Random Thoughts..
Saturday, December 07, 2002
Over the past fortnight, some opportunities arose that enabled me to go on a GNU/Linux installing spree. Now i have always believed that the more one "installs" an OS the better the ideas about pre-install and post install bugs and idiocies become. However what i'd not bargained for, much less imagined would be possible was that the install blast would provide an insight into the hearts and minds of the folks keen to try out the "Free OS". Now the sample included a range of age groups but roughly the one that gave me the most insightful questions were those between 18-20 and 45-55 years. The installation machines were different, as were the environment in which they were supposed to work. And thus burdened with RedHat v. 7.0 & 7.3, PCQLinux, Mandrake v8.0 the journey began. i am really not putting out the queries in any order of detail but what comes to mind first comes first in the list. But before i begin, the process showed one thing with clarity. Given enough time and patience and of course illustrations, it is possible to explain to non-geeks or folks with Win9x install experience the basics of the Linux partitions and the usage and the space allocation thumbrules for each. So the eternal gripe about the mumbo-jumbo "hd - what ??" is basically untrue !!
Guess what the first things people - mostly my first age group ask - "what do i do with the mp3/music library that i have ?" well it seems that music after all does unite users across platforms !
Then there was the question about "i tend to do some photo/image editing - show me stuff that i can use to attain the same level of proficiency"
Of course how could i forget "Is OpenOffice & StarOffice one and the same ?"
Or this one - "we use StarOffice at our office, the guy who got it says it is a pirated version for windows - so how can you provide me with a licensed version ?"
Check this one : "Can you get me the GPL document - a hard copy along with a book that ships with Windows ?" [the book in question was the Getting started with...]
Then there is this young programmer with "what do i do with my c++ programs ? they were all in bloodshed dev !!" the young fellow took sometime to get acquainted with the programming toolsets in his new environment and now swears that Linux rocks..
Or this young lady who freelances and thus surfs the net night and day " eeshh !! netscape is so uncool.. can i run IE here ?" Well i could only point her out towards Mozilla and suggested the same in her windows platform
And the list goes on.. with the spreadsheets, the doc files, pdfs and what not. sometimes i never imagined that people work under so many different applications all in one day.
Yet at the end of it all, what was left was the secure knowledge that somewhere a little had been achieved. These are not complete converts, they probably will never be. Yet they have had their first fling with the heady wine of "Free Software", even though for the most of them the freedom is immaterial. More could be done with short introductory courses under the aegis of the local LUGS. If *reputed* institutes can charge a lot for Introduction to Windows, then a token amount would suffice for the LUGs to start taking classes. Show them the way and they will find their own path. Be a star not a race horse. Some will stumble, some will falter, we all do. Yet in the end we all do find our own destiny.
Like they say, don't look at the finger or else the glory of the moon will be lost. In the end the movement will be stronger and more vibrant and those are the days we all dream about.
Guess what the first things people - mostly my first age group ask - "what do i do with the mp3/music library that i have ?" well it seems that music after all does unite users across platforms !
Then there was the question about "i tend to do some photo/image editing - show me stuff that i can use to attain the same level of proficiency"
Of course how could i forget "Is OpenOffice & StarOffice one and the same ?"
Or this one - "we use StarOffice at our office, the guy who got it says it is a pirated version for windows - so how can you provide me with a licensed version ?"
Check this one : "Can you get me the GPL document - a hard copy along with a book that ships with Windows ?" [the book in question was the Getting started with...]
Then there is this young programmer with "what do i do with my c++ programs ? they were all in bloodshed dev !!" the young fellow took sometime to get acquainted with the programming toolsets in his new environment and now swears that Linux rocks..
Or this young lady who freelances and thus surfs the net night and day " eeshh !! netscape is so uncool.. can i run IE here ?" Well i could only point her out towards Mozilla and suggested the same in her windows platform
And the list goes on.. with the spreadsheets, the doc files, pdfs and what not. sometimes i never imagined that people work under so many different applications all in one day.
