[here's an introductory paragraph for the above post that i forgot to include]
Global Justice Ecology Project is planning to collaborate with European groups on a campaign against the United Nations to convince them to rescind their decision to allow GE trees to be used in carbon sink plantations as part of the Kyoto Protocol. In December 2003, the United Nations issued a go-ahead for countries to include genetically engineered trees in plantations designed to soak up carbon emissions from industries in order to address global warming. However, the use of genetically engineered trees in these plantations will lead to forest health crises that worsen global warming rather than help alleviate it.
Background: Threats from Genetically Engineered Trees
Threats from the release of genetically modified trees into the environment are extremely serious and differ according to the traits for which they are modified.
Herbicide Resistance Threats from glyphosate resistant GE tree plantations include: o toxification and damage to soils (glyphosate persists in soils for up to 3 years); o increased reliance on chemicals and susceptibility to disease; o poisoning of wildlife and killing of beneficial insects; o escape of pollen from engineered trees causing herbicide-resistant "weed trees" resulting in increasing applications of ever more toxic herbicides to eliminate them.
Insect Resistance Threats from trees engineered to exude Bt toxin include: o the elimination of beneficial insects and creation of "super-pests": insecticide-resistant insects which have few remaining natural predators; o serious disruptions in soil microflora and fauna as well as fungus from Bt exuded through plant roots; o Contamination of water.
Bt trees also have a huge competitive advantage over their wild relatives. Should pollen from Bt trees escape, ecological havoc would result, as insect populations would be disrupted and Bt trees, having an unnatural advantage, could take over.
Sterility Because of the threats from genetic contamination of native trees, any GE trees released into the environment would have to be permanently sterile. However, even proponents of genetically engineering trees do not believe that this is possible. GE Trees sterility researcher J.L. Hamrick states, "genes will escape, based on what we know about trees. At what rate, we don't know yet."
In Germany, a test plot of engineered aspen was given a five-year permit. Because this aspen was known to flower after seven years, harvest of the tree would occur before flowering to prevent gene transfer. However, one of the trees inexplicably began to flower after only three years.
In addition, according to The New Physiologist, pollen from a single pine has been found 600 kilometers (360 miles) away from the source. This means one genetically altered pine could potentially spread its engineered genes over more than 1,130,400 square kilometers of land, contaminating any native forests in that area.
However you look at it, the issue of sterility is a no-win situation. The most likely scenario is a plantation where most of the trees are sterile-resulting in vast plantations of tree clones devoid of seeds, nuts, fruit or pollen, which are incapable of supporting wildlife. However, there will be a few trees that will flower. The engineered pollen from these trees will contaminate native forests in a never ending cycle leading to an ecological catastrophe.
GE Tree Plantations Replacing Native Forests Another concern is the potential for GE tree plantations to replace native forests. Roger A. Sedjo, of the industry think-tank Resources for the Future, in his report, "Biotechnology and Planted Forests: Assessment of Potential and Possibilities," describes the potential for GE trees causing increased establishment of tree plantations (most likely where native forests recently grew).
"The cost-reducing nature of the herbicide tolerance gene, glyphosate, suggests that its application alone would increase the level of plantation establishment in the range of 78,700 to 225,000 hectares (197,000-562,500 acres) annually over what would have been established on a worldwide basis without the innovation, thereby adding a net addition to global production of between 1.97-5 million m3 annually." (emphasis added)
Threats to Public and Private Lands There is also a threat to private and public lands from GE trees. The inevita
one problem with this approach is the pervasiveness of cookies designed for tracking. once your email is out there and linked to certain cookies (and thus profiles) the only way to "de-link" your email address is either to get rid of it or to stop accepting cookies *everywhere*.
double-click is an example that makes the problem easy to visualize. they run advertisements with cookies on many different sites. once they've started a profile on you any time you link (directly or indirectly) to one of their advertisements your profile grows.
once your email has been added to your profile it's too late.
google is no different than double-click in that they are a for-profit-company. that's why they keep their options open with respect to their privacy policy. if selling your personal data becomes very profitable (especially if they were experiencing financial hardship - i know that doesn't sound possible today) they'd do it in a heartbeat. they would be even more likely to do this post-ipo which seems like it will happen eventually.
