Alexis C. Madrigal

The iPhone Antennagate is, for most intents and purposes, over. Apple's free-case quick fix for the problem tamped down consumer anger -- and Apple's great earnings report blasted its problems off the front page. Analysts predict the issue won't materially affect the company's next financial reports.

The long-term impacts of the problem are less clear. Will unforeseen negative repercussions emerge in the future? Did Antennagate cause some kind of fundamental shift in Apple's relationship with its core fans?

There are scholars who study Apple's consumers as religious devotees. Consumer behavior specialists Russell Belk of York University and Gulnur Tumbat of San Francisco State, even put together a framework for assessing Apple's mystical mythology. The company was built on four key myths, they argued.

Here are the four narratives, as summarized by media scholar Texas A&M's Heidi Campbell, who distilled their work for her May paper "How the iPhone became divine":

1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company...

The stories they identified aren't myths in the sense that they aren't true, but more in the Joseph Campbell sense of being a story that helps people make sense of their relationship with the world. These ideas are where consumers attach to attachment Apple, so we thought it would make sense to see whether what happened during the affair could undermine any of these key beliefs.

We can throw out the satantic and resurrection myths right away, which didn't really come into play. Antennagate wasn't an attack on Apple's countercultural heritage, and its origin story is well-established.

About the only part of the core Apple fan belief system that the event could have been compromised is the hero myth. Jobs, at first, did not come off looking good. Comedians parodied his admonition that users were holding their phones wrong.

But after last week's press conference quelled questions about the company's practices and this week's iPhone sales report, Jobs not only seems like a hero again, but he reinforced the resurrection myth too.

Jobs even let media representatives into an inner sanctum at Apple, the antenna testing center. Fans responded with appropriate enthusiasm at being shown one of the powerful shrines to Jobs' dedication to perfection. BoingBoing tastemaker Xeni Jardin  posted photos of the place with the headline, "Best thing to come out of Antennagate? Apple's 'antenna testing chamber' porn." Bloggers reveled in using the official name of the facilities, "anechoic chambers," which practically buzzes with gnostic appeal.

Heidi Campbell, for one, doesn't think the company has much to worry about.

"This resurrection myth, and the belief in the infallibility of Mac technologies is going to keep people still invested," Thompson said.

Recalling the pricing and availability problems following the launch of the original iPhone, she concluded, "Antennagate will make waves for a little while, but if what happened to Apple around the launch of the original iPhone and all that rigmarole didn't shake people's faith, I don't think this will."

Indeed, as illustrated in this (hilarious) video that's garnered 5.5 million views on YouTube, it is hard to shake the faith of iPhone buyer that they are purchasing the world's best device.

"What the hell entices you about the iPhone 4, if you don't mind me asking?" an imaginary store clerk says. "It is an iPhone," the cartoon customer response. "You do realize that doesn't mean anything. It's a brand," the clerk responds, but to no avail.

But that's just it: the iPhone does mean something, and it's the type of meaning that transcends rational optimizing about features and raw performance. "Apple weathered the storm because there is such brand loyalty through the religious narrative," Campbell maintained. "When you're buying into Mac, you're buying into an ideology. You're buying into a community."
  Image: Alexis Madrigal.

The Internet is running out of addresses!

When devices are connected to our global network, each one is assigned a unique identifier. That 32-bit number is an IP (Internet protocol) address, and there are only about four billion possible numbers that can be stored in 32 bits.

Now, we find that there are only about six percent of those numbers left, according to a new piece in ReadWriteWeb. John Curran, an official from the non-profit that manages distributing IP addresses in North America, expects that those approximately 240 million addresses will be gone by the end of the year.

There is a solution: Internet service providers can switch to a revised Internet Protocol (IPv6) that uses a greater number of bits per address, thereby increasing the number of unique addresses by orders of magnitude. Experts, though, are sounding some alarm bells because that solution has to get deployed to work, and deployment of IPv6 has been slow.

What hasn't been slow is the number of devices being connected to the Internet, a fact which is blamed for exacerbating the address problem. "There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data," wrote ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus. "Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web."

Reading the Wikipedia entry on IPv4 address exhaustion, you'd probably believe that we're headed for some serious trouble as analysts try to predict whether enough people will switch over to the new IP language before addresses run out. But the recent behavior of companies is only a murky indicator of their future intentions. As ReadWriteWeb suggests, it's certainly possible that people will freak out when the moment of truth comes, and then quickly fix the problem.

