As the article says, *immature* open source projects are done, the key word being immature. Certainly - any company large enough to have a real CIO position would have been hesitant to put immature technology into operation in the past, with not that much changing up to the present.
The article writer considers Linux as a mature technology. I worked at a Fortune 100 financial company not long ago where engineering was testing Red Hat Linux, but had none of it in production. Whether you call it data management or business processes, a critical machine could have literally billions of dollars worth of trades processed over it in a day, and engineering placed a very high value on stability. Most critical machines ran versions of Solaris which were more than one version out of date, even if they were new machines with new applications - IT management didn't want any surprises, they didn't want to be the ones to find a bug in the latest version of Solaris, or even the previous one. And if you have, say, hundreds of Sun Enterprise 4500s all over the world, you might tend to see bugs that shops with dozens, or a handful of E4500s might not. Wanting maturity is not a new thing.
I would agree that consolidation and focus on business process is the new fad among CIOs. So perhaps the days where in large companies an immature open source project would make its way in by 10%-20% of the environment are gone while this fad lasts. But there are plenty of smaller companies who do not have the budget, and are willing to use it. My friend works for a company with $1 billion in revenue, which is one company in a corporation which has over $3 billion in revenue - the revenue is just shy of putting the corporation in the Fortune 500. Despite all of that, the IT department uses a ton of open source, and only uses propietary technology when necessary. They've even been using immature open source software when mature, good propietary solutions exist for some things, simply due to budget. Despite a lot of things, at the end of the day, free as in beer looks very, very attractive to a lot of companies over even a slightly better competitor that costs tens of thousands of dollars. Even for companies almost in the Fortune 500.
José Bové is a french farmer who is part of the alter-globalization movement. He was allowed in Hong Kong by China in December, but not let in the US this month. It seems China allows more freedom of speech on globalization than the US does. And I can tick off my hand how many people are or were denied entry to the US because the powers-that-be don't want people to hear their speeches (Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey, Ernest Mandel etc.)
As far as domestically, we're told TV channels controlled by Fox News are conservative (or even fair and balanced) while NBC is liberal - NBC, which is owned by the military contractor General Electric. When small groups like the Workers World Party print their newspaper, and have protests against the US sending $1 billion a year in military expenses to Colombia (the only group locally that has them that I know of), the director of the FBI goes before Congress and says "Anarchists and extremist socialist groups--many of which, such as the workers' world party, reclaim the streets, and carnival against capitalism, have an international presence--at times also represent a potential threat in the United States."
There is not much immigration from China to the US. Many Chinese people have moved back to China in the past few decades. I think that says everything there is to say about existing freedom and opportunity.
There is a project on Wikipedia which says "the Wikipedia project has a systemic bias that grows naturally out of the demographic of its contributors". But beyond this is the control you exercise over Wikipedia.
You have said that "[Friedrich] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Or you've said things in interviews such as "Unlike some other grassroots journalism type of projects like Indymedia, which is a very far left type of thing written by activists, we strive to be a neutral, high-quality source of basic information." (which of course implies that the supposedly "very far left" Indymedia is not a good source of information, whereas Wikipedia is).
Regarding the most powerful group of your lietenants, the Arbitration Committee, last year you had an election. This year you wanted to appoint them with little input until an uproar allowed more input from the community. During this (s)election, you put in the people with the highest vote rates, except for JayJG, who had people ahead of him since so many people voted against him due to his lack of the neutrality you espouse in interviews. You say you did this because he was on ArbCom - which he is, because you appointed him to it in the past few months. This was after the election last year, where he received no votes. Instead of having another election, or going down the 2005 election list, you appoint your crony who shares your point of view. When in the election he has people ahead of him due to strong opposition over his lack of opposition, you appoint him anyway.
As a post-script to this message, which is not part of my question, I would note to the readers that Wikipedia review is a board where people discuss their unhappiness with the Wikipedia "cabal". That board has some trolls, but some of the discussions are enlightening, from experienced users. Wikipedia looks open and inviting, but experience shows that is not the case. The one good thing about Wikipedia is the licenses for Mediawiki and English Wikipedia are GPL and GFDL, so that if people become unhappy enough they can fork. I myself tend to edit on other wikis since I'm tired of the nonsense on Wikipedia. I began editing in 2003, and have watched it go downhill from then. A lot of smart experts in the field have been driven off, and the cabal, Jimbo and his lieutenants hold sway. The fact that 2005 had elections from ArbCom and 2006 had "selections" should say something about how things are headed on Wikipedia. This is a policy everyone becomes familiar with after a time.
Actually, I think Wikipedia does a decent job on articles like quantum mechanics, but it is a complete mess in articles pertaining to say relations between the Israelis and Palestinians and that type of thing. And it has just gotten worse and worse. So Wikipedia isn't all bad, just anything to do with politics or history is a mess.
I am a normal user and not a graphic designer. Thus, I do not use complicated features in Photoshop or GIMP, just the low level features. One of these, however, is crop. And crop sucks on GIMP. With Photoshop it is simple, I put a box around what I want to crop to and I crop. With GIMP there are three crops, none of which are very good. The only one that I can use is "guillotine", which one uses by going to the ruler, dragging a line out to the middle, going back to the ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, and dragging a line to the middle again. Then I go through the menu to guillotine crop, and 9 images pop up. I close the eight I don't want, so that I now have the original big one, which I don't want any more, and the cropped version. I can just imagine what the more complex features are like. Or what people who aren't like me think, who don't use Debian as their desktop.
I was in a situation like that. Someone here advised you take a sick day. Another excuse you can make is you have a doctor's appointment. Or a dentist's appointment. Or something like that. Of course, not only am I at the behest of my employer working no pay overtime, but I am at the interviewers behest as well, having to go in during the work day. And sometimes after making all my excuses about a doctor's appointment or whatever, they cancel the interview at the last minute and ask to reschedule. Wage slavery means the employer holds all the cards.
The job I had that was similiar to yours paid over $80k a year, but like you said was "sucking the life out of me...a lot of overtime in a high-stress, tight deadline job". It was actually as an IT worker for a Fortune 100 financial company. The reason I went to Wall Street in the first place was because the dot-coms were crashing after the spring 2000 stock decline. Things got progressively worse in the space of a year there (layoffs, and since I was a contractor, a small salary cut), and in the midst of all the other BS I had it. But the job market was dead which is what gave them the power to do that. After two or so interviews they knew what I was looking for another job and said either I say that I'll stay there or I'd be fired. So I just quit. At the time I had so much in the bank, that I preferred the idea of a clean break and recommendation over them telling future employers I had been fired. Of course this meant I got no unemployment. A month later 9/11 happened and the slump in New York City got even worse.