i had a yahoo email address that i was using "anonymously". put in fake information like lots of folks. then one day a few months ago i noticed that all of the fake information had been replaced by my *real* information. now, i know a bit about anonymity, and while i wasn't under any delusions about the level of anonymity i had at yahoo i was surprised to see all of my personal data displayed given that i never explicitly gave yahoo that data.
since most companies profiling us are driven only by the bottom line and have no vision for a *better* society, yet have a very large impact on the way our society develops, it would be wise to roll back their influence on our lives, IMNSHO.
i wouldn't touch this service with a 10-foot pole given google's lack of a serious privacy policy. i didn't notice any statement regarding privacy in the announcement. but the privacy policy for the whole site includes, "Google may decide to change this Privacy Policy from time to time." also, do you know what google *really* does with those cookies?
talk about a profiler's goldmine. don't tell me any of you believe google (a for-profit company) wouldn't scan every last email for "marketing" reasons?
i've used something like this called mantadb under windows:
MantaDB v02.03 - MantaDB is a very useful set of utilities for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Included with MantaDB is a Web Page Database that indexes the words that on view in your browser, a utility to check for dead links on web pages and smaller utilities to numerous to mention. From: Net 2000 Ltd. (Win95, 98 2000, NT4)
a similar windows product still under development is called hindsite
it is a bummer these are both windows only products. does anything like this exist for linux? i checked the mozilla extentions page and didn't see any such creature there.
this says a lot about how much we live in our heads
how disconnected we are from the physical world
how disconnected we are from other people
the more we engage in a virtual existence, the less time we have to be in the physical world
being physically disconnected from our local communities leads to a default acceptance of unsustainable lifestyles
an example:
i make my living doing computer consulting. i buy my food with the money i earn. this food comes from all over the globe transported to me by polluting the earth. if i had to accept all the pollution generated from just the transport of my food into my home i'd probably be asphyxiated. the computers that i fix to make the money i think i need to exist probably create more toxic byproducts than i'd be willing to store or release into my home so *i choose* to store or release these toxics into someone else's "backyard".
the flip side (a tangible example of how connectedness to place can result in sustainable choices):
when i go out jogging and breath the exhaust from all the automobiles driving past me i gag. as a result i've chosen to drive my car less and bicycle instead with the ultimate intention of getting rid of my car.
i very much appreciate the author's insights. but just as AARG! noticed the EFF report's shortcomings, so his/her analysis is also lacking at least one important perspective. what AARG!'s analysis fails to duly acknowledge is the idea that trusted computing supplies Microsoft (replace "Microsoft" with the existing powerful entity of your choice) with a tool to maintain their power over others.
if Microsoft can enable *wide-spread* lock-in prior to alternatives sufficiently establishing themselves, alternatives may never appear. and if they do appear they may never become a true alternative due to Microsoft's ability to control the environment in which any alternative exists.
we live in a society that allows the existence of monopoly corporations with more rights than people. this allows environments to be created where choice is even harder to come by. customer lock-in means not only limiting/eliminating choice, it also means making it too painful to choose freedom.
Microsoft will continue to attempt to lock-in customers by manipulating the environment so there is less choice. they may or may not succeed to one degree or another. trusted computing gives Microsoft a new tool (in addition to their immense leverage over the computing industry, their political power, their financial resources, and their existing monopoly position) in establishing an environment where choice effectively does not exist.
in my mind this is a much more glaring omission than the technical misunderstandings of the EFF report. what's obvious is that the EFF is interested in being a watchdog for freedom, whereas AARG! seems to assume freedom will just happen.
again, trusted computing gives corporations another tool that allows them to consolidate their power, increase their control, and create environments where alternatives exist only in name.
i choose freedom, and will do all i can to rollback the expansion of corporate rights to pre-1886 levels.
P.S. AARG!, if you read this i'd love to hear your reply (publicly as i don't use the email address attached to this account) to this concern. btw, is there a way to get a message to you?
Debian is generally regarded as a good Linux distribution with great package management but a terrible installer. However, it's actually a lot more than that. Technically it's not even really a Linux distribution in the traditional sense, and it can be a hard thing to define for those who have dealt primarily with commercial distributions like Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE, because Debian even embraces alternative kernels such as the BSD kernel and The Hurd.
