In your example, the drill is allowing your mind to drill a hole in the wall, so it is extending your mind in that sense.
When I said a computer is for extending your mind, I meant it is letting your mind process more information than it could without access to a computer.
What I was objecting to was the idea that because a consumer drill has a widely accepted 'user interface' that computer software/hardware assemlies for achieving complex information processign tasks should also.
That makes about as much sense as complaining that blank paper you buy in the store is hard to use to write a story because it doesn't come with a plot outline already on it.
The annotator's main point in response to Neal was that the right interface is the one that gets 'whatever work you are interested in' done.
His constant comparisons to cars and drills and toasters miss the mark by a mile. Those appliances are not about extending your mind.
Computers are about amplifying your mind's ability to process information. Large numbers of people agree with each other on how they want their toast prepared, their holes drilled, and their vehicles to work and can safely leave all the decisions about how best to do those things to specialists.
Every person, however, has a different reaction to reading a great work of literature. There is enough overlap between people's experience in reading any given book that people can meaningfully discuss literature with each other, but not so much that we could expect another person to read Moby Dick for us and tell us what it means to us. The only way to know what Moby Dick would mean to you is to read it yourself.
How telling that the annotator didn't want to touch Neal's last section, the left pinky of god, where he points out that this quest for the perfect interface to 'get something done' makes no more sense than a button labeled 'life my life for me.'
You are the only one who can possibly make all the decisions that count as 'living your life.'
I think programming (in the broader sense of understanding the hardware and software's theory of operation well enough to arrange the 'pieces' to carry out an analysis or goal), will become more and more a part of the average person's use of computers, just as reading and writing and thinking in general continue to become and larger part of the average person's life.
While the R manuals might not be good from the point of view of someone not willing to spend a lot of time with them, R has to have one of the best mailing lists out there. Last time I checked, there were 50 emails per day.
I once had a question about how to get the plot command to do something and I had an answer from 3 different continents in under two hours. Often, the people answering you have a PhD in statistics.
The R community is very enthusiastic, welcomes newcomers, and seems to be expanding at a great rate.
There are a ton of libraries available for R at any of the CRAN (comprehensive R Archive Network) mirrors, such as:
http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/
While it is true that R loads data sets into memory and that can put an upper limit on the size of the data sets you might want to manipulate in it, it also has a great MySQL interface that lets you use the MySQL engine as a sort of virtual memory manager to, in some circumstances, break out of the memory limitation.
Allow me extend your points by putting my finger on the mother of all reasons why slackware is simple.
Let me begin with this question:
Where exactly does the simplicity of slackware come from?
It comes from the fact that one man, Patrick Volkerding, maintains/develops the entire distribution. This puts a severe upper limit on how complex a build script he can write for any given package. The build scripts had better all follow the same basic concepts and be easy to read or one man could never maintain a thousand of them.
I don't know much about the other distribtions, but I'd wager that there is quite a bit of variance and complexity among the build scripts. Would any debian users care to comment on that?
How many distributions can boast that a single man develops/maintains the entirety of the build scripts?
Heh. This, coming from the "teh softwarez must be free-as-in-um-actually-i'm-just-cheap" crowd (which unfortunately makes up the majority of the people who use open source) is absolutely hilarious.
By calling OSS users cheap, I take it you mean they are less willing to spend money on software than some other crowd.
First of all, why is that a bad thing?
Secondly, compared to what other crowd?
I might point out in response that OSS users are more willing to spend their time learning how to use software than windows users are and that for most of us, our time is quite valuable. It is often said that windows is easy to learn but hard to use while Unix like operating systems are hard to learn but easy to use.
OSS users, then, are more willing to sit down and spend up-front time learning how something works to make better use of the bulk of the time they will spend using a program into the future.
By contrast, windows users want Microsoft to figure out for them what complex tasks they should be doing and put a button somewhere that they can push to make it happen.
they write a press release claiming it was a DDOS attack from the open source community, then ask us to responsibly join them in condemning such attacks?
#!/bin/bash if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
echo "which womanual page to you want?"
exit 1 fi echo "Well, if you don't know, then I'm CERTAINLY not going to tell you!"
can lack of software kill?
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From the article:
The three Panamanian medical physicists who used the software to figure out just how much radiation to apply to patients are scheduled to be tried on May 18 in Panama City on charges of second-degree murder. Under Panamanian law, they may be held responsible for "introducing changes into the software" that led directly to the patients' deaths, according to Special Superior Deputy Prosecutor Cristobal Arboleda.
