Slashdot Mirror

At the time I needed a bootable USB image (so I could use it to flash a BIOS), there wasn't one. I ended up writing up how I made one and Jim posted the end result at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/virtualbox/ for others to download. If you want to try FreeDOS without going through the installation process yourself - or if you don't have the facilities to do so because the $#@()! server is down and your boss is freaking out and screaming and you're out of time - then enjoy!

Option 1. (if your software is linux-native or runs stable under wine, needs no fancy gfx)
xrdp + wine - a remote desktop solution, integrates well, authenticates well
rdesktop can haz a seamless mode, preferred corporate solution
can be tunneled via ssh or vpn to add security
ubuntuwiki/xrdp

Option 2. (if your software is linux-native or runs stable under wine, needs no fancy gfx)
ssh -X remotemachine "wine remoteapp"
to integrate: ActiveDirectoryAuthentication

Option 3. (if your app only runs only on windows, you live in a reverse engineering friendly country)
(was?) LEGAL only in some countrys i.e. germany, sweden, ...
have a (possibly virtualized) xp/win7 box running your apps, modded with:
a. Seamless RDP hack (xp only afaik)
- SeamlessRDP
- Ubuntu/SeamlessVirtualization
b. Enable Multiple Concurrent RDP Connections
a bit hacky but it works, rly :> I've done this in small corporate environments, but usually in such situations you either have to choose between investing in making your apps run under wine, or pay m$ or a commercial opponent for their work.

Finally you could have a look at TinyCore as a nice toolbox to mend it all together.

anx XMPP ulzq de

Yes, Kuhn was full of horse puckey. Not only doesn't his book describe science outside of physics at all well, it doesn't even correctly describe 20th-century physics, its ostensible paradigm (using the word correctly now) case.

Years ago I wrote a more detailed takedown in Brother, can you Paradigm?

The only amplification I'd write today is that the shifts between large theoretical models generally (and contrary to Kuhn's claims) go smoothly in physics because test by correct prediction of experimental results is so difficult to argue with. The soft sciences have more trouble setting up repeatable experiments, so it's easier for people to hold on to broken theoretical models.

See the assurances of people who use the Creative Commons NC license clause but have objections to renaming it to the Commercial Rights Reserved clause on the grounds that they have no intention of making commercial use of their own works in any way (trust us?) in this thread:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2012-December/008087.html

but then check out the objections to the proposal to solve the trust us issue in the license here:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2012-December/008150.html

in the "As Free As I Keep It" NC license proposal which would build the trust into the license.

all the best,

drew

See the assurances of people who use the Creative Commons NC license clause but have objections to renaming it to the Commercial Rights Reserved clause on the grounds that they have no intention of making commercial use of their own works in any way (trust us?) in this thread:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2012-December/008087.html

but then check out the objections to the proposal to solve the trust us issue in the license here:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2012-December/008150.html

in the "As Free As I Keep It" NC license proposal which would build the trust into the license.

all the best,

drew

Dear Dr. Stallman,

In this Slashdot feature “Stallman is quoted here saying that game engines should be free, but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")”. However, this feature does not give a citation from you for that. To add to the confusion in a post to the Creative Commons Community mailing list, Rob Myers said:

RMS's views on culture are coherent and consistent with his views on software. But he's treating game assets as a matter of functionality (software) rather than speech (culture). There is an issue with the latter not being free..

So I'm a little confused. Do you approve of people using non-free licences for cultural works, including the CC-by-nc, CC-by-nc-sa, CC-by-nd, and CC-by-nc-nd licences? If so, when?

This is especially important given the fact that in the process for formulating the latest version of the Creative Commons licences (4.0), there has been some requests to deprecate the non-commercial (nc) and/or no-derivatives (nd) options (which I doubt will happen, but is nonetheless some thing some people feel strongly about).

Eric S Raymond had an interesting take on the gorilla arm problem. They key is the position of the screen.

And your willingness to attach your name to your reply stands as a bold refutation.
Someone with credibility, ESR has shown what a pack of clowns "you guys" are: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447
Also instructive, NewsBusters: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/09/19/pbs-under-attack-allowing-global-warming-skeptic-speak
Calling me a liar, Your Anonymity, doesn't remove the challenge to start at square one and restore credibility before proceeding.

