Agreed, "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." sums it up....No, wait, that's way too general for the given context, hmm.. (Ignorance alert: I actually never even considered the origins of that particular phrase* - thanks for the pointer!).
*) For folks matching me in cluelessness: I believe KFG's referring to the quote**
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (The Life of Reason, 1905)
I think you got it backwards. Price/performance and dumb-features ratio of that red atrocity tells us it's a managers toy. So, underlings worldwide moan inwardly as their PHBs repeatedly "rev" their Ferrari redtops. I rue the day...
Granted, but the web's 'unFUBARness' and forgiving/liberal parsing of HTML, is a large part of its success.
In contrast, Mark Pilgrim, has been documenting the evolution of XML's error handling (which is pretty much "fail on first error"). Something I personally think is good (in the projects where we use XML), but general adoption is far slower. The threshold - while pretty low - is too high.
Microsoft is trying to break into the reporting market by being generic to break the hold of the current slew of companies that hold the monopoly there with more proprietary solutions.
Or "bait-and-switch-and-embrace-and-extend", as Microsoft calls it in internal communication.
the obvious stuff in the universe [...] is actually only 4% of its total content. About another quarter is so-called cold, dark matter [...] The remaining 70% is even stranger. It is known as dark energy, [...]
But what if dark matter/energy does exist?
We already know that 90% of everything we actually can see is crap. Think of how much crap we theoretically have yet to discover!?
Sounds pretty cool (d'you know which camera/s [links]? Does it have an internal GPS, or do you have to thumb it in?).
On the same page: does anyone know - or have any ideas - on how you (efficiently) could get geolocation data into the EXIF tags et al. (while in the field), if you don't have such a nifty camera?
Hm.. Perhaps compass & map + pen & paper would be as good as any other way that isn't automagic(?)
But still, a solution envolving e.g. a Zaurus with GPRS/Wifi, GPS card/device, and some GPL'ed Linux software, would feel more...appropriate.;)
Yeah, good arguments all, thanks. (Obviously, without code/~ing there wouldn't be any movement to begin with. I'm with you.)
The things about SCO, IBM & Co., and open source being "rewritten" wasn't so much in the legal (GPL) sense, as in a conceptual/belief sense (which prompted me to write my first post).
Perhaps an unfounded worry. After the initial 'rush' of thinking that the Microsoft hegemony could actually come to an end, I - along with a few million other geeks, probably:) - have been thinking about what will happen when (not if;) ) Linux do becomes mainstream.
Things change, of course, especially with growth like this. I'm just hoping that the best parts of the movement will find a way to survive - openness, sharing, collaboration,... You know, without it becoming too much like business of today.
It's probably unreasonable to demand of "traditional" users, to roll up their sleves and join in the development - but it's way cool(!)
People can be so much more than just consumers/users of Apache, Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, mplayer, GNU/Emacs, etc. I'm kind of hoping that people who come to Linux will pick up on that - instead of only demanding bugfixes, features and/or doing point-by-point ROI comparisons to Microsoft.. Cheers.
Good points, thanks (eventhough I'm not sure I fully agree about OSS being the better term).
I can appreciate that the finer points of the "GPL Way" etc., is a 'hard sell' for the people you listed (I code for a living and it's difficult for me too), and that OSS is a practical, clear and encompassing concept.
But I get the feeling that there's a growing(?) number of developers and "power users" that don't think or care about these issues - regardless of whether they believe in 'free software' or 'open source'. In the long run I think no good can come out of that.
I think you're right in that participation is very important (hopefully my employer will be persuaded soon, and we'll be changing some of our development to an open model as well as contributing to existing projects).
But trying to hard to understand the culture/history? I think not, in fact quite the opposite. Doesn't recent events show "us" quite clearly, that "we" cannot make the mistake of "just getting on and [code]"? Isn't that stance a bit naive?
As I mentioned earlier: SCO, my friend! Even the ongoing Trolltech/Qt licensing arguments, not to mention BSD, etc. Copyrights, licensing schemes, patents,...it's unfortunately become integral to what we do. In a perfect world, we (who love to code) could just get on with it and hack to our hearts content. But it's not, so we can't.
