Tuesday, October 27, 2009

FMOSS (Free market open source software)

With all the comments being fairly similar, going to present the other side as I see it.

Linux exists in a particular environment where INDIVIDUALS selfishly develop what THEY need for their own purposes. A person who needs a piece of software for their own purposes and successfully develops what they need has not only had their needs met, but also created intellectual wealth. The sharing of that wealth even by a single individual is positive.

The volume of wealth is so great, and the foundation so solid, that anyone with a computer and Internet access can take from the pool, ATTEMPT to improve on it, share their insight (whatever the form) and you get a positive sum of wealth.

This model, unlike any other, is INFINITELY scalable.

One problem may be approached by n people. The more people looking at the problem, the greater the chance of producing the ideal solution. Relatively no individual has the ability to STOP independent competitive solutions by any means than rationally demonstrating the superiority of their ideas.

There are "problems" with this model, but in my opinion, the nasty and poisonous perception of this model is that progress is zero-sum. I don't know if I could list in my lifetime how many ways anyone with that belief could be wrong, so let me make it very simple and clear.

WHAT I DO IN MY FREE TIME FOR MY OWN PURPOSE IS NONE OF YOUR F***ING BUSINESS any further than your freedom to do with and improve upon in your own way as you see fit what I choose to return to the community by either choice, or expected by the terms of the Gnu GPL.

You can not CONSCRIPT me into producing what YOU want, you can only enable me or discourage me to continue to contribute as I choose.

One of the articles criticisms, which seems to be a recurring themes of articles that like to tell people how they should be spending their time, is that of the number of distributions out there. Think about this: Why do people create distributions?

Is it because there are not enough of them? ... no

Is it because other distributions are going the wrong direction? ... maybe?

Is it because other distributions don't meet their needs? ... seems to be their perception at least

Is it because they feel like it?

BINGO!

Creating, maintaining, and promoting a particular distribution is a LOT of work (in my observation and from talking to people that have done it) But if you could make them not do what they want to do with their time, you really think they are going to magically do what you want instead?

What is amazing is that people left to their own devices (no pun intended) to do as they please, their minds begin to open to "what is possible in the spirit of playful cleverness".

Getting people to not do what you do not need doesn't make more for you. If you need more, there are three basic solutions: 1) wait and hope someone with with more initiative, motive, skill, etc 2) read a book and develop it yourself, or 3) Provide an incentive such as money to encourage someone with the skill to do it for you.

This is not an argument against team work, but just the same this article isn't an encouragement of team work either. Encouragement of teamwork involves 1) identifying a specific problem 2) defining the scope in which you wish to address that problem 3) outline a solution and develop a functional prototype that demonstrates why not only you have a good solution, but that your solution is better than other solutions (or non solutions) 4) Use your product from step 3 and actually demonstrate to people why they should expend their time and energy working on YOUR project, and technically 5) pick from those people you wish to bring onto the core of your team.

Final point: Teams and Communities do not exist for their own sake; they exist because it serves the voluntarily consenting members of them. If you want a centrally controlled, managed, and developed system that democratically considers the needs of everyone equally, such a project already exists. It is called Windows.

Cannonical / Mark Shuttlesworth provides something very specific: A platform and location for people to freely collaborate and exchange ideas while providing a face, in a sense, to a very distributed community. Thankfully, Mark has the wisdom to understand his role and learned the lessons of many other FlOSS projects come and gone and never abused his position of a role model to dictate how Linux should inspire anyone.

All projects stand on their merit alone, and as one hobby / amateur programmer, I hope I am not alone in hope that this state of anarchy never changes.

Friday, October 23, 2009

More fun with CSS and Javascript

This one was just weird... whatever

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html>

<head>

<script type="text/javascript">

function d2h(d){return d.toString(16);}

</script>

</head>

<body>

<script type="text/javascript">

var x=0;

var y=0;

var z=0;

var c=0;

for (z=0; z<=300; z++)

{

if ((Math.floor(Math.random()*2)) == 0)

{

x=Math.floor(Math.random()*100 + Math.floor(Math.random()*1100));

y=Math.floor(Math.random()*100 + Math.floor(Math.random()*2)*600);

}

else

{

x=Math.floor(Math.random()*100 + Math.floor(Math.random()*2)*1100);

y=Math.floor(Math.random()*100 + Math.floor(Math.random()*600));

