Understanding is the Essence of Intelligence

Today, Google unveiled the Android Mobile Phone:


The first revolution with Android is the Synchronization of Mobile applications with Web applications such as Google Contacts, Calendar, Mail and Talk, you will never loose your contacts ever again!

Android is an Open-Source platform with the promise of thousands of unrestricted applications, as such Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications unlike Apple iPhone which controls which applications can be installed and specifically forbids VoIP applications.

The only real restriction today is that the phone is SIM-locked to T-mobile much like iPhone with AT&T.

CNET reports speed test between Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari:


We'll have to review this with Firefox 3.1 optimized JavaScript engine with trace-based JIT which could get Firefox on par with Chrome:

What about Microsoft Internet Explorer? How long will it take for end-users to find-out they're running their business on the back of a turtle?

In his review of the NEO FreeRunner, an open-source mobile phone running on Linuxoids, Wayne MacPhail, tells us that Open-Source sucks at designing usable products:

Physical buttons are placed in ergonomically awkward positions, the drop down menus are slow and the screen scrolling is lethargic and unresponsive. This would be a phone you would use as a prop in a comedy sketch about bad Russian Cold War products.

... GIMP, a popular open source photo editor is to Photoshop what an elephant is to Martha Graham.

There are a few design successes in Open-Source though, such as Firefox, but for the most part, Open-Source still remains designed by engineers for engineers. That explains why most of the successes of Open-Source have been on servers and language tools which are only used by engineers and hard-core network administrators.

The typical Open-Source is a tool that can do it all, but has so many undocumented options all over the place that you need to be an expert and spend hours to figure out how to do basic things. Mac OS X is a good example showing that less is more as far as design is concerned and that good design can transform an unknown (by the masses) open-source project into a successful product that everyone can use. We have to recognize that picking and laying-out the right features is difficult and essential for end-users rather than providing everything and let end-users figure out how to use them.

Jean-Hugues tells me that this is why we need to act like artists, not like engineers. The problem, Jean-Hugues, is that we are engineers, not artists!

Chris Messina goes as far as to write that "open source design” is an oxymoron and that "Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head"..

So to fix the problem we need to hire Open-Source designers.

Which leads me to the next question, why are there so many Open-Source engineers for so few Open-Source designers?

Open-Source has gained tremendous popularity since Microsoft became so dominant that it started to stifle competition and innovation while working against standards such as SVG, which continues to be missing in IE8, 7 years after SVG 1.0 became a recommendation from the W3C.

On the other hand, designers have, during the same period, enjoyed a relatively open market and have so far not felt the urgency to join the Open-Source movement.

For this to change open-source developers need to seek designers early in the design phase of open-source projects. The same goes for documentation and marketing in general but good design would go a long way towards improving Open-Source adoption by the rest of them (end-users).

Seeking a designer does not mean picking a really good engineer and assigning him or her to the design task, it means looking for really good designers to help really good engineers provide usable open-source products.

There must be designers willing to work on open-source projects, to find them we need to engage them, some of them may be found from Open Designs, OSWD, CSS Zen Garden or Open Web Design. These are all for web design but a lot of applications today are web-based anyways and I'm sure these designers could design better hardware and software that most of us would.

To attract designers we need to empower them so that they own the design and have the final say as what goes in and what does not. We also need to let designers pick the design tools they want even if these are not open-source.

The Open-Source model of sharing knowledge, discoveries, and developments is spreading beyond software everyday.

The Eco-Patents Commons from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), aims at sharing patents to reduce pollutions. IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony have already pledged 31 patents to the Eco-Patents Commons.



I believe that the Open-Source model can greatly accelerate the development of humanity vital solutions in sustainable development, health and balanced nutrition.

"No one who works in TV gets to ask this question", says Clay Shirky in his brilliant speech at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo.

According to Clay, the time comes from the Cognitive Surplus TV has been masking for 50 years and Wikipedia would represent about a 100 million hours of thought while TV watching is 200 billion hours in the US alone every year, or 2,000 wikipedia projects wasted every year watching television, or one Wikipedia project wasted every weekend just watching adds. Clay also teaches us that 4-year-olds now knows that a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.

The Internet revolution is just beginning and the amount of cognitive surplus put to work is growing every day world-wide. People now want to use their cognitive power to empower themselves and give new meaning to their lives rather than giving it away to adds, sitcoms or gin. This shift is redefining everything we know in unpredictable ways.

Yesterday morning at OSCON, David Recordon announced the creation of the Open Web Foundation. According to the announcement, "the Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications".

