Popularizing Linux

I just had this idea yesterday morning... it seems that in many consumer product areas, the best tool seems to be the thing which eventually gains the most market share.

Google certainly won market share where dmoz, and yahoo and other search engines lost it... not because google was aesthetic - but because it was the best tool out there. Reddit.com seems to be pulling ahead of digg - because it's just more efficient at providing links to people.

Photovoltaic technology has never gained widespread acceptance, because it's not practical, usually. The electrical current is too weak.

Think about the yellow and black "Dummies" books. Who would think that they would gain the popularity which they did? I'm sure many editors quailed at the thought that people would not buy a book which seemed to insult them. But, because they were the best tools out there for learning how to do new things, they have become iconic in our society.

This measure even holds true when you look at how people choose a presidential nominee. Democrats don't want Kucinich or Gravel, because they believe that these people aren't the best tools out there for the task.

So this is my thought about why Vista is not accepted.

The change from 98/ME to XP is nothing like the change from XP to Vista. Xp was a big upgrade and a much better tool than 98 was - it's stable, where 98 and ME were very rickety, in many ways. And even though XP was very slow on the first computers it was released on, it gained popularity.

Ummm... that's exaggeration, Sid. Everything has a mechanics to it. And if that mechanics is understood, then something can be done to change the trends. Hyperbole dulls a person's judgement.... because it presumes to summarize a situation which is much more complex than that. I was a kid when Bill Gates was just getting started. He set out to do what everyone in the computer world thought was a crazy and impossible idea. He wanted to sell operating systems independent of hardware. But he succeeded, and now his company has become iconic. In the same manner, wikipedia, google and even Apple with the first macintosh - also set about tasks which everyone scoffed at... people thought such projects were ludicrous ideas.

A well thought out agenda by some deep thinking people, can go a long way. And invariably, the course which is most effective, and most wise, will be something which looks weird and different to the mainstream industry at that point. It's interesting how, in retrospect, people don't remember how these companies used to be perceived.

Microsoft has it's current status in the world, only because it has been the favorite platform for technicians, hobbyists, hardware makers, and software makers. What gives microsoft it's value? The mountains of software made for it. Microsoft and Apple took two different roads in the woods. Apple kept all their production in-house. Microsoft chose to set up a little village - so to speak - around their factory. Gates created an entire economy, where guys in garages could buy six or seven parts by mail, assemble a computer and sell it to someone in their community. People could write a piece of software in ten lines of code, which does something to the windows' registry, and sell it.

Now, of course, open source is the logical next step. There are certainly awkward, and untenable things about working with an operating system where you cannot look under the hood. And it makes better sense, for the future of the world, to break Microsoft's monopoly. And that will happen. But it not a matter of a long hard slog. It's a matter of precise strategy.

Well, I see I touched a nerve there with my mention of Wikipedia. As a writer, and a philosophical thinker, I admire wikipedia. It's only a few years old... and the fact that it suffers scorn is because it's still making it's footprint. In ten years... I guarantee you that our cultural paradigm about scholarly work will have changed to where wikipedia and what it represents will be the standard for scholarly thought and inquiry. It's not as if it's written by mystics from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Give me a break!

And your reaction should remind us of how Microsoft was viewed in the early 1980s, how the first macintosh was viewed (the first "windows" computer), and how Google was thought of when they set up shop. Just like these other agendas were scorned... because they tried to work with a new paradigm... so Linux is scorned. And this is an important point which I'm trying to make here.

I think you're right about the need to popularize the Open office formats. How is that to be done? Does open office include an analagous format to adobe pdf? It would be great if we could make the most prevalent downloadable text format, an openoffice format.

I certainly am aware of the grassroots movement behind Linux... I've hung around tech forums for a long time. As you pointed out, my thrust here, is that we need to consider people's individual passions, needs, and interests... and make a tool that fits like a glove on their hand, as they work on the aspects of their project, their career, or their hobbies.