}

c=d2h(Math.floor(Math.random()*16777215))

document.write("<p style=\"height:1; position:fixed; top:" + y + "px; left:" + x + "px; color:#" + c + "\">Happy Birthday!</p>");

document.write("<p style=\"float:left; height:0px\">" + Math.random() + "</p>");

document.write("<p style=\"float:right; height:0px\">" + Math.random() + "</p><br /><br />");

}

</script>

</body>

</html>

My first javascript

So evidently this is a bit too complicated for me to get into blogger in any kind of reasonable way. Layouts and all that stuff... blah! Anyway, if anyone wants to check it out, here it is:

granite.png
black.png



<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html>

<head>

<style type="text/css">

img

{

float:left;

height:20px;

width:20px;

margin:0px;

padding-top:0px;

padding-bottom:0px;

padding-right:0px;

padding-left:0px;

}

br

{

clear:both;

}

</style>

<script type="text/javascript">

var t=0;

function mouseOver(imgID)

{

t+=1

document.getElementById(imgID).src ="granite.png";

var r=setTimeout(function(){document.getElementById(imgID).src ='black.png';},t); // Thank you Rogi!

}

</script>

</head>

<body>

<script type="text/javascript">

var c=0;

for (c = 0; c <= 255; c++)

{

if (c % 16 == 0)

{

document.write("<br />");

}

document.write("<img src=\"black.png\" id=\"" + c + "\" onmouseOver=\"mouseOver(" + c + ")\">");

}

</script>

<br />

</body>

</html>

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Havn't we seen this before?

Proof that government needs to get their stinkin' noses out of business. 1) AIDS medications are VERY expensive, so it makes sense to discriminate against pre-existing conditions, otherwise it is a service plan, not an insurance policy. Affordable service plans should be affordable, but they are still totally different. 2) She wasn't looking for an insurance policy to protect her against AIDS, which sadly she is at abnormally higher risk, but a health insurance policy for her general health and well-being in the future. 3) I would speculate that while she may still be concerned about the AIDS herself that she would be willing to buy a policy that excluded treatment coverage of AIDS if she contracted the disease, and of course subsequent harm that may be caused by the disease. If she is still HIV free in 3 years, have them take a look at her health and keep to their word of coverage without the exemption. You could probably get a bit of a cheaper rate considering you are not buying insurance against it, and they are happier to let you pay a little more when you do want the insurance again.

Now the million dollar question here is why hasn't this been thought of before? TRICK QUESTION! It has been and while the insurance companies would love to tailor your policies to exactly your needs, it is illegal. ILLEGAL! Not big bad insurance companies stopping you, but the law! Who writes the law? The government, sticking their noses in where they don't belong.

Why did the government do this? Well it was to protect people against the big evil insurance companies that were making it too complicated for people to understand what they were buying. So they made all health insurance virtually identical so people wouldn't get confused. For example, some people wanted catastrophic illness insurance, but then complained that it didn't cover antibiotics for ear infections. The really sad stories were those that bought health service plans like checkups, medication discounts, broken arm insurance, but NOT catastrophic illness insurance, and then got very sick. I remember a story of a guy that had a health service plan he bought for his whole family. After having paid premiums for him, his wife, and 12 year old daughter every month for over 12 years, his daughter was sadly diagnosed with brain cancer. The father was devastated when he "discovered" that the plan he had been paying into his daughters entire life wasn't going to help her when she was sick because as the insurance company said that while they were sorry about his daughters illness, brain cancer wasn't covered by the policy.

This story and many others like it were important anecdotes to support health care reform in the 80's. Insurance companies were demonized for selling predatory policies, and the government made insurance policies "regular", in addition to other regulations.

So maybe, like last time, instead of outlawing "confusing" policies, give people the resources necessary to make informed decisions, because no matter what the law is, if you are paying hundreds of dollars a month to someone, government, business, friend, whatever, and you don't know what it is really for, you are going to be totally screwed. And nobody loves to keep bigger secrets about how they do business for you a secret than government.

This article proves to me that government can't do anything right and need to get out of places they don't belong like economics. Actually, there are a few things the federal government might be able to do reasonably well. I think someone wrote them down once in a blog or something. Here's the link if interested: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html

And just to note, making trade regular and regulating trade or planning the economy are NOT the same thing open to interpretation as one group of people see fit when it pleases them. If you don't like the constitution, repeal it... of wait, already being done. Never mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40

Monday, October 19, 2009

CSS sure is strange

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So spending some time today checking out CSS, and evidently you can just add CSS styles to the header in the template if you edit the full template in html. Pretty cool. Wow, you sure can do some goofy stuff with CSS. :) However, the pages can not be previewed :(