Eric Raymond predicted several years ago that eventually falling hardware prices would have this effect.
A couple of years ago when I saw him at a conference I asked him if that was still his prediction and he replied that he was no longer so sure, because he thought that it was possible that Microsoft would simply cut the price of the Windows OS (to close to zero) to cancel out this effect.
That hasn't happened, but I think it's more than possible that it might.
I suppose this is what the "10 Downing Street" E-Petitions site is all about: not only they know who you are (and probably where you live), but they can write back to you to tell you how good war, surveillance and tyranny really are.
I won't bore you with Tony's entire missive -- here are just a few interesting lines:
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
(my emphasis)
Last time I was offered a store card was at Marks and Spencer's. I accepted the offer (although I've never used it again) because it reduced the cost of the suit that I was buying. I don't remember having my fingerprints taken. Nor were my irises scanned. And, as far as I remember, they didn't threaten to put me in prison if I didn't accept it.
The key to this is the fact that Xen is about to go mainstream: more specifically, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is about to be released, which will be the first Enterprise Linux with Xen included.
I find it sad that shallow and crude anti-Muslim comments are getting moderated "insightful" in this discussion: that in itself indicates what a mess we are in.
The Danish journalist (Flemming Rose) who commissioned these cartoons knew exactly what he was doing: he has more or less stated as much. There was a calculated intention to provoke, and it was successful.
Why should he have wanted to do this? It's been pointed out that Flemming Rose is an associate of, and has written approving about Daniel Pipes, the notorious Zionist neo-conservative figure who is behind the organisation
http://www.campus-watch.org/, which is attempting a McCarthy-type witch-hunt against people in US universities who don't share their views.
At a time when the United States is planning yet another war against a Muslim nation, the images of Muslims rioting over this matter have acted as powerful propaganda for that war.
The "too late" was in reply to a promise by a fellow SUSE employee to forward the comments of others on the suse-beta-e list (regarding the Gnome/KDE stuff) to the management.
Artificial life was invented when JH Conway thought of "the game of life". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life. I'm serious: I believe (as do others) that living, conscious, reproducing beings will exist within a sufficiently large Conway life simulation. Sufficiently large is very large indeed in this context.
John Naughton, who wrote the article, writes regular articles on the internet, software and related matters in the Observer's business section. He is one of the few journalists in the UK who really "gets it", and is also the author of the book "A Brief History of the Future" (published 1999) about the history and future of the Internet.
There are serious doubts in many people's minds about whether the stories of cell phone use on September 11th 2001 can possibly be true. See for instance
this article on Global Research.
The European Central Bank is proposing European legislation which would ban the distribution of software and devices not including such anti-counterfeiting technology: this has possible serious implications for open source software.
It is also owned by the appalling Rupert Murdoch, who while supporting the Blair government over Iraq, is using the current political controversies to try to destroy the excellent public service BBC broadcasting organisation because he sees it as a competitor to his dreadful "Sky" satellite channels. He has also turned the once excellent "Times" newspaper into what might be termed a "middle class tabloid" with essentially the same values as the "Sun", but more politely expressed.
While the fatal anthrax attacks of last year remain unsolved, the flippant tone of many of the comments on this seems inappropriate to me. It is clear that the anthrax attacks were not carried out by Islamic terrorists, and that the main suspect is still at large and is a US government employee.
This in itself is chilling enough, along with the fact that the suspect is apparently being protected. This does not of course prove that these deaths are all part of some conspiracy: it does suggest, however that there are some very disturbing unanswered questions which could be related to this story.
The attempt to draw a parallel between globalism (seen as good, free-trade stuff which makes everyone richer overall) and open source software falls down in various ways.
I've also used the analogy between open source and free trade at times. However, it's notorious that although free trade ultimately makes everyone richer, it's always advocated by those who are already in a commanding economic position and who have most to gain. Tariffs are imposed by those whose short term interest is not best served by open markets.
In the case of open source, it's interesting that the advocates of openness and those who have most to gain are actually those who are competing from below as it were.
Globalism, of course, is really a modern version of the free trade argument with force attached.
And unfortunately when one nation is so vastly more powerful than all others, globalism essentially means American imperialism. And in the field of information, that means US restrictions in the areas of copyright, patents and the like being imposed on the rest of the world - not very `open source' or `free-trade', this.
