Gvote

My advice to the right-wingers in American politics is this: beware! The open source community is mobilizing to shut you down.

I don't know from where, but the 'libs' are going to hunt you down and take away your 'G' membership cards.

Just giving you fair warning.

Peace out.

Republicans hate Democrats

Despite clear and documented evidence to the contrary, US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist maintains ignorance to his own assets. Frist's sale of the "blind trust" fetched an undisclosed amount, but his earlier statements indicate values in the range of $7 to $35 million.

Okay. We don't know if this particular transaction was illegal or not, but we damn-well know now that the Frist family are the epitomy of the bloated & greedy healthcare industry -- being the largets for-profit hospital company in America. One quesiton certainly looms: do you trust Senator Frist to be the next leader of the free world?

Just asking.

Prosecutors, SEC Probe Frist Stock Sale - Yahoo! News

Pink promotes Homophobia

New University of Iowa law professor (and former Bostonian) Erin Buzuvis apparently came to Hawkeye country to make trouble. She says Coach Hayden Fry promoted homophobia by having the visitor locker room at Kinnick Stadium painted pink and plans to change her new home.

Doggonit! I knew that should have been a screening question in the hiring process.

Funny. "Buz" sounds a bit like a "Butch".

TheIowaChannel.com - Sports - Professor Says Pink Locker Room Promotes Sexism, Homophobia: "Homophobia"

I came up with this neat idea...

I'm not sure where I came up with the idea, but I thought of a big national coffee house that seems to be the epitomy of the undermining of American values and culture and wanted to do something that people would want to support.

If I start a coffee chain, it will be a locally owned franchise in each location and have only a few restrictive guidelines. The first rule: wi-fi is free. Beyond a few basic rules, let them serve Folgers in plastic cups for all I care, so long as the spirit of open source is felt.

Oddly, when I Googled "open source cafe", which I made up, seems someone else made it up first:
The open source cafe - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Ideas - News

Rats!

Gov't vs Family: A Conflict of Values

The Des Moines Register is telling us that kids are upset about a ban on soft-drinks on campus. In its next breath, the reporter writes that students now go off-campus to get their sugar fix. Well, I've made a couple fundamental observations:

1) Cash-draining, electricity hungry, health compromising vending machines have no place in public schools -- and I don't care what they put in them.

2) I'm expected, by law, to leave my kids in the care of the public school system, purportedly so they might get a proper education. I submit that when the schools release students to run around town during lunch, health and education are both undermined.

When I went to public school, we had a lunch ticket. One punch meant you got a plate of food handed to you and you could add bread & butter and milk, or drink water. It was a certified diet and parents could trust it. There were no vending machines, and no, students were not permitted to leave campus. It worked. Parents had trust. Don't dare tell me the budget made you poison my son.

Admit it. Fast food is now part of our school culture because administrators have no backbone and I think that's a sad commentary.

Family "A" gives their kid cash to go to Quizno's for lunch every day. Family "B: wants their kids to eat school lunch for nutritional reasons. For whatever reason, perhaps out of a sense of peer pressure or for social reasons, kid from family "B" wants to go to Quizno's too. Dad "B" says, "No son, I'm against your eating fast food more than once a week". Dad "B" subsequently has a fight on his hands.

This is part of a larger conflict. Cash strapped schools are compromising health out of greed of their administration. Soft drink bottlers and vending companies would like to see more of the market share. I have no problem with most of the creative ways they find to increase market share -- until they begin to enlist public schools to bid for their profits.

Parents feel that soft drink bottlers and schools make bad bed fellows. But it appears, once again, greed wins.

Researchers have found that rats, when given a choice, will consistently turn down healthy food in favor of sugary treats and cocaine, to the point of self-detriment and even their own demise. Unfortunately, it looks like our kids are more like rats than we want to think. So a level sense of guidance by parents and responsible adults is something society should value.

So what's the deal? Have parents become less concerned about the well-being of their kids? Are they complacent? Or has right-wing capitalistic greed gotten in the way of common sense? We report; you screw up the world.

Put down the talking points and rub the make-up off your seedy little face, Mr. Witherspoon, and see how you're poisoning society at its very base. We see through the phony spin. The fact that you still wanted to be superintendent, even after finding out that you'd have to sell our kids into virtual slavery, should give the city pause. Stop throwing money and spin at the problems you've helped to create. And start doing your job. Educate our kids. Stop feeding students -- and everyone else -- crap.

DesMoinesRegister.com

Elevator to space?

Although I haven't seen any official confirmation, Space.com reports that the FAA has given go-ahead for use of airspace to test a space elevator.

Now, you might be picturing a very tall and perhaps cartoonesque square shaft that is mounted to the ground and extending to the heavens. Close, but not quite.

