Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC’s Money Programme. As he prepares to significantly reduce his direct work for Microsoft Corporation, Bill reflects upon what got him started in the first place and what kept him ahead of the ‘competition’. The video provides a brief glimpse into the character that founded and guided Microsoft. Regardless of whether you love him or hate him, he is indeed a fascinating character.
Skip ahead to the 40 second mark, to the segment titled “How the teenage Gates and his friend Paul Allen got access to a computer”. The story according to Gates was that he and his friends were allowed to hack on a company’s computer “like monkeys” at night to find bugs. He spent hours reading manuals and experimenting to figure out this “fascinating puzzle”. However, they were stuck at the “tinkering” stage until they stumbled across the source code in a rubbish bin. It was only then could the monkeys evolve.
I don’t think the producers of the show realised the significance of this admission, since they quickly cut to another segment. Reading between the lines, Gates is essentially confessing that he would not have progressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code. Without this knowledge, and without this opportunity to understand and experiment with how the internals of a computer worked, Gates and Allen would have been severely constrained in their ability to found a software company and develop products
I would go so far as to say that Microsoft owes its very existence to this access to source code.
To anyone with a passing familiarity to how things worked back then, this comes as no surprise. Source code was expected to be free, and this in turn nurtured a generation of computer hackers. But whereas Richard Stallman saw the amazing potential of this freedom and wanted to preserve it for all, Bill Gates appears to have perceived it as an advantage for himself that he must deny to others.
LotD: Gates memo shows user frustration
I promised way back in January that we’d release a video of that month’s SLUG meeting — our up-close-and-personal with Microsoft. We did just that a month ago, but I totally forgot to mention it here.
I know, I suck.
Anyway, you can get the video and slides here (the links in the original announcement are no longer functional). It’s been pointed out to me that the slides in the video vary slightly from the PDF, but the difference is minimal. It’s three months old now — so don’t expect any revelations — but it’s still an interesting watch.
LotD: Save money by buying directly from the USA (for Australians only)
"Freedom is the right of all sentient beings." — Optimus Prime
This one throwaway line in the new Transformers film is in fact homage to the original Transformers series. As observant readers of this blog may have noticed, I am quite a fan of the Transformers multiverse, particularly of the 1986 animated film (amongst other things, it has an awesome soundtrack and some great vocal work). Optimus Prime was a childhood hero of mine, so this motto has always struck a chord with me.
It also makes me wonder, if the Autobots are such strong advocates of freedom, are they themselves programmed with Free Software? Conversely, are the Decepticons proprietary?
LotD: The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers
What do you do when you’re in the city and need to kill some time? Watching a film sounded like a fair option to me. The cinematic masterpiece (!), ‘Epic Movie’, caught my eye. I wasn’t expecting much from it at all, so I placed myself into Low Expectations Mode™, gritted my teeth, and went in. It went according to plan, with the LEM buffering me somewhat from almost-certain disappointment.
One thing struck me, however. I was sitting through the closing credits, and I noticed an attribution to a character named ‘Steve Irwin’. That’s strange, I thought. I didn’t remember a Steve Irwin character. The closing credits were punctuated by short video clips, each followed by a change in music as the standard credits scrolling returned. A minute later, the screen flickered for a split-second, the credits returned, and the music suddenly changed. Did they cut something out? At the end, there was still no sign of Steve.
Was the Steve Irwin scene removed somewhere between the film studio and Hoyts? It could not have been done by the studio - the cut was far too amateurish for that (although I might be giving them too much credit, given the mediocre quality of the film). While I understand that Steve Irwin died not too long ago, in my opinion that is no excuse for anyone to tell me what I can and cannot watch. The cinema probably calculated that the risk of public backlash from maintaining the scene would be greater than the opposition to censorship. If so, they were probably right. That still doesn’t change the fact that I paid money to view a title that has been rendered incomplete at the (likely perceived) behest of extremists.
Censorship has its place in society, but this is going too far. Within reason, a free and open flow of information is the hallmark of a healthy democracy. Of course, the perceptions of what exactly ‘reason’ is is debatable, and that’s what lies at the heart of such debates. I prefer to err on the side of openness, in the same vein as ‘innocent until proven guilty’. I don’t like being told what to think, and what I can view. If I wanted that, I’d be using Windows Vista with all of its Digital Restrictions Management nonsense.
There’s always the chance that I’m completely off the mark with my accusations. I’d appreciate it if someone could verify/dispel my claims.
Are you aware of the condition known as Service Support Termination Trauma (SSTT)? View this Novell Public Service Announcement to find out more.
