I think the main problem with most geek-child toys, such as consoles and this PDA too, is that the children are mostly just playing on their own when they use such things. This means they miss out on competitiveness, social awareness, companionship (so they don't feel lonely, I mean) - and above all closeness to human beings.
I'm not anti-tech, and to those who would say for example that they don't like their children watching tv all day because it's bad for them, I'd say - watch it with them then. Sit with them, enjoy the thing together, laugh, or even teach stuff about what's being watched if you think that won't be boring and ignored.... If nothing else, it's a chance for the child and the rest of the family to snuggle up together and do something they all enjoy. Or it can be a horrible box that breeds alienation. They are tools...
So anything tech-wise that doesn't allow others to join in (if the child wants: you have to leave them their space to be alone too!) - is going to be limited, and potentially limiting, for your child. With hardware like the PDA, we can adapt and help, but can't change the overall structure. I think with software we can go a lot further, and actually create things which by default encourage this sharing and companionship.
With regard to this, and this generally being an open source related forum, I think there's 2 software areas where children could benefit from the connectivity you get from the internet:
1) a mail reader - same as the article featured, kids draw simple sketches, can send to friends. This is much the same as any mail client, except the interface would be child friendly, and have pictures of the intended recipients, rather than their email addresses...
2) a peer to peer game - some way of exchanging drawings and sounds, or even "objects" made up of drawings and sounds together, all though a first person perspective.
But these are just my views on possible projects. There are already loads of children's games on linux, usually written by parents while the child had the age the game was intended for, and abandoned later. There's no larger scale project that I know of that directly addresses the child's "linux"(or any open source) desktop. I think it's my responsibility as a programmer and parent to do something about this. Can anyone help or inform me about what's currently around in terms of software projects?
So you say: "do you advocate banning non-free software?"
He says "No, and I don't care - as long as there's loads of source code around"
Far as I'm concerned, there's no story there.Stallman is supporting free software, and would like a law requiring source code to be made public, as he puts it, like ingredient lists on foods.Where is your problem, neo? If you have no faith in stallman to be stallman, can you trust yourself to be yourself? There are lots of other people and opinions to support... This is not a big conspiracy to promote some secret agenda to control all software! (more like lots of little conspiracies... oh well, at least it's pluralist!).
I can see from the article on mexico, and from my own experience trying to propose a free software alternative to a non profit organisation, that the problem of adopting a completely new or different operating system is not just about the price of the software. So my question to any experts out there is : how do you propose people get this going in other provinces - from getting the proposal out(I live in barcelona - I bet the local catalan linux translation group would help...), lobbying for it, getting political support, and getting the smarts and the time for people to install it, and from there to the point where everyone is actually happily using it and benefiting from it?
If it can be done, it's probably a great benefit, but I can see how it's just a waste of money if it's not done right, and especially, if it's just not the right time or place to do it...
What we need here, aside from the ben franklin quotes and correct acronyms for anti terrorism act - is a new RFC:
A protocol for quickly getting email/internet content to government agencies:
Should include an open stream of info going direct from the agency to the telco/ISP, which can be opened and closed when both parties agree to a subpoena and to a filter which will allow them both to get that info. It's not fair to get the poor sysadmins to have to do all the dirty work!
To help the agency and telco interact, they should appoint 2 mediators: one within the telco to approve the filter and the subpoena, and the other to ask for it at the agency, and to have open access to all the data at the ISP, but sworn to keep it to themselves until the legal bits are approved...
As for wether it's right or wrong, I think they can look at whatever they want. Provided we can look at them back. Open information!! Purveying Access To Real Information Over The world. (might need a counter-RFC...).
I have just finished a computing degree where I devoted most of my final year to studying the methodologies used in different open source projects... I looked at a lot of the things which are being used to make larger open source projects work, such as python's PEPs, apache's voting structure, the enlargement of the CVS writing and code review heirarchy etc. What other technical or non technical methods are you thinking of implementing (or are already doing) with regard to the gnome project, and the way software is built within ximian, to allow for it's continued growth?
Also, are there any suggestions you could give towards getting smaller projects to bridge the gap and grow to optimal sizes?
1) Get one 2) Get it out of your body (or never have it put in in the first place) 3) Figure out how it works 4) Figure out how to copy, erase sections, change data. 5) write/dev/me interface, scanner, etc. GPL.
Knowledge is for everyone.If this kind of data is kept in the hands of governments and organisations, individuals will lose out tremendously. Like steve mann, we should be counteracting the panopticon structured one-sidedness of modern surveillance and information networks.
Nowadays we should do these things as a means to raise awareness of the dangers and set legal precedents, and in future, we could have a combined coexistent society of watcher and watched all intertwined.
Well technically, manipulating all reality through the power of will alone is a pretty good functional definition of what it means to BE God.
This is all very simple until things get polytheistic:
So what about the lesser gods? Like the little ones who make the bus come in time and protect rivers etc? I thought you could define god as anything that's not actually human ( or !cowboyneal)).
Also, "creative gods" doesn't mean they also own everything they created. So I'm not proprietary humanware and I'm recursively able to create and play too, thank you very much. Regardless of who created me.
