According to SoftMaker president Martin Kotulla, the only commercial word processor available as a native FreeBSD application, TextMaker, will no longer support that platform as of the upcoming 2008 edition. There will of course be a Windows edition, and a native Linux edition (which should be able to run through the Linux binary compatibility software in FreeBSD), but the FreeBSD edition will not grow beyond TextMaker (and the full SoftMaker Office suite) 2006 unless there is more demand from FreeBSD users, and the operating system itself becomes easier to develop for.
TextMaker has been around in one form or another for almost 20 years, but the native FreeBSD port did not exist until shortly after the release of TextMaker 2002 when some FreeBSD users requested it. At the time, Kotulla publicly said that only two lines of the TextMaker code had to be changed in order to compile the source code for FreeBSD. Since then, so much has changed in both the SoftMaker Office code and the FreeBSD base system that the simplicity of a native port has been erased.
I asked Martin Kotulla why it is so much more difficult to create a FreeBSD binary now than it was in the FreeBSD 5.1 days when the first native TextMaker binary was made. “The ever-changing ABI for one,” he said via email. “It’s not possible to create a FreeBSD application that works on 4.x, 5.x and 6.x simultaneously. Also, as we are making the applications more locale-aware (by supporting Unicode, by supporting different date, time, and currency systems), we find significant wrong behavior in the C runtime library provided by FreeBSD. For example, I remember that a certain string conversion or comparison function simply provided wrong results instead of failing, resulting in wrong sorting order inside the application. This is the stuff that’s hard to debug, and it’s discouraging.”
In a separate email, Kotulla said that there could still be a FreeBSD version of future SoftMaker products, but it depends on customer demand and the level of developer frustration when programming for FreeBSD. “Right now, FreeBSD demand is really low, and frustration is pretty high,” he told me.
The FreeBSD Project did not officially respond to two requests to comment on Kotulla’s FreeBSD-specific complaints. Unofficially, Jeremy Reed, who helps with FreeBSD marketing, suggested that Kotulla file bug reports on the issues he experienced, and that he consider dropping support for older FreeBSD releases.
Brian Proffitt over at LinuxToday posted a rebuke of an InfoWorld troll experiment in which a writer purposefully tried to incite an entity known as the “Linux community” to attack him. Such actions are unbelievably stupid by any measure of sanity, and the Web does not need further proof that cyberspace is filled with highly destructive, undercooked man-children who make real-life threats over everything from books about Java to who has the better rogue talent spec in World of Warcraft. There are so many bad assumptions in the InfoWorld writer’s thesis — for instance, the illusion of a single, cohesive “Linux community” — that I hardly know where to start. But Brian Proffitt isn’t entirely in the correct frame of reference either. Yes, there are a lot of violent Linux people, and they are the dominant public face of Linux for many technology news readers, but there is another side to this story on the publishing end of things. Brian’s right in that he should be more discriminating with his news picks, but I have the feeling his job is going to get tougher as the rise of Linux blogs and advocacy sites make it more difficult to find reliable and authoritative Linux-oriented stories.
In his criticism of the InfoWorld tripe, Proffitt compares the InfoWorld blogger to someone walking into a Boston bar and insulting the Red Sox, or hitting a beehive with a stick. What he seems to have overlooked is that with these analogies, he’s admitted that Linux advocates can be violent, angry brutes who enjoy participating in online harassment and abuse. You know that bees have stingers, and that sports fans in bars could potentially be violent if incited, but I did not know until now that I was expected to think that Linux advocates were equally dangerous. I mean I did think that, but I didn’t realize that this was supposed to be as obvious as the notion that bees have stingers. Proffitt in essence concedes that there is a large contingent of dangerous Linux people who will come out and sting if there is a perceived attack on the hive, and that purposefully stirring up trouble will draw the reaction the effort deserves.
This really is true; there really are some unbelievably horrid people in the free software and open source worlds. First, though, let’s establish the fact that there is no “Linux community.” This is a term used when someone wants to either credit or blame Linux as an operating system, free software as a techno-religion, or open source as a development model. There is no central community structure; Linux as a community is, in the most optimistic light, a large number of individual software development projects that are designed to work with one another in some way, supported loosely by a group of partisan distro fiefdoms and financially enabled by a handful of corporations who make money on services and hardware products peripheral to Linux. People only invoke the “Linux community” when they want to marvel at or place blame upon something associated with Linux. In this case, it’s online violence.
Proffitt goes on to cite a frequently regurgitated accusation among Linux activists — that InfoWorld posted the tedious, sickeningly sanctimonious 5-part troll post to get more Web traffic (and therefore ad dollars). Perhaps this is true, and there are a small minority of media productions that really do make money primarily off of this philosophy, but InfoWorld does not seem to be one of them. The only consistent effort I have seen — reading between 50 and 100 tech news stories per day — to bash Linux beehives to make money is Dan Lyons at Forbes. He is part of a psychotically-fashioned sect of the news media that makes money off of other people’s anger. Howard Stern, Sean Hannity, Alan Colmes, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Nugent, and Al Franken are all in this same category. They are making money off of readers, listeners, and viewers who have a masochistic urge to be infuriated. On the one hand you have writers and pundits who enjoy upsetting people, and on the other you have people who enjoy being upset.