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This new foundation will hopefully enable faster development of open data specifications such as my authorization web service.

I am currently performing research on an Open Source Authorization Web Service for web applications.

Most web sites with users and users' data have to provide an authorization service to decide which data a user can access and under which conditions (read, write, delete, ...).

In Wikipedia, anyone can modify unrestricted articles, users registered for more than 3 months can modify restricted articles, only administrators can delete an article. Administrators are authorized by other existing administrators.

In the LinkedIn service, users are only able to access information from their friends, and less information as their relationship distance increases with other users. The information accessed is read-only for friends' data and full access for most personal information. More complex rules exist for recommendations which can only be accepted by a user and modified only by the sender at the express request of the receiver and under the control of a trusted third party, the LinkedIn service itself. Also LinkedIn users cannot break their relationship with their friends, only an administrator can do this.

In a hypothetical accounting service, accountants are able to add, modify or delete accounting records for a month. Then records can only be read for ten years and cannot be deleted or edited by anyone including company owners. Finally after ten years, accounting records can be deleted by owners but still cannot be edited.

In some banking service, account holders can view their bank accounts and perform payments with additional authentication or a per-use basis.

The same or greater complexity applies to all social network sites and enterprise services managing data and users.

Databases (SQL and others) alone cannot provide these services as the SQL language is far too limited and therefore all services must implement an authorization layer or service within their service to marshal database access. Built-in database access controls are seldom used except to limit what the service can do as a whole versus what database administrators can do.

Complex authorization relationships are non trivial to develop, error-prone and hence very costly and lengthy to implement. In some cases the time to market features is significantly increased because engineers far underestimate the overhaul of their authorization schemes and subsequent performance and scalability degradation.

The lack of a separate authorization service and distinct data model makes it very difficult to manage authorization data and even more difficult and error-prone to change authorization schemes.

As social networks and other internet services develop there is a growing need for information sharing between services, data backup and subsequent users' need to control their own data.

End-users should not be required to re-enter over and over their personal information, they should be able to authorize service providers some access to their own data. Service providers also benefit from existing information and enrich end-users experience therefore increasing the value of personal data. This provides for a positive-value feedback loop where data enables services that in turn increase the value of existing data and entices users to enter additional data.

While developing the DataFever network the most vital service to develop quickly became a versatile, scalable, low-delay, and reliable authorization web service. As such I have defined a number of concepts to express complex authorization rules encompassing data licensing issues with data contracts, and resource groups.

After specifying the authorization web service, I realized that this constituted a major building block to deliver the vision for The DataFever Network.

Related Post:
What is Data Portability and why is it important to all of us?

Related Wikipedia Articles:
Identity and Access Management
Data Portability
OAuth
XRI
Dataweb
Social Web
Open Social
OpenMicroBlogging

My name is Jean Vincent, I was born in France in 1963 and lived in the countries of France, Morocco and the United States. I am not attached to any country in particular as I am first and foremost a human being and believe that we need to work together rather than against each other to make this earth a better place for all.

I believe that we need to find the ways to abolish frontiers even though I recognize it is difficult to do today for a number of reasons. The first of these reasons being our own fear of the differences that we naturally emphasize in strangers. Abolishing frontiers does not necessarily mean one uniform country, it means freedom of movement as outlined by Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I am agnostic in its broadest meaning as I can't figure out if god exists or not and, if s/he exists, what we should be doing if anything. However I strongly believe that all existing religions today are very far from the truth and were designed by humans to control (the largest number of) other humans. Religions have indeed been very effective at leveraging our natural fears. If god exists we need to seriously question who s/he is and what s/he may want us to do.

I believe that humanity will spend most of the twenty-first century re-inventing development to make it sustainable. After this transition, the world will be able to continue its unstoppable march towards more understanding of ourselves and our environment.

This blog is about science, sustainable development, health, nutrition, open-source, education, and changing the world in general hopefully to make it a better place :)

Making the world a better place is not just desirable, it is possible with the help of everyone of us, citizens of the world by nature. It is up to everyone of us to do something about it, be it only to communicate our desire for a better world around us.

After hesitating for a long time, I finally decided to start this blog using posterous.com, which was recommended to me by my old friend Jean-Hugues Robert, mostly because of the ability to simply backup my posts through my email client sent items.

My posts will be in English and in French.

My public LinkedIn profile is at:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanvincent

I am always keen of making new connections with people who want to positively change the world for the better, so feel free to contact me if you share the same goal, and especially if you disagree with my ideas and the ways to get there.

I hope you'll enjoy.