The First Blog?

This is the first weblog page published in 1997 on Camworld. Useful for an article I’m writing about Blogging.

The other side of the album vs. tracks argument

Interesting piece in Salon. Makes the point that in a track-downloading world, some of the serendipity you get from albums will be lost. Quote:

“Music bundling means that the sure things that are catchy but utterly forgettable, together with the not-so-sure things that can surprise and sometimes nourish our artistic hunger, both end up in the hands of consumers and critics — who can then sample the latter for free. This exposure of chancy ideas is a great boon to the creative process. But because of the discrete selling and buying of music, digital single by digital single, that iTunes and its kin will foster, we can expect a decline in music bundling, and thus in risk-taking and its shy companion, innovation. ”

Getting to the nub of SCO’s claims about Linux and Unix

There’s a fantastically intelligent and illuminating article by Ian Lance Taylor based on a visit to SCO, talking to the folks there about their case against IBM and adding his own reflections on the issue. For the first time I feel I understand what this case is really about.

New life for old hard disks

Recently I decided to breathe new life into this old Dell laptop by installing Linux on it.

But first it needed a bigger hard drive, so one was duly installed. Problem: what to do with the old drive, which is a perfectly good 10Gb IBM unit? Answer: my friend Quentin brought me back a cute little Firewire drive enclosure from the US. It clicks open to reveal a little motherboard and a slot for the drive.

Slide the drive in, snap the case shut, slip on the rubberised shock protector and — Hey Presto! — you have a neat little Firewire drive.

Not quite an iPod, but not bad either!

Where on Earth is Saddam Hussein?

Way back in the Stone Age, my kids had an ‘educational’ game for the Apple Mac called “Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?” The object of the exercise was to seduce children in to learning world geography– quite a challenge for American kids, I would guess. In the box with the disk was an invaluable reference work — the CIA World Factbook. So how about a new game — “Where on Earth is Saddam Hussein?” According to the NYT, US officials are convinced he’s still at large in Iraq. At the moment, this game is for real. But if it should fail, there may be psychic benefits from converting it into a computer-based entertainment. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Iraqis cannot see the joke.

Why the WMD issue is so important

Excellent, thoughtful article in The Atlantic by Clive Cook. Concludes: “Deliberately misleading voters, even in a cause as good as the destruction of Saddam Hussein, is bad in itself. It may very well prove counterproductive as well — especially if America and its allies are right to suppose that the war against the West’s enemies is only just beginning. In prosecuting this long war, the electorate’s trust is a vital strategic asset. George W. Bush’s stock of credibility with voters seems ample, for now. But what happens next time when Tony Blair, clutching bulging dossiers of intelligence, asks Britain to trust his assessment of national security and to go to war? Unless danger by then is staring them in the face, his audience is going to take an awful lot of convincing.”

SCO gets loonier by the minute

As it thrashes around to find a way of extracting money from IBM and other Linux providers, SCO has now taken to attacking Linus Torvalds. SCO’s amended suit against I.B.M., filed on Bloomsday, contends that Linus appears to have a casual attitude toward intellectual property rights.

NYT story reads, in part: “SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, sued I.B.M. in March, contending that the computer company improperly copied Unix code into Linux.

SCO bought the source code and license rights to Unix in 1995. I.B.M. denies the allegations and counters that SCO is vastly overstating its contract rights.

‘As I.B.M. executives know,’ the filing states, “a significant flaw of Linux is the inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual property origins of contributed source code that comes in from those many different software developers.'”

Wow! How to lose friends and influence. This case is clearly run by ambulance-chasing lawyers. It’s a bit like opening a suit in an ecclesiastical court by suggesting that the Pope beats his wife.

Hurrah for Microsoft!

Eh? Well, on one subject (spam), Bill Gates and I see eye to eye. And Microsoft has started to throw its formidable resources into the battle against spammers. According to the NYT, the company filed lawsuits on June 17 against 15 groups of individuals and companies that it says collectively sent its clients more than two billion unwanted e-mail messages.

Unwanted e-mail, commonly called spam, has been a fast-growing problem for many e-mail users. The Hotmail service from Microsoft, with 140 million users, has been a fat target for spammers.

The company estimates that more than 80 percent of the more than 2.5 billion e-mail messages sent each day to Hotmail users are spam. It now blocks most of those spam messages.

All of the large Internet service providers, including America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo, have started filing lawsuits against e-mailers that they say are sending spam.

Microsoft’s suits represent the largest number filed at one time, and reflect Microsoft’s willingness to devote some of its considerable resources to fighting spam. It promised more such actions to come.”

How Linus stays sane

By not getting worked up the way geeks usually do. “My basic strategy has always been to not care too much. It actually ends up working wonders – avoiding confrontation by just walking away. The thing is, I don’t usually feel as deeply about some of the issues they feel strongly about, and that makes it easier just to ignore the politics – and as a result, the political consequences. That also allows me to concentrate on the things I do enjoy, namely the technical discussions.

Q: How long will that work? Well, it’s worked so far. Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can’t totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral. Again, that comes from me caring a lot more about the technology than about the politics, and that usually means that my opinions are colored mostly by what I think is the right thing to do technically rather than for some nebulous good.”

[Wired interview.]

What is SCO playing at?

“In an escalating legal battle, the SCO Group announced yesterday that it was revoking I.B.M.’s license for software essential to a multibillion-dollar business and that it had asked a federal court to block that business permanently.

The SCO action focused on the license for AIX, the I.B.M. version of the Unix operating system. But the legal dispute is stirring wider concerns in the computer industry because it has the potential to affect the many corporations now using the GNU Linux operating system, a close relative of Unix….”[NYT report.]