Today is Sue’s birthday. If she had lived, she would be 51. One of those days with bitter-sweet memories. I love this picture of her feigning astonishment at one of Tom’s tall stories.
Reboot, reboot I say!
Passing through Cambridge station the other day, Alan Jackson of AidWorld noticed an interesting malfunction.
Normally, it’s the central monitor that is displaying the Blue Screen of Death. This time it was the left-hand screen, displaying a prompt well known to those aged 50 and over! Ah, the days of booting from floppies… Don’t think my kids have ever used one.
Specialist schools: the new suckers
Here’s a neat little sca…, er scheme. The UK government, in its laudable attempt to raise school standards, has a ‘specialist school’ programme. The aim is to encourage schools to aspire to excellence in a particular field, and to reward such aspirations and efforts. All very right and proper, not to say admirable. As I understand it, if a school gets specialist status, then the government offers it additional funding (~£100k) provided the school can match that by raising £50k itself from companies and sponsors.
So far, so good. Schools in affluent areas can generally raise the necessary £50k, but their counterparts in poorer areas have great difficulty in raising the dosh.
Enter, stage right, a friendly US monopolist which offers to provide the sponsorship needed to tip the school over the threshold.
Hooray! Microsoft is generously donating £50k to every needy, aspirational school! What a turn-up for the books!
Er, no. In the words of the hapless Specialist Schools Trust,
Microsoft has offered to support a further 65 aspiring specialist schools. Support is for schools applying in the October 2005 bidding round only and will be in the form of a software licence entitling schools to Microsoft software titles, upgrades and support over the initial four-year development period.
Neat, isn’t it. The cost to Microsoft is precisely zilch. But the result is 65 more hapless schools being locked into a software and hardware ecology that none of them can sustain or support. It’s a bit like a re-run of those Imperialist narratives where African tribesmen sign away their natural resources for a handful of baubles. And what’s funny is that the Specialist Schools Trust professes itself “delighted” by the wheeze. That’s probably because the Trust’s worthies know as little about software as the aforementioned tribesmen knew about Uranium 235.
Microsoft understands the value of W.C. Fields’s famous adage: never give a sucker an even break.
What Google Maps does to the Cheney residence
Have a look. You’ll find it here.
Thanks to James Fallows in the New York Times.
The new gender gap?
Why is it that only 4% of legally downloaded music is being bought by women? Interesting Guardian report by Natalie Hanman.
Dumping Microsoft
Today’s Observer column on the benefits to UK schools of weaning themselves off Microsoft software.
On not believing everything you read on the Web
Last week, George Monbiot wrote a fascinating column in the Guardian. It opened thus:
On April 16, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing … 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980”. His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?
So he telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy’s letter to them.
I don’t think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity: “This is complete bullshit.” A few hours later, they sent me an email: “Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible.” He had cited data that was simply false, he had failed to provide references, he had completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.
So where had Bellamy got his numbers from? Read George’s article for the grisly details, but the answer, in a nutshell, is that they came from websites published by a number of fruitcakes who are into denial about global warming. The article is a salutary warning to anyone who believes something on the grounds that they saw it on the Net. It should be required reading for every teacher who tells pupils to “look it up on the Web”.
Open Source Software in schools
The BECTA report is out. Its findings are what one would expect: significant savings and improved performance from dropping Microsoft. At last, the penny begins to drop. Yippee!
Tom Friedman and Open Source software
Tom Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat, has quite a lot in it about Open Source software and the OSS movement generally. Doc Searls has been through it with a fine-tooth comb and written a very interesting two-part critique. I was struck by this passage:
The problem here and throughout the book lies in Tom’s big-company frame of reference. As (I can only assume) a Windows user, and as a widely traveled fellow who no doubt sees approximately everybody in the world using Windows, he grants Microsoft a degree of importance it does not deserve, in a domain it did little to develop: namely, the Net, which is the flat anvil on which all the other flattening forces he profiles hammer down–with the single exception of open source.
What he misses is that the practices, values, traditions, standards, protocols and products that created the Net also are those of what we now call the Free Software and Open Source movements. Yes, commercial interests were involved. Paul Kunz of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) gives an excellent talk (see Resources) about the history of the World Wide Web, of the role played by high energy physics laboratories (including SLAC and CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee created the Web) and of the roles played by largely uncredited commercial interests, such as IBM (with BITNET), NeXT (providing the machines on which the Web first ran) and Digital Equipment Corp. (With machines and various Decants). In summary, he says, “Use of the backbone remains free, and ARPANET open-source culture persists.”
Let’s face it: if it were up to commercial interests alone, Microsoft especially, the Net we now know never would have come into being. Instead we’d have a forest of silos such as the one that still comprises the instant messaging “market”, where few of the silos–notably Apple’s and AOL’s–communicate with one another.
Doc’s right about the way Friedman’s worldview is clouded by the company he keeps.
Tom also falls into the common trap of assuming that open source is fundamentally, rather than secondarily or peripherally, in competition with commercial software, especially Microsoft’s. Once trapped, it’s easy to characterize open source vs. Microsoft as another sports contest between market leaders. Although some competition does exist, there is far more symbiosis in the real world where we find countless Windows clients making use of open-source infrastructure and open-source products, as well.
I like the way Doc thinks and writes. He has a way of getting to the heart of things. For example:
The fact is, or will be, far more money will be made because of open source than will be made with open source–or with any of the infrastructural (in Tom’s words, vanilla) software it replaces. Think of open-source infrastructure as a huge, flat cake on which you can build a vast new market for any kind of topping you like. A cake which, by the way, only gets bigger.
Never buy graph paper again!
What a great idea — Free Online Graph Paper — in PDF format.