(‘born ‘1927)
(‘championed ‘ai)
(‘created ‘lisp)
(‘thought-up ‘space-elevator)
(‘won ‘turing-award)
(‘died ‘oct-23-2011)
Tag Archives: Technology
Land Of Lisp Book Giveaway
You will recall that I recently reviewed the book Land of Lisp. It turns out I’ve got two copies of it, and would like to give one away. To you. As a bounty.
Continue reading Land Of Lisp Book Giveaway
A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books
Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!
Continue reading A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books
Why do I even bother with the Internet any more????
I very rarely read a story on the WCCO web site. That’s my local news station. I don’t scroll down below the headlines, and that by the way means that I don’t see any of the wonderful ads that are down there. I often don’t respond to facebook conversations with anything more than a sentence, but rather, put my thoughts in a text editor and then post them somewhere, usually not facebook. Lately, I’ve stopped with any extensive responses on Google+ as well.
Why?
Continue reading Why do I even bother with the Internet any more????
… Because the lack of State will always be ensured … The Land Of Lisp
How come nobody told me about this!!!!
Continue reading … Because the lack of State will always be ensured … The Land Of Lisp
Google Inc IS a different kind of thing
In the old days, canals, roads, train tracks, etc. were almost all privately owned in many countries. Some airports too, but not many. Now, most of these elements of our infrastructure are publicly owned or so regulated that they may as well be. Same with utilities.
I wrote a while ago about how Amazon Dot Com is a public good that should not be privately controlled. A lot of people got mad at me and pointed out how wrong I was, but that is because they did not understand that the vast majority of on line commerce is actually run by Amazon even though you don’t know that while you are doing it. Imagine that Sears not only was sears, bur also owned all other appliance manufacturers, as well as Walmarts, Coscos, and Kmarts, but you didn’t know that. If I then said “Sears is about the only place you buy stuff from” you would have to understand that i mean “Sears and all that they own.”
In the case of Google, it is somewhat different. Google probably owns and/or operates stuff that does not have their name on it, but aside from that, it is quite possible to run your entire computer life off of Google and nothing else. Google is on the verge of becoming more insidious than Microsoft, but they are actually dong a pretty good job at it.
But the latest maneneo with pseudonymous has shown us that a benevolent dictator is still a dictator and must be destroyed. As a society we have to do what we’ve done before: Publicly take over and run that which was private but that has become infrastructure. And while we are at it we need to decommission all cable companies. I mean, seriously … how is that not a monopoly?
See:
Cthulhu Lives in The Blog Cave
Apropos Linux in Exile losing his Linux System to a Predatory Windows Install the other day (see Windows killed my laptop, again) I’ve been thinking about and beginning to do something about cleaning house. See below for my latest Windows mini-horror story (not as bad as LIE’s). But first, a word about Cthulhu. Who lives in my blog cave.
Continue reading Cthulhu Lives in The Blog Cave
I shall build it and I shall call it gregBook
Both my desktop and my laptop started working more slowly a few weeks ago. This indicated that something about the operating system (some version of Ubuntu Linux) changed in a bad way. Or, perhaps, since the slowness was mostly noticed in the web browser, the newer version of Firefox was somehow borked. It turns out that the latter is true to some extent because the developers of Firefox left Linux out in the cold with hardware acceleration (and despite the excuses for that I’m still annoyed … had the same issues applied to, say Windows, they would not have left Windows out in the cold). But that is a digression. It turns out that the cause was related to something I had installed that was related to the system. This little problem has been solved, but it brings up another issue, which has also been addressed on the blog Linux in Exile. This is what I wanted to talk about.
Continue reading I shall build it and I shall call it gregBook
$25 tiny computer!
The games developer David Braben and some colleagues [developed] something called Raspberry Pi. It’s a whole computer on a tiny circuit board – not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. They plugged a keyboard into one end, and hooked the other into a TV they had brought with them.
Steve Jobs: “Android tracks you, Apple does not.”
According to Steve Jobs, Apple’s iPhone and/or Apple corporation (the distinction is important but often muddled in this conversation) does not track its users’ geographical location, but Android (which is neither a phone nor a company, but a system … another important yet muddled distinction) does.
