The Linux Extremist

As many people may be experiencing the same plethora of ads for online pharmacies, it’s important to review the side effects of the drugs on offer.

Viagra - known side effects include headache, flushing, dyspepsia, nasal congestion, urinary tract infection, abnormal vision, diarrhea, dizziness and rash.

Less common effects on other bodily systems are as follows -

Cardiovascular: angina pectoris, AV block, migraine, syncope, tachycardia, palpitation, hypotension, postural hypotension, myocardial ischemia, cerebral thrombosis, cardiac arrest, heart failure, abnormal electrocardiogram, cardiomyopathy.

Digestive: vomiting, glossitis, colitis, dysphagia, gastritis, gastroenteritis, esophagitis, stomatitis, dry mouth, liver function tests abnormal, rectal hemorrhage, gingivitis.

Hemic and Lymphatic: anemia and leukopenia.

Metabolic and Nutritional: thirst, edema, gout, unstable diabetes, hyperglycemia, peripheral edema, hyperuricemia, hypoglycemic reaction, hypernatremia.

Musculoskeletal: arthritis, arthrosis, myalgia, tendon rupture, tenosynovitis, bone pain, myasthenia, synovitis.

Nervous: ataxia, hypertonia, neuralgia, neuropathy, paresthesia, tremor, vertigo, depression, insomnia, somnolence, abnormal dreams, reflexes decreased, hypesthesia.

Respiratory: asthma, dyspnea, laryngitis, pharyngitis, sinusitis, bronchitis, sputum increased, cough increased.

Skin and Appendages: urticaria, herpes simplex, pruritus, sweating, skin ulcer, contact dermatitis, exfoliative dermatitis.

Special Senses: mydriasis, conjunctivitis, photophobia, tinnitus, eye pain, deafness, ear pain, eye hemorrhage, cataract, dry eyes.

Urogenital: cystitis, nocturia, urinary frequency, breast enlargement, urinary incontinence, abnormal ejaculation, genital edema and anorgasmia.

Cialis - known side effects include headache, dyspepsia, back pain, myalgia, nasal congestion and pain in limbs.

Less common effects on other bodily systems are as follows -

Body as a whole: asthenia, face edema, fatigue, pain

Cardiovascular: angina pectoris, chest pain, hypotension, hypertension, myocardial infarction, postural hypotension, palpitations, syncope, tachycardia

Digestive: abnormal liver function tests, diarrhea, dry mouth, dysphagia, esophagitis, gastroesophageal reflux, gastritis, GGTP increased, loose stools, nausea, upper abdominal pain, vomiting

Musculoskeletal: arthralgia, neck pain

Nervous: dizziness, hypesthesia, insomnia, paresthesia, somnolence, vertigo

Respiratory: dyspnea, epistaxis, pharyngitis

Skin and Appendages: pruritus, rash, sweating

Ophthalmologic: blurred vision, changes in color vision, conjunctivitis (including conjunctival hyperemia), eye pain, lacrimation increase, swelling of eyelids

Urogenital: erection increased, spontaneous penile erection

Wellbutrin - common side effects: Feeling Restless / Anxious, Dry Mouth, Incomplete or Infrequent Bowel Movements, Dizziness, Abnormal Trouble Sleeping, Excessive Sweating, Involuntary Quivering, Loss of Appetite, Weight Loss, Feel Like Throwing Up, Throwing Up, Stomach Cramps

Infrequent side effects: Ringing in the Ears, Itching, Hives, Rash, Severe Headache

Rare side effects: Hepatitis caused by Drugs, Cannot Focus Thoughts, Hallucination, Feeling Faint. Seizures. Chest Pain, Abnormal Liver Function Tests, Confused, Delusions, Paranoia, Having Thoughts of Suicide, Blurred Vision, Throat Irritation, “Change of Life” Signs, Muscle Pain, Drowsiness, Fever. Taste Problems, Temporary Redness of Face and Neck, Heart Throbbing or Pounding, Diarrhea, Frequent Urination, Nervous, Feeling Weak, False Sense of Well-Being

In short, despite what idiot spammers tell you - don’t buy your drugs online, and for goodness sake, before buying any drugs, consult your doctor.