I would love to not have to deal with these things, but we (either collectively or each to his/her own) need to get a very firm understanding of these issues, because IBM or similar entities sure as hell can't be trusted with the "keys to the kingdom".
They say "'Open source' is great!" why? Not out of passion/et al., but because it's good business to say so. But how about tomorrow? If (as) "the Linux movement" gets into bed with these entities, what is being traded and for what?
What I think I'm wondering is: What is the definition of this (new) "open source" that is currently being (re)written by all these major players? Will "we" even recognize it when they're done?
When did FS get edited out of the story?
on
Linux Going Mainstream
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm quite new to Linux (c64/z48/MSX->Atari->Mac->Win->Linux), and I'm working hard to get a deeper understanding of the Linux culture (and development model). Can't say I have a full understanding of the cultural and historical roots of this movement, but still I feel something's sorely missing from the coverage in 'mainstream media'.
The ongoing SCO and copyright shit - most of what I read is from open source people.
This trend of getting Linux "on every desktop" - again, open source advocates are legion.
What about free software? Yes, fanboys all over just love to trash RMS, but most fanboys (to my limited knowledge) have done dick all for the movement.
I don't know enough to say OSS is worse than free software (although I'm leaning towards the latter). But hell, it's starting to look like a lot of people's main goal is to put the "open source" sticker on the whole thing, get the mega corps blessings and declare this land Utopia.
WTF?
From what I'm slowly learning about this movement, there's a lot more to it than just the "open source". And I think it's getting lost in the process.
Aren't many good ideas and a lot of cultural heritage getting thrown aside here? Are we loosing important stuff along the way?
I only got through a 1/3 of it before it scared me senseless though..:
"Our customers that are buying [UNIX] from us today, we generally don't have a problem with," McBride said. "We have some former customers that have left that are running on Linux, and they are in the crosshairs."
We're in deep trouble people! There are lawyers, positioned on rooftops, packing sniper rifles, as we speak *shudder*
Thank God so many of you are quite accomplished CS players. Duck-run-strafe-fire!
Giving credit where credit is due is intellectually honest....
I also found myself thinking along these lines. I thought it was a well-written article, but it and the "Copy Left" spokespersons, came off as 'creators-of-(almost)-all-ideas-presented-here'...
(I posted another example here, about possible original sources for the claimed economic power of interaction/communication over passive consumption.)
Thanks for the pointers, I'll be reading up on them.
Very good and interesting article, but appallingly weak on sources and further reading (didn't the NY Times get the memos on hyperlinks?).
In the article, Yochai Benkler, law professor at Yale, exemplifies how creative interaction is more "valued" by users - even economically, than passive consumption. Benkler says:
How much do people pay the recording industry to listen to music versus how much people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends and family?
The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a "revealed willingness to pay," a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good....
[emphasis mine]
Unfortunately for these [mass media] companies, content is not the key. Content certainly has all the glamor. What content does not have is money. This might seem absurd. After all, the media trumpet the hundred million dollar opening weekends of blockbuster movies, and leading actors such as Julia Roberts or Jim Carrey earn $20 million (plus a share of the gross) per film. That is true, and it is definitely possible to become rich and famous in Hollywood. Yet the revenues and profits from movies pale next to those for providing the much denigrated "pipes."
The annual movie theater ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10 billion. The telephone industry collects that much money every two weeks! Those "commodity pipelines" attract much more spending than the glamorous "content."
[emphasis mine]
A good article on the whole. And I very much agree with the 'Copyleftists', that the internet and WWW has been (is) a (the) catalyst for innovation and cultural resurgence, and that copyright -- as it is currently sharpened to a lethal weapon -- is becoming increasingly perilous to the very things it was meant to foster: innovation and improvement of society/culture.
Even if their new format is patented, the fact that it is XML based will surely help in the production of open source decoder/encoder.
XML is no guarantee. We haven't seen what the MS XML format will finally look like. It is certainly possible they'll clip its wings - put stuff in binaries, have the format depend on xyz gizmo in the OS, raise a thousand different hurdles making interop very impractical..
Didn't MS already do this to a supposedly open/interop 'standard' - RTF (Rich-Text Format)?