I just love it when reporters try to pull a fast one. The people operating the machine *changed the software* because they *thought they knew what they were doing*. If they had opened up the machine and altered the control circuits, would the article be trying to discourage kids from having fun designing circuits and publishing the designs? "Can Circuits Kill?" would be the title, I suppose and it would end with a cautionary note shaking its finger at radio amatuers.
Again, from the article:
This is not a cautionary tale for medical technicians, even though they can find themselves fighting to stay out of jail if they misunderstand or misuse technology. This also is not a tale of how human beings can be injured or worse by poorly designed or poorly explained software, although there are plenty of examples to make the point. This is a warning for any creator of computer programs: that software quality matters, that applications must be foolproof, and that-- whether embedded in the engine of a car, a robotic arm in a factory or a healing device in a hospital-- poorly deployed code can kill.
Every example given was life threatening, yet the author clearly wants you to draw the conclusion that a software author should hesitate to publish a program she wrote to perform a calculation because someone *who thought they knew what they were doing* might plug it into a lethal machine.
Next we will be hearing about how someone wrote a spreadsheet in gnumeric to calculate the radiation dose, killed someone because of a bug in gnumeric, and how the authors of gnumeric should be ashamed of themselves, and not the asshole who *thought he knew what he was doing.*
Special Superior Deputy Prosecutor Cristobal Arboleda, unlike the author of the article, is accusing the right people and doing his job well.
In the end, Aiden, it's your choice. Do you want to have a car, a house and a family when you are 30? Do you love being a software engineer at the same time? If so, you literally need to get a life. Forget the dream about stuff being free and stop advocating it. It's idiocy. It's bigotry. If you want to put your skills to work and you need to support a family, your work and work results can't be free. Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again.
I am a father and a husband. No one writes me a check to be either yet I spend most of my time working (directly or indirectly) at fulfilling my responsibilities in both roles.
Am I an idiot or a bigot because I've don't expect to be paid directly in case for my efforts?
It's fun to beat up on people who find themselves, through a moment of weakness, in a terrible fix. We have often not bothered to understand their circumstances, nor acknowledge our own role in their predicament. Ronald Reagan, for example, liked to blow hard about the Welfare Queen, a terrible creature which exists in about the same measure as Grendel.
The fix they find themselves in is that they have declared total and utter war upon a completely innocent group of people, and the group and its supporters and sympathizers is responding by, among other things, heaping abuse back.
Your claim that the group is being childish is itself childish. When someone declares war on you and your family you don't stand back and worry yourself about what madness drove them to it.
I wish there were some way I could take a number home with me after voting that would let me verify how my vote was counted after the election.
I am picturing the government publishing a DVD of election results that anyone can buy after the election. You can use the number on your receipt, together with the DVD, to verify how your vote was counted.
I realize some care had to be taken to avoid compulsary vote selling schemes.
Let's say my boss says I have to vote for X, and I have to give him a voting receipt proving I voted for X, or he will fire me after the DVD comes out.
When I vote, I vote for Y and get a receipt. Then I ask for another receipt that says I voted for X, and I give that one to my boss.
In other words, the machine lets me print phony receipts and true receipts and I am the only one who knows which is the real receipt.
Why is this useful? Well, everyone would be able to verify how their own vote was counted. Let's say a large election is hacked by the forces of evil and 100000 votes are changed. Let's say one in ten people bother to check their vote. Then there are 10,000 people who know their votes were changed.
I think that would be a useful check and could avoid the vote buying problem. Well, if you could work out the bugs, that is;-)
Well, I don't think it is yet a government regulation, I think these companies by and large are doing it themselves, possibly for liability reasons.
I don't think it has to be a regulation for it to be problematic, or a threat to our rights. Once it becomes a regulation, it is rather late in the game to begin complaining.
But no one is telling you that you can't run PhotoShop or any other software (although they tried their hardest to make PGP a crime as in "what have you got to hide?", and it is possible that the NSA *did* in fact lean on Microsoft to install back doors in Windows), what they are saying is that they don't want you to use their software to counterfeit money.
Well, I'm more worried about someone telling me I can't run The Gimp than PhotoShop.