"Spreading American values of freedom, democracy, pluralism and free market capitalism is a Good Thing"
It all depends what you mean by these pious phrases - as your expression "Usurping Sovereign Democratic Decision-making" shows that you understand.
To give an utterly trivial, but possibly instructive example, there was a planning application by McDonalds to build a drive-in very near to where I live in the South-West suburbs of London. There was virtually unanimous local opposition to this, expressed in public meetings, petitions and letters to local and national politicians, but it still got built. And the trash is being dropped in front of my house. Am I likely to feel better or worse about globalisation and American culture than before?
This is just a tiny example of how people feel when they see that what globalisation really means is the right of US corporations to walk all over their countries and their lives. I'm not making a big deal out of my grievance, but there are plenty of others who have real grievances.
There is a lot in this book:
Axelrod, Robert: The Evolution of Cooperation which is relevant to this discussion and also to how open source development works, particularly if you read it alongside Eric Raymond's stuff.
Technical versus social reasons
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm often asked - `won't viruses for Linux start to appear once Linux gains more desktop users?'. And I always explain what it is about Linux and Unix-like operating systems in general that make this very unlikely (the strict separation between root and users in particular). However, at present we have a situation in which there is a very strong sense of mutual trust: if you see some code being offered for download in the usual places you know that it's very unlikely that it will harm your system if you build it / install it as root.
It is worth thinking about the possible dangers of these particular waters getting muddied - as Linux gains more users, there will be more people around with less sophistication about these matters and there could be more people deliberately offering dangerous code for download.
So there are some reasons for concern but they are based on faults in the potential users, not in the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
See also:
http://www.currentcost.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/andysc/the-house-that-twitters
Eric Raymond predicted several years ago that eventually falling hardware prices would have this effect.
A couple of years ago when I saw him at a conference I asked him if that was still his prediction and he replied that he was no longer so sure, because he thought that it was possible that Microsoft would simply cut the price of the Windows OS (to close to zero) to cancel out this effect.
That hasn't happened, but I think it's more than possible that it might.
I suppose this is what the "10 Downing Street" E-Petitions site is all about: not only they know who you are (and probably where you live), but they can write back to you to tell you how good war, surveillance and tyranny really are.
I won't bore you with Tony's entire missive -- here are just a few interesting lines:
(my emphasis)
Last time I was offered a store card was at Marks and Spencer's. I accepted the offer (although I've never used it again) because it reduced the cost of the suit that I was buying. I don't remember having my fingerprints taken. Nor were my irises scanned. And, as far as I remember, they didn't threaten to put me in prison if I didn't accept it.
What is being described here is the subject of Ronald Dore's book "The Diploma Disease", first published in the 1970s.
Unfortunately, education in Western countries (certainly in the UK) is going down the same path.
See also:
http://www.reportlab.org/
The key to this is the fact that Xen is about to go mainstream: more specifically, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is about to be released, which will be the first Enterprise Linux with Xen included.
Transcripts of the series are available at http://disruptive.org.uk/20050129.power-nightmares /.
I find it sad that shallow and crude anti-Muslim comments are getting moderated "insightful" in this discussion: that in itself indicates what a mess we are in.
The Danish journalist (Flemming Rose) who commissioned these cartoons knew exactly what he was doing: he has more or less stated as much. There was a calculated intention to provoke, and it was successful.
Why should he have wanted to do this? It's been pointed out that Flemming Rose is an associate of, and has written approving about Daniel Pipes, the notorious Zionist neo-conservative figure who is behind the organisation http://www.campus-watch.org/, which is attempting a McCarthy-type witch-hunt against people in US universities who don't share their views.
At a time when the United States is planning yet another war against a Muslim nation, the images of Muslims rioting over this matter have acted as powerful propaganda for that war.
See also: http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2006/02/danish-cartoo n-conspiracy.html and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1 703501,00.html for a description of how the same newspaper rejected cartoons lampooning Jesus Christ.
The "too late" was in reply to a promise by a fellow SUSE employee to forward the comments of others on the suse-beta-e list (regarding the Gnome/KDE stuff) to the management.
Artificial life was invented when JH Conway thought of "the game of life". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life . I'm serious: I believe (as do others) that living, conscious, reproducing beings will exist within a sufficiently large Conway life simulation. Sufficiently large is very large indeed in this context.
From the picture it appears to be a Lex mini-ITX ("book PC") machine with a VIA processor.