USDOT supports your view as well... essentially drivers are going to drive at a their own speed and accidents stay essentially flat no matter what the speed limit is.

http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html

Try TC: http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html

So if we don't allow extreme on one side, then you must remove those extremes on the other. If you don't, then the extremes move away from the RMS side and over to the ESR side.

FTFY. ESR is something of a Randian libertarian nutcase. (NOT neo-con -- he's in the outright anarchist minority of libertarians, FFS! It doesn't get any farther from neo-/paleo-/conservatism than that.)
Regarding Randian...

Rand was a brilliant moral critic but an embarassingly, cringe-makingly bad epistemologist. I might blog a detailed takedown of her epistemology sometime; it’s not a difficult dissection for anyone who knows even a smidgen about 20th-century analytical philosophy and the Wittgensteinian or Korzybskian analysis of language. Topic sentence: she mistakes Aristotelian logic for a feature of reality rather than a contingent artifact of language, and from there much nonsense flows.

To any Randites listening: Calm down, OK? Ayn was dead right about the whole altruism thing. That’s the essence; the bogus epistemology isn’t necessary to it.

source

(Personally, I'm a Heinleinian (since we're rolling with SF designations) minarchist, not that I expect an authoritarian who conflates neocons with libertarians of any stripe to know the difference...)

And, yet, he supports the exact same thing (seriously, compare the OSD and FSD), for somewhat different reasons.

Maybe these "extremists" aren't so opposite as you think?

Maybe you're a complete moron who crams everything into a 1-dimensional spectrum because that's all you can comprehend, but I suspect you're just a partisan who claims everything is 1-dimensional so you can present a false dichotomy and prevent people from considering those options that you have a harder time arguing with. I'd assume the more gracious of these, but I'm really not sure which is worse...

An USB GPS means no Pulse Per Second

Hrmmm .... good point - looks like it is available in a few devices.

esr says he can get 1ms on USB with the Macx-1 device. What accuracy is required for each stratum? The bufferbloat people are using that device for their latency measuring project.

Start with http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/eckel/

See my comments here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/looking-back-on-noemail-at-6-weeks/comment-page-1/#comment-441324

And here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f

And a related back-burner open source project by me (being passed by): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

And by others: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients - leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. ..."

See my comments here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/looking-back-on-noemail-at-6-weeks/comment-page-1/#comment-441324

And here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f

And a related back-burner open source project by me (being passed by): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

And by others: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients - leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. ..."

Receiving time from a GPS receiver is much safer. That's a broadcast signal with a fixed message format.

A fixed what?

I'd love to see someone implement a bittorrent client with an option to limit peers to other Comcast customers, and then see how they start redefining "internal traffic"...

You need to implement bittorrent 'choking' based on network closeness. See this thread I started on the bittorrent list in 2005 for some discussion.

An oldie, but a goodie: http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/alien.html

It violates antitrust laws. Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services should just sue Comcast and get it over with it.

Comcast will just claim that they have peering costs with transit of traffic that doesn't originate on their network so they can't price it the same. And they'd probably be right.

Netflix should embrace Bittorrent-style distribtion with network-closeness preferences. Keep most of the traffic inside the ISP, then go back and argue the point.

BTW, a thread I started on the bittorrent list on this in 2005.

I don't consider file-sharing the life or death situation that most reasonable people would consider a valid exception to the rule.

Besides, is speeding in itself a crime? From what I've always been told, minor parking and traffic violations (to include non-insane levels of speeding) are not technically crimes but civil infractions, which is why things like speeding tickets don't generally show up on your criminal record.

Besides, some studies have shown that increasing speed limits by a small amount actually decreased accidents, whereas lowering them a small amount increased their frequency. Also, the lowered speed limit was ignored by more than half of the motorists, but so was the higher speed, as well...people generally drove at the speed they were comfortable with regardless.

The speed limits being lower sure does increase the number of people they can ticket, though, doesn't it? I suspect this may be the higher motivation in some places.

Latency depends on your destination. It is limited by the speed of light, and governed by how lousy the link itself is. It's how you sometimes get stories like the 500 mile emailFor some reference points:

A map of expected United States latency from some place in Texas.