One piece of advice I'd give is try to be choosy in your interviews. You have to be. In this respect, headhunters are a liability, as they want you to interview for any job you're anywhere near qualified for.
Just quitting would probably be a bad idea. Employers like hearing that you're currently employed. An unemployed person looking for a job gives them cause for concern.
First we hear about how the NSA is tapping into Americans talking with people overseas, and now the government wants to see what we're searching for on Google. I see so many articles on Slashdot about what the Chinese government is doing (which of course they shouldn't be doing), but how about what the US government is doing?
And if we go back a few years, we can see all of this COINTELPRO data wasn't to stop foreigners, or even people doing illegal things, but to harrass people like Martin Luther King, or breakins to the Watergate hotel to bug the Democrats. Not like the Democrats have rolled this stuff back when they got into office, Clinton's staff was over-requesting FBI files of people during "filegate".
And we're told it's because of the "War on Terror", which is a war which they never say when it will end. It reminds me of Orwell's 1984, when the government is in a state of permanent war, or war preparation anyhow. I may be older than some Slashdotters, but when I grew up I was told the US only had foreign military bases because of the USSR, and if they weren't targets of attack by Moscow, we wouldn't have them there. A decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin wall, I'm now told we are in a new state of permanent war - the cold war has become the war on terror. American military bases still circle the globe - in fact they've expanded, especially in countries south of Russia and west of China. The Russians used to say America had bases all over the world not because of Russia, but because of American imperialism. I was always told this was false, the bases were there because of the possibility of Russian attack. A decade and a half later, what the Russians used to say rings truer than what the US used to say. In fact, the government has now changed its story, and wants us to forget they used to say that, and have us all concentrate on their new permanent war.
I have been using and writing on Wikipedia a long time, and am unhappy with the way it is run. On Slashdot, many of us know the story of how Linus's lieutenants came to him one day and demanded he relinquish some control of the OS since centralization in him was causing problems.
One of the highest bodies on Wikipedia is the Arbitration Committee. Originally it was appointed by Jimbo, who I thought made several poor choices. Then last year there was an election to ArbCom, and I think the community made excellent choices to who would go ArbCom. Then in the interim, Jimbo appointed two more arbitrators, one of which I think is of very poor quality. Now he is changing the democratic election of last year, which I think went very well, and is trying to change it so it is more centralized towards himself. I think there are many signs of the problems, but this is just one of them.
While I think Wikipedia covers science and mathematics articles well, it has many problems when it comes to political matters, the Seigenthaler matter yet again just being a sign of the problem. I think Wikipedia should simply acknowledge that a "neutral" standpoint is not realistic with regards to history and politics. Wikipedia should concentrate on scientific articles and the like, and cede articles like George W. Bush to partisan wikis like Demopedia and Wikinfo.
I'm tired of the Wikipedia mess and am not contributing any money.
I have been using UNIX and the Internet since I was 16 years old back in 1989. In 1996, I began working as a systems administrator, and did that in dot-bombs until 2000, when I took the summer off and then went to work for the financial sector after the market crashed. I quit that after a year and am still doing sysadmin consulting but am not as focused on big bucks I once was.
Anyhow, when I left the financial sector I had more free time so I taught myself C language, which I knew a little of but didn't know well. And actually, that is still my "programming" language. I've been writing PERL and PHP scripts recently, but that is just hacks, the C programs I write I do in a serious, "Code Complete" way. I have seen myself become better by following the Code Complete rules, which I guess most experienced programmers think are common sense but they're new to me. Short functions - trying to keep local variables to six or seven. Trying to keep global variables as few as possible. And that sort of thing. So since 2001 I have just been increasing my skill in C, and have had no need or desire to move onto the next step.
One thing I wanted to do was read "The Art of Computer Programming" and do stuff in assembler and learn that hardcore stuff, but right now I barely have time to improve my C, which has some practical and immediate uses, so that will be postponed until I can do it. So putting aside assembler and that stuff to really understand what's going on with the machine, I guess my next step once I feel I know C well enough is C++. After that I guess I'm in the same boat you're in. Since I, of course, hate Microsoft, I guess that gives me a little bit of a push towards Java. But there isn't any good Java for my Debian either - Kaffe and all of those just don't cut it yet. So I use a non-free port. And to me, that is bringing me into the same realm as C# and Microsoft - except Sun is the big, evil corporation instead. Hopefully by the time I know C, C++ and possibly assembler well enough to move onto C# or Java, there will be a GOOD free version of one of them (hopefully Java).
I have never trusted libraries. I read stuff by Mao as well but I never check it out of the library. Usually I read it there. I read all 637 pages of "Fanshen" at my local library, and have started on the sequel, "Shenfan".
At the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, you have to fill out your name and address to request a book (which you can't take out). I always give a fake name and address. I used to read Bell Labs RECORD, AT&T Technology and stuff like that, as well as other stuff. The Mid-Manhattan Library used to have the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, but it is not there anymore for whatever reason. Now it is in the NYPL, in a special room, with an even more rigorous list. I also noticed the largest local library to me had "Molotov Remembers" on the shelves before it disappeared from the catalog.
I'm not getting over on anyone, I'm being gotten over by being successfully intimidated. I sometimes volunteer at a local volunteer-run bookstore where people can browse, borrow or buy books from publishers like Soft Skull Press, Autonomedia, South End Press etc. I've also scanned public domain stuff in and put it up for sites into that. I also contribute to wikis like Anarchopedia and Red Wiki. You can hear stuff other than the Republicrat party line in the US, but it takes a little bit of work. I do it, and also try to make it easier for others, and others doing the same makes it easier for me.
Coca-Cola has been killing its workers in Colombia. They even had one killed right inside the plant while he was working. Apparently they don't like that the workers are trying to organize a union. There is a global boycott of Coca-Cola products going on right now, which I participate in, I haven't had any Coca-Cola products for several years. The web site for the boycot is Killer Coke.
I doubt that most of the white, western professionals who read Slashdot will care much about this, some probably will like Coke more than ever considering the kind of talk so many listen to on talk radio and Fox News, but a few will, and I am posting this to inform those few. Working class people tend to be more sympathetic to these things.
