By "failed operating system" I was referring to the dozens of mini computer OSes that were tried, and abandoned, in the 80's and 90s. Unix succeeded mainly because it was open source, and because it was built on the philosophy of making it easy to build new things out of old ones. That 100-line web server looks like it's a shell script but in fact it's based on a number of small, reusable pieces like nc.
Windows was not one of the failures I was thinking of. Rather, systems like DG/AOS, VMS, VM/CMS, DOS/VSE, etc. All workable up to a point, none ever became an ecosystem. Since you bring up Windows, it does not at the shell level offer more than a weak imitation of the UNIX model. But it does offer something similar to developers starting with languages like VB, and ActiveX, which is a large part of why it succeeded.
Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not a Windows hater, and am right now building a bunch of my open source on Windows using the free Microsoft C compiler. I just won't use Windows for my real work because it is the wrong tool for me as a serious developer.
One does not write a web server in Bash, one wraps a webserver in it, pipes its output to a log analyzer, restarts it automatically if it crashes, and so on.
The most important part of any UNIX-derived shell langauge is not its syntax or power but the fact it lets you construct large ad-hoc applications out of a toolbox of tens of thousands of pieces.
This is where all other operating systems (that I've ever used, and that's 30-40) have failed.
Any serious developer should know several glue languages, Unix shells being the most flexible and accessible.
This is a very profound threat to lucrative mobile cartels. Yet it's absolutely necessary as a step on the way to opening the airwaves to serve a real global Internet. My prediction: the telcos will respond with patent litigation, and with "think of the children and *AA" legislative proposals to tie the new open networks up in monitoring, filtering, and other restrictions on use.
This "infrastructure is expensive" argument is 20 years out of date. Newsflash: no-one puts down cables any more unless they're for IP. There are many, many ways to build cheap and extremely competitive telecoms networks that would end the cartels overnight. They don't mostly happen because patents block innovation wherever it is a threat. I remind you that telecoms has become a software industry, top to bottom, and every "invention" of that industry is heavily protected by software patents.
Spectrum "regulation" are just the side effect of a powerful cartel that has friends in government - a good way to raise the cost to unbearable levels for newcomers and tax the consumer. Again, it's patents that prevent more efficient use of spectrum and those "expensive" lines you talk about.
It is all about keeping out competitors that would disrupt the cozy price-fixed market.
Try to start a VoIP telecoms provider, and see what happens. Read about Vonage, if you forget your recent history. Now tell me again, seriously, that telecoms cartels have "nothing to do with patents".
Patents are the core of the telecoms stack and the reason your mobile phone bill rises year on year.
Yes, to truly re-create competition in the telecoms industry, we need a powerful competition authority, and we need much better policies for spectrum use, but most of all, we need the end of software patents.
Software patents are extremely important to certain businesses, most of all the telecoms industry, which manages to keep prices rising in an area where their half-life should be 12-18 months.
If there were no software patents, it would be much harder to maintain the telecoms cartels, the high prices, and the jobs and profits they generate. So for many people, software patents are very, very useful.
Of course the overall effect is to slow down progress in communications, keep costs artificially high, penalize emerging industries, and punish the competitiveness of regions like the USA and Europe, which allow the cartels to continue.
However, the times are changing and I've written about why the growing power of the Internet as a non-political force in politics will cause the end of software patents.
It's worth noting that software patents will also be reviewed in Europe by the European Patent Office's Extended Board of Appeal (EBA), the closest thing we have to SCOTUS with respect to patents in Europe. Sure, the EPO is a fiefdom of the patent industry and EBA its chief priesthood, but reexamining the cosy arrangements that allowed software patents to exist so far is very significant.
I think we are seeing the swing of the pendulum back towards sanity and the understanding that when it comes to the digital economy, any barrier to trade and competition - and the essence of a patent is to prevent competition - is harmful.
All music players have to support MP3 in any case, without this the public won't buy..mp3 files are what people swap, rip, and play. It's been almost 15 years.
