Image and text source: NYTimes

Published: February 10, 2008

REDMOND, Wash. — TUCKED away in a building on this forested corporate campus, John Montgomery and his team of 17 programmers might be more at home in Silicon Valley than at Microsoft.

Compared with its tenacious Internet competitors like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is generally still viewed as being more of the shrink-wrapped software generation than the Web 2.0 world.

In Silicon Valley today, software is increasingly delivered as a Web service, it is often put together by teams of programmers who might be scattered on three continents, it’s often free to users, and Web surfers usually do the testing soon after the first prototype is complete.

By contrast, Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.

Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold.

Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.

Read the entire article at NYTimes

VANDANA SHIVA

Image and text source: The News Hour

In the fourth installment in a series of conversations about the impact of globalization, NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman interviews Vandana Shiva, an activist at the forefront of the fight against globalization for nearly three decades.

PAUL SOLMAN: For three decades, physicist Vandana Shiva has been a key activist in the fight against globalization, especially in her native India, where she says it threatens hundreds of millions of peasants still down on the farm.

She’s accused beverage companies of stealing the people’s water in India, this footage by a new documentary by Swedish filmmakers PeA Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian.

Outside the European patent office, Shiva challenged corporate patents of seeds, what she calls the biopiracy of natural resources.

VANDANA SHIVA, Physicist: Our world is not for sale.

Read the entire interview at  The News Hour

Image source: galibier design‘s quattro turntable

Text source: Serial Consign

Original post: September 24, 2007

One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.

How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?

It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I was also very involved in the visual arts since I was a kid, and when I reached my mid-twenties I decided to focus in art as a profession and enrolled in art school in the mid-1990’s.

I eventually got a BFA from Otis College of Art, followed by a residency at Skowhegan School of Art, and then I received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. It was during my Graduate studies at Cal Arts when I became heavily invested in New Media. While at Cal Arts, I also played percussion with the Cal Arts Latin Jazz Band, and I also developed various music projects with another visual artist, Justin Peloian. Obviously, being part of a visual arts program meant that I would make “art” and so I was also heavily invested in studio based art. I was very influenced by Conceptualism. I simply loved (and still love) ideas, and I embraced my time at Cal Arts because the school has very good critical thinkers teaching.

(more…)

Image and text source: Archive.org

Eben Moglen’s keynote address, titled “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” presented at Plone Conference 2006 on October 25, 2006 in Seattle, WA.

In this inspiring lecture, Professor Moglen weaves together the industrial revolution, the knowledge economy, the free software movement, the One Laptop Per Child project and the long struggle for human dignity and equality.

Eben Moglen is Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School, and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation.
MP3 and Ogg (audio only) versions of this talk are also available. Click on the FTP or HTTP “all files” links at left.

This item is part of the collection: Open Source Movies

Director: Grace Stahre
Producer: ONE/Northwest & The Plone Community
Production Company: Versant Media
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Language: English
Keywords: open source; eben moglen; plone; plone conference; politics; free software
Contact Information: For more information about Plone contact the Plone Foundation, http://www.plone.org. For more information about the Software Freedom Law Center, see http://www.softwarefreedom.org
Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

Image: Valéry Grancher: 24h00, 1999
interactive Web project sponsored by BAM

Image and text source: BAM/PFA

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA celebrates the cultural and artistic practice of remix, inviting guest artists to “rip, mix, and burn” elements from two digital-media works in the museum’s collection—Ken Goldberg’s Ouija 2000 and Valéry Grancher’s 24h00 (both 1999)—resulting in new artistic creations. Drawing from the open-source software tradition, with the permission of artists Goldberg and Grancher, the remix artists may alter or revise original code or media files from the source works, or they may choose to take a more conceptual route, remixing some of the methods or behaviors of the originals into their own new works. Ouija 2000 and 24h00 will be exhibited along with new works by Michael Joaquin Grey, Alison Sant, Jonathon Keats, and Nathaniel Wojtalik and Iris Piers. On view in BAM’s Bancroft lobby and stairwell gallery, the artworks will also be available via the exhibition website at bampfa.berkeley.edu/ripmixburn for the public to download and remix.
(more…)

Screenshot of Miro media player
(Credit: Miro)

Image and text source: CNet, State of Surveilance Blog

NBC’s recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of users of Apple iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC’s content. Could this be the push that brings easy-to-use ‘piracy’ to the masses? This article discusses the issues, and then provides step-by-step instructions to setup a computer to automatically download any of hundreds of TV shows as soon as they are broadcast and put online.

With Apple’s recent lovers’s spat with NBC making the headlines, it seems like a good opportunity to examine the state of the online TV downloads, be they paid or ‘pirated’. The end result of the dispute between the companies is that NBC’s shows, which currently count for approximately one third of iTunes’ TV show sales will no longer be available for sale at Apple’s iTunes store. Customers wishing to purchase NBC’s shows will now need to go through Amazon’s Unbox service. While Unbox supports users of Windows and TiVo, Mac users, as well as those millions of iPod users are left out in the cold. Linux geeks, and those customers who have purchased divx/avi capable portable music players are also excluded, but this small subset of the market were equally ignored by Apple. (more…)

Lawrence Lessig, left, a law professor, spoke at “Who Owns Culture?,” a talk moderated by Steven Johnson, an editor at Wired magazine.

