Thanks to DUH BLOG :: 2004-01-08, I’ve been reading a paper by Yochai Benkler on the economic basis of open source development – Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm by Yochai Benkler http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html . Very good stuff – the abstract: For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one “owns” the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals. In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

Economic Scene: U.S. Is a Case Study in Free Trade – interesting article. Basically says that we have had free trade within the US for a century+, and that the primary effect has been to pull the income levels of the poorer regions up. The richer regions have not suffered significantly. And that we can draw a lesson from this as we consider globalization.

Amazon.com: Books: The Winter Queen : A Novel by Boris Akunin – a great detective novel, the first translated from a best-selling Russian series. A great character and a great story, makes me sad that I am not fluent in Russian, I have to wait for the rest of the series to be translated. I wonder how much other great reading I have missed because I am mono-lingual?

Nice list at Neil’s World - Pinging service run-down of all the services you might want to ping. I’ve updated my list, I also ping the folks at http://seablogs.hellbent.org/. You’d think someone would do a ping mirv service so I would just have to ping one thing, and they could distribute the pings out.

I’ve seen several pointers to Lookout email search for Microsoft Outlook - Lookout Software, most recently from Marc’s Outlook on Productivity. I’m mostly interested to see if it will help me navigate thru the thousands of RSS feed items I gather each week thru Newsgator – I need a faster way to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m impressed with the team’s responsiveness – I reported a minor bug this morning and they responded right away.

Great Observations from Tom Peters on offshoring. The ones that especially resonated with me:

* “Off-shoring” will continue; the tide cannot be reversed.

* Service jobs are a bigger issue than manufacturing jobs, by an order of magnitude.

* We are in the middle of a once every hundred years’ (or so) productivity burst – which is good for us … in the long haul.

* Americans’ “unearned wage advantage” (Born in the U.S.A.) could be erased … permanently.

* The wholesale, increasingly upscale entry of 2.5 billion people (China, India) into the global economy at an accelerating rate is virtually unfathomable. Unfathomable = Unpredictable, exceptional challenges, amazing opportunities.

* Free trade works. Period. It makes the world a safer place … in the long haul. The process is not pretty at times. (Sometimes long times.) Those who dutifully followed yesterday’s rules yet are displaced must be helped when the “rules change.” Such help must not be in perpetuity – it demands a sunset date.

* Big companies do not create jobs, and historically have not created jobs. Big companies are not “built to last;” they almost inexorably are “built to decline.”

Thanks to Scoble for the pointer.

Lost Remote: Super DVRs in the pipeline – these start to look like whole-home media servers. Are we going to end up with one media server in the house driving all our tvs, or a federated network of many of them?

Thanks Rich for the cookbook to get my config up to date – Tong Family Blog: MovableType Maintenance

Lost Remote: Max out your TiVo – nice pointer to the WeakNees site which looks like an easy way to upgrade your Tivo. I am teetering tho as I have said before, I am in deep doodoo if I screw up the Tivo.

Martin’s admitting that he watches the Apprentice (Deep Green Crystals: The Apprentice Episode 7: Tammy’s turmoil) has motivated me to come clean. Besides The Apprentice, we are in love with My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancee (what a finale last night!!); Smallville; 24; Friends; Judging Amy; Law and Order SVU; The Practice. And we have minor fetishes for Average Joe: Hawaii, The Ellen Degeneres show, and The Batchelorette. And March Madness is fast approaching, it is a fulltime job just to keep up with TV.

Alpine Launches World’s First Car Audio Head Units to Allow True Integration with iPod – this is what I really want.

From Rich’s site – great counsel on debugging a PC – basically really look hard at the power supply –

Well, here’s what I’ve learned about really debugging a PC that is crashing. Script for future use: Get a device count and estimate power supply requirements. Make sure the power supply is adequate to the job. Otherwise, go get another one. Run memtest86+ overnight. Make sure the basic CPU and…

EE Times - The trouble with Rover is revealed – from Lockergnome

Marginal Revolution: What ten books should an undergraduate read? – great list. I confess to having never read “Democracy in America” and so ordered a copy. If I had to slip in one more science oriented book, it would have to be something that covered G?del, perhaps G?del, Escher, Bach

Top 75 Network Security Tools via Scoble, thanks.