Once more into week out, and it bodes to be a good week out at that. Admittedly we have the rather tedious nonsense of Father’s day to endure, a punishment visited on us by women whose cooking we consume as compensation for not reproducing and running away. Or at least that’s what the brain sty at fair Hahvahd is telling us these days.

Not that there is much cooking these days. Mostly it’s fast food, maybe brought home, or fast food extracted from boxes purchased at the local MalWart. Regardless it is going to make sure the current generation lives fewer days than its predecessor generation. So the expenditure of effort on cooking is a lot less than it was when society invented family. Of course what men do these days is a lot different from then, and Sturgeon’s rule applies because at least 0.9 of it can be done by a woman, so it comes down to the fact that men are a convenient sperm factory and that is not far off from being it.

That’s why Father’s day is such a farce. The hypothesis that it only exists to balance Mother’s day, which does have some validity, is more than just viable. Sons don’t make a big thing of the day; daughters do. And wives, although whether the latter is part of the conspiracy or not is unclear.

Anyway, what makes things good is that the Lord High Justicers of the Yankee republic have decreed that genes cannot be patented. [Link] To comprehend why this is good, we need only, in good maths practice, consider the opposite. Simply put patenting of genes is slavery. Pure and simple. If some corporation owns the intellectual property of a bit of DNA, then they own the people who have that snippet. And that’s a worse evil than Father’s day.

humans, corporations, behavior, government, society, stupidity, slavery

Archy, no Dancing

It’s ice cream day and I didn’t need it during my morning constitutional. I rather hate it when it’s hot before the sun rises.

On which azimuth, Chinese researchers have unearthed the skeleton of the oldest primate, [Link] Archicebus Achilles.

The beastie was about 55 MYA and was about the (body) size of a mouse. One more thing for the religionists to marvel at during pseudo-shabbat services.

Meanwhile, the administration’s direction that all refereed articles paid for by Yankee government money have to be publicly available has finally bashed the crania of some capitalist journal publishers. [Link] I personally would have liked a bit more use of truncheons but if they give on this maybe their overweening prices will be next?

Next, a report from U Waterloo [Link] indicates that flourocarbons rather than carbon dioxide are responsible for global climate change. This bears watching. It may substantiate – again – that correlation (or consensus in this case) is not causation.

humans, biology, science, greed, capitalism, corporations, chemistry, climate

The Linux Reich?

As I was wandering about Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill last day, the question occurred to me “has Canonical become the new MegaHard?”

There seems to be a certain strength to this idea. Their management has clearly failed. They have staked the corporate future on abandoning old customers for potential new customers. They have introduced major products that have been rejected in disgust by old and new customers.

The parallels are a bit disturbing.

MegaHard has always been a totalitarian organization masquerading as egalitarian. That is not surprising. It is, after all, the model of the modern information organization. But Canonical is supposed to be part of FOSS. And it isn’t.

Greatest disillusionment since Hitler proved to not be progressive?

I have to admit to being rather disturbed.I have been reading linux critique article and a great ideological war seems to be brewing. On the one hand are the patriots of FOSS who advocate, among other things, that Ubuntu needs to be forked to save it. The model of course is Libre Offfice, the fork that saved Open Office by destroying it. Although I have to admit that Libre Office is better than OO could have been.

On the other hand are those who are Linux conquistadors and no amount of tyranny is too much if one user can be tempted away from the abomination that is Winders. I am unsure whether to call these people fascists or evangelists but for now we can label them as professional journalists working for semi-covert advertisers. Generallu untrustworthy as well as more than marginally incompetent.

And meanwhile Canonical is making noises that Ubuntu transcends Linux, which is one more indication of a totalitarian ideology.

I keep reflecting on the old saw “The Tree of Liberty must from time to time be watered with the blood of patriots.” I fear that there are many patriots who are willing.

corporations, tyranny, humans, computers, conflict

Insanity Apathy

Shule is desessioned. That was blatant this morning. No educationalists. And it was nice. Good, even. That’s one of the few boons of summer. The heat more than negates it. And we are already much hotter than I would like.

I listened to quite a lengthy podcast this morning on the new psychiatric rule book, the DSM I believe it is acronymed. This gave me rise to contemplate the nature of mental illness. I began to ask myself why is it that we have this supposed problem with mental illness?

I started by examining the two primary drivers of human behavior: insecurity; and denial. Both seem to apply here. From what I can observe about the treatment of mental illness, none are rapid and all seem to reduce the patient to the state of mental slime mold. So in effect, treatment for mental illness is slow and negates the individual. Both are ample reasons for denial. Perhaps even justified. Almost no ne, except the most inept of bogs wants to voluntarily be reduced to that level.

And because the treatment is slow and involves medicalist attention, it is expensive, which is another reason for denial.