Actually, the concept is to string a ribbon or tether, anchored to the ground and extended to a point in space that is beyond geosynchronous orbit (more than 22,500 miles above Earth's surface) with a counter-weight at the top, effectively pulling it tight.

The sheer tensile strength required to accomplish such a feat would be astounding, however, once in place, the space elevator would reduce the cost of space travel enormously. For instance, you could then build a car or 'climber' that is completely solar powered, eliminating the need for onboard fuel. Another concept is to create a pulley system that could be powered on the space end of the ribbon, which, as we know, could be nearly or fully friction-free -- and again, powered by the sun.

And yes, just in case you were wondering, this is not a pipe dream, but a completely feasible venture, begun by the LiftPort Group, a private company based in Bremerton, Washington.

I'm so paranoid, I'm convinced the elevator in our 4-story office building will break while I'm aboard. Can you imagine riding with me on the space elevator to orbit?

Read more about the space elevator at WikiPedia:
Space elevator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Innovation kills profits

Every time I turn around, I'm hearing about built-in limitations; products that won't perform fundamental tasks only because such enhancements might threaten a company's ability to further deepen its pockets at your expense.

The Rokr iPhone from our friends at Motorola and Apple is another example. The crumby thing can't even download an iTunes song or play an MP3 as a ringtone, features that would have made sense.

Deliberate disabilities like these will bite these non-innovators squarely in the posterior.

The Observer | Business | John Naughton: Why the iPhone won't rock your world

500 Internal Server Error

The supposed new plugin for MSIE -- the one that adds security and tabbed browsing like Firefox does -- is apparently the victim of that darn 500 Server error.

500 Internal Server Error: "Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error."

Software Best Practices -- or Pipe Dream Novelties

I make no apologies for asking people to unplug their computers, stack them in their basements or garages and leave them alone. Because there's way too much junk tech making it to market.

I know there have been a lot of tremendously innovative and pivotal technologies developed in the last fifteen years...and there's been a lot of money wasted on junk programming too.

Before any feature goes into any application, it ought to be well-written, bullet proof, sound, secure, as lean as possible and agile enough for gradual amendments and improvements. In fact, until you adopt that concept, I’ll keep my money.

The reasons features are released so fast & furious -- before a rock-solid proof of performance is demonstrated -- I'll never understand. It's bad business because it makes people not like your products. Write programs one module at a time, then invite anyone to try their damndest to break them. Write applications that break them.

Here are two dirty little secrets:

1) Decision-makers know that well-written software doesn't need to be upgraded or reversioned every year.
2) The Cardinal Sin is letting any technology, computer program or operating system leave the warehouse with bloating or security or functional flaws.

I’ve just outlined why we need the Open Source community and the products developed by it: flaws are exposed, discussed, shared and fixed. Now, if more developers would learn to operate in this transparent environment, they will have happier customers willing to spend more money with them.

Where was Linus when we needed him?

I don't know Linux creator Linus Torvalds, but I like him. I wish he'd been there when IBM was hunting for an operating system for their PCs. The world would have been a better place because I really believe computers wouldn't suck so much today.

I think television would've been better off if, when color technology was developed, it had been done from scratch, like HDTV. FM would have been better too, if stereo broadcasts didn't have to play to mono sets. Beta was better than VHS, cassette was better than 8-track and grandpa was a lot nicer than dad, but people sometimes tend toward choices that benefit them in the short term.

But I also think people can make new choices if they believe they can make a difference. If we vote with our feet, stop buying products from a bloated company with a bloated bottom line through bloated code -- for a while at least -- maybe the big guys will start looking at our needs as a way to a fair profit.

I'm not for a boycotts, but would it hurt to buy something Open Source this week or this month?

War driving for Skype

You may have noticed that I like VoIP. Probably because I like the idea of paying nothing to call around the world more than I like paying 30 cents or more per minute. In fact, I think I'll be carrying a wifi VoIP handset soon, and you may see me driving around the neighborhood looking for a hotspot during a Qwest DSL outage (and judging from the last month, that'll probably be tonight).

But the minute you introduce the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network largely via old copper), you start paying real cash, especially if you're in business. Telecom costs add up fast.

No loyalty for ma bell
If small businesses understand the importance of having broadband and have the willingness to use programs like Skype -- and trust me, they do -- then the telecom trend will move that way even for larger organizations and individuals alike. The phone was a novelty in 1920, as was the fax machine in 1980, and they're both essential to business today. VoIP will be too, but the learning curve is getting a lot sharper.

By the way, I won't be a bit surprised if I'm getting WLAN from Google in the next five years, to enable my VoIP addiction. Perhaps I'll have a Gphone account then too!