So every normal manufacturer will pay the MP3 licensing fees (which are really a software patent tax, but let's not go there), and optimise their hardware for MP3 playback.
So Ogg is free. Even if the manufacturers got $5 for each machine they shipped Ogg on, most would not do it because it would not increase sales by any measurable amount, and it would force them to pay more for hardware. MP3 decoders are mass produced and very very cheap.
Is Ogg therefore dead? Yes, along with all other "funny" formats, on the general-purpose music player.
Where Ogg should excel is in pure software applications, especially in heavily patented areas like VoIP where there is no hardware cost, where it's trivial to add codecs, and where the current state of play penalizes cheaper solutions.
IOW it'll only work in end-to-end solutions where it can be both encoder and decoder, and resolve the issue of patent costs on the whole system.
Wait, the "Video Phone Predator Act" is in preparation, it requires all video-capable phones to make a government-mandated "heavy breathing" noise when filming.
Next, the "Spy Glass Predator Act" will make it necessary for any hidden camera to marked with blinking red/blue LEDs and make a "pshooost!" sound each time it takes a frame.
And finally, we have the bi-partisan "Window Predator Act", which requires all Glass Windows to be painted in black. This bill was sponsored by the Ink Manufacturers Association of America (IMAA).
Happily Obama has promised "transparency", so the windows are probably safe.
It's not encouraging that the committee's website will stick to this proprietary format, which is mainly designed to kill JavaScript and launch Microsoft's conquest of the free and open Internet.
However, is this really exclusive? Will the inauguration be streamed in other formats from other sources? Presumably. In which case, this is really not a problem. It's MSFT getting some marketing.
The marketing won't work. Silverlight will die, and pretty rapidly. I predict MSFT will stop pushing it early 2010.
The free and open Internet was a big part of Obama's winning machine and there's no way he or his team can switch to the old cronyisms without losing their entire support base. It will not happen.
In my firm we've used Debian for 10 years or so for all our servers. Clearly the choice of packages is a big part of keeping the systems clean and secure, and the most exotic hardware issues were with RAID disks.
Contrast that with my last desktop install where a fresh Kubuntu can't do better than 800x600 until the Nvidia drivers were activated.
The main advantage of Ubuntu is the speed which which it adapts to new hardware, but non-free drivers is part of the price to pay for that. (Another part is the instability in new versions.)
There is a global push by certain interests to get governments and ISPs to support filtering. The reason has nothing to do with child porn, that is a justification that ensures no-one will complain... would you defend the rights of child pornographers?
The real motivation here from big business is first to block the global trade in copyrighted digital goods: music, movies, TV (Vivendi, IFPI, et al). Second, to sell masses of shiny technology (Cisco et al). Third, to lock down the computer and turn it into a controlled environment where FOSS is not permitted (MSFT et al).
Governments are eager for this because they trust big business to draw the line, and because they do not trust their citizens. They fear the end of the State thanks to a flat global digital economy, and the firewalls are about stopping and controlling that.
Note the Data Retention Directive passed three years ago which mandated the storage of data on every communication (phone call, email, web click), which banned anonymous wifi, cybercafes, and mobile phones, and which was also passed as a tool against "child pornographers and organised criminals".
This would be very depressing, since the State (and don't forget, every State in existence was born in blood) has all the power.
However, the digital society seems to have its first world leader, and IMO the old industrial world, with its censorships and tolls anti-social property models, is already on the way out.
This election is probably the most important one I'll ever see in my lifetime. The fight is between special interests and society as a whole.
I've been telling people since the start of the race for candidacy that Obama would win because he has the superior machine. But his "machine" is people, organized in smart and flexible ways, largely thanks to the web and what it offers.
To some extent this fight matches the fight between Anonymous and Scientology.