So I have to accept the hypothesis that this hullabaloo will have no end result. For the same reason we don’t have a meteor patrol.

humans, health, behavior, medicine, corporations, tyranny

Act of Ground

We were just visited by the tyranny of Greater Metropolitan Arab Electron Uncooperative exercising their usual sundae morning reign of disruption, aka, power outage just long enough to make us restart computers and reset asentient clocks.

This is one of the joys of living in Greater Metropolitan Arab/Alibam/the old Confederacy. It rather reminds me of that old Asperger’s saying:

One of the bad things about Asperger’s is being hated by neuronorms because their silly behavior isn’t overlooked and understood; one of the good things is not caring.

organizations, tyranny, evil, corporations, humans, behavior

Business Acumen

It’s ice cream day and once agin time to get ruthless in purging tabs. And me without any Black Drink.

First, a survey of Winders Ate users [Link] not only indicates that the majority of users ignore the Tile GUI (nee Metro) and just pretend its a debased form of W7. In fact,

the only folks who predominantly use the tile gui are the slabists. And while this is, or is rapidly becoming, the new majority, it still seems rather foolish on MegaHard’s part to micturate their established customer base.

I have to reflect on this a moment. The wisdom that one doesn’t run off existing customers in seeking new ones is well established. It follows that only in times of great change will ignoring this wisdom be wise. So do we have such a time of great change? The answer is a resounding maybe, and the scope of that maybe reveals the magnitude of the risk being taken by MegaHard and Canonical.

If they are right then they have the advantage of maybe establishing a common computer interaction across box sizes and forms. Note critically here that this assumes desk and lap boxes will still be around. The disadvantage is that in leaping they find the mist concealing the chasm and doing a Wile Coyote. And the whole gamble is on the margin since they are having to bet the bog boxes will still be there. But they have alienated the big box users in the process. Sic Transit Gloria Mundae?

Next, on a related matter, a study [Link] from U York proposes that humans evolved upright stance and motion because of the terrain of Africa. Previous theories proposed the development was due to climate change and the reduction in available trees for us to cower in. Or is that cavort? If so that cavorting may give some insight into typical christianist behavior during sundae services.

If the picture of terrain in the article is representative I would have to support the hypothesis. This is not terrain for four legged locomotion. But how representative is it? As usual, even for the Brits, the journalism sags woefully.

And lastly, the old bit about sapiens eating neandertals has been surfaced again by researchers at a Spanish U. [Link] This is not a new thing. It’s one of two major theories of how neandertals went away, the other being reproductive. That theory has enormous weight these days as a result of mapping of sapiens and neandertal genomes that demonstrated that except for the purest of African human lineages, all modern sapiens are about 0.15 neandertal.

I shall not offer the rather obvious and hideous sexual innuendo. But the cannibalism theory is claimed to be strengthened by finding gnaw marks on neandertal bones that match sapiens dentition.

Given what I have seen of human behavior – sapiens’ – I would not be greatly surprised if both theories are accurate.

humans, history, evolution, biology, computers, corporations, stupidity

Spoil the Moment

Yesterday I ran across this cartoon [Link]

and I was struck by the accuracy of the presentation. It managed to summarize the television news so accurately I was whelmed.

First that the news people seem to have no compunctions about decency, integrity, or honesty, to say nothing about their overt practices of cruelty and inappropriate happiness at misfortune and suffering. I have yet to understand how it can be policy for any organization, not dedicated to the extermination of the human species, to relate on pain, agony, and/or misery with a garish smile. Somehow this seems the epitome of evil.

Only when the matter touches the lives of the folks who own the broadcasting instrumentality does any respect or regard creep in. Any other time it is blatantly false and pretended. And even when they are batted down, the respite is short before their evil pours forth undiminished.

Only the weather forecast is partly worth while since it deals with useful information. And the commercials are a relative respite, which, a mixed blessing, are growing in duration as a fraction of the broadcast.

And the apparent bias in the news read is disturbing. I am not sure which is worse though, the repeated protestations of fairness and objectivity, both of which are clearly subjective in the professional activities of the news media, or their natty lectures to the populace for holding them accountable.

All in all, a good cartoon. It remains to see if we do anything about this cancer it prods.

corporations, prevarication, evil, journalism

Too much, Too late

Thor’s day and am I happy to put the hammer down. My sally to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill began with a visit to have the bandaging from the oral surgery so now I am in the mode of flouridizing the newly exposed roots so I can once more eat/drink stuff slightly different from body temperature. Coffee was DEFINITELY an adventure yesterday!

The gym was happily thin this morning, which rather matched with my absence of energy from the joy of food and drink yesterday. I listened to an episode of the English Ubuntu podcast and aside from the skit had little to gain from it. But it is noise of distraction.