One of Wikipedia's problems is it has a political point of view, but it does not say it does. Thus it is similar to television news, and this contradiction makes it unstable, where at some point it will probably collapse. Jimbo Wales has talked about how he is an admirer of Ayn Rand, wants Wikipedia to follow a von Mises model and so forth. If you're following how people get on the Arbitration Committee, Jimbo is unhappy with the elections (which actually put up much better candidates than he selected) and wants to exercise more power over it again. A Wikipedia guideline is "Wikipedia is not a democracy", something that is being said more and more often recently, and you know where that leads. Slanders, trolls, vandalism and so forth are left alone - trolls operate for months and months and months and are not dealt with, while all of Wikipedia will come down on someone who displeases the "Wikipedia cabal"
As I have said before on Wikipedia, on the top of the front page of Wikipedia, it breaks almost all articles into eight master categories. On the Mathematics and Science categories it does fine. On the History and Society pages, it does an awful job. As far as the History and Society pages, they have just gotten worse and worse over time. Jimbo is lucky Seigenthaler is a free speech advocate and is raising the issue in the press instead of suing the hell out of him and Wikipedia. I foresee alternative wikis springing up to handle history and so forth. The left-leaning Democratic Underground has started Demopedia, although I'm unaware of Free Republic or any other conservative site starting a conservative counter to Wikipedia yet. Anyhow, I'm sure that's the route it will go down I'm sure, a balkanization of certain categories.
You quote me saying there is "absolutely no private-sector investment". You neglected to leave off the word before absolutely, I said there "was absolutely no private-sector investment". I would not have used the past tense if I was speaking of the present. If you look at the sentence prior to that, the time period I mentioned was "From the late 1960s and before even that, up until the mid-1990s". Then you "refute" what I said by talking about everyone who has been investing in the Internet from the mid-1990s on.
The point is that she is painting a story of the "history of the Internet's extraordinary growth...based on private-sector...investment", and counterposing to that the intrusion of government. The reality is the private sector did not invest in the Internet up until the mid-1990s, there was just "government funds sent to the private sector". The government is who spend decades investing in the Internet before it became commercially applicable. Now she is trying to paint a picture that the private sector created it, and government, which had no involvement, wants to come in and ruin it. I'm sure plenty of people are gobbling this story up with a spoon. Most people don't know any better, people here know better, the ones who replied to my post who don't want to come to the same conclusion seem to be doing a lawyer-reading of her wording to prove her innocent, which they have to do because they know better.
If the private sector is so innovative, is so great and so forth, why did it take decades of government money in R&D to create the Internet, why didn't the private sector just do that type of R&D. The answer is the private sector never does that type of long-term R&D - unless it is a government-granted monopoly like Bell Telephone was.
"The history of the Internet's extraordinary growth and adaptation, based on private-sector innovation and investment, offers compelling arguments against burdening the network with a new intergovernmental structure for oversight."
What? The history of the Internet's growth was based on private-sector investment? Intergovernmental structure would be a burden? As everybody on Slashdot knows, this is a complete rewrite of history. From the late 1960s and before even that, up until the mid-1990s when NSFnet began handing things over to corporate America, the Internet was funded by, invested in, and overseen by the US government. There was absolutely no private-sector investment, just government funds sent to the private sector. The government paid for decades of R&D to create the Internet, and oversaw its creation. Now she is trying to claim that the Internet was created by private sector investment, and that government oversight would just cramp what she says the private-sector investment created. And of course, neither she nor Bush has any intentions of removing government oversight from the Internet. What a joke!
Re:Write and test on three different platforms
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Write Portable Code
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· Score: 1
I agree, if you write for portability on just two platforms, say Windows and Linux, porting to anything else becomes that much easier. I'm not even much of a C programmer but I managed to write a program that uses threads, and sockets that works on Windows and Linux (and Solaris running on big endian chips, and FreeBSD, and OpenBSD etc.) My program is GPL and I borrowed portable code for threading and sockets from other GPL programs. So if you are writing a GPL program it is not a big deal, as you don't have to spend the time figuring all of this stuff all out.
Another thing is I just make some minor changes in my programming to keep things portable. For example, some systems still have the bzero() function, and programs using it will work on that platform, but the memcpy() function can do the same thing and is on most platforms, so now I never use bzero() and always use memcpy().
Most platforms are pretty compatible, Windows is the one platform that seems to need lots of special defines and whatnot, probably purposefully. 80% of the #ifdef's in my system are "#ifdef WIN32". Aside from many differences in thread and socket calls (closesocket instead of close), things like the sleep function are different as well.
The CCR5 gene (which includes the CC5's with the delta 32 mutation) is on chromosome #3. You can look over the DNA code (nucleotides, codons etc.) and get more information on a number of sites:
UCSC Genome browser - has the whole gene, but you can zoom in on segments if you want.
NIH - this has links or links to links of everything you'd want to know.
As I said in what I wrote, the reason for doing this is all my Windows networking was fried, so a network backup was impossible. I could have backed up my data via the floopy drive, but it would have taken a while to get the 2 gigs of data onto all of those 3.5" 1.44MB disks. And none of this wouldn't have been a problem if Windows hadn't switched its easy Windows 95 install CDs with the crappy OEM recovers in Windows 98. In the end, I got the data I had backed up on a second drive, but it was despite Windows, not because of it.
Windows wants you to switch from 3.11 to 95 to 98 to ME to XP. Since 3.11 was still out in 1994, and XP came out in 2001, that would be 4 switches in 7 years.
Last year, my desktop was not an XP, which seems to be what Microsoft expects it to be nowadays, it was a Windows 98 bought in late 1999 - months before the stock market crash. If I had as much money flying around now as I did then I'd probably have bought a new computer, but I didn't, and I hadn't had a problem with it.
Then I get a Linksys wireless USB ethernet adapter. When I try to install it on Windows 98 (which it says it does), it not only doesn't work, it kills all of my networking, irreparably. So much for Windows always having good 3rd party drivers.
So I decide to reinstall my system with the crappy OEM reinstall Windows implemented with Windows 98. I take all of the important stuff off the C drive and move it elsewhere. Then I do the OEM reinstall. Well, not only does it erase C: (which I expected), it erases all of D: just to write one 1k file.