People do not get smarter because they get the right education. This helps but it's not enough. They get smarter because they live and work in more diverse groups, because they have access to knowledge and information, because they can argue, because they don't follow dogma and ideology, but only the merit of social accuracy. We don't need an ideology to know that the Bush regime were a gang of thieves. But when the thieves run everything from the security infrastructure up to the courts, and back down to the vote counting itself, nothing less than a revolution can put things right.
And this is revolution. Quiet, polite, like Americans are. But it's real, it's powerful, and it's going to succeed unless there is a coup.
The outcome of this election proves to the world that the Americans were mainly victims, not supporters, of the Bush junta. It is as important a victory as the ending of WWII and the chasing away (by Americans, for a large part) of another ugly elite of vicious thugs and thieves.
It's been especially heartening - for a European - to see America confront its racism, intolerance, and fractionalism, and turn that into a mass movement for something better.
As for the education system itself... time to move away from the industrial world and into something more suitable for 2008. Mix kids of different ages, give them more freedom to learn in projects online, bring education into the digital age and merge it with digital business and lifestyle.
This law was mainly pushed by Vivendi but there are powerful backers from all across the spectrum:
* Telecoms firms that want a mandate to filter all Internet traffic so that they can block all P2P, and then VoIP, and then video streaming and then anything which competes with their monopoly products. * Large ISPs, because these are now all owned by the telecoms firms. * Vendors like Cisco because they want to sell loads and loads of expensive filtering equipment. * The music industry, because it still thinks it's going to sue its way back onto the right side of history. Stupid kloten, when will they learn? * The movie industry, because they've drunk the music industry koolaid. * The TV industry, because they want to sell more DVDs and because their distributors in the digital age are, of course, the ISPs. * And finally, certain software firms, because the only way to implement this law, finally, is to use a fully locked down operating system that only runs authorized software, so no Linux.
The French tried so hard to get this same law pushed through the European Parliament, but that seems to be saner.
There are similar legislative pushes all around Europe, at the national level, and for the same reasons.
The Internet is, really, under attack from concerted and powerful forces that hate what those free packets represent.
I remember dreams that were in black and white but where specific things - a person, an object - were in vivid colors, red, blue, yellow.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that our dream color schemes are influenced by the TV we watch. Did they ask people who grew up with no TV if they dream in color, B&W?
Much more likely, there are age differences. Maybe some people start to dream more in B&W as they get older. Correlation is not causation!
Anyhow, I don't dream much at all. Two young kids means that deep sleep is a rare luxury.
Explain that software is like a city... pipes, houses, roads, bridges. Explain that there are people who design the stuff, make it, repair it, and use it. Explain that this is the world they will live in, and give examples they can relate to: the phone network, the Internet.
Give them the understanding that IT is about stacks, layers, stuff that is old and deep, stuff that is fresh and useless...
Don't use technical words, don't try to teach anything specific at all, and don't try to sell Linux or open source (kids tend to respond to sales pitches cynically and negatively).
My advice above all is to explain how it's about people, doing things, making things, working together.
Actually, it's quite interesting. I remember when Windows NT used to run on several platforms (Intel, Alpha) and then gradually Microsoft dropped support for everything except the latest and greatest Intel boxes.
Linux, meanwhile, colonized the supercomputer and the embedded markets, and moved towards the desktop from both ends. This is still happening today: most servers run Linux and most smaller devices run Linux.
So both the Cray and the OLPC represent Microsofts attempts to push against this tide, and in some ways a reversal of previous policy. XP was going to be dropped, but now it's too valuable as a lightweight Windows for smaller notebooks.
To be honest, it reminds me a lot of parts of Holland which are 6 meters (that's about 18 feet) under sea level but which are protected by dykes and walls. The sea is rising, the land is sinking, but it's "so far, so good".
So, I've been told by one of the guys that is leading the group of the adoption of OLPCs at LatAm (a community guy) that Peru is purchasing 200,000 Linux OLPCs for Peru and just making a smaller test with Windows with a much smaller quantity of units.
Microsoft is over-stating the importance of the smaller test, it's marketing, not reality.