We do happen to have a great historical analogue for the IP address issue. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, people worried that we were running out of phone numbers. The problem is essentially the same: you only have so many unique slots, and those slots eventually run out as phone numbers proliferate. So, in 1993, we get this UPI story: "U.S. Running Out of Phone Numbers."

"Americans have nearly used up the 1 billion phone numbers provided in a plan adopted in 1947," the piece reads. The plan to fix the problem was to release more area codes and start ten-digit dialing, which did indeed happen.

Again, it was the newfangled machines being connected to the network that were at fault. "Phone company officials blame the problem on increased demand for numbers by people adding extra lines to their homes and offices for such devices as computers and fax machines," the UPI wrote. "Cellular phones also have made a dent."

But a 2003 report [doc] from the company that runs our phone numbering system, the North American Numbering Plan Administration (yes, there is such an institution), finds that it wasn't just more devices, but a host of social, political, and technical factors. The report fingered bad planning by Bell, all kinds of technological things, government access, the break-up of AT&T, the competitive practices of the telecom companies, regulatory missteps, and "consumer's [sic] insatiable desire for increasing communication."

The "number exhaustion" problem, as NANPA calls it, never went away, but fixes kept being found because the system was too valuable to let fall apart.  

Perhaps we can take two lessons from this analogue, despite differences in the technology and time. First, call us optimistic, but even if Internet infrastructure people have to scramble, it seems unlikely that the system as a whole will be allowed to fall into disarray. Second, in looking for reasons for the problem, gadgets tend to get blamed when they are actually just the most visible new thing. There are undoubtedly a swarm of issues leading to IPv6 underdeployed. But that's actually good news because it means there will be plenty of ways to fix the problem when everyone swings into action.

There was a time, say around 1985, when Americans discovered "desktop publishing." Suddenly, *anyone* could make a newsletter or a flyer. And boy, did they, in MacPublisher and Pagemaker and a host of less illustrious products. By the time the web came along, the DIY design attitude was firmly entrenched, and it got extended to the networked realm.

But in recent years, decades after modern design first swept through the country's graphic arts scene, we're seeing a retrenchment of design and a recognition of the value of designers. The principles and practice never went away, but now they are positively everywhere. A feature film has been made about a font -- and it did well.

This is just an intuitive argument, but I think the reason we've seen the Return of Design is that people realized the value of actually knowing how to lay words and images on a page or screen. Sure, anyone could do it, but some people were damn good at it. It just took Comic Sans and blink tags and horrible clipart and unreadable color combinations to make people  see that good design was as much about guiding people to information as it was about looking pretty.

Now, here's where the hypothesis turns self-centered. Every writer and editor I know really liked an essay published this week by Paul Ford called "Real Editors Ship." Of course we would: it makes the case for our value in our economy. Here's the nugget of his thought.

Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are good at process. They think about calendars, schedules, checklists, and get freaked out when schedules slip. Their jobs are to aggregate information, parse it, restructure it, and make sure it meets standards. They are basically QA for language and meaning.

In other words, editors do the things for text that designers did for visual products. They standardize rules; they enforce consistency; they provide the key for the map; they make things right.

And yet, in recent years, they've seemed expendable, perhaps because they were still around. Now, though, they're disappearing. Text goes online with less editing than it did at magazines or newspapers. More and more of us writers are working without regular editors. More and more people are writing without ever having been edited. Maybe now people will realize what editors did: their presence will be felt in their absence.

Here's my analogy. We take good roads for granted in the US; our highway system just works, so you start to think of it almost as geology, almost immutable and close to eternal. But if you take a drive on the backroads of the Yucatan, the forest encroaches, large potholes appear out of nowhere, and the signage is indecipherable, regardless of your level of Spanish.

The Internet can feel like a jungle, and journalists are in the business of providing paths through the territory. Writers might blaze the trails, but editors maintain the roads. The vines are creeping and the potholes are growing. And maybe letting the road deteriorate is really the only way to make audiences and media companies realize the value of those whose names do not appear underneath the headline.

Update 12:32pm: This article has been updated to fix a couple of typos that only served to reinforce my point.

Going into politics usually means boning up on legal code not Google Code, but the Howard Dean campaign's lead developer and a major proponent of open government suggested in an editorial this week that programmer-politicians would make Washington work better.