At this point I'm tired of my stupid Windows box. I burn a Debian CD on my roommate's computer and install a light Debian on drive C of the wrecked computer. I use it to recover the essential stuff on drive D: (a phonebook etc.) Then I also pull stuff I want off my other drives, which is easier as Windows hasn't mangled them thankfully. Then I do a complete reinstall and put Debian Linux as my desktop.
I thought I would miss Windows a lot more. I haven't at all. I should admit I do some Debian cheating - I have a good Java on my system, but now I'm more aware of what's free and what isn't anyhow. The one thing I thought I'd need was Microsoft Word to send documents, but I havn't needed to do that since I installed 10 months ago. Plus there are programs that can do that, plus my roommate has Windows if I really need to use it. I just imported an Excel file into Gnumeric this week with no problem. Abiword has been a decent Word replacement.
I have been much happier with Debian than Windows. The main thing is I can use my new ethernet adapter. But I just like the multiple windows, easy access to MySQL, PERL, Apache, sed, awk, sort and whatnot. I suppose I can implement all of that on Windows, but it's easier and integrated here. The only drawback is I had is accelerated graphics - I spent a day trying to get Tux, which is first-person perspective, running at a decent speed but failed - and first person shooters worked much faster on Windows. Perhaps if I spent more than a day on it I could have been successful, but I am not going to spend more than a day trying to get Tux to be faster. Anyhow, other than accelerated graphics, I've been happy with everything else.
I went to a NANOG meeting in 1997, at which were many of the bigshots of network operation - Van Jacobsen (author of traceroute and Van Jacobsen compression, which you may recall as a checkable option on Windows 3.x's Trumpet Winsock), Paul Vixie (of BIND and MAPS fame), Kim Hubbard (of ARIN), Mark Kosters (of Network Solutions) and that type.
Anyhow, I myself was curious about if/when IPv6 would be rolled out. One of the talks was about how to deal with IPv4 space running out, and a lot of the talk revolved around such things as multiple web sites running on the same IP (which was very uncommon then) and other ways to use less address space. Some audience members gave other suggestions for conserving IP space such as ways to use Network Address Translation to limit public IP use. I would say the feeling in the hall was that this was not a problem, and that people had to go the route of IP sharing, and aside from the need for more IP sharing, everyone pretty much liked the situation as it was, which was in contrast to the prevailing attitude in the world outside the hall. One audience member rose his hand and said, "What about IPv6?" The response to this was the entire audience broke into laughter - it was the funniest thing they had heard that week. After that I began thinking about IPv6 more along the lines of projects such as MBONE (anyone remember the hooplah over that years ago?). Not that IPv6 will never be implemented, but this story that IPv6 was needed straightaway could have been written 8 years ago. I haven't seen much headway in it in the past 8 years, except for products promising they were IPv6 compatible, just in case. Not that IPv6 will never be rolled out on a large scale, but I'm not holding my breath.
I wouldn't say e-mail interrupts much - I can read it when I want to. The most disruptive is someone walking into my office - you can't get away from that, although you can tell the person you're busy. A phone call is second to that, although you can just not pick up the phone. It also takes longer to punch in your access code and listen to a voice message then to quickly read an e-mail. Instant messenging would be next in line, although you can wait a few minutes (or hours) to respond to those. To me, e-mail is the least disruptive.
Having been on Wikipedia for a long time, I'd say you can't make a blanket judgement about all of Wikipedia. At the top of Wikipedia's main page are eight master categories: "Culture | Geography | History | Mathematics | People | Science | Society | Technology". Wikipedia does a fantastic job on the Mathematics and Science categories. Wikipedia does a horrible job on the History and Society categories. Mathematics and Science categories are ones where people agree, unless there is some cross-over into the society category (global warming and whatnot) as well. As far as the Society category articles, well, in the Middle East Palestinians and Israelis are shooting at each other, and Americans and Iraqis are shooting at each other, and if that's happening there's no surprise there is disagreement over the Society (and History) category articles on Israel, Palestine, Iraq and so forth.
So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia, Dkosopedia and Anarchopedia, and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo, and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.
One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.
Accepting that he does make $400,000, what does that dollar sign in front of the number 400,000 mean? The fellow is in Australia and not the US, so he probably means Australian dollars, not American dollars. Thus, he is making less money than most people reading the initial blurb would assume. Of course, Slashdot stories so many times assume that everyone reading them lives in the States, so it's only fair that this is reversed now and then.
I began playing with Linux in 1994 or 1995, when I downloaded it to my PC and used LILO to stick Linux on one of the drives. Eventually I owned multiple PC's, but usually used Windows as my desktop, and had a Linux server. One of the reasons for this was that it was easy to handle Linux remotely, and Windows wasn't, so due to Windows bad features in that area, it was stuck being my desktop.
Anyhow, last December I got a Linksys wireless ethernet adapter and put it in my main desktop, a Windows ME machine (I haven't bought a new machine since the market crashed in spring 2000). Except it didn't work - perhaps it only wanted to work on Windows XP or something. Anyhow, the drivers for the adapter fried all my networking. I kept working on it, and finally decided to reinstall my C drive. Except it's not like Windows 95 with its decent install disks, I have these crappy OEM Windows ME repair disks. OK, so I backup everything I need on C and go. Well, the crappy OEM CD not only blows away C (which I expected), but blows away the D drive as well to write just one file. So I stop everything, and ponder how I am going to get my stuff off D which I need. So I install Debian on drive C, and rescue the important stuff on D. I also pull my stuff off drives E and F. Then I blow everything away and reinstall Debian for my entire disk.
I have to say, I have missed Windows a lot less than I thought I would. My main concern was being able to read and send Microsoft Word documents, but I haven't had to send a Word document in months, and I haven't had a problem reading the few I need anyhow. So I haven't even had to use the Linux programs that say they can help compensate for this. My roommate has a Windows box anyhow, so I can always use his if I'm desperate (or make other arrangements). I've been using UNIX for a long time and love being able to run Apache, MySQL, PERL, PHP etc. on my computer. I have Mediawiki and osCommerce running locally just for testing, and I have my own MySQL tables and PHP/Apache and PERL scripts as well.
I haven't needed Microsoft like I thought I would. Also, I should point out, I switched because Microsoft has gotten worse (OEM repair CDs instead of the old, easy Microsoft vanilla install/reinstall CDs), and Linux has gotten better (which includes GNOME/KDE etc.) I switched due to necessity, not because I am a free software zealot, although I appreciate free software zealots and can be one myself sometimes. I should also add that my wireless adapter worked fine - Linux had the drivers for it. Windows had the drivers as well - but only for XP (ones that didn't blow away your machine). I would have had to shell out money to upgrade my OS to use my new device. You don't have this problem with Linux.