BTW it seems that Microsoft's main attack point against Linux on the OLPC is the lack of Flash support. The Adobe Flash viewer doesn't work in the OLPC because it needs too much CPU power, while the Flash viewer for Windows is more efficient.
No, that would be Ecuador, which also voted against Microsoft's arrogant pushing of OOXML through ISO, and appealed the bogus approval that format got.
Peru has been a MSFT client state since before the current presidency. There is a lot of work to do there. Luckily MSFT insist on playing the bad guy, which makes such work a lot easier.
To some extent, every successful community needs a bad guy. So pushing XP in Peru will probably promote interest in free software and stimulate FOSS activists to work on educating government about the importance of free software.
Any responsible politician should be encouraging a home grown FOSS industry because it creates the basis for future jobs. Learning Windows is like learning to eat every meal at McDonalds.
* Microsoft used every trick they could, including subsidies from the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation, to destroy OLPC/Linux projects. * The OLPC was never distributed en-masse to developers who could have turned it into a living ecosystem. * Running Windows on the OLPC is just stupid. * Cheap netbooks will make the OLPC redundant. * While Microsoft was attacking the OLPC, it lost sight of the fact that Linux is the obvious choice for Chinese netbooks.... in ten years time every schoolkid in Latin America, Asia, and Africa will be using netbook-style computers that cost $20 and they will be running Linux, and they will have everything the OLPC wanted to have, and more.
Free software will, eventually, set us free. ("us" = "everyone on the planet except the rich who can afford toys that lock them in and rob them blind").
The point of my post was, if you read it, that anything which could be kept secret would not be patented. If Coke had patented their recipe, they'd have lost their monopoly after 20 years.
"Notoriously hard" does not mean "impossible". It's notoriously hard to put a man on the moon. That does not mean the moon landings were faked.
If innovation = "writing down an idea as a patent" then yes, inability to profit from this will mean fewer people write down ideas as patents.
If you mean innovation = "making new stuff" then it's the market, paying users, that rewards innovation, not the patent office, nor a nice monopoly.
It's well known and easy to prove that innovation actually happens on a large front, by many people working in small increments. They are rewarded individually, according to their skill and luck. The patent holder breaks this front, claims it as his own, and punishes innovation.
So innovation is actually put at risk when patents come into play. The old bargain was that the store of knowledge was so valuable that this risk was worthwhile.
To give a real example, patents on steam engines (filed by trolls, not the real inventors) halted the industrial revolution by 20 years. But, today we have every aspect of steam engines recorded in the prior art. So when petrol runs out, we can travel by burning coal and wood again, thanks to the foresight of the patent industry.
It was never, and is still not, about innovation. It was and is about recording knowledge, nothing more or less.
Now, go try and read some software patents and tell me whether the deal still stands.
This rationale was proposed, and discredited, over 150 years ago. Trade secrets are notoriously hard to keep, as the poster JesseMcDonald points out.
More ironically: any secret that could be kept, would never be patented in the first place. There would be no point. So patents do not promote disclosure of trade secret. They reward the documentation of ideas that could never be kept secret at all.
There are many rationales for patents, and they are without exception bogus, except the rationale of an incentive to deliver nicely written patent documents which promote the collection of knowledge. Given that Wikipedia does this today, and that the granting of monopoly over the recorded ideas is insane in any high technology sector... high tech patents have lose their only plausible economic basis, and now exist purely on the basis of belief, inertia, and the power of special interests exercised via slave courts.
Yay! McCain's position on patents basically shows him as a protectionist 1800-era politician who won't bat an eyelid while raising barriers to trade, tariffs, and taxes.
The only value in patents is to record knowledge, and the penalty is a 20-year exclusion of trade in specific areas. All other rationales for patents are bogus. It's about building up the prior art and bribing people to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
By "failed operating system" I was referring to the dozens of mini computer OSes that were tried, and abandoned, in the 80's and 90s. Unix succeeded mainly because it was open source, and because it was built on the philosophy of making it easy to build new things out of old ones. That 100-line web server looks like it's a shell script but in fact it's based on a number of small, reusable pieces like nc.
