newspeak

OpenStack: VC investments are slowing – Business Insider.

If anything, the article underplays the extraordinarily swift decline of the Open Stack ecosystem and its overplays the consolidation that has taken place in the last year. I would guess, however, that other factors play an unstated role, not least of them being that the “cloud” is still inchoate, still being developed, precipitated.

The meaning of “Copyleft” in EUPL | Joinup.

This is interesting and raises lots of questions.

Glenn Moody reports on the latest moves by the UK government to limit the public’s access (and thus actionable use) of information that directly affects them. The piece is short and to the point and summarises what The Guardian’s excellent Ian Sample reported Friday (http://goo.gl/03oyy8).

The government is not explicitly suppressing; it is doing the modern bureaucratic equivalent, delaying (often coupled with de-funding). Thus, as The Guardian has it:

Under the new code, scientists and engineers employed at government expense must get ministerial approval before they can talk to the media about any of their research, whether it involves GM crops, flu vaccines, the impact of pesticides on bees, or the famously obscure Higgs boson.

The driver for this bureaucratic chilling is global warming, or more precisely, the fossil-fuel businesses affected by shifting investment and government largesse away from them and toward renewables and other Green Energy enterprises and their logistical implications. This is a vast and complex economy, and if we include the social and governmental apparatuses implied, it’s a veritable civilisation. But it’s also a very recent one.

Following Canada’s Bad Example, Now UK Wants To Muzzle Scientists And Their Inconvenient Truths | Techdirt.

EC to create level playing field for open source | Joinup.

The European Commission will create a level playing field for open source software when procuring new software solutions, it announced on 27 March. Evaluation of open source and proprietary software will take into account their total cost of ownership and exit costs.

Credit for reporting to Gijs Hillenius 

Essay challenging Kevin Carey’s new book on higher education @insidehighered.

It’s a fine & blistering demolition of an argument made by self-interested enthusiasts and technobabblers. It’s also long, but worth reading.

The lede, “U.S. regulators have been attempting to deal with the negative affect that a few large Internet providers might have on competition. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, new mobile technologies have been encouraging competition,”says a lot about US self-inflation. It also suggests that even though the US makes some of the technology exploiting the freer Internet markets abroad, its position is, seemingly, precarious.

Wireless Innovation Is Challenging Internet Incumbents | MIT Technology Review.

My colleague, Peter Kelly, pointed us to this article (actually, a reference to this one). It’s rather interesting and, like Peter, I’m interested to see what develops—and see this as, so far, a positive change.

Back at CollabNet, when we had to draft webpages for sites, we’d have to put in the exceptions for Netscape 4 (Sun had standardised on it, as had so many) and IE. Tedium. But also more than that. Recall that South Korea’s ecommerce infrastructure, as well as much of its public government, has standardised on increasingly obsolete—embarrassingly, dangerously obsolete—IE. And by dint of contract and law (and oligarchy, I suppose, as well as momentum: boredom) is stuck with the kind of past only a grave robber would love.

Inside Microsoft’s New Rendering Engine For The “Project Spartan” – Smashing Magazine.

“Okay, 80 pages in and I am officially Giving Up on MS Office 2011 for OSX. Switching to LibreOffice with relief, b/c it works better.

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) February 23, 2015

LibreOffice=OpenOffice plus/minus minor things.

The point: it’s easier to use.

And regarding change tracking: Charlie: contact me. We have some ideas on this score. You’ll like them (especially if you give us suggestions).

‘Utterly unusable’ MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross • The Register.

Challenging perceptions about public investment in Canada | MARIANA MAZZUCATO.

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life – NYTimes.com.

The title to this examination of the effects of online pack vengeance is not nearly as good as the article itself, which seeks to present the human toll of online shredding.