Linux itself is grounded in community involvement and accessibility, concepts it inherited from the GNU project. But when we think of Linux distributions today they are almost all commercial ventures. What goes into each commercial distribution is a decision made by paid employees with the company bottom line in mind. That may not in itself be a bad thing, but it does leave them open to the possibility of commercial failure as we saw recently with Mandrake. If an organisation needs to make money to survive, that danger always remains.
But Debian is different. It's a totally open, cooperative project involving a great diversity of people, each doing what they do either because they want to or because they feel it's worthwhile. In fact Debian doesn't really exist in the legal sense. There is no Debian Inc, there are no shareholders, no board, not even a non-profit organisation. There is an umbrella organisation called Software in the Public Interest (SPI), but Debian itself is really just a big cooperative project. It's probably one of the best large scale examples of a true 'bazaar' style project as described by Eric S Raymond in "The Cathedral And The Bazaar" that exists today. It doesn't have to make any sales, it doesn't have to meet investor expectations, its members just get on with doing what they do best: create one of the best ever collections of open source software.
That can be both a good and a bad thing. One of the recent problems, for example, has been obtaining AMD x86-64 prototype hardware for porting and testing. AMD have limited supplies of hardware, and while it's still at the prototype phase they will only release machines to organisations that can both demonstrate a need and enter into a non-disclosure agreement. Because Debian doesn't really exist legally, it can't enter into an agreement binding on all it's developers and so AMD have been unable to provide hardware for Debian developers to test on.
However, problems like that are few and far between, and for the most part Debian's lack of structure is its strength. It's diversity and inclusiveness have resulted in its ability to package a huge range of software on more hardware architectures than any other distribution, or indeed any other operating system.
Something that many people don't know is that Debian officially supports 11 different hardware architectures: x86/IA-32(i386), Motorola 68k, Sparc, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, MIPSel, HP PA-RISC, IA-64 and S/390. And that doesn't mean that everything is developed for i386 first, with other architectures lagging behind and treated as poor cousins, with distribution releases delayed by weeks or months. When a release such as Woody (Debian 3.0) happens, it happens simultaneously on all 11 architectures.
That's a pretty mind-blowing concept when you consider that even the big boys such as Red Hat only officially try to support one or two. Managing development on 11 architectures has required Debian to put in place a very sophisticated auto-builder system that allows a developer to create a software package on whatever their local architecture happens to be, then upload the package to a build queue. Once in the queue the package is sanity checked, then distributed to machines in the build farm: a group of machines loaned or donated to Debian that represent all 11 architect
A rare victory for small business in VoIP should not obscure the fact that DSL competition is fading across America.
by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [February 13, 2004]
"Deliver 100 meg to almost all Americans." -- John Cioffi. Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon, Brian Roberts of Comcast, and Bob Blau of BellSouth all recently spoke of moving to 50 and 100 Megs.
They delayed the FCC meeting this morning, but as this issue is going out Jeff Pulver should be getting miraculous news at Thursday's FCC meeting. None of us believed his Free World Dialup petition had any chance, despite the logic of moving voice to the net. "Mr. Smith"--actually, Mr. Pulver, a small businessman--went to D.C. and convinced officials his cause was right. The phone companies realized they can still game the system and stay ahead, and even the FBI offered to compromise on ruling the internet.
Friday is also the day for bids on AT&T Wireless, a deal that will probably go down because $300 million in commissions and accelerated options are at stake. Amazing that bids are at $30 billion for an outfit whose profits are negligible and headed negative, and whose management wants to cash out. Buying AWE is essentially a bet spectrum will go up dramatically in price despite the return of the analog TV band, SDR, and the FCC's plan to make more available. It's time for John Wayne CEOs to ride into the sunset.
Meanwhile, our technology produces everyday miracles. Jef Raskin writes "just gave a talk in Graz, Austria, via iChat AV. Real time voice and video, both ways. We set up the session by discussing it (at no extra cost above my standard DSL line) via audio, video, and text (all simultaneous)." His California Pac Bell connection may soon go to 3 Mbps+ down, 600 Kbps up, making that even easier. Everyone who cares about the user experience should read Jef's The Humane Interface.
Last week, yet another CEO told me how important the interface is, then showed me something second rate. Imagine if the designer of the Macintosh defined your user experience. Companies like Verizon, (whose install is thankless) or gateway/set top vendors should get it right by bringing in Jef, a friend, or similar talent.