Then again, if it was greek gods, I'm sure you'd get loads of bitching about who created who, and some crap about zeus laying claim to all the other guys and creating proprietary viral licensing etc. Next thing you know that other guy would start firing his lighning bolts and chaos ensues. What a bore. That's what you get from gods who sit around together all the time. Bit like big brother the other way round.
Better to have gods who are a little more isolated but more independant and with a little more space to work in. Maybe there's a god of only science, and scientific exploration, enemy but mostly tolerant of the god who protects spiritual hippy dippy shit. Even Linus and open source are seen as god and religion respectively by some. One god. That's monopoly.
This is about the first line of your message, about being human and needing money like us. I don't disagree, but it started me thinking about the issues that come up in the transition of the web from free to fee.
Do I pay money to make someone rich? For a large faceless company's growth? (which in this case might be VA, but I'm trying to be theoretical) Can't we post a financial proposal detailing where the money is going, which we then approve and direct money towards as we see fit?
Sounds open source to me...:)
This is what a lot of charities do - people want them as transparent as possible so they know it's mostly going to the purpose. The regular business world can have nothing to do with a good site surviving or with it's workers and their families having stability and happiness.
But maybe that's the way this kind of thing is going: a semi non profit sector where payment is seen like a semi-voluntary thing for a good cause...
I find that Ricardo Semler, author of Maverick (you can read about him a bit here) has applied already some of these principles in his Brazillian company, Semco.
I think that rather than manifestoes, you need to be the right guy in the right place to make this kind of thing work: in the end, sharing information and power is a natural thing, and closing those things and aggressively protecting them are just animalistic tendencies that can't stand up to their more peaceful alternative.
Proof of this is that Semco survived the terrible 80s inflation in Brazil, simply through the advantage that everyone in the company actually was enthusiastic about the company and was 100% committed to it's survival. You don't need reams of management theory to do this, just a bit of common sense.
How can a society based on freedom protect itself by sacrificing liberties? But how can it protect itself without such sacrifices?
This little quote stuck with me. The wisest answer would have been not to turn that corner. But maybe growth comes from going through this kind of problem too.
I may be a troll in saying this, but I'm one of many chileans who left my home country through a coup organised for a different 11th of september, in part by the pentagon and the CIA, in part by lobbying organisations with lost interests in a left wing chile, and in part by chileans.
What "freedom" were those organisations protecting? To what extent did they go?
I don't have a problem with americans though. I think it's a nice, albeit twisted country, my life has taken me always closer to it, still trying to understand.I'd ask people who really believe in this "freedom" thing to read up a bit on history. Try latin american history for starters. The 70s, the "National Security Doctrine". Don't worry about chile. Try Guatemala and clinton's apology. Try argentina, cuba, panama. Then look up US interests in other parts of the world. Foreign Debt, the international criminal court and Bush's reasons for opposing it(monsanto?).
The US doesn't bother me. You bring together the dreams of so many peoples. This small mindedness, ignorance, is the same as that of the british of the past few centuries, or any "empires" before. We all share those traits. It's just the same problems as ever, but maybe, the US will be the place where we, humanity, will finally solve these problems.
As for sacrificing liberties, try cause and effect, or "do unto others" as the christian view of it is. It's a simple concept. Any power that lives in fear of the outside will not last.
Bottom line is, this kind of thing is up to people. Individuals. Not agencies or organisations. If America is really free, then the agencies and corporations will listen to those like the EFF who apply their knowledge and their wisdom for the good of everyone, and to those who silently support them with votes, ethical choices, expressed opinions, and dialogue.
I happen to be testing some web counter programs, so I was looking for something random to mirror. Hope it's not too offtopic then to post here my mirror of the pics that are running off said pda webserver:
Would the moderator please point out, off list to shomon at softhome.net which other comment is on the topics of unity, social constructionism and utopia already? Or if you don't agree with the opinion, please post a reply, (off list too if you want), but I honestly can't find another article with the same viewpoint, and that's why I posted what I did.
The views in the article are old fashioned to me. They take for granted that there has to be division. I for one, refer to the 2 movements as one: Open Source/Free Software - I don't want to divide them, specifically, because they are 2 movements with similar goals, OS for the commercial/popular side, and FS for the philosophy. I believe they only have a chance of long term existence if we treasure both as separate but meaningful means to change the way we think about software.
We need unity, and if you can stretch your hearts, not only between these 2 factions, also with the much hated microsoft, even though I myself find it hard to think and write such a thing.
If you ask bill gates ( for example, in this recent interview) what motivates him, he says it's because he wants a computer in every home, because he wants things to be simple to use, he wants to be involved. It's a good vision, even though he's distorted in the way he carries it out.
That's why we need unity. How memorable would it be if a person like Gates turned around and said he was wrong, and he was sorry for his limited vision on the impact of his efforts on society, that now he saw how important the method was as well as the aim.
And same for this guy in this article: Seems to me he also is attached too much to the end product than the process. The process is what we will be living through for the rest of our lives. The end product is just a party one evening. Why don't we concentrate on improving the process of getting to our different software utopias? Utopia will always be 5 steps away, that's what utopia is there for in the first place - to move you forward.
