About

The goal of the Linux-Society (LS, dating back to the mid-90s as a professional club and tech-mentoring group) has been a purely-democratic Information Society; many of the articles are sociological in nature. The LS was merged with Perl/Unix of NY to form multi-layered group that included advocacy, project-oriented learning by talented high school students: textbook constructivism. Linux has severe limitations such that it is useless for any computer that will, say, print or scan. It is primarily used for webservers and embedded devices such as the Android. (Google is high-invested in it).

Technology is problematic. During the heyday of technology (1990s), it seemed it had the democratic direction Lewis Mumford said it should have in his seminal
Technics and Civilization.

Today, we are effectively stuck with Windows as Linux is poor on the desktop and has cultured a maladaptive following. Apple is prohibitive, and all other operating systems lack drivers, including Google's Android, an offshoot of linux.

In the late 90s there was hope for new kernels such as LibOS and ExoOS that would bare their hardware to programs, some of which would be virtual machines such as Java uses. Another important player was the L4 system that is a minor relation to the code underlying the Apple's systems. It was highly scientific but fell into the wrong hangs, apparently, and has suffered from having no progress on the desktop. There is a version, "SE" that is apparently running in many cell phones as specialized telecom chips, but is proprietary. SE's closed nature was only recently revealed, which is important because it is apparently built from publicly-owned code as it is not a "clean room" design it may violate public domain protections, and most certainly violates the widely-accepted social contract.

Recent attempts to enjoin into L4 development as an advocate for "the people" have been as frustrating (and demeaning) as previous attempts with the usual attacks to self-esteem by maladaptive "hacks" being reinforced by "leadership" (now mostly university professors).

In short, this leaves us with Windows, which is quite a reversal if you have read earlier posts here. But, upon Windows, we have free and open software development systems in the forms of GTK+ (the windows usually used on Linux) and the Minimal GNU Windows (MinGW and MSYS) systems. It is very likely this direction that development should go (that is, on Windows) such that s/w can then be ported to a currently-valid microkernel system that includes a driver system that can be adapted by hardware developers to reuse of their windows and apple drivers.

From a brief survey of L4, it appears that the last clean copy was the DROPS system of the early 2010s, was a German effort that used the Unix-like "OS kit" from an American University.

If we are going to be stuck on Windows, then it seems that a high level approach to free and open systems integration, such as creating fully transparent mouse communication between apps so that they can seamlessly work together as a single desktop (rather than deliberately conflicting). This would be very helpful for GIMP and Inkscape, both leading graphics programs that are strong in the special ways, but suffer from an inability to easily interrelate.

Another important issue is the nature, if you can call it that, of the "geek" or "hack." Technology is formed democratically but "harvested" authoritarian-ly --if I can coin a term that Mumford might use. Authority is plutarchy: a combination of aristocracy and oligarchy that is kept alive after all these millennia by using, or maligning, the information society as a part of the civilizing (or law-giving) process that embraces the dialectic as its method. Democratic restoration, that is to put humanity back on an evolutionary (and not de-evolutionary) track, I think, will require the exclusion of the "geek" from decision-making. As is, the free/open s/w culture attempts to give leadership to those who write the most lines of code --irrespective of their comprehension of the real world or relationship with normal users. We need normal people to somehow organize around common sense (rather than oligarchic rationalism) to bring to life useful and cohesive software and communications systems.

Interestingly, the most popular page on this site is about Carl Rogers' humanistic psychology, and has nothing to do with technology.




Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Bubble 2 dot Oh

Today's Technology Elite: Looking for anything they can get, Web 2 is an attempt
to inflate the bubble again, re-establishing the technical elite, cool and manic, spawned in the fraud and greed of the gutting of the new economy; an economic collapse that was the fiscal black whole that sucked down all the innovative money, and with it the American innovative technology ideology. All the American wealth and development oddly reappeared, and then re-exploded in Bangalore; in the antiquated, and obscenely genocidal and repressive culture of
the dominant Hindus: the Aryans.

Who could have done this? Probably the same people who invented the idea that the collapse of a healthy economy is a natural phenomena: a cyclic rotation. It was probably the culture that triggered their cyclic euphemism into a frenzy of short selling that made some rich, many poor, and destroyed the emerging beneficial cultures of the still young American nation. Those few who benefited got to spend the booty, themselves under-employed, inflating another bubble: the crippled US economy. The irony is that there is no bubble it is a myth, bubbles are being inflated everywhere except in the US; the US economy is completely foreign debt and depleted personal savings accounts.

Only massive exploitation of the order of the colonial invasions of a century ago can repay this debt; a return to the level of exploitation that only recently evolved into this particular monster. Or, more likely, the debt will be repaid with the gifting of American land to foreign lean holders, themselves corrupt lean holders, coming from corrupt nations to enjoy American social stability. America becomes everything but American.

But, was American ever American? Just as surely as Nazism is German and Arianism is purely east Indian, a diverse array of dominant and genocidal cultures have always celebrated their capital commonalities globally, mutually strengthening their dominant family biases as each of their respective lands, annexed from natives, is harvested in a carnival of economic exploitation: humanity is yet again united in suffering. The dominant elite celebrates in New York City.

Or, will the Americans, reclaim their nation, liquidating the yellow liquidators, sending yellow markets spiralling into their own unique implosions? Again, there will be re-exploding. But this time, will there be the Synergistic and equalised return of the Asian garden farmers to their natural positions at the peak of the food chain? Will the warlords go broke from isolation as localities experience Independence and self-reliance from domination; their knowledge cross pollinating in a networked building process that includes mutual support and self-defence?

Meanwhile they, the members of the Web 2 consortia, blissfully re-inflate the technology bubble, un-realizing of the completely distributed model on the horizon, where every textual thought is linked object, joined conceptually. The only service necessary is a linking service to match each linking objects with their families contextually. The natural evolution will be originality built on a component model returning to the world's people the distributed model that had been hijacked long before the cannibalistic technical crash of the year 2000 had even been engineered. Or, was it simply delivered? Who, if anybody, can we trust?

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