Often times your first hop on DSL will be slower... my own network right now shows 40ms to my ISP's gateway. 300ms is my ping time from Maine in the US to Australia.

Another helpful source of references are looking glass servers that will let you drop right into another provider's system and see ping times from their perspective.

The inferred message here is that the RIAA (and presumably the MPAA, et al) will continue to try to pass this crap.

I have an inferred message right back (holds up a single finger).

In the wake of ESR's open letter to Chris Dodd, do I really need to remind you:

[D]on't screw with the Internet. Because it will screw you right back.

??

This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note

This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

The worst, though, is that .config/dconf/user file. One can haggle back and forth about esthetics, and argue that my judgment about what end-users want may be faulty. But burying my configuration inside an opaque binary blob â" that is unforgivably stupid and bad engineering. How did forty years of Unix heritage comes to this? Itâ(TM)s worse than the Windows registry, and perpetrated by people who have absolutely no excuse for not knowing better.

(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.

Me? Iâ(TM)ve bailed out to KDE. And I may be bailing out of Ubuntu. I want control of my desktop back. I want an applet panel or dock I can edit, I want my focus-follows-mouse-with autoraise back, I want to be able to set my own wallpaper slideshow. Most of all what I want is a window manager that will add to my control of my desktop with each future release rather than subtracting from it.

Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.

Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Personally I blame SMS.

Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.

ESR on SOPA opponents:

It's bad bunch of drivel, alright. It's a terrible flamebait — awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, superficially pandering to the populist notion that pretty much everything a government does by definition must be evil.

Buit I can't help noticing that a lot of people critical about ESR's latest outings are the same people who've been cheerfully referring to other texts by him over the past decade — Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Magic Cauldron, you name it — and I have to wonder.

Don't these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?

It's bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday who were all about allegedly benign and intelligent analysis on open source economics by ESR are suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious comments that has been captured by a venal and shortsighted view about society.

Yeah, no shit? How....how do they avoid noticing that in reality nothing is black and white, and that in fact almost everyone and every organisation/institution says and does both intelligent and stupid things? And that in case of large organisations, it may even depend on whose actually in charge about something, or the topic it is about?

(before replying, please read the parent's citation)

ESR on SOPA opponents:

It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.

But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder

Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?

It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.

Yeah, no shit? How...how do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time?

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4009

        It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.

        But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder

        Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?

        It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.

        Yeah, no shit? Howhow do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time?

1. Download a VM like Virtalbox.
2. Download Puppy Linux .iso
3. Install Puppy Linux in Virtalbox. 4 gig dynamic drive with 128 megs of RAM will suffice.
4. Inside puppy download and install the pet package Hiawatha
5. Setup FTP inside your home directory (I think it's called setup file sharing)
6. Set your network in Puppy to a static IP and set Virtualbox to use a bridged adapter for the puppy install.
7. Use Notepad++, Filezilla in windows to FTP into your virtual box to update files.

That's close to a LAMP server. I don't think technically using Puppy/Hiawatha would be LAMP. But I believe Hiawatha serves the same function as Apache and I think would suit your purpose. if you're just interested in the PHP part you can also just install XAMPP.

The thing I like about the Virtualbox (or any VM) is you can wipe it out easily. You can move it to different computers. It's easy to play around with FTP and SSH settings.
There are tons of ways to do this without getting a host if you're just looking to learn. If you really want a host most have LAMP options. For many it is even the default. For tutorials I think W3 Schools is good starting point and has examples.

*All suggestions are debatable. When making these suggestions I considered using low resources and ease of use. Given more resources to give to the Virtual box you have tons and tons of choices.

Yes, I missed that. Whoah!! So, this is the original MP3.com brought back, in the sense of a place where musicians can connect to fans without a record contract, and WITH the music locker feature that eventually destroyed MP3.com in court? I _never_ thought I'd see something like that come back to life. To understand why it is so important, try reading this, which is Roger McGuinn testifying to the Senate on the effect such a service has on a musician's income.

-Gareth

Some people don't even like Gnome 3.

Shuttleworth has not only disregarded the community's complaints about Unity, but now his blog is actively deleting and censoring any further criticism. Pleas for them to offer a desktop that actually looks and works like a desktop, if not as a replacement for Unity then at least an offering with an equal amount of support, are being treated with a "we know best, go away you silly peon" response. Sorry Mark, you are not Steve Jobs, you can't get away with that routine. Unity is a disaster, and when you have Linux luminaries like Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond switching their desktops to Xfce, you know you're heading in the wrong direction.

I myself have also made the switch to Xfce, and after doing so, and even after having been a loyal Ubuntu user for five years, I'm wondering what's the point of staying with Ubuntu at all if not for what used to be a gorgeous desktop. I did a little research and found that aside from the formerly gorgeous desktop, all of the things that I loved about Ubuntu were actually things about Debian. Now that Unity has replaced the good desktop, the only advantage Ubuntu has over Debian is a better installer.

Yes, Unity will probably be more at home on a device that has no keyboard and mouse, such as smartphones and tablets. But competing with Android (not to mention Apple) is going to be a tough sell there. So why are they blowing it all by alienating their existing installed base?

Interestingly, esr, who knows what he's talking about when it comes to giving speeches thinks rms' requests are reasonable. Who's being out of touch with reality here? You, or those who actually speak of their own experiences? ;)

My household runs on Ubuntu 10.04LTS right now. 5 machines of it. I've been running Ubuntu since 7.04. I do NOT upgrade releases with each new release. I go from one LTS to the next after giving the new LTS a period to settle down, usually a few months. 12.04LTS is due soon.

Shuttleworth, owner of Canonical, owner of Ubuntu, seems committed to Unity Desktop from what I have read of his pronouncements. For me, it looks like I have to find a replacement for Ubuntu.

I have had 11.10 running in a virtual machine. I absolutely HATE everything about it. Everything. If I had wanted a hand-held I'd have bought a fscking hand-held device. I do software development and a hand-held UI just does NOT cut it. I hate GNOME3 too. Want to see what other Linux professionals think? Have a look:

ESR's blog article titled "Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark". He thinks even less of it than I do. His solution is XFCE.

Dave Jones G+. Search the page for "linus torvalds". One of Linus' comments is a scathing assault on Unity and GNOME3. Linus has gone to XFCE. See also the Wikipedia article on Linus Torvalds.

Here's the wrinkle. Since I go from LTS to LTS, if Unity in 12.04 does NOT have an option for a GNOME2 desktop, it will be a long, long time before there's an opportunity for me to switch back to Ubuntu, assuming they come to their senses and give me a GNOME2 UI.

There's good news!!! There are at least 2 forks of GNOME2 now: MATE and BlueBubble:
MATE Desktop Environment. A fork of GNOME2 on GitHub
BlueBubble Desktop. Apparently Fedora based

There's hope!

I have tried both Lubuntu and Xubuntu in virtual machines. Looks like Xubuntu will do at 12.04LTS unless Ubuntu comes to its senses.

Linux and now ESR are both moving away from GNOME3 (and KDE) and go to XFCE. ESR says XFCE looks like where Iâ(TM)m landing.

Many people resent the way both KDE and GNOME are not about functionality anymore, but about "because I can".

The fact that the GNOME community need to do their own survey shows, to me at least, how high the Ivory Tower is that the developers live on.

ESR was also basically of the same opinion. Except he sugar coats the whole thing, to be politically correct.

Tact is unfortunately overrated.

Tact is what prevents RMS from being taken seriously.

Tact is unfortunately overrated.

I find it reasonable that Mickey is copyrighted as long as Disney company actively use the character and that can be for a very long time. The same should be true of any work being actively exploited (i.e. being in print or software being distributed).

I don't necessarily agree that a company must be able to exploit a work "for a very long time" (in perpetuity, as it turns out, with the Mickey Mouse act), that right should belong to the creator and possibly his/her immediate descendants. Otherwise I totally agree. So many works get lost because there's no practical way to obtain the rights to reproduce them, even if the work has no commercial value (probably > 99% of works still in copyright), and even if you're willing to pay for the rights. Leave the rights to commercially valuable works in the creator's hands, and let the rest be free for the public good.

In his CC book Free CultureLawrence Lessig outlines the problems with the current legislature and suggests a reasonable solution to the whole copyright issue which adresses all of Big Content's concerns, at least the overt ones. The book is a very good read, it's not outdated even if it's a few years old.