I'm interested in the parallel you bring up to PGP. Exporting PGP was a crime, and as you point out, the Feds were trying to make it a crime to use it as well. Should we have waited until it had been made a crime to start complaining? Wouldn't you say that the efforts the Feds put into making it a crime constituted a threat to our rights?
As far as Adobe not wanting me to use their software to copy money, I don't see how they could effectively prevent that, so I interpret their token efforts to do so as a symbolic act. A signal to the government that they are willing to put special hooks in their software in the name of national security.
I think it makes sense for us to actively look for such signals sent between business and government and to question their purpose. Does that make me a tin foil hat wearer?
The problem isn't that this is stopping people from printing images of currency, but that it is establishing the principle that it is ok for the government to require programmers to put crime detection / phone home features in their software.
Do you see the problem now?
The "right" being infringed here is very close to speech. The right to write/run software of your own choosing without having to ask the government if it is ok first.
You would consider it a big deal if the government required you to get their approval before publishing an article you had written, wouldn't you?
I've spent a few hours here and there trying to get farsi support in KDE and mozilla working without success.
I defy you all to point me to a place on www.kde.org that explains how I get from a standard install of KDE to let me edit a document in farsi using KWord.
I seem to be missing the fonts I need and I don't know where to find them. I also don't know how to install fonts in KDE.
Think of it this way. When you imagine the surface of a sphere, or of a torus, you are describing how the points on the surface are connected to each other. You have a set of points with "movement rules", if you will, for what happens as objects move through the points. It is the movement rules that you can do experiments on to verify or falisfy. The sphere analogy is just a convient way to think of the rules.
It I came up with a way to describe real numbers as points on a sphere, and motivated multiplication in terms of geometric operations on that surface, would you turn around and say "But, what's outside the sphere of numbers? I refuse to buy this real number crap until someone tells me what it outside."
You beat me to it. I have been thinking about that book ever since the blackout myself.
Another factor Vinge postulates is that as the world wide network grows in efficiency and usefulness, it becomes tempting for the government to promise to optimize it beyond its ability to do so, which makes the gov take undue risks in the process.
It simply amazes me how well Vinge understands the social/technological implications of the information soceity, then describes them in such general terms.
He did a similar thing in Marooned in Realtime, where he uses real estate terminology to describe the social problems arising from the mining of antimatter from the surface of the sun.
"virtually every nontrivial piece of tech you encounter has a vast base of knowledge behind it..."
You put that so well. Thank you.
I think where things are headed is, finally, the realization that for the average home user, a computer and its OS require on-going service from a specialist, just as a home furnace or water heater requires some sort of on-going service.
That's why I think lindows is such an interesting idea. The have focused on making all of the compiling and configuration choices for the user and offer the click-and-run warehouse as an on-going update service.
This gives the illusion of seemless operation, with an army of engineers in the back room doing constant testing and recompiling the latest versions of all of the open-source apps you might want to run.
As complex as computers and their operating systems are these days, I don't think any amount of up-front fool-proofing is going to work for very long (such as Windows and OS-X are attempts at). The answer is an on-going tweaking service, as with other complex home appliances.
When you take security into account, this concept *really* takes off. It is looking more and more like security issues may be the final nail in M$'s coffin.
Well, the sensors made possible an era of universal law enforcement which brought down the star system that invented them.
Vinge seemed to be warning us about the dangers of overly ambitious 'network optimization' on the part of governments, which seems erriely related to the recent power grid problems.
I can't remember his exact words, but Vinge talks about how once the network effect takes off, it becomes very tempting for governments to promise more than they can deliver in terms of solving the problems of stabilizing the network, which destabilizes civilization in the end.
Between my 3 favorite authors, Vinge, Egan, and Stephenson, I have concluded that Vinge has the most to tell us about how technology is going to effect us in our lifetimes.
The article mentions $3.9 billion that was appropriated by the Help America Vote bill, and that Virginia is spending $55 million on 11,000 voting machines, which works out to $5000 per machine. That seems a bit pricey for a computer with a touch screen, doesn't it?
I assume that the Help America Vote law leaves it up to the states to procure their machines how they see fit.
How much could it possibly cost for university researchers (like the ones at John's Hopkins) to write an open source system for voting that could run on commodity hardware?
Perhaps the government should take $10 million of that $3.9 billion, fund the research, and GPL the result. Let the code be vetted in public.