Klepas pointed us on IRC to a brilliantly-done film explaining the concept of Trustworthy Computing. It concisely and clearly demonstrates why so many of us in the FLOSS world prefer to call it Treacherous Computing.
Unfortunately, the producers decided to make the film available as a Sorenson-encoded Quicktime file. I find it amusing that people who oppose digital restrictions are using such a highly-proprietary video format. Fortunately for us, there is a DivX/MP3 version (still not as good as Theora or even XviD, but it’ll do) available at Google Video.
Once you have finished viewing it, head on over to Against-TCPA for more information.
A must-see film for anyone who grew up in the ’80s.
More info here. It’s a shame that the official site requires Flash 8 to run. That locks us GNU/Linux users out 
Whenever most people go ice skating, they usually begin by clinging onto the barrier going around the edge of the rink. I am no exception, but considering that I hadn’t skated in close to ten years, I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to skate away from the barrier after only about ten minutes on the edge. I was able to build up some reasonable speed, and I didn’t even fall over once.
Despite the cold, I worked up a sweat, and I must have had a considerable workout since my hamstrings felt tender for the next couple of days.
After that, we went to see Superman Returns. The intro had me wrapped: it was essentially an updated version of the intro in the first movie. Unfortunately, I feel they borrowed too much from the original four films. Unlike Batman Begins (which I loved), Superman Returns, as its name implies, is a continuation and not a reboot. Lex Luthor was darker, but still felt like a bumbling buffoon surrounded by even greater buffoons. He played a minimal role in the film, with a large chunk of time going to Lois Lane. Lois, I feel, was very poorly written for and casted. What happened to the sassy reporter that offset the goody-goody Clark Kent so well? This Lois was like a wet blanket on the whole plot.
Superman himself was pretty darn good. The problem with Superman, though, is that he’s too darn powerful. Lex Luthor is a powerful adversary with his evil genius, but if you want a character to match Superman in raw power you’d have to look towards the likes of Darkseid or Doomsday. For the movie franchise to survive, I think they will have to branch away from Luthor, but hopefully not as badly as was done in Superman III.
I must nominate Hotel Rwanda as my Movie of the Year. I know that it was officially released last year, but it only came to Australia this year. I rank it right up there with two of my other favourite movies, The Killing Fields and Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fireflies).
These movies deal with incredibly disturbing subject matter: the effects of war on a civilian population. Each movie took its own approach to the topic, but they all masterfully captured the despair and suffering that people go through. What I also like about these films is that they have dealt with incidents which were either ignored or forgotten by people in other countries. Hotel Rwanda covers the Rwandan genocide of 1994, The Killing Fields is set in the Khmer Rouge dominated Cambodia of the 1970s, and Grave of the Fireflies is about Japan during World War II.
Hotel Rwanda and The Killing Fields both deal with civil war. Who cares about that? After all, it’s not in my backyard. Most of the countries in Africa are in some sort of war, yet the West currently seems more concerned with Pope John Paul II’s funeral or Prince Charles’s wedding. In the case of Cambodia, Vietnam (with diplomatic support from the USSR) turned out to be the Good Guys (funnily enough), invading the country and deposing the Khmer Rouge with popular support (despite their misgivings about the Vietnamese). The USA, Thailand and China actively worked to support the Khmer Rouge. Did we hear about any of this on television? Is it in any school history books? Nope, it’s as (self) censored as the Japanese occupation of Korea is in Japan.
The Rwandan genocide was yet another shameful event in world history. The United Nations and economically developed countries had the power to intervene and halt the bloodshed, yet they didn’t. The US had been in Somalia only a couple of years prior, but I guess Rwanda wasn’t important since it it didn’t lie on any major shipping lanes. The UN itself, France and other countries also deserve much of the blame.
Grave of the Fireflies is somewhat different, yet the same. Firstly, it is animated. This is no children’s movie, however, even if the two protagonists are children. I don’t think more impact could have been achieved if it were a live action film. Grave of the Fireflies covers yet another ignored event in world history: the effects of World War II on the Japanese population. It is natural to ignore the aggressors (or even applaud their suffering), particularly ones as brutal as the Japanese in WWII, but it is important to remember that they are just as human as everyone else. Many Germans consider the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a war crime, but did you know that the firebombing of Tokyo caused more damage and loss of life than the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which BTW were dropped on non-industrial residential areas)? I won’t get into the debate over whether such attacks were truly necessary (it was a war, after all), but we shouldn’t forget the human suffering which took place as a result, regardless of whom it is.
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