Like many people using ADSL, I decided to be cheap and not fork over extra money for a fixed IP address. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake. I recently had difficulties because of what the previous owner of my IP address had done with it, though probably not intentionally. I found that my IP address was on a black list at Spamhaus, the organisation that keeps track of addresses which push out unwanted e-mails.

It’s not at all surprising that I would get an IP address of this kind. In June 2006, Microsoft found that some 5.7 million PCs were infected with malicious software which had turned the computers into “zombies”; i.e., the PCs were under the control of the hacker who had infected them. The zombies were then used to initiate sending spam or denial of service attacks.

The idea of a group of hackers being able to reach out and control my PC is not a pretty one. It was bad enough when they could make it impossible to work; in the autumn of 2003, my company was infected with a virus that would automatically shut down a PC as soon as it booted up. It was spread through networks and not everyone had the sense to yank out their Ethernet cable in time. It was only through the efforts of a QA person who was studying to be a support technician in his spare time that we got up and running again in only a few hours.

Adware provides an additional annex to the chamber of horrors; when I had a Windows PC, I used to somewhat amuse myself by using Spybot Search and Destroy and seeing what my PC had become infected with next. Fortunately, I never used it for anything serious, like putting in personal details; I had it just to play Rome: Total War until the pain of Windows outweighed the advantage of the game.

Zombies, viruses, adware, spyware: a Windows PC is not one’s own. The strange thing is not that Microsoft refuses to learn from their mistakes; given their history, this is not unexpected. What is strange is how many people simply put up with it. In 2004, the market research group IDC estimated that Windows share of desktop PCs would fall by 2007, but that fall was only to 94%. So what is perpetuating this ‘Net of the Living Dead?

Part of is undeniably Microsoft’s aggressive strategy in dealing with hardware vendors and the fact that people aren’t necessarily looking for an alternative when they should be. However, part of the blame lies at Linux’s doorstep; its strengths, being Open Source, translates into a weakness, namely, there is no marketing department with the same muscle as Microsoft to get the word out. Linux advocacy has a role to play in this; it requires that users who have benefitted from the Linux Revolution ensure that its message spreads to those who are unaware of it. If you see someone ditching a spare PC, show them how Linux can revive it. If someone has had a computer that has become hopelessly infected with viruses, show them the superior performance and security of the Linux way. There is an element of self interest in doing so; so long as we are encumbered with the ‘Net filled with zombies oozing their own brand of pestilence and gore: overstuffed inboxes, awful denial of service attacks and also crowded out bandwidth will be a plague. If the Linux Revolution succeeds, this may enter into the realms of the past; and then maybe, I can send my e-mail without anyone thinking I’m advertising Viagra.

There are many days which make me thank God I’m alive and in England; today is one of them. I just checked the weather for New York; today it’s going to reach the burning heights of of 34 degrees Celcius (93 degrees Fahrenheit). In contrast, it’s 24 degrees Celcius here in West Sussex (75 degrees Fahrenheit).

This August is an anniversary of sorts for me. 15 years ago in New York City, I had my first exposure to major technology operations at a Wall Street bank. The recorded temperature today fills me with nostalgia; city was just as hot then as it is now. Back then, all of Manhattan seemed to pulse with the Lovin’ Spoonful song, “Summer in the City” -

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city

The song applied to the feverish work as well as the weather; I was there during a large systems migration and I had to work on auditing the data. I also was required to do IT support; this was made difficult by one of our external consultants insisting on using a Macintosh when everyone else was using PCs. I was exhausted and burned out after a month of this, and a chorus was rattling in my mind:

All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

I learned some important lessons though; I was working nights and weekends because the data migration hadn’t been carefully planned. Manually audited data had to go through several checks to ensure consistency; we had real issues flowing the data into the new database because of this, and again, checks had to be done at every stage. The relationship between planning and the costs making up for the lack thereof was firmly established in my mind by this experience. Furthermore, our problems were complicated by using a proprietary provider, Digital Equipment Corporation. This summer bred in me a dislike for waste and proprietary solutions of any kind.

The only break I had from the ennui and stress was to go to Yankee Stadium some nights and hope the the baseball game would distract from the heat, which was so bad it felt like I was being steamed in my own juices. I’d drink a giant cola, watch the match, and then head back via subway and train to where I was staying.

