Epistemology is an area of philosophy that is concerned with studying human knowledge and justified belief. Human civilization advanced with the increased ability to transfer and propagate knowledge. Computing and the internet are the tools we rely on in the information age to advance human knowledge and civilization. Open source software provides a model for sharing and retaining knowledge equitably throughout the world.
However, it lacks mainstream adoption for various perception-related reasons. This research paper studies current computer usage through a survey of social network users as primary research. The results show that users, regardless of their philosophical, civil, or social beliefs, are significantly more accepting of open source software through the prism of the internet. Coincidentally, this is an area open source software is strong at.
On the morning of Friday, April 2nd 2010, in a Saudi Arabian jail cell in Riyadh, a father of five from a rural village in Lebanon named Ali Sibat was told to get ready for his beheading later that afternoon. The horrible news fell hard on his mother, his wife, his children, and his brother. Adding to their pain was the fact that they had no voice in the matter. Sibat had not been assigned a lawyer in the Saudi court system.
His family did receive legal counsel from a Lebanese legal expert but they have no real access to the Saudi legal system. They decided to go public with their plea by enlisting the help of the satellite television station where Sibat worked. Sibat hosted a TV show about fortune telling and sorcery. He was a popular TV fortuneteller, made popular to a large degree by Saudi viewers and callers. His viewers were strong believers in superstition and fortune telling. It is ironic that the Saudis want to kill him for the very reason many members of their society made him so successfully popular.
Like many Americans, I have struggled with my weight for the majority of my life. I said “majority” instead of “all” because it wasn’t always like that. There was a time when I didn’t have this problem. And I didn’t grow up American. I grew up in Saudi Arabia.
Up until I was 9 years old, I weighed the normal weight for my age. Then one night, my dad came home with dinner. It was something we had never seen before. We could tell this was something different. It didn’t smell like the usual stuff he brought home like lamb gyros, beans, or chicken with rice. This dinner had a logo, and it spelled Hardee’s.
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Even before he opened the bag, the smell quickly drew the family towards it like a cube of sugar in an ant farm. It smelled different, it spoke to our deepest desires, and we paid attention. As we sat down at the table we set out the plates and spoons. We soon realized, however, how redundant that new food made those eating devices. There were burgers each wrapped individually, and french fries portioned in little paper holders for each member of the family. The fries were crunchy and salted enough to drive us towards those Hardee’s labeled soda cups pretty quick. The meal was a new wonderful and fun experience. There was just one thing that didn’t satisfy me. I wanted more. Much more.
I saw a link today to buy a textbook online and decided to checkout the latest shenanigan the textbook publishers were peddling these days. I found myself at CourseSmart.com looking at what appeared to be the best eTexbook experience I could imagine. They had everything figured out and addressed pretty well. They had full text search, allowed reasonable copy and paste, allowed printing, enabled online and offline reading, even page numbers were made to match the printed version. I was hard pressed to think of an eBook sore-thumb they haven’t tended to.
For just a few moments I wondered if somewhere out there in some distant forest a lion laid peacefully besides a lamb.
Alas, my poor eyes were swiftly and ruthlessly assaulted with this sharpest of insults:
This publisher and I differed to no insignificant measure on the simple concept of “Buying”. One would innocently assume that by pressing the green button captioned “Buy Online Version” that one would respectively “Own” something at the end of this “Buying” exercise. Not so with this dimwitted excuse of a technologically progressive publisher.
It turns out, what you are really “Buying” is a mere 180 days ownership of self-evaporating book. That’s right, 180 days after you “Buy” this book, you will automatically be relieved of your ownership burden.
If you don’t realize how insulting that is, consider that at the very least the emperor owned and got to keep his imaginary new clothes.
Yousef Raffah did an amazing job capturing the essence of Jiddah like I’ve never seen before. I recognize some of the locations, it just never occurred to me…
Jiddah By Yousef Raffah. Click to see slideshow of his latest work.
What made blogging popular? What changed from the days when blogging was not known? The internet has been around much longer than blogging has, yet blogging is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The trigger is differentiation. It is the same thing that made us drop $5 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks as we abandoned Dunkin Donuts and their fried carbohydrates. They both served coffee, but if Dunkin Donuts started charging that much for their coffee we would not have bought it. We knew what coffee was and have come to expect it in a certain style and environment. Starbucks weren’t really selling coffee, they were selling something else. They were different. In our minds, it’s was not coffee as we expected it.
But there was one more trick; the moniker. Starbucks didn’t call it coffee, joe, or -even the exotic favorite- java. They called it something else. Indeed, I didn’t know what a Latte was until I had tried it.
Blogging, is the moniker that stipulated the experience we expected when we “blog”. Along with the environment that blogging software provided, these two innovations made blogging what it is today. Before, a person would “publish” content on a “website” that was run by a “webmaster”. You had to be cool, proper, or otherwise straight-up interesting for your thoughts to be “published”.
But now, those layers of complexity have been peeled off. You just be yourself, relax, say what you may. Your posts needn’t conform to any editorial style or a webmaster’s timeline. And that is a different experience that has a different name; a different moniker. That is the differentiator.
How could this post be useful to you? Think about what you are producing, is it different? should it be? should it go by a different name?
So far, Vimeo looks awesome. Let’s see how far these people will go. I like them because they are much cleaner that YouTube, and they seem to be quality driven. Here is a sample.
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