I read in BoingBoing that at least one of the 5 finalists to the 2005 Hugo best science-fiction novel award has published his work (Accelerando) under the Creative Commons.
Yes, free to download legally. Yes, a novel that is among the finalists for an international prize, won by people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card or J.K. Rowling in 2001 for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Viernes 5 de mayo, carretera N1 dirección Donostia, cercanÃas de Vitoria. Una inocente joven, a quien identificaremos como L., conduce su flamante coche nuevo con destino a Donosti, huyendo de la asfixiante y deprimente macrourbe conocida como “Madrid”.
No sabe si lo ha alcanzado o le acaba de adelantar, pero tiene delante un coche de siniestro aspecto, y con matrÃcula francesa. Hay algo en su manera de circular, lento pero con suaves acelerones ocasionales, que parecen indicar a L. “adelántame”. No, indicar no es la palabra adecuada. Retar.
“Lo que me faltaba, un pirado”. L. acelera y rebasa al amenazador automóvil, dejándolo fácilmente atrás. Respira aliviada, y prosigue su viaje.
Pero no todo queda ahÃ. Segundos más tarde un destello en el retrovisor la sorprende. “Si todavÃa hay luz, ¿qué hace ese tÃo?” Un rápido vistazo al retrovisor confirma su sospecha: es el coche francés de antes. “Bien, si quiere adelantarme, que lo haga”. Efectivamente el coche rebasa a L., pero en vez de alejarse reduce su velocidad hasta quedarse justo delante, como en la anterior ocasión.
L. decide no adelantarlo, reduciendo la marcha con la intención de dejarlo ir. Pero no será tan fácil… el coche también frena. Van tan lento que L. se extraña de que otros coches no los alcancen, pero el hecho es que van sólos por la carretera.
Al final, L. decide adelantar y acelerar hasta dejar el coche atrás. Pero este parece que no cede tan pronto, y acelera hasta alcanzarla. L. inicia una carrera desenfrenada por dejar al franchute loco atrás.
[…] Me salto 187 páginas de descripciones de acción a raudales, más que nada porque tengo más cosas que hacer […]
Cuando está llegando a Donosti, L. reduce la velocidad y se prepara para tomar la salida necesaria. El francés loco se posiciona a la par del coche de L. y por primera vez circulan en paralelo cierto tiempo.
L. mira horrorizada cómo dos pares de ojos rojos que parecen refulgir la observan desde los asientros traseros del coche francés. Fijándose más puede ver el contorno de unas cabezas enormes y ligeramente deformes, como la descendencia siniestra de una familia infernal. Lentamente, con exasperante deliberación, la ventanilla del copiloto se va abriendo, dejando ver tras ella la melena rubia de una mujer que bien podrÃa ser una diablesa, con su rostro pálido pero hermoso entre la cabellera revuelta por el viento. Unos complicados gestos, posiblemente satánicos, de la mujer, empujan a L. a bajar su ventanilla, y prestar atención, contra todo lo que su ya torturada razón le avisa. Temiendo oir palabras terribles que perviertan su mente y la subyuguen al Señor de las Tinieblas, L. oye (en francés):
– “¡Gilipollas, llevas el intermitente derecho todo el tiempo encendido!”
Read in Kriptópolis: Microsoft patents an automatic censoring machine.
That machine would, allegedly, detect “phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data”, and then “the input audio data stream is altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality of such words is unintelligible or inaudible”. This capability is available for recorded speeches (of course), and even in real-time.
I bet Franco, for one, would have loved this precious thingie, back then. And I bet that some governments today will put it to *cough* good *cough* use.
It seems that this year the prestigious prize PrÃÂncipe de Asturias (precisely the International Cooperation Prize 2006), given by a Foundation lead by Prince Felipe (the son of the current king of Spain. Yes, we have a king… no comment) has been given to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
You can read about it in many places, e.g. the Fundación PrÃÂncipe de Asturias site, a newspaper like El Mundo, or a news blog like menéame (all the links in Spanish).
Now, I am sick and tired of hearing this bullshit about “Maybe Microsoft is a bit on the dark side of the Force, but this Bill Gates fellow is not a bad guy after all. Hell, he gives away for charity a whole lot of money!”
This is false, for two reasons:
1) Giving away that much doesn’t have so much merit.
Bill Gates’ Supporter: He gives away so much money, he is Good.
Voice of Facts: False. He has so much money, that what he gives is not much.
BGS: Yes, but even as a percentage it is a lot. He gives away a x% of his income, and neither you nor me do it!
VoF: False. You and me spend 105% of our income paying our flat, our car, the gasoline, the food, the clothes… He is so rich that he could easily donate 75% of his possessions and still be so rich that he wouldn’t notice the difference.
Hence, comparing percentages of income is not fair, either. For most people, donating a 10% of their income amounts to the difference between having where to sleep tonight or not. That’s not exaggeration. That’s a fact.
BGS: OK then, but meritorious or not, he does give away an awful lot of money!
VoF: We get back to the first point. Maybe that money is peanuts for him, but that’s a lot in absolute terms. OK, true. But the whole point was to demonstrate how philanthropic Gates was!
2) For him that money is an inversion. It is well worth it in tax refunds and market revenues.
VoF: Did you know that Bill Gates saves a lot of money on taxes because of what he donates to his own “charitable” Foundation?.
BGS: That’s silly! If he gives away one billion, and saves x% in taxes, he would have been better of not giving away anything at all! How can donating be economically advantageous?
VoF: My friend, this is in our poor fellows’ world, not in the world of the super-rich. According to the merits the newspapers (see above) atribute to the Foundation, they have spent USD 10 billion since 2000. Now, according to the Wikipedia, as of 2005, they had USD 28 billion as endowment (that is, “money to spend”). According to US law, a foundation has to give away at least 5% of his assets, yearly, to be considered “charitable”.
If my math is not wrong, USD 10 billion since 2000 amounts to USD 2 billion/year, which is not much above the USD 1.4 billion/year that an endowment of USD 28 billion requires. If the Foundation had given away less than what they did, they would not even be considered charitable by the US government, so putting money into it would not ensure good ol’ Bill a tasty tax deduction.
Even if I try to put my best to it, I can not see why they don’t give away for charity all the money they “donate” to the Foundation. Either they give away the whole USD 28 billion, or they only put into the Foundation the USD 2 billion that they expect to give away! Oh, wait, maybe they get tax reductions for the USD 28 billion, but end up “losing to the poor” only USD 2 billion. How philanthropic!
Now, some people might say that the other USD 26 billion have indeed been “spent” by Gates… he also “lost” them. Not at all. The Foundation uses this money for many different things, most of which are beneficial for Mr. Gates. Look at that new at ZDNet Australia. In 2004, Gates offered the Australian government to spend:
“AU$40 million over the next five years to help improve technology literacy in under-privileged communities.”
However, Australian Democrats’ IT spokesperson Brian Greig calls this “tainted charity”, because:
“the software tycoon’s global philanthropy exercises carry a hidden agenda to persuade beneficiary governments to reverse policies promoting the use of open source software.
Greig claims Gates’ whistle-stop visit to the country was more likely to have been motivated by NSW Commerce Minister John Della Bosca’s intention to end the state government’s reliance on proprietary software.”
Graig recalls the case of India, where Gates spent USD 500 million in “charity” in 2002, after the government disclosed its intention of getting rid of proprietary software (that is, Windows). Of those USD 500 million, 100 where aimed at helping fight AIDS (highly commendable), and 400 to “improving computer literacy in the country.” (???). Craig’s words remind those of Sergio Amadeu, president of the Brazilian National Institute for Information Technology, who compared Gates’ strategy with that of drug dealers who give first doses for free, to get people “hooked”.
No wonder Microsoft’s lawyers sued Amadeu “for difamation”. However, the accusation hardly held any water, after Gates’ words regarding software piracy in China, in which he “difamated” himself:
“As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade”.
In summary, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is just a corporative arm of Microsoft, aimed at cleaning Gates’ bad reputation, spreading pro-MS propaganda, financing bribes to governments to perpetuate Windows use, and give free samples of their product to keep markets hooked, all of it under a charity mask.
Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Failure to launch (Novia por contrato).
