PlasticBoy

Jim Griffin in The Register: “So where does this leave us, digital delivery ahead, carbon and friction behind, brackish combinations surrounding our Tarzan-like transition from one vine to the next? It leaves us in a better place, one where access to art and knowledge are not conditioned on the size of your wallet, or worse still, the size of your parents’ wallet. A world where the collective flat fees outweigh per capita average spending, where ideas can flourish with reward and without friction, a world Eleanor Roosevelt and Cicero would adore.”

NYTimes has a short interview with Linus.

News.com: Microsoft critic dismissed by @Stake. “A computer security expert who contributed to a paper deeply critical of Microsoft has been dismissed by his employer, a consulting company that works closely with the software giant.”

Newsfactor: The Flourishing Dell-Linux Coalition. “The overall server market seems to be getting back on track. According to IDC, spending on servers in the United States is expected to hit US$18.2 billion in 2003, about 3 percent growth over 2002. X86-based systems will lead the charge. IDC forecasts that the Linux server market will grow 34 percent to $3.1 billion, and the Windows server market will increase 8 percent to $15.0 billion. By 2006, Linux hardware sales are projected to hit $6.5 billion.”

InfoWorld: Stop buying from spammers, Net industry says. “With an arsenal of new laws, campaigns, and technologies failing to stop spammers from sending a seemingly endless flow of unsolicited commercial e-mail, the Internet industry is finally turning to a little-acknowledged culprit to stem the tide — consumers.”

NY Observer on nutritionist Marion Nestle, who wants to be the “Dr. Ruth” of nutrition.

Her goal is to get people to share her fervent belief that food—and the so-called diseases of affluence like cancer and heart disease—are not just personal issues, but bona fide social and political problems. And the big, fat problem that no one but she seems to notice at the heart of the nation’s obesity crisis is, as she sees it, a gross oversupply of calories—not consumer demand. The reason is simple: Companies like Kraft and Burger King produce 3,900 calories of processed food daily for every person in the United States. That’s at least a third more calories than most people need. If we were to go on a national diet and not meet our allotted 3,900 calories, food sales—and stock prices—would dip, shareholders would get gloomy and the economy would flag. “In order to stay competitive, the food industry needs people to eat more,” Ms. Nestle said. And so, of course, they do.

InfoWorld: Programmers abandoning their IDEs for code editors.

Many developers feel that mouse-centric IDEs slow them down, while keyboard-driven code editing tools’ feature-rich and flexible nature gives them an edge. “I’ve yet to use an IDE where I can enter or edit code as quickly as I can using Vim,” adds Wade Bowmer, a senior developer at Excido. “I don’t need to use a mouse, and many IDEs heavily use the function keys, which seems to really slow me down.”

Scott Anderson, a senior software architect, agrees. “I use Emacs for everything. It’s programmable, open source, has a huge user community, and its range of features is simply stupefying,” he explains.

Red Hat is merging Red Hat Linux with the Fedora Linux Project. The result is the Fedora Project, a community-driven Linux distribution. Red Hat will no longer sell a consumer-targetted Linux distro. This seems like a pretty smart move to me. Keeping Red Hat Linux corporate-controlled would never have satisfied the geeks, and the consumer-oriented distro market is pretty crowded. Now Red Hat can stop getting into fights with the community and focus on what’s making them money, Enterprise Linux.

BMG manages to miss the point entirely by offering DRM-ridden CDs that allow you to burn 3 copies and email time-limited songs to friends. I assume it’s all Windows-only.

Sarah Vowell memorializes John Ritter by talking about how good we was on Buffy.

Richard Dawkins talks about bright, a new coinage intended to for the non-religious what gay did for homosexuals.

I am a bright. You are (quite probably) a bright. Most of the people I know are brights. The majority of scientists are brights. Presumably there are lots of closet brights in Congress, but they dare not come out. Notice from these examples that the word is a noun, not an adjective. We brights are not claiming to be bright (meaning clever, intelligent), any more than gays claim to be gay (meaning joyful, carefree).

Neil Gaiman is on Talk of the Nation today talking about Sandman. Looks like he’s on the second hour, 2:00 on WBUR.

A good interview with Paul Krugman. Conducted by a blogger, no less.

Train wreck is a way overused metaphor, but we’re headed for some kind of collision, and there are three things that can happen. Just by the arithmetic, you can either have big tax increases, roll back the whole Bush program plus some; or you can sharply cut Medicare and Social Security, because that’s where the money is; or the U.S. just tootles along until we actually have a financial crisis where the marginal buyer of U.S. treasury bills, which is actually the Reserve Bank of China, says, we don’t trust these guys anymore — and we turn into Argentina. All three of those are clearly impossible, and yet one of them has to happen, so, your choice. Which one?

Propelled by the success of their Windows Annoyances series, Oreilly is publishing Linux Annoyances. The authors have set up a mailing list where people can discuss what annoys them about Linux.

From Eat the State.

And when The Guru came down from the mountain with her shining CD containing the GPL, she saw the Geeks partying and drinking and dancing like Wall Streeters around their golden stock option. And she was wrought with anger and erased the shining CD with the GPL. Then the Guru called out, who among the Geeks will stand by me and the programmers who are free, and who will return to serfdom?