"Still, the tremendously increased investment that can be conjured up by the profit motive is nothing to be sneezed at."
What tremendously increased investment are you referring to? The tremendously increased fees that content providers will have to pay to already bloated telcos for the 'privilege' of continuing to do business? The trememdously increased revenues that the telcos receive for sitting on their fat asses? Others have stated already that the only incentive present in this scenario is for them to reduce performance for customers of certain clients until the clients agree to their extortion. This is a shakedown, pure and simple.
F*ck balance. There are two sides to this argument all right, but they are Right and Wrong. Extortion has always been wrong and always will be.
I value nothing more than being the master of my own destiny - which should explain why I live in the South Pacific and am more or less retired from corporate life at 42. Here, in a nutshell is the modus vivendi I've developed:
Any organisation beyond a certain size inevitably becomes pathological in its behaviour. It sometimes reverts to normalcy for periods of time, but it will swing, and you will swing with it. Avoid long term commercial commitments to any large organisation. Working with groups or individuals within them for finite terms is fine, and sometimes really enjoyable, though.
Find a niche where you can work with a number of trusted individuals (perhaps as a consultant or contractor) and either work for yourself or work in a small company of less than 50 staff. The material benefits won't be as easily accessible, but your life will be infinitely more enjoyable, because you'll actually have some control over it.
'I feel the need to nitpick the title: "UK Music Fans Can Copy Own Tracks". This would imply that other music fans, or UK fans previously, could not copy their own tracks. Maybe they couldn't figure out how to use the cd burner? A correct title would be: "UK Music Fans Allowed To Copy Own Tracks".'
Yeah, and if my friends are any example, it's an important difference. They may be allowed to copy their own tracks, but they're still too stupid to know how. I always end up doing it for them.
"Last month a service center in new mexico was broken into as part of the larger incident. This was a result of an attack using zero-day that at the moment is still unpatchable (no patch exists)."
What are you talking about? If there's no readily available patch, then you inspect the source and assign someone to patch the flaw. Sheesh!
And what was sensitive information doing sitting on a system which is breakable via a single exploit?
"It's sickening to see a country that can supposedly defend itself and the world, can't even secure their own networks."
Sickening, I agree, but I hope it doesn't come as a surprise. The all-too-common blindness that states, 'I don't care how it works; just make it work.' is finally exacting its toll. The stupid false alternative that assumes any criticism is an attack has made it downright dangerous for anyone to disagree, and now the price of conflating 'right' with 'agrees with me' is beginning to be felt.
It is sickening, but it's been a long time coming for anyone with eyes to see it.
Well maybe you should have started reading the paragraph at the top of the article that explains its audience and purpose. Here, I'll save you the effort of clicking the back button:
"*Disclaimer this article was written for Linux enthusiasts. If you are coming from the Windows side and the command line seems intimidating you can accomplish all of the updates and installs from Synaptic or Adept package manager applications. Both have nice graphics and require nothing more than checking the box next to the program you want to install and then selecting the install button and you are set to go. I prefer the command line because it is faster."
"If this is supposed to be "Linux For The Masses" and it (1) can't recognize common commodity video cards correctly, and (2) requires you to hand-edit a config file to correct the situation..."
Linux is perfectly capable of recognising commodity video cards. The issue is not one of recognition, but support. Ubuntu's baseline support (i.e. drivers that ship with the OS) is a significant multiple of that available in Windows. But, just as with any operating system, not all hardware is supported equally. Driver development takes time in Linux because certain corporations have yet to dig their heads out of their borked marketing models and so driver developers have to go through a time-consuming reverse-engineering process to make them work. Linux also features a perfectly decent graphical fallback mode, which meant that the author was able to use X just fine even though the particular driver that he wanted was flaky. Windows does that, but not nearly as gracefully.
Linux does not require that you hand edit a file. The author chose to hand edit the file because that's the way he prefers. Wake me up when Windows allows me to do things exactly the way I like.
Changing video drivers is extremely simple in Ubuntu. I should know, because I boot Ubuntu from my external USB disk on about 6 different machines every week. That, incidentally, is something that you cannot even dream of doing on Windows.
"There's a fault with a section of the Southern Cross data cable that connects Australia to the US. This means it currently has limited access. Suddenly, my ISP lost *all* international connectivity [....] It seems that their wholesale traffic/customers aren't as important as its own."
It's worse than that. Here in the South Pacific country of Vanuatu, Internet services have been reduced to a crawl. They're second-rate at the best of times, but now we're in a situation where if there were a serious problem - earthquake, volcano, unrest - lives might be lost as a result of some corporation's bottom line. I'm not talking about theoretical possibilities here, either. A small tsunami reached our shores following this month's Tonga earthquake, the capital of our nearest neighbour country was in flames just weeks ago, and there are two volcanoes smoking heavily within two hundred miles of me.
Frankly, I think that putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at the mercy of 'market forces' is sheer folly.
'In a 2002 letter to Microsoft, Peruvian Congressman Edgar David Villanueva Núñez noted that, "Relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains 'errors' or 'bugs' (in programmers' slang). But it is also well-known that the bugs in free software are fewer." Yet, ask computer security experts and they'll tell you that's not necessarily true. Software, with its millions of lines of code, is so complicated that experts don't know for sure that open source has fewer bugs, nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure.'