I have often wondered about doing this sort of technical support remotely, by having a linux box on the inside that I could ssh/vpn into and thus diagnose/troubleshoot. Windows and Mac machines could have WinVNC (or the equivalent Mac program) installed and left running so that after connecting to the linux box, you could run vncviewer to connect to them.
I use just this setup to be able to connect to my windows machine at home when I am at work and it works like a charm.
You'd think more tech support would be done this way, but I never hear of it (although I am not well connected in the field, so perhaps it is done sometimes).
Find out who SCO customers are, and what problems they are using SCO's software to solve, then start projects to solve them using open source software by integrating existing software or writing new code.
Isn't it interesting how often americans and europeans feel the need to piss on each other when discussing politics? Ditto for americans and middle easterners. Does it have to be that way? Was it ever not? It's pretty sad if you ask me.
I am an american living in Washington D.C., my wife is from Iran, my boss is from Norway, one of the junior engineers that I mentor at my company is from France, and one of the other senior engineers is from Taiwan. I am proud to know all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
In your example, the drill is allowing your mind to drill a hole in the wall, so it is extending your mind in that sense.
When I said a computer is for extending your mind, I meant it is letting your mind process more information than it could without access to a computer.
What I was objecting to was the idea that because a consumer drill has a widely accepted 'user interface' that computer software/hardware assemlies for achieving complex information processign tasks should also.
That makes about as much sense as complaining that blank paper you buy in the store is hard to use to write a story because it doesn't come with a plot outline already on it.
The annotator's main point in response to Neal was that the right interface is the one that gets 'whatever work you are interested in' done.
His constant comparisons to cars and drills and toasters miss the mark by a mile. Those appliances are not about extending your mind.
Computers are about amplifying your mind's ability to process information. Large numbers of people agree with each other on how they want their toast prepared, their holes drilled, and their vehicles to work and can safely leave all the decisions about how best to do those things to specialists.
Every person, however, has a different reaction to reading a great work of literature. There is enough overlap between people's experience in reading any given book that people can meaningfully discuss literature with each other, but not so much that we could expect another person to read Moby Dick for us and tell us what it means to us. The only way to know what Moby Dick would mean to you is to read it yourself.
How telling that the annotator didn't want to touch Neal's last section, the left pinky of god, where he points out that this quest for the perfect interface to 'get something done' makes no more sense than a button labeled 'life my life for me.'
You are the only one who can possibly make all the decisions that count as 'living your life.'
I think programming (in the broader sense of understanding the hardware and software's theory of operation well enough to arrange the 'pieces' to carry out an analysis or goal), will become more and more a part of the average person's use of computers, just as reading and writing and thinking in general continue to become and larger part of the average person's life.
When the robot in question is so simple and well constrainted in its design that there is no conceivable way for it to harm humans.
As in, say, a little robot bird that flys around an orchard, gathering all of the fruit flies it finds.
I thought of that story also when I saw the headline to this article.
While the R manuals might not be good from the point of view of someone not willing to spend a lot of time with them, R has to have one of the best mailing lists out there. Last time I checked, there were 50 emails per day.
I once had a question about how to get the plot command to do something and I had an answer from 3 different continents in under two hours. Often, the people answering you have a PhD in statistics.
The R community is very enthusiastic, welcomes newcomers, and seems to be expanding at a great rate.
There are a ton of libraries available for R at any of the CRAN (comprehensive R Archive Network) mirrors, such as:
http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/
While it is true that R loads data sets into memory and that can put an upper limit on the size of the data sets you might want to manipulate in it, it also has a great MySQL interface that lets you use the MySQL engine as a sort of virtual memory manager to, in some circumstances, break out of the memory limitation.
along the lines of:
"A method of using geographically separated networked sensors to mine data about the physical environment..."
Allow me extend your points by putting my finger on the mother of all reasons why slackware is simple.
Let me begin with this question:
Where exactly does the simplicity of slackware come from?
It comes from the fact that one man, Patrick Volkerding, maintains/develops the entire distribution. This puts a severe upper limit on how complex a build script he can write for any given package. The build scripts had better all follow the same basic concepts and be easy to read or one man could never maintain a thousand of them.
I don't know much about the other distribtions, but I'd wager that there is quite a bit of variance and complexity among the build scripts. Would any debian users care to comment on that?
