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Interview with California Air Resources Board CIO
SilentBob4 writes "Mad Penguin has published an exclusive interview with the CIO of California's ARB (Air Resources Board), Bill Welty." From the article: " Massachusetts might have been the FOSS shot heard 'round the world, but California may be quietly building pressure for an open source earthquake of its own. On the face of it, the California Air Resources Board (ARB) is not setting the world on fire with its well-documented adoption of free open source software. It is using FOSS primarily in the back office, just like so many other governmental agencies and businesses. But if you dig just a little deeper, as shown in this Mad Penguin(TM) interview of the ARB staffers responsible for moving ARB toward a more FOSSy future, you can see that the seeds of more profound change gradually developing. "
SilentBob4, your metaphors make my head ache, almost as if I had been hit by a chair angrily thrown by a bald guy...
These are the same idiots you can thank for making such things as ANY modification to any car illegal unless it has CARB approval and a sticker.
Yes, even a cold air intake, or any sort of aftermarket exhaust, even though both modifications to cars generally INCREASE a car's gas mileage and effeciency.
Given their track record, their use of OSS is only going to allow them to be more effecient in their ability to make and enforce more stupid policies. We cannot allow this. Californians, write to your representatives and tell them to DEMAND the ARB use only Microsoft software.
nnice
the FOSS shot heard 'round the world
quietly building pressure for an open source earthquake
On the face of it
setting the world on fire
if you dig just a little deeper
the seeds of more profound change gradually developing.
I'd like to try to compete but I'm just not up to it.
Well done and thanks for the laughs
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
If they'd stuck with the Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, then back in 2003, 10% of vehicles sold in California would have been electric cars. Instead they gave in to the pressure from GM and Ford, and all we have are a handful of hybrid vehicles.
I don't think we can trust them to stick with FOSS measures. The pressure from Microsoft and other closed source shops will again be too much for CARB to take.
That really shouldn't be within the purview of the Air Resources Board.
.sig withheld by request
It would probably be more convincing if it wasn't on a site called "madpenguin", which has all of the credibility of my little sister's blog.
Also, they went a bit overboard on the FUD, too: "In the eleven years we've been doing open source, we have not, in my view, had one failure in applying open source solutions." Wow. These guys must be the best IT staff on the planet, if they haven't (in his view), "had a single failure in (applying) open source solutions".
Also, you're not going to find any intelligent IT person slamming Microsoft, specifically. The OS isn't important, anymore. Nobody who has two brain cells gives a shit about the OS. That's piddly stuff for large companies. It'd be more believable if he was talking about his database or CRM applications.
And, the piece-de-resistance: "It's been difficult to move off of Windows and Oracle and move onto Linux, but most applications have been migrated over to Linux-Apache-MySQL and PHP (LAMP)." This actually made me laugh out loud... replacing Oracle with MySQL.
C'mon guys, if you're going to go through all of the trouble to manufacture FUD, at least work on the story a bit more. You guys hit all of the major FUD sensors!
I don't respond to AC's.
Nothing reminds me of living in California more than seeing the smog cast over Sacramento and Roseville as I descend down i80 commuting to college.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I hate to seem like I'm starting a beating of a dead horse, but what was this coward thinking when he posted this garbage. NotCowboyNeal
But "FOSSy"? Please.
You did say "gridlocked" and since this is California we're talking about here, you may actually have been on to something after all.
Do you really think that many people want an all electric car?
If owning them means being able to pimp them out with carpool lane access stickers, they will buy.
No question mark because it's a rehetorical question. I saw this as an interesting confirmation of my theory that the last place we'll see FOSS is in the schools. I find it fascinating that the earliest adopters of fOSS are in the business community. No surprise there, business is cut-throat. You've got to take every advantage you can. The first wave f public sector adoption is taking place in governmental administative agencies. Again no surprise. As the article pointed out even the Governator was pushing agencies to make the move to cut costs. But the last place we'll ever see FOSS is in the schools. It will get there eventually, and that will be check-mate but it will be the last move on the board as is appropriate for a check-mate.
