The NOT couple was sitting next to me this afternoon on the bus. I call them the not couple, because they perfectly embody this generic feeling of emptiness you find so often in big cities. They are not ... everything, they're nothing. He isn't tall, he isn't short either. He's not young but he's not old. She's not pretty but she's not ugly for that matter.
The "Not" couple was not talking, but wasn't bored. Until a woman came on the bus. By some mysterious coincidence, she just happened to be a friend of the "not" couple. They were surprised to see her but not disturbed. They chatted for a while. Not once did he look at his wife let alone talk to her. She didn't either. 20 minutes later, they get to their stop, say bye, smiled, and left.
If I ever turn into that guy, shoot me.
Friday, 11 December 2009
Monday, 7 December 2009
The Thanksgiving Hypocrisy
I always loved the fact that Americans commemorate one of the biggest genocides in history by celebrating a national holiday called "Thanks-Giving".... Just saying...
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
What Richard Stallman meant by freedom
Let's take a moment and discuss the (totally pointless) distinction made today in the computer industry between "free" and "open-source". Some would say that it is only a matter of politics. Let's take a brief look at history.
I feel I should point out that this is not about geek stuff, but really understanding from historical, social and political points of view what happened in this community.
Historical overview
Several years ago, buying a computer was not the same as today. When you buy you're computer, you're thinking of all the software you can get. But back in the days, people thought of the hardware. Not everyone knew how to use a computer, and people who did know, wanted them for the machine. They would ultimately write their own software if they had to. And believe me the often did. It was not before IBM released its "Personal Computer" that computers went mainstream. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
In the 70s, vendors started to realize that by adding software themselves on the machine, they could sell it at higher costs. The idea that a software had a value, more than just a way of using the computer , started to appear. Companies and software developers stopped sharing their secret recipes, their codes.
Some people found that to be fair practice, believing in a fashionably capitalistic way, that the best way to boost innovation is to protect innovative ideas. In that sens, stealing somebody else's idea would make you a pirate as much as stealing material belongings. Were they wrong? No. History proved them right numerous times. However one guy, Richard Stallman, didn't like the change that was taking place.
Richard Stallman
Stallman was a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT. When people and companies stopped sharing their source codes, their secret algorithms, he felt threatened. Worse, he had to buy a restrictive license to use his software, the way the vendor forces him to use it. He genuinely felt that his freedom to use that "machine" the way he wanted to was taken. Stallman comes from a long tradition of developers who constantly shared their works to create something bigger. They created a software called Unix, considered by many to be one of the greatest pieces of work in modern computing. So if a guy like him wanted use his machine the way only he understands how, he would be called a "pirate"? and that's supposed to help innovation ?
But the revolution started a few years later, when Stallman, fed up with these new practices decided to launch the Free Software Foundation. The goal was simple: People are protecting their knowledges, so users don't have their freedoms anymore. The FSF was set up to publish software that the authors will give away for free. Naturally he started preparing a clone of the Unix system he knew so much. He called that system GNU, which stands for GNU is Not Unix. Many people joined him and by the late 80s they had almost completed the entire GNU system, except for one particular part, a piece called the kernel. No modern computer can run without a kernel. So people would usually buy a proprietary Unix system (Unix was cloned many times, but Stallman's was the first attempt to make it free). And people would then replace the original Unix part by those developed for the GNU project. Usually because of the freedom they give, but also because some of the GNU tools turned out more powerful than the original ones.
Linus Benedict Torvalds
Move to Finland now, University of Helsinki. A young Computer Science student just bought a new machine (the direct ancestor of the one you're using now), didn't want to buy the (very limited) DOS with Windows version, and couldn't afford to buy a regular Unix. So as a hobby project, he start working on a kernel, figuring that once that was done, he could always use the other parts from the GNU project. By 1991, the first version of Linux (Linus' Unix) was released. And Linus shared it with the rest of the community on the Internet, using the same permissive license used for GNU. However he never intended for it to be part of GNU. When he published it, he wrote something along the lines of: "Hey everybody, here's a hobby project I've been working on. It won't be as big as GNU. Check it out."
And people did. They found in Linux what was missing from the GNU project. Now for the first time, users could have an up-and-running free Unix machine. Notice that, following the words of Stallman himself, "When we speak of free we mean freedom not price". By the late 90s, Linux was getting very popular amongst hobbyists, but also businesses were showing great interest in this new technology.