Martin on Competition "Time now to speak" "I'm proud to have stood up for what I believe was right" "I'm afraid we may be losing some of the battles" to preserve the competition that currently exists. "Policy-makers in Washington are not debating the benefits of the services you offer," he said. "They are too frequently debating how much of the rules should be eliminated, and how should the changes be made to be more fair to the incumbents."
"If you have a message to deliver, I think the time is now . . . . Speak now or forever hold your peace. You must now be your own champions." (From Telecommunications Reports)
Editor's opinion: The right choice is either strong competition or strong regulation. If we don't want direct regulation of telcos' rates and profits, then we need regulation that creates thriving alternatives. Incumbents' economies of scale and financial power allow them to crush others unless curbed. As far as I'm concerned, calls for policies that cripple competitors are also a call for strong government intervention to keep prices down. One day, I'll report a Tauke or a Whitacre call for limiting CLEC access using the headline "Verizon/SBC calls for return to strict rate of return regulation"--the alternative implied if they kill the opposition.
Telco Cowboys Repairmen to John Wayne CEOs Ed Whitacre wants to spend $30 billion on AT&T Wireless, building an empire deserving of Ozymandias. He's blind to the AT&T folk desperately looking for an exit, as profit heads towards zero and beneath. Decimated Ameritech has lost $30 billion or more in value, and would have required a career-ending write-off except for an accounting l
one simple step in the direction of including environmental costs in the production of the product is to require the manufacturer to take the product back at the end of the product's lifetime. the manufacturer would then have an incentive to make the product as recyclable/reusable/biodegradable as possible.
moving from a fixed width/monospaced font to a variable spaced font will make it more difficult for simpler forms of communication to interface officially with government entities.
increasing complexity typically reduces reliability.
please just go and submit all your personal information directly to Upromise.com to expedite your complete enslavement to your corporate masters.
nothing is free.
if the above statement rings true for you then the next obvious question to ask of a "free" service being offered to you by a bottom-line for-profit corporation is, "how does the corporation profit?"
i'm annoyed at how quickly my fellow geeks are rushing our society headlong into a dystopian fantasy novel.
skip Friendster, Orkut, Upromise, and other data profiling entities and go sign-up for an Anonymizer account (yes, i know they are not perfect). do something to further the vision you have for the type of society you want to live in.
hoping to not meet you all in more repressive and restrictive society a few years down the road. please choose something different.
i attempted to post the above and received this message in reply:
"This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original..."
that made me wonder about adding a feature to slashcode that would allow folks without mod points to indicate that a particular post deserves moderating.
this could potentially make it easier for moderators to find a post that was languishing (unnoticed by moderators but noticed by the more numerous folks without mod points) in the backwater of some thread (like this one).
this is what i tell all of my customers. i give them advice on which laptop to buy, but i stress that because laptops are so proprietary it is critical that they purchase a three-year parts and labor warranty too.
if there is a laptop manufacturer out there that offers some reasonably cost effective replacement parts service i'd bet the laptop's initial cost is higher than average. it all seems to come down to economics.
it also seems to come down to whether a company is interested providing a superior product. since there isn't a great demand for superior products only small companies are able to offer this. (heh, i guess that's economics;)
i recently had a customer purchase a laptop from powernotebooks.com. very nice product. strong commitment to a quality build and linux compatible hardware. not sure about their replacement parts offering but the customer picked up their three-year parts and labor warranty, so they have no worries for at least three years.
Slashdot Mirror
[here's an introductory paragraph for the above post that i forgot to include]
Global Justice Ecology Project is planning to collaborate with European groups on a campaign against the United Nations to convince them to rescind their decision to allow GE trees to be used in carbon sink plantations as part of the Kyoto Protocol. In December 2003, the United Nations issued a go-ahead for countries to include genetically engineered trees in plantations designed to soak up carbon emissions from industries in order to address global warming. However, the use of genetically engineered trees in these plantations will lead to forest health crises that worsen global warming rather than help alleviate it.
another huge problem is GE trees. the following information summarizes the issues.
[from: http://globaljusticeecology.org/index.php?page=get rees]
Background: Threats from Genetically Engineered Trees
Threats from the release of genetically modified trees into the environment are extremely serious and differ according to the traits for which they are modified.
