Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

Worst Tourist Website Dept.. Visit London -- The official London Tourist Board site. Probably one of the worst such sites in the world. Ugly, messy, hard to read, slow loading and obviously the page-generation is done by a content-management system that clearly stinks. The last time I looked at it the background was light teal and the type was medium teal making it nearly impossible to read. If they don't use teal-on-teal they use purple-on-purple. It's horrendous. Only mentioned because you know it cost a fortune and it's dreadful. The worst blog about cats is better. Is anyone paying attention in the UK? Can't say if there is anything good on the site because you go blind trying to look at it. The color after-images will give you nightmares.OK, I'm stopping the rant. Pant, pant. No discussion!

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 7:59:58 PM | permalink

POST 349. A debate rages over the lawsuits with SCO, IBM and Linux and my column, Killing Linux, has attracted a lot of forum posts. Much of the debate is about Open Source Software and its future with many theorists chiming in with their opinion. I have never read anything as succinct and astonishing as post 349 from a user who calls himself TSMO. Not really wanting to load up this blog with nerdy self references to these columns I had to pull out this comment because I've never heard this explanation before. It's almost like a manifesto. It's a response to another posting and begins with, "I find your statements regarding the 'OSS movement' and it's motivation to be inaccurate." Then this!

"OSS is an important effort to replace 'for-profit' motives (with it's material rewards) with 'for-ego' motives (with it's emotional and psychological rewards). It's a restatement of capitalism's thesis ('private vice begets public virtue') for an industry in which the participants feel the immaterial rewards for one's self (prestige) are equivalent to, or greater than, the possible material rewards for one's self (money).

"Vanity is the driving force behind OSS, as is greed behind closed-source software. Try to use someone's OSS code without attributing original authorship, and you will see how quickly your quaint "community" devolves into harsh campaigns of public remonstration towards the violator. It is of primary importance that original authorship always be identified.

"This is _not_ the hallmark of a communal environment; it is indicative of an environment in which everything is okay as long as people get credit for what they have contributed to a project. In other words, people in this community are not driven by altruism over greed, but by fame over obscurity. "

What is interesting to me is that I've never heard this expressed so perfectly and immediately realize that TSMO nailed this situation better than anyone ever has. I'm awestruck.

I should add that the way I see this is that there is nothing really wrong with any of this. Fame is as important as money for most people. But if we're fooling ourselves to think that Open Source is all about altruism, we need to be told the truth. Discuss

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 12:39:04 PM | permalink

Gratuitous plug. Not that I'm looking for a lot of extraneous hits on my website, but I do have an interesting page I did for myself and then polished up a bit for some friends. It's my Guide to New York City. I use it mostly for transit information and as a good way to find out the newest trendy restaurants when I'm in Manhattan. I did it because I got tired of plowing through Google for this information. Restaurant reviews in this country are all over the map and inconsistent, especially when they are "reader reviews." Too many of these reviews are fake and others are done by people who really don't go out that much. I know a few people who are going to CeBIT America in a couple of weeks who might find this page handy

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 5:40:57 PM | permalink

Bookmark du jour. Have you ever forgotten the sequence of codes for call forwarding and other features of your phone? It's amazing how the operators of the local phonecos can't even help you. Bookmark this site for a nice list. It includes features in most of the phone switches that they never tell you about and rarely activiate. Too much work to activiate is my guess. You know, you have to actually type something into a computer screen. OH! The agony!

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 11:52:23 PM | permalink

International bureaucracies are needed I suppose for developing certain standards to be used by all despite the fact that what Microsoft SAYS goes! One of these groups is the ISO/IEC crowd that deals with gods-knows-what, but they deal with a lot of it. ISO has all sorts of standards many of which are necessary to get a government contract. So I run into this proposal to incorporate the Klingon language into ISO/IEC 10646 as a recognized character set. Can you imagine? Once the Klingon language is incorporated we can expect Romulan and all sorts of other crap too. The irony of the Klingon language is that it has surpassed Esperanto in popularity. I recall, when I was a kid, talk about how Esperanto would become the universal language for "all peoples." Nobody gave a shit and most people made English a de facto International language much to the chagrin of the French. And, of course, the Brits take credit for this development when we all know it was the Americans who forced it since we hate to speak other languages, but everyone has to do business with us. Perhaps Klingon could be next. "But Mommy I don't want to learn Klingon!" "Shut up and eat your Rokeg blood pie!" This amount of coughing and guttural noise you have to make speaking Klingon makes Arabic sound like Castilion Spanish.

And let's not overlook the Universal Translation Project which actually has an Esperanto to Klingon translation system available as part of the Open Source movement. Who can keep up with all these fabulous trends? Discuss

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 12:38:30 PM | permalink

So they're out to get Martha Stewart. The concept here is simple, she lied to the government and she must be punished. It's that simple, from their perspective. It's like the way the IRS makes examples of celebrtity tax dodgers when it can. It's effective marketing.

