Incumbent Power and Total War in High Tech

Mario, a senior studying Political Science and History at the University of Washington, is one of my oldest friends. I’ve had the pleasure of learning a lot about political science from him.  In particular, I remember a discussion with Mario on the concept of total war – a type of warfare where every and any asset of a country is used to wage war – and how it’s changed since World War 2 with the advent of nuclear weapons.

ChromeOS: Great for Technology, Not the Second Coming.

I like Valleywag. Like a lot of geeks, I love to pop it open and read about what stupid hijinks are going on in technology. The ubiquitous Silicon Valley gossip rag serves as a frankly horrifying combination of Wired, the now-defunct Fuckedcompany.com, the Weekly World News, and Playboy. Scathing, scandalous, and often sexual, Valleywag is one of those things you talk about in hushed conversation over a glass of wine at a dimly-lit bar in Palo Alto or yell about over some loud house music while holding a Stella at a party in San Jose. Valleywag is all about the ‘Valley’s fairyland image of geek money, sex, and power.  And we, the people living in the much more muted version of its stories, eat it up.

Stop Making Linux and Open Source Ideological

Recently, Slashdot reported that Free Software Foundation (FSF) leader Richard Stallman criticized Debian’s decision to include Mono in its future releases of its Linux distribution. Mono is an interpreter for Microsoft’s .NET platform that allows certain prorams coded for the Windows .NET platform to be executed inside of Linux natively. Arguing that this maneuver further indebts the development of GNU Linux to Microsoft, Stallman vehemently arued that it was a mistake and will have dire consequences for the continued development of Linux, open source, and free software as a whole.

MIX[1]: Silverlight Burns It Up

There’s a lot to talk about for the first day of MIX09. Let’s get to it.