InfoWorld does not fit this pattern, nor does the befuddled author of the five articles that bash Ubuntu, so I think Brian Proffitt’s accusation is unjustified (unless he knows something I don’t about InfoWorld and its parent company, IDG, which produces the various LinuxWorld Conference & Expo events). More than likely, the InfoWorld blogger was trying to teach us all a lesson about… something. What specifically, I don’t really know, but I’m sure he had some good and sound reasons when he started the 5-part anti-Ubuntu series, even if they did not translate into print correctly.
Speaking of Dan Lyons, look at him now, with his famous (and terribly written) Steve Jobs blog and his hugely profitable book deal. Linux advocates have been shouting for years about what a monster he is, but who really is to blame? The monster writing things that upset people, or the people who are easily upset and feed that monster with their online clicks? Lyons at least admitted he was wrong about the SCO Group and hinted that there was some measure of personal antagonism in it for him, referring to Linux advocates as “nerds” on Forbes.com and “freetards” on his terrible blog. Rob Enderle said that he took up the anti-Linux, pro-SCO cause in his writing primarily because of the rabid Linux activists who viciously attacked him. Enderle did not, to use Brian Proffitt’s metaphor, swat the hive — the hive came and attacked him, and he took it upon himself to get revenge for it. Keep in mind that both Lyons and Enderle were working with a company history and inside information at SCO that made its court case against IBM (with regard to SCO code illegally included in the Linux kernel) look lopsided in SCO’s favor. From their frame of reference, the Linux people were the aggressors.
I think it goes a little deeper than the people who like being upset. There is a growing mass of Linux advocates who have a strong need to act out against people like Lyons. When Bill O’Reilly rants and raves on television, people yell back at their television sets and complain about it over beers at taverns and at the weekly poker game. But there are some Linux people who, given the greater power and freedom of the Web, have taken it upon themselves to exact revenge against writers who speak out against Linux and/or free software.
Revenge is a messy business; innocent people will get hurt, perfectly reciprocal harm is almost never possible, vengeance does not return reality to its previous unharmed state, and righteous anger never ends with a feeling of justice. History is replete with examples of these facts. Just like Enderle and Lyons wanted revenge against the Linux people who attacked them, the Linux advocates needed revenge against them for what they perceived as ad hominem attacks.
There is something far worse than overreacting Forbes editors and IT analysts, though, and that’s where we come back to the InfoWorld blogger. He is like many writers in the technology world — he is an activist first, a journalist second. I did this too, for the middle portion of my writing career, while under the toxic influence of the pathetically underqualified and overhyped SourceForge Inc. editorial staff, but I’ve since reformed. The trouble is that when you write about technology and you learn so much about it, you start to think of yourself as a supreme expert. Once you reach that self-assessment, you begin to think that your opinions and preferences are better than other people’s because they don’t know as much as you do. You assume that you know better — you make an emotional connection to what you think is right — and once that happens, you start to justify spreading misinformation or omitting important details that don’t jive with your beliefs so that your readers will form the “right” opinions. You begin to adopt the attitude that it’s okay to lie if you know you are right.
And so we have Linux journalist-activists, who know that they are right — people like Pamela Jones of Groklaw; Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of eWeek, Linux Watch, and DesktopLinux.com; Joe Barr of Linux.com; Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet Blogs, and this whole site, which is dedicated to free software advocacy-journalism, among a few others. They print pro-Linux, pro-GPL, pro-GNU, pro-FSF, pro-Stallman, anti-Microsoft, anti-SCO, and sometimes even anti-BSD articles and news stories. They have created this gang of angry Linux activists, and feed them with both glowing propaganda and blistering invective. If these clowns were standing on stage in front of a group of people and incited them with misinformation, omitted information, advocacy, and harsh rebukes of genuine criticism, and that group went out to threaten people’s lives and destroy private property, they would be charged with a crime. But when they do it on the Web, and the result is death threats, DDoS attacks, crapflooding of comment sections and forums, and racial slurs and other hate speech — even while outwardly feigning disgust at such actions — they ignore the damage, or make half-hearted pleas for the attacks to stop so that the entire “community” is not tarnished. It is these activist-journalists that do the tarnishing, not the people they incite and influence. Even if they don’t directly incite online violence, they actively attempt to build an atmosphere in which it is agreeable to take revenge against dissent.
Pamela Jones created Daniel Lyons with her snarky, irreverent commentaries on Linux as our sacrament, Richard Stallman as our computational lord and savior, and SCO as the unreasonably evil anti-Christ. Over the past few years, Lyons and Jones have acted as shadow brothers, variously attacking each other in direct and indirect ways on Forbes.com and Groklaw.net, trying to show how much of a moron the other was for staunchly defending his or her tightly-held beliefs. It’s not over, though. It continues to this day, with fact-free paranoid investigations into how many ex-Microsoft employees work for what investment group or tech patent firm, or what big evil corporation could be funding which anti-Linux journalists. We will have more Dan Lyonses with the rise of advocacy blogs and the willingness of sites like Linux Today to link to them as though they were reliable news and information sources. As long as these literary turds are floating in the pool of the Web, spreading their attack-vocacy and inciting online violence against people who disagree — even if the dissenters are despicable — we will all, as Linux users and technology news readers, suffer.
