The RealMac Blog

I’ve always been interested in people collaborating in new and innovative ways. First was through e-mail, then Internet relay chat, instant messaging and the list goes on… however, one key flaw that all of these have is that the real socialization aspect is not present. So all these people who are either telecommuting, or run a business completely out of their home are not getting the same level of high quality interaction that they may otherwise get in an office environment.

During February 2006 in New York City two guys decided to make a paradigm shift in the way people interact. They started a movement affectionately known as ‘Jelly’. they define it as casual co-working, a process in which people are invited to work from their home for the day. “We provide chairs and sofas, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of.”

From my vantage point, jellies provide a unique sort of social interaction that is often missing in the day-to-day lives of intellectuals, designers, Internet groupies, developers and plenty more people. In an increasingly more competitive world, there is a strong need for people who are creative.Creativity is not something that can be pressured, but instead something that is extracted by way of the environment.

Where are these Jellies?

There are currently seven jellies in effect. They’re located in New York City, Austin Texas, Atlanta Georgia, Sydney Australia, Boston Massachusetts, Houston Texas, Philadelphia PA. Plenty more are on the way.

Where can I get more information?
Workatjelly.com has links to bunch of different articles and video on this new and exciting phenomenon.

Have you personally gone to one?
Nope, I deal with people all day 40 hours a week right now. My present job offers somewhat limited flexibility in that area.

After not attending a Long Island Linux User Group meeting in months, my friends encouraged me attend to this one. I have taken some notes of the event and posted them for the benefit of my readers. Hopefully you can make sense of my somewhat arcane notes.

Why do I support the free culture movement?
Simply put, when software is free, it encourages people to tinker and learn things they may have not done otherwise due to economic factors. As software is made freely available, it will be easier for individuals to learn and likewise contribute to our workforce.

On Music, I believe that if given the opportunity people will choose to support artists. Significant inroads have been made with the iTunes music store and offering music at 99 cents a song and more recently, giving users the option of downloading DRM-free music. Bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have released their albums freely and given users the opportunity to pay what they feel is reasonable.

The movie industry has recently reported record profits, despite claims people are pirating left and right. I prefer the experience of watching a movie at home or a friend’s house instead of a theater. Call me old, but my last experience involved a bunch of kids making the most annoying noises you can imagine and nonstop talking. More movies should be released either streaming over the web at a low cost or for free with some advertisements thrown in. The typical $10 at the door system really doesn’t work for me and I’m sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

So back to notes on the meeting…
Free culture is actually two different things… The group, ‘Students for free culture’ and ‘free culture’
Presenter: G Parker Higgins
Free culture @ NYU
Free culture and free software : a new environmentalism

Students for free culture
• International organization, founded in 04
• Chapter-based, has over 30 chapters in high schools and colleges across the world

The group has four primary functions
• creating resources for chapters and public
• reaching out to student sand youth
• networking with groups
• issuing advocacy on behalf of chapters

• Free Culture @ New York University – An official club with a budget, primarily holding events on campus. Most of the events are open to the public.
• What kind of events– Held the first major DRM protest at the Apple Store over FairPlay and at Tower over Sony rootkits
• Held creative commons art show on campus and in second life
• Led national boycott of Regal cinemas what made it to Digg.com
• Host lectures that are available freely online

Definition of free cultural works
• Freedom to use and perform the work
• Freedom to study and apply information
• Freedom to redistribute copies
• Freedom to distribute derivative works

Objectives
• Promoting creativity in access and ability
• Fostering technological freedom
• Anti-DRM, support free software, oppose filtering, support net neutrality
• Founded by a group of student at Swarthmore college
• In 03 students posted 15k leaked internal Diebold e-mails and posted them to a school hosted server
• Diebold posted a DMCA takedown notice and sued the students
• Eventually the memos were allowed to be posted and the student

Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
Richard Stallman - Free software, free society

Free software as an umbrella term
• Unite disparate groups with some common goals
• Common goals aren’t even necessarily known, but are achievable by a a large group much more than a single organization
Organizations in the free software movement
Long Island Linux User Group
EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation
Creative Commons

Free Software Foundation
Public Knowledge
Downhill Battle

People having control over the free sharing of information is not a new phenomenon.
For centuries, the cost of reproduction has fallen, this is one dramatic stretch of it.
Today, distribution and collaborative development costs can be really low.