<xml> <very-important-data key="££€}$@[}$@€@$"> &nbs p ; ł@]}þþ£]þ}(R)þ@& #16 3;@@£](R)$]}£@þ€£þ}[ @$þ(R)ew@(R)þ(R)@$ </very-important-data> <contents> <content how-to-use="see very-important-data"> this could be data from any part of the document, that should be handled/formatted in a way we can't find out about - apart from old-style reverse engineering (if that wasn't outlawed already..) </content> ... </content> </xml>
And now, with a patent, a decoder/encoder could be shot down in a second.
(1) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in paragraph (2), protection under this Act shall not extend to--
(A) a database generated, gathered, organized, or maintained by a Federal, State, or local governmental entity, or by an employee or agent of such an entity, acting within the scope of such employment or agency; or
(B) a database generated, gathered, or maintained by an entity pursuant to and to the extent required by a Federal statute or regulation requiring such a database.
(2) EXCEPTION- Nothing in this section shall preclude protection under this Act for a database gathered, organized, or maintained by an employee or agent of an entity described in paragraph (1) that is acting outside the scope of such employment or agency, or by a Federal, State, or local educational institution, or its employees or agents, in the course of engaging in education, research, or scholarship.
IANAL, but doesn't 5.a.1.A and.B look like e.g. law databases, are excluded?
..the book had a lot more information on many topics, which in this case would warrant the extra pages. Plus, I have the 1st edt. of this one (very good intro to Python, btw), and have read some other stuff by Lutz, and he is not verbose. I don't think he suddenly would change his style and pad a good first book with a couple of hundred pages of fluff.
Wouldn't you know it, I just convinced myself to get this edition too:).
Sad, but probably true. I don't object to your point that the companies can shift product (hence my initial "1-2-3-profit!" Troll Fu). But I can't agree to being in the wrong or even being arrogant when laying some well-earned, sarcastic criticism on their conduct (although, in all fairness, I was painting with a pretty broad, high-contrast brush in my first post, thanks for reading this far btw).
I mean, I'd be lying to say I never check out fine looking women - in ads or wherever - without feeling the world's in a sad state (on the contrary), or that I don't at least partially match any male stereotype, etc. Wasn't the point I was aiming for.
The main reason I think it's sad is that it's all a feedback loop. Marketing and media are an increasingly big, unavoidable presence in all our lives. It's not something that's just reflecting our lives, or catching up to our needs and our behaviour. It's taking every chance it gets (and with the billions spent, there are plenty of chances) to shape and dictate what, who, where, even why.
We're handed our G.I. Joes and Barbie's real early, and on it escalates.. The stereotypes become increasingly hard to distinguish from the individuals. Now, of course men and women are different. But which differences are important, which are even "real" and which ones are manufactured(?) To use a term close to home: I feel like we're being "hacked" by a lot of this shit. The glaringly sexist, racist, or otherwise stupid crap, we nowadays identify immediately and don't accept in our societies. But more nuanced 'gender/etc. memes' can quickly become gospel.
We geeks seek knowledge, right? Preconceptions, false or untested premises, bias, etc., obfuscate truth, and makes it harder to find. I get very uncomfortable when I start to suspect I'm getting 'riders' snuck into the reality I experience.
Ok, I'll shut up and go to work now. Thanks for reading my ramblings.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." sums it up. ...No, wait, that's way too general for the given context, hmm.. (Ignorance alert: I actually never even considered the origins of that particular phrase* - thanks for the pointer!).
*) For folks matching me in cluelessness: I believe KFG's referring to the quote**
As told by Wikiquote. See also George Santayana, stern looking feller.**) But "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child," seems applicable too.
and someone will create a better idiot."
The New Diamond Age
I think you got it backwards. Price/performance and dumb-features ratio of that red atrocity tells us it's a managers toy. So, underlings worldwide moan inwardly as their PHBs repeatedly "rev" their Ferrari redtops. I rue the day...
"Don't assume that they're always going to do some evil shit just because they're Microsoft." <-- exact point where you lost me ;)
Granted, but the web's 'unFUBARness' and forgiving/liberal parsing of HTML, is a large part of its success.
In contrast, Mark Pilgrim, has been documenting the evolution of XML's error handling (which is pretty much "fail on first error"). Something I personally think is good (in the projects where we use XML), but general adoption is far slower. The threshold - while pretty low - is too high.
