Daily Archives:July 9th, 2002

Half the world has never used a telephone

[Original Link] Clay Shirky has written a splendid article, discussing this well-known maxim, which teaches us something about statistics, something about catchphrases, and quite a bit about telecoms. [Found on Michael Gilbert’s excellent Nonprofit Online News.]

Update, twenty years later: Clay’s article is no longer at its original location but can be found on the Internet Archive here.

Views on Linux in Business

[Original Link] Doc Searls quotes Vint Cerf: “The history of the Net is the history of its protocols”.

And then in this Linux Journal article he emphasises

…that the real virtue of Linux and other forms of infrastructural software…is not only that it’s open and free, but that it’s transparent. It is see-thru infrastructure. In fact, what makes it infrastructural is the fact that you can see through it. You can trust it because it has no secrets.

…Bill [Gates] says, “Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony.” We should note that all those services are pure infrastructure whose workings are mostly transparent.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser