Gin, Television and Social Surplus

This interesting post was linked to from the ORG mailing list this morning. I won’t re-post the entire thing because it’s very long, but I encourage you to stop by and give it a read.

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought…

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Fedora + Creative Arts

After reading Jef’s post a short while ago I’ve been thinking about things we could do that would encourage creative people to use Fedora, to use free software tools for the creation of their work. Ultimately, I guess the goal is to try and build a community of people who will become passionate about using free software in their creative work, and who will help improve it So, a few thoughts:

1. Showcasing work created via free software tools, such as Jef’s webcomic idea, is a great way to get some attention and interest, not just in Fedora but in free software generally
2. While hosting could be a problem, there are lots of existing sites that we could create “fedora” tags on and aggregate via news.fp.o, or some other such site when we have the infrastructure in place, also archive.org could be an interesting solution
3. There’s no need to start from scratch – already there exists a number of communities who, with a little persuasion, would probably be quite interested in coming and working with us – especially if they can get their work show cased as above
   1. Creative Commons – already we have a relationship with them, and they have a large following of creators who care passionately about free culture, free software is a logical extension
   2. Red Hat High – started introducing students to creative arts through free software, why not follow up with previous students and invite them to continue working with free software tools in a healthy and supportive community, i.e. Fedora :p – what about getting some curriculum stuff from here that we can document properly to help new users get started too
   3. Fedora Art Team – we all know they rock, and I’m sure they’re all interested in show casing some of their other, less release focused work, from time to time
   4. Get upstream developers involved – if we can give them a platform to show case what their software can do, they may well be interested in working with us to create cool stuff

This isn’t very well thought out, but I do love Jef’s idea, and I certainly like the idea of trying to get ex-Red Hat High people on board too!

St.George’s Day Dream

How strange – I honestly had no idea that St.George’s Day was coming anytime soon, at least not consciously! Last night I had a dream that my village was being attacked by a dragon and when I woke up and told my parents about this, they replied immediately: “How strange – it’s St.George’s Day this week!”

I’m guessing I must have heard it somewhere without realising it, or remembered it from my primary school days and my sub-conscious was aware of it. Still, I thought it was a super cool coincidence. And for those who don’t know, St.George is famous for slaying a dragon.

5 Reasons Why You’ll Love Fedora 9

The final release of Fedora 9 has been delayed by two weeks, so I thought I’d take this chance to look at what you can expect from Fedora 9 and why you should be excited! Oh, and if you want other people to feel as excited about Fedora 9 as you’re going to once you’ve finished reading this article, why not give it a digg.

New Desktops

Fedora 9 ships with GNOME 2.22 and KDE 4.03 by default, and while KDE 4.0x has received a lot of attention and buzz in the free software world, this GNOME release is also very exciting.

Softpedia called it “A truly amazing desktop!”, and with features like Cheese, the new international clock and integrated window compositing they could be right. One significant feature that has appeared in this release that has come from active Fedora developer Alexander Larsson is the improved file management abilities provided by GVFS, allowing the queuing of file transfers and increased resilience to failures. Also new in GNOME for Fedora 9 is integration of support for the X RandR extension: this allows a user to do many things, including drag and drop configuration of multi-head monitor set-ups. This particular feature landed too late to make it upstream for the 2.22 release, but it will be included in the next up-stream release; it has already been taken up by other distributions too, so great work Søren! If this feature interests you, check out this cool video on John Palmieri’s blog that shows it in action.

As I said already, KDE 4.03 is set to be included in the final release as the default KDE option. Traditionally, Fedora has been seen as a GNOME centric distribution, but as a result of the hard work of the KDE SIG [Special Interest Group] this is no longer the case and KDE can be seen as an equal citizen in Fedora. The fact that Fedora is set to be the first major distribution to ship KDE 4 by default, and with so much attention given to the details such as ensuring that all KDE 3.x applications will continue to work, demonstrates Fedora’s ongoing commitment to providing users with the latest and greatest free software on a stable platform, while providing upstream developers with increased exposure which is guaranteed to improve the quality of their software.

NetworkManager

NetworkManager has received a lot of attention this release. Perhaps the most significant change is that NetworkManager is now the default across the entire system. The result of this is that it is now started earlier in the boot sequence to ensure that your network is available when you log in, and also it has now been extended to allow you to edit your system-wide network configurations via NetworkManager. Other improvements include the ability to have multiple devices active at the same time, allowing connection sharing and ad-hoc networking like in the OLPC.

If you’re a mobile user, one feature that you’re probably going to find more exciting than any of the above is the ability to plug in a CDMA or GSM device and have it recognised and working with no configuration required! This work has been done by Fedora’s very own Dan Williams, and you can find out more about it on his blog or in this interview with him.

PackageKit and Yum

Fedora developer and user Richard Hughes started work on the PackageKit project to provide a common interface to all the package management back-ends that exist in the Linux world, and to try and help ensure end-users get to use a sane interface. Already, PackageKit has a lot of traction with support coming from many other distributions and as a result it can now be used with the following back-ends: yum, yum2, zypp, smart, apt, apt2, conary and many many more. PackgeKit is going to be replacing Pirut and Pup as the default GUI package management solution in Fedora 9.

Yum, which is used as PackageKit’s back-end in Fedora, has also received many more speed improvements; people who claim that it is slow should definitely take another look this release.