For example, computers may well be doing the kind of hard labour that clerks and secretaries used to do, but you can't predict the entire universe: that's rationalism, and that's what the great belivers in Taylor and Ford used to believe in. Better to believe that in a social environment, the best solution comes from your interaction with that environment: Social constructionism puts for the point of view that reality is constructed through our interactions, not through planning it out beforehand. Look at the work of agile methodologists for example: make small changes in increments and you have a chance to see if that's really the best way forward. Utopian visions of societies are flawed already: it might be perfect is everyone was a communist, or if everyone was a capitalist, but the reality is most people are somewhere in between(or nowhere near either), and so is reality!
But we all want to do good and change the way things are, why can't we work together and use dialogue to build our future instead of wasting time fighting between each other?
Yeah, it's frustrating. Especially cos no-one will listen to you, or anyone else advocating peace on bulletin boards. This is mass hysteria, and it's not easy to stop. Like a bad case of road rage that's slowly escalating in your street, and your children are playing out there too, but there's nothing you can do inside the house shouting. Then they pull out guns. An angry crowd forms. You keep shouting "bla bla bla, fighting is wrong". They can't hear you.
You have to go outside. That's real pacifism.
Ale
Re:Military solutions don't do well with civilians
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Peer-to-Peer Cellular
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Yes, I know it's old news, but the arpanet is an example of an expensive military idea, which over time became available first to places with relatively large needs and sums of money, and then to a regular (aol) joes like um, my mother in law.
So would there be a chance of seeing an expensive corporate, short range solution for wireless p2p(or internet/freenet type stuff), within the next 5 years, and then slightly cheaper solutions until finally we all have phone chips in our wearables giving us chat, sms, statistics on population density and xml data on how late our train is?
When I saw the Cybiko site, suggested in the article as a simple embryonic version of this, the short range put me off, but if worked on, could provide maybe a secure (based on freenet?) information system for say, communicating between offices or from home, to do 24 hour support etc. Imagine if it supported ssh: wouldn't be good for hardcore stuff, but you could read a logfile from your bus, and advise on a solution.
Ok, excuse my little sysadmin dreams... 2008: still grumpy but stuck in transport with cool tech instead of stuck in a cubicle with the lusers themselves.:)
I'm sorry to hear about the misrepresentation. I'm sure as well that they will do better next time. It's very important that your reaction to this mistake wasn't anger, which is what I'd have expected of a lot of people. Anyway, here's my question:
To what point would you go with PGP? For example, if it were outlawed, or you considered your life to be threatened through some government's outlawing of it, would you stop working with it, or supporting strong crypto? And if you would actually "go underground" if you sincerely believed that it would help people's freedom, do you think it would matter?
What I mean is... do you think the internet(email, freenet, www, etc) could still be seen as a place where people can somehow communicate and share information, even under a regime that tried hard to stop that information being shared?
I am sick to death of hearing people say violence breeds violence.
No, it's not just that, violence-breeds-violence is just a special case of a generic law of cause and effect that underlies everything we do.
Anything you do, any cause you make in your life will "breed" a response from your life. So, if you take actions that make certain causes, such as being greedy and buying a big lunch (or living a greedy life) - in this case, by being violent, and killing people, you will get a direct effect in response. So a greedy person might have the effect of being hungry, or being fat, and a violent person might have the effect of having violence done to them, or of being killed.
I'm not saying wether the law of cause and effect is true or not, but when people talk about violence breeding violence, this is what it's based on. It's also what buddhism is based on, and perhaps a few other (mostly modern) religious currents too.
In this sense, it's a matter of faith, because the law doesn't imply that there's a government or god that come and impose an effect of any action on you, but that this is simply something we manifest naturally ourselves, and inherent in life in general.
Buddhism teaches that we can overcome our impulses for violence, and potentially avoid ever having wars again, by all people (not necessarily just buddhists) taking action that prevents there being wars again. In another post you spoke of organisations fostering hatred. In reality, we can break this powerful stronghold of hatred by changing the organisational culture, but this has to happen with each person inside the organisation. An example might be making sure that peace treaties (eg: the versailles treaty) are truly satisfactory to both sides of any truce. In the versailles treaty for example, it is said that the strong measures used to keep Germany from starting other wars, were the precise reasons for hitler acquiring such a strong following for world war II. On the other hand, it's said that the resolutions after the second world war were much more fair on countries (perhaps apart from the creation of the state of israel, which has been seen as the start of the current middle-east problems), which was the reason for lasting peace between western countries in the second half of the twentieth century.
I'm interested to see someone who does not understand "violence breeds violence" as a fact of life: please mail me if you want to talk further.
Well, the solution seems simple to me: if PK meaning instant chao seems the problem, there needs to be some kind of way of turning this into a more hazy thing, rather than instant.
Either that game logic has to be changed, so that, for example there's a random chance of not going chao, which decreases the more people you kill, or some kind of law system/moderation:
You could do time as a moderator (like in slashdot for example), where you are logged with player kills and can come in and assign "chao probability" points to people depending on what you've seen happening.
This kind of stuff wouldn't kill the anger aspects that are probably the attractive part to some people: it would still be socially imperfect, but I'm amazed that no-one amongst the game's producers has already implemented something like that. If they don't it's something that needs to be done in a "soft" way: ie, through players getting together and making lists of people who are not as chao as they seem.
