Catherine Cooke

The Guardian ran an appropriately generous obituary of my Open University colleague, Catherine Cooke, who was tragically killed in a road accident recently. Catherine was a remarkable person — larger than life in every sense of the term, with the grand manner and bearing of a dowager duchess and the relentlessness of a steam locomotive. I used to work with her occasionally at OU summer schools and remember thinking once that she was the nearest thing in real life to one of Bertie Wooster’s aunts. Our students really loved her — they responded to her directness and haughty indifference to the petty considerations of life. To them, she looked like a real academic, completely different from the colourless, earnest mediocrities (us) who surrounded her. Like me, she lived in Cambridge — but in her case right in the centre of the town. When I asked her once why she had chosen to live there she replied that she had chosen a house that was exactly midway between the two most important facilities in her life — the nearest university photocopier and the railway station! She was also a great scholar — in the words of Andrew Saint’s obit, her research “transformed understanding of the [Russian] constructivist movement not just in the English-speaking world but in Russia as well, and inspired the generation after perestroika with enthusiasm for its legacy”. It always seems trite to say “we shall miss her” when someone dies, but in Catherine’s case it’s the literal truth. Larger-than-life people leave bigger gaps in our lives. May she rest in peace.

Swiss Army goes digital

This is too good to be true, but I read it in The Register:

“It was bound to happen. Given that you can buy a Victorinox Swiss Army Knive with just about every gadget known to man, from horse-hoof awl to Hubble Space Telescope lens polisher, it’s no real surprise that the company – in association with flash memory outfit Swissbit – is now offering cutting tools plus USB flash memory stick. The gadget will be unleashed on an incredulous world at CeBIT next week.”

Thinks… Wonder when Quentin’s birthday is…”.

Microsoft and SCO: more

Some of my friends are sceptical about the charge that Microsoft is playing organ-grinder to SCO’s monkey. This is because they are innocent souls who like to give their fellow-men the benefit of the doubt. However, back in the real world, today’s NYT reports that:

“More evidence emerged yesterday about Microsoft’s role in encouraging the anti-Linux campaign being waged by the SCO Group, a small Utah company.

BayStar Capital, a private investment firm, said Microsoft suggested that it invest in SCO, which is engaged in a legal campaign against Linux, a rival to Microsoft’s Windows.

BayStar took Microsoft’s suggestion to heart and invested $50 million in SCO last October. But a spokesman for BayStar, Robert McGrath, said, “Microsoft didn’t put money in the transaction and Microsoft is not an investor in BayStar.” He added that Microsoft executives were not investors as individuals in the investment firm, which is based in San Francisco.

Mr. McGrath said the suggestion came from unidentified “senior Microsoft executives” but not Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, or Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive.”

After the Bang

“Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute today unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called “dark ages,” the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe. The new image should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the universe long ago.

This historic new view is actually two separate images taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Both images reveal galaxies that are too faint to be seen by ground-based telescopes, or even in Hubble’s previous faraway looks, called the Hubble Deep Fields (HDFs), taken in 1995 and 1998.” [ Source]

So where do those bootleg movies on file-sharing networks come from, exactly?

Er, mostly from people working in the movie industry. Here’s an interesting paper by two AT&T researchers which establishes that salutary fact. Quote:

“Our research attempts to determine the source of unauthorized copies by studying the availability and characteristics of recent popular movies in file sharing networks. We developed a data set of 312 popular movies and located one or more samples of 183 of these movies on file sharing networks, for a total of 285 movie samples. 77% of these samples appear to have been leaked by industry insiders. Most of our samples appeared on file sharing networks prior to their official consumer DVD release date. Indeed, of the movies that had been released on DVD as of the time of our study, only 5% first appeared after their DVD release date on a web site that indexes file sharing networks, indicating that consumer DVD copying currently represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks.”

Thanks to Larry Lessig for the link.

Is the SEC looking at the Microsoft-SCO alliance?

Groklaw thinks it may be. Now that would be interesting…

Searching the Deep Web

Interesting Salon article by Alex Wright.

Bruce Perens’s critical examination of the SCO ‘case’

Predictably, he doesn’t think much of it. Quote:

“In 1985, concerned Unix customers asked A&T to clarify that particular term of the license. A&T agreed and published the license change in the Echo newsletter that got sent to all Unix licensees in August of that year.

Explaining the change, A&T wrote that the sentence was added to assure licensees that the company would claim no ownership in the software that they developed–only the portion of the software developed by A&T.

SCO is legally bound to honor the contract and publicly stated interpretation of A&T’s terms.

SCO conveniently overlooked this change when it decided to sue IBM. As A&T’s successor in interest, SCO is legally bound to honor the contract and publicly stated interpretation of A&T’s terms. That’s why I think SCO’s major claim against IBM and Linux will fail. The remaining copyright infringement claim is that Linux makes use of the Unix API (application program interface), and that copies of several header files defining that API were included in Linux.

SCO should know there is ample case law asserting that APIs can’t be restricted and are available for all to implement under “fair use” in copyright law. ”

How news travels through the Blogosphere

Lovely illustration by Stephen VanDyke. Thanks to Karlin Lillington for pointing me to it.

A Harvard case study on the political significance of Blogging

The Kennedy Center at Harvard has published a fascinating case study on how the Blogging community rather than the mainstream media exposed Senator Trent Lott’s speech honouring Strom Thurmond that cost him his place in the political sun. What’s interesting — and useful — about the case is that it’s exhaustively researched. Also interesting is that the PDF comes with pretty restrictive DRM measures. No cutting and pasting — even of short excerpts. Harvard is clearly not joining the Open Courseware bandwagon. Reminds me of Jay Rosen’s list of the ten differences between weblogging and traditional journalism.