Herbicide Resistance
Threats from glyphosate resistant GE tree plantations include:
o toxification and damage to soils (glyphosate persists in soils for up to 3 years);
o increased reliance on chemicals and susceptibility to disease;
o poisoning of wildlife and killing of beneficial insects;
o escape of pollen from engineered trees causing herbicide-resistant "weed trees"
resulting in increasing applications of ever more toxic herbicides to eliminate them.
Insect Resistance
Threats from trees engineered to exude Bt toxin include:
o the elimination of beneficial insects and creation of "super-pests": insecticide-resistant
insects which have few remaining natural predators;
o serious disruptions in soil microflora and fauna as well as fungus from Bt exuded
through plant roots;
o Contamination of water.
Bt trees also have a huge competitive advantage over their wild relatives. Should pollen from Bt trees escape, ecological havoc would result, as insect populations would be disrupted and Bt trees, having an unnatural advantage, could take over.
Sterility
Because of the threats from genetic contamination of native trees, any GE trees released into the environment would have to be permanently sterile. However, even proponents of genetically engineering trees do not believe that this is possible. GE Trees sterility researcher J.L. Hamrick states, "genes will escape, based on what we know about trees. At what rate, we don't know yet."
In Germany, a test plot of engineered aspen was given a five-year permit. Because this aspen was known to flower after seven years, harvest of the tree would occur before flowering to prevent gene transfer. However, one of the trees inexplicably began to flower after only three years.
In addition, according to The New Physiologist, pollen from a single pine has been found 600 kilometers (360 miles) away from the source. This means one genetically altered pine could potentially spread its engineered genes over more than 1,130,400 square kilometers of land, contaminating any native forests in that area.
However you look at it, the issue of sterility is a no-win situation. The most likely scenario is a plantation where most of the trees are sterile-resulting in vast plantations of tree clones devoid of seeds, nuts, fruit or pollen, which are incapable of supporting wildlife. However, there will be a few trees that will flower. The engineered pollen from these trees will contaminate native forests in a never ending cycle leading to an ecological catastrophe.
GE Tree Plantations Replacing Native Forests
Another concern is the potential for GE tree plantations to replace native forests. Roger A. Sedjo, of the industry think-tank Resources for the Future, in his report, "Biotechnology and Planted Forests: Assessment of Potential and Possibilities," describes the potential for GE trees causing increased establishment of tree plantations (most likely where native forests recently grew).
"The cost-reducing nature of the herbicide tolerance gene, glyphosate, suggests that its application alone would increase the level of plantation establishment in the range of 78,700 to 225,000 hectares (197,000-562,500 acres) annually over what would have been established on a worldwide basis without the innovation, thereby adding a net addition to global production of between 1.97-5 million m3 annually." (emphasis added)
Threats to Public and Private Lands
There is also a threat to private and public lands from GE trees. The inevita
nope, all completely unique bogus info. my brother's wife has had the same experience.
one problem with this approach is the pervasiveness of cookies designed for tracking. once your email is out there and linked to certain cookies (and thus profiles) the only way to "de-link" your email address is either to get rid of it or to stop accepting cookies *everywhere*.
double-click is an example that makes the problem easy to visualize. they run advertisements with cookies on many different sites. once they've started a profile on you any time you link (directly or indirectly) to one of their advertisements your profile grows.
once your email has been added to your profile it's too late.
google is no different than double-click in that they are a for-profit-company. that's why they keep their options open with respect to their privacy policy. if selling your personal data becomes very profitable (especially if they were experiencing financial hardship - i know that doesn't sound possible today) they'd do it in a heartbeat. they would be even more likely to do this post-ipo which seems like it will happen eventually.
i had a yahoo email address that i was using "anonymously". put in fake information like lots of folks. then one day a few months ago i noticed that all of the fake information had been replaced by my *real* information. now, i know a bit about anonymity, and while i wasn't under any delusions about the level of anonymity i had at yahoo i was surprised to see all of my personal data displayed given that i never explicitly gave yahoo that data.
since most companies profiling us are driven only by the bottom line and have no vision for a *better* society, yet have a very large impact on the way our society develops, it would be wise to roll back their influence on our lives, IMNSHO.
i wouldn't touch this service with a 10-foot pole given google's lack of a serious privacy policy. i didn't notice any statement regarding privacy in the announcement. but the privacy policy for the whole site includes, "Google may decide to change this Privacy Policy from time to time." also, do you know what google *really* does with those cookies?
talk about a profiler's goldmine. don't tell me any of you believe google (a for-profit company) wouldn't scan every last email for "marketing" reasons?
peace
i've used something like this called mantadb under windows:
MantaDB v02.03 - MantaDB is a very useful
set of utilities for Microsoft Internet
Explorer. Included with MantaDB is a Web
Page Database that indexes the words that
on view in your browser, a utility to
check for dead links on web pages and
smaller utilities to numerous to mention.