The Open Source Initiative
We're in 1998. Many users throughout the world are using Linux systems. It has become a collaborative work of thousands of persons, with millions of lines of codes written. A whole community was built around it, with rules, ethics, nomenclature, etc ... Other software start following the same model, like the Netscape Web Browser. Free software was stable, fast, secure, and ... free (as in no price). Businesses were showing interest. Yet for some reason, no real venture capitals were shown. So some leader of the community (Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'reily and others) gathered to define a new way of presenting the movement to corporations, in a language that would suit them better. The word "Free" itself was scary and led to confusion. It was supposed to refer to freedom, yet people understood gratis. Understandably, usinesses are afraid of trusting a "Free" software, ...
They came up with the term 'Open Source'. Open Source is not a morally heavy philosophy of sharing and freedom, but rather a methodology that produces reliable software at low-cost. It is a model that has already made its proofs and has a great potential. It wasn't about hippy idealists anymore, but engineers and scientists producing software like never before (funnily enough, the "idealist hippy" - Stallman, is considered by many to be one of the greatest computer minds of all time. But that's Wall Street for you). But the point is that venture capitalist were not indifferent to that new definition and consequently, V.A. Linux, a leading Linux service provider, broke an all-time record when it went public, scoring the highest price on opening day to date. (Stupid financial indicator that only mean that a lot of investors trusted the concept. It was stupidly marketed as a free - gratis - substitute for Microsoft Windows. Who wouldn't invest in that?)
GNU/Linux
Stallman reaction came as a surprise. He declared that he and the FSF do not abide by this new definition of open source, mainly because the definition focused on the result, not the moral baggage it supports. He goes on asking people to call it GNU/Linux reminding them that the system they use contains on average more than 30% of GNU software (note that as of 2009, the GNU kernel Hurd is not ready yet but still under development). He did that so that the public hears more about GNU and its philosophy. See here's where Stallman really differs from Open Source: Open source wants to see their software everywhere, Stallman wants to see corporations like IBM, Microsoft, HP and Sun stop putting restrictions on people's use of machines.
What about Linus?
Linus was often asked about this separation to which he always respond that he doesn't care about politics, he agrees with Stallman's philosophy, he just works on Linux and wants to create the best damn kernel out there. In that sens, Linus is a typical Open Source guy, who doesn't get caught in politics, rather focuses on the product itself.
Simply put, the difference between "Free" and "Open Source" is shown in this example:
- Linus Torvalds wants to see Linux go up.
- Richard Stallman wants to see Microsoft go down.
I feel I should point out that this is not about geek stuff, but really understanding from historical, social and political points of view what happened in this community.
Historical overview
Several years ago, buying a computer was not the same as today. When you buy you're computer, you're thinking of all the software you can get. But back in the days, people thought of the hardware. Not everyone knew how to use a computer, and people who did know, wanted them for the machine. They would ultimately write their own software if they had to. And believe me the often did. It was not before IBM released its "Personal Computer" that computers went mainstream. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
In the 70s, vendors started to realize that by adding software themselves on the machine, they could sell it at higher costs. The idea that a software had a value, more than just a way of using the computer , started to appear. Companies and software developers stopped sharing their secret recipes, their codes.
Some people found that to be fair practice, believing in a fashionably capitalistic way, that the best way to boost innovation is to protect innovative ideas. In that sens, stealing somebody else's idea would make you a pirate as much as stealing material belongings. Were they wrong? No. History proved them right numerous times. However one guy, Richard Stallman, didn't like the change that was taking place.
Richard Stallman
Stallman was a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT. When people and companies stopped sharing their source codes, their secret algorithms, he felt threatened. Worse, he had to buy a restrictive license to use his software, the way the vendor forces him to use it. He genuinely felt that his freedom to use that "machine" the way he wanted to was taken. Stallman comes from a long tradition of developers who constantly shared their works to create something bigger. They created a software called Unix, considered by many to be one of the greatest pieces of work in modern computing. So if a guy like him wanted use his machine the way only he understands how, he would be called a "pirate"? and that's supposed to help innovation ?
But the revolution started a few years later, when Stallman, fed up with these new practices decided to launch the Free Software Foundation. The goal was simple: People are protecting their knowledges, so users don't have their freedoms anymore. The FSF was set up to publish software that the authors will give away for free. Naturally he started preparing a clone of the Unix system he knew so much. He called that system GNU, which stands for GNU is Not Unix. Many people joined him and by the late 80s they had almost completed the entire GNU system, except for one particular part, a piece called the kernel. No modern computer can run without a kernel. So people would usually buy a proprietary Unix system (Unix was cloned many times, but Stallman's was the first attempt to make it free). And people would then replace the original Unix part by those developed for the GNU project. Usually because of the freedom they give, but also because some of the GNU tools turned out more powerful than the original ones.