This statement is true, as far as it goes. But it ignores something that's far more important than the opinion of a computer scientist: empirical evidence. No matter how you measure it, FOSS software is successfully exploited far less often than proprietary software. In many cases, the differences are striking. There are, for example, effectively no Linux viruses in the wild.
Even in cases where FOSS is the dominant application (like the Apache web server, for example) the number of successful attacks are so much lower that there is no effective competition from the alternatives.
So the key here is not whether software is provably secure (i.e. auditable) but that it's effectively secure. The difference here is subtle, especially to those who don't understand software. It's something crucially important, however.
There's another issue here that's at the core of the Free Software philosophy: process. The FOSS software development process is based entirely delivering quality software. In fact, development cycles and processes often sacrifice convenience for IT folks in favour of solid code. Proprietary software is almost always driven by business priorities which sometimes - but not always - put a low priority on software quality.
Another quotation from the article:
'There are really two reasons that it is very difficult to know whether software is secure [....] The first reason is that even the simplest software program consists of hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, and potentially all of these have to be correct, or the system may have security vulnerabilities. The second reason is that we have no technology for systematically checking that the parts are correct and fit together in a way that ensures security."'
Both of these points (that even simple software is hopelessly complex, and that there is no systematic way to test intereactions between software) are inaccurate. It's like saying that human bodies are composed of billions of cells, so we'll never be able to measure a person's health.
Unix-inspired systems usually use a 'toolkit' approach, in which a number of small, special-purpose tools are brought together to perform complex tasks. The result is that each individual part is very well understood and performs its task(s) in a clear fashion. So, while it may be true that it's hard to document every possible interaction between software elememts, that's not nearly the problem the writer makes it out to be.
The article concludes:
'Software becomes more interesting--indeed, rhetoric-worthy--when it promises a better future. Open source may well deliver that promise, but computer science is too young a discipline, and there is too much we do not yet know about software to be so sure.'
This is a silly argument, especially in an article that claims to compare two alternative approaches to software. Computer science is not a young discipline, even if you compare it to physics and mathematics. The fundamentals of computing were understood even before we had computers to test with. The assertion that we just don't know enough is just plain wrong-headed.
Furthermore, even if it is true that we don't know enough, shouldn't that be an argument in favour of open source, where at least nothing is deliberately hidden?
"I have to agree. There a large number of great FOSS projects, but I can't say I see that many innovative ones."
Er... you can't be serious. You know that thing called the World Wide Web, the massively revolutionary technological change that has proven to be the way that most people interact with the Internet? Almost entirely FOSS. And how about the really unique and original permutations that allowed for the creation of online communities, like wikis and blogs? All originated as FOSS projects.
And then there's email, IRC and Jabber. Oh, and Perl, which was highly innovative when it arrived. And Firefox's XUL UI, which allows quick, easy and open development of UI elements.
And that's just innovation on features. When you get down to technical innovation (i.e. taking new approaches to old problems), the list gets too long for any individual to compile.
"The OSS software Linspire is using (and sharing) was released by its owners with the understanding that others would use it for both commercial and non-commercial uses. And they were fine with that.... If [Michael Robertson] wants to share his software with the world while keeping parts proprietary, that's his business."
Careful, you're conflating two logically unrelated points there. Proprietary and Commerical are not the same thing.
People who are in perfect agreement with the commercial sale of software might easily be violently opposed to proprietary (i.e. closed source) software. There's absolutely no inconsistency there. It's just like some people are perfectly fine with commercial software, and with proprietary software too, but hate EULAs.
"All I ask is that Linspire doesn't lay any Intellectual Property traps for unsuspecting souls."
There are some who argue that proprietary software necessarily leads to Intellectual Property [sic] traps. Whether they're intentional or not is not always clear. That's why you'll reliably find people who will forcefully criticise efforts to mix software that they view as encumbered and that which they consider to be Free.
"So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must[....]"
To which you replied:
"Real people work at Microsoft. I'm proud to say that I am one of them."
Good for you. I'm glad you take pride in your work. But you've completely misconstrued the purpose of that statement. I'm not arguing that corporations are soulless or inhuman. I'm actually stating the opposite: that it is wrong to defend the image of a corporation as an impersonal and amoral entity. Many people do so, using the old 'business is business' cliche, which completely ignores an organisation's role in the larger community and refuses to weigh the impact of its decisions. I personally feel that both of these are part of the social contract which should extend to organisations as much as to individuals, in relation to the role of each in society.
Then you said:
"These are smart people that are doing their damnedest to produce world class software. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft routinely produces extensions that ADD VALUE to Microsoft products. I often use a variety of the MSXML extensions to the DOM because I am developing for Microsoft platforms and they SAVE ME TIME as a developer."
Again, that's fine, as far as it goes. And if you agree that a corporation is indeed composed of people, many of whom genuinely try to make things better, then you should be willing to accept that one's actions have repercussions for which one must be held responsible, for better or for worse.
The fact that certain tools save you time when working in a certain context is nice. I like time-saving tools. For me as an application developer who has specialised in managing large collections of amorphous, heterogeneous data, I've learned that standards are more important in the long run that the benefit of a quick non-standard hack. I've also learned that my convenience does not trump the common good. Just because it's more convenient for me to use port 80 for SOAP doesn't make it better. It does the opposite, in fact; it makes the security and management situation incalculably worse.
If you accept the position that corporations are made of people working for a common cause in a free and fairly competitive manner, than you have to accept that there are certain times when a small individual sacrifice is necessary for the betterment of all. In short, whatever benefits may derive to you should never trump the common good. There are limits beyond which even profit motive should not allow one to venture.