As far as me being a tech, and this not effecting the population, I disagree. I write software, as do many of us, and this is really what effects things. If all the techs begin writing lots of software for Linux, this changes the dynamics of things. There's an old saying "if you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow". Microsoft no longer has me by the balls, which means my mind no longer has to follow them.
The atom bomb, the 50 megaton nuclear bomb, the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, anthrax, napalm, tear gas. People going home after being exhausted from work and watching television shows on corporate-owned channels instead of visiting one another like they used to. Carpal Tunnel syndrome, repetitive stress injury. Global warming.
Does technology lead to happiness? When the atom was split, the first thought was how to use it as a bomb. Even the use of it as energy seems to be run by shady characters (note Karen Silkwood and Kerr-McGee). Or take the invention of the motion picture camera, one of the first blockbuster movies was Birth of a Nation, followed 20 years later by another blockbuster in Europe - Triumph of the Will.
I can't imagine anyone a day after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and the subsequent nuke build-up, to where people thought the world might end during the Cuban missile crisis) thinking technology led to progress and happiness. It should have been apparent to people after World War I (a war which there was massive resistance to in Europe among Italian troops, French troops, German troops and Russian troops, to the point where Russian troops mutinied and overthew their government). It seems to me that technology often makes social problems more difficult to solve. What really matters is the social context. Would you want Nazi Germany to be making advanced technological discoveries in genetics, physics and whatnot?
I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic about the future, although I would guess it will be a rough road ahead. It seems to me most positive change comes from people organizing together to make things better, be it to kick the British out of the colonies, or to try to change the status of African-Americans from slaves to people with equal opportunity, or do away with child labor (in advanced industrial countries anyhow). Technology did not fix these things, people organizing together to make things better did. Technology often made things worse - textile industrialization helped made child labor a Dickensian horror, just like the cotton gin helped create an even larger slave system. I do not see GE solving the world's problems, GE often is the source of the world's problems, at least they are local to me where their factory has polluted everything.
You seemed to have missed the point. He came forward, his story was public, a judge told him to quit talking while the case was ongoing and he didn't. You're spinning the story just like it seemed spun to me in this newspaper article. The point is what he did after he went public, after the matter went to court.
The story begins with a portrait that tries to paint this fellow sympathetically, and I normally would look on him sympathetically. He goes to the government and complains about problems he perceives, and he gets fired. The events transpire, and eventually a judge tells him to be quiet. By now this is out in the public - he is an American with a family in a foreign city and if he had a need to do something he did it. But then he violates the judges order and begins posting about this on a blog? It makes me think there's something more to the story, or as aviation consultant Weber says "There is something really unusual about this case in the sense that there is this hard standoff between Airbus and the individual, it doesn't make any sense to me." It doesn't make sense - him violating a judges order doesn't make sense, them filing criminal charges doesn't make sense. There seems to be something more at work here. I'll read more about this, but both parties are acting unusual to the point where I am really on neither side, whereas normally I suppose I would be on his side.
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The article writer considers Linux as a mature technology. I worked at a Fortune 100 financial company not long ago where engineering was testing Red Hat Linux, but had none of it in production. Whether you call it data management or business processes, a critical machine could have literally billions of dollars worth of trades processed over it in a day, and engineering placed a very high value on stability. Most critical machines ran versions of Solaris which were more than one version out of date, even if they were new machines with new applications - IT management didn't want any surprises, they didn't want to be the ones to find a bug in the latest version of Solaris, or even the previous one. And if you have, say, hundreds of Sun Enterprise 4500s all over the world, you might tend to see bugs that shops with dozens, or a handful of E4500s might not. Wanting maturity is not a new thing.
I would agree that consolidation and focus on business process is the new fad among CIOs. So perhaps the days where in large companies an immature open source project would make its way in by 10%-20% of the environment are gone while this fad lasts. But there are plenty of smaller companies who do not have the budget, and are willing to use it. My friend works for a company with $1 billion in revenue, which is one company in a corporation which has over $3 billion in revenue - the revenue is just shy of putting the corporation in the Fortune 500. Despite all of that, the IT department uses a ton of open source, and only uses propietary technology when necessary. They've even been using immature open source software when mature, good propietary solutions exist for some things, simply due to budget. Despite a lot of things, at the end of the day, free as in beer looks very, very attractive to a lot of companies over even a slightly better competitor that costs tens of thousands of dollars. Even for companies almost in the Fortune 500.
As far as domestically, we're told TV channels controlled by Fox News are conservative (or even fair and balanced) while NBC is liberal - NBC, which is owned by the military contractor General Electric. When small groups like the Workers World Party print their newspaper, and have protests against the US sending $1 billion a year in military expenses to Colombia (the only group locally that has them that I know of), the director of the FBI goes before Congress and says "Anarchists and extremist socialist groups--many of which, such as the workers' world party, reclaim the streets, and carnival against capitalism, have an international presence--at times also represent a potential threat in the United States."
There is not much immigration from China to the US. Many Chinese people have moved back to China in the past few decades. I think that says everything there is to say about existing freedom and opportunity.
You have said that "[Friedrich] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Or you've said things in interviews such as "Unlike some other grassroots journalism type of projects like Indymedia, which is a very far left type of thing written by activists, we strive to be a neutral, high-quality source of basic information." (which of course implies that the supposedly "very far left" Indymedia is not a good source of information, whereas Wikipedia is).
Regarding the most powerful group of your lietenants, the Arbitration Committee, last year you had an election. This year you wanted to appoint them with little input until an uproar allowed more input from the community. During this (s)election, you put in the people with the highest vote rates, except for JayJG, who had people ahead of him since so many people voted against him due to his lack of the neutrality you espouse in interviews. You say you did this because he was on ArbCom - which he is, because you appointed him to it in the past few months. This was after the election last year, where he received no votes. Instead of having another election, or going down the 2005 election list, you appoint your crony who shares your point of view. When in the election he has people ahead of him due to strong opposition over his lack of opposition, you appoint him anyway.