I remember vividly the impressions of the City at night which I gathered en route. I recall seeing the bright neon lights, and the bustling people: some blokes were in shirt sleeves and loosened ties, some women were clad in tight summer outfits and some dapper fellows were dressed to the nines to go to the theatre. The city still throbbed with the same song, just a later verse:

But at night it’s a different world
Go out and find a girl
Come-on come-on and dance all night
Despite the heat it’ll be alright

And babe, don’t you know it’s a pity
That the days can’t be like the nights
In the summer, in the city
In the summer, in the city

After Yankees games, I’d go back to my unmade bed, collapse in a heap at around midnight, and awaken at 5 AM the next morning to repeat the cycle. The brutal orange and gray sunrises over New York, indicative of yet another burning day, would come and I would be get up with the same tune in my head; the song had become tedious in repetition but unavoidable given its appropriateness.

We did finish the project, and by a happy coincidence, on the same night there was a rainstorm. I was walking back to my place, and the skies opened up; rather than run for cover, I enjoyed it. Rain was the only thing that dissipated the heat; even at night sultry waves of warmth radiated up through the ground, asphalt still melted and stuck to one’s shoes. But when the rain came, the city seemed to relax. It was not dancing all night for once; it was a point where “Summer in the City” seemed to stop and hint that autumn was coming.

I am glad that I am here now; West Sussex is the final destination after a life and career that have had many stops along the way. The great sizzling behemoth of New York City was an unforgettable point of departure. The weather forecast for the City suggests that there are more hot days to come this week; there is no sign of rain for the next 5 days. I hope they’re wrong, and that the remaining days are like the nights in the summer in the city.

There’s a fine line between heroism and madness; sometimes, one can get a glimpse of that line being crossed. On Sunday, I saw a Sky News reporter in Northern Israel standing on a ridge outside of a town, wearing a flak jacket and informing the audience that Hezbollah rockets were still raining upon her area. The report was interrupted by the sounds of loud Hebrew radio chatter; apparently a police vehicle had pulled up just outside of shot and was telling her that it wasn’t safe and that she ought to get out of there. Undaunted, she carried on and the police drove off.

Speaking as a normal, safety-conscious human being, the police warning would have made me take shelter. However the journalist seemed to believe that because she was reporting on a situation, that she was standing outside of it and couldn’t be harmed by it. This is not an uncommon assumption; journalists often appear to think they are on the outside edge of human experience, not affected by change, and living in an isolated pocket of their own.

This perception also applies to the recent changes in technology. Yes, journalists are aware of blogging and citizen reporting, yet they somehow retain the belief that it is an animal that can be tamed, controlled, utilised, so that they can maintain their present position. This is simply not the case; blogging is going to continue its onward march, and if journalists don’t adapt to the changing times, they are going to go the way of the dinosaur.

Journalism, particularly on television, is nice work if you can get it. A good example is the programme “Fox and Friends”, which is broadcast in the morning in the United States and in the early afternoon in Europe via satellite. I’ve only watched it a few times, but it appears to involve a group of 3 people sitting around and laughing at each other’s jokes for 3 hours. Yes, they may have to get up early in order to be on the air at 6 AM, but the rest of the day can be spent fishing, sleeping or watching Muppet porn (though one shudders at the idea of journalists spending their time watching Kermit and Miss Piggy bumping ugly). Journalists get to invent panics (for example, a recent Daily Express headline predicted that the UK’s August was going to be hotter than July; this has not happened), attend big fancy dinners with politicians and if they snap pictures, kill members of the Royal Family with immunity. If they run out of ideas, they can merely reproduce ones from Reuters and Agence France Presse; seeing the sheer number of times a Reuters article is reproduced is instructive in this regard.

Bloggers, on the other hand, mostly hold other jobs; we’re reporting what we see around us. We do not get paid, and we certainly do not get sufficient free time to go angling for carp. We don’t have expense accounts, we don’t have Reuters or AFP, and we certainly don’t sit outside of a situation; we are part of it and the reporting that stems from bloggers is the view from within, which often times is better than the view from without. A good example would be the present crisis in the Middle East: which is more reliable in conveying the emotions and experience of the people on the ground, bloggers who actually live in the affected areas, or the young lady who obviously believed the thickness of her skull would afford protection from a Katyusha rocket?