John Naughton, who wrote the article, writes regular articles on the internet, software and related matters in the Observer's business section. He is one of the few journalists in the UK who really "gets it", and is also the author of the book "A Brief History of the Future" (published 1999) about the history and future of the Internet.
In fact his journalism is only a sideline to an academic career.
His Observer articles can be found archived at http://www.briefhistory.com/footnotes/.
His blog is at http://www.skillbytes.co.uk/memex/.
There are serious doubts in many people's minds about whether the stories of cell phone use on September 11th 2001 can possibly be true. See for instance this article on Global Research.
This (and the company's word processor, textmaker) are included in the boxed version of SUSE 9.1 Professional.
The European Central Bank is proposing European legislation which would ban the distribution of software and devices not including such anti-counterfeiting technology: this has possible serious implications for open source software.
See: this document
There was a story in the Independent a few days ago.
It is also owned by the appalling Rupert Murdoch, who while supporting the Blair government over Iraq, is using the current political controversies to try to destroy the excellent public service BBC broadcasting organisation because he sees it as a competitor to his dreadful "Sky" satellite channels. He has also turned the once excellent "Times" newspaper into what might be termed a "middle class tabloid" with essentially the same values as the "Sun", but more politely expressed.
Very interesting and informative information here: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
Press releases detailing SuSE's work on Linux for the Hammer can be found here (20th March 2002), here (28th February 2002) and here (31st January 2001).
Roger Whittaker (SuSE Linux Ltd)
While the fatal anthrax attacks of last year remain unsolved, the flippant tone of many of the comments on this seems inappropriate to me. It is clear that the anthrax attacks were not carried out by Islamic terrorists, and that the main suspect is still at large and is a US government employee.
See for example this Guardian story.
This in itself is chilling enough, along with the fact that the suspect is apparently being protected. This does not of course prove that these deaths are all part of some conspiracy: it does suggest, however that there are some very disturbing unanswered questions which could be related to this story.
The attempt to draw a parallel between globalism (seen as good, free-trade stuff which makes everyone richer overall) and open source software falls down in various ways.
I've also used the analogy between open source and free trade at times. However, it's notorious that although free trade ultimately makes everyone richer, it's always advocated by those who are already in a commanding economic position and who have most to gain. Tariffs are imposed by those whose short term interest is not best served by open markets.
In the case of open source, it's interesting that the advocates of openness and those who have most to gain are actually those who are competing from below as it were.
Globalism, of course, is really a modern version of the free trade argument with force attached.
And unfortunately when one nation is so vastly more powerful than all others, globalism essentially means American imperialism. And in the field of information, that means US restrictions in the areas of copyright, patents and the like being imposed on the rest of the world - not very `open source' or `free-trade', this.
I agree
"Spreading American values of freedom, democracy, pluralism and free market capitalism is a Good Thing"
It all depends what you mean by these pious phrases - as your expression "Usurping Sovereign Democratic Decision-making" shows that you understand.
To give an utterly trivial, but possibly instructive example, there was a planning application by McDonalds to build a drive-in very near to where I live in the South-West suburbs of London. There was virtually unanimous local opposition to this, expressed in public meetings, petitions and letters to local and national politicians, but it still got built. And the trash is being dropped in front of my house. Am I likely to feel better or worse about globalisation and American culture than before?
This is just a tiny example of how people feel when they see that what globalisation really means is the right of US corporations to walk all over their countries and their lives. I'm not making a big deal out of my grievance, but there are plenty of others who have real grievances.
There is a lot in this book:
Axelrod, Robert: The Evolution of Cooperation
which is relevant to this discussion and also to how open source development works, particularly if you read it alongside Eric Raymond's stuff.
I'm often asked - `won't viruses for Linux start to appear once Linux gains more desktop users?'. And I always explain what it is about Linux and Unix-like operating systems in general that make this very unlikely (the strict separation between root and users in particular). However, at present we have a situation in which there is a very strong sense of mutual trust: if you see some code being offered for download in the usual places you know that it's very unlikely that it will harm your system if you build it / install it as root.
It is worth thinking about the possible dangers of these particular waters getting muddied - as Linux gains more users, there will be more people around with less sophistication about these matters and there could be more people deliberately offering dangerous code for download.
So there are some reasons for concern but they are based on faults in the potential users, not in the OS.
Roger Whittaker
SuSE Linux Ltd London