"Great developers are systems fixers and systems hackers. There is no system more ripe for elegant process hacks than the United States House of Representatives," wrote Clay Johnson on his new Infovegan blog. "Put a developer in Congress, and they'll start exposing data on their own. They'll build systems to make it so they can hear from their constituents better. Just as Ted Kennedy had his staff make the first Congressional website, a developer in Congress will seek to use new technology to make their job easier. That's what hackers do."

Johnson's call for coders to run for Congress is part of a larger trend that I'm watching: the spread of programmer ideals into the most powerful circles in the country. You can see it in Bill Gates becoming a philosopher-king of the nerds, Google's growing legislative influence, or makers trying to change education practices.

What's important in all this isn't the practical skills that coders bring, but that they tend to think about problems and organizations in different ways. They want transparency and data-driven decisionmaking. They emphasize toolsets, interoperability, and do-it-yourselfness. Perhaps that's not all that Congress needs to get less rancorous and more productive, but they sure wouldn't hurt.

Energy markets are weird. Though we talk about renewable energy sources being "competitive" with traditional power plants, the price people pay for electricity varies widely. People in New England pay almost twice as much for electricity as their cousins in Kentucky or Montana. On that spectrum, the strangest places to buy some kilowatt hours are the noncontiguous states Alaska and Hawaii.

Take the town of Gustavus, Alaska, about 50 miles northwest from Juneau. For decades, a generator has been burning thousands of gallons of diesel to generate electricity. Because of the high cost of fuel transport and plant operation, residents of the town were paying several times the national average price of about 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

But that generator's been switched off now in favor of a microhydroelectric plant, reports the innovative online-only news site the Alaska Dispatch.

At the end of a three-mile road to nowhere, on the southern edge of one of North America's wildest national parks, the sound of a clean, environmentally friendly energy future is drowned out by the noise of a gurgling salmon stream. Just feet to the side of that stream, a hydroelectric turbine for Gustavus Electric Inc. spins in a small metal building not much bigger than a farmland garage.

The operation is the 27-year dream of resident Dick Levitt, who battled regulators and political opponents to get the turbine installed. "Gustavus residents who know the 65-year-old Levitt well contend that if he wasn't such a hard-headed old cuss, their green-leaning community built on an old glacial moraine on the edge of the park would still be getting its power from the aforementioned diesel generator," writes the Dispatch's Craig Medred.

The Gustavus hydro installation isn't just a nice story about a tough "old cuss" getting his way because it highlights the role that far-flung places can play in clean energy innovation. Where electricity and fuel prices are high, new energy technologies are often much more competitive.

Hawaii, for one, has taken on the mantle as a leader in non-fossil energy. Right now, the state relies on imported oil for 90 percent of its energy, but by 2030, it wants to meet 70 percent of its energy needs with clean power. To get there, the state will need to bring on a lot of renewable sources like a 30 megawatt offshore wind farm and drive down energy usage through efficiency.

Alaska hasn't been quite as ambitious, but still has the second strongest renewable energy goal in the country. Sarah Palin's energy plan as governor of the state called for generating 50 percent of the state's energy to from renewable energy by 2025. (Of course, about a quarter of the state's power already came from large hydroelectric dams, which are renewable, but not the innovative kind.)

If both states hit their goals -- which, it must be said, have not been codified into a renewable portfolio standard -- they'll easily surpass states like California that have been more noted for green policies.

Update 4:22 EST: Honolulu Civil Beat reporter Michael Levine was kind enough to write in with a correction. That Hawaii wind farm will be of the conventional onshore variety, not offshore.

Rajendra Pachauri, the occasionally controversial head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that climate action would have to bubble up from the bottom, rather than coming down from on high.

"I really think the time has come for us to build from bottom to top. There is enough initiative in different countries that all this will bubble up and perhaps lead to an accord," Pachauri told The Atlantic during a break at the Clean Energy Ministerial meeting convened by the Department of Energy. "I think the drive really has to come from communities, from the grassroots level, and the public at large."

To Pachauri's detractors, his comments may come as a surprise. The organization he heads is, in some ways, the ultimate instantiation of a trained scientific elite. The world's best climate scientists all work together to synthesize the many fields related to climate science (oceanography, atmospheric chemistry, etc) into reports and projections on what's likely to happen if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise.

The group's 2007 report unequivocally stated that climate change was happening and that it was largely due to anthropogenic sources. Some saw it as a tipping point that could lead to climate action on the national and international levels. Last year, Pachauri and other scientists pushed for a more ambitious decarbonization of the economy.