You either have to accept that, or argue for the soulless corporation - which, of course, we've already rejected, you and I.
So if you accept that in some cases individual benefit can erode the common good, then surely you can accept that some people would rather that a company not follow a certain course when it's been demonstrated that that particular course is subversive to the health of the community.
I'm not asking you to agree with me in the details, but you must, in good conscience, accept that it's reasonable for someone to view Microsoft's Embrace and Extend policy as subversive and ultimately countrary to the common good.
"IE extensions have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily for the development of Outlook Web Access) which have given birth to the technologies that fuel AJAX and other modern web techniques."
What an interesting viewpoint. I couldn't disagree more.
The 'Embrace and Extend' strategy on which Microsoft has relied since about 1998 is designed to be divisive and ultimately to support Microsoft's one interest: by hook or by crook, to land everyone on the Microsoft platform. They worked with little or no support or cooperation from any other body[*] and more often than not used their position to subvert the activities of others. They published competing specifications and duplicated functionality that others had already implemented through their own proprietary implementations.
Now before we go any further, it's important to remember that this strategy was dressed up nicely, spoken about politely in marketing euphemisms and was seldom openly disparaging of competing technologies. It is also important to note that very few of the people actually responsible for the creation and fostering of standards ever felt anything but frustration and animosity toward these efforts to subvert the process. I've seen such luminaries as Lawrence Lessig and Sir Tim Berners Lee stand up in public fora and state in absolutely unambiguous terms that 'this MS technology is the single biggest threat faced by the web today.' (WWW Conference, Amsterdam 2000, for those who care).
It's true that there are some who have argued for accomodation, and while they've achieved short-term gains (RSS and SOAP, for example), the recent announcement of MS-only implementations and extensions of these standards offers further evidence that MS' intentions are anything but benevolent.
Now, some may trot out the sorry old argument that a corporation's job is to profit and damn the ethical/legal torpoedoes, but the fact is that to most of the people working in standards, this is not the goal. Believe it or not, most of us actually care about the community, and feel that the way things are implemented is just as important as what gets done. So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must, but please, don't pretend that that's the only way things can be made to work.
Microsoft (and Netscape in its time) are not only guilty of skewing standards in their favour. They're also guilty of something far more insidious: the infection of the application space with software designed to lock people into their proprietary approach to things. Often enough, the design is fatally compromised in the process. The example you cite above, Outlook Web Access, is a prime example of how to break things in the name of lock-in.
Here's a quick summary of the ways in which Outlook Web Access, which encapsulates email access inside HTTP and passes it through port 80 by default, is technically broken:
Caching proxy servers might or might not do the right thing -
behaviour here is undefined
Traffic/network analysis is subverted
Security is compounded, as activity patterns have to be checked on
more, not fewer ports (think about it)
Likewise, security audits are far more difficult, as traffic has to be
disambiguated
Security is subverted, users can simply tunnel high volume traffic
through to (at least) the DMZ with no guarantee that it's being
inspected (i.e. no one catches that the traffic is neither going to the
web nor the Exchange server; each one assumes it's going to the other
and that it's 'okay'. Same goes with large volumes of outgoing information.)
Deliberate bypassing of firewall policies, promoting insecure
configurations (e.g. pushing things through ports 80 and 443 as a matter
of informal policy, reducing the firewall to an ornament)
"It's hard as hell (I gather) to put on a major mag a face with buckteeth, wild hair, unkempt appearance and so forth."
Yeah, Lord knows who would want to be associated with someone like this guy.
Sorry, but this 'you have to wear a suit to get taken seriously' claptrap is a crock. It's pandering to the very worst anti-intellectual elements of our identity and society.
(I'm not normally quite this dismissive, but this post is so divorced from reality that it's unbelievable. If it hadn't been modded 'Insightful', I would have just tagged it Troll and left things at that....)
"A few years back, after much public outcry, one of these "sweatshops" was closed. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution."
Liar. Post proof or shut up.
"Really, I think Nike is helping these people. Nike offers jobs. People voluntarily take these jobs because they see a good deal -- the pay is "good" and the work is "not bad", by 3rd world standards at least."
Nike is helpful in the same sense that Abu Ghraib prison was a 'reforming influence'. What you think is useless to anybody (yourself included) unless you occasionally try to align it with what is true. May I suggest that you read No Logo by Naomi Klein for a start?
"Remember, $100 in the US (and many other countries) is very cheap. In the countries that this is intended for, it's a lot. Perhaps even several months wages. When you are looking at not being able to feed yourself or your family, that laptop will most likely become a bartering tool, or sold outright to get food on the table."
As others have already pointed out (albeit somewhat misguidedly), when you're worrying about satisfying one of Maslov's basic needs, you're probably not in school anyway.
But take another look at the countries where these computers are destined for first use. None of them appear on the UN's list of Least Developed Countries. Almost all of them have a fairly well-developed (if uneven) educational system, and while deepest poverty does exist in some (if not all) of those nations, they also feature a large majority who are doing okay in day-to-day terms, but who have few opportunities for self-advancement. Until the laptop arrives, that is.
My experience in development is not as extensive as some people's, but I do work on technology-related projects in the developing world. I live in the community (rather than in an expat haven), and have found that people care a great deal about education, and see its value very clearly indeed. The majority of parents I've encountered are willing to go to great lengths - indeed, forego a great many things - in order to improve their children's lot in life. While every society maintains its quota of greedy, selfish and violently anti-social behaviour, it's always the exception rather than the rule. So while I agree that you have a point, I suspect that in practice its effect will be limited.