So yes, Brian, as an LT reader I want you to cut out the trolls, but I want you to do it on both sides. Cast off the InfoWorld bloggers and the Pamela Joneses with equal enthusiasm — that will be the greatest service to your readers, even if they end up attacking you for it.
There’s more to say on this subject, but this isn’t the right time to print it.
Ed. note:This is our final political article, capping a weekend of Presidency IV coverage. We hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as we enjoyed producing it. Back in high school, some politically-minded classmates first instructed me on the difference between the political left and right. On the most basic level, conservatives want less government, and liberals want more government. This applies to laws, corporate regulations, central government planning and management, and personal restrictions and rules for citizens. Since I have always struggled with the concept of “following the rules” — just remembering what they are is a challenge for me — conservatism has generally appealed to me. After this past weekend’s GOP debate, I’m totally confused. Republicans, who have been traditional conservatives, now want a larger and stronger federal government; and Democrats, who have been traditional liberals, seem to want to eliminate a lot of the oppressive regulations and policies set forth by the current Republican administration. Have the sides switched?
The American founders were conservatives by 20th century standards. Coming from an oppressive British imperial government, they feared a strong American federal government and established the U.S. constitution to ensure that the kind of oppressive political atmosphere that created the United States could never happen there again. These are facts and are not in dispute. However, in modern times we struggle with the notion that our country has evolved beyond the founders’ vision, and that we must adjust, ignore, or reinterpret the constitution in order to deal with global and domestic problems that the founders never envisioned. And this is precisely where America’s 21st century political quagmire remains.
All throughout this weekend, I was inundated with references to Ronald Reagan as the pillar of modern conservatism, and Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as its archetypes. But what have these leaders really shown us? What did they represent in their time in the White House? Lincoln advocated a large and powerful federal government — so much so that he took the entire nation to war against itself. More Americans were killed in the civil war than in all other American-involved wars combined, all to establish the fact that the federal government has ultimate power, and states have limited rights. This is not a conservative stance; it advocates big government, and is not what the founders intended.
Theodore Roosevelt abandoned the Republican party and started the Progressive party, which caused the Republicans to lose the 1912 presidential election. He was the Ross Perot of his time, except he had more popular support and actually defeated his Republican opponent. How on earth can modern Republican conservatives look up to Theodore Roosevelt as an icon and an idol when they incessantly proclaim the paramount importance of a Republican candidate being elected to the White House? Roosevelt was the world’s first Republican presidential election spoiler.
Ronald Reagan increased the size of government, spent billions of dollars of American citizens’ money on weapons that were never used in order to out-scare the Soviets, and established a political legacy of heavy spending and heavy inflation. A hundred years from now, when political analysts are commenting on why America fell, the huge amount of wasteful government spending funded by the gratuitous printing of money to pay government debts will be listed as a significant contributing factor. And Ronald Reagan did this — he stood for bigger government with big (military) spending. Isn’t that what conservatives are supposed to be against — aren’t we supposed to be for lower taxes, less spending, and less government interference? Just a few years after Reagan was out of office, one of the most iconic Democrats of all time — Bill Clinton — reduced government spending and eliminated the federal budget deficit. Have we formally entered Bizarro World?
Speaking of Clinton, his main presidential idol was Thomas Jefferson, who was the original cheerleader for limited federal control and regulation. Jefferson was heavily in favor of states’ rights. That hardly sounds like Bill Clinton.
I think this past weekend’s Reagan worship is little more than a bad case of “pain is temporary, glory is forever.” We’ve forgotten (or perhaps not yet realized) that Reagan’s policies have destroyed or will destroy us, and that his charisma and charm — like Bill Clinton’s — is all we remember in pictures and video clips now that the pain of the domestic economic rot of the 80s, when America’s middle class began to die, is over.
I attribute the corruption and fall of conservatism in the late 20th century to an increasing connection between outdated and irrelevant Christian moral codes with the Republican party. The liberal Democrats want to avoid making rules to prevent abortion and gay marriage — they want less government in this respect — and the so-called conservatives want to create federal regulations to ban these things — more governmental control. A true conservative would insist that it is not the federal government’s responsibility to regulate these things, yet here we are with the regulation of these issues at the forefront of Republican political debate.
Do these neo-conservatives think that homosexuality and abortion did not exist in the 1700s, that the founders were not aware of these practices? Do the neocons think that the founders did not wisely choose to leave abortion and homosexual issues out of the constitution and other statements of federal policy? Abortion predates America, the protestant religious sect, and the English language. Homosexuality has been around — and heavily documented — since before Romulus murdered Remus. To think that the American founders were ignorant of these acts (and indeed that at least one of them did not at some time participate in one of them), or that these practices were suddenly introduced in the 1970s in America, is nothing more than pure arrogance. But activists on both sides of the political spectrum have no respect for the ideals on which this country was built. It’s about arguing and being “right” instead of being “correct.” The ability to shout loudly and argue successfully has superseded the need to rely on facts, accurate information, and intelligent observation. It’s a lot like the majority of technology journalism.
If anything, religious Republicans should be in favor of more Bible-like governmental control and regulation, of a “nanny state” that forces an outdated and unnatural sense of morality on an unwilling populace. The atheists and liberals should want less government, less regulation, and more distance from the kind of despotic dictatorship that the god of the Old Testament exemplified. The simplified definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” have lost their meaning for me — I no longer know which group I can safely throw my lot in with because they’ve both come to represent the same kind of socio-political disease.
Secretly, the neo-conservatives really do want bigger government, even if they publicly say otherwise. Unfortunately, so do the liberals. The only difference is that neocons think that they are morally obligated to support an oppressive nanny state (exactly like the Taliban did in Afghanistan), and liberals simply think that they’ve got the perfect plan for costly, widespread regulation (which works well on a small western-European-nation-sized scale, but cannot possibly work on an America-sized scale). The neocons think the founders were unaware of homosexuality and abortion and did not anticipate modern, Christian-judged immorality; and the liberals think that the founders didn’t appropriately consider the future needs of a large and needy American nation with 50 states plus protectorates. They’re both on the same level of wrong. I’m not convinced that there is any way out of this, that there is a “good” side to pick, but as a disenfranchised conservative I’m tired of the neo-conservative worship of spendthrift policies, bloodlust and warmongering, empire-building, and pro-big-government historical figures while paying lip service to freedom through limited government. These are not conservative ideals.
At the Presidency IV rally in Orlando this past Saturday, I interviewed several Republican ambassadors (or what the Republican party of Florida (RPOF) calls “activists”) and three members of the Teenage Republicans delegation. Below are videos of the interviews along with some written commentary.
Saturday’s schedule began with the governor’s luncheon, at which I sat with a number of Republican ambassadors from all around the state of Florida. One of the most friendly and animated was Danny Sexton, a florist and longtime Republican party member from Kissimmee. We had an interesting chat about the growing sense of factionalism in the Republican party, and how the latest crop of candidates had strayed somewhat from the party’s core beliefs. Despite that, he wasn’t a big fan of the lesser-known candidates — at least at the beginning of the event.
After the luncheon, there was a dessert reception on the other side of the convention center. It was pretty loud, and various Republican party officials were trying to give speeches near where the desserts and coffee were being served. Down a quiet side hallway, several groups of people escaped the crowd and silently enjoyed their coffee and confections. One of them was Dick Windle and his wife. Dick’s actually the secretary of the Republican Executive Committee in Citrus county, and served for 16 years as an elected city councilman in Oregon before he moved to Florida, so he’s about as die-hard a Republican as you’ll find. Like many Republicans in attendance, Dick was most interested in nominating the candidate who would be most likely to defeat the Democratic opposition. Although he thought Mike Huckabee had some good ideas, he didn’t think that Huckabee would win, so he will probably not cast his primary vote for the former governor.
An in email after this article published, Dick Windle said that he was disappointed in Fred Thompson’s too-brief rally speech, but that the other top-tier candidates are still in the running. In a discussion with some sourthen Florida Presidency IV attendees after the below video clip was recorded, the group dreamed up an ideal Giuliani/Huckabee GOP ticket.
My next stop was a part of the convention hall where various Republican groups and candidate supporters had set up tables. Though several were interesting to me, I thought that the Teenage Republicans would provide the most compelling interview materials. Travis Clinger, Joshua Edson, and Devin Devenport had some very carefully worded things to say about the Republican party. 2008 will be the first presidential election that they will be able to vote in.
After the candidates’ speeches, I found Christa Johnson, her husband Stephen Johnson, and their friend Meredith Mercer relaxing near the press room. I’d actually been standing behind them during the candidates’ rally, too — they had a nice front row spot. The Johnsons, being parents of two with another child on the way, were Republicans because of the party’s stalwart position on family values. I learned something surprising from this interview: Mitt Romney’s campaign had contacted the Johnsons via email and asked them to apply to be ambassadors for Presidency IV. Surely if Romney could flood the rally with vocal supporters, the visible show of strength would be enough to convince the party’s die-hard core constituents that he was the most electable of the candidates. To me, this is dirty pool, but I suppose that’s what politics is all about. The good news was, neither the Johnsons nor their guest were particularly in favor of Mitt Romney, and had not yet decided whom they would vote for in the primary or in the presidential election.
Other Presidency IV videos
It’s hard to keep a camera still while you’re holding it up above your head for a long period of time. If you don’t mind a little shakiness, I have some video clips from Saturday’s Presidency IV events:
Fred Thompson’s rally speech:
The RPOF chairman’s rally speech introduction:
Florida governor Charlie Crist’s rally speech:
Most of Rudy Giuliani’s rally speech (in three parts):
Candidates and their representatives filled the Spin Room provided by the Fox News Channel after the Presidency IV debate, met by a small army of news media personnel. I spoke directly with Ron Paul, Mitt Romney’s son Tag, Charlie Bronson, and got some interesting comments from Mike Huckabee and another Mitt Romney representative, Tom Freeney.
Only four of the 2008 Republican presidential candidates gave speeches at Presidency IV on Saturday. A few Ron Paul supporters in the crowd shouted their discontent when Mitt Romney appeared instead of their candidate. So I asked the congressman why he wasn’t there. “I was travelling at the time, and it just wouldn’t have worked into my schedule,” he said. So it ends up being not a lack of funding or a lack of respect for Florida voters — just a simple scheduling conflict. Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, said that he opted out of the speech because his campaign did not have the $100,000 to blow on a rally speech.