From: Net 2000 Ltd. (Win95, 98 2000, NT4)
a similar windows product still under development is called hindsite
it is a bummer these are both windows only products. does anything like this exist for linux? i checked the mozilla extentions page and didn't see any such creature there.
ciao
this says a lot about how much we live in our heads
how disconnected we are from the physical world
how disconnected we are from other people
the more we engage in a virtual existence, the less time we have to be in the physical world
being physically disconnected from our local communities leads to a default acceptance of unsustainable lifestyles
an example:
i make my living doing computer consulting. i buy my food with the money i earn. this food comes from all over the globe transported to me by polluting the earth. if i had to accept all the pollution generated from just the transport of my food into my home i'd probably be asphyxiated. the computers that i fix to make the money i think i need to exist probably create more toxic byproducts than i'd be willing to store or release into my home so *i choose* to store or release these toxics into someone else's "backyard".
the flip side (a tangible example of how connectedness to place can result in sustainable choices):
when i go out jogging and breath the exhaust from all the automobiles driving past me i gag. as a result i've chosen to drive my car less and bicycle instead with the ultimate intention of getting rid of my car.
peace
We do not inherit the world from our parents; we borrow it from our children
- American Indian Proverb
i very much appreciate the author's insights. but just as AARG! noticed the EFF report's shortcomings, so his/her analysis is also lacking at least one important perspective. what AARG!'s analysis fails to duly acknowledge is the idea that trusted computing supplies Microsoft (replace "Microsoft" with the existing powerful entity of your choice) with a tool to maintain their power over others.
if Microsoft can enable *wide-spread* lock-in prior to alternatives sufficiently establishing themselves, alternatives may never appear. and if they do appear they may never become a true alternative due to Microsoft's ability to control the environment in which any alternative exists.
we live in a society that allows the existence of monopoly corporations with more rights than people. this allows environments to be created where choice is even harder to come by. customer lock-in means not only limiting/eliminating choice, it also means making it too painful to choose freedom.
Microsoft will continue to attempt to lock-in customers by manipulating the environment so there is less choice. they may or may not succeed to one degree or another. trusted computing gives Microsoft a new tool (in addition to their immense leverage over the computing industry, their political power, their financial resources, and their existing monopoly position) in establishing an environment where choice effectively does not exist.
in my mind this is a much more glaring omission than the technical misunderstandings of the EFF report. what's obvious is that the EFF is interested in being a watchdog for freedom, whereas AARG! seems to assume freedom will just happen.
again, trusted computing gives corporations another tool that allows them to consolidate their power, increase their control, and create environments where alternatives exist only in name.
i choose freedom, and will do all i can to rollback the expansion of corporate rights to pre-1886 levels.
P.S.
AARG!, if you read this i'd love to hear your reply (publicly as i don't use the email address attached to this account) to this concern. btw, is there a way to get a message to you?
The Future of OSS Desktop Development, Part II is a current discussion of the blog debate between Havoc Pennington and Miguel de Icaza regarding Havoc's initial essay on Mono, Java, and the Linux desktop.
also worth a read is Rasterman's (lead developer of the Enlightenment project) comment.
educate yourself.
peace
please mod parent up
here's a great summary of why i'm moving all of my clients from windows to linux and specifically Debian GNU/Linux.
[from: http://debianuniverse.com/readonline/chapter/01]
The Debian Universe
Debian is generally regarded as a good Linux distribution with great package management but a terrible installer. However, it's actually a lot more than that. Technically it's not even really a Linux distribution in the traditional sense, and it can be a hard thing to define for those who have dealt primarily with commercial distributions like Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE, because Debian even embraces alternative kernels such as the BSD kernel and The Hurd.
