The Edison Vendetta

One hundred years ago, America was the place for innovation. People flocked to the United States from every nation around the world with the dream that they could become successful. There were many, however, who were out for more than success. The Edison Company was started by Thomas Edison after his one-trick-pony-success of the incandescent light bulb. Seeking more than success, Edison was out for money and power (and success). He ruthlessly pursued the next big thing, but ultimately was incapable of developing it himself. So he turned to brilliant, desperate people to do the leg-work for him. One such individual was Nikola Tesla.

Tesla, having moved to New York (at the age of 19) to pursue his dream of building the alternating current motor, decided that Edison would be the perfect individual to submit his idea to, since he was the world’s most prolific inventor at the time. Having met nothing but disdain from his university colleagues back in Serbia, Tesla was sure that Edison would popularize this technology, as it was more efficient and more practical than the direct current motor. He was wrong. Since the Edison Company built its success on direct current, Edison was not happy to see an alternative to his empire. He did not fund Tesla’s idea, but seeing an opportunity (being the ravenous opportunist that he was), hired Tesla to improve the efficiency of his direct current generators. Eventually, Tesla would have his fill of Edison’s profiteering, and storm out on him (quite literally and dramatically) to pursue his dreams on his terms. And the rest is history.

The New Edison

I was reading the transcript of an interview of the CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison. He made some interesting comments that immediately made me think I was reading a transcript of Edison. He stated,

[Interviewer]: Is open source going to be disruptive to Oracle?

[Larry Ellison]: No. If an open source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it. Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that’s what we’ll do. So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. Keep in mind it’s not that good in most places yet. We’re a big supporter of Linux. At some point we may embed Linux in all of our products and provide support.

Just like software-as-a-service, we have to be good at it. We don’t have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source. At some point we could very well choose to have Linux as part of the Oracle database server. We certify it, we test it. We could have JBoss as part of our middleware. It costs us nothing. We can do that, IBM can do that, HP can do that – anyone with a large support organisation is free to take that intellectual property and embed it in their own products.

I’ve had this discussion with the CEOs of open source companies. We’ve looked at buying some, some with very high price tags – but since we already have access to all the intellectual property, why wouldn’t we just embed this technology in our technology and provide support.

via Financial Times

First of all, he’s right about Open Source. It is freely available to take. Many more talented people than Larry Ellison (or Thomas Edison) have contributed many hours for no pay and no reward, for no other reason than to produce something that is better than what is being developed by those who get payed to do so. Now, in the world of Open Source (and humanity), there is something known as reciprocity. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So what has Oracle done for the Open Source community lately? Well, it recently shut down the development servers that its most recent acquisition, Sun Microsystems (an open source server company) had set up for developers of the open source database PostgreSQL. It is also in the process of suing Google over alleged patent violations of Google’s Dalvik virtual machine for Android (essentially Google’s homemade version of Sun’s JavaME). This patent, by the way, is rumored to be one of the main reasons that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems; for no other reason than to make money by suing Google, who actually is being innovative. (it’s no wonder that the open source community lovingly refers to Larry as LPOD, Larry Prince of Darkness)

So how does Open Source respond to all of these attacks? By making better products. In the end, Oracle cannot harm the Open Source community. It is a movement, not a business; the faceless collaboration of millions of people around the world. A collective voice from Silicon Valley, Burundi, Bangladesh and Shanghai. Passionate people are churning out high quality products for no other reason than they can. In the end, no matter how fat the leach, It still needs a host. When you build your Empire on exploitation, you inevitably find yourself on shaky ground. Oracle has no foundation; it is a company with the blinders on. Its drive for profit is its demise; it has already lost. Sure, it could go on making exorbitant amounts of money, but in the end, it accomplishes nothing more than temporary comfort for its investors. Nobody is going to remember Oracle in one hundred years (or 20 years if my suspicions are correct). Open Source is here to stay; it has already won.

UPDATE: Upon reading this post I realized that the title has little to do with the actual content of the article… but, by golly, I’m sticking with it. It’s really in line with my writing style (and thinking style); haphazard and scattered. Every once in a while I can complete a cohesive thought… just not necessarily the original thought that I set out to think.

It’s always nice going back home for a holiday. My parents thoroughly enjoy my visits, and it is always great to see friends that I have not seen for some time. It is also nice to see my toys that I have not seen for a while.

Recently, my mother has been going through a lot of mine, and my sister’s old things (perhaps to see what she can get rid of), and has happened across our old nintendo set. This brought back many memories.

I remember playing games together, like mario, or our crappy bible games. We had a couple of those obscure titles, like Bible Adventures, Joshua, and King of Kings – The Early Years (why they chose to focus on the early years, I will never know). My favorite of the bunch, however, was Bible Adventures. This consisted of a couple of separate games, the best of which was Noah’s Ark. In it, you play a busy Noah shortly before the flood is to arrive. It is your job to gather two of every kind of animal, which can be tricky at times. Some of the animals were obvious choices, like cows and goats. But things would quickly become trickier when you had to capture those wiley pigs and monkeys (Pigs and monkeys would have to be distracted first with fruit baskets and coconuts, respectively).

