There always seems to be war somewhere on the planet. A decade ago, the seeds of Afghanistan and Iraq were sprouting. Now it’s Syria and Iran. Some people need war to be relevant, the military-industrial complex and politicians.
Does Obama need a good war to distract voters from domestic issues? He was elected on the basis of ending a predecessor’s war. If he becomes despairing enough, will he provoke war in the Middle East again? Fortunately, the Republicans seem in disarray. If they come up with a strong candidate who rattles the saber, will Obama have to preempt them?
Syria continues to kill its people. Syria is on the verge of civil war. Any intervention by USA or Turkey or Israel will trigger a real mess. The Arab League is conflicted but may lean to war with any escalation.
Iran is a very dangerous situation with nuclear weaponry being added to the mix. Closure of the Gulf with the world economy being fragile is a powerful lever for war. For now the war is a cold one. Israel/USA is assassinating scientists working on the nuclear weaponry. STUXnet was aimed at Iran. Warriors have a powerful argument that war commenced sooner will be less painful than later. It all boils down to whether or not war with Iran is inevitable.
The Arab Spring is unfinished. Still democracy is tasted but not seized around the region. There is a possibility that a hot war anywhere in the region could trigger civil wars to overthrow corrupt/illegitimate regimes. There are plenty: Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan… How convenient will it be for one side or another to assume assistance from the outside will help them or that outsiders will be too busy with another matter to intervene?
The world used to be provoked to war by ideology. Now there are no lies left thanks to Cablegate. War is about money/power. Getting it and keeping it. 2012 will have plenty of opportunities to destroy others’ power and to take their money.
I believe the world will be motivated to enter yet another hot war in 2012. All or most of the situations mentioned above will be involved. It’s too bad that leaders have the skills to arouse people to kill other people for some cause. It’s too bad the USA feels the need to meddle in the affairs of others, to call revolutionaries terrorists etc. all the while doing everything possible to destabilize non-clients even murder and torture. While we look back on history and pronounce ourselves morally superior, this tendency to throw off any semblance of civility in order to punish those who disagree with us shows the lie. I wish Canada had the intestinal fortitude to follow its own foreign policy and base choices on reason and morality not money and power. Canada could start by throwing M$, the FBI and the CIA out of Canada. They don’t work for us.
Sometimes one gives up on maintaining something old, obsolete or worn out. It’s too bad we had to wait years for the stupid registry of unrestricted firearms to be scrapped. It’s still not quite done as there still remains third reading in the House of Commons, consideration in the senate and royal proclamation but the Conservative Party of Canada is committed to the process which should resume in February 2012.
The PCs have their lists of myths and facts but I thought I would create my own list. I do love lists. They clarify, motivate and break down problems to smaller pieces.
There are about 10 million families in Canada and if they are like mine they will have a hammer or two. An announcement that a registry would be created to keep track of hammers would be laughed out of the house but that is what happened with unrestricted firearms (pieces of wood, steel and plastic occasionally used for murder but more often used for providing food, protection or sport for ordinary people).
There are about 10 million hammers in Canada and about 20 million unrestricted firearms.
The cost of registering the firearms was about equal to their purchase cost, more than doubling the cost of ownership for no benefit to the owners.
The cost of registering firearms to Canada was immense. It practically eliminated retail sales of firearms except for the large chain stores. It practically eliminated the local gunsmith. While the cost of maintaining the registry was trimmed down to $hundreds of millions per annum, the cost to the economy was $billions per annum.
Because firearms owners refused to register their firearms they could not avail themselves of legal firearms and services making criminals of ordinary people and creating huge cash-flows for organized criminals and reducing tax revenue for the government.
Because millions of Canadians were in violation of the criminal code of Canada, ordinary good citizens were reluctant to cooperate with local and national police forces who were seen as tools of gun-grabbers.
The level of debate to which the opposition sank recently is a clear demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of the gun-grabbers. They raised irrelevant issues. They attacked good people doing their jobs. They begged the question constantly. Paperwork on hammers has almost no effect on crime but the opposition repeatedly claimed it did and pronounced stupid, foolish, and wrong anyone who pointed that out. They tried to undermine democracy by attacking members of parliament elected by Canadians to carry out the wishes of Canadians.
2012 should be a better year. Something horrible will be behind us, left on the scrap-heap of history. I don’t know whether my 22 year old roto-tiller or my 26 year old lawn-mower will be scrapped in 2012. I hope not. They have done a lot more good than the firearms registry ever did. A lot of military bolt action rifles widely used for hunting in Canada will not be scrapped. They are durable goods passed on from one generation to the next like family heirlooms. Few hammers are so beloved. I have hunted deer with rifles more than one hundred years old and they still shoot well enough. One ancient one in my hands beat a brand new Remington in the hands of a young man in a test of accuracy. Some have survived war, gun-grabbers and the registry.