Furthermore, if these laptops really will be ubiquitous (which IME should not be assumed until they're actually delivered), then their individual value will go down, likely to a point where they have more value as a possession than as an exchange item. As I mentioned, there will always be desperate parents who would gamble away the children's shoes, but they're not as common as you might think.
"You forgot to mention under which tree in Africa this book can be found. It can be downloaded, though, for 0 distribution cost, from a postman truck's server when it comes around, and when someone else visits you the copy you have can be given to the visitor. Can you do the same with a physical book, even assuming that you have one?"
Thank you for that. I'm constantly amazed that people don't twig to the fact that books (and paper-based content in general) are more expensive than digital data. I mean, for heaven's sake, if books and paper are so cheap and effective, how come none of us use them any more?
It's true that there are costs (and often significant ones) involved in bootstrapping a country's communications infrastructure to the point where ICT becomes reasonably accessible to the population at large in terms of cost and quality. It's also true that the cost of implementing a digital communications network is almost always the cheapest option available, no matter what purpose it's designed to serve.
Negroponte's vision is fundamentally good, though I do believe it deserves careful scrutiny, and that its assumptions should be checked and challenged early and often. I say this because these things often take on a momentum of their own, and sometimes end up crushing other alternatives while at the same time foundering under their own weight. The kind of pooh-poohing that Intel and Bill Gates have indulged in is, however, anything but useful.
"See, this is a concrete example of the intelligent engineering behind this particular PC For The Poor."
With respect, you couldn't be more wrong. If you've spent any time trying to operate electronic equipment in remote, tropical areas, you'll know that moving parts are the problem. Adding more moving parts - in fact, making the health of the system depend on them - is... how shall I say it nicely? Not an entirely appropriate response.
"Negroponte's $100 laptop has a hand crank for powering it, but I do not recall hearing how it handled heat and humidity. (maybe he said somewhere but I don't see it)"
Aside from having a water- and impact-resistant case, it relies on its low power usage to reduce heat generation.
"Now, a hand-cranked machine doesn't target this market as much as the rural areas, true. Which makes it, ultimately [...] An ineffective tool of socio-economic development through technology[.]"
Full marks for arguing from fact and direct observation. It feels like a blessing to see this. I will take issue with your conclusions, though.
But first, credit where credit is due. Your arguments about focusing on urban areas is valid and I too have seen good results from starting there. Someone else argued above that it's more important to focus on commodification and supply-chain issues than it is to develop one-trick ponies such as this. I'm prone to agree, though only provisionally.
What you've described goes to the heart of critical elements of how computers can be used to improve conditions in developing countries, but I suspect that you're a little too close to your particular circumstances to see that there actually is a place for community-based computer resources.
I work in the Pacific Islands region, where poor communications lead to a great many problems, including urban drift, social breakdown, rampant, unchecked corruption to name just a few. Having low-power, robust systems available for use in such circumstances helps to tie communities in to the larger scale - and as you rightly state, more efficient - systems in place in urban areas.
So to be clear, you're dead right that it makes sense to focus on urban populations and to put a good deal of effort into simply making computers affordable. But that's not all there is to it. There is a place for robust, low-power, shared computing and communications resources in rural areas.
That said, the solution that Intel is hyping does not seem appropriate, for one simple reason: Rather than properly address heat and power issues, they simply added a fan and put in a dust guard. This is not what I call innovation. It smacks of design by management who know nothing about the problem they're trying to solve.
FWIW, the power requirements we have for deployment in remote areas is maximum 20W per machine. That's about 80% lower than Intel is offering. That alone makes it a non-starter. Apple does it with their Mac Mini, so we know it's possible.
"Who sets up Vmware as a permanent use type of solution like this?"
I do. I run a few public access computer centres, and this is the only way to keep them intact. The computers run Ubuntu by default, but if someone absolutely positively needs Windows (e.g. Teaching a class about Word), they run XP in a VM, which reverts to its initial state the moment it's powered off. Thank heavens for snapshots!
In public access situations, I really do have an 'infinite number of monkeys' at the keyboards, and this is the best way I've found to guarantee that things never break.
"You can afford a computer - but not the postage on a what - 100g - package?"
Who said I could afford a computer? Most people here can't, which is why I work at obtaining computers donated by people more open-minded than you, and setting them up in public places so that people can use them.
"There is electricty available where you are. But no postal service?"
Yes, exactly.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. Life's like that for a lot of people. I regularly receive packages of books and disks from very generous friends in North America. It typically takes between 2 and 4 months for them to arrive and the cost of postage is often in excess of USD 100.
Even a small package of 100 grams or so is expensive. For someone living on the local minimum wage of USD 200 per month[*], even a few dollars is often more than they can spare. But if they can get their hands on a live CD, they can come to a friend's work place or to one of the community-based computer centres we run here, pop the thing into the drive, and... explore.
... And that, really is what Ubuntu is all about.
[*] Most people earn a great deal less than that, being un- or only partially-employed.
We were doing this for the SME Server (http://www.contribs.org/) back in 2000, when it was still owned by e-smith, inc. We shipped one CD free of charge to anyone who filled out a request form on our site.