Linus Benedict Torvalds
Move to Finland now, University of Helsinki. A young Computer Science student just bought a new machine (the direct ancestor of the one you're using now), didn't want to buy the (very limited) DOS with Windows version, and couldn't afford to buy a regular Unix. So as a hobby project, he start working on a kernel, figuring that once that was done, he could always use the other parts from the GNU project. By 1991, the first version of Linux (Linus' Unix) was released. And Linus shared it with the rest of the community on the Internet, using the same permissive license used for GNU. However he never intended for it to be part of GNU. When he published it, he wrote something along the lines of: "Hey everybody, here's a hobby project I've been working on. It won't be as big as GNU. Check it out."
And people did. They found in Linux what was missing from the GNU project. Now for the first time, users could have an up-and-running free Unix machine. Notice that, following the words of Stallman himself, "When we speak of free we mean freedom not price". By the late 90s, Linux was getting very popular amongst hobbyists, but also businesses were showing great interest in this new technology.
The Open Source Initiative
We're in 1998. Many users throughout the world are using Linux systems. It has become a collaborative work of thousands of persons, with millions of lines of codes written. A whole community was built around it, with rules, ethics, nomenclature, etc ... Other software start following the same model, like the Netscape Web Browser. Free software was stable, fast, secure, and ... free (as in no price). Businesses were showing interest. Yet for some reason, no real venture capitals were shown. So some leader of the community (Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'reily and others) gathered to define a new way of presenting the movement to corporations, in a language that would suit them better. The word "Free" itself was scary and led to confusion. It was supposed to refer to freedom, yet people understood gratis. Understandably, usinesses are afraid of trusting a "Free" software, ...
They came up with the term 'Open Source'. Open Source is not a morally heavy philosophy of sharing and freedom, but rather a methodology that produces reliable software at low-cost. It is a model that has already made its proofs and has a great potential. It wasn't about hippy idealists anymore, but engineers and scientists producing software like never before (funnily enough, the "idealist hippy" - Stallman, is considered by many to be one of the greatest computer minds of all time. But that's Wall Street for you). But the point is that venture capitalist were not indifferent to that new definition and consequently, V.A. Linux, a leading Linux service provider, broke an all-time record when it went public, scoring the highest price on opening day to date. (Stupid financial indicator that only mean that a lot of investors trusted the concept. It was stupidly marketed as a free - gratis - substitute for Microsoft Windows. Who wouldn't invest in that?)
GNU/Linux
Stallman reaction came as a surprise. He declared that he and the FSF do not abide by this new definition of open source, mainly because the definition focused on the result, not the moral baggage it supports. He goes on asking people to call it GNU/Linux reminding them that the system they use contains on average more than 30% of GNU software (note that as of 2009, the GNU kernel Hurd is not ready yet but still under development). He did that so that the public hears more about GNU and its philosophy. See here's where Stallman really differs from Open Source: Open source wants to see their software everywhere, Stallman wants to see corporations like IBM, Microsoft, HP and Sun stop putting restrictions on people's use of machines.
What about Linus?
Linus was often asked about this separation to which he always respond that he doesn't care about politics, he agrees with Stallman's philosophy, he just works on Linux and wants to create the best damn kernel out there. In that sens, Linus is a typical Open Source guy, who doesn't get caught in politics, rather focuses on the product itself.
Simply put, the difference between "Free" and "Open Source" is shown in this example:
- Linus Torvalds wants to see Linux go up.
- Richard Stallman wants to see Microsoft go down.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
We invented science
When I was in middle school, I remember something our science teacher told us: "Scientific laws are not invented they are discovered." For some reason I didn't like that statement. Now when I come to think of it, I realize more than ever how wrong this sentence is.
The idea of science being discovered relies on one erroneous assumption: our vision of the world, as human beings, is an absolute truth. I want to mention a very interesting scene from the movie "What the bleep do we know?".
In that particular scene, Dr Quantum visits a special place called Flatland. Flatland is a 2D world where the idea of "up" and "down" doesn't exist. You either go forward, backward, left or right. Dr Quantum, being the 3D person that we all are, stands above one of the creatures of Flatland and start talking to her. This creature was afraid because even though she could hear him, she couldn't understand where he was.