Furthermore, the aura of journalistic infalliability has been severely punctured as of late; their sources are not better than ours. The Memogate affair, in which Dan Rather of CBS was shown by bloggers to have relied on forged memos in order to attack President Bush, indicates that fact checking at major news organisations is simply not as tight as it should be. It also indicates that bloggers are making sure the “official” journalists are staying on the straight and narrow.

Sky News has obviously been unnerved by this; a recent advertisement of theirs indicated that they were going to be “relaying the experiences of people on the ground”, namely, they were going to start relying on bloggers. The Guardian has made similar moves and the Telegraph has blogs for their journalists. The air is slowly being let out of the journalists’ bubble, perhaps, or they may be attempting to ride the animal rather than realise they are going to have to be subdued by it. I suggest the latter. If so, it may very well be that in the future our news will be from aggregators of blogs, and the broadcasts of bloggers; the likes of Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite will be a distant memory, consigned to the same ash heap upon which also lay the horse and carriage, vacuum tubes and pet rocks, items whose abandonment was considered an undeniable symbol of progress.

One of my pet peeves at the moment is the proliferation of home equity loan commercials on the backwaters of British television. These commercials try to make it seem that the way out of debt is to get more debt. The most annoying out of these ads is the one for a loan company called Picture, which tries to make the whole process of getting hopelessly in hock seem a jolly affair. The jolly silly bugger in the ad talks on the phone to the jolly silly bugger at Picture while his jolly silly wife films the entire conversation, which is just as much about football as it is about getting a loan. The fellow casually borrows £25,000 without skipping a beat, and supposedly they’re all going to live happily ever after thanks to putting their home at risk. The whole thing looks like it’s “loans for idiots”; given the rise of personal insolvencies in the United Kingdom, companies like Picture appear to be in an idiotic market.

Still, catering to stupid people has generally been big business. P.T. Barnum reportedly said “There’s a sucker born every minute”, and proved it with little schemes like posting a sign saying “This way to see the Egress” with an arrow in order to relieve congestion at his shows. Many people did not realise “Egress” means “Exit”.

Microsoft apparently also believes the future belongs to morons. Users of their products are consistently pelted by incredibly annoying messages apparently intended to lessen the effect of their lack of cerebral capacity. Does there breathe a user so base that he or she did not want to kill Clippy, that annoying little “help” animation embedded into Microsoft Office? Microsoft’s messaging overkill also occurs when installing their products; they keep on telling the user about all the wonderful features they provide. Now, it’s one thing to use sales and marketing messages when trying to get the user to buy a product, it’s quite another to keep up with the messages after the user is putting it on the machine. In my case, these messages imbued a deep desire in me to throw rocks at the PC I was working on; I found myself shouting, “I’m installing it already, stop telling how bloody wonderful it’s supposed to be!” Much of my anger stemmed from knowing they were lying; of course one could ask why Microsoft feels it necessary to reassure the user after they’ve bought the product. Are they trying to minimise regret in advance?

Of course making products for dolts leads to products which only dolts could appreciate. In Microsoft’s quest for glory and profit, they tried to create an operating system which caters to every need and desire of the user. They reckoned that it’s good business to be making every last decision for their customers, and they would be thanked for unbundling any “unnecessary” software selections. This hit a snag, as bunging everything into the operating system has made it more buggy and vulnerable. The user profile, in light of these issues, has to be upgraded to something more intelligent in order to maintain their Windows PC; they are obliged to deal with virus scanning, setting up software firewalls and using spyware removal tools. In response, Microsoft is now providing these tools now to their users, however, the additional complexity is still something the user needs to be aware of in order to sustain their PC. This is not some idle speculation; I have dealt with users who had no technical skill at all, and found their PC had become overloaded with spyware to the point where it was non-functional. I had to teach users of this kind how to deal with it; invariably there was a sigh, likely in response to the added complications that operating their computer had just acquired.