The effect was quite positive. It helped to build awareness of the software at a critical point in its life, and we went from a few hundred servers installed in the wild to a few thousand. Not huge, but still enough to build a really dynamic community. The server's onto version 7 now, and the community is stronger than ever.
I think the biggest reason why Ubuntu ships their software anywhere for free is that most people who live in the developing world (including me) simply couldn't get it otherwise. It's very smart, but more importantly it shows that Ubuntu is willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to creating an operating system 'for everyone else.'
Slashdot Mirror
"Still, the tremendously increased investment that can be conjured up by the profit motive is nothing to be sneezed at."
What tremendously increased investment are you referring to? The tremendously increased fees that content providers will have to pay to already bloated telcos for the 'privilege' of continuing to do business? The trememdously increased revenues that the telcos receive for sitting on their fat asses? Others have stated already that the only incentive present in this scenario is for them to reduce performance for customers of certain clients until the clients agree to their extortion. This is a shakedown, pure and simple.
F*ck balance. There are two sides to this argument all right, but they are Right and Wrong. Extortion has always been wrong and always will be.
HTH, HAND.
I value nothing more than being the master of my own destiny - which should explain why I live in the South Pacific and am more or less retired from corporate life at 42. Here, in a nutshell is the modus vivendi I've developed:
Any organisation beyond a certain size inevitably becomes pathological in its behaviour. It sometimes reverts to normalcy for periods of time, but it will swing, and you will swing with it. Avoid long term commercial commitments to any large organisation. Working with groups or individuals within them for finite terms is fine, and sometimes really enjoyable, though.
Find a niche where you can work with a number of trusted individuals (perhaps as a consultant or contractor) and either work for yourself or work in a small company of less than 50 staff. The material benefits won't be as easily accessible, but your life will be infinitely more enjoyable, because you'll actually have some control over it.
"You must live in a small and unrealistic/idealistic world."
I do, and my small, idealised world has been attacked, but never 0wned. Which is why I'm happy I'm here.
'I feel the need to nitpick the title: "UK Music Fans Can Copy Own Tracks". This would imply that other music fans, or UK fans previously, could not copy their own tracks. Maybe they couldn't figure out how to use the cd burner? A correct title would be: "UK Music Fans Allowed To Copy Own Tracks".'
Yeah, and if my friends are any example, it's an important difference. They may be allowed to copy their own tracks, but they're still too stupid to know how. I always end up doing it for them.
"Last month a service center in new mexico was broken into as part of the larger incident. This was a result of an attack using zero-day that at the moment is still unpatchable (no patch exists)."
What are you talking about? If there's no readily available patch, then you inspect the source and assign someone to patch the flaw. Sheesh!
And what was sensitive information doing sitting on a system which is breakable via a single exploit?
"It's sickening to see a country that can supposedly defend itself and the world, can't even secure their own networks."
Sickening, I agree, but I hope it doesn't come as a surprise. The all-too-common blindness that states, 'I don't care how it works; just make it work.' is finally exacting its toll. The stupid false alternative that assumes any criticism is an attack has made it downright dangerous for anyone to disagree, and now the price of conflating 'right' with 'agrees with me' is beginning to be felt.
It is sickening, but it's been a long time coming for anyone with eyes to see it.
"I stopped reading when I got to this point."
Well maybe you should have started reading the paragraph at the top of the article that explains its audience and purpose. Here, I'll save you the effort of clicking the back button:
"*Disclaimer this article was written for Linux enthusiasts. If you are coming from the Windows side and the command line seems intimidating you can accomplish all of the updates and installs from Synaptic or Adept package manager applications. Both have nice graphics and require nothing more than checking the box next to the program you want to install and then selecting the install button and you are set to go. I prefer the command line because it is faster."
"If this is supposed to be "Linux For The Masses" and it (1) can't recognize common commodity video cards correctly, and (2) requires you to hand-edit a config file to correct the situation..."
Changing video drivers is extremely simple in Ubuntu. I should know, because I boot Ubuntu from my external USB disk on about 6 different machines every week. That, incidentally, is something that you cannot even dream of doing on Windows.
"There's a fault with a section of the Southern Cross data cable that connects Australia to the US. This means it currently has limited access. Suddenly, my ISP lost *all* international connectivity [....] It seems that their wholesale traffic/customers aren't as important as its own."
It's worse than that. Here in the South Pacific country of Vanuatu, Internet services have been reduced to a crawl. They're second-rate at the best of times, but now we're in a situation where if there were a serious problem - earthquake, volcano, unrest - lives might be lost as a result of some corporation's bottom line. I'm not talking about theoretical possibilities here, either. A small tsunami reached our shores following this month's Tonga earthquake, the capital of our nearest neighbour country was in flames just weeks ago, and there are two volcanoes smoking heavily within two hundred miles of me.
Frankly, I think that putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at the mercy of 'market forces' is sheer folly.
Benner's article states:
'In a 2002 letter to Microsoft, Peruvian Congressman Edgar David Villanueva Núñez noted that, "Relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains 'errors' or 'bugs' (in programmers' slang). But it is also well-known that the bugs in free software are fewer." Yet, ask computer security experts and they'll tell you that's not necessarily true. Software, with its millions of lines of code, is so complicated that experts don't know for sure that open source has fewer bugs, nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure.'
This statement is true, as far as it goes. But it ignores something that's far more important than the opinion of a computer scientist: empirical evidence. No matter how you measure it, FOSS software is successfully exploited far less often than proprietary software. In many cases, the differences are striking. There are, for example, effectively no Linux viruses in the wild.