Supposedly:
Continue reading Steve Jobs: “Android tracks you, Apple does not.”
iKnowwhatyoudidlastsummer
iPhones know where they are, so they probably know where you are, and these data have been captured and maintained by the Apple devices and have been used by police in geoForensic investigations. Crushing civil liberties? There’s an app for that!
Apple came to international attention in 1984 when the upstart computer company bought Superbowl Halftime ad space to show how they could destroy Big Brother. I’m not sure who Big Brother was at the time (it may have been a combination of IBM and Microsoft) but this was a direct reference to Orwell’s book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”
Ironically, or perhaps expectedly, there is little in the computer world more Orwellian than a widely used and much loved hand held device being distributed widely and lovingly, which secretly keeps track of your location, and secretly storing those data where they could later become available to The State. I wonder what else they are keeping track of? I wonder if we know where all the copies of these data are stored?
The Linux-based Android system also collects these data but does not send it to Big Brother unless you tell it to.
Following is a summary of recent posts and news reports on this and closely related topics to give you an idea of the nature and magnitude of this problem.
Continue reading iKnowwhatyoudidlastsummer
Technology good news and bad news. Mostly bad news.
Good news: The next version of Internet Explorer will only run on Windows 7. That should be the end of Internet Explorer.
Bad News: Google Video is done with. It will stop existing on April 29th. Well, I never used it so I don’t really care personally, but this is why I once said that things like Amazon and Google should be taken over by the government and turned into utilities (you all hated me for saying that). This is exactly like having private companies build all the roads, then one company decides to unbuild its roads to use the asphalt for something else. If you happen to have spent time, energy, money, etc. with the assumption that this road you use will always be there, then you are screwed. Same with Google arbitrarily deciding that it would no longer be the infrastructure that I assume some people were busy using.
Good News: Google has a suggestion: Let all the users who need the ‘road’ each take a chunk of asphalt and see how that goes.
If you want to help archive Google Video, get some Linux machines running and join us in IRC (EFNet #archiveteam / #googlegrape)
Details here. If you do this, does that make you some kind of chump, or what?
When commercial interests seep into OpenSource: Good things can happen, but usually don’t.
The other day, Julia and I decided to install SimCity 4 Deluxe
What I men by Geeksnarkese is a linguistic and cultural phenomenon that at one time prevailed in Linux circles on the Internet (and elsewhere, in Windows fora and in Meatland as well) but is now, thankfully, less common. I’ll write about that some other time but there is a good chance you know what I mean. Anyway, it was impossible to figure out from them what was needed to get SimCity4 Deluxe to install, run, or run properly (though they claimed it could be done) because in Geeksnarkese one ends potentially helpful paragraphs with things like “… and I’ll let you figure that part out on your own” and substitutes key instructions with phrases like “… just set up your media drive to emulate a file in the correct path and adjust the permissions accordingly…” In other words, an amateur IT person who speaks mainly Geeksnarkese is merely an amateur for a reason!
Anyway, frustrated with the inability of snot nosed kids working out of basements to communicate effectively, I downloaded Crossover Games. Crossover is the commercial implementation of Wine. The money they make selling Crossover is supposedly used to make Wine better. I am pretty sure that Crossover (the not-for-games version) is pretty good. At any given moment it lets you install and run a recent (but not necessarily the most recent) version of Microsoft Office on your computer with no problems. I got it a long time ago because I simply needed to run Endnote for a short while, and it worked flawlessly. It’s a nice product, and for a mere 30 bucks or so a year, it is an excellent option for transitions from Windows to Linux.
But the free version you download to try it out is, as one might expect, stupid and annoying, as least for the games version. It had a strange menu and interactive system that was not easily understood but obviously designed to be clear and useful (they would do better if they didn’t just imagine that it was a good design, but actually tried it out with people other than those who know the system inside out). Then, at critical moments in the install process, an obnoxious dialog box would pop up asking one of those questions that didn’t really have an appropriate answer (it turns out that when you want to click something like “I don’t want to pay now for the free trial version I downloaded nine seconds ago, but I do want to continue the current operation” you hit “Cancel.” Dummies.
Anyway, after all that mucking around, it turns out that Crossover for Games produced the same exact result wine produced: Nothing. However, I think that other than their dumbass dialog boxes it might be the case that installation with Crossover for Games was easier. The problem with installing Windows games on Linux is that Windows games are inherently unsafe little security monsters, and it is hard to run unsafe things off of a CD. There are ways around that and Crossover for Games might implement one of those ways (not sure).
