In the last couple of years I attended a couple of talks from Noam at MIT and Harvard. Excellent talks, if you were not able to attend these, you might want to get the DVD.
It comes with the presentation at Harvard and a Q&A section from both events.
Duncan sent me a link to The Life of Joe Republican, very funny, excerpt:
All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too.
On the other end of the spectrum, multi-billionaire George Soros gives his opinion on Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush.
Follow up: Bruce Springstein interview detailing why he had to take a position on this election.
Mikael is the founder of Imendio, there is an interview with him at OSnews on the subject of Gtk+/Gnome commercial support.
I read with alarm the discussion between the Solaris kernel engineer and some Linux dude. I have to say that it is a bit sad that the Linux dude did not understand the points of the Solaris kernel developer.
It was a bit embarassing to read the arguments from the Linux dude. And I found myself agreeing more with the Solaris engineer which clearly articulated the rationale for his decision. On the other hand or Linux friend just launched a long tirade of fanboyism and flames.
This is the wrong way of advocating Linux. I have always maintained that to effectively compete you should never compare the downsides of your competitor with your advantages, that just leads to the placebo effect you can see from the Linux guy: "everyting we do is fine, there is no need to improve". He got defensive. But this is exactly the wrong attitude to take because in this mode of operation you do not react and do not take steps to improve. What the Linux community should do is compare the strengths of Solaris and the weaknesses of Linux. Maybe there are things that can improve, maybe there are cultural changes that can take place but dissing someone else on these grounds is not going to improve our loved kernel.
When Sun decided to adopt Gnome as their desktop environment there was a big discussion about API stability, an issue that many of us although peripherally aware of, did not take as seriously as Sun did. We have to thank Sun for bringing that culture into Gnome, and I wish that the same culture spead further to other projects.
The slashdot thread at +5 has some very interesting insight on the latest Get the Wrong Facts campaign from Microsoft. The best responses: one, two but in general everything at +5 is worth reading.
Awesome Interview Transcript: Jon Stewart being extremely classy in his replies to the ad-hominem comments from O'Reilly.
According to O'Reilly viewers of the Daily Show are stoned slackers, research apparently proved the opposite: the audience of the Daily Show is more likely to have completed four years of college as opposed to the O'Reilly audience. Me not having completed college probably puts me on the `stoned slacker' category.
In other news:
Posted on 28 Sep 2004