Quote of the Week

"I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it." -Rosalia de Castro

Quote of the Week

"It is never too late to become what you might have been." - George Eliot

Quote of the Week

"Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?" - Steve Jobs

Linux is Ready for Mainstream

In recent years there has been a small change in desktop computers. Users that are getting tired of Microsoft and their proprietary technology are slowly converting to Linux. Linux has been improving rapidly, and is coming to the point where it's ready out of the box for consumer use.

Manufacturers like Dell, sense a demand for the Unix based operating system, and have started offering it. There are many distributions of Linux, tailoring to specific needs. And Linux has evolved. You no longer need to know how to compile the kernel, or how to partition your hard drive. For the average home user, the Linux Desktop is starting to be just as easy, if not easier, than Windows.

After I began to use Linux, every time I needed Windows, I was becoming increasingly annoyed. I saw Windows Update for what it was, slow, redundant (think Windows Genuine Advantage), and inefficient. When you install an update, Windows has to be restarted. And damn, if you choose not to, those messages to reboot harass you until you go insane. Not to mention, Windows Update mostly updates Windows itself, there aren't very many other things that use it. Move over to Linux, where they have package managers, and there auto update will check for not only operating system updates, but application and package updates as well. The only time you have to restart Linux is when you patch your kernel.

Open source technology is coming to the main stream. It is easily accessible, and its ease of use is increasing. If you don't believe me, google open source switch. Many governments and business's are looking for ways to benefit from open source technology. There are even other industries taking advantage of the open source way. There are open source car ideas(1) (2), and even a gold company took advantage of mass collaboration to find gold (crowd sourcing).
By the way, as I said before, if you can get a hold of Wikinomics, it's is an interesting read.

CNN fudging the facts, then accusing Michael Moore

Being an occasional watcher of CNN, I found most of their stuff to be on par with the truth. I hadn't seen a Michael Moore news broadcast with CNN before though. I was recently pointed towards a clip from CNN about the latest documentary, Sicko. I watched the clip, and Michael Moore did not make it boring. I like Moore's attitude, and his ability to stick up for what his documentary was about, as well as what the facts are.

I wandered over to his site after the clip, and looked at the facts that CNN "fudged". I haven't seen any of Michael Moore's other documentaries, not out of lack of interest, but because of lack of time. From what I've seen, the film Sicko is a must see (and I will make time). And clearly, if the facts are shown in the movie like Michael Moore portrayed, I'm sickened by CNN's lack of checking the facts. For a news station, especially "the most trusted name in news", this doesn't seem like they're very reliable. Maybe Michael Moore is right, and it has fallen pray to the world of pharmaceuticals. I think it was just a thrown together set of mistakes they made, but still, to be that catastrophic, I would expect CNN to make an apology.

So, if anyone reading this knows if CNN made an apology, could you point me in the right direction? If not, I think I'll write a letter. I invite everyone else who has the same opinion as me to do the same. One letter might not do much, but if enough are written, maybe it will make CNN respond to their mistakes. More information on writing a letter is at the bottom of this article.

By the way, heres the link to the CNN vs the facts page on Michael Moore's site: http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/news/article_10017.php

To contact CNN, you can use this web form: http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form6a.html?2
Or the method I like, send a hand written letter to them.
I'm not sure if this address is right, I couldn't find a contact us link on CNN's page, so I used Google maps. Here is what the address appears to be:

190 Marietta St NW
Atlanta, GA 30303, USA

(404) 827-2300

Always On

A slow but steady cultural transformation is occurring. People are adopting the values of an "always on, always available" world. The internet is at the middle of this transformation, a behemoth of information that continually grows, and allows easy collaboration at any time. More then ever before, are we able to harness people in an integrated network as the world's largest human supercomputer. When you put the millions of people on the internet together to complete specific tasks, there are endless possibilities. An example is chacha.com, which lets you use a live search guide to help you find what you're looking for. Chacha pays people 5 to 10 dollars an hour to help assist its customers.

The power of the internet is just beginning to be harnessed. If every idle moment of time people spend on the internet could be put towards a purpose, much could be accomplished. The time can be taken from many things people already do everyday, and wouldn't affect anyone's day on the internet by much. Take for instance the ReCAPTCHA project. Captchas are common in our internet world. They act to deter the efforts by spammers and hackers (or crackers, whatever your prefer to call them) to create accounts. Captcha's helped prevent these spammer attacks, which were significantly hurting server loads around the world. Now, bot algorithm's are getting more complex, and some are able to determine some captcha's. The ReCAPTCHA project helps by making the text a little harder to read, thus throwing off the bots. But the main point of ReCAPTCHA is to help document pre-computer age books that could not be read by text recognition software. It's done by using two words for the captcha. The first, an unrecognizable word that the person filling in the captcha determines, and the second word, a known word by the computer to verify you aren't a bot. When quite a few people fill out the first word, the word is known because a few people helped to verify what it is. There are similar ideas in the work for things like videos, pictures, and all sorts of digital content. As the internet expands, these are only going to become more common.

The planet is the most powerful supercomputer, and I can't wait to see what kind of things will be done with this massive power in the future.