His blog is here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/ It seems he's purposely stayed out of the limelight for 10 years, or at least his "Speaking Engagements" section of his home page says that he has stopped giving them since 2002 for personal reasons. Not wanting to speculate, but at around the same time he took a lot of flack for talking about the shares he received from the IPO of VA Linux. I think a lot of technical people can identify with having made political gaffs and I wish he'd been given some slack. But there you go, being famous has both its ups and downs. I think in the end we all lost out because his voice was valuable and he doesn't seem to raise it as much any more. Still, he appears to be quite active on a lot of projects, just not as vocal.

Thinking about it, it's an interesting question given that my response was really intended to deflect some all too common, unwarranted criticism of RMS. Like a lot of people, I don't agree with everything he says (though I could say that about anyone, really), but the guy stands up to an incredible amount of abuse and keeps marching on in the spotlight. I don't blame ESR one bit for not wanting to follow suit (if that's really what happened).
 

I suspect that the mental skills required to use things like Visual Studio and Eclipse are much different from the skills needed to think through and communicate thoughtful programming.

Not in my experience - auto-completion does help enormously, especially if one
– names the variables in a meaningful way
– drops the awful style prefixing your variables with m_ and the use the hungarian notation.
I mean, what's wrong with this->name or this.name - quickly "picked" by autocompletion - instead of m_wszName/m_strName?

I wonder how the above stays in the way of "thoughtful programming"?

BTW: I googled "thoughtful programming" and found it mostly associated with Forth (is it because of Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth?), with some "tangents" coming from Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in..." series.
Not every helpful... therefore: would you mind please to share your definition of "thoughtful programming"?

No, it is a mindset. Either you want freedom and accept responsibility for maintaining it, or not. For many people it is not, both in hardware and in society. For others, freedom is something worth working for. And I am not the only gun owning, personal responsibility, free choice FOSS advocate. http://esr.ibiblio.org/ http://blogsofwar.com/About/ Are some examples. I am sure there are more.

By me, about Paul Jones' interesting #noemail experiment, in the context of a 2008 IBM report on unified communications: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613

===
That IBM report leaves out the idea that a "Social Semantic Desktop" will integrate all our communications (including email-like messages). It kind of fits under "interoperability" but is something beyond that. Ideally, something like my (essentially) peer-to-peer Thunderbird email client (but much better, as a social semantic desktop application) would be able to track all the content on all those systems for me.

I accepted an invitation to Google+ to be in a web conference on "Discussions on the Future of the Economy", to talk about the effect technology is having on economics.

So, am I any happier with a Google+ account? Not so far.

It was fun to play around with the video chat for a few minutes with my wife and kid on another computer. Although now I see that event shows up in my "stream" but it is not clear who can see that; It just happened automatically. I don't think that is shared, but it just is not easily clear who can see it.

Google+ is now just another stream of stuff that I have no local copy of. Anything I put on those servers is lost to me if they go down or I leave the service (unless I go to extra trouble to make a copy). I can't integrate it in with my existing email archive. There is already a lot of stuff in the stream from the people I've added to circles, but I have no easy way to navigate it other that a rather cumbersome and relatively slow web interface. Google now knows anything I search for in that stream.

Google+ is now one more stream of pressure on me. It joins twitter, which I use mostly for microblogging (like links to slashdot posts). But for twitter, I can ignore it mostly as a site and let Thunderbird just keep up with for me using its RSS feed reader functionality for people I follow and I also get email from it otherwise I would never see what people sent me. I don't see how to get an RSS feed of Google+ stuff? Maybe it is there, but it is just one more adhoc learning curve. It looks like you can't do it, except with some third party application like "plusfeed" on appspot. Even with that, which I'm not going to bother to wrestle with right now, I am hostage to Google's good graces for access to the information others want to send me (reminds me of the current problem with high-priced science journals controlling the copyrights on tax-funded research):.

Now Google knows part of my social network. I felt socially pressured to put a current picture of me up on the web, invading my privacy in a way email does not pressure me.

