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Eric Sink: Baptists and Boundaries

By on January 20, 2007 in Home Page

Eric Sink, a fine essayist and software developer, does a little vanity Googling in “Baptists and Boundaries” and makes several excellent points about people and their world views, the punchiest of which is “Objects in browser are smaller than they appear.” Do read the essay and enjoy.

I’ve been involved in several insular communities (Commodore, GEOS, Amiga, FoxPro) that believed that they had The One True Truth and all others were mistaken, ignoring the growing evidence outside the walls that other alternatives might have something going for them, too. My biggest shock in my journeys outside the Microsoft Reality Distortion Field has been discovering that there are rich and powerful tools, long traditions of software excellence and some subtle (and blatent) differences in culture. The rich bazaar of choices: BSD vs. UNIX vs. Linux vs. Solaris, Perl vs. Python vs. PHP vs. Ruby, PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. SQLite vs. BerkeleyDB, tabs vs. spaces, vi vs. emacs, n-tier vs. mvc, African vs. English swallow, only add to the richness and freedom of the environment.

The biggest complaint of people stuck with a one-size-fits-all solution is that there is no choice. The biggest complaint when faced with the dazzling alternatives of FOSS is that there are too many choices. With great choices comes great responsibility. Conversely, “choosing” to stay with a one-size-fits-all monolithic solution is no choice at all, but rather an abdication of responsibility and a surrendering of freedom. Choose wisely.

CentraLUG, 5-Feb-2007: Matt Brodeur and GnuPG, OpenPGP, keysigning

By on January 18, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, Security, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Next month’s meeting is on February 5th at 7 PM.

Directions and maps are available at http://www.centralug.org and on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/directions.htm. This month, we’ll be meeting at our usual location in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

At this month’s meeting, Matt Brodeur will present an introduction to e-mail and file security using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). The talk will cover basic concepts of encryption and digital signatures. Examples and demos will use GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a free (GPL) implementation of the OpenPGP standard available for most modern operating systems. Following the presentation, a PGP keysigning event will be held. Anyone interested in exchanging key signatures with other local PGP users can find details on our website,… as soon as we’ve set it up. Stay tuned.

Matt Brodeur is a Quality Assurance Engineer at Red Hat in Westford, MA and volunteer in local LUGs. He has previously presented OpenPGP talks at the Boston Linux & Unix User Group.

More details on the group and directions to the meeting can be found at http://www.centralug.org and at http://www.gnhlug.org.

Ed Foster’s Gripelog || Reader Voices: Invalid Terms

By on January 16, 2007 in Home Page

Ed Foster’s Gripelog || Reader Voices: Invalid Terms asks, “At what point is it clear that a nasty license provision goes so far across the line that it must be deemed invalid? That seems to be an increasingly hot topic, due in large part to recent discussions here and elsewhere about various terms in Microsoft’s Windows Vista EULA.” Anyone considering installing Vista needs to be informed about the liabilities they may be assuming for themselves and their organizations. Or not, depending on whether you’d like to go to court and debate the validity of these licenses…

Ernie The Attorney: Avoid penalty for switching cellphone carriers

By on January 16, 2007 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Home Page, Technology

Ernie The Attorney blogs about how to Avoid penalty for switching cellphone carriers when you’re signing up for the new Apple iPhone. He points to Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch where Mike suggests, “My recommendation is to simply throw out the PC and switch to Mac. You’ll do it eventually anyway. Might as well do it now.” Wow! Will the iPhone be the new driver for Switchers?

Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs – New York Times

By on January 14, 2007 in Home Page, Technology

In today’s New York Times, Randall Stross writes, Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs

Here is how FairPlay works: When you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you can play them on one — and only one — line of portable player, the iPod. And when you buy an iPod, you can play copy-protected songs bought from one — and only one — online music store, the iTunes Music Store.

Well, I suppose that might be “fair play” if you make your living selling iPods or you’re a record company whose business plan is to sell listeners the same music over and over, each time they want to listen on a different media. Great business if you can get away with it.

Make no mistake: I’m not advocating we steal content. That’s not right. The Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression puts it succinctly:

  • Piracy of an artist’s work is illegal. Fair use is not.
  • We have the right to hear, speak, learn, sing, think, watch, and be heard.
  • No one should assume by default that we’re criminals, and the technology we use shouldn’t do so either.
  • We have a right to use technology to shift time & space.
DRM-encumbered devices are Defective By Design — intended to prevent you from using all of the capabilities of the device.
 

Groklaw – EU Commission Study Finds You’ll Save Money Switching to FOSS

By on January 12, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, Technology

Groklaw points to EU Commission Study Finds You’ll Save Money Switching to FOSS. The “free” adjective has always been a burden for FOSS, but when the other choice sounds like “Open Sores” it doesn’t take a marketing genius to decide… that geeks shouldn’t try to sell software. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) stalking-horse has been one of the best ways to confuse the issues, like the “shopping cart” estimates of cost of living. It depends if you prefer organic tofu or roast beast. Calculating the total cost of developing, maintaining, installing, training, supporting, migrating to/from and disposing of software is a guesstimate so mired in swags and assumptions it can mean whatever the company paying for the study wants it to mean, now can’t it?

Survey of email servers shows Open Source still king

By on January 11, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Over on the O’Reilly site, Ken Simpson and Stas Bekman write of their adventures “Fingerprinting the World’s Mail Servers.” They report:

Of the 400,000 domains we surveyed, 31.2 percent of them (still) receive their email via open source mail server software. Of these, the most popular by far is still the old guard, Sendmail (12.3 percent), with Postfix a relatively close second (8.6 percent). Exim and qmail are roughly tied (5.3 and 5.0 percent, respectively) in third place.

Interesting.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.