Speaking of Governor Huckabee, many of the Republican ambassadors and guests I spoke to on Saturday said that they thought Huckabee had some great ideas and spoke well in the debates, but that they probably would not vote for him in the primary because they did not think he could win. When I mentioned this to Mike Huckabee representative Chip Saltsman, he said, “Well, at first we were a no-shot campaign. Then we were a long-shot campaign. And now we’re a sling-shot — our support in states where were were just an asterisk a few weeks ago is suddenly up to 18% in Iowa — and this without ads. We have not run one advertisement. Governor Huckabee is an incredibly effective communicator, and because of that he’s starting to get the respect and support he deserves.”
Mitt Romney’s representative Tom Freeney said that this was a good debate for Governor Romney, but that some of the other candidates were spoiling it for him. “Social conservatives will waste their votes by concentrating on candidates who can’t win the primaries,” he said, likely referring to Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Duncan Hunter. “The only candidates in the nomination race are Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney will be more successful with evangelical Republicans.”
Romney had many representatives in the Spin Room — at least 5, including Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services commissioner Charlie Bronson, and Romney’s eldest son Tag. I asked them what would distinguish Romney among his conservative competitors, all of whom seemed to share the same goals and ideals. “His policies on issues that appeal to conservative Democrats,” said Tag Romney, “especially on health care and fiscal issues.” “Mitt Romney will help people help themselves,” Bronson added, “and he has always been and always will be a strong conservative.”
It was rumored among members of the press that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson were too important and popular to come out and speak with us personally. All four of them did not talk to anyone except Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes on their post-debate live television program. Only Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and Duncan Hunter came out to talk to the press directly, though all of them — and Tom Tancredo — had spokespeople on hand to answer questions. Like Socrates in Plato’s story of the Symposium invaded by drunken revelers, Ron Paul outlasted both Mike Huckabee and Duncan Hunter on the Spin Room floor, answering questions, shaking hands, and signing autographs. Perhaps it was not because he had more to say, or because his Hannity & Colmes interview was late in the lineup, but because it was nearly impossible for him to leave, being constantly surrounded by young journalists who all but lost their composure in his presence. “People just love him,” one reporter said to me as we watched the Ron Paul onslaught. None of the other candidates in attendance, nor the famous journalists and news entertainers associated with Fox News who were in the room with us, nor Florida governor Charlie Crist could shake them, but Ron Paul reduced those reporters and presenters to mush. At least from a media standpoint, it was the so-called “second tier” candidates that made this leg of the 2008 Republican presidential nomination race an exciting saga.
This Sunday’s debate caps the weekend Presidency IV rally in which Florida Republican politicians, political groups, and four of the Republican presidential candidates vied for attention to their views and policies. After all of the thousands of Republican ambassadors from Florida’s 67 counties filled the Gatlin ballroom at Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, FL to hear Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, and Fred Thompson battle to establish themselves as the GOP frontrunner for the 2008 presidential election.
Before the debate began, a Fox News Channel focus group showed some of the more bizarre Florida GOP voter opinions, along with equally bizarre, attitude-heavy moderation on the Hannity & Colmes pseudo-news entertainment program. Not only did Fox News Channel presenter Frank Luntz bereate the focus group for being undecided on a Republican candidate, but one of the participants called Ron Paul “certifiably insane,” and almost every group member agreed that Hillary Clinton was a “socialist.”
All of the debate hosts were from Fox News Channel, and consistently frustrated the candidates by misquoting them and misrepresenting their stances and policies.
The first battle among the candidates was over who was more conservative. None of the candidates gave particularly inspiring responses — they commented on their voting and political records, and tossed off small attacks on various votes, political support, and positions that opposing candidates have executed over the years. The first portion of the debate frequently seemed like a series of arguments among candidates, fueled by antagonistic comments from the Fox News Channel hosts meant to encourage the participants to attack one another. In some cases, the questions asked of the candidates contained misquotes and quotes taken out of context, which all of the candidates expressed some discontent with. The exception was Mike Huckabee, whose first comment of the debate, some 20 minutes into it, were that he would not attack his fellow Republicans. Duncan Hunter even commented in his first response that the Fox hosts were trying to divide the Republican party with their questions and comments.
On the subject of health care, both John McCain and Ron Paul had in-depth analyses of how the health insurance issue can be dealt with affordably. Mitt Romney talked up his own plan in Massachusetts, which reduced regulation in state-organized health insurance. Duncan Hunter insisted that Romney’s plan would fail on a larger scale because it contained too many state mandates, and Mike Huckabee said that the larger problem was the health of the average American citizen, and that prevention of chronic diseases would be a better focus than federally organized health care plans.
Continuing the string of bizarre questions, the Fox News hosts asked Mitt Romney if he thought Hillary Clinton would make a good commander-in-chief of the US military, Romney laughed and said that the audience — which unanimously screamed “No!” — would answer for him. When told that some analyst had asserted that he and Hillary Clinton are identical on many social issues, Giuliani said incredulously, “You have got to be kidding.”
John McCain got a standing ovation for attacking Hillary Clinton for her pork-barrel spending, specifically for trying to secure federal funding for a Woodstock concert museum, admitting that he was “tied up at the time,” referring to his time spent in the “Hanoi Hotel” POW camp in Vietnam. Huckabee refused to joke about Clinton, saying that “there is nothing funny about Hillary Clinton being president.” Thompson insisted that the Republicans shouldn’t concentrate on fighting one Democrat, but to stick to Republican ideals, which he said were the best formula for running the federal government.