Yet at the end of it all, what was left was the secure knowledge that somewhere a little had been achieved. These are not complete converts, they probably will never be. Yet they have had their first fling with the heady wine of "Free Software", even though for the most of them the freedom is immaterial. More could be done with short introductory courses under the aegis of the local LUGS. If *reputed* institutes can charge a lot for Introduction to Windows, then a token amount would suffice for the LUGs to start taking classes. Show them the way and they will find their own path. Be a star not a race horse. Some will stumble, some will falter, we all do. Yet in the end we all do find our own destiny.
Like they say, don't look at the finger or else the glory of the moon will be lost. In the end the movement will be stronger and more vibrant and those are the days we all dream about.
- posted by sankarshan @ 12/07/2002 07:26:00 AM 0 comments
07.12.2002
While moving from company to company, and sometimes industry to industry, keeps consultants? work lives interesting, it can lead to ethical dilemmas. Take for example, the experience of ?Midge,? a software development manager at a custom software consulting company in Minneapolis, who was asked to work for an Internet client that provided pornography. Find out how she navigated between her high moral ground and keeping her job without any negative repercussions.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00720021113bla01.htm&fromtm=e108-1
Midge is an "unusual" case. i do not mean that in any derogatory or demeaning manner. What i do like to point out is that her case is different. Most of us have faced situations in our job-scenarios that have forced us to come to terms with moral, ethical, religious and/or personal beliefs. And in India, most of the cases have been resolved by means of a compromise. The employer *makes* the employee see reason and thus things go on. Once or twice things do come to such a pass that an outburst and a final decision is required, however the case under purview is elegant for the manner in which the crisis is resolved. Much of it is based on the underlying fallacy that management, more importantly the immediate hierarchy is understanding and even sympathetic towards personal and strongly held beliefs. As Midge herself points out ?We should not be scared or ashamed of our personal values, but we also shouldn't attack those that have different values.? - that is a tough call for most managers. Learning experiences that involve de-learning of deep seated prejudices and existing work-force instruction flows are a combative, exhaustive and often futile effort. The case shows that given trust, belief in judgement and support it can be turned into a win-win scenario for all concerned. And in that there is a lesson for the dilemmas that are looming in the future.
While moving from company to company, and sometimes industry to industry, keeps consultants? work lives interesting, it can lead to ethical dilemmas. Take for example, the experience of ?Midge,? a software development manager at a custom software consulting company in Minneapolis, who was asked to work for an Internet client that provided pornography. Find out how she navigated between her high moral ground and keeping her job without any negative repercussions.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00720021113bla01.htm&fromtm=e108-1
Midge is an "unusual" case. i do not mean that in any derogatory or demeaning manner. What i do like to point out is that her case is different. Most of us have faced situations in our job-scenarios that have forced us to come to terms with moral, ethical, religious and/or personal beliefs. And in India, most of the cases have been resolved by means of a compromise. The employer *makes* the employee see reason and thus things go on. Once or twice things do come to such a pass that an outburst and a final decision is required, however the case under purview is elegant for the manner in which the crisis is resolved. Much of it is based on the underlying fallacy that management, more importantly the immediate hierarchy is understanding and even sympathetic towards personal and strongly held beliefs. As Midge herself points out ?We should not be scared or ashamed of our personal values, but we also shouldn't attack those that have different values.? - that is a tough call for most managers. Learning experiences that involve de-learning of deep seated prejudices and existing work-force instruction flows are a combative, exhaustive and often futile effort. The case shows that given trust, belief in judgement and support it can be turned into a win-win scenario for all concerned. And in that there is a lesson for the dilemmas that are looming in the future.