This is one of the reasons why an intelligent user must love Linux; it is for grown ups. The operating system doesn’t pester you with messages; it’s rather like being given the car keys by your father for the first time and being told, “Take her out for a spin.” Where you go, what you do, is up to you. Linux assumes that I am going to take the time to study my computer and gain a basic understanding of how it works; there are plenty of materials to assist me. It assumes that I am going to think about what I am doing when I set it up. It lets me customise the components that it utilises. The result is a computer which runs as intelligently as I’ve been able to customise it. In short, Linux was created by intelligent people for intelligent people, and this has led to an intelligent product which functions intelligently.

Of course, there are plenty of people who want to call Picture loans and not have to think about such matters. Being dumb is often quite a popular thing to be; Brittany Spears is more boffo than Stephen Hawking. Furthermore, numbskulls do make a contribution to society; their excess cash fuelled the Dot Com boom and all of them will eventually become a rich source of fertiliser. However, it should be noted that it is usually the constructs of genius that endure: Gustave Eiffel’s tower is still admired today, a pile of dung from a village idiot in Provence is not so well respected. Linux is enduring, adapting, growing into the operating system of mobile phones and video games consoles, not just PC’s and servers. Windows appears to be under fire due to delays in Vista, security issues and is apparently in retreat in the web server market. They still have time to turn this around; however, they’re going to have to realise users do have brains, and more importantly, they can use them. Armed with this bit of understanding, they may survive; hopefully their compatriots at Picture won’t be so lucky.

This week’s issue of the Economist reminds us that an important anniversary is happening this month. It’s 25 years since the first IBM PC was released onto the market. 25 years may not sound like much on the surface, but if you think about how different the world was then, the distance in time seems enormous. 25 years ago, Ronald Reagan was President. 25 years ago, Van Halen’s lead singer was David Lee Roth. 25 years ago, we were at the dawn of the Yuppies. Strolling down memory lane back to that era seems more like an exercise in archaeology; amongst the ruins of that past are Rubik’s Cubes, hair gel and Thompson Twins albums.

I was a fairly early adopter of the PC; I had wanted a home computer since I started learning programming with a Commodore PET machine at my school. To tide me over, my father got a Texas Instruments home computer which plugged into the television; I remember that it was considered a great advance because with an additional module, one could actually get the computer to speak. There was a Star Trek game that came with it which involved the computer barking that the Klingons were attacking; this was cool to me at the time. But somehow it didn’t satisfy; I wanted to do more.

After the PC was introduced, my first real machine arrived at my house; my father got an IBM PC AT. This was considered a great advance at the time, a very powerful machine; for starters it came with a colour monitor and had a hard disk drive. It was an impressive hunk of metal - even the keyboard was made of it. It seemed to speak of a bygone era before plastic in some senses; computers then were steel, almost crafted like vintage cars. The AT was the first computer I performed upgrades on; I also learned more programming skills by using BASIC which was part of PC DOS 3.0.

That AT was also the first computer I ever used to dial up anyone. I first had a Hayes modem, then I installed an internal modem which fit into the PCI card slot. With that, I was able to access the precursors of the internet, online bulletin boards. The text interface was daunting, as were some of the phone bills, but it showed the potential of networking.

I moved on to the first “portable” computer in my collection, a Compaq. It had an LCD screen and ran off of some batteries, but it was extremely heavy. Its screen was considered a marvel for its time; the colours were entirely washed out, but the images were discernable. To avoid getting a headache, I plugged it into a VGA monitor, which made it look glorious. The new Windows interface was an improvement on DOS. Bulletin boards were replaced with using a service called PC Link, which was a precursor to AOL.

Since then I’ve owned a broad variety of machines including the Fujitsu ICL PCTV, a late, unlamented product which incorporated a television and a PC in the same unit. I’ve owned several Macintoshes. I had a custom built PC made for me; which I then rebuilt. I’ve now reached the point where I have 4 PCs in my home, all of which seem to have reached the apex of progress by running Linux, connecting to the internet at speeds which were unimaginable only a few years ago. How far the PC would go was totally unforeseen by its creators; it’s now a part of most people’s lives. How far being interested in programming and computing would take me personally was only a glimmer in my perception back in 1981; my only hint came from the fact that my father was a highly successful technologist. Since then, I’ve been proud to follow in his footsteps.