But no international accord has come together, and climate legislation remains stalled in Congress. Maybe that's why Pachauri is sounding the grassroots note: twisting the arms of national leaders just hasn't worked.

Image: Alexis Madrigal/The Atlantic

So, question: on which show did canned laughter first appear?

TV historian Ben Glenn II answers that question, and many more in a delightful interview with the Paris Review's Mike Sacks. (Answer: The Hank McCune Show, a short-lived NBC situation comedy.) The trivia most apropos to our topic here, though, is that the canned laughter machine actually has a name and a creation story.

"Actually, its official name is the Laff Box, and it was invented by a man named Charles Rolland Douglass," Sacks said. He goes on to describe the reasons for its creation, which aren't quite what you think maybe, its prototyping, and Douglass' legendary secrecy regarding his work.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the Laff Box to our modern eyes is that it is actually a machine with honest-to-god buttons. Check out the video of it working above. You can even think of it as a type of instrument, an unholy combination of a typewriter, piano, and your extended families' larynxes. Apparently, Douglass was even treated as a very specific kind of maestro. Producers would call Douglass in to "laugh" a show, custom creating the score of joy associated with a bunch of bad jokes.

Forty-one years ago today, humans set foot on the moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong left a footprint in the dust, and said, "This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Interestingly, he went off script for that remark. He meant to say, "This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." (I think we're all thankful for the flub.)

This post is really about great space photos, but allow me a quick digression into the outsized role Apollo now plays in energy policy, mostly due to that glorious moment four decades ago.

Apollo is the analog of choice for any field in science and technology that proponents think needs a big boost in funding. We apparently need an Apollo project for everything, most especially energy. The impulse to draw the link to Apollo is understandable. NASA was incredibly successful at boosting its budget during the program's early days. And while there was fierce opposition to Apollo (aka "the moondoggle") before its completion, the success of the missions erased most of it.

Energy R&D, particularly for non-nuclear technologies, has historically been underfunded, so most energy experts think it makes sense to increase that budget, perhaps to $15 billion a year (or 0.1% of GDP). By drawing the link with a proud moment in American history, some groups think clean energy advocates can gather political momentum.

But the Apollo analogy just doesn't fit our energy situation, in my mind, not least because we wouldn't want energy R&D to turn out the way Apollo did: the program was canceled before it could finish its docket of flights.

More deeply, Apollo just had to get some guys to the moon. It didn't have to change Earth (though some would argue it did). Put it this way: Apollo barely left a mark on the moon, while a clean energy R&D program would have the goal of changing the way everyone on Earth does everything. So, I lean towards the group of policy people like Butler economist Peter Grossman who think that the rhetoric of Apollo has "political benefits but" ultimately is "detrimental to the adoption of potentially effective energy policies."

In any case, more on that another time. Today, we can just reflect on why Apollo has political cache. It was a wondrous thing getting to the Moon (and beating the Russians to boot!) and NASA savvily made sure it was very well-documented. Enjoy. According to NASA, all these photos were taken exactly 41 years ago on July 20, 1969.

Images: NASA.

The footprint seen round the world. 

'The Automatic Telephone Throws on the Subscriber Responsibility for Any Mistakes in Making a Call, Which, in Cosmopolitan Shanghai, May Be Disastrous'. Source: North China Daily News, 7 April 1924.

This light-hearted cartoon about the perils of technology is drawn from a much more substantial article in China Heritage Quarterly about the artistry of Sapajou, the pen name of Georgii Avksent'ievich Sapojnikoff, a Russian army officer turned refugee in Shanghai.

He drew for the North-China Daily News, which the paper's author Richard Rigby describes as "probably the most important and prestigious English language newspaper in the Far East" during this time before World War II.

Sapajou's work is great, and a fun way to delve into the complex social history of Shanghai. And, as you can see, there's even a few hints about the impact of tech on the city.

Via Danwei

Up first is Robert Atkinson, head of The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think tank devoted to technological issues of national importance. His group was one of the more influential pushing for Congress to enact a plan like this. We asked Atkinson, who could go deeper on all these subjects, to lay out the basics here as a sort of primer on some of the key issues at play.