Linux itself is grounded in community involvement and accessibility, concepts it inherited from the GNU project. But when we think of Linux distributions today they are almost all commercial ventures. What goes into each commercial distribution is a decision made by paid employees with the company bottom line in mind. That may not in itself be a bad thing, but it does leave them open to the possibility of commercial failure as we saw recently with Mandrake. If an organisation needs to make money to survive, that danger always remains.
But Debian is different. It's a totally open, cooperative project involving a great diversity of people, each doing what they do either because they want to or because they feel it's worthwhile. In fact Debian doesn't really exist in the legal sense. There is no Debian Inc, there are no shareholders, no board, not even a non-profit organisation. There is an umbrella organisation called Software in the Public Interest (SPI), but Debian itself is really just a big cooperative project. It's probably one of the best large scale examples of a true 'bazaar' style project as described by Eric S Raymond in "The Cathedral And The Bazaar" that exists today. It doesn't have to make any sales, it doesn't have to meet investor expectations, its members just get on with doing what they do best: create one of the best ever collections of open source software.
That can be both a good and a bad thing. One of the recent problems, for example, has been obtaining AMD x86-64 prototype hardware for porting and testing. AMD have limited supplies of hardware, and while it's still at the prototype phase they will only release machines to organisations that can both demonstrate a need and enter into a non-disclosure agreement. Because Debian doesn't really exist legally, it can't enter into an agreement binding on all it's developers and so AMD have been unable to provide hardware for Debian developers to test on.
However, problems like that are few and far between, and for the most part Debian's lack of structure is its strength. It's diversity and inclusiveness have resulted in its ability to package a huge range of software on more hardware architectures than any other distribution, or indeed any other operating system.
Something that many people don't know is that Debian officially supports 11 different hardware architectures: x86/IA-32(i386), Motorola 68k, Sparc, Alpha, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, MIPSel, HP PA-RISC, IA-64 and S/390. And that doesn't mean that everything is developed for i386 first, with other architectures lagging behind and treated as poor cousins, with distribution releases delayed by weeks or months. When a release such as Woody (Debian 3.0) happens, it happens simultaneously on all 11 architectures.
That's a pretty mind-blowing concept when you consider that even the big boys such as Red Hat only officially try to support one or two. Managing development on 11 architectures has required Debian to put in place a very sophisticated auto-builder system that allows a developer to create a software package on whatever their local architecture happens to be, then upload the package to a build queue. Once in the queue the package is sanity checked, then distributed to machines in the build farm: a group of machines loaned or donated to Debian that represent all 11 architect
that debian distros will now be able to include working DVD players?
mod parent up please
DSL Prime: Telco Cowboys, Mr. Pulver to D.C.
A rare victory for small business in VoIP should not obscure the fact that DSL competition is fading across America.
by Dave Burstein
DSL Prime
[February 13, 2004]
"Deliver 100 meg to almost all Americans."
-- John Cioffi. Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon, Brian Roberts of Comcast, and Bob Blau of BellSouth all recently spoke of moving to 50 and 100 Megs.
They delayed the FCC meeting this morning, but as this issue is going out Jeff Pulver should be getting miraculous news at Thursday's FCC meeting. None of us believed his Free World Dialup petition had any chance, despite the logic of moving voice to the net. "Mr. Smith"--actually, Mr. Pulver, a small businessman--went to D.C. and convinced officials his cause was right. The phone companies realized they can still game the system and stay ahead, and even the FBI offered to compromise on ruling the internet.
Friday is also the day for bids on AT&T Wireless, a deal that will probably go down because $300 million in commissions and accelerated options are at stake. Amazing that bids are at $30 billion for an outfit whose profits are negligible and headed negative, and whose management wants to cash out. Buying AWE is essentially a bet spectrum will go up dramatically in price despite the return of the analog TV band, SDR, and the FCC's plan to make more available. It's time for John Wayne CEOs to ride into the sunset.
Meanwhile, our technology produces everyday miracles. Jef Raskin writes "just gave a talk in Graz, Austria, via iChat AV. Real time voice and video, both ways. We set up the session by discussing it (at no extra cost above my standard DSL line) via audio, video, and text (all simultaneous)." His California Pac Bell connection may soon go to 3 Mbps+ down, 600 Kbps up, making that even easier. Everyone who cares about the user experience should read Jef's The Humane Interface.
Last week, yet another CEO told me how important the interface is, then showed me something second rate. Imagine if the designer of the Macintosh defined your user experience. Companies like Verizon, (whose install is thankless) or gateway/set top vendors should get it right by bringing in Jef, a friend, or similar talent.
