Arguments against Linux…

… are the same kind of arguments one might use against Longhorn. Ingenious article by Charlie Demerjian in which he first sets out the arguments Microsoft uses to dissuade CIOs from switching to Linux. Then he does a search-and-replace on the piece, substituting ‘Longhorn’ for ‘Linux’ and — guess what — the same arguments look plausible. Lovely rhetorical trick. Conclusion: “Pay now, and get off the gerbil wheel, or pay later, and stay on it. Your choice.”

Thanks for Dave Hill for the link.

New Naughtons

In response to popular demand, here are portraits of the two new residents who have taken over my study, thereby rendering it totally unsuitable for any kind of reflective or creative work.

This is Zoombini, who is nice but dim.

And this is her sister, Tilly, who is shaping up nicely as an inventive scamp.

Memoirs of a fast-food virgin

Morgan Spurlock decided to eat only McDonald’s food for 30 days. The result? An award-winning film and a very bad liver. My Observer colleague Tim Adams repeated the experiment in Britain, but after seven days of burgers and shakes his body told him to stop. His sobering account is here. I wasn’t entirely surprised by Spurlock’s experience over a whole month. But the thought that even a week’s exposure to McCrap could do perceptible damage comes as a bit of a shock.

Cultural revolution

There’s a very thoughtful piece in yesterday’s Guardian by Larry Elliott, the paper’s economics editor. In it, he explores the question of why the IT ‘revolution’ hasn’t spawned the kind of cultural upheaval which accompanied the first and second industrial revolutions. “The question is”, he writes, “whether there has been much creativity, and if not why not. Perhaps it was just a fluke that past periods of structural economic change coincided with revolutionary movements in the arts. Perhaps the old forms — the novel, the symphony and so on — have been pushed as far as they can be”.

One possibity he considers is what one might call the Robert Gordon Hypothesis. Gordon is the economist who has argued that the so-called ‘IT revolution’ is pretty tame stuff compared with the upheavals caused by steam, electricity, motor and air transport, movies, radio and indoor plumbing.

This may be right, but there is another possibility, namely that Elliott is looking on too short a time span.

Suppose, for example, that the Web turns out to be as radical a transformation in our communications ecology as the invention of printing. As a mass phenomenon, the Web is now 11 years old. Gutenberg’s first bible was printed in 1455 in the German city of Mainz.

Now try this thought experiment: it’s 1466 and you are a MORI pollster standing with your clipboard on a street, doing an opinion survey on the town’s residents.

Q1: Who is Johannes Gutenberg? Is he
(a) a butcher,
(b) a baker,
(c) a candlestick maker or
(d) a printer?
[Eh? What’s a ‘printer’?]

Q2. Which of the following effects do you think printing by moveable type will have?
(a) Undermining of the authority of the Catholic Church
(b) The rise of Protestantism?
(c) The emergence of ‘science’
(d) The Romantic Movement
(e) The redefinition of ‘childhood’ as a period in life before young people become regarded as ‘adults’. Tick all that apply.

You get the point. the invention of printing had all of these world-transforming effects, and more. But eleven years into the revolution, nobody could have foreseen them. My feeling is that the same may apply to the revolution that is underway now. The ground is shifting under our feet, but we cannot see it. The cultural impact of the IT revolution, in other words, will be visible only in retrospect.

After Munich, what? Paris perhaps

Last year the city of Munich famously snubbed Microsoft and plumped for open source software when upgrading its 14,000-PC system. Last week, the French government announced that it was moving many of its installations to Linux. And now it seems that the Paris city administration is thinking about doing the same.

What’s going on? It would be nice to think that public officials across the world are waking up to the perilous lock-in implicit in continuing to use Microsoft software. But it might just be that they’ve cynically twigged that the best way to squeeze whopping discounts from Redmond is to threaten a move to Linux. Thoughtful article about all this in IT.director.com. Excerpt:

“It is interesting to note in all of this that the Linux battle has become political in a major way. National and local governments across the world (the list is long and includes China, Japan, Brazil and much of Europe) have got the Linux bug, for three reasons. The first is that they think that they are paying too much for software, particularly desktop software. The second is that they believe that Open Source will do more to stimulate the local software industry than the purchase of proprietary software from a US provider. The third is that Windows poor security record has cost Microsoft a good deal of credibility. Microsoft can say what it likes about the fact that Linux suffers security breaches too, but the fact is that the expensive worms are the Windows worms.