DEFINING SUCCESS

I would define the goal of a national plan not simply as the construction of a series of networks, but ultimately as the robust use of broadband. You could build an unbelievably great network and if nobody signed up for it, it doesn't really get you very much. The plan is quite good in recognizing that, and in addressing issues beyond the physical network.

It turns out that the reason why we're behind some other nations in broadband is adoption rates, not network deployment. We have the highest rate of cable deployment in the world, for example, but we have relatively low rates of computer ownership, and if you don't have a computer, you aren't likely to subscribe to broadband.

We held a debate about a month ago about whether the U.S. was behind on broadband, and if so, was it because of a failure of our policies. (We argued that it was not due a failure of regulation).

One of the things we calculated is that if we had the same computer ownership as the top six OECD nations (assuming that the same ratio of computer ownership to broadband adoption), we'd be fifth in the overall broadband rankings, not 15th. So addressing issues of digital adoption and use are equally important as making policies directed to the network itself.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, & THE MONEY

I think the plan was very, very good. The best thing in the plan is its proposal to take much of the largely wasted TV spectrum and put it into wireless broadband. We can get by with much less TV spectrum (and still have very good TV broadcasting) and doing so will enable the next wave of the mobile broadband revolution. But this will be a tough fight as the broadcasters want to keep the spectrum they never paid for.

If I have to have any criticism of the plan, it's two-fold. First, it was three or four years late. We were quite late to developing a national plan. Many other countries had put their strategies in place in the early part of the last decade. But better late than never.

Second, the biggest limitation of the plan is that it doesn't have much money behind it. The plan can talk all it wants about wanting to get high speeds to a large number of people -- 10 megabyte download speeds for 100 million people, say -- and that's all well and good, but what's the real mechanism by which you do that?

If you want to accelerate that, you have to put some public investment behind it, either in grants and/or tax incentives. The Swedes had a stimulus package for the last recession (early 2000s) and invested a lot more than us in grants and tax incentives for broadband. If you adjust for the size of the countries' populations, the U.S. would have had to invest $32 billion to match the Swedish spend. We did $7.2 billion in the stimulus package. That's better than zero, but nowhere near what it should have been.

ON WHY JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA LEAD IN BROADBAND

A major reason Japan and South Korea lead in broadband is that their governments had aggressive broadband policies, including letting the carriers write off their network investments on an accelerated schedule. The way that it works here is if a broadband provider puts in $1 billion in a new network, they can write off only a very small share each year on their taxes. The Japanese and Koreans let providers write off these investments much faster, thereby reducing the taxes they had to pay. 

The other reason is that both the Japanese and Korean governments pressured the companies to invest more in broadband. I was in Seoul for a study we did and I've also talked extensively with the Japanese. The major incumbents are owned by the government or were recently owned, like Korea Telecom, and are quite influenced by the government. In Japan in particular, the CEOs also have this ethos that while we are profit-making, we are also part of Japan Inc., and have a responsibility to invest more.

THE POLITICS

There are some issues about whether to regulate broadband, but the real partisan issues in this debate are not so much about the plan itself. In the last five years broadband has become motherhood and apple pie: everyone is in favor of more of it.

What is not motherhood and apple pie, at least to many, is the issue of net neutrality [pdf]. That's one reason why they didn't put anything in the plan about net neutrality because it was so incredibly decisive.

I think the FCC risks being distracted from the key work of implementing plan because of the net neutrality and Title I versus Title II regulatory decision they are focused on. Congress is distracted. Everyone is distracted. If we devoted even one-quarter of the attention to the broadband plan that we devote to the hyper-partisan, hyper-emotional issues of net neutrality, we'd be in a lot better place.

While many Democrats are focused on net neutrality, many Republicans are not focused on the plan. In fact, it's unlikely they ever would have come up with a plan. The Bush administration had eight years to come up with one and they never did. The idea of developing a strategy and thinking it through and bringing in real experts is more of a Democratic idea because they are more willing to think about the role of government. But it's also not the sort of thing where Republicans are going to go crazy and oppose this as some kind of statist French industrial policy .

From time to time, I like to go through my spam folder to see if there are any oddities beyond the genital growth adverts and barrister scams. It keeps me up on the latest desperate clangs in the global machine.

Today, I got a gem: frozen squid tube you can buy by the ton! Imagine having a couple thousand pounds of wingless squid bodies out in the garage. Never would a day go by when you couldn't fry up some delicious calamari.