Even in cases where FOSS is the dominant application (like the Apache web server, for example) the number of successful attacks are so much lower that there is no effective competition from the alternatives.
So the key here is not whether software is provably secure (i.e. auditable) but that it's effectively secure. The difference here is subtle, especially to those who don't understand software. It's something crucially important, however.
There's another issue here that's at the core of the Free Software philosophy: process. The FOSS software development process is based entirely delivering quality software. In fact, development cycles and processes often sacrifice convenience for IT folks in favour of solid code. Proprietary software is almost always driven by business priorities which sometimes - but not always - put a low priority on software quality.
Another quotation from the article:
'There are really two reasons that it is very difficult to know whether software is secure [....] The first reason is that even the simplest software program consists of hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, and potentially all of these have to be correct, or the system may have security vulnerabilities. The second reason is that we have no technology for systematically checking that the parts are correct and fit together in a way that ensures security."'
Both of these points (that even simple software is hopelessly complex, and that there is no systematic way to test intereactions between software) are inaccurate. It's like saying that human bodies are composed of billions of cells, so we'll never be able to measure a person's health.
Unix-inspired systems usually use a 'toolkit' approach, in which a number of small, special-purpose tools are brought together to perform complex tasks. The result is that each individual part is very well understood and performs its task(s) in a clear fashion. So, while it may be true that it's hard to document every possible interaction between software elememts, that's not nearly the problem the writer makes it out to be.
The article concludes:'Software becomes more interesting--indeed, rhetoric-worthy--when it promises a better future. Open source may well deliver that promise, but computer science is too young a discipline, and there is too much we do not yet know about software to be so sure.'
This is a silly argument, especially in an article that claims to compare two alternative approaches to software. Computer science is not a young discipline, even if you compare it to physics and mathematics. The fundamentals of computing were understood even before we had computers to test with. The assertion that we just don't know enough is just plain wrong-headed.
Furthermore, even if it is true that we don't know enough, shouldn't that be an argument in favour of open source, where at least nothing is deliberately hidden?
"film at 11. (no pun intended)."
None taken.
"I have to agree. There a large number of great FOSS projects, but I can't say I see that many innovative ones."
Er... you can't be serious. You know that thing called the World Wide Web, the massively revolutionary technological change that has proven to be the way that most people interact with the Internet? Almost entirely FOSS. And how about the really unique and original permutations that allowed for the creation of online communities, like wikis and blogs? All originated as FOSS projects.
And then there's email, IRC and Jabber. Oh, and Perl, which was highly innovative when it arrived. And Firefox's XUL UI, which allows quick, easy and open development of UI elements.
And that's just innovation on features. When you get down to technical innovation (i.e. taking new approaches to old problems), the list gets too long for any individual to compile.
"The OSS software Linspire is using (and sharing) was released by its owners with the understanding that others would use it for both commercial and non-commercial uses. And they were fine with that. ... If [Michael Robertson] wants to share his software with the world while keeping parts proprietary, that's his business."
Careful, you're conflating two logically unrelated points there. Proprietary and Commerical are not the same thing.
People who are in perfect agreement with the commercial sale of software might easily be violently opposed to proprietary (i.e. closed source) software. There's absolutely no inconsistency there. It's just like some people are perfectly fine with commercial software, and with proprietary software too, but hate EULAs.
"All I ask is that Linspire doesn't lay any Intellectual Property traps for unsuspecting souls."
There are some who argue that proprietary software necessarily leads to Intellectual Property [sic] traps. Whether they're intentional or not is not always clear. That's why you'll reliably find people who will forcefully criticise efforts to mix software that they view as encumbered and that which they consider to be Free.
I wrote:
"So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must[....]"
To which you replied:
"Real people work at Microsoft. I'm proud to say that I am one of them."
Good for you. I'm glad you take pride in your work. But you've completely misconstrued the purpose of that statement. I'm not arguing that corporations are soulless or inhuman. I'm actually stating the opposite: that it is wrong to defend the image of a corporation as an impersonal and amoral entity. Many people do so, using the old 'business is business' cliche, which completely ignores an organisation's role in the larger community and refuses to weigh the impact of its decisions. I personally feel that both of these are part of the social contract which should extend to organisations as much as to individuals, in relation to the role of each in society.
Then you said:
"These are smart people that are doing their damnedest to produce world class software. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft routinely produces extensions that ADD VALUE to Microsoft products. I often use a variety of the MSXML extensions to the DOM because I am developing for Microsoft platforms and they SAVE ME TIME as a developer."
Again, that's fine, as far as it goes. And if you agree that a corporation is indeed composed of people, many of whom genuinely try to make things better, then you should be willing to accept that one's actions have repercussions for which one must be held responsible, for better or for worse.
The fact that certain tools save you time when working in a certain context is nice. I like time-saving tools. For me as an application developer who has specialised in managing large collections of amorphous, heterogeneous data, I've learned that standards are more important in the long run that the benefit of a quick non-standard hack. I've also learned that my convenience does not trump the common good. Just because it's more convenient for me to use port 80 for SOAP doesn't make it better. It does the opposite, in fact; it makes the security and management situation incalculably worse.
If you accept the position that corporations are made of people working for a common cause in a free and fairly competitive manner, than you have to accept that there are certain times when a small individual sacrifice is necessary for the betterment of all. In short, whatever benefits may derive to you should never trump the common good. There are limits beyond which even profit motive should not allow one to venture.
