Archive for July, 2005
Vista and the Open Source opportunity
Sunday, July 31st, 2005
When Microsoft release the newest version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn, now announced as Vista) in 2006, everyone from network admins to home users will be faced with a decision: upgrade their existing operating system to Vista, or be left behind. There will be a colossal marketing push, and no doubt legacy users will be gradually frozen out in an effort to encourage upgrades. Microsoft will actually be spending loys of money and a huge amount of effort encouraging it’s entire user base to ditch Windows XP.
I wonder if many people will take this opportunity to ditch Windows entirely? Maybe, instead of shelling out for Vista, and faced with the prospect of having to install a whole new OS anyway, people will move to a Linux distro instead.
Vista’s release could see Microsoft retain market control. It could also be the tipping point for widespread adoption of open source software. Should the open source community see this as an opportunity and act on it?
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Collected situationist quotes
Sunday, July 31st, 2005
“We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment.”
- Walter Benjamin (more)
“Unitary Urbanism: The theory of the combined use of art and technology leading to the integrated construction of an environment dynamically linked to behavioural experiments.”
- Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958 (more)
“The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – all this seems to be neglected.”
- Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (more)
“Live without dead time.”
- Graffiti, Paris, May 1968 (more)
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Progress Marches On
Thursday, July 28th, 2005
I must say, I really have been hearing a lot about these “Web Logs” (or “blogs” for short). They work like this: people write about what they are thinking, and then they put it on the Internet for other people to read! I decided it was time for me to learn more about this latest fad.
Which is another way of saying that I’ve finally caught up with the times, and have moved everything here over to Wordpress. While my own handrolled CMS was once my pride and joy, I now realise that these last couple of years… well, we’ve grown apart. I’ve seen how the other blogs look at me, with their RSS feeds and their fancy plugins. I’m not blind.
So there’s now an RSS feed, some links and other ‘Small Pieces, Loosely Joined’ over there on the left (your right), and plenty of room for more to happen.
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25/07/2005
Monday, July 25th, 2005
Back from a thoroughly enjoyable weekend spent exploring the streets of Brussels.
The man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theatre, the bazaar. In every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order [...] This – some say – confirms the hypothesis that man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, the individual cities fill it up.
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
See also Italo Calvino sparks obsessions, Illustrated Invisible Cities
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06/07/2005
Wednesday, July 6th, 2005
In a piece of good news, the EU Patents Directive was overturned by a large majority this morning in the European Parliament. One of the speakers in the Exploiting Potential symposium last week discussed this issue at length, and a couple of days ago I emailed the Irish MEPs to express my opposition to the proposal.
I actually heard the news this morning from none other that Dublin MEP Gay Mitchell, who emailed me back:
Thank you for your recent email. The European Parliament this morning voted to reject the draft directive on computer-implemented inventions. It does not seem likely that the Commission will bring forward an alternative in the near future. A consensus seems to have evolved in the Parliament that no directive is better than a bad directive.
Seems like Gay was on the same page as Associated Press:
“It was a mess. Better no directive than a bad directive,” said Tony Robinson, spokesman for the Socialist group in parliament.
Still, good for him for emailing back.
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