As a post-script to this message, which is not part of my question, I would note to the readers that Wikipedia review is a board where people discuss their unhappiness with the Wikipedia "cabal". That board has some trolls, but some of the discussions are enlightening, from experienced users. Wikipedia looks open and inviting, but experience shows that is not the case. The one good thing about Wikipedia is the licenses for Mediawiki and English Wikipedia are GPL and GFDL, so that if people become unhappy enough they can fork. I myself tend to edit on other wikis since I'm tired of the nonsense on Wikipedia. I began editing in 2003, and have watched it go downhill from then. A lot of smart experts in the field have been driven off, and the cabal, Jimbo and his lieutenants hold sway. The fact that 2005 had elections from ArbCom and 2006 had "selections" should say something about how things are headed on Wikipedia. This is a policy everyone becomes familiar with after a time.
Actually, I think Wikipedia does a decent job on articles like quantum mechanics, but it is a complete mess in articles pertaining to say relations between the Israelis and Palestinians and that type of thing. And it has just gotten worse and worse. So Wikipedia isn't all bad, just anything to do with politics or history is a mess.
I am a normal user and not a graphic designer. Thus, I do not use complicated features in Photoshop or GIMP, just the low level features. One of these, however, is crop. And crop sucks on GIMP. With Photoshop it is simple, I put a box around what I want to crop to and I crop. With GIMP there are three crops, none of which are very good. The only one that I can use is "guillotine", which one uses by going to the ruler, dragging a line out to the middle, going back to the ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, and dragging a line to the middle again. Then I go through the menu to guillotine crop, and 9 images pop up. I close the eight I don't want, so that I now have the original big one, which I don't want any more, and the cropped version. I can just imagine what the more complex features are like. Or what people who aren't like me think, who don't use Debian as their desktop.
The job I had that was similiar to yours paid over $80k a year, but like you said was "sucking the life out of me...a lot of overtime in a high-stress, tight deadline job". It was actually as an IT worker for a Fortune 100 financial company. The reason I went to Wall Street in the first place was because the dot-coms were crashing after the spring 2000 stock decline. Things got progressively worse in the space of a year there (layoffs, and since I was a contractor, a small salary cut), and in the midst of all the other BS I had it. But the job market was dead which is what gave them the power to do that. After two or so interviews they knew what I was looking for another job and said either I say that I'll stay there or I'd be fired. So I just quit. At the time I had so much in the bank, that I preferred the idea of a clean break and recommendation over them telling future employers I had been fired. Of course this meant I got no unemployment. A month later 9/11 happened and the slump in New York City got even worse.
One piece of advice I'd give is try to be choosy in your interviews. You have to be. In this respect, headhunters are a liability, as they want you to interview for any job you're anywhere near qualified for.
Just quitting would probably be a bad idea. Employers like hearing that you're currently employed. An unemployed person looking for a job gives them cause for concern.
And if we go back a few years, we can see all of this COINTELPRO data wasn't to stop foreigners, or even people doing illegal things, but to harrass people like Martin Luther King, or breakins to the Watergate hotel to bug the Democrats. Not like the Democrats have rolled this stuff back when they got into office, Clinton's staff was over-requesting FBI files of people during "filegate".
And we're told it's because of the "War on Terror", which is a war which they never say when it will end. It reminds me of Orwell's 1984, when the government is in a state of permanent war, or war preparation anyhow. I may be older than some Slashdotters, but when I grew up I was told the US only had foreign military bases because of the USSR, and if they weren't targets of attack by Moscow, we wouldn't have them there. A decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin wall, I'm now told we are in a new state of permanent war - the cold war has become the war on terror. American military bases still circle the globe - in fact they've expanded, especially in countries south of Russia and west of China. The Russians used to say America had bases all over the world not because of Russia, but because of American imperialism. I was always told this was false, the bases were there because of the possibility of Russian attack. A decade and a half later, what the Russians used to say rings truer than what the US used to say. In fact, the government has now changed its story, and wants us to forget they used to say that, and have us all concentrate on their new permanent war.
One of the highest bodies on Wikipedia is the Arbitration Committee. Originally it was appointed by Jimbo, who I thought made several poor choices. Then last year there was an election to ArbCom, and I think the community made excellent choices to who would go ArbCom. Then in the interim, Jimbo appointed two more arbitrators, one of which I think is of very poor quality. Now he is changing the democratic election of last year, which I think went very well, and is trying to change it so it is more centralized towards himself. I think there are many signs of the problems, but this is just one of them.
While I think Wikipedia covers science and mathematics articles well, it has many problems when it comes to political matters, the Seigenthaler matter yet again just being a sign of the problem. I think Wikipedia should simply acknowledge that a "neutral" standpoint is not realistic with regards to history and politics. Wikipedia should concentrate on scientific articles and the like, and cede articles like George W. Bush to partisan wikis like Demopedia and Wikinfo.
I'm tired of the Wikipedia mess and am not contributing any money.
Anyhow, when I left the financial sector I had more free time so I taught myself C language, which I knew a little of but didn't know well. And actually, that is still my "programming" language. I've been writing PERL and PHP scripts recently, but that is just hacks, the C programs I write I do in a serious, "Code Complete" way. I have seen myself become better by following the Code Complete rules, which I guess most experienced programmers think are common sense but they're new to me. Short functions - trying to keep local variables to six or seven. Trying to keep global variables as few as possible. And that sort of thing. So since 2001 I have just been increasing my skill in C, and have had no need or desire to move onto the next step.
One thing I wanted to do was read "The Art of Computer Programming" and do stuff in assembler and learn that hardcore stuff, but right now I barely have time to improve my C, which has some practical and immediate uses, so that will be postponed until I can do it. So putting aside assembler and that stuff to really understand what's going on with the machine, I guess my next step once I feel I know C well enough is C++. After that I guess I'm in the same boat you're in. Since I, of course, hate Microsoft, I guess that gives me a little bit of a push towards Java. But there isn't any good Java for my Debian either - Kaffe and all of those just don't cut it yet. So I use a non-free port. And to me, that is bringing me into the same realm as C# and Microsoft - except Sun is the big, evil corporation instead. Hopefully by the time I know C, C++ and possibly assembler well enough to move onto C# or Java, there will be a GOOD free version of one of them (hopefully Java).
At the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, you have to fill out your name and address to request a book (which you can't take out). I always give a fake name and address. I used to read Bell Labs RECORD, AT&T Technology and stuff like that, as well as other stuff. The Mid-Manhattan Library used to have the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, but it is not there anymore for whatever reason. Now it is in the NYPL, in a special room, with an even more rigorous list. I also noticed the largest local library to me had "Molotov Remembers" on the shelves before it disappeared from the catalog.
