Category: observations

Chad Dickerson Incidentally, when I wrote this week’s column (“Beyond Linux”), I wasn’t even thinking about the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, but using a non-GPL OS like FreeBSD certainly keeps you legally free and clear. The courts might conceivably be able to kill Linux, but not the whole idea of a free high-performance Unix-like OS.

The columns he references is worth a read: it’s interesting to observe how people are torn between wanting Linux or whatever to succeed but still want to keep it to themselves, like that band they saw in a club in their college days. What makes the tipping point between the unique and the ubiquitous? I’ve written about how I find FreeBSD more reliable, stable, and maintainable than Linux, and I’m glad to see someone with Chad’s visibility make people aware of their choices. Isn’t that what Open Source is about? His comments on how far Open Source databases like mySQL have come and how appropriate they are for many uses — buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about a startup I endured that spent hundreds of thousands on Oracle licenses for nothing more than the privilege of saying they used Oracle — are interesting. At what point do you need Oracle or SyBase?

Idle Words

If you look at all the outgoing links from English language blogs, only about 1.75% point to a non-English weblog. In the reverse direction, however, the figure is much higher. A full 7% of links from non-English-language weblogs point to an English site.

This means that non-English speakers, on average, link in to our community at four times the rate at which we link into the rest of the world. This is a kind of one-way mirror effect: because English dominates the Internet, we are less likely to to see anything outside our own community, while non-speakers will still be exposed to a lot of what goes on here. In the global conversation, we’re the ones standing at the microphone.

Ben Hammersley put me on to this one.

It is disturbing how insular American culture is. I think the assumption of power in everyone else speaking English is wrong: while it might make some feel smug over how the rest of the world follows our lead, don’t forget, they can talk amongst themselves and we have no idea what they’re saying. It might be no big deal — wait staff joking over the ignorance or unfashionable dress of their customers — but it could also be more meaningful, like the examples described in the linked article. If those storage facilities had blown up, the No Smoking sign would have been destroyed in the blast, and the convenient answer would have been sabotage or terrorism, rather than ignorance of the local language.

I wonder how many native speakers or translators Caesar employed during his imperium?

McGee’s Musings

Jim McGee references Ivan Ilich: McGee is lightyears ahead of where I could hope to be in this space.
The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, ‘What should someone learn?’ but with the question, ‘What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?’

It’s not the new environment that needs to be thought about this way: the old ones should be examined as well. After all, schools — all schools — are made to serve transient populations, and their needs evolve as the subject matter itself does. Shouldn’t the tools and environment do so, as well?

Idle Words

The Waypath Project is worth a visit because they are trying to do two very challenging and cool things. The first is, provide a per-post weblog search, rather than the kind of per-page search you can get on Blogdex or Google. The second is to search things based on similarities in content, rather than just doing keyword matches.

I’m glad to see this: I know Steve (from Waypath) from a prior gig and he’s just half of a dangerously smart team. He’s taken great pains to point out how the Waypath stuff is better (in many ways, scalability not being the least of them) than any of these other new information retrieval techniques. While it may look like query by example, it adds a significant amount of magic to refine the example and thereby deliver better results.

Everything Burns Zeitgeist

Here are the search term from various search engines which people followed here to Everything Burns over the last few days. The list is updated every hour. The size denotes how many hits came from a certain search.

meta-douglasp

iPod and Will power: I visited the Apple store today. I held a new iPod in my hand. I walked away without buying one. I am going to stop talking about it now or I may go back.

A shortage of coin trumps will power anytime. If I could afford one, I’d have one. The U Bookstore can’t keep them in stock, so I’ve not seen one.

I’d be happy with the small one. I have a couple of reasons for wanting one. One, the job stress right now reminds me of nothing so painful as adolescence and music got me through that intact, or reasonably so. Two, it would give me either motivation or an excuse to continue with my analog to digital conversion project — converting all my LPs to CDs, MP3s or both. Perhaps just an extension of the first argument, I don’t know.

BlogShares – quotidian

I’m still trying to figure out blogshares works: this, of course, is further evidence that I am a dunce as a stock picker, bu I figure this is a less harmful way to learn than with Real Money.

I can’t figure why my work weblog, which is all but dead (I don’t update it, but haven’t taken it down) has attracted buyers. The one you’re reading now is not valued all that much higher, hence my bafflement.

So on CNN’s home page today, I noticed these two headlines:

Apple’s online music coup ignites industry

Microsoft: flaw left millions at risk

Which “innovator” would you want to buy products from?

iTunes Music Store Sells Over One Million Songs in First Week

“In less than one week we’ve broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Apple has created the first complete solution for the digital music age—you can purchase your favorite music online at the iTunes Music Store, mix your favorite tracks into playlists with iTunes, and take your entire music collection with you everywhere with the super-slim new iPods.”

“Hitting one million songs in less than a week was totally unexpected,” said Roger Ames, Warner Music Group’s chairman and CEO. “Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the Internet.”

“Our internal measure of success was having the iTunes Music Store sell one million songs in the first month. To do this in one week is an over-the-top success,” said Doug Morris, Universal Music Group’s CEO. “Apple definitely got it right with the iTunes Music Store.”

So Steve Jobs has negated the record industry’s reality distortion field: perhaps they’ll start to realize their customers aren’t criminals.

Axis Communications – Axis 2100 technical overview

The Axis 2100 is based on the Linux operating system. This in order to ensure maximum reliability and ease of use. Some of the benefits are:

* Well-known and well-documented OS
* Small footprint system, it does not take a lot of flash or ram memory.
* Longer term decentralized development.
* Much, much functionality available for “free”.
* The source code for Linux is freely available to everyone.
* Developed under the GNU General Public License. This means we publish our contribution to the Linux community on our website developer.axis.com
* And much more….

Interesting that these guys say Linux is well known and well documented (hmm, I guess that’s true if you’re conversant in C), while the CIOs in the grocery business (see a couple of entries back) think it’s too “bleeding edge.”

This camera looks interesting: if I had a use for it, I’d get one. I’m working on finding a use for one . ..