Despite the fact that Ron Paul was booed for saying that US troops should come home from the war in Iraq, his comments on removing all troops from “America’s empire” around the world earned him generous applause. John McCain reiterated his staunch support of US troops, and his belief that a stronger military presence is now working to win the war in Iraq, which will in turn help to remove the threat of Islamic terrorism from the middle east.
On social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and social security, Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney all agreed that extensive work needs to be done to reform these plans. Ron Paul called for giving people the option of getting out of social security — paying into it and receiving benefits from it. The other candidates favored a partial or complete privatization of social security and other benefits. Duncan Hunter said that many social security problems could be solved by fixing foreign trade deficits, tariffs, and re-claiming the manufacturing jobs the US has lost to China and other economically emerging countries, which would revitalize the middle class.
For some reason, the hosts thought that asking the candidates about diplomatic ties with Russia would elicit good responses, but the candidates only offered theorycraft and vague speculation.
If crowd reaction is any indication, warmongering is popular among Florida Republicans. Ron Paul was booed for suggesting an Iraq pullout and a strict policy of non-interventionism. He was booed again for saying that the Republican party had adopted the Democrats’ foreign policy attitude and strayed from traditional Republican philosophy, and all candidates who advocated military strength overseas were met with applause.
Post-debate coverage will be available on this site soon.
Ed. note:Please see this note for more information on why we are running some political news stories this weekend. Florida is the fourth most populous state in America, and after the 2000 presidential election disaster, it’s become a legendary battleground for national political opponents. Now in its fourth iteration, the Republican Party of Florida’s (RPOF) weekend rally is host to the 2008 Republican presidential candidate — whomever it will be. Hopefully after this Sunday’s debate, Florida’s registered Republicans will have a better idea of which candidate they’d like to officially support.
Pictures
Rather than embed all of the photos from Saturday’s events in this story, we’ve decided to publish them as a directory. Feel free to browse through our directory of Presidency IV photos. None of them may be reused without written permission from JEM Electronic Media, Inc.
Presidency IV overview
The RPOF’s Presidency rally began in 1979 to showcase Republican candidates and their issues. From that rally, voters got to know Ronald Reagan and went on to vote him into office twice. In 1987, George Bush got his message out to Florida voters through Presidency II — and won. Bob Dole was here for Presidency III in 1995, but though he won the Republican nomination, he lost not only the state of Florida, but also the national election to Bill Clinton. Now in 2007, voters have an unprecedentedly diverse array of candidates to decide among at Presidency IV at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando.
Not just anyone can attend a Presidency rally. A number of Republican ambassadors from every voting district in the state apply online or via mail to be selected by party leaders to attend. There is, of course, an effort for each candidate to get as many of his supporters into ambassadorships as possible so that they will have the appearance of widespread Republican support. The RPOF refers to Republican ambassadors as “activists,” which belies its lack of insurance that each candidate is fairly represented by his constituency. Each ambassador pays $100 per ticket, and can bring one guest. Because of its financial sponsorship of the event, the Florida Association of Realtors also had a significant delegation in attendance. In all, more than 4000 people attended Saturday’s events.
Sunday had a longer but less crowded schedule, starting with a prayer breakfast, filling out the middle of the day with roundtable discussions and receptions for various Republican groups and factions. The day ended with a full-scale Republican presidential debate, hosted by the Fox News Channel.
The governor’s luncheon
Presidency IV kicked off with a nicely catered luncheon hosted by RPOF Chairman Jim Greer and Florida governor Charlie Crist. All of the Republican speeches shared the same basic theme: That the GOP is in danger of being ideologically and politically divided. Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt were repeatedly invoked as Republican archetypes.
Roundtable meetings and special receptions
The bulk of the weekend’s programs and hallway booths were for specific Republican faction groups such as the Florida Federation of Black Republicans, the Republican National Hispanic Association, the Hispanic Advisory Council, the Jewish Advisory Council, the Young Republicans, and the Teenage Republicans. Some had tables, others had conference rooms reserved for meetings, all explained why their members were excited to be Republicans.
Presidential candidate’s rally
Very little information about this part of the event was available to ambassadors before it began. It was on the schedule, but the participating candidates were not listed, so thousands of Republican ambassadors, delegates, and media personnel streamed into the cavernous Panzacola ballroom with their signs and cameras with the hope of seeing their preferred candidate speak. However, only Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson were scheduled to speak (in that order, which is alphabetical to avoid any appearance of bias or preference), no doubt disappointing the respectable number of Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee sign-holders. Several Ron Paul supporters even shouted some brief protests when Mitt Romney followed Rudy Giuliani. According to a number of Republican attendees, candidates were required to pay $100,000 for the privilege of speaking at the rally, which may explain why some of the candidates chose not to participate.
Virginia Algar, a Republican candidate for president, found her way to the press room while this article was in progress, and expressed discontent that she was not allowed to participate in Saturday’s speeches or Sunday’s debate. Having been told of the fee for giving a speech on Saturday, she balked at the cost. “This country was not founded on money. It was founded on honesty, integrity, and faith. It needs to get back in the hands of the people, where it belongs. I don’t have millions of dollars in my pocket, but I know what the people want and what they need.” Shortly thereafter, she was calmly escorted out of the press room by security.
