The GnuVision Blog

I am reading Naomi Klein’s book “The shock doctrine - rise of disaster captialism”. The central theme of the book is that global free-market capitalism (the one that is actually in practice these days, not the one idealized by various groups who call themselves anarchists or libertarians or various other names) thrives on disasters - when people are in a state of shock, either by natural (earthquakes, tsunamis) or man made (wars, military coup’s) disasters, vested interests (politicians, corporations) find it easy to thrust free-market policies down their throats - when your worry at the moment is whether you will survive to see the sun rising tomorrow, you don’t care about your state’s natural resources/industries being auctioned away for the highest bidder.

If you wish to see why the world is the way it is - how man’s greed and complete insensitivity towards others drives him to commit horrible crimes - this is the book for you. You will learn how war’s are “outsourced”, how tsunamis and cyclones provide fortunes for the free-market “entrepreneurs”and how a nation’s obsession with terror creates a “boom” for a new class of technology “companies”.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a scholarly, unemotional analysis of the free-markets as an economic system, this is not the book for you. The writer is not an economist, and she has no sympathy for the system. Some people also accuse her of demonising Milton Friedman and the “Chicago School” of economics. A fellow from the Cato Institute (a libertarian “think-tank”) has produced a scathing criticism of her book. As usual, this fellow has caught on to the book’s weak points and “extrapolated” from there to prove how worthless the whole thing is. It may also be good to check out the credentials of the Cato institute before reading the criticism (you may also find it interesting to read
The crisis of public reason which is linked from this site).

I couldn’t resist putting this inline (source: http://www.thismodernworld.org/arc/TAP/01-libertarian.jpg )!

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GNU Toolchain tips of the week!

The Phoenix project has matured since its beginning in 2004. We now have a reliable, cost-effective product which is ready for mass deployment. Some academic institutions have already started using Phoenix. For example, the West Bengal University of Technology(WBUT) has included it in their refresher course for Physics teachers. The Department of Education, Kerala, has initiated a project to use Phoenix as a tool for IT enabled education at the high school level.

Read More

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GNU Linker Concepts which every Embedded Systems programmer must know - Part 1

Michel Bauwens asks: Can the experience economy be capitalist?.

People who are unable to understand the logic of Free Software consider digital information to be exactly similar to material goods - which it is not! The rules of economics applied to scarce, rival goods will have to be re-written before they can be applied to the digital domain. This, and the fact that the open Internet forms a powerful disruptive technology by its ability to bring large number of people into direct contact with each other without the need for middlemen necessitates the birth of a new “Information Economics”.

Bauwens writes:

In other words, we have a growing discrepancy between the direct creation of use value through social relationships and collective intelligence (open platforms create near infinite value through the operations of the laws of Metcalfe and Reed), but only a fraction of that value can actually be captured by business and money. Innovation is becoming social and diffuse, an emergent property of the networks rather than an internal R & D affair within corporations; capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence; more and more positive externalizations are created from the social field.

Can the actual “value” of free software be directly captured by money? We hear business magazines proclaiming that the “world automobile market is worth X billion dollars” - can we arrive at such an estimate of the “value” of Free Software by looking at exactly how much money was made “selling” Free Software? Is it not the case that Free Software creates “value” even when nothing is sold or bought?

The backbone of capitalism, going by the way it is practiced in the US, is the constant churning out of goods to be consumed by a population which has been brainwashed by the media (especially Television) that endless consumption is the only way of life. Imagine for a moment what would happen were the people to suddenly become frugal and stop acting the way they are advised by the media. We will very soon have a “recession”! But what is wrong with this endless produce-market-consume/discard cycle which is the basis of the creation of so much “wealth”? The simple fact that material goods do not come out of vacuum - they need resources from the environment around us to be “manufactured”, and these resources are not infinite.

Now, let us look at the capitalist idea of wealth creation from digital information. A million copies of a program can be created at no additional cost - so how do you create “wealth”? Make it scarce by imposing artificial restrictions on copying - churn out techno-legal traps like DRM and go to court with ideas like “Intellectual Property”.

Isn’t it interesting to compare these two “models”? One which takes essentially finite resources and creates wealth by exploiting them as if they were available in infinite quantities and the other which takes essentially infinite resources and creates wealth by making it appear as if they were finite!

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AVR32 Assembly Language Basics Part 2 - Position Independent Code Generation

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AVR32 Assembly Language Basics Part 1 - Memory Access and Linker Relaxation

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Understanding U-boot internals

In a nutshell, the Groklaw effect will happen to you if you try to play dirty against a well established Internet community.

The Groklaw Effect hits Becta ….

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Writing Standalone Applications for the ATNGW100 on my FOSSTRONICS Blog.

I will keep linking to recent entries on my new Blog for some time - to make sure that some traffic reaches there! There are Wordpress plugins to fetch from RSS feeds - but for the version of Wordpress which I am using (and my particular theme), I will have to do a bit of PHP/CSS tweaking before I get the desired results … will do it some time later.