The Economist opined that the days of the PC’s dominance are drawing to a close; they’re too energy hungry and bulky for many, particularly those in developing nations. Rather, they suggest that computing will focus on portable appliances like the mobile telephone; this is not an outrageous statement, Larry Ellison of Oracle made a similar prediction several years ago. This has yet to pass. According to the UK Office of Statistics, the volume of Desktop PCs sold in the United Kingdom has risen from 2,194,278 in 2001 to 2,653,867 in 2004. This is not indicative of a dying market. It is likely that we will see the rise of intelligent appliances, such as high definition television that doubles as a PC, and yes, increased access to the internet through mobile phones and other pocket devices like the Blackberry. However, the shape of this digital future is still coming together; and it is fair to say that it never would have happened without the PC.

Prediction in this case is purely idle speculation; 25 years ago seems almost a time of innocence in comparison to now, back then, we simply didn’t know what would happen. It will be interesting to see how much we will have evolved in our use of technology 25 years from now, and when we root around the ruins of our present time perhaps we’ll feel that this era is just as primitive as we feel the first IBM PC is today.

No one does kooks quite like America. The assortment of lunatics, weirdos, freaks and eccentrics there, from the Manson Family, to the Unabomber, to Michael Jackson is unsurpassed. Maybe it’s to do with the “pursuit of happiness” part in the Declaration of Independence; some people have taken that endeavour to unimagined lengths, from lining the inside of their hats with tin foil to proclaiming that space aliens run the government.

There is one particular breed of wacko that appears to be on the rise, however. This variant of fruit loop thinks Linux is a foreign plot, created by Communists in an attempt to destroy America’s software industry. They point to the fact that Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is apparently leftist in his politics, and that Linus Torvalds’ father was a Communist, as if one’s politics was transmitted through one’s genes. These “Anti-Linux Patriots” cling to Windows rather like their forebears in lunacy clung to American cars, even if the Toyota next door was more reliable, had better gas mileage and didn’t blow up like a Ford Pinto.

Winston Churchill once defined a fanatic as someone “who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject”; these mental midgets fit into that category. What they fail to recognise is that if Linux is at all Marxist, it’s of the Groucho rather than the Karl variety.

Karl Marx and Linux are an extremely poor fit. Marx believed that men’s behaviour was determined by economics, or to use the traditional Marxist phrase, “conditions create consciousness”. In other words, we do things on the basis of what we get paid to do. This situation would only be remedied by the Proletarian Revolution, in Marx’s view; even then, people would be allocated resources “from each according to their ability to each according to their need”. The idea of man acting solely on economic impulses falls to pieces as soon as it meets the Open Source philosophy; capitalism is far from dead, yet here we have groups of individuals who are acting out of motives which do not have a clear economic rationale. Nor can this behaviour be said to be creating the “Proletarian Revolution” that Karl Marx described; the products of Open Source assist rather than hinder commerce by reducing the cost of new entrants into the marketplace. Capitalism is propagated, not blocked or overthrown.

Indeed, Karl Marx would be very surprised we had gotten into a situation that people would be able to do this at all under the capitalist system; when he wrote in the 19th century, he foresaw a world in which the proletariat would be progressively impoverished by capitalism, and the increasing pain and drudgery of life would inspire them to unite, en masse, and overthrow the existing order. This has clearly not occured; indeed it was obvious by the early 20th century that this was not going to happen. Marxist philosophers have been having difficulty breathing life into this theoretical corpse ever since.

On the other hand, Open Source programmers should be proud to repeat the French quip, “Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.” (I am a Marxist of the Groucho variety). This is not just a reference to the community’s sense of humour; if one looks at the underlying structure of a Marx Brothers film, there are some commonalities with how Open Source development occurs. Their films provide a structure for moments of individual inspiration: Groucho with his wise cracking quips, Harpo with his silent gags, and Chico with his exaggerated Italian pronunciation. There are also moments of collaboration; a well-known example comes from the film “Duck Soup”, in which Harpo and Chico dress as Groucho in order to create hilarity out of confusion. It seems anarchic, but these moments of individual and collaboartive genius work well together. Similarly the individual and collaborative efforts which comprise Open Source projects also combine to produce excellent results. Yes, a sense of direction and a framework are required: the Marx Brothers had that as well. However, Open Source is much more liberated than deterministic, and much more Groucho than it ever will be Karl.