How many distributions can boast that a single man develops/maintains the entirety of the build scripts?
By calling OSS users cheap, I take it you mean they are less willing to spend money on software than some other crowd.
First of all, why is that a bad thing?
Secondly, compared to what other crowd?
I might point out in response that OSS users are more willing to spend their time learning how to use software than windows users are and that for most of us, our time is quite valuable. It is often said that windows is easy to learn but hard to use while Unix like operating systems are hard to learn but easy to use.
OSS users, then, are more willing to sit down and spend up-front time learning how something works to make better use of the bulk of the time they will spend using a program into the future.
By contrast, windows users want Microsoft to figure out for them what complex tasks they should be doing and put a button somewhere that they can push to make it happen.
Now who's cheap?
they write a press release claiming it was a DDOS attack from the open source community, then ask us to responsibly join them in condemning such attacks?
Thanks for a great idea!
/usr/bin/woman:
I just installed the following as
#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
echo "which womanual page to you want?"
exit 1
fi
echo "Well, if you don't know, then I'm CERTAINLY not going to tell you!"
Again, from the article:
Every example given was life threatening, yet the author clearly wants you to draw the conclusion that a software author should hesitate to publish a program she wrote to perform a calculation because someone *who thought they knew what they were doing* might plug it into a lethal machine.Next we will be hearing about how someone wrote a spreadsheet in gnumeric to calculate the radiation dose, killed someone because of a bug in gnumeric, and how the authors of gnumeric should be ashamed of themselves, and not the asshole who *thought he knew what he was doing.*
Special Superior Deputy Prosecutor Cristobal Arboleda, unlike the author of the article, is accusing the right people and doing his job well.
The last line should read:
Am I an idiot or a bigot because I don't expect to be paid directly in cash for my efforts?"
Am I an idiot or a bigot because I've don't expect to be paid directly in case for my efforts?
The fix they find themselves in is that they have declared total and utter war upon a completely innocent group of people, and the group and its supporters and sympathizers is responding by, among other things, heaping abuse back.
Your claim that the group is being childish is itself childish. When someone declares war on you and your family you don't stand back and worry yourself about what madness drove them to it.
You protect yourself.
I wish there were some way I could take a number home with me after voting that would let me verify how my vote was counted after the election.
;-)
I am picturing the government publishing a DVD of election results that anyone can buy after the election. You can use the number on your receipt, together with the DVD, to verify how your vote was counted.
I realize some care had to be taken to avoid compulsary vote selling schemes.
Let's say my boss says I have to vote for X, and I have to give him a voting receipt proving I voted for X, or he will fire me after the DVD comes out.
When I vote, I vote for Y and get a receipt. Then I ask for another receipt that says I voted for X, and I give that one to my boss.
In other words, the machine lets me print phony receipts and true receipts and I am the only one who knows which is the real receipt.
Why is this useful? Well, everyone would be able to verify how their own vote was counted. Let's say a large election is hacked by the forces of evil and 100000 votes are changed. Let's say one in ten people bother to check their vote. Then there are 10,000 people who know their votes were changed.
I think that would be a useful check and could avoid the vote buying problem. Well, if you could work out the bugs, that is
I'm interested in the parallel you bring up to PGP. Exporting PGP was a crime, and as you point out, the Feds were trying to make it a crime to use it as well. Should we have waited until it had been made a crime to start complaining? Wouldn't you say that the efforts the Feds put into making it a crime constituted a threat to our rights?
As far as Adobe not wanting me to use their software to copy money, I don't see how they could effectively prevent that, so I interpret their token efforts to do so as a symbolic act. A signal to the government that they are willing to put special hooks in their software in the name of national security.
I think it makes sense for us to actively look for such signals sent between business and government and to question their purpose. Does that make me a tin foil hat wearer?
The problem isn't that this is stopping people from printing images of currency, but that it is establishing the principle that it is ok for the government to require programmers to put crime detection / phone home features in their software.
Do you see the problem now?
The "right" being infringed here is very close to speech. The right to write/run software of your own choosing without having to ask the government if it is ok first.
You would consider it a big deal if the government required you to get their approval before publishing an article you had written, wouldn't you?
The phrase prior-restraint comes to mind.
I've spent a few hours here and there trying to get farsi support in KDE and mozilla working without success.
I defy you all to point me to a place on www.kde.org that explains how I get from a standard install of KDE to let me edit a document in farsi using KWord.
