![]() ![]() This is one of the better articulations of just how broadly the idea of open, collaborative, distributed innovation can be used. To wit: Thomas Goetz's piece in the November issue of Wired, Open Source Everywhere. And, although "open source" is commonly understood to be a software-writing practice, it's clearly meant for bigger and even better things. The idea of making the inner workings of a technology or process not just visible, but accessible, is deliriously seductive to those of us who think that collaborative, democratic approaches can change the world. It's no secret that we here at have an affection for the "open source" concept*. Each soldier is conceived of as part of a system of units, real-time intelligence sources (such as unmanned aerial vehicles and "smart dust"), both relying on and contributing to "operational topsight." It's useful to recognize that, whatever advantage swarming protesters have at the moment, the military and police forces are also beginning to go emergent, too. The American military has been aggressively pursuing emerging collaborative technologies to help soldiers make flexible, well-informed judgments about battlespace conditions and goals. Peer-to-peer, distributed systems aren't just the tools of protesters and activists. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to Linux-based OS." Dave Gallop is quoted as saying, “Evidence shows that Linux is more stable. According to an article in the National Defense Magazine, this is part of a larger move to Linux in the Army. Linux will be the OS of choice for the "Commander's Digital Assistant" package, which allows the field commander to coordinate troops, movement, and intelligence. The latest application of Linux on the battlefield is the Army's " Land Warrior" project, intended to define the capabilities, equipment and tactics of the 21st century soldier. ![]() Linux holds up better under adverse conditions, and can be found embedded in a growing number of small devices. The notorious insecurity and relative instability of Windows can be somewhat more than an annoyance on the battlefield. Linux - the open source poster child - is becoming increasingly popular in the American military. ![]() The article has received quite a bit of attention in the mainstream media (I mean, how could you not want to learn more about monkey mind control?!?), in turn giving an important boost to the status of open biology movement, and the Public Library of Science. This has obvious implications for adaptive technology for the disabled, and opens the way for more advanced mind-machine interfaces. The monkeys quickly realized that they didn't need to move their arms to control the robots. They then disconnected the joystick the monkeys continued to control the robotic arm via the brain-computer connection. Researchers at Duke University implanted computer connections into the brains of monkeys, allowing the team to learn the brain signals corresponding to the monkeys using a joystick to control a remote robotic arm. Fortunately, the second issue of PLoS Biology contains an article that has received abundant attention: monkey mind control (warning: 3MB PDF). PLoS currently publishes two journals, PLoS Biology and (soon) PLoS Medicine.Īll very cool, but if reputable scientists and interesting research teams don't use the journals to publish their results, it might take awhile for PLoS to build up any steam. Using the Creative Commons license, PLoS journals allow anyone on the Internet to read and reproduce articles for free. The Public Library of Science - PLoS - is a new organization focusing on making scientific literature open and available to the public. Current non-SETI distributed computing projects include protein folding and climate prediction. What can be handled with this method? Anything that requires mathematical analysis of lots and lots of components. Once BOINC is out of beta, we could see a flowering of interesting distributed computing projects. ![]() BOINC continues this tradition, running on Windows 95 and up, Linux/x86 (possibly others to come), Solaris/SPARC, and Mac OS X. Not only was the most well-known of the various distributed computing projects, it ran on a wide variety of platforms, including some not normally included in other projects, such as the Mac and SPARC. It's also a client-side program, making it possible for a single user to participate in a variety of distributed computing projects with a single application. In effect, it will make supercomputing power available to the masses.īut BOINC is more than the server source code. This will allow anyone (well, anyone with sufficient programming chops and an available server) to run distributed computing experiments. A refinement of the code underlying the popular distributed computing application is now available under the name BOINC - Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. ![]()
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