the job of checking laptops, Ipods, phones and other personal devices for content that ‘infringes’ copyright laws.
If you have any ripped CDs or DVDs you could be in deep in poo as the customs officials can define on the spot what they think constitutes copyright infringement.
Interesting review by Christopher Caldwell of Steve Coll’s biography of Osama’s folks.
Is Osama bin Laden a rebel against the Saudi Arabian ruling class or a model member of it? That question lurks behind “The Bin Ladens,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Steve Coll. The world’s most famous terrorist owes his fortune and his standing to a family business that Coll calls “the kingdom’s Halliburton.” Like Halliburton, the Saudi Binladin Group specializes in gigantic infrastructure projects. Government connections are the key to the family’s wealth.
Caldwell gives an excellent summary of the book, culminting in the revelation that the bin Ladens are still doing just fine.
Sept. 11 changed the family in two big ways: it made one of the sons into the hero of the Arab world, and it drove up the price of oil, igniting a construction boom. With oil topping $100 a barrel, the bin Laden group is thriving. It has 35,000 employees and expects to double in size in the coming decade. It is building airports in Egypt and elsewhere. In Mecca and Medina, it oversees vast real estate projects. “To please American audiences, the bin Ladens would have to seek forgiveness and denounce Osama,” Coll writes. “To please audiences in the Arab world, where the family’s financial interests predominantly lay, such a posture would be seen as craven.”
Seven years’ distance reveals a brutal reality. For both his family and his country Osama bin Laden’s attacks turned a profit.
In papers filed in support of its copyright infringement case against YouTube (prop. Google Inc.) Viacom claims that Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (the rights to which are owned by Viacom) had been viewed “an astounding 1.5 billion times”.
Wow! Only the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination comes close. I’d have thought that represented real success for the Viacom brand. But that’s not the way lawyers think.
Dave Winer has had an interesting idea. He wrote a script to work out how much work the Twitterers he follows makes for Twitter’s servers. Results here.
First a big disclaimer — this means nothing. In so many ways. To be on the list I had to have followed you some time in the last few months. If I haven’t followed you, you can’t be on the list. So don’t think of being on the list as some kind of honor.
So what are the numbers? Okay from left to right, the number of people folllowing the person, then the number of updates, and finally the first multiplied by the second, giving a very very rough indication of the amount of noise (or spew) this person is generating on Twitter. Of course Scoble is at the top of the list. I’ll let you figure out what that means. I chuckled when I saw Guy Kawasaki coming in at #4 — I guess his semi-spam pays off (if this means anything, which it doesn’t — see the disclaimer).