What I find so intriguing is that I see this comclusion as an inevitable outcome of the culture of open source development. Why do people develop open source after all? For many, certainly not all but a substantial proportion, it's simply a matter of pride. In open source, anybody can jump to the front. Everybody wants to be a kernel hacker and anything that isn't written in C, C++ or at least Java is considered a trivial aside. I'm not saying that's wrong. Quite the contrary, that's right and the success of FOSS is the best proof that this is indeed the right way to do things. Dumbing it down is dumb after all. But that hot-shot look at my mad skillz approach doesn't fit into education. The irony of education is that it's actually about dumbing things down and that's tedious boring work that few people are going to appreciate.
What was supposed to happen in the closed source world of education was that the teachers were going to be given a set of tools to create their own content since they were the ones in the trenches who knew how to create relevant content. Originally, Macromedia thrived on this market with products like Director and Authorware. Unfortunately, those tools were all very expensive and teachers didn't see any motivation to make it work as there was no compensation for even working with those "simplified" tools. The result was that a few large companies began to dominate the educational content market and now the market for educational technology is completely owned. Prying it out of the grips of the owners is only going to happen when open source versions of those early tools are put into the classrooms that teachers can actually use and when teachers are compensated for creating content using those tools.
It can be done, but I'm telling ya, it's going to be the last place we'll see the success of FOSS. Furthermore, when it does happen it will be the beginning of the end of schools as we know them which is undoubtedly a good thing.
cue Pink Floyd. . .
I really don't see why nobody has thought of this. In cities, you have known times of day when there are going to be many vehicles chuffing out waste products. So accept this as inevitable. Instead of trying to minimise what is coming out of vehicles, try mitigating the effects of what has already come out of vehicles. Build air ducts in the roadway, leading to a purification plant: draw in the fumes, filter out the nasty stuff with cyclones, chemicals, activated charcoal, electrostatic precipitation and any other methods necessary, and pump out cleaner air at a higher level. The plant only needs to be running when traffic is dense -- either on a time switch, or some kind of "dirtostat".
If you think this sounds a little crazy, just remember: so did the idea of treating sewage before dumping it into rivers and the sea, the first time anybody proposed it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It would behoove the state of California to base its servers in the San Jose area. Would provide a base of employees with expertise beyond the state's needs, and would provide jobs to some of the laid-off-from-the-slump Linux experts.
Use of oxygenates was mandated by the Feds after some serious junk science from a single Winter trial of them in Seattla. It was not CARB's fault we used them.
e nate030905.htm
Ethanol sucks too, likely adding to pollution:
http://feinstein.senate.gov/05releases/r-epa-oxyg
(Please ignore that this link is from one of our idiot spendthrift Senators, I'm sure she just slapped her name at the bottom and had nothing to do with it.)
Because of this, CARB worked for years for the ability to return to making fuel with no oxygenates at all, and finally won it from the Feds a couple weeks ago. The cut over date isn't set, but it's great news.
I dunno that MTBE was particularly expensive, nor is it the reason for the cost of fuels in California, since there are a dozen or something metropolitan areas in the country that are mandated to use oxygenates and MTBE was the one in popular use at the time.
Our fuel is more expensive mainly because they can get away wth it. Fuel is noticeably more expensive in Northern California (esp. 5 years ago) versus Southern California. And the fuel is the same.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
They want to use open source software, but they're opposed to open-source IC engines (ie. they support the "weld the hood shut, and treat shadetree mechanics like criminals" approach to enforcing automotive emissions controls).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
They might have even been mandatory, I forget.
Anyway, they could make a car "clean" by adding a retrofit oxygen sensor to the exhaust, adjusting the carb to run lean, and adding an "enrichment" fuel injector into the throttle body.
The engine runs as it did before, but this added system adds the right amount of fuel at all times to keep it right at the best fuel/air ratio. It improves mpg and emissions on older cars. On some cars you could even add a catalytic converter to complete the job.
Given that California doesn't even have car inspections (unlike, say, the east coast), I don't know what you're complaining about. Get what you want and put it on. Who's going to even catch you?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I've lived in San Jose, CA for 10 years.
We don't have inspections, we just have emissions testing.
I assure you the place you go to isn't going to look twice at your bolt-ons. If you pass emissions, you're done, even if you have non-CARB parts on your car. If you don't pass emissions, I don't have any sympathy for you.
Compare this to east coast states, which inspect your car yearly or so for safety and compliance in ways other than emissions. They'll fail you for bald tires, cracked windshields, and I'm sure they'd check over your exhaust too if it was on the list.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95