Encrypted Installations and Partition Resizing

Another big plus for mobile users in this release is the ability to create and install Fedora on encrypted partitions. So, besides the pain of loosing a computer, at least you won’t have to worry about how safe your data is any more if you do misplace your laptop. Maybe this is an even bigger plus for employers, especially here in the UK where I’ve lost count of the number of discs and laptops that have been lost by various parts of the civil service with valuable data on it!

And for those users coming from another operating system (Linux or Windows) that want to set their system up to dual boot, they’ll be pleased to see the introduction of support for resizing ext2/3 and NTFS partitions from within the installer.

Look out for an interview with the Anaconda development team in the near future about these new features!

Live Persistence

With Fedora’s focus on live CDs and respinning technology over the past two releases, it would be surprising not to see a new technology along these lines this time, and you won’t be disappointed either! Fedora 8 made it easy for you to create your own custom version of Fedora, whether for distribution as a traditional install disc, or as a live CD with whatever packages you desire. Fedora 9 takes this one step further and makes it easy for you to put your custom version of Fedora onto a USB stick and have the ability to store the data you create on the same drive! Where ever you go, you can have all your applications, your settings, and your data with you, leaving you in control of your privacy and security.

Jeremy Katz was kind enough to take the time to talk to us about this feature, and you can find the resulting interview here. It has lots more details about the feature, and how you can start to make use of it yourself.

More More More!

Why stop at 5! There’s many other great new features in Fedora 9 which you can look forward to. Check out the Fedora 9 feature list for more details about the technologies mentioned here, as well as information about many other improvements and brand new developments. Included is further work building on the bluetooth developments of Fedora 8; FreeIPA, a technology for enabling easy management of identity, policy and auditing processes; ext4 file system support; mammoth virtualisation improvements; Firefox 3; a brand new version of X with lots of speed improvements; PreUpgrade; Upstart…heck, the list goes on!

Congratulations to the Fedora team for their hard work during this release cycle, and good luck with all the bug squashing you have ahead of you I should also extend my thanks to everyone who contributes to the upstream projects too!

PreUpgrade Interview

Thanks to Will Woods and Seth Vidal, we now have the interview about PreUpgrade up on both Red Hat Magazine and the Fedora wiki. If you read it and enjoy it, feel free to give it a digg and help spread the word

Love Fedora? Talk about it!

In an effort to help bump up Fedora’s marketing efforts another gear, I’m planning a barrage of e-mails to various podcasts inviting to arrange for interviews with various members of the Fedora Project. Ideally, before I start sending out these messages, I’d like a list of people who’d be interested in being interviewed on a podcast about their work and the project in general that I could point to and say “How about one of these awesome people?! Don’t think of it as just a chance to promote Fedora, but also as a chance for shameless self-promotion where you get to talk about how cool your own work is

So, if you’re either leading a Fedora sub-project or SIG, or are deeply involved in one from day to day and think you’d enjoy doing something like this, then I want to hear from you! Drop a comment on this post, or contact me at jonrob AT fedoraproject DOT org.

Updates and Interviews

Wow, I’ve been on holiday for the last three weeks and it’s been awesome so far I still have almost two weeks of holiday left, but I’m going to have to start working a bit harder. This explains, however, the slowdown in interview production and the backlog I have now to get published!

The first one has gone up, and you may notice that it’s on Red Hat Magazine. The reason for this is that they were interested in the content, and I figured it would help increase exposure for the interviews, so agreed that we could co-publish them. This interview, with Jeremy Katz about live CDs in Fedora 9 has only gone up on RHM for now, but I’ll be putting it on the wiki shortly. The same rules apply though, and if you’d like to drop by Digg and vote for it, then feel free (or to submit it to any other news site you wish ).

Thanks to Jeremy for answering though, it is a great read and very interesting! My apologies also go out to those who are waiting for an interview they’ve already completed to get published too, but I promise they’ll all be done in a few weeks time. Also, thanks to Rodrigo, who published his first interview a few weeks ago and has a second ready to go!

In other, non-interview related news, I had a go at working on a few changes for fedoraproject.org, and once I’ve tidied up the changes I’ve made will post it to the websites’ list for feedback and to see if anybody actually wants to use it. You can see a screenshot of it running on my local system here. I’m still working away at getting news.fedoraproject.org set-up too, but I’m a little lost with it right now and just trying to figure out the best way forwards.

My final piece of news is that I’ve got a new computer I bought a MacBook, and the hardware really is well put together, feels far more sturdy than anything I’ve had in the past! I was torn between this and a Dell XPS, as I wanted a 13inch system: after fighting with proprietary wireless drivers and firmware, some parts of me wish that I’d got the Dell but a whole host of factors went against that (warranty options, delivery time etc). One of my favorite features is the Magsafe power adapter: I’ve had several laptops fail here and I hope that this will cause far less problems. Now though, I’ve got Fedora running on here and I will be updating the Fedora On Mactel wiki page with the latest information – some chipsets have changed since that was written.

Virgle

“In my life, I’ve had a lot of exciting adventures and launched a lot of ambitious business ventures. I’m delighted today to announce Virgle, Inc., a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google which qualifies on both counts.

Virgle’s goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world.”

Damn it, I was totally fooled for a minute – check the date!