Windows was not one of the failures I was thinking of. Rather, systems like DG/AOS, VMS, VM/CMS, DOS/VSE, etc. All workable up to a point, none ever became an ecosystem. Since you bring up Windows, it does not at the shell level offer more than a weak imitation of the UNIX model. But it does offer something similar to developers starting with languages like VB, and ActiveX, which is a large part of why it succeeded.
Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not a Windows hater, and am right now building a bunch of my open source on Windows using the free Microsoft C compiler. I just won't use Windows for my real work because it is the wrong tool for me as a serious developer.
One does not write a web server in Bash, one wraps a webserver in it, pipes its output to a log analyzer, restarts it automatically if it crashes, and so on.
The most important part of any UNIX-derived shell langauge is not its syntax or power but the fact it lets you construct large ad-hoc applications out of a toolbox of tens of thousands of pieces.
This is where all other operating systems (that I've ever used, and that's 30-40) have failed.
Any serious developer should know several glue languages, Unix shells being the most flexible and accessible.
This is a very profound threat to lucrative mobile cartels. Yet it's absolutely necessary as a step on the way to opening the airwaves to serve a real global Internet. My prediction: the telcos will respond with patent litigation, and with "think of the children and *AA" legislative proposals to tie the new open networks up in monitoring, filtering, and other restrictions on use.
This "infrastructure is expensive" argument is 20 years out of date. Newsflash: no-one puts down cables any more unless they're for IP. There are many, many ways to build cheap and extremely competitive telecoms networks that would end the cartels overnight. They don't mostly happen because patents block innovation wherever it is a threat. I remind you that telecoms has become a software industry, top to bottom, and every "invention" of that industry is heavily protected by software patents.
Spectrum "regulation" are just the side effect of a powerful cartel that has friends in government - a good way to raise the cost to unbearable levels for newcomers and tax the consumer. Again, it's patents that prevent more efficient use of spectrum and those "expensive" lines you talk about.
It is all about keeping out competitors that would disrupt the cozy price-fixed market.
Try to start a VoIP telecoms provider, and see what happens. Read about Vonage, if you forget your recent history. Now tell me again, seriously, that telecoms cartels have "nothing to do with patents".
Patents are the core of the telecoms stack and the reason your mobile phone bill rises year on year.
Yes, to truly re-create competition in the telecoms industry, we need a powerful competition authority, and we need much better policies for spectrum use, but most of all, we need the end of software patents.
Software patents are extremely important to certain businesses, most of all the telecoms industry, which manages to keep prices rising in an area where their half-life should be 12-18 months.
If there were no software patents, it would be much harder to maintain the telecoms cartels, the high prices, and the jobs and profits they generate. So for many people, software patents are very, very useful.
Of course the overall effect is to slow down progress in communications, keep costs artificially high, penalize emerging industries, and punish the competitiveness of regions like the USA and Europe, which allow the cartels to continue.
However, the times are changing and I've written about why the growing power of the Internet as a non-political force in politics will cause the end of software patents.
It's worth noting that software patents will also be reviewed in Europe by the European Patent Office's Extended Board of Appeal (EBA), the closest thing we have to SCOTUS with respect to patents in Europe. Sure, the EPO is a fiefdom of the patent industry and EBA its chief priesthood, but reexamining the cosy arrangements that allowed software patents to exist so far is very significant.
I think we are seeing the swing of the pendulum back towards sanity and the understanding that when it comes to the digital economy, any barrier to trade and competition - and the essence of a patent is to prevent competition - is harmful.
About 10 years
You would save your work on:
* 8" floppy drives
* Removable Winchesters
* Good old spinning rust
* SSD, like my MBA
* GDrive: slow, but cosmic
* Cowboy Neal's Sneakers
All music players have to support MP3 in any case, without this the public won't buy. .mp3 files are what people swap, rip, and play. It's been almost 15 years.
