MishMash

New Scientist on Biometrics

Don’t know how long this will stay there (New Scientist interviews
online seem to go awol after a while), but here’s
one that everyone’s favourite Home Secretary would do well to
read. In very short: biometrics suck.

Reg: Aussies back Open Source attack

According
to the Register, South Australia are likely to end up with a legal
requirement for government offices to use open source software “where
practicable”. New South Wales is also trying to educate its
parlimentarians on the subject.

Unsurprisingly Microsoft is fighting both initiatives. Says the Reg:

Microsoft Australia’s Martin Gregory made an appearance at the debate, carrying the company line about choice, choice, choice.

Software should be picked because of its strength as a product and overall value, Gregory argued.

Which neatly embeds the assumption — of great value to Microsoft — that the software which shows greatest “strength as a product” now is the one to go for, and that “overall value” similarly need take no account of the future: risk of lock-in, exposure to the whims of the supplier, ability to choose when to abandon one piece of software in favour of another, the ability to modify software (or have it modified) to better suit changing needs, and so on.

In the mean time, there is a Silbert and Gullivan parody based around the SCO vs. IBM tiff (to the tune of Modern Major General, of course: Modern SCO Executive.

RMS comments on SCO vs. IBM spat

SCO, no longer able generate any income from value, appear intent
on squeezing a bit out through the legal system. It remains to be seen
how things pan out, but since in the long run — whether they have a
legitimate claim against IBM or not — this can only harm their
reputation and certainly won’t rescue them from oblivion, I can only
assume that they’re hoping for a quick buck for their directors and
shareholders.

Robert X. Cringley has a Pulpit piece on the subject, which not only predicts that SCO will get nothing from the suit, it also predicts lots of damage to Linux and Unix, mostly in favour of Microsoft.

SCO is effectively trying to destroy both the UNIX and Linux markets. This makes no sense, but that is the logical result of their current efforts. The idea that 1,500 of America’s largest companies will be forced to drop Linux and will do so in favor of SCO’s UNIXware is ludicrous. Why would those companies spend big bucks buying licenses from SCO — a company they are upset with — when they can comply just as easily, and almost for free, by converting to one of the BSD variants?

Richard Stallman, meanwhile, has also made a few points. He’s banging several of his old drums:

• the argument here is about code in Linux, the GNU system can be
  used with other kernels besides Linux
• the term “intellectual property” is meaningless, even confusing, and deliberately designed to be so

Most importantly, he also points out the obvious: if the code is copyright SCO (which Cringley reckons it isn’t), then it gets taken out and replaced. Big deal.

Linux on the desktop?

The Register suggests that in the next couple of years are the years of the Penguin on the Desktop (the penguin being the Linux mascot), predicting that critical mass will build in the “third world” (Reg’s words) allowing economies of scale to be established before Linux pushes North/West.

The recent addition of support for Indic languages in Qt and therefore the K Desktop Environment and all applications that use the Qt/KDE libraries is presumably a big boost for this, just as it is for the usefulness of Linux/KDE as a usable desktop in areas such as Easton, where the Community Wireless LAN project are planning to distribute computers (obsolete from the perspective of large companies) with linux installed into the community and provide wireless network access across the area.

Drama ahead!

More Jersey pics

(Ever wondered what it’s like to be a fish, looking through water all the time? Much how a camera phone sees, apparently. I’ll read the reviews next time …)

Uncle Booger’s Bumber Dumper®

The Ultimate Portable toilet
for the outdoorsman. As it says at the bottom, God Bless America.

ID card update

The Register is reporting that

The UK government has finally admitted that the majority of responses to consultation on its ID card scheme were strongly opposed to the controversial idea.

They have until now been studiously ignoring the large number of responses (5031, of which 4856 expressed views against the scheme, 131 contained obviously false names) received via the Stand web site. Since there were only around 7000 reponses in total including these, it’s clear that this would make a huge difference.

Elsewhere they also note that the Today programme (I missed this, I’m not sharp enough when it’s on in the morning), “revealed that the alleged ‘entitlement’ cards are referred to as ID cards internally at the Home Office.”

The consultation document has moved. It’s pretty irrelevant anyway, it seems, despite having admitted that the response to the consultation was overwhelmingly negative, Blunkett is planning to slip ID card legislation in on the back of his ongoing offensive against asylum seekers. Which is particularly absurd, given his eagerness that the card is “voluntary”, which would make it totally useless for the purpose stated. From the Guardian:

Everybody will be required to register for the new national database but it will not be compulsory to carry the card to produce to the police.

Er, right, OK. Unless you look foreign, I suppose.

“Show me your ID card.”
“No”
“OK, sorry to have bothered you.”

Oh, and I nearly forgot. All this is to be paid for by a £25 levy on passport and driving license fees. So I’d better get saving.

Nanoguitar

class="rightthumb">[Oddmusic
Musical Instrument Gallery via Gizmodo]: The
world’s smallest guitar.

The guitar has six strings, each string about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms. If plucked — by an atomic force microscope, for example — the strings would resonate, but at inaudible frequencies. The entire structure is about 10 micrometers long, about the size of a single human blood cell.

Cory Doctorow’s notes from Tim O’Reilly’s presentation

Cory Doctorow has posted his
notes from a Tim O’Reilly talk. Some interesting snippets, though
little new.

Shirky's "Listening to Napster:" You can build a big database by:

1. Paying people (Yahoo)

2. Getting volunteers (DMOZ)

3. Architect the system so that users' natural activity yeilds a

database (Napster)

That's the secret of what's happening on the Internet today.

Every time you make a link, you contribute to Google. Amazon

reviewers improve Amazon. This outstrips OSS projects for

collaboration.

…

The money doesn't come from selling software. People who don't
know this have a paradigm failure.

…

What keeps me up at night?

* No one in OSS seems to care about Google/Amazon/eBay (I told

Bezos off for pissing in the well when he sued BN.com)

* Users don't own their data -- who cares about source when your

data is locked in?

That last point brings up Joel Spolsky’s strategy letter on lock-in again.