Well, Marco... Much to your chagrin, I am, indeed going to continue this conversation with you about wikipedia -at least one more post's worth. I don't defer to readers' needs when I write. It's likely that no one's reading this conversation except us, and these two or three other people that chimed in, when they get dinged about new posts on the thread. An internet conversation is my moment with my conversation partner, and I milk that opportunity for all it's worth, whenever I get it.

I suppose what I'm saying is the same thing that Lawrence Lessig was saying here (video). We need to move to a more participatory culture, in every way... and the field of writing is no exception. I dislike the trend of the era that I grew up in - in the 1900s, where literature was consumed, and not created by people. I think it's not healthy for a society to have ideas from the elite coming down in books for everyone else to read. Wikipedia invites everybody who has any relationship whatsoever to the topic, to write about what she or he knows. It's not just the work of people who walk in the ivory halls of the colleges and universities.

Here is a beautiful example of the philosophizing that happens at wikipedia. Think about what philosophy was, as a tradition in middle ages in Europe, or in ancient Greece. This is how things work. Everybody gets up and joins in. Some people play games with words, and ideas. Others are honest. Everybody has some passionate agenda which they're pushing. This is the stuff of life, sir! People will just have to learn that to be able to use the information on the internet, you have to yourself, learn to think critically, and to be able to judge what is true and what is false.

I'm sorry if I offended you for not being a professional computer person. I'm not. I've taught myself one modern modern computer language - tcl/tk. I've learned how to maintain my computer, and secure the master boot record and set up a multi-boot system. But that's all been on my own.

As far as your indignance goes about proprietory formats. It makes me chuckle. the way the mainstream software companies have created software suites, and document formats has been to an extent out of touch with what real tradespeople, and real offices need. And there is an opportunity for the open source movement to create better alternatives. From what I've heard about open document format, I think it's like firefox trying to outcompete internet explorer, or linux trying to compete against vista, by copying all the errors which the other organization made. Most people would find that these alternatives aren't faster, or more useful than what they've always used.

And this is where I fear that the open source movement could fall behind. The innovators in a field, are often the little mavericks in a workshop somewhere who have a brand new idea. I listed several examples of this effect above, in my comments. A large group of people who get together, rarely form a consensus which leads them to find solutions and innovations which are beyond the scope of the current paradigms.

Well, thanks for giving us your thoughts...! ;-)

Marco... I see that you have some worldviews which are pretty firmly set in stone. I just have to sigh at your snide comment about me wanting to orate about wikipedia to get traffic. I said the opposite, you know? The internet is a big bazaar, and there's a thousand booths out there. I don't expect many people are reading any particular thing I say. And certainly I don't make any money at Newsvine - maybe a nickle or a dime each month. What I want in my internet experience is other people who understand how to have friendship with text. Nobody does. And that's sad.

Particularly, I'm finding Newsvine is a fruitless thing for me. Because I'm an avid writer, I think I should do something which looks professional. But really, I'd much rather spend my time talking about exponentially more kinds of topics at reddit.com. Now that I've made this newsvine column pretty, people are getting so uppity and stiff and formal around my newsvine persona. Yuck. Now, why did I want to talk with you about a second topic? Do you see, how much more I wrote in the comments of this thread, rather than the article? That's because you, and others who are replying are helping me think... and musing about the world is my greatest joy. I think about a broad range of topics... I am not a specialist in my life, I'm a generalist.

Marco... no offense taken. Don't worry about anything. The system here does not allow automatic email notification for thread replies. But, you should see a little box in the upper left hand corner of every page which says "Conversation Tracker." This has three numbers in it. The topmost one gives you notice about any people who have posted comments in your column. The middle one gives notice about people who have added comments in threads which you have also participated in. And the bottom one tells you if any of your newsvine colleagues are leaving comments here and there around the vine. So, if you view any newsvine page, while being logged in, you should be able to see if there is any new stuff you ought to be aware of.