2009-02-24 20% of PCs run GNU/Linux – Goal is 50% within 5 years
NovaLinux, designed by University of Havana is working on its third release.
In February, 2011, it was announced that 8000 PCs at the University of Computer Science in Cuba will migrate to GNU/Linux and that all PCs assembled in Cuba will have GNU/Linux.
According to RoyalPingdom, Cuba has the lowest utilization rate of “7″ in the world.
It’s a small step but it will not only facilitate independence from M$ but also will sidestep the US embargo on just about everything. Many countries would be better off to ban M$ doing business in their jurisdictions.
As much as some of the Wintel “partners” would wish small cheap computers to go away, the netbook keeps going like the Energizer Bunnytm. Shipments are down quite a bit from a year ago with all the noise about smart thingies but the netbook is beloved because it is small, cheap, portable and comes with a keyboard.
Intel has just announced an Atom processor designed for netbooks. At 1.6gHz it can be fanless but at 1.8gHz it wants a fan. In spite of 32nm technology and lots of features to reduce idle power consumption the thing must still be a hog. It uses 3.5 to 10 W while ARMed CPUs are way less than 1W per core. These gadgets are dual-core/dual-threaded. I guess Intel expects heavier batteries will do the trick…
Nevertheless, Intel sees that the netbook just will not die and wants to stay in the game. This allows M$ to keep selling licences for netbooks too even as ARM takes a hold of the market. ASUS eeePad Transformer Prime comes with a keyboard but it’s not that cheap. Smartbooks are not going away. GNU/Linux is always available to run on netbooks or smartbooks.
No, the death of netbooks is actually a continuous rebirth. The world hungers for small cheap computers, not hair-driers. Intel knows that. That’s why they were embarrassed by the success of Atom and why they are planning to crank out new versions even if they will not fly on smartphones.
Somewhere in the early 1990s, M$ really got the concept of monopoly. Everything they did was about killing competition. Almost nothing was done to give end-users great software. They created Lose 3.1 and Lose ’9x. They had a shot at producing great software because of the abundance of resources that monopoly gave but then came Internet Exploder 6 (saw it at work yesterday at my bank… discussed it with the manager…) and NT became XP and malware took over the world of IT.
In all that time, shareholders reaped short-term gains. Insiders reaped huge windfalls. End users suffered one indignity after another. A better product was not produced until 2009 by which time the world had seen a better way to do IT: GNU/Linux on desktop and server and Android/Linux on mobile devices. M$ has climbed to the top of the “shareholder value” ladder only to find it’s not resting on anything. The monopoly is a house of cards now that OEMs are discovering they can cut M$ out of the stream of revenue. M$ is scrambling to put something forward in the mobile space buying Nokia (more or less) and pushing a laughable product consumers don’t buy and suing competitors to hold them back. In a year or two all this will bear fruit and M$ will be on a downward slide with no bottom.
Somewhere along the way, M$ became short-sighted, focusing on immediate returns with no thought for the future. The vehicle that is that other OS is about to hit the ditch, having too much inertia for the curve in the road. M$ has made the EULA so onerous, the performance of the OS so low, the burden of malware so great and the price per unit so high that end users are looking for a way out and they will take whatever the OEMs and retailers put in front of them that’s not from M$. We saw the eeePC with GNU/Linux bought in such volume that ASUS could barely keep up with demand for months. Android/Linux and iThingies are outselling M$’s offering by a wide margin. Thin clients running GNU/Linux are selling well. It’s only a matter of time before all retailers are offering good notebooks and desktops running GNU/Linux, Android/Linux even on ARM processors. That’s the death of the Wintel monopoly.
Even the deeply locked-in corporate world does not love M$:
In a recent survey, only 7% of one group of organizations had completed a migration to “7″.
In August 2011, 71% of PCs in that group of businesses had XP installed.
13% have “7″ running on less than 1/4 of their fleet.
If that dedicated group are not following M$, the world with its millions of freedom-loving people anxious for change will not.
Two disappointments for me have been the licensing of Android and the kernel split. We seem to be stuck with the former situation but the kernel is coming home. A project of 15 developers has begun to prepare Android to merge back with Linux. There is a lot of water under the bridge and the diff is nearly the size of the Bible. The idea is to share the load and to share the benefits of a single global kernel. I don’t see a timeline but if more developers join the effort, the happy reunion could happen in 2012. If that abyss is bridged there’s still hope for the licensing.