But let me tell you a personal anecdote. When the Martha Stewart story first broke an owner of a small stock brokerage (a friend) called me to tell me the "real" story about what happened. This is one of those communites where everyone knows everyone else's business. The Martha Stewart scenario played like this: The CEO, Sam Waskal, of ImClone got the bad news about his product not making the FDA cut. He calls his broker to dump the stock. He knows he's doomed. They tell him he simply can't because of his position. Freaked out, he goes and tells other family members to dump their stock to salvage what he can of his fortune. Some start to sell. Martha gets a call from her broker, who also handles some ImClone accounts and is paying attention to trades in the office. He tells Martha that Sam's daughter is selling off her shares. He asks her what should he do with hers. They may have had a chat, I don't know. I suspect a "What do YOU think I should do?" would be asked by Martha and any broker looking for commissions would say "sell!" Whatever happened, she sells.

Now here is a woman who likes to be in control. Geez, I mean selling stock at the spur of the moment doesn't look good for her image. The stock collapses and she looks suspiciously like an insider although all she knew is that others were selling. A Bloomberg terminal could have revealed that too. But instead of just saying, "Uh, my broker told me that others were selling, so I decided to sell too" wouldn't suffice for her. She had to dream up the complex stop-loss order nonsense because she could never just act like a normal person and panic sell, could she? After all, she was the great and thoughtful billionaire CEO Martha Stewart. If she admitted immediately what had really happened -- the truth -- she'd have lost a few points on the ego scorecard and it would have blown over. Now she's screwed and they want to make an example out of her. The moral: tell the truth to government officials or shut up and let the lawyers do the talking. This old link tells most of the story. I've never seen a good mainstream story about it. Discuss

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 2:40:24 PM | permalink

Palm buys Handspring. This was just announced this morning and should be noted by everyone. The picture appearing today on the Palm website says it all. Jeff Hawkins is there with that look of the losing pitcher in the locker room after game seven of the world series. This situation will give us a better picture of what's ahead for Palm versus WindowsCE/Pocket. I'm currently wondering if I should make a column of it or not. Neither of these companies seems to have any clue about marketing or PR. Discuss

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 9:27:34 AM | permalink

When I began news writing I was in high school and eventually got the entire staff of the HS newspaper reprimanded for getting them to print my expose on the slipshod cafeteria. They used to make these tuna sandwiches and heat seal them with a plastic wrap. This was probably a good idea since it made it easier to toss the sandwiches at the students as they rushed past in line. One of the sandwiches had a live fly sealed within and buzzing. Someone showed it to me and I got pictures of it and ran it on the front page. I thought it was a scandal. LIVE FLY FOUND IN SCHOOL SANDWICH. Breaking news, if ever there was. Nobody in the administration thought much of it and threatened to shut down the paper if we did anything like that again. The episode managed to trigger my long term interest in media accuracy and bias. How does it come to be? I’m always amazed at how often hot stories turn out to be fixed or planted or bogus and we only find out about it years later when it doesn’t matter. Thus I was intrigued by the true story about the Sexual Freedom League that I somehow stumbled onto while googling around. In the 1960’s the public was led to believe that a serious trend towards promiscuity and group sex was emerging spearheaded by the Sexual Freedom League in Berkeley. It had appeared out of nowhere during an era of bra-burning and naked girls spinning around stoned on acid at outdoor rock concerts. So it made some sort of sense. I had seen ads for these folks and read reports about their orgies. Now reading this article (above) made me realize that it was all a scam by a few guys so they could get laid by a lot of different women. Everybody has an angle. But what is more than a little annoying is that none of this was suspected or revealed during a heyday of Bay Area media. Berkeley itself had a daily paper. There was the Berkeley Gazette, the Oakland Tribune, the SF Examiner, the Chronicle. Even the Call-Bulletin may have been publishing at the time. Here is this phenomenal supposed megatrend that was pumped up in Playboy and elsewhere, and nobody investigates? Now I read this wacky story. Link Discuss

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 11:10:14 AM | permalink

How does some "creation" from the tabloid News of the World actually turn into real life? This is how.link Discuss

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 8:12:21 AM | permalink

I suppose you're wondering exactly how I got here. The answer is simple: only a fool would refuse the opportunity to guest blog on what is probably the most entertaining blog being published today. In fact I don't see how these guys even manage to do any real work. Anyway, I'll throw up my annoying observations over the next week to draw as much attention to myself as possible. Then I'll see how I feel. And I may as well start out with some self promotion since that seems to be what a lot of bloggers do. In this case it's about my recent PC Mag online column where I fret over the distinct possibility that the Open Source movement can actually be derailed by this SCO lawsuit. I seriously think that Linux folks are not taking this seriously, at all. I'll try to get into a less serious mood later. Discuss

posted by JohnC Dvorak at 4:07:32 PM | permalink

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