Democracy has the best chance in the society where most citizens are middle-income (Aristotles)

new elites arose

new elites arose: corporate chieftains, beaurocrats, media moguls. Mass production, mass distribution, mass education, and mass communication were accompanied by mass democracy, or dictatorships claiming to be democratic. (Alvin Toffler, "Powershift", p11)

redistribution of power

..closely held specialists' knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it. --Alvin Toffler, "Powershift"

" Give me control over a nation’s currency and I care not who makes its laws." - Baron M. A. Rothschild (1744- 1812)

" It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." - Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Если Солнце зажигают, значит это кому-нибудь нужно

There's no real enemy.
By having this a war on terror, you can never win it...
... so you can always keep taking people's liberties away
...the media can convince everybody that it's real.
You just keep talking about things, keep saying it over and over again and people start to believe this"
(N.Rockefeller)

Science itself doesn't make money. The wealth comes as a result of applications.

Opensource projects have been compared to science projects. Science itself doesn't make money. The wealth comes as a result of applications.

I don't care what anybody else does. I want to do what I think is right.

RedHat

For RedHat it wasn't important that we are shipping be a better operating system than Microsofts' or Sun's operating system. It becomes really important that we are shipping operating system that solves the problem for our customers that they cannot solve using the traditional proprietory binary only software. What we are doing is we are building a technology and giving it away. How do you make money doing this? And of course we would go to California to Silicon valley where they said you cannot make money in the software business giving you technology away. And we come back and we talk to our customers and we realize the only that kept our customers loyal to what we were doing was that we did give away our technology. For the very first time they had control over techoblogy they were using. [The code [5/7] from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFMhfKPq80]

Linus is a good leader.

"Linus was someone who was a very very good leader, someone who is acually quite humble. He doesn't take credit for something he doesn't do."

Bush wants more terrorism, government-sponsored terrorsm

Authority is not truth. Truth is the authority.

We should fight for peace

"We have 1001 explanations why we should have war, an not one why we should have peace. We've got a problem here.
To me if war requires active participation, then peace requires active participation.
Without a hunger food means nothing.
"(Prem Rawat)

You have rights, the government has privileges

gorilla war

gorilla war is usually done by people who have little money, and little power, and little influence in society. The best explanation is by any means necessary.
There's a paradox. The more information is becoming decentralized in the Internet. There's more control of the information thank's to telecommunication deregulation act.
The best way to suppress information isn't to attack people who present it. But instead to have so many intelligent pleasures out there that all your information will be drowned out by the noise.

Crises precipitate change

If you fight terror with terror how can you say which is which?

# Should we not trust the government? Historically, governments have killed a lot of people.

# Should we not trust the government?

Historically, governments have killed a lot of people
(Philip Zimmermann)

# Should we be concerned with Total Information Awareness and other Ashcroftian initiatives?

Yes, of course. I think the biggest threat to privacy is Moore�s law. The human population does not double every eighteen months but the ability to keep track of us does. This may be a prescription for an omniscient government. Democracy never had to face an all-knowing government. I don�t know how we�re going to get through that.
# Should I, being European and Swedish, be concerned with the development of U.S. policy on cyberlaw matters and U.S. encryption policy?

Absolutely! U.S. policy could in the long run jeopardise U.S. democracy. Since the U.S is the only remaining superpower it is vital that the U.S. has a healthy, functioning democracy. Democratic institutions might be weakened through surveillance. If the democracy is eroded, the rest of the world is in danger because of U.S.�s superpowers.

cryptography is about freedom of speech

"in the Information Age, cryptography is about political power, and n particular, about the power relationship between a government and its people. It is about the right to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of political association, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom to be left alone.
..
The U.S. federal government wants to built a nationwide communication system designed for domestic surveillance, with technologies that in the long run can be used by the tyrants of the world to keep themselves in power.
"

(preface to the Official PGP User's guide by Philip Zimmermann, October 1994)

no control leads to corruption

"Any government that can automatically generate an intimate profile of every one of ts citizens is a government endowed with a potential for absolute power that will eventually, to use Lord Action's phrase, corrupt absolutely. Few civil liberties are likely to survive such capacities in the hands of increasingly panicky authoritarians who run the embattled old beaucracies of the Meat World.
..
any govermnent which can see everything we do all the time will sooner or later feel compelled to add omnipotence to omniscience, which are, in the Virtual Age, much the same thing anyway."
(Foreword by John Perry Barlow to The Official PGP User's guide by Philip R.Zimmerman)

Linux people are problem solvers

Linux people are problem solvers. A typical linux power user can put together a small server, get a dedicated Internet pipe with a static IP address into her home, register a domain name, and build a server on the Internet.

what system administration is

"System administration books used to be fairly predictable. they showed you how to manage users, filesystems, devices, processes, printers, networks and so on. They did not tell you what to do when new problems emerged. If your web site became popular, you had to learn quickly about proxy servers, different levels of caching, load balancing, distributed authentication and other complex issues. If you added a database, you soon needed to scale it and learn to avoid SQL injection attacks. Overnight, sites become mission critical, and you needed the ability to make hot backups on 24x7 systems."

Linux system administration/Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic

linux reach

Linux probaly has the broadest reach of any operating system, from tiny systems to phony jacks, to cell phones, to supercomputer clusters bigger than your high school. It has infiltrated the fields of telecommunications, embedded systems, satellites, medical equipment, military systems, computer graphics, and - last but not least - desktop computing.

Linux system administration/Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic

machines are cheaper than people

"Machines are cheaper than people. With shel you can optimize your investment in people by creating look-alike environment that can grow as the users grow. The key to productivity is to make user interfaces idiot-proof and easy to learn. Tran the machine instead of training people." (Lowell Jay Arthur, UNIX shell programmng. - 4th ed., p.5-6)

Opensolaris

+Excellent documentation at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/47.23 At opensolaris.org documentation is very poor and only in html.
+

SUN Microsystems contribution to IT

Java
Solaris
NetBeans

ACID

Today I learnt that ACID stand for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability

Berkeley contribution to IT

«Две вещи, изменившие миp, были созданы в Беpкли: LSD и Unix. Вpяд ли это случайное совпадение». (Jeremy S. Anderson)

C shell, created by Bill Joy and students on the Berkeley campus
TCP/IP
BSD
sendmail
vi
PostgreSQL

BSD license, that Michael M.Lucas summarized as follows:

• Don't claim you wrote this
• Don't blame us if it breaks
• Don't use our name to promote our product
  

don't trust words from Microsoft

On Interop Moscow 2008 were people from Microsoft that actively participated in discussions on the future of software. On the second day they said to the audience 'I invite you all to remix.ru conference. Steve Balmer is going to talk there. Maybe it'll help to clarify something to you.
The next day I went to remix.ru, and guess what, just as expected registration is only for people with promocodes. I called Microsoft on different days and times asking to connect me to a person who gave a presentation. After learning that I came from a conference, the answer was always the same - he's not in the office. Neither did anyone call back.
What I wanted to do at that conference? I wanted to see what sort of people are there.

intro

The reason for writing this blog is a need to share my ideas, to tell you about great people I meet and their ideas. And you are welcome to post comments with your ideas.
This month I met Ian Murdock, Andrew Morton, David Holtzman, Gary E. McGraw and lots of other very interesting people who I also going to talk about. For those interested in psychology there's also a blog at psiguz.blogspot.com
So, let's begin.