So every normal manufacturer will pay the MP3 licensing fees (which are really a software patent tax, but let's not go there), and optimise their hardware for MP3 playback.
So Ogg is free. Even if the manufacturers got $5 for each machine they shipped Ogg on, most would not do it because it would not increase sales by any measurable amount, and it would force them to pay more for hardware. MP3 decoders are mass produced and very very cheap.
Is Ogg therefore dead? Yes, along with all other "funny" formats, on the general-purpose music player.
Where Ogg should excel is in pure software applications, especially in heavily patented areas like VoIP where there is no hardware cost, where it's trivial to add codecs, and where the current state of play penalizes cheaper solutions.
IOW it'll only work in end-to-end solutions where it can be both encoder and decoder, and resolve the issue of patent costs on the whole system.
Wait, the "Video Phone Predator Act" is in preparation, it requires all video-capable phones to make a government-mandated "heavy breathing" noise when filming.
Next, the "Spy Glass Predator Act" will make it necessary for any hidden camera to marked with blinking red/blue LEDs and make a "pshooost!" sound each time it takes a frame.
And finally, we have the bi-partisan "Window Predator Act", which requires all Glass Windows to be painted in black. This bill was sponsored by the Ink Manufacturers Association of America (IMAA).
Happily Obama has promised "transparency", so the windows are probably safe.
It's not encouraging that the committee's website will stick to this proprietary format, which is mainly designed to kill JavaScript and launch Microsoft's conquest of the free and open Internet.
However, is this really exclusive? Will the inauguration be streamed in other formats from other sources? Presumably. In which case, this is really not a problem. It's MSFT getting some marketing.
The marketing won't work. Silverlight will die, and pretty rapidly. I predict MSFT will stop pushing it early 2010.
The free and open Internet was a big part of Obama's winning machine and there's no way he or his team can switch to the old cronyisms without losing their entire support base. It will not happen.
In my firm we've used Debian for 10 years or so for all our servers. Clearly the choice of packages is a big part of keeping the systems clean and secure, and the most exotic hardware issues were with RAID disks.
Contrast that with my last desktop install where a fresh Kubuntu can't do better than 800x600 until the Nvidia drivers were activated.
The main advantage of Ubuntu is the speed which which it adapts to new hardware, but non-free drivers is part of the price to pay for that. (Another part is the instability in new versions.)
There is a global push by certain interests to get governments and ISPs to support filtering. The reason has nothing to do with child porn, that is a justification that ensures no-one will complain... would you defend the rights of child pornographers?
The real motivation here from big business is first to block the global trade in copyrighted digital goods: music, movies, TV (Vivendi, IFPI, et al). Second, to sell masses of shiny technology (Cisco et al). Third, to lock down the computer and turn it into a controlled environment where FOSS is not permitted (MSFT et al).
Governments are eager for this because they trust big business to draw the line, and because they do not trust their citizens. They fear the end of the State thanks to a flat global digital economy, and the firewalls are about stopping and controlling that.
Note the Data Retention Directive passed three years ago which mandated the storage of data on every communication (phone call, email, web click), which banned anonymous wifi, cybercafes, and mobile phones, and which was also passed as a tool against "child pornographers and organised criminals".
This would be very depressing, since the State (and don't forget, every State in existence was born in blood) has all the power.
However, the digital society seems to have its first world leader, and IMO the old industrial world, with its censorships and tolls anti-social property models, is already on the way out.
This election is probably the most important one I'll ever see in my lifetime. The fight is between special interests and society as a whole.
I've been telling people since the start of the race for candidacy that Obama would win because he has the superior machine. But his "machine" is people, organized in smart and flexible ways, largely thanks to the web and what it offers.
To some extent this fight matches the fight between Anonymous and Scientology.