Linux is one of the most successful projects mankind has ever attempted. Reuniting these two branches will preserve and strengthen the whole thing and make the world a better place. It certainly makes the Linux ecosystem more attractive to more people and organizations. What was a great deal, getting more for less, now becomes getting it all for less. Getting this done sooner rather than later will unite old industries around servers and networking with desktops and mobile gadgets. It’s a huge step in the evolution of IT. It makes it possible to have the same GUI on a smart thingy and an HPC cluster should the need arise and the smart thingies will get smarter, no doubt. Look for new touch interfaces on everything… planes, trains, automobiles, normal PCs and multimedia systems.
It went on until 0500 for me… It was a very long day. Highlights:
the house was full – perhaps 50 people
diverse food was carried in – everything from roast pig to vegetarian egg-rolls smothered in peanut sauce. My favourites were turkey and Swedish meatballs.
a new PC arrived – a cute little Atomic dual core thingy with 4gB RAM. I got to install Debian GNU/Linux on it over the LAN. Whoohoo! Everything worked but the surround sound. Will solve that today. It’s a problem with a particular ASUS mobo which has a published solution.
a young lady noticed the carolling programme I had produced and when I told her it was created on a GNU/Linux machine, one thing led to another and she learned a bit about GNU/Linux. She loved my databases and web applications. She’s a Mac person so I have no clue how that would be done but we discussed virtual machines or migration. Cool.
due to every light and device in the house operating simultaneously we discovered the kitchen outlet for the microwave oven is somehow on the same line as my wife’s office and the lights in the foyer… Obviously the microwave should have its own circuit. The first sign I noticed was the lights in the foyer blinking when the microwave was started… Then the breaker tripped. Sigh.
the almost finished basement was used to great effect with those noisey kids making noise downstairs while we old folks sheltered upstairs. Some people actually used ear-plugs…
It was a great party. Wish you all could have been here. The food was wonderful. The people from all over the world (Philippines, BC, Alberta, Michigan and dozens from Winnipeg) were pretty cool. The new arrivals from Philippines got called for jury duty shortly after they arrived. Welcome to Canada.
In conversation with adults there was amazement at how tech-savvy the youngsters are. Of course, the teenagers and twenty-somethings all had smart phones but even toddlers as young as two were using digital cameras and the VCR… I remember when it took a teenager to set the time on a VCR. I guess Moore’s Law applies to humans somehow. If you don’t know you can’t do something, you can do it. As an educator this is quite surprising to me. The common wisdom is that good hand-eye coordination develops around ages 4-7. In my own children I saw that at 5 they could never hit a bull’s eye, just the paper, somewhere. By 7 they could shoot tiny groups. Same with handwriting. The huge pencils and printing don’t go away until a few years after school. Now a 2.5 year old grand daughter can point and shoot a digital camera and frame the picture nicely. She can also assemble multiple jig-saw puzzles simultaneously. I feel so old. It is time to retire.
The Document Foundation put out a Christmas card with this bit of information: “Today, over 30 million people use LibreOffice in 109 languages, a software developed by 40 core developers and a total of over 300 active developers plus 280 localizers. Probably the biggest achievement is the fact that 230 of those developers are totally new, have never been contributing code to the free office suite before, and were attracted by our open, transparent, meritocratic and inclusive community. Over 16.000 mailing list subscribers are on our 100 mailing lists, and TDF now counts 138 members.”
Only Slackware, CentOS, PCLinuxOS, and ArchLinux do not ship LibreOffice. RedHat is a major contributor to LibreOffice so it will likely be shipped by them sooner or later and CentOS will follow. I think the number “over 30 million” is a conservative estimate. The distros shipping LibreOffice ship more than 30 million. The number must come from their downloads which include users of that other OS so the number could be twice as large as that. I would not be surprised if LibreOffice reaches 100 million users shortly. It’s that good.
ASF has done a lot of good work with their world-famous server and many other server tools. On the desktop, their venture into OpenOffice.org is another matter. In a recent blog entry ASF attempted to define the benefits of doing things their way but instead pointed out bluntly the real disadvantage where the rubber hits the road, under the hands of real human beings: “The permissive Apache License 2.0 reduces restrictions on the use and distribution of our code and thus facilitates a diverse contributor and user base for the benefit of the whole Open Document Format ecosystem. Within an Apache project it is possible to rise above political, social and commercial differences in the pursuit of maximally effective implementations of freely available open standards and related software tools.”