Image and text source: NY Times
Published: April 9, 2005

he tickets for the event Thursday sold out in five minutes on the Internet, and on the evening itself the lines stretched down the block. The reverent young fans might as well have been holding cellphones aloft as totems of their fealty.

Then again, this was the New York Public Library, a place of very high ceilings and even higher cultural aspirations, so the rock concert vibe created some dissonance. Inside, things became clearer as two high priests of very different tribes came together to address the question of “Who Owns Culture?” – a discussion of digital file-sharing sponsored by Wired magazine, part of a library series called “Live From the NYPL.”

Read the article at  NY Times

Image and text: Mashable

Remember the time when we announced Facebook as a platform? Well, a lot has changed since then: thousands of great applications for Facebook have appeared, and having a “naked” Facebook profile is just not that cool these days. This time, we’ve assembled a list of 20 great music-related apps for Facebook that you simply must try out.

My Music – here’s one for all you iTunes users: this handy little app enables you to access your entire iTunes library directly from Facebook.

Pandora – tune into Pandora from Facebook and find your new favorite songs and artists.

Last.FM Music – the official Last.FM Facebook app lets you turn your music into playlists and compare musical tastes with friends. Read more about it here.

Last.FM Charts – import up to 5 charts from Last.FM into your Facebook profile.

iLike – somewhat of a competitor to Last.FM, iLike lets you see which concerts your friends are going to as well as add music and videos to your Facebook profile.

MixLister – create a personal theme song; import and create playlists and share them with everyone.

BandTracker – track your favorite bands and their shows and check out who your friends are tracking.

Music Videos – add favorite music videos to your profile. Simple and effective.

Yahoo! Music Videos – another way to import music videos to your profile, this time from Yahoo!’s vast collection.

Upcoming – track all the events you plan on attending. Great for tracking live shows.

What I’m Listening To – a must-have app that shows the world what song you’re currently listening to; powered by Last.FM’s audioscrobbler application.

Currenty Listening – similar to What I’m Listening To, this app shows the artist name and cover art of whatever song is currently playing on your computer.

My Last Songs Played – display the last songs played in iTunes or any other media player.

Image and text source: Greg.org

Originally posted on September 14, 2007

Wait, the Warhol Museum called the 1-hour excerpt of Empire released on DVD an unauthorized bootleg?

Yes they did, in 2004:

“It’s a bootleg!” says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Which is odd. The Italian company Raro Video has released several Warhol films on DVD over the last couple of years. Andy Warhol: 4 Silent Movies is listed as a 2005 release on Amazon, and there’s a Chelsea Girls DVD, too.Last year, Raro compiled 11 films and 8 discs into a box set, Andy Warhol Anthology, which–like all the films–is issued in region-free PAL format. There are extensive bilingual notes, interviews, and bonus material accompanying the discs, but there are also odd errors in formatting:

At least two of the silent films, Kiss and Blow Job, are mastered at the wrong speed [25fps instead of 16fps], and the once-randomly silent or audible soundtracks on the split-screen Chelsea Girls are provided in a single, seemingly arbitrary configuration which omits much well-documented dialogue.

Read the entire entry at Greg.org

Image and text source: New York Magazine

Published on November 22, 2004

At eight hours, Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire is something that one watches, as its creator said, “to see time go by.” Officially, the only way to see the artist’s epic stationary shot of the Empire State Building is to borrow a 16-millimeter print from MoMA or attend one of the museum’s infrequent screenings (there’s one on November 20). But a one-hour edit appears on a new Warhol-film DVD, Four Silent Movies, released by the Italian company Raro Video. “It’s a bootleg!” says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which owns the artist’s films. Raro says the disc is authorized; the museum disagrees and, says Huxley, may sue.

The qualities that make Empire a precursor to reality TV—no script, elevation of the mundane—would seem to encourage sampling. But defenders of the film (which Warhol slowed down; shot at 24 frames per second, it’s projected at 16) say it simply can’t be cut. “It’s conceptually important that it’s eight hours long,” says Callie Angell, director of the Whitney’s Warhol Film Project. “Some people show it at the regular sound speed to make it go by faster, and I just think that’s not the film.” Seeing the whole thing offers surprises, she adds. “[Warhol and Jonas Mekas] were shooting it from the office of the Rockefeller Foundation in the Time-Life building, and when they changed the reels they’d turn the lights on. In three reels, they started before they turned the lights back off, so you can see a reflection of Warhol and Mekas in the window. No one had ever mentioned that before. Probably no one ever had sat through the whole thing.”