I think there are ethical implications when you make something. Either you assume responsibility, or you empower others to do the same. Otherwise you (creators AND players in this case) are not being creative but destructive.
I would boycott this company for not wanting to confront this problem. But then again, this article is all I've read, so they may well already be confronting it.
Can new, original pieces be added to this? What license will they need? Is the street performer's protocol up to scratch?
I'd think it should be easy to do a system (buzzword alert!) , like with p2p, where through UDP you start a connection that streams a track over the internet that others can join in on, or sample or record, resulting in a tree, which at the end of it's branches is low quality, and phased out from the original broadcast by network lag + processing time, and which has as a parent a soloist musician, or a recording with the best quality. Wouldn't be a good way to get good quality jamming material, but would be a feasible way of doing community stuff with music.
So instead of going to the basement and jamming alone after a hard day, you could do it over the internet, with the chance that other people could share what you were doing.
Then you could put resulting public domain (equivalent to GPLed tracks) music on this archive, and anyone could download it. Face it, not everyone now needs sheet music: some need samples too.
Anyway, Great, wonderful, but no license. WHat license do you use for something like this???
I'd also like to add that in some cases you'll only want open source tools on the server side. In this way, you don't need to worry about training, since operators will be using any client software they want, but the database will be open source, as would whatever other backend tools they might need (office network, web server, email, etc).
I'd suggest for example, getting the nice hardware and maybe some copies of windows from microsoft, but saving the concerns of tying yourself to a proprietary company's products, by using open source, standards compliant software for the back end of the office.
The result may be an investment rather than a straight success. If you back the use of open source in your application area, you end up debugging it: you're helping that software to mature.
I'd add that there's not much in the way of programming tools that directly address a charity's area (gnucash?), but there's only a few things that would stop you from starting a project right now:
* open source has traditionally been made by and for programmers: you might need a more traditional form of requirements elicitation.
* Documentation may not be good enough for generic IT staff, or volunteer staff. Hopefully this will improve as OSS is more widely adopted outside the hacker community.
* user interfaces may be less user friendly, but you can solve this by separating client from server.
So I'd encourage charities to adopt open source for all their backend software, and to actively initiate projects to create the software they need.
Ale - http://barnton.gcal.ac.uk/
Re:great program, but it isn't keeping up
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Gimp 1.2.0 Released
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Sorry but I can't agree with that, at least, in the following sense:
Without wanting to start flame wars on this, I's like to give my gentlemanly opinion on why free software isn't going anywhere these days, but open source is:
Open source is just a name, in many ways just a buzzword for the people with money, and in a lot of ways, it's the same thing as free software.
I can understand the purity needed at this crucial time when the concept of what has long been seen as a service can now be provided for free without any corporates butting in and stealing it all. In a way, that's what sparks off complaints when one of these words or definitions is used rather than another.
In a way, this is also how the commercialisation of GPLed software has damaged the ideal, so that top KDE developers for example can say that they they do this because they know there is money behind it in the end. Which is fine, but where do you draw the line? That's where purity is important.
And I admire people like Bruce perens, like great leaders, trying to keep this thing pure until it's known well enough to be considered established. And maybe it'll happen.
But it's that old myth that gets me, that is' made for the coders, by the coders, so anyone else can go and buy something instead. No, I'm sorry, I can't agree with that.
I wonder if half of the people reading this see how important this work is? If open source commercialises, fine, if it's making this stuff known. THere are many, many causes for gpl software. Least of which projects like GNUMED (gnumed.sourceforge.net) or any others that try to make this freedom cross the digital divide. It's crucial that the people who are not as able as the rest can benefit from this.
Most people won't see this as an incredibly just cause, and it may become as complicated and sour as most other causes, but it's only as powerful as we make it. Even bill gates ahs given up on helping people through technology, and for all his faults, I believe him. Most people are beyond this kind of help, but this doesn't have to be the way.
If everyone knew how important it is to have software that is free, and if that softwear were put to good use, we could really change this world around.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I used a casual surfer's simple logic to tell wether or not to install the advanced stuff or not when I tried this 2 days ago:
Google's a cool company. It has a linux based search, doesn't have big ads on it, it's fast, it does it's job well. It seems to do this with python too (although the pages doing the installation had a.php extension) IIRC. Most importantly, nothing I know about google tells me it's going to misuse my data.
So I installed the advanced stuff.
On the other hand, two surfings later I mistyped a URL in ie (I don't usually use this browser) and it went off to msn.com or something similar, presumably to log loads of stuff to some unknown place, and from there figure out where I was probably trying to get to.
Now I don't like microsoft very much. So I stopped surfing and went back to doing my visual c++ coursework!
So regardless of what the advanced options actually reveal to google.com about me, clickwrapping or not, I would more readily reveal them to a company I have more reason to trust.
But if anyone ever tells me that google is no longer to be trusted (and backs this info up accordingly) I'll think twice.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the main problem with most geek-child toys, such as consoles and this PDA too, is that the children are mostly just playing on their own when they use such things. This means they miss out on competitiveness, social awareness, companionship (so they don't feel lonely, I mean) - and above all closeness to human beings.