- posted by sankarshan @ 12/07/2002 06:46:00 AM 0 comments
Friday, December 06, 2002
With the release of RedHat release8.0 the GNU/Linux platform has attained an aura of respectablity. Simply put RH8.0 rocks. And with the specs demanded of the average machine for the smooth performance of the OS, not many will be complaining that it serves as the poor man's personal OS free from the hassles of proprietary licensing. With the media now posturing the skirmishes between the Redmond giant and RH as the "mother-of-all-battles" [now where have heard that one before ?], it remains to be seen whether the strategic advantage gained by the GNU/Linux community in terms of sheer spiffy and dressed to kill appeal can translate into more converts. As the scenario stands now, compared to the sleekness of WinXP appearances, RH is vintage charm. Smooth and eyecatching. Attractive without being tart. Under the hood also many a major modification has taken place the prime among them being the availability of a feature called "Personal Desktop" - a new installation feature. The package selection and grouping has been dramatically revamped. Yet my personal favorite is the option to check the installation medium for problems even before the installation commences. Trust me, i know the consequences of a less than flawless installation. But why should anyone just read to learn about the distribution ? Get a copy from the local LUG and then simply rock to the new beat in town.
www.in.redhat.com
www.in.redhat.com
- posted by sankarshan @ 12/06/2002 07:31:00 AM 0 comments
Thursday, December 05, 2002
The semantics of the Web...
One of the major fallacies of working with forward-looking i.e into-the-future legal issues is that sometimes it throws up more complications than the existing legal framework is equipped to handle. The excerpt from an article on Computerworld [full text available at www.computerworld.com] shows that more often than not semantics can take a matter just too far..
"For example, if someone develops the means to crack a copyright-protected CD
and makes the technology for doing so available to others, the DMCA allows civil and legal sanctions. That makes sense.
But it caused a problem for Edward Felten, a leading security researcher at Princeton University, and his team when they circumvented the proposed Secure
Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) watermarking technology standard for music. SDMI's
creators had invited researchers to crack the technology, but when Felten sought to publish the results, he was threatened with a lawsuit from SDMI's recording industry
backers.Felten fought back. The Electronic Freedom Foundation filed a lawsuit challenging
the prohibitions. But it never evolved into a test case because the research was
conducted before the DMCA's prohibition on acts of circumvention took effect in 2000. The suit was dismissed.
Felten says researchers are worried that their work will lead to lawsuits. "There is a
very strong sentiment in the research community that doing research in [content protection] is dangerous," he says.
The DMCA has survived one important test. The Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) sued Eric Corely, the publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly when the magazine sought to post De-Content Scrambling System code that
circumvented DVD anticopying technology, arguing that First Amendment
protection applied.
New York District Judge Lewis Kaplan found for the MPAA but saw legitimate
arguments on both sides. "In our society, however, clashes of competing interests
like this are resolved by Congress," wrote Kaplan.
For now, at least, the courts have resolved this clash in the DMCA's and plaintiffs' favor.
For the motion picture industry and content providers in general, Kaplan's decision was critical.
If the publisher had prevailed, "the protection that Congress afforded content owners under the DMCA would have been eliminated," says Charles Sims, the New York attorney representing the MPAA.
"By defeating that challenge and establishing that the anticircumvention provisions are constitutional, we preserved the security for copyrighted works that the DMCA
afforded," he says.
But the Corely case is hardly the end of legal challenges to this complex law or new efforts in Congress to revise it. There will be battles for years to come."
All of us are quite at ease of copying information from diverse electronic media and other sources, sometimes crediting them but more often than not avoiding the credit lines. Soon this will evolve into something that is not kindly looked upon..
"The DMCA also raises issues that can affect the sharing and copying of data in the
workplace. Suppose, for instance, that an employee copies several paragraphs of an article off
the Web and disseminates it. The DMCA requires that those excerpts include copyright management information such as title, author, and terms and conditions of use, says Michael Overly, an attorney at Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles. He advises companies to review their content-sharing practices in light of the DMCA. Another problem raised by the DMCA is fair use of electronic data. If a copyright includes an anticircumvention clause that prevents copying, then anyone who breaks that provision could be liable under the DMCA. If the same material appears in paper, the reader is free to copy it for personal use. The law creates different rules for the same material, depending on the medium, says Overly. "
And therein lies the fallacy, protectionism is good and sometimes required to safeguard intellectual property rights. But how far is far enough ? And in a scenario for a country like India, when does the buck stop ? More importantly is it possible to lead a quiet life and not be bothered by the DMCA ?
- posted by sankarshan @ 12/05/2002 01:44:00 PM 0 comments