I'm not getting over on anyone, I'm being gotten over by being successfully intimidated. I sometimes volunteer at a local volunteer-run bookstore where people can browse, borrow or buy books from publishers like Soft Skull Press, Autonomedia, South End Press etc. I've also scanned public domain stuff in and put it up for sites into that. I also contribute to wikis like Anarchopedia and Red Wiki. You can hear stuff other than the Republicrat party line in the US, but it takes a little bit of work. I do it, and also try to make it easier for others, and others doing the same makes it easier for me.
I doubt that most of the white, western professionals who read Slashdot will care much about this, some probably will like Coke more than ever considering the kind of talk so many listen to on talk radio and Fox News, but a few will, and I am posting this to inform those few. Working class people tend to be more sympathetic to these things.
As I have said before on Wikipedia, on the top of the front page of Wikipedia, it breaks almost all articles into eight master categories. On the Mathematics and Science categories it does fine. On the History and Society pages, it does an awful job. As far as the History and Society pages, they have just gotten worse and worse over time. Jimbo is lucky Seigenthaler is a free speech advocate and is raising the issue in the press instead of suing the hell out of him and Wikipedia. I foresee alternative wikis springing up to handle history and so forth. The left-leaning Democratic Underground has started Demopedia, although I'm unaware of Free Republic or any other conservative site starting a conservative counter to Wikipedia yet. Anyhow, I'm sure that's the route it will go down I'm sure, a balkanization of certain categories.
The point is that she is painting a story of the "history of the Internet's extraordinary growth...based on private-sector...investment", and counterposing to that the intrusion of government. The reality is the private sector did not invest in the Internet up until the mid-1990s, there was just "government funds sent to the private sector". The government is who spend decades investing in the Internet before it became commercially applicable. Now she is trying to paint a picture that the private sector created it, and government, which had no involvement, wants to come in and ruin it. I'm sure plenty of people are gobbling this story up with a spoon. Most people don't know any better, people here know better, the ones who replied to my post who don't want to come to the same conclusion seem to be doing a lawyer-reading of her wording to prove her innocent, which they have to do because they know better.
If the private sector is so innovative, is so great and so forth, why did it take decades of government money in R&D to create the Internet, why didn't the private sector just do that type of R&D. The answer is the private sector never does that type of long-term R&D - unless it is a government-granted monopoly like Bell Telephone was.
What? The history of the Internet's growth was based on private-sector investment? Intergovernmental structure would be a burden? As everybody on Slashdot knows, this is a complete rewrite of history. From the late 1960s and before even that, up until the mid-1990s when NSFnet began handing things over to corporate America, the Internet was funded by, invested in, and overseen by the US government. There was absolutely no private-sector investment, just government funds sent to the private sector. The government paid for decades of R&D to create the Internet, and oversaw its creation. Now she is trying to claim that the Internet was created by private sector investment, and that government oversight would just cramp what she says the private-sector investment created. And of course, neither she nor Bush has any intentions of removing government oversight from the Internet. What a joke!
Another thing is I just make some minor changes in my programming to keep things portable. For example, some systems still have the bzero() function, and programs using it will work on that platform, but the memcpy() function can do the same thing and is on most platforms, so now I never use bzero() and always use memcpy().
Most platforms are pretty compatible, Windows is the one platform that seems to need lots of special defines and whatnot, probably purposefully. 80% of the #ifdef's in my system are "#ifdef WIN32". Aside from many differences in thread and socket calls (closesocket instead of close), things like the sleep function are different as well.
UCSC Genome browser - has the whole gene, but you can zoom in on segments if you want.
NIH - this has links or links to links of everything you'd want to know.
As I said in what I wrote, the reason for doing this is all my Windows networking was fried, so a network backup was impossible. I could have backed up my data via the floopy drive, but it would have taken a while to get the 2 gigs of data onto all of those 3.5" 1.44MB disks. And none of this wouldn't have been a problem if Windows hadn't switched its easy Windows 95 install CDs with the crappy OEM recovers in Windows 98. In the end, I got the data I had backed up on a second drive, but it was despite Windows, not because of it.
Last year, my desktop was not an XP, which seems to be what Microsoft expects it to be nowadays, it was a Windows 98 bought in late 1999 - months before the stock market crash. If I had as much money flying around now as I did then I'd probably have bought a new computer, but I didn't, and I hadn't had a problem with it.
Then I get a Linksys wireless USB ethernet adapter. When I try to install it on Windows 98 (which it says it does), it not only doesn't work, it kills all of my networking, irreparably. So much for Windows always having good 3rd party drivers.
So I decide to reinstall my system with the crappy OEM reinstall Windows implemented with Windows 98. I take all of the important stuff off the C drive and move it elsewhere. Then I do the OEM reinstall. Well, not only does it erase C: (which I expected), it erases all of D: just to write one 1k file.
At this point I'm tired of my stupid Windows box. I burn a Debian CD on my roommate's computer and install a light Debian on drive C of the wrecked computer. I use it to recover the essential stuff on drive D: (a phonebook etc.) Then I also pull stuff I want off my other drives, which is easier as Windows hasn't mangled them thankfully. Then I do a complete reinstall and put Debian Linux as my desktop.
I thought I would miss Windows a lot more. I haven't at all. I should admit I do some Debian cheating - I have a good Java on my system, but now I'm more aware of what's free and what isn't anyhow. The one thing I thought I'd need was Microsoft Word to send documents, but I havn't needed to do that since I installed 10 months ago. Plus there are programs that can do that, plus my roommate has Windows if I really need to use it. I just imported an Excel file into Gnumeric this week with no problem. Abiword has been a decent Word replacement.
I have been much happier with Debian than Windows. The main thing is I can use my new ethernet adapter. But I just like the multiple windows, easy access to MySQL, PERL, Apache, sed, awk, sort and whatnot. I suppose I can implement all of that on Windows, but it's easier and integrated here. The only drawback is I had is accelerated graphics - I spent a day trying to get Tux, which is first-person perspective, running at a decent speed but failed - and first person shooters worked much faster on Windows. Perhaps if I spent more than a day on it I could have been successful, but I am not going to spend more than a day trying to get Tux to be faster. Anyhow, other than accelerated graphics, I've been happy with everything else.