Before I forget, today is the anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman. I shall celebrate his memory. I may even draw a few diagrams or drag out the bongos.

And in typical Feynmanesque humor (maybe) I note an article [Link] entitled “10 reasons why Canonical and Ubuntu will connect the masses with Linux”. My colleague Magnetic Inductance Force shared with me and my discussion will largely follow his comments.

The thesis is that Canonical, via Ubuntu, will glue together userdom. The list is sadly stuttering but that goes with any list. It’s the sort of thing that defies good composition but is attractive to humans, even the majority who suffer dyscalcula.

I fear I have to put this prediction in the same pile as Laplace’s (?) that the seas would turn to lemonade. What Canonical now seems fated to do is flop. For several reasons:

1. First of all, there is Unity, Canonical’s tile GUI. This abomination has been billed as the common interface for box/slab/phone. It does that, but as with most Swiss Army Knives, not well.
2. Second, Unity works for people who either do not work or who work sequentially as opposed to cumulatively. For those of the latter, Unity is something to to avoided or, as in my case, blown away with some useful GUI like XFCE or KDE.
3. Third, Unity is a tile GUI, just like Gnome 3 and whatever MegaHard calls ‘Metro’ this week. So all the folks running screaming in terror from W8 are not going to run to Ubuntu. One of the derivatives with a workable GUI maybe, but not Ubuntu.
4. Four, the Ubuntu tablet is probably never going to be anything more that a niche market. Consider the abject dismality of MegaHard’s tablet sales. The average tablet user – mostly consumerist – doesn’t care about OS, only about app. Which means that they ain’t gonna learn a new OS that has few apps when they are already comfortable with Apple or Android.
5. Five, the Ubuntu phone is probably a non-starter. Look at W8 phone sales. Same as with tablets but squared. The marketplace is pretty well dominated by Apple and Android and Ubuntu isn’t a camel to sneak into the tent.

That isn’t ten but it’s enough. I would be pleasantly surprised if Ubuntu does any good in the tablet or phone markets. I hope it does. I would like an Ubuntu tablet that I could do something useful on. After I replaced Unity with KDE, which already has a tablet and a tablet interface. I’m not sure about the phone. Maybe. That way I could get decent (maybe) email and calendar apps. If Thunderbird will work on a phone.

humans, behavior, corporations, computers, OS, stupidity

Etheric Insight

One of the primary causes of obesity in Amerika is electronics.

humans, behavior, physics, corporations

Apres Moi

Now is the spring of discontent. This may be Saturn’s day on the official YG calendar but for me is it is two day – second day after gum surgery and the epitome of ache and distraction. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” And while Tellus may not end, my ability to apply attention span-time is impacted.

This is not helped by the weather beavers’ foretelling of rain all day.

On the good side at least I have no uncertainty of being alive.

On which azimuth, I noted an article [Link] in the Register that over half (barely) of the organizations they sampled lacked a plan to replace Winders XP. That’s with a looming end-of-life next calendar year.

Somehow I am NOT surprised. The problem comes down to Vista and Winders Ate. Both are banana peels. That is, once you have them installed all that is left is useless crap that is slippery on one side, tacky on the other, and generating accidents and spills without rhyme or reason. Add to this the relatively minor bit that you can’t upgrade from WXP to W7 and that almost all of the boxes running WXP aren’t brute enough to run W7 as other than a demonstration in slow motion and with fire alarms.

So some of the absence of plan is denial but a lot of it is just flat end-of-road. Anything you do and any direction you set out in will be painful and costly. In business, nothing is worse than being the best you can ever be.

I have to wonder how many of those are seriously considering Linux as an alternative? The bad part about end-of-life is cessation of security fixes. But if you run WXP in a virtual box in Linux then you get your security from Linux, especially if the WXP clients only talk to the internal network.

Of course you aren’t going to run Ubuntu 13.04. It seems the beast is perpetuating its woes without any improvements. [Link] The self-elevated Saint Mark of Canonical trumpets that his Unity GUI is natural and easy but that seems to be true only for geeks who work consecutively rather than cumulatively. And it is definitely alien landscape for WXP users of long standing, especially those who have been mind wiped by organizational IT Gestapo. They might be bale to switch to one of the derivatives with usable GUIs, but then we get into the question of whether Ubuntu hasn’t abandoned the Linux paean of running on old hardware or not?

I put U 12.10 on my dated Inspiron lapbox and it was like watching some miscegenation offspring of Plutonian molasses and liquid Helium. Yes, it booted faster than Winders but otherwise it was as snappy as ashes. I hate to say it but Ubuntu may have about run its course as number one. Canonical seems to be hell bent on reducing itself to a company of measure zero.

And on that note I must needs spread seed for the tree mammals and dinosaur descendants.

computers, humans, health, OS, corporations