Giuliani spoke first, and longest. In what was apparently the theme of the entire Presidency IV event, Giuliani played up his similarity to Ronald Reagan, his commitment to traditional family values, his hardline stance on military action in the middle east, his leadership and management experience, and to the surprise of some attendees, announced plans for national tort reform. Giuliani sited the financial and societal benefits of limiting non-economic financial damages and other civil lawsuit reform in the state of Texas, and his vow to bring similar policies to a national level, to the adoration of the Republican crowd. This was not a secret before, but it was the first original idea to come out of a Republican speaker’s mouth all day, and it brought a great deal of individual distinction to a pool of candidates who all seem to share the same goals and ideals.
John McCain’s solemn introductory film reiterated his military service, his commitment to American military strength, and of course a history of his interactions with Ronald Reagan. McCain did not appear to be as comfortable on stage as Giuliani, but the self-proclaimed “comeback kid” hit a nerve with the crowd with his insistence that his military policy, ignored for the bulk of the Bush administration’s tenure, has now been adopted by American military leaders and is undeniably winning the war in Iraq. McCain’s presentation and speech was easily the most emotional and heartfelt for the audience. McCain was the only candidate that did not walk the front of the crowd to shake hands at the end of his speech; it’s not clear whether he was unaware that this was an option for him, or if he felt that his message would be taken more seriously if he didn’t smile and shake hands afterward.
Mitt Romney was introduced by a host of Florida Republican politicians, and made his way to the stage with his wife (who spoke to the crowd for a few minutes), and eldest son. By contrast, the charismatic Giuliani and the emotionally moving McCain looked like loners on stage, but they both had much more inspiring presentations than Romney. Romney’s message was the standard Reagan/family values rhetoric that rally attendees had already been listening to all afternoon.
The last — and briefest — of the candidates was Fred Thompson. Thompson’s intro movie showcased his long career as a lawyer and politician, including his work in investigating the Watergate scandal, and his professional relationship with Ronald Reagan. Thompson entered the stage with his wife Jeri, but she left through the back of the stage before he began his speech. Like Romney, Thompson offered little but a commitment to family values, limited federal government, and other traditional conservative precepts. He initially left the stage directly after thanking the audience after an unusually short speech, but then came back out to walk down the front of the audience for photos, smiles, and handshakes.
Overall, McCain and Giuliani concentrated on what they would do in office and how they would get things done, whereas Romney and Thompson focused on establishing their character and principles.
We’ll have coverage of Sunday’s events and the presidential debate published soon.
There are few Linux enthusiasts who have not built, attempted to build, or thought about building a Linux-based appliance computer. Some are very easy and have a lot of extant software that does all the hard work for you — digital video recorders, network firewalls, and wireless routers, for instance — but what if you want to build something more complicated? What if there is no premade Linux distribution designed for the kind of appliance you want to make? Well, if you have some programming skills, you can make it yourself with the aid of No Starch Press’ Linux Appliance Design.
Writing analysis
The quality of the writing in Linux Appliance Design is good. It’s by no means entertaining, but it’s also not distracting or incomplete. I’d like to say that the writing is average, but the average technology book is poorly written and edited, so to avoid misleading you, I’ll say that it’s “good.” I did not find any typographical errors, spelling mistakes, or formatting problems in this book, and that alone puts it a cut above the majority of modern tech books.
The authors make extensive use of diagrams, code samples, and the occasional photo or screen shot — one or more of these appears on almost every page in the book. The diagrams show the layouts of complex processes, and the code samples show relevant pieces of actual, working code. This is in stark contrast to many programming books that list non-working sample code for the purpose of explaining a concept or technique. That’s fine in some cases, but programmers learn best by looking at and working with real, operational code that can be plugged in and played with. All of the book’s code, plus development tools and libraries, are available on a CD in the back of the book and available for download from the No Starch Web site.
Putting the book to the test
Linux Appliance Design’s goal is to guide readers through the development of their own Linux-based computer appliance. The book’s primary example is Laddie, a fully functional but feature-incomplete alarm system. The most impressive facet of Linux Appliance Design is the depth of information about this example appliance — all of the code, plus hardware specifications, block diagrams, and schematics are included. Obviously if you want to build an alarm system, this book will be an enormously helpful resource. The further you get away from Laddie’s functionality, the more work you have to do on your own.
You must be a competent C and C++ programmer with Linux experience, and you need to be comfortable with soldering and wiring in order to get the most benefit from Linux Appliance Design. You should be ready to build a unique hardware appliance and have a basic idea of how it will operate before getting into this book. There is little discussion of Linux in specific; this is more of a hardware-oriented book with a secondary emphasis on control software. Linux is only presented as the easiest and cheapest platform on which your software will run, so if you were hoping to learn more about hacking Linux for embedded use, Linux Appliance Design is not what you’re looking for. Considering this information, the book is not appropriately titled — the fact that Linux is the most sensible operating system to use for the projects that the book enables you to learn to create is not important to the book’s primary content.
Every facet of appliance design is covered, from the hardware design and construction to operating system installation and configuration to application development to designing a variety of different user and network management interfaces. Everything you need is here — you just have to learn how to implement these ideas and examples into your own project. Alternatively, if you are not totally up to par on your programming or hardware construction and application design skills, you could learn quite a bit about these concepts by simply following the book and sticking to the Laddie example throughout.