Paris has yet to make a decision, but the simple fact that it is contemplating the Linux desktop indicates the inroads that Linux on the desktop is now making. The Linux momentum is growing and the Linux market share will inevitably grow with it. This is all a self-feeding phenomenon. The more success it has, the more that Novell, Red Hat and the rest will invest in improving usability and the greater the number of vendors that will see Linux as the platform of opportunity.”

The monoculture debate

The question of whether a Microsoft-based monoculture makes the world more vulnerable to catastrophic failure is interesting and complex. Following on his earlier essay on the subject, Ed Felten has published an excellent report of the debate at USENIX last week between Dan Geer and Microsoft’s Scott Charney. Here’s the gist:

“Geer went first, making his case for the dangers of monoculture. He relied heavily on an analogy to biology, arguing that just as genetic diversity helps a population resist predators and epidemics, diversity in operating systems would help the population of computers resist security attacks. The bio metaphor has some power, but I thought Geer relied on it too heavily, and that he would have been better off talking more about computers.

Charney went second, and he made two main arguments. First, he said that we already have more diversity than most people think, even within the world of Windows. Second, he said that the remedy that Geer suggests — adding a modest level of additional diversity, say adopting two major PC operating systems with a 50/50 market share split — would do little good. The bad guys would just learn how to carry out cross-platform attacks; or perhaps they wouldn’t even bother with that, since an attack can take the whole network offline without penetrating a large fraction of machines. (For example, the Slammer attack caused great dislocation despite affecting less than 0.2% of machines on the net.) The bottom line, Charney said, is that increasing diversity would be very expensive but would provide little benefit.”

More from the ‘You couldn’t make it up’ department

“There was only one way Microsoft could screw up its dominance among Web browsers, and by golly, those clever folks up in Redmond seem to have come up with it: Allow a neverending string of increasingly dangerous security flaws to scare users away. And when a government agency posts what amounts to a public service announcement on behalf of the competition, you can almost hear the self-destruct mechanism clicking down. Last week was particularly rough for Internet Explorer, with the disclosure of a nasty, data-snatching Trojan that exploited a combination of vulnerabilities that had gone unfixed for months. Then Microsoft issued a work-around that didn’t really solve the problem. Now comes word that there’s yet another hole through which this evil can creep. But IE still has a few things going for it, namely ubiquity and inertia. “Mozilla has shown itself to be a capable browser and has only gotten better with each release, but until something bad happens to more people, then the interest in moving to that is not going to be that high,” said Dennis Barr, IT manager at civil engineering consulting company Larkin Group Inc., in Kansas City, Mo.

That’s right — the perceptions are the problem: From Steve Ballmer’s annual State of the Empire memo to the Microsoft troops: ‘We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough, and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security.'”

Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Thanks to Good Morning, Silicon Valley.

The prius of progress

One unintended side-effect of buying an offbeat car is that it encourages one’s friends to make outrageous puns. I’ve already been asked if I will become ‘Prius sensitive’. And someone has even adapted Oscar Wilde’s crack about a cynic being “someone who knows the prius of everything and the value of nothing”! It’s tough being an innovative consumer. Sigh.

Latin tag

Quentin wants to know what’s the plural of Prius. The answer, surely, is Prii. (Just like alumnus and alumni). Er, Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Textual versatility

According to an AP report, a Singapore student, Kimberly Yeo, 23, managed to type a complicated 26-word message on her phone in 43.66 seconds. This beats the existing text message record of 67 seconds, set last year by Briton James Trusler in Sydney, Australia. Contestants had to type: ‘The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.’ Using predictive text was not allowed, and the punctuation needed to be spot on, too.”