So what of the lunatics in the States who refuse to believe this? I am a particular believer in shock therapy; for example, if I ever had a daughter that wanted a pony, I would take her to a restaurant specialising in horse meat, and then tell her afterwards what she had consumed. It would likely guarantee she would never want to look at another horse again. Similarly, we should likely make the Anti-Linux Patriots aware of how much they owe to Open Source, how much of the fruits of Open Source they consume, how much of the products of their ire are already integrated into their lives. Either they will get used to it, or better still, they may end up hiding under their beds.

Everything one needs to know about politics can be found in the scripts of “Yes, Minister”, a British comedy programme which detailed the fictional career of the Right Honourable James Hacker, MP. One of the more pertinent lessons doled out by the show is that politicians will seize upon half-baked initiatives in order to prove to the public they’re doing something. This faulty logic was encapsulated by what one of the characters called “The Politicians Syllogism”. A syllogism, for those who haven’t come across one before, is a form of deductive reasoning, comprised of a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. The Politicians Syllogism goes as follows -

We must do something
This is something.
Therefore we must do this.

Of course this is about as good, the character notes, as saying the following -

My dog has four legs.
My cat has four legs.
Therefore, my dog is a cat.

The Politicians Syllogism is applicable to the latest initiative out of the American Congress, the so-called “Deleting Online Predators Act”, or DOPA for short. The act, passed by a margin of 410 votes to 15 in the House of Representatives, intends to forbid schools and libraries access to “social networking” sites. The FCC is obliged to define these sites as any that allow users to chat to another, maintain a profile, and post personal data. Some commentators have already noted that this description would apply to sites like Ebay and Amazon.

The politicians are doing this, quite frankly, because it’s easy. The latest scare created by the media is that MySpace has become nothing more than a recruitment ground for paedophiles. This act is a very simple way to show that both Democrats and Republicans “care”. Doing “something” also prevents questions about why rank and file members of the US Congress are paid $165,200 per year, plus benefits and expenses.

Of course, sending paedophiles for a ride on Old Sparky set to “Extra Crispy” or castrating them with a rusty butter knife would be certainly more effective (it would definitely cut the recidivism rate). However, such measures would not command a bipartisan consensus, and therefore be less likely to pass; “something” would not be achieved.

However, something in this instance is the worst sort of nothing. If we apply Lenin’s old query, “Whom does this benefit?” to the act, we can quickly ascertain that it certainly does not benefit the children the measure is intended to protect.

According to the Pew Internet & Life project, only 23% percent of adult Americans have gone online from somewhere other than home or at work. Even if we assume that children’s proportion is marginally higher, this does not account for the vast majority of internet users. These figures also do not account for people using MySpace at these alternative locations; given the filters already placed on salacious content, the library or school environment was already not conducive for accessing questionable material.

Just as the act is unlikely to benefit users, it is just as likely to hit sites like MySpace and any site that offers an element of social networking. It also hits policy makers in schools and libraries; their independence in deciding what is appropriate material has been taken away and put into the hands of the Federal government. Power has been shifted to the centre, bureaucracy empowered, and there is no solid reasoning behind it.

It also does not benefit good governance. A solid objection to this act is the supposition that it makes about human nature; it seems Congress has read their Jean Jacques Rousseau. Without the acoutrements of civilisation, Rousseau suggested, men automatically behave better. Similiarly, Congress suggests that without the tools to make man bad, he will not become bad. Considering that paedophiles are motivated by unnatural lust, it seems that even if a fraction of their prey were made unavailable, they would not stop in their activities. Only the aforementioned ride in Old Sparky (or the rusty butter knife) would stop them completely; the fear of being stopped in that manner would make some, not all, realise that life is more important than gratifying themselves.

So whom does this benefit? The bureaucracy is the biggest winner, given the additional powers they will receive. Also, Congress will get a few days of a few positive headlines for doing something. Individual representatives, in a tough election year, will be able to tell the folks back home that they tackled the scourge of internet paedophiles, and with a bit of luck, (but not too much luck as the incumbency rate in the House is around 90 percent) they’ll continue to collect their large salaries for a job which demands the occasional loud bit of nothing. One can only hope that the nothing produced in the next session will be of better quality.