To reply to your feelings about my forthrightness... I think about everything under the sun, Marco. I think in general terms... I don't need to have intimate experience with all the various areas of life which I contemplate. And, indeed, I can come to some pretty well formed models about how the world works this way. Once I do get more information, and start rubbing shoulders with people who work in the field, I can fill in the blanks and see more clearly why what I've observed is the way it is. That's exciting. I kind of have the feeling you're trying to cling to the ways that writers acted in a bygone century.

Writing in this generation is about consensus building. And it's about drawing on the knowledge of every human being on earth, who can type onto a keyboard and share her or his ideas. And the consensus building process does not start in some college laboratory with someone who made a discovery. There are more people out there doing experiments in their garages than there are people in laboratories. There are more people mulling about their world quietly with their journals, than there are sociologists who are doing formal studies, who have funding from some source or another.

So what you're seeing is a natural change in the way literature is created, and how ideas are passed around, and how consensuses are built.

I really do dislike this brusque attitude people have on the internet today. As I was saying, people don't know how to develop friendships through text, in the english speaking world. All they know how to do is look at an idea, and think whether they agree with it, or not. If they disagree with it, they disapprove of the writer, and what he's doing. If they agree with the statement, they applaud him. It's a very shallow way to interact. There's a lot more depth to human interactions with text.

Benno... just good old-fashioned critical thought! What's wrong with that? Do you know the history of science very well? In every century before our own, you can see myriads of false models and wrong conclusions that the field of science corporately holds. Any student of history knows that he ought to question current scientific thought, as much as one would chuckle about previous errors which we can read about.

I, for instance, have never heard a scientist explain global warming through carbon dioxide output satisfactorily. The explanations for the effect (which has certainly come upon us), seem to me to be like a person who is guessing how a jigsaw puzzle goes together... not like a person who is demonstrating how a jigsaw puzzle fits together.

I really disagree, super. I think science should speak facts and secure conclusions, and if there simply isn't enough information to work with (such as in astronomy), than a scientist should in all honesty admit that she or he doesn't know. That opens the doorway for scientists who make a marvelous journey like Charles Darwin did... as he spent his life looking around him, and thinking and musing. And he comes up with a damn good model, which we hold in high esteem ever since.

Consider the puzzle idea. Think about a social experiment, where you would just dump a pile of puzzle pieces in front of ten different people.... You wouldn't show them the picture which was supposed to come together, when the puzzle was assembled. Everyone would have a different idea of how those cardboard puzzle pieces fit together... they would say "because there seems to be sky here, and ground here, I think such and such is the case." But they would be 95% wrong. Only the person who actually showed how the puzzle pieces fit together, by example, would be right. This is the thing that ancient philosophers talked about when they spoke of "demonstrating" something. (example: third chapter of Aristotle's book "Posterior Analytics")

Now, as far as the climate thing goes... I think it's very healthy for our world and our nations, that we have a meditation like this, to help us think about the terribly tragic footprint homo sapiens are making on this planet. I applaud the social movement of the people who are leveraging consensus for the climate-change-by-CO2 model. Global warming is a serious problem, and it looks like we might have quite a bit of sea level rise pretty damn quick - given the extent of melting in the arctic this summer, and in Greenland.

Peak oil is certainly a problem. Just as we, a hundred years ago, switched from heating our homes with coal, to heating them with oil and natural gas, now we have to make another technological jump. There's a big oil siphon in China and India which is really making a dent in the supply.

So, it's all good. But I still insist that science should be more careful with how it forms it's conclusions. And I think that the healthy philosophical tradition which is now forming around places like wikipedia, is a vital counterbalance to those folks working with their testtubes in laboratories. Philosophy is also at it's core, about logical reasoning.

Benno. Let's take this one apart... (a third topic for this thread!). What controls climate? Well, the one effect which I see as the most prominent factor is the angle of the sun. I live in a southern rocky mountain tourist town, and I see the temperature drop by about fifteen degrees in about a week... come autumn. The only prominent factor here is that the angle of the sun has dropped below a certain threshhold. What else is involved in temperature? Precipitation is a big factor. On a summer's day, a thundershower can instantly lower the air temperature fifteen degrees. And of course, there is the factor of wind bringing air into an area where it has been either heated or cooled over another geographically different part of the country.