Or "bait-and-switch-and-embrace-and-extend", as Microsoft calls it in internal communication.
But what if dark matter/energy does exist?
We already know that 90% of everything we actually can see is crap. Think of how much crap we theoretically have yet to discover!?
Makes you think, or something.
Sounds pretty cool (d'you know which camera/s [links]? Does it have an internal GPS, or do you have to thumb it in?).
...appropriate. ;)
On the same page: does anyone know - or have any ideas - on how you (efficiently) could get geolocation data into the EXIF tags et al. (while in the field), if you don't have such a nifty camera?
Hm.. Perhaps compass & map + pen & paper would be as good as any other way that isn't automagic(?)
But still, a solution envolving e.g. a Zaurus with GPRS/Wifi, GPS card/device, and some GPL'ed Linux software, would feel more
I agree with the sentiment (diversity = a Good Thing), but equating Microsoft with GNU/Linux? That's wrong on soo many levels..
Yeah, good arguments all, thanks. (Obviously, without code/~ing there wouldn't be any movement to begin with. I'm with you.)
:) - have been thinking about what will happen when (not if ;) ) Linux do becomes mainstream.
... You know, without it becoming too much like business of today.
The things about SCO, IBM & Co., and open source being "rewritten" wasn't so much in the legal (GPL) sense, as in a conceptual/belief sense (which prompted me to write my first post).
Perhaps an unfounded worry. After the initial 'rush' of thinking that the Microsoft hegemony could actually come to an end, I - along with a few million other geeks, probably
Things change, of course, especially with growth like this. I'm just hoping that the best parts of the movement will find a way to survive - openness, sharing, collaboration,
It's probably unreasonable to demand of "traditional" users, to roll up their sleves and join in the development - but it's way cool(!)
People can be so much more than just consumers/users of Apache, Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, mplayer, GNU/Emacs, etc. I'm kind of hoping that people who come to Linux will pick up on that - instead of only demanding bugfixes, features and/or doing point-by-point ROI comparisons to Microsoft.. Cheers.
Good points, thanks (eventhough I'm not sure I fully agree about OSS being the better term).
I can appreciate that the finer points of the "GPL Way" etc., is a 'hard sell' for the people you listed (I code for a living and it's difficult for me too), and that OSS is a practical, clear and encompassing concept.
But I get the feeling that there's a growing(?) number of developers and "power users" that don't think or care about these issues - regardless of whether they believe in 'free software' or 'open source'. In the long run I think no good can come out of that.
I think you're right in that participation is very important (hopefully my employer will be persuaded soon, and we'll be changing some of our development to an open model as well as contributing to existing projects).
But trying to hard to understand the culture/history? I think not, in fact quite the opposite. Doesn't recent events show "us" quite clearly, that "we" cannot make the mistake of "just getting on and [code]"? Isn't that stance a bit naive?
As I mentioned earlier: SCO, my friend! Even the ongoing Trolltech/Qt licensing arguments, not to mention BSD, etc. Copyrights, licensing schemes, patents,
I would love to not have to deal with these things, but we (either collectively or each to his/her own) need to get a very firm understanding of these issues, because IBM or similar entities sure as hell can't be trusted with the "keys to the kingdom".
They say "'Open source' is great!" why? Not out of passion/et al., but because it's good business to say so. But how about tomorrow? If (as) "the Linux movement" gets into bed with these entities, what is being traded and for what?
What I think I'm wondering is: What is the definition of this (new) "open source" that is currently being (re)written by all these major players? Will "we" even recognize it when they're done?
I'm quite new to Linux (c64/z48/MSX->Atari->Mac->Win->Linux), and I'm working hard to get a deeper understanding of the Linux culture (and development model). Can't say I have a full understanding of the cultural and historical roots of this movement, but still I feel something's sorely missing from the coverage in 'mainstream media'.
The ongoing SCO and copyright shit - most of what I read is from open source people.
This trend of getting Linux "on every desktop" - again, open source advocates are legion.
What about free software? Yes, fanboys all over just love to trash RMS, but most fanboys (to my limited knowledge) have done dick all for the movement.
I don't know enough to say OSS is worse than free software (although I'm leaning towards the latter). But hell, it's starting to look like a lot of people's main goal is to put the "open source" sticker on the whole thing, get the mega corps blessings and declare this land Utopia.
WTF?
From what I'm slowly learning about this movement, there's a lot more to it than just the "open source". And I think it's getting lost in the process.
Aren't many good ideas and a lot of cultural heritage getting thrown aside here? Are we loosing important stuff along the way?
1
Thank God so many of you are quite accomplished CS players. Duck-run-strafe-fire!
Unfortunate choice of words, no? People raise all kinds of hell when "GNU/Linux" is mentioned.. Must say I prefer the latter ;)
(I posted another example here, about possible original sources for the claimed economic power of interaction/communication over passive consumption.)
Thanks for the pointers, I'll be reading up on them.
In the article, Yochai Benkler, law professor at Yale, exemplifies how creative interaction is more "valued" by users - even economically, than passive consumption. Benkler says:
I'm not sure, but I believe these ideas originates from Andrew Odlyzko's seminal paper "Content is Not king" (january 2001):
A good article on the whole. And I very much agree with the 'Copyleftists', that the internet and WWW has been (is) a (the) catalyst for innovation and cultural resurgence, and that copyright -- as it is currently sharpened to a lethal weapon -- is becoming increasingly perilous to the very things it was meant to foster: innovation and improvement of society/culture.
Regarding information and copyright, I would like to recommend reading Perry Barlow's (EFF) thought-provoking essay Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net, which contains a lot of stuff. Mainly dealing with the question:
What is this thing (information) that we're trying to protect (with copyright)?
XML is no guarantee. We haven't seen what the MS XML format will finally look like. It is certainly possible they'll clip its wings - put stuff in binaries, have the format depend on xyz gizmo in the OS, raise a thousand different hurdles making interop very impractical..
Didn't MS already do this to a supposedly open/interop 'standard' - RTF (Rich-Text Format)?
And now, with a patent, a decoder/encoder could be shot down in a second.
..but the irony would be unbearable. Oh well..
Very well put, nevertheless, I'll be reading more from you.
But I browsed the bill (Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act) and, section 5 says:
IANAL, but doesn't 5.a.1.A and
Yes, you really wouldn't want to traverse the bridge of asses more than once. ;)
..the book had a lot more information on many topics, which in this case would warrant the extra pages. Plus, I have the 1st edt. of this one (very good intro to Python, btw), and have read some other stuff by Lutz, and he is not verbose. I don't think he suddenly would change his style and pad a good first book with a couple of hundred pages of fluff.
:).
Wouldn't you know it, I just convinced myself to get this edition too
Sad, but probably true. I don't object to your point that the companies can shift product (hence my initial "1-2-3-profit!" Troll Fu). But I can't agree to being in the wrong or even being arrogant when laying some well-earned, sarcastic criticism on their conduct (although, in all fairness, I was painting with a pretty broad, high-contrast brush in my first post, thanks for reading this far btw).
I mean, I'd be lying to say I never check out fine looking women - in ads or wherever - without feeling the world's in a sad state (on the contrary), or that I don't at least partially match any male stereotype, etc. Wasn't the point I was aiming for.
The main reason I think it's sad is that it's all a feedback loop. Marketing and media are an increasingly big, unavoidable presence in all our lives. It's not something that's just reflecting our lives, or catching up to our needs and our behaviour. It's taking every chance it gets (and with the billions spent, there are plenty of chances) to shape and dictate what, who, where, even why.
We're handed our G.I. Joes and Barbie's real early, and on it escalates.. The stereotypes become increasingly hard to distinguish from the individuals. Now, of course men and women are different. But which differences are important, which are even "real" and which ones are manufactured(?) To use a term close to home: I feel like we're being "hacked" by a lot of this shit. The glaringly sexist, racist, or otherwise stupid crap, we nowadays identify immediately and don't accept in our societies. But more nuanced 'gender/etc. memes' can quickly become gospel.
We geeks seek knowledge, right? Preconceptions, false or untested premises, bias, etc., obfuscate truth, and makes it harder to find. I get very uncomfortable when I start to suspect I'm getting 'riders' snuck into the reality I experience.
Ok, I'll shut up and go to work now. Thanks for reading my ramblings.