desirable things

The Third Draft

The third draft of the GPLv3 has been released. The draft is a result of feedback from various sources (general public, official discussion committees, and two international conferences held in India and Japan). The draft incorporates significant changes since the previous draft (July 2006). This draft is planned to be the penultimate draft prior to the formal release of the official GPLv3.

Changes in this draft include:

* First-time violators can have their license automatically restored if they remedy the problem within thirty days.
* License compatibility terms have been simplified, with the goal of making them easier to understand and administer.
* Manufacturers who include the software in consumer products must also provide installation information for the software along with the source. This change provides more narrow focus for requirements that were proposed in previous drafts.
* New patent requirements have been added to prevent distributors from colluding with patent holders to provide discriminatory protection from patents.

    The draft will be open for comments and discussion for sixty days. Following this the FSF will release a “last call” draft, followed by another thirty days for discussion before the FSF’s board of directors approves the final text of GPL version 3.

    Richard Stallman, president of the FSF and principal author of the GNU GPL, said, “The GPL was designed to ensure that all users of a program receive the four essential freedoms which define free software. These freedoms allow you to run the program as you see fit, study and adapt it for your own purposes, redistribute copies to help your neighbor, and release your improvements to the public. The recent patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell aims to undermine these freedoms. In this draft we have worked hard to prevent such deals from making a mockery of free software.”

    Posted on by mklang

    En tus brazos

    En Tus Brazos is a short animation about the Tango king and his partner. I will not tell you about it as anything I shall say would give away part of the story. The film is brilliantly done and the story is well chosen. The dance of life indeed!

    The film is moody and intriguing. It was released in 2006 and created by Fx Goby, Mattheiu Landour and Edouard Jouret.

    Posted on by mklang

    Is it really happening?

    Oh my god!!! This is the most recent strip from PhD comics. Slackerney is on his way! This is truly the end of an era.

     

    For those of you who are unable to see the significance of this event then either you are hopelessly lost… or you have a wonderful experience ahead of you discovering the work of Jorge Cham. The comic strip is called Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD in case you missed it) and features the troubles of ordinary PhD students struggling with writing, conferences, self doubt, procrastination, insecurity, supervisors, food and sleep deprivation in the futile quest for a title.

    The strip began in 1997 and the whole archive is available online. But beware it is not only highly amusing it is addictive and will increase your level of procrastination to new heights. I became hooked in 2002/2003 and since then I have read all the strips, bought the books, bought the t-shirt and included this strip (with permission!) in my own PhD thesis.

    The significance of the strip above is that Mike Slackerney is about to pass his PhD. He has been a student since before anyone else can remember – his supervisor is embarrassed to remember the date. So this event must be seen as an evolutionary leap forward.

    Personally I think it is great since I took way too long to finish writing my thesis – but remember Newtons First Law of Graduation: A grad student in procrastination tends to stay in procrastination unless an external force is applied to it. (PhD comics 3 March 2001)

    Posted on by mklang

    A European Spine?

    “The British Government has issued a response to a recent petition calling for ‘the Prime Minister to make software patents clearly unenforcible’. The answer is reassuring but perhaps doesn’t go far enough, and gives no specific promises to bring into line a patent office that grants software patents (according to the petition) ‘against the letter and the spirit of the law’. The Gowers Review that it references gives detailed insight into the current British position on this debate, most interestingly recommending a policy of ‘not extending patent rights beyond their present limits within the areas of software, business methods and genes.'” (via Slashdot)

    OMG! Does this mean that there are European countries, part of the EU which actually may have a spine? That they are prepared not to toe the EU competition of who can sellout their values the fastest in order to please the US?

    Originally I thought that European Unity was a good idea since it would enable Europeans to take a stand against the cultural and economic superiority of the States – but we haven’t seen much of that yet…

    Posted on by mklang

    Luddite Challenge

    Can you shut down your computer for a full day? Why not take the Shutdown Challenge and switch of the old box for a full day on 24 March. This is the kind of challenge which makes you think: I am not addicted I can shut down any time I want to… But I don’t want to!

    Actually I have no idea why I should want to promise to shut off my computer on a day a month from now. If I did actually turn off it would probably be more like an accident rather than a planned event. I never was much of a Luddite, I will have to fail this test…

    Posted on by mklang

    Coffee Break Peacemaker

    Amongst technical discussions on platforms, systems and semantic webs (making my head spin) we slipped into the more general dangerous philosophical question of what is knowledge? This was sparked off by a discussion on the concept of the learning object as the smallest indivisible learning base. Is it the fact, the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter or the book?

    The discussion of what is knowledge and how small the learning object can become turned into a lively discussion, probably since it was a nice break from the technology side of the project.

    The main thrust of the argument (well more of a disagreement) was the disagreement with the proposition that all learning objects should (and therefore could) be broken up into more palatable parts. The idea was to include a 500-word (approximate) limit for each such part.

    Some of us disagreed that such a thing was possible. That such a normative formal approach could be taken in relation to learning objects. Knowledge can be too complex to always be able to be broken down into a fixed limit.

    We shared ideas and put forward metaphors, philosophers and concepts. But in the end we had to agree to disagree since neither side could convince the other. The argument could have continued but we broke up for coffee.