I'm not anti-tech, and to those who would say for example that they don't like their children watching tv all day because it's bad for them, I'd say - watch it with them then. Sit with them, enjoy the thing together, laugh, or even teach stuff about what's being watched if you think that won't be boring and ignored.... If nothing else, it's a chance for the child and the rest of the family to snuggle up together and do something they all enjoy. Or it can be a horrible box that breeds alienation. They are tools...
So anything tech-wise that doesn't allow others to join in (if the child wants: you have to leave them their space to be alone too!) - is going to be limited, and potentially limiting, for your child. With hardware like the PDA, we can adapt and help, but can't change the overall structure. I think with software we can go a lot further, and actually create things which by default encourage this sharing and companionship.
With regard to this, and this generally being an open source related forum, I think there's 2 software areas where children could benefit from the connectivity you get from the internet:
1) a mail reader - same as the article featured, kids draw simple sketches, can send to friends. This is much the same as any mail client, except the interface would be child friendly, and have pictures of the intended recipients, rather than their email addresses...
2) a peer to peer game - some way of exchanging drawings and sounds, or even "objects" made up of drawings and sounds together, all though a first person perspective.
But these are just my views on possible projects. There are already loads of children's games on linux, usually written by parents while the child had the age the game was intended for, and abandoned later. There's no larger scale project that I know of that directly addresses the child's "linux"(or any open source) desktop. I think it's my responsibility as a programmer and parent to do something about this. Can anyone help or inform me about what's currently around in terms of software projects?
Ale
Can anyone give a quick rundown of the most notable points in X's 10 year history? Or is there a URL that does that?
Thanks
Ale
Giving up some karma here, but...
So you say: "do you advocate banning non-free software?"
He says "No, and I don't care - as long as there's loads of source code around"
Far as I'm concerned, there's no story there.Stallman is supporting free software, and would like a law requiring source code to be made public, as he puts it, like ingredient lists on foods.Where is your problem, neo? If you have no faith in stallman to be stallman, can you trust yourself to be yourself? There are lots of other people and opinions to support... This is not a big conspiracy to promote some secret agenda to control all software! (more like lots of little conspiracies... oh well, at least it's pluralist!).
Ale
Hi,
I can see from the article on mexico, and from my own experience trying to propose a free software alternative to a non profit organisation, that the problem of adopting a completely new or different operating system is not just about the price of the software. So my question to any experts out there is : how do you propose people get this going in other provinces - from getting the proposal out(I live in barcelona - I bet the local catalan linux translation group would help...), lobbying for it, getting political support, and getting the smarts and the time for people to install it, and from there to the point where everyone is actually happily using it and benefiting from it?
If it can be done, it's probably a great benefit, but I can see how it's just a waste of money if it's not done right, and especially, if it's just not the right time or place to do it...
Ale
What we need here, aside from the ben franklin quotes and correct acronyms for anti terrorism act - is a new RFC:
A protocol for quickly getting email/internet content to government agencies:
Should include an open stream of info going direct from the agency to the telco/ISP, which can be opened and closed when both parties agree to a subpoena and to a filter which will allow them both to get that info. It's not fair to get the poor sysadmins to have to do all the dirty work!
To help the agency and telco interact, they should appoint 2 mediators: one within the telco to approve the filter and the subpoena, and the other to ask for it at the agency, and to have open access to all the data at the ISP, but sworn to keep it to themselves until the legal bits are approved...
As for wether it's right or wrong, I think they can look at whatever they want. Provided we can look at them back. Open information!! Purveying Access To Real Information Over The world. (might need a counter-RFC...).
Ale
I have just finished a computing degree where I devoted most of my final year to studying the methodologies used in different open source projects... I looked at a lot of the things which are being used to make larger open source projects work, such as python's PEPs, apache's voting structure, the enlargement of the CVS writing and code review heirarchy etc. What other technical or non technical methods are you thinking of implementing (or are already doing) with regard to the gnome project, and the way software is built within ximian, to allow for it's continued growth?
Also, are there any suggestions you could give towards getting smaller projects to bridge the gap and grow to optimal sizes?
Thanks
Ale
1) Get one /dev/me interface, scanner, etc. GPL.
2) Get it out of your body (or never have it put in in the first place)
3) Figure out how it works
4) Figure out how to copy, erase sections, change data.
5) write
Knowledge is for everyone.If this kind of data is kept in the hands of governments and organisations, individuals will lose out tremendously. Like steve mann, we should be counteracting the panopticon structured one-sidedness of modern surveillance and information networks.
Nowadays we should do these things as a means to raise awareness of the dangers and set legal precedents, and in future, we could have a combined coexistent society of watcher and watched all intertwined.
Well technically, manipulating all reality through the power of will alone is a pretty good functional definition of what it means to BE God.
This is all very simple until things get polytheistic:
So what about the lesser gods? Like the little ones who make the bus come in time and protect rivers etc? I thought you could define god as anything that's not actually human ( or !cowboyneal)).
Also, "creative gods" doesn't mean they also own everything they created. So I'm not proprietary humanware and I'm recursively able to create and play too, thank you very much. Regardless of who created me.