You either have to accept that, or argue for the soulless corporation - which, of course, we've already rejected, you and I.
So if you accept that in some cases individual benefit can erode the common good, then surely you can accept that some people would rather that a company not follow a certain course when it's been demonstrated that that particular course is subversive to the health of the community.
I'm not asking you to agree with me in the details, but you must, in good conscience, accept that it's reasonable for someone to view Microsoft's Embrace and Extend policy as subversive and ultimately countrary to the common good.
"IE extensions have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily for the development of Outlook Web Access) which have given birth to the technologies that fuel AJAX and other modern web techniques."
What an interesting viewpoint. I couldn't disagree more.
The 'Embrace and Extend' strategy on which Microsoft has relied since about 1998 is designed to be divisive and ultimately to support Microsoft's one interest: by hook or by crook, to land everyone on the Microsoft platform. They worked with little or no support or cooperation from any other body[*] and more often than not used their position to subvert the activities of others. They published competing specifications and duplicated functionality that others had already implemented through their own proprietary implementations.
Now before we go any further, it's important to remember that this strategy was dressed up nicely, spoken about politely in marketing euphemisms and was seldom openly disparaging of competing technologies. It is also important to note that very few of the people actually responsible for the creation and fostering of standards ever felt anything but frustration and animosity toward these efforts to subvert the process. I've seen such luminaries as Lawrence Lessig and Sir Tim Berners Lee stand up in public fora and state in absolutely unambiguous terms that 'this MS technology is the single biggest threat faced by the web today.' (WWW Conference, Amsterdam 2000, for those who care).
It's true that there are some who have argued for accomodation, and while they've achieved short-term gains (RSS and SOAP, for example), the recent announcement of MS-only implementations and extensions of these standards offers further evidence that MS' intentions are anything but benevolent.
Now, some may trot out the sorry old argument that a corporation's job is to profit and damn the ethical/legal torpoedoes, but the fact is that to most of the people working in standards, this is not the goal. Believe it or not, most of us actually care about the community, and feel that the way things are implemented is just as important as what gets done. So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must, but please, don't pretend that that's the only way things can be made to work.
Microsoft (and Netscape in its time) are not only guilty of skewing standards in their favour. They're also guilty of something far more insidious: the infection of the application space with software designed to lock people into their proprietary approach to things. Often enough, the design is fatally compromised in the process. The example you cite above, Outlook Web Access, is a prime example of how to break things in the name of lock-in.
Here's a quick summary of the ways in which Outlook Web Access, which encapsulates email access inside HTTP and passes it through port 80 by default, is technically broken:
"It's hard as hell (I gather) to put on a major mag a face with buckteeth, wild hair, unkempt appearance and so forth."
Yeah, Lord knows who would want to be associated with someone like this guy.
Sorry, but this 'you have to wear a suit to get taken seriously' claptrap is a crock. It's pandering to the very worst anti-intellectual elements of our identity and society.
"RTFM mate. This is not reinventing the wheel. It's adding a few more spokes, better tires and tougher rubber."
Yep, and the brakes will ship in the second service pack. 8^)
"Digg _is_ moderated. The poor soles who frequent that site just don't know it."
I think you mean 'heels'.
(I'm not normally quite this dismissive, but this post is so divorced from reality that it's unbelievable. If it hadn't been modded 'Insightful', I would have just tagged it Troll and left things at that....)
"A few years back, after much public outcry, one of these "sweatshops" was closed. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution."
Liar. Post proof or shut up.
"Really, I think Nike is helping these people. Nike offers jobs. People voluntarily take these jobs because they see a good deal -- the pay is "good" and the work is "not bad", by 3rd world standards at least."
Nike is helpful in the same sense that Abu Ghraib prison was a 'reforming influence'. What you think is useless to anybody (yourself included) unless you occasionally try to align it with what is true. May I suggest that you read No Logo by Naomi Klein for a start?
"Remember, $100 in the US (and many other countries) is very cheap. In the countries that this is intended for, it's a lot. Perhaps even several months wages. When you are looking at not being able to feed yourself or your family, that laptop will most likely become a bartering tool, or sold outright to get food on the table."
As others have already pointed out (albeit somewhat misguidedly), when you're worrying about satisfying one of Maslov's basic needs, you're probably not in school anyway.
But take another look at the countries where these computers are destined for first use. None of them appear on the UN's list of Least Developed Countries. Almost all of them have a fairly well-developed (if uneven) educational system, and while deepest poverty does exist in some (if not all) of those nations, they also feature a large majority who are doing okay in day-to-day terms, but who have few opportunities for self-advancement. Until the laptop arrives, that is.
My experience in development is not as extensive as some people's, but I do work on technology-related projects in the developing world. I live in the community (rather than in an expat haven), and have found that people care a great deal about education, and see its value very clearly indeed. The majority of parents I've encountered are willing to go to great lengths - indeed, forego a great many things - in order to improve their children's lot in life. While every society maintains its quota of greedy, selfish and violently anti-social behaviour, it's always the exception rather than the rule. So while I agree that you have a point, I suspect that in practice its effect will be limited.
Furthermore, if these laptops really will be ubiquitous (which IME should not be assumed until they're actually delivered), then their individual value will go down, likely to a point where they have more value as a possession than as an exchange item. As I mentioned, there will always be desperate parents who would gamble away the children's shoes, but they're not as common as you might think.