Do I even know when the Logitech camera and microphone are working? Yes, they are supposed to have a red light go on, but to use Google+ chat I had to install opaque proprietary software that I have no idea what it did to my computer. Who audits that kind of stuff? Where do the streams even go when I know they are recording? When I was at IBM Research a decade ago, people were working on indexing video. Yesterday there was a Slashdot article about a DOD project to index videos looking for terrorists, how long is it before all that stuff is routinely screened if it is not already? Is Google going to tell us if it is?

On the plus side, I added you to a circle and you reciprocated. Although I might have felt that had we sent an email back and forth. Why should you have been essentially pressured to make a public social decision about that? Did Google track everything you did to make that decision?

Am I better off with Google+ over everyone usin

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

You'll get about 100 more points if you ask him on G+

https://plus.google.com/108967323530519754654/posts

One of his recent blog / G+ posts is kinda relevant to this discussion:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

You'll get about 100 more points if you ask him on G+

https://plus.google.com/108967323530519754654/posts

One of his recent blog / G+ posts is kinda relevant to this discussion:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

You'll get about 100 more points if you ask him on G+

https://plus.google.com/108967323530519754654/posts

One of his recent blog / G+ posts is kinda relevant to this discussion:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

You'll get about 100 more points if you ask him on G+

https://plus.google.com/108967323530519754654/posts

One of his recent blog / G+ posts is kinda relevant to this discussion:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

You'll get about 100 more points if you ask him on G+

https://plus.google.com/108967323530519754654/posts

One of his recent blog / G+ posts is kinda relevant to this discussion:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

I guess that Harvard etc are private businesses that receive no public funding, so are an example of the inherent benefits of capitalism over socialism.

Yup; Harvard is a private university, and most of its libraries are inaccessible to non-Harvard people. BU (Boston University) is also private, and is a bit more welcoming, but not much. But the "private" part isn't all of the story. I attended several American "public" (state-owned) universities, and while they were more open than the typical private university, they still erected barriers to the general public. As a student, I had numerous instances of being denied access to parts of various departmental libraries. This depended a lot on the department, though, and there were a lot of libraries where I could just walk in and read anything I wanted, no questions asked.

One thing that's different about the Internet is that it appears to (but doesn't) solve the basic barrier with traditional libraries: Most of them are a long distance away. Yes, there is "inter-library loan", but this tends to apply only to fairly common books. If you're looking for something rare, they are often not willing to ship it; you must visit the library to see it.

The Internet potentially solves this. But in many cases, and with most technical journals, there's a "paywall" in the way. Buying a subscription to all the members-only sites online is often beyond the financial capabitities of all but a few. We may solve this eventually. And some technical journals have already started to make material over N years old available to the general public. But this is countered by others that are restricting access. The New York TImes just did this. Though the NYT isn't what you'd call a technical journal, they are a "publication of record", which has legal meaning in the US, and a quick check I did recently showed that their paywall did block my access to things that (in the print form) is public information.

Another problem is the limited digitalization of a lot of material. Some time ago, I wanted to read some music-related material that was left behind by a musician who died about 50 years ago. I found that her papers had been donated to a state historical museum. It had an index of her material online -- but none of the actual documents. I can probably take a 2500-mile trip to the museum to view them, but that appears to be my only access. They have no plans for copying them, much less putting them online.

OTOH, some scholarly fields have been greatly enhanced by the Internet. There are a number of online collections of ancient documents, sometimes in poorly-understood languages, and these have attracted "amateur" historians and linguists who have helped greatly in the transcriptions. One that got a lot of attention a few years back deals with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contains images, transcriptions and translations of may of those documents. These relics were previously totally unavailable to the public, including most scholars, and the documents' "owners" objected strongly to the online copies when they first appeared. There are similar online projects around the world. A lot of Mesoamerican material, especially including Mayan writing, have been put online, and again "amateur" linguists and historians have helped materially in decoding its contents. Google "Mayan writing" for lots of links to information on this.

So the Internet's effectiveness at eliminating the traditional barriers to information is currently in a "mixed" state. There's a lot of information available in seconds that used to take long trips to distant locations to access. But online organizations are experimenting with ways of limiting access to paying customers. And there's a lot of material that will never be online in our lifetime.

We'll see how it all plays out. Or maybe our descendants will.