This, sir, is ecology. Ecology is not looking at one minute detail, like carbon dioxide, and focusing on that, until your eyes cross. As a logical thinker, Benno, I frankly cannot see how increased carbon dioxide could create warmer temperatures because it traps the heat from reflection of the sun off the ground in a way that other gasses do not. Gasses intermingle, sir! And when they intermingle, they exchange the heat which is between them.

This is the sin of modern science, Benno - that they are too focused on minute details, and they lose sight of the larger picture. Think about the old fable of the four blind men and the elephant. This is what happens.

If scientists talking about any subject in lectures, and television shows, essays, and elsewhere, cannot fairly bring into the conversation all the things which affect the systems which they are speaking about, then I don't think it's prudent to uncritically believe them, just because they're the experts and we're the uneducated masses who are expected to believe the experts.

Is he the dude, then, huh?

Hmmm... that's an interesting biography. A guy who wanted us to reject empiricism, and just make science into a game of falsifying your colleagues' guesses. How is that a logical way to do things? 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2 anymore... No, not if you're talking about string theory or events far out away from us, in other star systems.

Oh yes, now I'm remembering in highschool when I learned about that bastard. My mom, was at that time an editor for a medical journal, and I was betwixt and between, reading her writers' work, and hearing what she had to say about it. I knew it wasn't even close to the honest pursuit of science which I understood had always been the ideal. Then I heard of Popper.

Thanks for reminding me about him.

Well, indeed, I do not at all agree what is referred to as "the scientific method" as it was taught to us in primary and secondary school ~~~ (1) form a hypothesis (2) test it out with experiments (3) write about your conclusions in a scientific journal.

The problem of starting with a hypothesis, is that you begin your observations with a preconception in mind;, and the human mind is just too prone to seeing things that aren't there. It's better to start approaching the endeavor with an even playing field laid out between you and the topic. Now, in practice, how was "the scientific method" pursued over the course of the 1900s? It's corporations which are doing research and development, who wish to hire someone to do a study. Those people have a goal in mind, for what they want to prove, or what they want to research, and how they want to use the knowledge that's gained. Now you can't tell me that there isn't a bias in studies which are put together in this fashion. And that, my friend, is the body of work which comprises what we all look at today, and say is "science."

It's better to be a Charles Darwin.... who observes and observes a thousand times, before he finally puts together some models about how things work. And then he qualifies his models by pointing out where they might be found flawed, in the future. That's a much more logical approach to science, in my estimation.

This is a cool conversation, Super, thanks!

I think that philosophers have some things they can teach scientists. Scientists work with their hands and real time observations. But philosophers know that observation of patterns is also a valid way to go. I understand your concern about how science progresses. And perhaps Popper synthesized that as an observation, more than he was encouraging it to be so.

I really think we should have an infusion of philosophers into the sciences. We already had an infusion of science fiction writers in the decade and two. I'll tell ya a lot of the things I read in Scientific American magazine sound like what was proposed by 1980s science fiction novelists.

Philosophers, however, would teach scientists that they have to think about context, as much as you have to think about specificity. I know it's disheartening to go through a sequence of dull experiments using test tubes and chemicals and not be able to synthesize a broader model from what you've observed. But those models have to be educated by the larger contexts which are available to look at.

I glanced at the "Critical rationalism" explanation at wikipedia. Many things can be said in big words, and half those things will invariably be wrong, Super. That article confirms my thought here. I can see in that paper, exactly why and where "critical rationalism" has gone astray. Unfortunately, most people won't be able to read that article at all, because of the holes in their comprehension, every time they come across a word which they don't know yet.

Benno...

All I'm saying is that questions need to be asked, and they need to be answered. I have an open mind. But if those who speak about some theory have not demonstrated it. If they are instead doing "critical rationalism" because of their belief in the ideas of Karl Popper... that means that their statements are fairly specious. I subscribe to nothing, just because some authority figure said it was true. Nobody should.