Then again, if it was greek gods, I'm sure you'd get loads of bitching about who created who, and some crap about zeus laying claim to all the other guys and creating proprietary viral licensing etc. Next thing you know that other guy would start firing his lighning bolts and chaos ensues. What a bore. That's what you get from gods who sit around together all the time. Bit like big brother the other way round.
Better to have gods who are a little more isolated but more independant and with a little more space to work in. Maybe there's a god of only science, and scientific exploration, enemy but mostly tolerant of the god who protects spiritual hippy dippy shit. Even Linus and open source are seen as god and religion respectively by some. One god. That's monopoly.
Ale
This is about the first line of your message, about being human and needing money like us. I don't disagree, but it started me thinking about the issues that come up in the transition of the web from free to fee.
:)
Do I pay money to make someone rich? For a large faceless company's growth? (which in this case might be VA, but I'm trying to be theoretical) Can't we post a financial proposal detailing where the money is going, which we then approve and direct money towards as we see fit?
Sounds open source to me...
This is what a lot of charities do - people want them as transparent as possible so they know it's mostly going to the purpose. The regular business world can have nothing to do with a good site surviving or with it's workers and their families having stability and happiness.
But maybe that's the way this kind of thing is going: a semi non profit sector where payment is seen like a semi-voluntary thing for a good cause...
Ale
I find that Ricardo Semler, author of Maverick (you can read about him a bit here) has applied already some of these principles in his Brazillian company, Semco.
I think that rather than manifestoes, you need to be the right guy in the right place to make this kind of thing work: in the end, sharing information and power is a natural thing, and closing those things and aggressively protecting them are just animalistic tendencies that can't stand up to their more peaceful alternative.
Proof of this is that Semco survived the terrible 80s inflation in Brazil, simply through the advantage that everyone in the company actually was enthusiastic about the company and was 100% committed to it's survival. You don't need reams of management theory to do this, just a bit of common sense.
Ale
This little quote stuck with me. The wisest answer would have been not to turn that corner. But maybe growth comes from going through this kind of problem too.
I may be a troll in saying this, but I'm one of many chileans who left my home country through a coup organised for a different 11th of september, in part by the pentagon and the CIA, in part by lobbying organisations with lost interests in a left wing chile, and in part by chileans.
What "freedom" were those organisations protecting? To what extent did they go?
I don't have a problem with americans though. I think it's a nice, albeit twisted country, my life has taken me always closer to it, still trying to understand.I'd ask people who really believe in this "freedom" thing to read up a bit on history. Try latin american history for starters. The 70s, the "National Security Doctrine". Don't worry about chile. Try Guatemala and clinton's apology. Try argentina, cuba, panama. Then look up US interests in other parts of the world. Foreign Debt, the international criminal court and Bush's reasons for opposing it(monsanto?).
The US doesn't bother me. You bring together the dreams of so many peoples. This small mindedness, ignorance, is the same as that of the british of the past few centuries, or any "empires" before. We all share those traits. It's just the same problems as ever, but maybe, the US will be the place where we, humanity, will finally solve these problems.
As for sacrificing liberties, try cause and effect, or "do unto others" as the christian view of it is. It's a simple concept. Any power that lives in fear of the outside will not last.
Bottom line is, this kind of thing is up to people. Individuals. Not agencies or organisations. If America is really free, then the agencies and corporations will listen to those like the EFF who apply their knowledge and their wisdom for the good of everyone, and to those who silently support them with votes, ethical choices, expressed opinions, and dialogue.
I happen to be testing some web counter programs, so I was looking for something random to mirror. Hope it's not too offtopic then to post here my mirror of the pics that are running off said pda webserver:
Here you go
Getting them as we "speak" so please allow time.
Ale
Would the moderator please point out, off list to shomon at softhome.net which other comment is on the topics of unity, social constructionism and utopia already? Or if you don't agree with the opinion, please post a reply, (off list too if you want), but I honestly can't find another article with the same viewpoint, and that's why I posted what I did.
Ale
The views in the article are old fashioned to me. They take for granted that there has to be division. I for one, refer to the 2 movements as one: Open Source/Free Software - I don't want to divide them, specifically, because they are 2 movements with similar goals, OS for the commercial/popular side, and FS for the philosophy. I believe they only have a chance of long term existence if we treasure both as separate but meaningful means to change the way we think about software.
We need unity, and if you can stretch your hearts, not only between these 2 factions, also with the much hated microsoft, even though I myself find it hard to think and write such a thing.
If you ask bill gates ( for example, in this recent interview) what motivates him, he says it's because he wants a computer in every home, because he wants things to be simple to use, he wants to be involved. It's a good vision, even though he's distorted in the way he carries it out.
That's why we need unity. How memorable would it be if a person like Gates turned around and said he was wrong, and he was sorry for his limited vision on the impact of his efforts on society, that now he saw how important the method was as well as the aim.
And same for this guy in this article: Seems to me he also is attached too much to the end product than the process. The process is what we will be living through for the rest of our lives. The end product is just a party one evening. Why don't we concentrate on improving the process of getting to our different software utopias? Utopia will always be 5 steps away, that's what utopia is there for in the first place - to move you forward.
