“Why is everyone in San Francisco obsessed with bacon?”.
“The city is built on it. Well, interleaved strata of bacon and vegans”.
I went to a geekhaus brunch, and the bacon was delicious (this is the same group who had successfully created bacon vodka, so it was bound to be.) Rose talked a bit about her research into hacker spaces, most notably the European spaces, but also the parallel US developments like l0ft and NYC Resistor. Jeremy and I spoke a great deal about what the low-hanging-fruit was for the edge-work. I’d initially thought that hacking on making WordPress a platform with some of the functionality of the centralising social-networking sites would be useful, but of course there is already lots of work going on in that space that is already producing results – DiSo and BuddyPress being the two main ones I know about. I need to set aside an evening or two to really grok the standards that DiSo is using.
So instead we talked about the slightly higher-hanging fruit, still unplucked since the last time this was at the forefront of people’s minds. Around then I went looking for smarter people than me to talk to, and ended up crammed into the back of a car with Jonathan Moore,Bram Cohen, and Zooko. I’m really pleased that Zooko is taking a lead on distributed file systems with Tahoe, and I really must drag Jonathan away to talk about all of this, as he’s is one of the most absorbent academic-paper-readers I know. Skimming through some of the XMPP and DiSO discussions, it feels like they’re discussing Zooko’s triangle-style problems right now; I expect they know the reference.
Terabyte drives are down to $175 now. Not quite the $70 I thought we’d have reached by now, back in 2002 — but then, I’m not sure if IBM was factoring in a collapse in the dollar when they published those figures (Matt Daley has a more up-to-date, Australian, perspective) . And we still have the rest of the year to catch up!
August 11th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Been following the Edge conversation for a couple of weeks now. It strikes me that there are loads of bandwidth, processing power and drive space on the desktops of college campuses. Unfortunately there seems to be a strong push to centralize systems at universities and sell off many aspects of the system to the “Cloud”. Where I’m working now all incoming students will get Gmail or Hotmail accounts. Chat/IM has been recently centralized on proprietary systems with logging. Centralization owns our campus and the Cloud has a strong beach head established but there are small pockets of covert resistance and new ones forming. Keep the home fires burning for us.