I seem to be missing the fonts I need and I don't know where to find them. I also don't know how to install fonts in KDE.
Think of it this way. When you imagine the surface of a sphere, or of a torus, you are describing how the points on the surface are connected to each other. You have a set of points with "movement rules", if you will, for what happens as objects move through the points. It is the movement rules that you can do experiments on to verify or falisfy. The sphere analogy is just a convient way to think of the rules.
It I came up with a way to describe real numbers as points on a sphere, and motivated multiplication in terms of geometric operations on that surface, would you turn around and say "But, what's outside the sphere of numbers? I refuse to buy this real number crap until someone tells me what it outside."
You beat me to it. I have been thinking about that book ever since the blackout myself.
Another factor Vinge postulates is that as the world wide network grows in efficiency and usefulness, it becomes tempting for the government to promise to optimize it beyond its ability to do so, which makes the gov take undue risks in the process.
It simply amazes me how well Vinge understands the social/technological implications of the information soceity, then describes them in such general terms.
He did a similar thing in Marooned in Realtime, where he uses real estate terminology to describe the social problems arising from the mining of antimatter from the surface of the sun.
"virtually every nontrivial piece of tech you encounter has a vast base of knowledge behind it..."
You put that so well. Thank you.
I think where things are headed is, finally, the realization that for the average home user, a computer and its OS require on-going service from a specialist, just as a home furnace or water heater requires some sort of on-going service.
That's why I think lindows is such an interesting idea. The have focused on making all of the compiling and configuration choices for the user and offer the click-and-run warehouse as an on-going update service.
This gives the illusion of seemless operation, with an army of engineers in the back room doing constant testing and recompiling the latest versions of all of the open-source apps you might want to run.
As complex as computers and their operating systems are these days, I don't think any amount of up-front fool-proofing is going to work for very long (such as Windows and OS-X are attempts at). The answer is an on-going tweaking service, as with other complex home appliances.
When you take security into account, this concept *really* takes off. It is looking more and more like security issues may be the final nail in M$'s coffin.
I predict great things for lindows.
Well, the sensors made possible an era of universal law enforcement which brought down the star system that invented them.
Vinge seemed to be warning us about the dangers of overly ambitious 'network optimization' on the part of governments, which seems erriely related to the recent power grid problems.
I can't remember his exact words, but Vinge talks about how once the network effect takes off, it becomes very tempting for governments to promise more than they can deliver in terms of solving the problems of stabilizing the network, which destabilizes civilization in the end.
Between my 3 favorite authors, Vinge, Egan, and Stephenson, I have concluded that Vinge has the most to tell us about how technology is going to effect us in our lifetimes.
The article mentions $3.9 billion that was appropriated by the Help America Vote bill, and that Virginia is spending $55 million on 11,000 voting machines, which works out to $5000 per machine. That seems a bit pricey for a computer with a touch screen, doesn't it?
I assume that the Help America Vote law leaves it up to the states to procure their machines how they see fit.
How much could it possibly cost for university researchers (like the ones at John's Hopkins) to write an open source system for voting that could run on commodity hardware?
Perhaps the government should take $10 million of that $3.9 billion, fund the research, and GPL the result. Let the code be vetted in public.
Am I missing something?
That was a very interesting pair of articles.
I have often wondered about doing this sort of technical support remotely, by having a linux box on the inside that I could ssh/vpn into and thus diagnose/troubleshoot. Windows and Mac machines could have WinVNC (or the equivalent Mac program) installed and left running so that after connecting to the linux box, you could run vncviewer to connect to them.
I use just this setup to be able to connect to my windows machine at home when I am at work and it works like a charm.
You'd think more tech support would be done this way, but I never hear of it (although I am not well connected in the field, so perhaps it is done sometimes).
How about this?
Find out who SCO customers are, and what problems they are using SCO's software to solve, then start projects to solve them using open source software by integrating existing software or writing new code.
Isn't it interesting how often americans and europeans feel the need to piss on each other when discussing politics? Ditto for americans and middle easterners. Does it have to be that way? Was it ever not? It's pretty sad if you ask me.
I am an american living in Washington D.C., my wife is from Iran, my boss is from Norway, one of the junior engineers that I mentor at my company is from France, and one of the other senior engineers is from Taiwan. I am proud to know all of them.