In any event, this particular foray into commercial software land produced the following results:
- 1) I was annoyed; and
- 2) It didn’t work.
Now, turn to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Linux (and/or Fedora, depending) is an excellent form of Linux which seriously competes with Debian and other distributions, and is often used in commercial operations. It has been adapted to specialized uses. It is the basis for Scientific Linux, and I’m pretty sure there are real-time versions for real-time tasks, etc.
The big deal with RHEL (the “E” being the key letter here) is that you buy it. Well, you don’t really buy it. It is released under the same OpenSource licenses as other OS software. But normally, when you deploy RHEL on your computer(s), you also purchase support contracts. this way, instead of having to wade through snot stained going-nowhere Geeksnarkese on the Intertubes, you call or otherwise contact a highly trained professional who simply solves your problem. Or, your company arranges for training of personnel by RHEL. Or whatever.
But sine the L in RHEL is OpenSoruce, you or I or anyone else can provide that Operating System and then, because it’s a free country, provide the service. Not allowing that would be like Ford selling cars and not allowing anyone else to fix them but Ford. Or Apple selling iPods
So, Oracle and Novell, which used to be one large evile company and one smaller not so evile company, now combined to produce the latest High Tech Monster trying to TOTW, is trying to sell RHEL support, competing directly with Red Hat. Is that good? Bad? Ethical? Evile? I dunno.
But RHEL‘s reaction is an example of how commercial interests can muck up the FOSS model. RHEL is now implementing “hidden patches” to its operating system which make anyone who does not know about the patches at risk of mucking up if they supply support. This would be like Ford adding design elements to their cars that break the car if you try to fix it without knowing about them, and not telling anyone about them.
This also means, and I think this is key, that there will be (or already are) patches that are implemented primarily or only to break the software and that otherwise have no purposed.
And thus, Linux creeps towards the Windows design philosophy: Break the software, blame the victim, charge more.
I would love to know what my friends who are professional trained RHEL engineers think about this.
Both cases are similar: The commercial model requires adding something that does not serve a purpose other than supporting the commercial model itself and that is annoying or destructive, and the final outcome is not improved software. Crossover for Games does not work any better than not using crossover for games (for SimCity4 … it probably works great for other games, so do try it) and RHEL, while probably still a top notch OS, now has code that is subject to all the negatives code is subject to (takes space, takes RAM, can have a bug, can be vulnerable, etc) that is not only unnecessary but also, because of the secret nature of it, not under the scrutiny of the FOSS community, and thus, more vulnerable to both bugs and security flaws.
Hat tip Virgal Samms for the RHEL story, which is here.
Libyan Dictator Warns Against Facebook, Microsoft Bans OpenSource
These stories are closely related at a philosophical level: Both stalwart entities have similar philosophies about what they think they can tell other people to do, how they do things, and what they fear:
Libyan dictator warns against use of Facebook, 40 protesters injured
Many Libyan Internet activists have declared their support for the pro-democracy movements and revolutions in the Middle East. After seeing the power of the people succeed in Tunisia and Egypt, they created groups on Facebook to call for political and economic reforms in Libya. Libya’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has responded by warning against the use of Facebook, according to IFEX.
Microsoft bans open source from the Marketplace
Microsoft has raised the ire of the open source community with its Windows Marketplace licence by specifically refusing to allow software covered under an open licence to be distributed.
The licence, which anyone wishing to distribute Windows, Windows Phone, or Xbox applications through the company’s copy of Apple’s App Store is required to agree to, is the usual torrent of legalese – but hides a nasty surprise for those who support open source ideals.
Nokia workers know a bad thing when they see it.
Thousands of Nokia workers walked off the job for the day in protest of the Microsoft-Nokia deal.
First there was the “Burning Platform” memo:
In Elop’s 1300-word memo … the ex-Microsoft exec likens the company to an oil platform burning at sea while the hands try to put out the fire by dousing it in gasoline instead of water.
We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses,” Elop wrote. “We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning.
… The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable…
We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
Then the walkout:
Continue reading Nokia workers know a bad thing when they see it.