For example, computers may well be doing the kind of hard labour that clerks and secretaries used to do, but you can't predict the entire universe: that's rationalism, and that's what the great belivers in Taylor and Ford used to believe in. Better to believe that in a social environment, the best solution comes from your interaction with that environment: Social constructionism puts for the point of view that reality is constructed through our interactions, not through planning it out beforehand. Look at the work of agile methodologists for example: make small changes in increments and you have a chance to see if that's really the best way forward. Utopian visions of societies are flawed already: it might be perfect is everyone was a communist, or if everyone was a capitalist, but the reality is most people are somewhere in between(or nowhere near either), and so is reality!
But we all want to do good and change the way things are, why can't we work together and use dialogue to build our future instead of wasting time fighting between each other?
http://www.apple.com/trailers/
For you lazy people.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/
/forbidden for some reason...
You can't go direct to
Yeah, it's frustrating. Especially cos no-one will listen to you, or anyone else advocating peace on bulletin boards. This is mass hysteria, and it's not easy to stop. Like a bad case of road rage that's slowly escalating in your street, and your children are playing out there too, but there's nothing you can do inside the house shouting. Then they pull out guns. An angry crowd forms. You keep shouting "bla bla bla, fighting is wrong". They can't hear you.
You have to go outside. That's real pacifism.
Ale
Yes, I know it's old news, but the arpanet is an example of an expensive military idea, which over time became available first to places with relatively large needs and sums of money, and then to a regular (aol) joes like um, my mother in law.
:)
So would there be a chance of seeing an expensive corporate, short range solution for wireless p2p(or internet/freenet type stuff), within the next 5 years, and then slightly cheaper solutions until finally we all have phone chips in our wearables giving us chat, sms, statistics on population density and xml data on how late our train is?
When I saw the Cybiko site, suggested in the article as a simple embryonic version of this, the short range put me off, but if worked on, could provide maybe a secure (based on freenet?) information system for say, communicating between offices or from home, to do 24 hour support etc. Imagine if it supported ssh: wouldn't be good for hardcore stuff, but you could read a logfile from your bus, and advise on a solution.
Ok, excuse my little sysadmin dreams... 2008: still grumpy but stuck in transport with cool tech instead of stuck in a cubicle with the lusers themselves.
Ale
I'm sorry to hear about the misrepresentation. I'm sure as well that they will do better next time. It's very important that your reaction to this mistake wasn't anger, which is what I'd have expected of a lot of people. Anyway, here's my question:
To what point would you go with PGP? For example, if it were outlawed, or you considered your life to be threatened through some government's outlawing of it, would you stop working with it, or supporting strong crypto? And if you would actually "go underground" if you sincerely believed that it would help people's freedom, do you think it would matter?
What I mean is... do you think the internet(email, freenet, www, etc) could still be seen as a place where people can somehow communicate and share information, even under a regime that tried hard to stop that information being shared?
I am sick to death of hearing people say violence breeds violence.
No, it's not just that, violence-breeds-violence is just a special case of a generic law of cause and effect that underlies everything we do.
Anything you do, any cause you make in your life will "breed" a response from your life. So, if you take actions that make certain causes, such as being greedy and buying a big lunch (or living a greedy life) - in this case, by being violent, and killing people, you will get a direct effect in response. So a greedy person might have the effect of being hungry, or being fat, and a violent person might have the effect of having violence done to them, or of being killed.
I'm not saying wether the law of cause and effect is true or not, but when people talk about violence breeding violence, this is what it's based on. It's also what buddhism is based on, and perhaps a few other (mostly modern) religious currents too.
In this sense, it's a matter of faith, because the law doesn't imply that there's a government or god that come and impose an effect of any action on you, but that this is simply something we manifest naturally ourselves, and inherent in life in general.
Buddhism teaches that we can overcome our impulses for violence, and potentially avoid ever having wars again, by all people (not necessarily just buddhists) taking action that prevents there being wars again. In another post you spoke of organisations fostering hatred. In reality, we can break this powerful stronghold of hatred by changing the organisational culture, but this has to happen with each person inside the organisation. An example might be making sure that peace treaties (eg: the versailles treaty) are truly satisfactory to both sides of any truce. In the versailles treaty for example, it is said that the strong measures used to keep Germany from starting other wars, were the precise reasons for hitler acquiring such a strong following for world war II. On the other hand, it's said that the resolutions after the second world war were much more fair on countries (perhaps apart from the creation of the state of israel, which has been seen as the start of the current middle-east problems), which was the reason for lasting peace between western countries in the second half of the twentieth century.
I'm interested to see someone who does not understand "violence breeds violence" as a fact of life: please mail me if you want to talk further.
Ale
Well, the solution seems simple to me: if PK meaning instant chao seems the problem, there needs to be some kind of way of turning this into a more hazy thing, rather than instant.
Either that game logic has to be changed, so that, for example there's a random chance of not going chao, which decreases the more people you kill, or some kind of law system/moderation:
You could do time as a moderator (like in slashdot for example), where you are logged with player kills and can come in and assign "chao probability" points to people depending on what you've seen happening.