To further the monotony and frustration, the game mechanics followed the standard nintendo model which did not include passcodes. Passcodes may not seem like much, but trust me, they were a godsend. Since the nintendo console had no form of writable memory, games could not be saved. In order to combat this problem, some games added a passcode system which would allow the player to jump to a specific level and play the rest of the game from there (G.I. Joe had this feature). I think the Bible game developers missed the memo. You would play for hours on end, collecting animals, only to run out of lives and have to restart from the beginning. And of course you didn’t have lives in the form of hearts, you had stone Ten Commandments tablets (obviously). This formula resulted in frequent controller throwing and general grumpiness. Neither of which I think the developer had intended.

I forgot where I was going with this, so I rest my case… for now.

Is there anything better than being on the cusp of a long weekend? Perhaps being on the cusp of a long weekend for a holiday where you get to blow stuff up to celebrate your long forgotten independence from a former superpower. It’s always nice to get together with people, and enjoy some fireworks on a nice summer evening.

I’ve been thinking a lot about life in general lately, mostly because I am on the cusp of graduating. I have some big changes coming, and big decisions to make.

I hate making decisions, as most people who know me probably know. Easy decisions are mundane, and hard decisions are, well, hard. Why couldn’t the hard decisions be easy and mundane, and the easy decisions be hard? Perhaps in that scenario, the easy decisions would become hard by definition. Or, in a bit of good fortune, the hard decisions would become easy.

Easy is no fun though. When things become easy, they have a tendency to become mundane, and quickly so. It then becomes challenging to find a challenge when things become mundane, and aren’t challenging. So what is a mundane challenge seeker to do? Well, find a challenge I suppose. But it its often a challenge to find a real challenge. It certainly isn’t easy.

This summer I haven’t had much time to think. Perhaps thinking is a challenge. I think it could be; depending on what you are thinking. I don’t know what you’re thinking because I’m not you. But I think you might be thinking that thinking is not a challenge. Why, you might think something like, “Thinking isn’t hard.” But isn’t it? Thinking is the process of billions of coordinated synapses all firing in a highly coordinated fashion. A miracle some might call it. Sounds like a challenge to me.

And that is the challenge. When I think things through, often I’m left with more questions. Challenging questions. So what am I to do? Do I think the challenging questions, or do I leave it to chance? Can chance be relied upon to deliver the answers? How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop?

Which brings me to my final question. Why is Charleston Chew so hard to find these days? And who doesn’t like the bold flavor of Charleston Chew? How could there not be demand for something so delicious?

These are the questions that keep me up at night, and most days. I really wish that the tough decisions were easier. Should I stay or should I go? What type of job should I pursue. Should I have to settle? Life after college will be a bit of an adjustment for me. Should I continue on with school then too, if I’m not to settle? So many questions, too few answers. I really hate to make decisions.

It uses some sort of magic prediction algorithm to determine which word you really wanted out of the possible combinations that it could be. This greatly increases typing speed by quickly allowing you to mash a bunch of letters into words.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s very impressive. In fact, this whole post was written using it. So give it a try, check it out here.

I should probably do something about these before they hatch (I named the spider Shelob). This is a picture of my rear window, which is bordered by woods. There seems to be no shortage of arachnids there.

… and …

Check out Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons at Amazon (CD || MP3 **DRM FREE**)

Between all the new hire paperwork that I have filled out for my internship and the various associated forms that I have to take care of for school, I’m dreaming in forms.

And now I find myself at the doctor’s office filling out more paperwork. I’m pretty sure that they have my records on file, yet here I am, filling out more paperwork.

If only there were some kind of device that could be used for scheduling and possibly, information exchange. Imagine a system where ten, maybe hundreds of these machines could be tied together into some sort of network, or internet. And data could be called up electronically instead of on paper. And mail could be sent electronically as well. One could only imagine.

Well, I’m off to my next stop, a shoulder X-ray. And I’m sure that no one there knows that I’m coming and there will be mounds of new paperwork for me to fill out. How exciting.

I am writing this post from my brand spanking new Droid Incredible. Jealous? I have been playing with it for less than 24 hours, so I hope to write a proper post about it within the next 48 hours.

I can, however, tell you this much. This phone is indeed incredible. The 3G speeds are blazing fast on the Verizon network as is the 1Ghz Snapdragon processor in this thing. I have yet to experience noticeable lag from either.

Anyway, like I said, I should have a proper review up in a few days time, so stay tuned for more updates.

Vezi mai multe video din Animatie

• Climate scientists admit fresh error over data on rising sea levels
  via Hacker News
  Comments
• Head of Climate Research Center admits no global warming since 1995
  via Hacker News
  Comments