"You forgot to mention under which tree in Africa this book can be found. It can be downloaded, though, for 0 distribution cost, from a postman truck's server when it comes around, and when someone else visits you the copy you have can be given to the visitor. Can you do the same with a physical book, even assuming that you have one?"
Thank you for that. I'm constantly amazed that people don't twig to the fact that books (and paper-based content in general) are more expensive than digital data. I mean, for heaven's sake, if books and paper are so cheap and effective, how come none of us use them any more?
It's true that there are costs (and often significant ones) involved in bootstrapping a country's communications infrastructure to the point where ICT becomes reasonably accessible to the population at large in terms of cost and quality. It's also true that the cost of implementing a digital communications network is almost always the cheapest option available, no matter what purpose it's designed to serve.
Negroponte's vision is fundamentally good, though I do believe it deserves careful scrutiny, and that its assumptions should be checked and challenged early and often. I say this because these things often take on a momentum of their own, and sometimes end up crushing other alternatives while at the same time foundering under their own weight. The kind of pooh-poohing that Intel and Bill Gates have indulged in is, however, anything but useful.
"See, this is a concrete example of the intelligent engineering behind this particular PC For The Poor."
With respect, you couldn't be more wrong. If you've spent any time trying to operate electronic equipment in remote, tropical areas, you'll know that moving parts are the problem. Adding more moving parts - in fact, making the health of the system depend on them - is... how shall I say it nicely? Not an entirely appropriate response.
"Negroponte's $100 laptop has a hand crank for powering it, but I do not recall hearing how it handled heat and humidity. (maybe he said somewhere but I don't see it)"
Aside from having a water- and impact-resistant case, it relies on its low power usage to reduce heat generation.
"Now, a hand-cranked machine doesn't target this market as much as the rural areas, true. Which makes it, ultimately [...] An ineffective tool of socio-economic development through technology[.] "
Full marks for arguing from fact and direct observation. It feels like a blessing to see this. I will take issue with your conclusions, though.
But first, credit where credit is due. Your arguments about focusing on urban areas is valid and I too have seen good results from starting there. Someone else argued above that it's more important to focus on commodification and supply-chain issues than it is to develop one-trick ponies such as this. I'm prone to agree, though only provisionally.
What you've described goes to the heart of critical elements of how computers can be used to improve conditions in developing countries, but I suspect that you're a little too close to your particular circumstances to see that there actually is a place for community-based computer resources.
I work in the Pacific Islands region, where poor communications lead to a great many problems, including urban drift, social breakdown, rampant, unchecked corruption to name just a few. Having low-power, robust systems available for use in such circumstances helps to tie communities in to the larger scale - and as you rightly state, more efficient - systems in place in urban areas.
So to be clear, you're dead right that it makes sense to focus on urban populations and to put a good deal of effort into simply making computers affordable. But that's not all there is to it. There is a place for robust, low-power, shared computing and communications resources in rural areas.
That said, the solution that Intel is hyping does not seem appropriate, for one simple reason: Rather than properly address heat and power issues, they simply added a fan and put in a dust guard. This is not what I call innovation. It smacks of design by management who know nothing about the problem they're trying to solve.
FWIW, the power requirements we have for deployment in remote areas is maximum 20W per machine. That's about 80% lower than Intel is offering. That alone makes it a non-starter. Apple does it with their Mac Mini, so we know it's possible.
P.S. Read your blog entry about OLPC with interest. Here's a link to my somewhat different take on the same issue.
"Who sets up Vmware as a permanent use type of solution like this?"
I do. I run a few public access computer centres, and this is the only way to keep them intact. The computers run Ubuntu by default, but if someone absolutely positively needs Windows (e.g. Teaching a class about Word), they run XP in a VM, which reverts to its initial state the moment it's powered off. Thank heavens for snapshots!
In public access situations, I really do have an 'infinite number of monkeys' at the keyboards, and this is the best way I've found to guarantee that things never break.
"You can afford a computer - but not the postage on a what - 100g - package?"
Who said I could afford a computer? Most people here can't, which is why I work at obtaining computers donated by people more open-minded than you, and setting them up in public places so that people can use them.
"There is electricty available where you are. But no postal service?"
Yes, exactly.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. Life's like that for a lot of people. I regularly receive packages of books and disks from very generous friends in North America. It typically takes between 2 and 4 months for them to arrive and the cost of postage is often in excess of USD 100.
Even a small package of 100 grams or so is expensive. For someone living on the local minimum wage of USD 200 per month[*], even a few dollars is often more than they can spare. But if they can get their hands on a live CD, they can come to a friend's work place or to one of the community-based computer centres we run here, pop the thing into the drive, and... explore.
... And that, really is what Ubuntu is all about.
[*] Most people earn a great deal less than that, being un- or only partially-employed.
We were doing this for the SME Server (http://www.contribs.org/) back in 2000, when it was still owned by e-smith, inc. We shipped one CD free of charge to anyone who filled out a request form on our site.
The effect was quite positive. It helped to build awareness of the software at a critical point in its life, and we went from a few hundred servers installed in the wild to a few thousand. Not huge, but still enough to build a really dynamic community. The server's onto version 7 now, and the community is stronger than ever.
I think the biggest reason why Ubuntu ships their software anywhere for free is that most people who live in the developing world (including me) simply couldn't get it otherwise. It's very smart, but more importantly it shows that Ubuntu is willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to creating an operating system 'for everyone else.'