machine-envy

I’ve no idea why it has taken so long to find it, but have a look at esp package manager. It’s simple and it works. An example configuration file to show you what I mean:
## Metadata
%product Foo
%copyright 2000-2007 by Foowhizzer.
%vendor Foocom
%license COPYING
%readme README
%description Foo server.
%version 2.2.2 1
## Filelist
$prefix=/usr/local
f 755 root sys ${prefix}/bin/foo […]

Our conference packs here in Buenos Aires included a map I had not seen before - showing the distribution of royalty fees paid in 2002. From the site, creator, Worldmapper:
Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of […]

I just finished reading The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper. One of the chapters discusses the idea of Utopian engineering rather than piecemeal engineering.

The Utopian approach may be described as follows. Any rational action must have a certain aim. … To choose this aim is therefore the first thing […]

My interview with Andrew Gowers has gone up on openDemocracy.

“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for […]

Two reasons to drop in on openDemocracy this week. The first is a pilot podcast, 20 minutes of audio journalism that takes in Sidney Blumenthal’s view on the Democrats’ victory in the states, Alain de Botton’s view on architecture, and prospects for an independent South Ossetia, as well as vox pops from the oD team. […]

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy tries to add something useful to the commentary surrounding Novell’s recent Faustian pact with Microsoft. In particular, it asks whether either the deal’s nod to non-commercial developers or Moglen’s threat to legally fork FLOSS with GPL v3 are predicted by Lawrence Lessig’s recent, controversial, “two economies” theory. My thanks to […]

The Trib published a great piece on MIT’s One Laptop Per Child (known as the XO-1) initiative yesterday. It’s a shame they’ve chosen the picture they did for the website, as there are some great ones in the print copy. Plenty available on the internets, though.
New stuff I learnt from this piece:

IBM and Microsoft are […]

Speaking of ideas-in-progress, Prof Jonathan Zittrain gave a lecture at the LSE last Friday entitled: “What would you put on the one laptop per child?”. It was basically an introduction for development types to his generativity theory, via the $100 laptop initiative, but he tested a few interesting ideas during the lecture, which are worth […]

(originally published on openDemocracy)
The pioneering Global Voices initiative hosted bloggers from Algeria to Zambia at a conference in London. An impressed Becky Hogge reflects on the challenges it may soon face.
Christmas came early for Joshua Schachter this year. On Friday 9 December his web-based social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us, which lets users share their favourite links […]

(originally published on openDemocracy)
The debate about who governs the internet will dominate the World Summit on the Information Society meeting in Tunis this week – but the world’s web users have more important things on their mind, says Becky Hogge.
One of the biggest draws of the information technology scene is that, unlike nearly any other […]