Conclusions
Linux Appliance Design is by no means light reading, and I’m kind of surprised to see a book this technically involved come from No Starch Press. When I picked it up, I was expecting to read something about installing Debian and MythTV, using ATI infrared remotes, and installing third-party drivers for LCD and VFT displays. Linux Appliance Design does cover some of this material, but in far greater detail than any superficial do-it-yourself guide could hope to.
This book is effective in what it presents, and has obvious and well-deserved appeal to those who want to learn more on this subject. The only real point of this review is to ward off people who are expecting a manual on operating system development or mini-PC assembly.
A few weeks ago, the OpenBSD Project announced that the Portable C Compiler (PCC) had been added to the OpenBSD source tree. There has already been some explanation of why the traditional GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is troublesome and why a new compiler is needed, but there are still some details left uncovered. In this interview, Theo de Raadt and Otto Moerbeek of the OpenBSD Project offer more information about PCC and GCC and where they are headed within the project.
Do you plan on refactoring or rewriting the code to be more in line with OpenBSD’s standards, as OpenBSD programmers have done with other older (and sometimes GPL-governed) programs like CVS and NTPD? In other words, will this be OpenPCC?
Theo de Raadt: There will be attempts to ensure that the code remains simple and short, as a priority.
Otto Moerbeek: There are no plans to fork, even though we have pcc imported into the OpenBSD tree. There are and will be some minor differences as compared to the main pcc repository. For example, our build method can be more simple, since the compiler will always run on OpenBSD. There might also be (experimental) OpenBSD-specific features in the future. But I like to reach the point where we can build the complete tree of OpenBSD using pcc first.
How far is PCC from being a GCC replacement in OpenBSD?
TdR: A lot ways. It can compile a large part of our i386 tree, though. But it is missing PIC, other architectures, and various gcc extensions that are rather critical.
OM: I’ve nothing to add to that — the road is still long.
What other hurdles remain in replacing GPL-licensed programs in OpenBSD?
TdR: But that’s never really been the agenda, see. Some people think we hate GNU code. But the thing is we hate large code, and buggy code that upstream does not maintain. That’s the real problem… gcc gets about 5-6% slower every release, has new bugs, generates crappy code, and drives us nuts. This is just an attempt to see if something better can show up.
We’re just fighting against an open source monopoly…
OM: Like in any environment, monopolies are bad. They create dependency. Dependency means you cannot decide completely by yourself on the route to take, because choices are lacking. Removing all dependencies may be a utopia, but it does not hurt to strive to be self-supporting.
Apart from that, compiler hacking is fun. I see programming largely as a craft (of course backed by things like the theory of algorithms and data structures). Working on a compiler, one of the most important tools for a developer, touches all aspects of that craft.
Last week Open Season (a Register podcast) featured an interview with Mark Shuttleworth; it’s definitely worth checking out. Below is a brief summary of the more interesting topics discussed.
The interview started with talk about Dell’s Ubuntu laptop and its misbehaving touchpad. This turned into predictions on how long it will be before Linux desktop software is ready for a broader user base.
Next, the participants engaged in a long discussion of the weak points of the OpenOffice.org office suite. Mark describes the current state of OO.org as being “a bit of a tragedy.” He believes that the problem with it is the bungling interaction between the “corporate folks” and the community, also remarking that potential contributors are deterred from participating due to extremely long build times for OO.org — 8 to 9 hours. He says if he doesn’t see signs of a turnaround in the next few months he’ll start looking elsewhere for Ubuntu’s included office suite.
He believes that ultimately the success of OpenOffice.org in specific, and community-developed software in general, requires that it switch to a Firefox-style model in which the core software is small, streamlined, and handled by a small team, and additional functionality can be easily added by the wider community through extensions, without the need to compile a massive amount of code or have commit access.
They also talked about Oracle’s position in the Linux ecosystem, remarking at one point they were very close to having Ubuntu certified by Oracle, but then Oracle decided it wanted its own Linux offering, which turned out to be little more than a copy of Red Hat. Shuttleworth doesn’t think that strategy is going to work.
Looking forward, the Ubuntu founder said he was very enthusiastic about the future applications of virtualization technology, believing it will “touch a whole bunch of different things.” He also remarked about consumer electronics and the mobile versions of Ubuntu, and improved collaboration with Launchpad.
The participants also spent some time discussing The European Union v. Microsoft. Shuttleworth wondered what the effective and appropriate remedies would be. He speculates that forcing Microsoft to disclose formats and protocols in an effective way (not what they’ve done so far) and perhaps requiring access to intellectual property would go a long way to toward making sure that projects like Samba and OpenOffice.org can have a level playing field on which to compete.
Interestingly, one of the interviewers asked who Ubuntu’s biggest competitors are. Shuttleworth defied expectations by stating that Ubuntu really isn’t competing against other major Linux distros — really it’s a competition between the proprietary and open source ideologies.
Interestingly, Mark Shuttleworth spends the last 10 minutes of the interview asking his interviewer questions. He really comes off as a cool and humble guy. As an example of his humility he jokes that he hates meeting people in person because they always say “I thought you were taller.”