This kind of stuff wouldn't kill the anger aspects that are probably the attractive part to some people: it would still be socially imperfect, but I'm amazed that no-one amongst the game's producers has already implemented something like that. If they don't it's something that needs to be done in a "soft" way: ie, through players getting together and making lists of people who are not as chao as they seem.
I think there are ethical implications when you make something. Either you assume responsibility, or you empower others to do the same. Otherwise you (creators AND players in this case) are not being creative but destructive.
I would boycott this company for not wanting to confront this problem. But then again, this article is all I've read, so they may well already be confronting it.
Ale
Few questions on this:
Can new, original pieces be added to this? What license will they need? Is the street performer's protocol up to scratch?
I'd think it should be easy to do a system (buzzword alert!) , like with p2p, where through UDP you start a connection that streams a track over the internet that others can join in on, or sample or record, resulting in a tree, which at the end of it's branches is low quality, and phased out from the original broadcast by network lag + processing time, and which has as a parent a soloist musician, or a recording with the best quality. Wouldn't be a good way to get good quality jamming material, but would be a feasible way of doing community stuff with music.
So instead of going to the basement and jamming alone after a hard day, you could do it over the internet, with the chance that other people could share what you were doing.
Then you could put resulting public domain (equivalent to GPLed tracks) music on this archive, and anyone could download it. Face it, not everyone now needs sheet music: some need samples too.
Anyway, Great, wonderful, but no license. WHat license do you use for something like this???
I'd also like to add that in some cases you'll only want open source tools on the server side. In this way, you don't need to worry about training, since operators will be using any client software they want, but the database will be open source, as would whatever other backend tools they might need (office network, web server, email, etc).
I'd suggest for example, getting the nice hardware and maybe some copies of windows from microsoft, but saving the concerns of tying yourself to a proprietary company's products, by using open source, standards compliant software for the back end of the office.
The result may be an investment rather than a straight success. If you back the use of open source in your application area, you end up debugging it: you're helping that software to mature.
I'd add that there's not much in the way of programming tools that directly address a charity's area (gnucash?), but there's only a few things that would stop you from starting a project right now:
* open source has traditionally been made by and for programmers: you might need a more traditional form of requirements elicitation.
* Documentation may not be good enough for generic IT staff, or volunteer staff. Hopefully this will improve as OSS is more widely adopted outside the hacker community.
* user interfaces may be less user friendly, but you can solve this by separating client from server.
So I'd encourage charities to adopt open source for all their backend software, and to actively initiate projects to create the software they need.
Ale - http://barnton.gcal.ac.uk/
Sorry but I can't agree with that, at least, in the following sense:
Without wanting to start flame wars on this, I's like to give my gentlemanly opinion on why free software isn't going anywhere these days, but open source is:
Open source is just a name, in many ways just a buzzword for the people with money, and in a lot of ways, it's the same thing as free software.
I can understand the purity needed at this crucial time when the concept of what has long been seen as a service can now be provided for free without any corporates butting in and stealing it all. In a way, that's what sparks off complaints when one of these words or definitions is used rather than another.
In a way, this is also how the commercialisation of GPLed software has damaged the ideal, so that top KDE developers for example can say that they they do this because they know there is money behind it in the end. Which is fine, but where do you draw the line? That's where purity is important.
And I admire people like Bruce perens, like great leaders, trying to keep this thing pure until it's known well enough to be considered established. And maybe it'll happen.
But it's that old myth that gets me, that is' made for the coders, by the coders, so anyone else can go and buy something instead. No, I'm sorry, I can't agree with that.
I wonder if half of the people reading this see how important this work is? If open source commercialises, fine, if it's making this stuff known. THere are many, many causes for gpl software. Least of which projects like GNUMED (gnumed.sourceforge.net) or any others that try to make this freedom cross the digital divide. It's crucial that the people who are not as able as the rest can benefit from this.
Most people won't see this as an incredibly just cause, and it may become as complicated and sour as most other causes, but it's only as powerful as we make it. Even bill gates ahs given up on helping people through technology, and for all his faults, I believe him. Most people are beyond this kind of help, but this doesn't have to be the way.
If everyone knew how important it is to have software that is free, and if that softwear were put to good use, we could really change this world around.
Ok. Hmmm.. Have a good xmas.
Ale
I don't know about anyone else here, but I used a casual surfer's simple logic to tell wether or not to install the advanced stuff or not when I tried this 2 days ago:
.php extension) IIRC. Most importantly, nothing I know about google tells me it's going to misuse my data.
Google's a cool company. It has a linux based search, doesn't have big ads on it, it's fast, it does it's job well. It seems to do this with python too (although the pages doing the installation had a
So I installed the advanced stuff.
On the other hand, two surfings later I mistyped a URL in ie (I don't usually use this browser) and it went off to msn.com or something similar, presumably to log loads of stuff to some unknown place, and from there figure out where I was probably trying to get to.
Now I don't like microsoft very much. So I stopped surfing and went back to doing my visual c++ coursework!
So regardless of what the advanced options actually reveal to google.com about me, clickwrapping or not, I would more readily reveal them to a company I have more reason to trust.
But if anyone ever tells me that google is no longer to be trusted (and backs this info up accordingly) I'll think twice.