Subject: Frozen Squid tube-100719 ....ESQ SeWVh0X

Re: Frozen Squid tube
Spec.: IQF, full cleaned, wing-off, tip on
Size: U/10
Packing: Bulk, 10kg or 22lb/ctn
Price:
CNF EMP USD$4570/mt
CNF L.A USD$2.09/lb
CNF N.Y USD$2.12/lb
Any need of them, plz contact as soon as possible. Since price is still jumping, we wish could keep more benefit for you!! Best regards, Amy

If you've gotten your own delectable offers, make sure to let me know. Email them to amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com, or find us on Twitter at @TheAtlanticTech.

Image: 21goods.net.

A purported unidentified flying object in the skies of Hangzhou, China has drawn attention from international media. Earlier this month, the local airport was shut down for about an hour when an odd twinkling object was spotted in the sky.

Because people love a good UFO story, the news of the airport shutdown has rippled outwards from the Chinese town. A Fox News affiliate posted a video it claimed came from the incident, and the LA Times bought that interpretation and posted it, too.

It's a gorgeous video. But there's just one problem. It wasn't taken over Hangzhou, but Kazakhstan, says Geoffrey Forden, an MIT weapons analyst, who is often called upon to analyze mysterious rocket launches and other real unidentified flying objects. 

"Unfortunately, this video is not from Hangzhou but from Kazakhstan and was taken on June 30th and shows a Progress M launch from the Baikonur," Forden said. The rocket seen here, in other words, was a routine launch to resupply the International Space Station. "It looks so strange because the upper stages have already left the earths atmosphere and the plume has expanded to many kilometers. It's very unusual to see this from the Earth's surface (and very
interesting since it shows the transition from one stage to another) but it is not a black-ops rocket at all."

The rest of the UFO story falls apart in a similar way. Forden debunked the alien conspiracists on his fascinating blog, Arms Control Wonk. It's tough to get a handle on what people really saw in the sky -- and photoshopped pictures proliferate immediately -- but the likeliest scenario, it turns out, is that the Great Twinkling Light of Hangzhou was actually a Chinese ballistic missile, the DF-21.

Video: LA Times.

Sometimes, you mix two trendy topics, and all you get is a mess. For instance, combine Mel Gibson and the Old Spice Guy, and you'd have one nasty set of viral videos. But other times, two buzzworthy themes combine perfectly, like the bacon craze and artisan ice cream.

OpenStack, a new open source cloud computing initiative, is like the porcine ice cream.

The new collaboration of 25 companies including large hosting service Rackspace and NASA is trying to open up cloud computing, which has been dominated by Amazon's extremely successful and proprietary EC3 service.

Tech heavyweights lined up behind the project for its launch today, including the influential Tim O'Reilly.

"If cloud computing is the future, then understanding how to make that future open is one of the great technology challenges of our day," O'Reilly said. "Rackspace and NASA are taking an amazing step towards my vision of an open cloud future."

Here's why this is important: cloud computing is the idea that people (or corporations or governments) purchase computation as a service instead of buying and maintaining computers has been one of the dominant themes of the last several years. To simplify: Gmail is hosted in the cloud. You don't store messages on your machine; you just retrieve them when you need them.

But there could be some problems with the cloud. Very few companies using proprietary technologies will become the possessors of much of the world's data. ""'The cloud' is a dirigible filled with hydrogen, with pictures of clouds painted on the side," designer Mickey McManus said to James Fallows at a panel this month. What he meant, Fallows explained, was that "we are collectively cruising for a bruising in entrusting so much of humanity's  knowledge and affairs to so few online storage sources."

And that's where OpenStack comes in. By creating an open source project and pushing for open standards, people and companies will be able to switch more easily between services, taking their data with them. The marketplace could be more competitive and potentially more secure with risk spread over a greater number of companies.

"If you look at other parts of the technology industry, people are able to change providers if the company doesn't fit their needs," said Jonathan Bryce, founder of Rackspace Cloud, one of the partners in OpenStack. "In the cloud, it hasn't been that way because there the systems are proprietary."

One fascinating component of the project is that the cloud code base was developed and then released by NASA under a standard open source license known as Apache. That meant both Rackspace and NASA can use the publicly developed technology. The two entities already are using the Nebula platform OpenStack technologies to store petabytes (that's one million gigabytes) of stuff.

The open source coalition will have plenty of competition, though. Beyond Amazon, both Microsoft and VMWare are trying to develop cloud platforms.