Claiming ASF is good for everyone including the end user is wrong. Clearly, the end user is a part of the ODF ecosystem, the largest and most important part. While ASF permits modifications to source code to be distributed it does not require source code to be distributed. That has serious implications for end users:
malicious software can be added and hidden,
freely donated source code can be exploited by software vendors but not passed on to users of later versions of software, locking end users in to vendors (the donated software source can still be accessed but only ported to new applications with greater difficulty and without features added after the original donation),
developers of donations do not benefit by having their source code published if the source code is not released by other developers,
only people who have access to the source code can really support the applications, and
the lifetime of released binaries may be very short as platforms move on to newer APIs.
So, there are real practical disadvantages to the way ASF handles OpenOffice.org for developers who want source code to live on, for developers who want feedback from end users and for end users. OpenOffice.org is mostly used on client machines so the number of instances can be orders of magnitude larger than distribution to servers. This magnifies the impact on the end users, who are totally left out of Apache’s vision. End users are part of the ecosystem. They use the software more and provide valuable feedback to developers. Preventing them from properly debugging such widely distributed software is a severe shortcoming of ASF’s way of doing things. The ASF rises above nothing but put their head in the sand, ignoring real problems of hiding the source code.
I read how secure “7″ is all the time. Here is a trivial DOS/BSOD attack against 64bit-”7″ that is delivered by normal HTML via the Safari web browser. Safari runs on 5% of PCs according to NetApplicatons. “7″ runs on about a third of all PCs and 3/4 of that is 64bit. That’s 1% of PCs vulnerable to a trivial HTML attack.
I recommend people use GNU/Linux which is not designed to fail.
I have never been to Viet Nam. Most of my knowledge comes from coverage of the Viet Nam war on television. I was looking at IDC’s news this week and found mention of tablet sales in Viet Nam and was curious. Interestingly, iPad is not leading there but Android/Linux has 60% share. Absolutely interesting is that “Linux” shows up at 1.3% share and that other OS is nowhere to be seen.
Admittedly it is a small sample but it shows GNU/Linux can thrive given the opportunity. The opportunity in Viet Nam and other emerging markets is that price/performance is absolutely vital. Profit margins for global corporations is the last thing consumers want to pump up. When people struggle to survive, GNU/Linux makes sense. It’s the right way to do IT. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. I wonder what tablets in Viet Nam run?
Viet Nam certainly has no problem selling GNU/Linux. site:www.trananh.vn linux gets 1700 hits. Oh my! That’s a growing business: “November 2011, the business results of the company’s continued growth: sales companywide months reached 151.86 billion 11/2011 growth than 9.48% and profit before tax was 8.32 billion copper increased 16.36% over the same period last year”
Their channel is unusual, too, with telephone and e-mail orders.
“Price-sensitivity is still a major characteristic of the local retail market. According to Ng Juan Jin, Market Analyst for Client Devices Research at IDC ASEAN, “The popularity of mininotebooks is evidence of end users prioritizing affordability over more advanced specifications. The surge in shipments indicates that first time users are content with the functionality of mininotebooks. And, given the relatively low adoption rate of PCs and the large low-income segment in the Philippines, there is still growth potential for mininotebooks provided prices remain low relative to other competing IT devices.” Sequential and year-on-year growth rates for mininotebooks are at 29% and 36% respectively.”
There was a party at my house this evening and besides the warm/fuzzy familial stuff, two people were introduced to GNU/Linux. One wanted to check FaceBook and the other wanted to know more. All I had to do was boot the machine for the first and write URIs for Distrowatch and Debian GNU/Linux for the other. A few questions were asked and answered to get the ball rolling. It was a good end to the evening.
Clearly, those who claim ordinary folk are not ready for GNU/Linux or GNU/Linux is not ready for ordinary folk are out to lunch. Neither party, although they don’t ever remember hearing of GNU/Linux had any difficulty grasping the concept of free software that is Free Software. Sharing is something people understand. It’s a GUI folks. The first person had only to point and click, read and type, more or less the same as they usually do. The second person understood that the world can make its own software without help from M$ and the world could share software freely.
UPDATE
An unintended consequence of the party was that a visitor left a child seat in the back of my car and when they did so, they left the light on discharging the battery overnight. A couple of minutes on the welding machine fixed that… I set it on the lowest range, 30A DC, and made contact with the ground clamp and a welding rod. About two minutes allowed the engine to start. Darn hybrids have such small auxiliary batteries…
My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.
My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.
I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.
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