Being a sycophant does not help anybody. Being a person who blindly rallies in favor of one idea or the other, just helps to fill the world with really shallow kinds of writing and oratory.

Again, I'd point you back to the third chapter of Aristotle's book on "posterior analytics." What he writes, is that if a scientist cannot demonstrate something he says, then his statement should be discounted, summarily. Those are pretty strong words... but words to live by.

That's a great article by the way. I'll have to pore over it. At first glance, I still would protest about the fact that this Fourier effect is taken out of context with all the different systems that govern the climate of our globe. Why can't they talk about the interactions, and Fourier effect's place within those interactions? If they can't put all these pieces together and show how much weight each effect has... then it just looks to me like classic scientific obfuscation because they know that they are unsure of their models. Being able to contexutalize something is the best test of accuracy. If a person is pushing an idea, and yet refuses to look at the broader contexts and deal with them, it's a sure sign that she or he is not secure in her ideas.

Why the hell are you harping about this to me, Benno? Can't you see a million other interesting things that have been brought up in this conversation so far? I don't know why you are fixated on trying to convince me, in particular, about the Fourier effect. I'm nobody, sir.

Benno...
To address your weird attempt at cynical humour in misquoting me.

Sir... problems have causes which need to be understood. No one can hope to solve problems with a half-baked or a wrong appraisal of what those causes are. Scientific consensus, in and of itself, about the Fourier effect, does not mean that the issue is settled. And people who question the Fourier effect, will only serve to encourage the scientists to explain their ideas more clearly, and to prove themselves more soundly, if they are, indeed, correct.

Meanwhile, if you had at all been reading what I have said about this, on this thread, you would see that I DO applaud the changes in political policy which the environmentalists are working using this story of why global warming is occurring.

I don't know what the reason for that prank was. It certainly shows that you don't comprehend the meaning of what I was saying underneath that which you lined out.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, jedecn. In reference to two of the things which you brought up:

Yes, I have seen what you are pointing out. Particularly, I notice on the Windsor core computer I just built, that XP loads and shuts down very slowly. On my older Venice core machine it was a lot faster. I still have to go through and see if I can tune up some things to improve the boot time.

I have several operating systems I can boot into... and my linux distro of choice is Sabayon. It really is slow to boot - even processing at a width of 64 bits.

Appearances are very important. One's facade is an important thing. Just as it it's important to comb one's hair before one leaves for work, it's also important to make the computer feel fast to people. Benchmarks aren't enough to judge this. Even if windows doesn't function for a minute or two after I see the desktop, I still can start thinking about my day once I see all the icons on the screen - and that gives me a headstart.

350 distros you say...? I wasn't keeping count. That brings up another usability problem that has to be looked at... if we need to have everyone compiling their code for linux... techs have to make a system to guarantee that if software designers test their application on one certain testbed, it will work in every linux distro equally well. There has to be a way for linux makers to agree on some standards to where there could be this sort of testbed given to software makers. It would be kind of like the w3.org html standards.

I'm actually kind of hoping that someone develops an open source microkernel system which we can travel on to, after we've had enough fun with Linux. I think that would be a much more practical foundation to work with.

You're quixotic, Marco. You think you're being so practical, but you're not. If it is true that that development for linux is as impossible as you insist it is, then we should abandon Linux, and create some new open source operating system... perhaps some delightful microkernel written in LISP ;-) As long as there is such an impediment to making reliable software that doesn't crash or have glitches, in the hundreds of varieties of linux which people might choose, Linux will have no way forward for itself.

This is why I'm saying that there needs to be a standards organization like w3.org. My proposal, as you remember, was that there needs to be a testbed environment developed, which programmers can use. Then, every linux distro maker can weigh in, to make sure that if programs test and work in that testbed, they will also work smoothly in the brand of linux which he is distributing. I don't think this is an impossible task.

Thanks. I'll check that out, Super. ;-)