Anyhow, I myself was curious about if/when IPv6 would be rolled out. One of the talks was about how to deal with IPv4 space running out, and a lot of the talk revolved around such things as multiple web sites running on the same IP (which was very uncommon then) and other ways to use less address space. Some audience members gave other suggestions for conserving IP space such as ways to use Network Address Translation to limit public IP use. I would say the feeling in the hall was that this was not a problem, and that people had to go the route of IP sharing, and aside from the need for more IP sharing, everyone pretty much liked the situation as it was, which was in contrast to the prevailing attitude in the world outside the hall. One audience member rose his hand and said, "What about IPv6?" The response to this was the entire audience broke into laughter - it was the funniest thing they had heard that week. After that I began thinking about IPv6 more along the lines of projects such as MBONE (anyone remember the hooplah over that years ago?). Not that IPv6 will never be implemented, but this story that IPv6 was needed straightaway could have been written 8 years ago. I haven't seen much headway in it in the past 8 years, except for products promising they were IPv6 compatible, just in case. Not that IPv6 will never be rolled out on a large scale, but I'm not holding my breath.
I wouldn't say e-mail interrupts much - I can read it when I want to. The most disruptive is someone walking into my office - you can't get away from that, although you can tell the person you're busy. A phone call is second to that, although you can just not pick up the phone. It also takes longer to punch in your access code and listen to a voice message then to quickly read an e-mail. Instant messenging would be next in line, although you can wait a few minutes (or hours) to respond to those. To me, e-mail is the least disruptive.
So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia, Dkosopedia and Anarchopedia, and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo, and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.
One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.
Accepting that he does make $400,000, what does that dollar sign in front of the number 400,000 mean? The fellow is in Australia and not the US, so he probably means Australian dollars, not American dollars. Thus, he is making less money than most people reading the initial blurb would assume. Of course, Slashdot stories so many times assume that everyone reading them lives in the States, so it's only fair that this is reversed now and then.
Anyhow, last December I got a Linksys wireless ethernet adapter and put it in my main desktop, a Windows ME machine (I haven't bought a new machine since the market crashed in spring 2000). Except it didn't work - perhaps it only wanted to work on Windows XP or something. Anyhow, the drivers for the adapter fried all my networking. I kept working on it, and finally decided to reinstall my C drive. Except it's not like Windows 95 with its decent install disks, I have these crappy OEM Windows ME repair disks. OK, so I backup everything I need on C and go. Well, the crappy OEM CD not only blows away C (which I expected), but blows away the D drive as well to write just one file. So I stop everything, and ponder how I am going to get my stuff off D which I need. So I install Debian on drive C, and rescue the important stuff on D. I also pull my stuff off drives E and F. Then I blow everything away and reinstall Debian for my entire disk.
I have to say, I have missed Windows a lot less than I thought I would. My main concern was being able to read and send Microsoft Word documents, but I haven't had to send a Word document in months, and I haven't had a problem reading the few I need anyhow. So I haven't even had to use the Linux programs that say they can help compensate for this. My roommate has a Windows box anyhow, so I can always use his if I'm desperate (or make other arrangements). I've been using UNIX for a long time and love being able to run Apache, MySQL, PERL, PHP etc. on my computer. I have Mediawiki and osCommerce running locally just for testing, and I have my own MySQL tables and PHP/Apache and PERL scripts as well.
I haven't needed Microsoft like I thought I would. Also, I should point out, I switched because Microsoft has gotten worse (OEM repair CDs instead of the old, easy Microsoft vanilla install/reinstall CDs), and Linux has gotten better (which includes GNOME/KDE etc.) I switched due to necessity, not because I am a free software zealot, although I appreciate free software zealots and can be one myself sometimes. I should also add that my wireless adapter worked fine - Linux had the drivers for it. Windows had the drivers as well - but only for XP (ones that didn't blow away your machine). I would have had to shell out money to upgrade my OS to use my new device. You don't have this problem with Linux.
As far as me being a tech, and this not effecting the population, I disagree. I write software, as do many of us, and this is really what effects things. If all the techs begin writing lots of software for Linux, this changes the dynamics of things. There's an old saying "if you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow". Microsoft no longer has me by the balls, which means my mind no longer has to follow them.
Does technology lead to happiness? When the atom was split, the first thought was how to use it as a bomb. Even the use of it as energy seems to be run by shady characters (note Karen Silkwood and Kerr-McGee). Or take the invention of the motion picture camera, one of the first blockbuster movies was Birth of a Nation, followed 20 years later by another blockbuster in Europe - Triumph of the Will.
I can't imagine anyone a day after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (and the subsequent nuke build-up, to where people thought the world might end during the Cuban missile crisis) thinking technology led to progress and happiness. It should have been apparent to people after World War I (a war which there was massive resistance to in Europe among Italian troops, French troops, German troops and Russian troops, to the point where Russian troops mutinied and overthew their government). It seems to me that technology often makes social problems more difficult to solve. What really matters is the social context. Would you want Nazi Germany to be making advanced technological discoveries in genetics, physics and whatnot?
I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic about the future, although I would guess it will be a rough road ahead. It seems to me most positive change comes from people organizing together to make things better, be it to kick the British out of the colonies, or to try to change the status of African-Americans from slaves to people with equal opportunity, or do away with child labor (in advanced industrial countries anyhow). Technology did not fix these things, people organizing together to make things better did. Technology often made things worse - textile industrialization helped made child labor a Dickensian horror, just like the cotton gin helped create an even larger slave system. I do not see GE solving the world's problems, GE often is the source of the world's problems, at least they are local to me where their factory has polluted everything.
You seemed to have missed the point. He came forward, his story was public, a judge told him to quit talking while the case was ongoing and he didn't. You're spinning the story just like it seemed spun to me in this newspaper article. The point is what he did after he went public, after the matter went to court.
The story begins with a portrait that tries to paint this fellow sympathetically, and I normally would look on him sympathetically. He goes to the government and complains about problems he perceives, and he gets fired. The events transpire, and eventually a judge tells him to be quiet. By now this is out in the public - he is an American with a family in a foreign city and if he had a need to do something he did it. But then he violates the judges order and begins posting about this on a blog? It makes me think there's something more to the story, or as aviation consultant Weber says "There is something really unusual about this case in the sense that there is this hard standoff between Airbus and the individual, it doesn't make any sense to me." It doesn't make sense - him violating a judges order doesn't make sense, them filing criminal charges doesn't make sense. There seems to be something more at work here. I'll read more about this, but both parties are acting unusual to the point where I am really on neither side, whereas normally I suppose I would be on his side.