People do not get smarter because they get the right education. This helps but it's not enough. They get smarter because they live and work in more diverse groups, because they have access to knowledge and information, because they can argue, because they don't follow dogma and ideology, but only the merit of social accuracy. We don't need an ideology to know that the Bush regime were a gang of thieves. But when the thieves run everything from the security infrastructure up to the courts, and back down to the vote counting itself, nothing less than a revolution can put things right.
And this is revolution. Quiet, polite, like Americans are. But it's real, it's powerful, and it's going to succeed unless there is a coup.
The outcome of this election proves to the world that the Americans were mainly victims, not supporters, of the Bush junta. It is as important a victory as the ending of WWII and the chasing away (by Americans, for a large part) of another ugly elite of vicious thugs and thieves.
It's been especially heartening - for a European - to see America confront its racism, intolerance, and fractionalism, and turn that into a mass movement for something better.
As for the education system itself... time to move away from the industrial world and into something more suitable for 2008. Mix kids of different ages, give them more freedom to learn in projects online, bring education into the digital age and merge it with digital business and lifestyle.
This law was mainly pushed by Vivendi but there are powerful backers from all across the spectrum:
* Telecoms firms that want a mandate to filter all Internet traffic so that they can block all P2P, and then VoIP, and then video streaming and then anything which competes with their monopoly products.
* Large ISPs, because these are now all owned by the telecoms firms.
* Vendors like Cisco because they want to sell loads and loads of expensive filtering equipment.
* The music industry, because it still thinks it's going to sue its way back onto the right side of history. Stupid kloten, when will they learn?
* The movie industry, because they've drunk the music industry koolaid.
* The TV industry, because they want to sell more DVDs and because their distributors in the digital age are, of course, the ISPs.
* And finally, certain software firms, because the only way to implement this law, finally, is to use a fully locked down operating system that only runs authorized software, so no Linux.
The French tried so hard to get this same law pushed through the European Parliament, but that seems to be saner.
There are similar legislative pushes all around Europe, at the national level, and for the same reasons.
The Internet is, really, under attack from concerted and powerful forces that hate what those free packets represent.
I remember dreams that were in black and white but where specific things - a person, an object - were in vivid colors, red, blue, yellow.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that our dream color schemes are influenced by the TV we watch. Did they ask people who grew up with no TV if they dream in color, B&W?
Much more likely, there are age differences. Maybe some people start to dream more in B&W as they get older. Correlation is not causation!
Anyhow, I don't dream much at all. Two young kids means that deep sleep is a rare luxury.
Explain that software is like a city... pipes, houses, roads, bridges. Explain that there are people who design the stuff, make it, repair it, and use it. Explain that this is the world they will live in, and give examples they can relate to: the phone network, the Internet.
Give them the understanding that IT is about stacks, layers, stuff that is old and deep, stuff that is fresh and useless...
Don't use technical words, don't try to teach anything specific at all, and don't try to sell Linux or open source (kids tend to respond to sales pitches cynically and negatively).
My advice above all is to explain how it's about people, doing things, making things, working together.
Actually, it's quite interesting. I remember when Windows NT used to run on several platforms (Intel, Alpha) and then gradually Microsoft dropped support for everything except the latest and greatest Intel boxes.
Linux, meanwhile, colonized the supercomputer and the embedded markets, and moved towards the desktop from both ends. This is still happening today: most servers run Linux and most smaller devices run Linux.
So both the Cray and the OLPC represent Microsofts attempts to push against this tide, and in some ways a reversal of previous policy. XP was going to be dropped, but now it's too valuable as a lightweight Windows for smaller notebooks.
To be honest, it reminds me a lot of parts of Holland which are 6 meters (that's about 18 feet) under sea level but which are protected by dykes and walls. The sea is rising, the land is sinking, but it's "so far, so good".
So, I've been told by one of the guys that is leading the group of the adoption of OLPCs at LatAm (a community guy) that Peru is purchasing 200,000 Linux OLPCs for Peru and just making a smaller test with Windows with a much smaller quantity of units.