    During coffee we were no longer on different sides of the table but on neutral ground – the discussions relaxed but we remained in fundamental disagreement on whether knowledge could or could not be subdivided  – but we all agreed that it was a good argument. Once again the importance of the coffee break  was proven.

    Posted on by mklang

    Chomsky in Uppsala

    Battleangel reports that Noam Chomsky is to be awarded an honorary degree by the faculty of languages, Uppsala University. Since Chomsky is one of the greats then maybe it would be interesting to go to Uppsala in May. I wonder if there will be a public lecture?
    For the purpose of enlightenment Battleangel also provides a bio:

    Professor Noam Chomsky took his doctorate in 1955, with a dissertation on formal grammar that laid the foundation for his groundbreaking work in linguistics. Since then he has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as Professor since 1961, and has fundamentally transformed the methods and theory of the subject of linguistics. By opposing explanations of language based on behaviorist psychology and emphasizing instead the innateness of the basic components of grammar as unique to the human species, his rejuvenation of linguistics constituted a paradigm shift. Chomskyâ??s work with formal grammar also established the research field of mathematical linguistics, which became the foundation of a major component in modern computational science. Few scholars have dominated their research fields the way Chomsky has, and as a leftist-oriented critic of U.S. foreign policy he has also attained a considerable reputation outside academic circles, standing out as one of the most outreaching and truly creative humanists in history.

    Read the university press release.

    Posted on by mklang

    Imaginary Centers

    The idea of the center is a powerful one. It somehow denotes the middle, equilibrium, balance and this spills over into an idea of well-being. The classic search for centers is Jules Verne â??Journey to the Center of the Earthâ?? which somehow never really makes it into a good metaphor for soul-searching introspection.

    In our local lives we have a middle-point. Actually we have several. We have a geographical center that somehow denotes the middle point of our everyday travels. Most of us would like such a point to be the place of our homes but the reality of real estate prices probably puts this point somewhere we may never have been â?? the tube or bus station in between home and work.

    But there is rarely one center. We have shopping centers (sorry about the pun), entertainment centers, and centers related to many other activities (e.g. food). The mental images of our travels to and from our centers overlap the physical city. Centers are also important outside the personal context. Centers of culture, economics, shipping, religion and industry abound. But these are centers of the imaginary kind.

    Geographic centers are common. One such center, which has been notoriously hard to pin down, is the center of Europe. First we have to start by attempting to define what Europe is. This is a historic, geographic, political and nationalistic quagmire (oh no, donâ??t go there). So we simplify, the center of the European Union (an entity which is not Europe).

    On the 1 January 2007 the EU center shifted. This is because both Bulgaria and Rumania joined. More territory joins therefore the center shifts (about 200 kilometers east). According to the IGN he new center of the EU is the German town of Gelnhausen.

    But the title is contested since there are plenty of places which seem to want the title. Here are a few: Bernotai, or PurnuÅ¡kÄ?s near Vilnius in Lithuania; a point on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia; the village of Krahule in central Slovakia; the town of Rakhiv, or the village of Dilove, in western Ukraine; Suchowola in north-eastern Poland; and ToruÅ? in the northern part of central Poland; Babruysk or Vitebsk in Belarus (Wikipedia).

    Several of these sites have nice markers to celebrate the â??factâ?? and to point out the reason for the significance of the insignificant site.

    To be able to arrive at the geographical center of Europe the IGN have taken into consideration the English and French colonies far, far away â?? proving once again that the center is equally a state of mind as a geographic fact.

    Despite the fact that the center is an illusion we still tend to seek it out. The newly declared Gelnhausen center is in the middle of an empty field (Google Satelite image of 50°10�21�N, 9°9�0�E), identical to all the other fields around it.

    Thatâ??s it isnâ??t it? We strive to find the center only to discover that it is no different from the periphery and yet we still value the center even when it is devoid of distinguishing characteristicsâ?¦

    Posted on by mklang

    Why the internet is cool: reason nr 324

    In February last year I wrote a post about a painting by the African artist Pilipil Mulongoy which has been hanging in my home since before I was born. It is, as I wrote, the stuff which makes me and my home. In the post I included a photo

    pilipili

    A couple of days ago I recieved an email from a publisher working on a book about African art history. They would like to use a picture of the work in their book. Stuff like this cannot happen in the analogue world, or at least it never happened to me.

    Posted on by mklang

    The Darfur Wall

    The tragic situation in Darfur has cost the lives of 400 000 people. In an attempt to raise money and awareness the Darfur Foundation have created a striking demonstration and collection method. They have created The Darfur Wall. This is 400,000 dark numbers spread over 40 pages. Each number represents one of the 400,000 people who have been killed in the Darfur genocide.

    Each visitor can pick a number and, by donating one dollar, the number is lit up.

    The founders carry the administrative costs so, aside from the Paypal fee, the money is divided equally between the four organizations supported by this foundation, allocated specifically to Darfur relief efforts.

    Since the wall went up in November:

    Numbers lit: 12270 of 400000
    Total amount donated: $12,542
    Number of donations: 848
    Average donation: $14.79
    Percent lit: 3.07%
    Pages fully lit: 0 of 40

    Posted on by mklang