It’s not everyone who can say that they used to work for a character straight out of Monty Python, but I can. Specifically, I worked for a real-life variant of the Dirty Vicar. For those who are not familiar with that sketch, the Dirty Vicar was a character (played by Terry Jones) who simply could not stop himself from groping well endowed women while letting fly with a raucous shout of “I like (insert rude word for breasts here)!”

Apart from admiring the breasts of female staff, the real-life Dirty Vicar had one other major obsession and that was sales. Presumably it was his repeating the word “sales” often and loudly that got him the job as Managing Director; one hopes it was not his use of the “f” word in every sentence. He used to destroy many of my carefully laid out plans because he could not understand the relationship between doing things the right way and getting sales; rather, he thought that having something semi-working now was better than something that worked perfectly tomorrow. He was so desperate for immediate uplift that he would sacrifice the company’s prospects over a medium or long term to achieve it.

Furthermore, he was constantly trying to squeeze customers for every penny in the wrong sort of way. For example, I had to argue very strongly against his proposal to automatically include an extra in our online shopping basket; the tickbox to remove it was subtle and could easily be overlooked. It had been tried before; many customers were overcharged and said they would never purchase from us again. Within months, the results of his “all out strategy”, if it can be called that, were predictably horrible, and I am pleased to say that eventually he was relieved of the burdens of his position.

That’s an admittedly extreme example of how the drive for sales and the ambitions of salesmen and their marketing bretheren can wreck a company’s online prospects. However, as an Open Source advocate, I have to wonder how much of Linux’s advantages stem from having much less of this kind of pressure. How much of Microsoft’s problems, in contrast, stem from these influences? What is the evil that salesmen do?

In my experience, salesmen want a simple life. The good ones will acknowledge this is not possible and learn to live with it; however, they’re in a minority. The bad ones will promise the customer or their superiors everything in the world and for it to be delivered yesterday, without any reference to those who actually have to build the solution in question. This is yet another extreme example, but in my first management role, I was obliged to pick up the pieces after a technically ignorant sales person told an equally technically ignorant customer that our website would have a “telepathic” interface. It took some explanation of what internet technologies can and cannot do for the customer to realise that I wasn’t going to be able to build a solution to read her thoughts.

One gets a hint of the “telepathic” salesman upon examining the site for Windows Vista. Some of the claims made for it are laughable; for example, the site states “..with Windows Vista, the operating system adapts to you, rather than the other way around.” Considering how Microsoft makes so many decisions for the user as to what software should be on their desktop, there is a very large distance between rhetoric and reality. It is not outrageous to suppose that this gap is maintained in so far as what the sales and marketing people are promising to the public and what the development staff can actually deliver. What is worse is that there is a hint of salesman-driven rationale in how Microsoft develops its products: they are always bigger, always have more features, they’re always more glossy. It is sales logic which would automatically assume that this is somehow “better”.

The difference with Linux could not be more stark; in the absence of this pressure, an operating system has emerged that was developed with the sole goal of getting it right. This is not some idle vanity among technologists; the results of the Open Source approach have proven very useful to business. There is a reason that Apache powers 68% of all webservers, for example. That said, there is a lot of mileage in simply approaching technology with the proper respect for the boundaries of rational planning.

While I was suffering in my labours for the Dirty Vicar, a parallel project was in motion in the same company; in that case, the lead developer was well known for his dislike of sales and marketing. He was often heard to tell them, “No, I’m not going to do it, it’s a hare-brained scheme and it won’t make us any money.” He was tolerated due to his obvious skill and intelligence; he was outstanding at mod_perl development. The result of his project was an e-commerce solution that won an award; the project was also immensely profitable. I’m not suggesting that all developers should have his moxie, nor do I consider it realistic to believe that the sales folk at Microsoft and elsewhere will leave their technology staff alone, even if superior results were more likely. However, the companies that do learn to restrain the ambitions of their sales staff may prove to be the most successful; many are already happily relying on technologies which required little or no salesmen to develop, this should prove to their satisfaction that developers don’t need pestering folk goosing them every 5 minutes like a Dirty Vicar to produce elegant solutions. That voodoo which salesmen do may be a necessary evil, but the dosage should be kept to the barest minimum.