Technology — Page 3

The Florida Courts

November 21, 2000 by Michael Boyle

The Florida Courts have an excellent site, and according to one report they often publish material on the web before it is publicly available in paper form. All of the documents pertaining to yesterday’s Supreme Court of Florida case are online – again, an example of how governments are using the web to distribute primary source material. Years ago I researched a story about an Ontario Court case, and it literally took me weeks to get the primary documents.

I think many of us “in the business” forget about this part of the web from time to time. Nothwithstanding all of the current issues – how to make money, questions of the appropriate use design and technology, usability, etc. – it’s good to remember that the web has made these important (though arcane) documents available to just about anyone who is interested. There’s a great deal of power in that, even if the web were to stay as-is from this day forward.

Cutting through the madness

October 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Cory Doctorow writes about [His] Date with the Gnomes of San Jose at the first P2P Working Group meeting, which looks like it might be a stillborn effort by Intel to coopt (or just to support?) the peer-to-peer community.

Really great quote from the article: “[peer to peer nets are] faery infrastructure, networks whose maps form weird n-dimensional topologies of surpassing beauty and chaos; mad technological hairballs run by ad-hocracies whose members each act in their own best interests.
In a nutshell, peer-to-peer technology is goddamn wicked. It’s esoteric. It’s unstoppable. It’s way, way cool.”

Now THIS

October 16, 2000 by Michael Boyle

I can get behind: la fondation Daniel Langlois for Art, Science, and Technology is opening a new research and documentation centre for art and new technologies. [via YULblog]

From the “Blast

July 27, 2000 by Michael Boyle

from the past” department, Apple is working on bringing their handwriting recognition software to the Macintosh. The technology was used in Apple’s Newton, which, though a failure as a standalone product, featured excellent handwriting recognition. The important variable was memory: a desktop implementation should be pretty good on a fast G4 with lots of RAM. Cool.

Community computing centers

July 11, 2000 by Michael Boyle

are an interesting way to bring technology, libraries, modern communications and the like to areas with insufficient infrastructures to support home or even business connections, like in Africa. Lots of people are working on them in that context. It seems that people find it an interesting idea in the US too: Cyber Centers Burn Up Atlanta [in Wired News].

The digital divide does exist, it’s just not as simple a matter as most nay-sayers propose. It’s a cultural and political issue, mixed intricately with questions of pedagogical theory, infrastructure development (and hence market issues in the development of major capital projects), among other things.