I went to Antiguo Berri, a cinema that is a 5 minutes walk away from where I live. That’s why I always get out 4 minutes before the movie starts…
Yesterday I got out 6 minutes before, congratulating myself because I had 1 extra minute. All was fun and rejoice until I arrived at the cinema ticket desk… and noticed I had forgotten my wallet at home (and had no time to go back for it). Wait, there’s hope! I had with me my coin wallet, in which I had enough money. The regular ticket is 5 euros, but a card issued to under-30s by my bank entitles me to a discount of one euro. Fine, I had 4.70 eur in my coin wallet! Now, the bad part: the discount card was in my other wallet, at home :^(
Now, I go to that cinema every week, so the clerk knows me. I thougth that she’d accept to make the discount even without the card, you know, my charming smile and all that… Tough luck, yesterday they had a new guy at the desk. My moral sank.
However, I thought “what the hell?”, and told him what the matter was. To my (mild) surprise, he accepted promptly, and issued me a discount ticket, making me pay only 4 eur. Bad part is he didn’t give me a “young discount” ticket, but one of “discount to the elderly” :^)
As for the movie itself, it is a romantic comedy, which says it all. It’s only moderately funny, but I had a good time watching it. It pokes fun at guys living with their parents, which is technically my situation… so I sometimes thought it was a drama, instead of a comedy!
I don’t think I spoil any big surprise if I disclose that the main line of the plot is that the parents of Matthew McConaughey hire Sarah Jessica Parker to make him fall in love with her, so that he quits living with them. Yeah, right, I thought the same thing: them bastards! My self-confidence was already low, I didn’t need the suspicion that next time a girl is “receptive” with me it’s because my parents hired her to make me move out of home, thanks!
I know, I know: it’s a movie. But… did they really think it would work? SJ Parker’s aim was to give MM self confidence, so that he’d shift to the next step in life, living alone. Now, if (or “when”) he did find out about the farce… wouldn’t his self confidence actually sink? Wouldn’t it be even more difficult to make him move away in the future (if it didn’t work out at the first try, as it was evident that it wouldn’t)? What kind of shit were those parents smoking when they came out with the idea, and were can I get some?
I read in Kriptópolis, via a Basque blog that the companies Coverity and Symantec, along with the Stanford University, have made a study regarding the number of bugs in both free and proprietary software. This study has been funded by the North-American Homeland Security agency.
The study has focused on comparing the number of bugs per line of code of similar free/non-free programs one-to-one. Many previous (non-independent, Microsoft-funded) studies before, simply counted the number of total reported bugs in, say, Windows XP and a given Linux distro. This method is clearly biased against the particular Linux distro studied, because there are many different programs in any Linux distro that perform the same task (being able to choose is important for the FLOSS hippies, you know), and adding up the bugs of all those programs seems unfair.
The results of the study give the FLOSS an appalling victory (surprised?). Firstly, of the 32 program pairs, the free partners showed an average of 0.43 bugs per 1000 lines of code. The non-free ones turned up to have a shameful average of 20 to 30 bugs per 1000 lines (45 times more).
Secondly, not only the number of bugs was lower in FLOSS programs, but also the speed to fix them was found to be much faster. As an example, Amanda (a FLOSS backup program), was found to have 1.22 bugs per 1000 lines of code (the highest of all the FLOSS programs in the study, still much lower than any non-free program in the study). Apparently, the Amanda developers read the study, got ashamed, and one week later they had fixed most of the aforementioned bugs, going from the most bug-ridden FLOSS program of the study to the less bug-ridden one! Apparently pointing out where the errors are is veeery healthy for any FLOSS project.
Heracles is the name of my computer at home. I have been “tuning” it this weekend, and I think the result is reasonably attractive. I am publishing a screenshot (see below) of the resulting desktop, partly to show off, and partly to keep a history of the evolution of the looks of my desktop.
The screenshot shows three different adesklets, namely Calendar 0.5.3, modubar 0.0.1 and SystemMonitor 0.1.3. The modubar is currently docking the icons for Konsole, Firefox (currently highlighted by the cursor), amaroK, OpenOffice, TVTime, Quake IV, and the Xfce settings. As I write these lines, I am considering getting new icons :^)
The icons of the bottom-right corner correspond to the Xfce Icon Box, a nifty program to show the icons of the currently open windows (in this case, amaroK, Konsole and Firefox).
The black texts correspond to two Conky instances. The top-left one gives general info, and the bottom-right one tells me how much Internet traffic I have had the last days and months. This is not trivial, since my ISP (Euskaltel) overcharges me if I download+upload more than 4GB/month.
The desktop environment is Xfce, and the Linux distro it is running on is Debian.