Microsoft is over-stating the importance of the smaller test, it's marketing, not reality.
BTW it seems that Microsoft's main attack point against Linux on the OLPC is the lack of Flash support. The Adobe Flash viewer doesn't work in the OLPC because it needs too much CPU power, while the Flash viewer for Windows is more efficient.
Gnash would probably help here.
No, that would be Ecuador, which also voted against Microsoft's arrogant pushing of OOXML through ISO, and appealed the bogus approval that format got.
Peru has been a MSFT client state since before the current presidency. There is a lot of work to do there. Luckily MSFT insist on playing the bad guy, which makes such work a lot easier.
To some extent, every successful community needs a bad guy. So pushing XP in Peru will probably promote interest in free software and stimulate FOSS activists to work on educating government about the importance of free software.
Any responsible politician should be encouraging a home grown FOSS industry because it creates the basis for future jobs. Learning Windows is like learning to eat every meal at McDonalds.
* Microsoft used every trick they could, including subsidies from the Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation, to destroy OLPC/Linux projects. ... in ten years time every schoolkid in Latin America, Asia, and Africa will be using netbook-style computers that cost $20 and they will be running Linux, and they will have everything the OLPC wanted to have, and more.
* The OLPC was never distributed en-masse to developers who could have turned it into a living ecosystem.
* Running Windows on the OLPC is just stupid.
* Cheap netbooks will make the OLPC redundant.
* While Microsoft was attacking the OLPC, it lost sight of the fact that Linux is the obvious choice for Chinese netbooks.
Free software will, eventually, set us free. ("us" = "everyone on the planet except the rich who can afford toys that lock them in and rob them blind").
The point of my post was, if you read it, that anything which could be kept secret would not be patented. If Coke had patented their recipe, they'd have lost their monopoly after 20 years.
"Notoriously hard" does not mean "impossible". It's notoriously hard to put a man on the moon. That does not mean the moon landings were faked.
If innovation = "writing down an idea as a patent" then yes, inability to profit from this will mean fewer people write down ideas as patents.
If you mean innovation = "making new stuff" then it's the market, paying users, that rewards innovation, not the patent office, nor a nice monopoly.
It's well known and easy to prove that innovation actually happens on a large front, by many people working in small increments. They are rewarded individually, according to their skill and luck. The patent holder breaks this front, claims it as his own, and punishes innovation.
So innovation is actually put at risk when patents come into play. The old bargain was that the store of knowledge was so valuable that this risk was worthwhile.
To give a real example, patents on steam engines (filed by trolls, not the real inventors) halted the industrial revolution by 20 years. But, today we have every aspect of steam engines recorded in the prior art. So when petrol runs out, we can travel by burning coal and wood again, thanks to the foresight of the patent industry.
It was never, and is still not, about innovation. It was and is about recording knowledge, nothing more or less.
Now, go try and read some software patents and tell me whether the deal still stands.
This rationale was proposed, and discredited, over 150 years ago. Trade secrets are notoriously hard to keep, as the poster JesseMcDonald points out.
More ironically: any secret that could be kept, would never be patented in the first place. There would be no point. So patents do not promote disclosure of trade secret. They reward the documentation of ideas that could never be kept secret at all.
There are many rationales for patents, and they are without exception bogus, except the rationale of an incentive to deliver nicely written patent documents which promote the collection of knowledge. Given that Wikipedia does this today, and that the granting of monopoly over the recorded ideas is insane in any high technology sector... high tech patents have lose their only plausible economic basis, and now exist purely on the basis of belief, inertia, and the power of special interests exercised via slave courts.
Yay! McCain's position on patents basically shows him as a protectionist 1800-era politician who won't bat an eyelid while raising barriers to trade, tariffs, and taxes.
"Useful"...
The only value in patents is to record knowledge, and the penalty is a 20-year exclusion of trade in specific areas. All other rationales for patents are bogus. It's about building up the prior art and bribing people to do this.
It may be a fair trade in some domains.