That's a really interesting idea. What if there's a dimension us as human beings couldn't grasp. We obviously see the world in 2 dimensions:
If there are other dimensions, then surely our vision of the world comes from our perception and is therefore subjective. Since it is not absolute, it must be invented. And until proven wrong, these theories are generally adopted. When Einstein discovered some strange properties about the time-space environment, he proved wrong Newton's theories, even though they had led the Man's quest to walk on the moon.
The reason I'm telling you this is because something occurred to me today. I've known for a long time that it was al-Khwarizmi who allegedly invented the number 0. But how great this invention really was, that I didn't realize. It hit me today when working on a computer science homework. Programmers start counting from 0. So let's say you have ten items in a table, the first item would be in cell number 0. Why do they do that? I keep getting amazed at how stupid machines really are. And here is yet another example.
Have you ever wondered why a ten is written 10? That is because modern languages use a 10-element alphabet to represent numbers. The alphabet is constitured of ten "figures". They are "0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8" and "9". Why just ten? Why not eight or sixteen? It's a safe assumption to believe that Man instinctively stopped at 10, the number of fingers he has on both hands. We do still use our fingers to count, right?Machines are dumb. It will blindly assign the first "figure" to the first "number". Intuitively when counting the first number is one. Think of old roman numbers, they start with I. So this shows to some extent that the number 0 was a pure subjective invention, that was generally adopted as a convention. It was not a natural truth.
We do like to use other alphabets in computer science, like binary (2 figures), octal (8 figures) and hexadecimal (16 figures). There's a big fork of algebra called Boolean algebra focused on binaries. And here's a joke I love:
There is only 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binaries and those who don't.
By inventing the number 0, alKhwarizmi led the way to invent something far greater. Number 0 was more than just a language convention. Indeed it opened the way for something far greater: negatives. If 0 had never been invented, what would it mean to say "negative five"? What's a negative number, if not a number inferior to 0? Science would have looked pretty different without the negative numbers today.
The idea of science being discovered relies on one erroneous assumption: our vision of the world, as human beings, is an absolute truth. I want to mention a very interesting scene from the movie "What the bleep do we know?".
In that particular scene, Dr Quantum visits a special place called Flatland. Flatland is a 2D world where the idea of "up" and "down" doesn't exist. You either go forward, backward, left or right. Dr Quantum, being the 3D person that we all are, stands above one of the creatures of Flatland and start talking to her. This creature was afraid because even though she could hear him, she couldn't understand where he was.
That's a really interesting idea. What if there's a dimension us as human beings couldn't grasp. We obviously see the world in 2 dimensions:
- Space (which is by itself a 3D environment)
- Time
If there are other dimensions, then surely our vision of the world comes from our perception and is therefore subjective. Since it is not absolute, it must be invented. And until proven wrong, these theories are generally adopted. When Einstein discovered some strange properties about the time-space environment, he proved wrong Newton's theories, even though they had led the Man's quest to walk on the moon.
The reason I'm telling you this is because something occurred to me today. I've known for a long time that it was al-Khwarizmi who allegedly invented the number 0. But how great this invention really was, that I didn't realize. It hit me today when working on a computer science homework. Programmers start counting from 0. So let's say you have ten items in a table, the first item would be in cell number 0. Why do they do that? I keep getting amazed at how stupid machines really are. And here is yet another example.
Have you ever wondered why a ten is written 10? That is because modern languages use a 10-element alphabet to represent numbers. The alphabet is constitured of ten "figures". They are "0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8" and "9". Why just ten? Why not eight or sixteen? It's a safe assumption to believe that Man instinctively stopped at 10, the number of fingers he has on both hands. We do still use our fingers to count, right?Machines are dumb. It will blindly assign the first "figure" to the first "number". Intuitively when counting the first number is one. Think of old roman numbers, they start with I. So this shows to some extent that the number 0 was a pure subjective invention, that was generally adopted as a convention. It was not a natural truth.
We do like to use other alphabets in computer science, like binary (2 figures), octal (8 figures) and hexadecimal (16 figures). There's a big fork of algebra called Boolean algebra focused on binaries. And here's a joke I love:
There is only 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binaries and those who don't.
By inventing the number 0, alKhwarizmi led the way to invent something far greater. Number 0 was more than just a language convention. Indeed it opened the way for something far greater: negatives. If 0 had never been invented, what would it mean to say "negative five"? What's a negative number, if not a number inferior to 0? Science would have looked pretty different without the negative numbers today.
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