The fight will be easy
• Information wants to be free
• When people experience it, they want info to continue to be free
• Tech will continue to reduce the cost of reproduction
But not that easy…
• Industries that have business models in place don’t want anything to disrupt them, good or bad
• Record industry, movie industry, all rejected technologies that ultimately proved to be very beneficial to them
Why is it important?
• Any threat to fair use is a threat to free speech, not the least because of the chilling effects.
• Our media is highly dependent on fair use and open access.

People are always welcome at FC@NYU events. Subscribe to the listserv at www.freeculturenyu.com
- FreeCulture.org maintains an IRC channel at #freeculture on server irc.freenode.net

Questions / Comments
Attribution vs Derived works – A commonly discussed topic on the creative commons community listserv. The distinction is the same that applies to copyrights. If a copy is a derivative, you still have to attribute the original. There is a risk that something will be attributed to the maker.
What is the likelihood that 20 or 30 years down the future of the RIAA or other record labels taking into account the open source movement into their business models?
Every new medium has began by pirates. In many situations, companies held back technology out of fear. The same thing is happening to today with phone companies, high definition television on the Internet vs television, etc.
700MHz frequency. What will the outcome be? What is the FCC’s role in this.

Some non-mac users just don’t get it. John Siracusa dishes the dirt on the Leopard.

The two million Mac quarter

During my 13 plus years being a Mac user, I have literally heard it all. From Apple being the beleaguered computer company to personal views about why the Mach kernel is inferior to some of the other alternatives out there.

I can only speak for myself, I love my Mac systems and am glad that Apple has been able to stay with or ahead of the industry in many areas. In other areas such as displays, they are areas where things lagging though. For example, the video card options on the Mac Pro systems are rather disappointing compared to similar offerings on the PC. AMD and NVidia don’t seem interested in offering us any alternatives, even though machines were released close to one year ago.

Back to the main point though. We are a lively bunch and we generally love to publish. It goes back to our roots in the 1980s with the Mac being a publishing workhorse. It’s simply amazing that Apple will be selling over 2m Macs again in a single quarter. These are desktop and portable machines run by end-users, not sitting around in a datacenter somewhere. Yeah I’m a shareholder, but it is still great to see my platform of choice thriving in an increasingly diverse market.

How to Read a Book

Yes I’m in Graduate School, but reading always seemed like a chore to me. I found this document most helpful in providing me with useful bits of advice to overcome some really limiting habits.

Courtesy of Macminute: MacTech Magazine has announced that its MacForge Mac open source project index now has over 45,000 projects. MacForge.net was created for not only the experienced open source user, but to introduce the Mac technical community to the wide array of projects available. With the huge availability of open source out there, it can be difficult to find projects most relevant to the Mac. MacForge indexes open source projects that either have already been built for/tested on the Mac, or are likely to run on the Mac, without major porting work. The site also features the ability to filter projects further, search, browse categories, and sort in a variety of different ways.

How do you like them Apples now?

It is a misconception amongst people who don’t use Mac OS X that our application options are limited. The blending of hardware and software design is what makes the experience so rich. AdiumX owes its very existance to the open-source movement that has taken place since the 90s.

The ability to connect to AIM, Jabber, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu (what is that anyway), LiveJournal, Novell Groupwise, QQ, and Lotus Sametime make it far more sophisticated than iChat.

Not to mention it offers tabbed messaging, another feature iChat currently lacks.

All these connectivity options make AdiumX the swiss army knife of instant messaging on our platform. It’s incredibly easy to setup and has almost all the features a user would need. One notable omission is the inability to do video or audio chats, but this is more due to the closed-source nature of these features with AOL’s Instant Messaging system. Adium doesn’t do IRC either but there are plenty of options there, besides IRC really more group than individual.

I personally enjoy being able to personalize the program using custom soundsets and visual themes. It is a welcome change over the boring run of the mill im sent / received, etc sounds that really get old after hearing them every single day.

If you have a Mac, give Adium X a try, otherwise try Pidgin. You’re missing out if you don’t.

Camino is a web browser written from the ground up for the Mac OS X platform. It has native Aqua widgets, and combines the power of the Mozilla gecko rendering engine. Mike Pinkerton and another programmer coded it originally to demonstrate to Netscape that Gecko could be embedded into a Cocoa application. Mac OS X was fairly new and Internet Explorer was considered to be the best browser available at the time, even receiving Steve Jobs endorsement at a Macworld expo.

It isn’t ground-breaking, but it is a nice alternative to Safari or FireFox worth looking into.