Martin on Competition "Time now to speak"
"I'm proud to have stood up for what I believe was right"
"I'm afraid we may be losing some of the battles" to preserve the competition that currently exists. "Policy-makers in Washington are not debating the benefits of the services you offer," he said. "They are too frequently debating how much of the rules should be eliminated, and how should the changes be made to be more fair to the incumbents."
"If you have a message to deliver, I think the time is now . . . . Speak now or forever hold your peace. You must now be your own champions." (From Telecommunications Reports)
Editor's opinion: The right choice is either strong competition or strong regulation. If we don't want direct regulation of telcos' rates and profits, then we need regulation that creates thriving alternatives. Incumbents' economies of scale and financial power allow them to crush others unless curbed. As far as I'm concerned, calls for policies that cripple competitors are also a call for strong government intervention to keep prices down. One day, I'll report a Tauke or a Whitacre call for limiting CLEC access using the headline "Verizon/SBC calls for return to strict rate of return regulation"--the alternative implied if they kill the opposition.
Telco Cowboys
Repairmen to John Wayne CEOs
Ed Whitacre wants to spend $30 billion on AT&T Wireless, building an empire deserving of Ozymandias. He's blind to the AT&T folk desperately looking for an exit, as profit heads towards zero and beneath. Decimated Ameritech has lost $30 billion or more in value, and would have required a career-ending write-off except for an accounting l
one simple step in the direction of including environmental costs in the production of the product is to require the manufacturer to take the product back at the end of the product's lifetime. the manufacturer would then have an incentive to make the product as recyclable/reusable/biodegradable as possible.
moving from a fixed width/monospaced font to a variable spaced font will make it more difficult for simpler forms of communication to interface officially with government entities.
increasing complexity typically reduces reliability.
can someone list the current pros and cons from a provider level regarding the different network topologies of cable and DSL?
here's a glimpse into the growing popularity of SPF:
SPF Adoption Roll
anyone have any info on quantifiable interest for either DMP or RME/RMX?
who don't have your interests at heart.
please just go and submit all your personal information directly to Upromise.com to expedite your complete enslavement to your corporate masters.
nothing is free.
if the above statement rings true for you then the next obvious question to ask of a "free" service being offered to you by a bottom-line for-profit corporation is, "how does the corporation profit?"
i'm annoyed at how quickly my fellow geeks are rushing our society headlong into a dystopian fantasy novel.
skip Friendster, Orkut, Upromise, and other data profiling entities and go sign-up for an Anonymizer account (yes, i know they are not perfect). do something to further the vision you have for the type of society you want to live in.
hoping to not meet you all in more repressive and restrictive society a few years down the road. please choose something different.
peace
maybe each post could have the equivalent of a mini poll attached to it.
something like:
Post Poll
( ) Mod Up
( ) Mod Down
again, this would mainly be useful in alerting moderators to posts they were unaware of.
once aware they would moderate as they see fit.
please mod parent up
NOTE:
----
i attempted to post the above and received this message in reply:
"This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original..."
that made me wonder about adding a feature to slashcode that would allow folks without mod points to indicate that a particular post deserves moderating.
this could potentially make it easier for moderators to find a post that was languishing (unnoticed by moderators but noticed by the more numerous folks without mod points) in the backwater of some thread (like this one).
please mod parent up
Opera Software obviously has a single-minded focus to produce an excellent browser but in the long run all of that effort will likely be for naught.
unless they change their license to the GPL (or some equivalent).
IMNSHO
any laptop = extended warranty required
;)
this is what i tell all of my customers. i give them advice on which laptop to buy, but i stress that because laptops are so proprietary it is critical that they purchase a three-year parts and labor warranty too.
if there is a laptop manufacturer out there that offers some reasonably cost effective replacement parts service i'd bet the laptop's initial cost is higher than average. it all seems to come down to economics.
it also seems to come down to whether a company is interested providing a superior product. since there isn't a great demand for superior products only small companies are able to offer this. (heh, i guess that's economics
i recently had a customer purchase a laptop from powernotebooks.com. very nice product. strong commitment to a quality build and linux compatible hardware. not sure about their replacement parts offering but the customer picked up their three-year parts and labor warranty, so they have no worries for at least three years.