Updates related to website and OSCOMAK/OpenVirgle mediawiki
Paul D. Fernhout
Not that anyone probably care much about this at this point about
OpenVirgle stuff from 2008 on a mediawiki, :-) but my hosting provider
upgraded to a later version of PHP yesterday and that broke the OSCOMAK
mediawiki that I was keeping around for archival/historic purposes that
had OpenVirgle content on it, here:
http://www.oscomak.net/
I had also been hosting that on a separate hosting account that was
costing US$55 a month or so (after downgrading from a year of a
dedicated server a long while back). I could have tried to fix it more,
but I'd been thinking about migrating the sites on that server (which
included openmanufacturing.net and openvirgle.net too) to our other
hosting account to save money, plus two other small sites I had there.
Money is tight at the moment for us (we're so far out of the mainstream
at this point in multiple ways, including wierd working on weird
conflicted things like http://www.artificialscarcity.com :-), and it has
probably cost about US$5000 over the past three years to host all that,
not to say it could not have been done cheaper or better. I would have
been smarter to have just given that money to someone like Doram or Mike
to have more time to work on great content. Thank you two guys, and
Bryan too, for adding content there and having some faith in all that
back then. Anyway, so, now seems a convenient time to stop some of the
ration-unit bleeding, given the wiki has become broken anyway to some
degree, and also that new initiatives will go in other directions.
So, I went ahead and did that, moving all those sites over to our other
hosting account, even though I liked keeping them separate. The
mediawiki stuff is still sort-of there, but I got the old version
running again enough for a time under the new PHP (without the Halo
Semantic extensions) to export it as best I could in a couple of
different ways, including using wget to crawl the site. So, most of the
textual content is still accessible, even if it does not quite look the
same for some reason. It may take up to two days for the domain name
service related changes to propagate everywhere.
The mediawiki site content is also accessible through archive.org in a
better looking form at this URL:
http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/*/
I continue to work towards better tools related to a social semantic
desktop, connected with these two things:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
http://www.rakontu.org/
And "open manufacturing" continues to pick up steam. So, stuff continues
to happen, and OpenVirgle in some form or another, with some name or
another, is seeming more and more feasible every day.
If the Rossi/Focardi eCat cold fusion stuff turns out to be for real, we
may have plenty of easily accessible energy both for for making a
sustainable OpenEarth project and a sustainable OpenVirgle project.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/05/swedish-skeptics-confirm-nuclear-process-in-tiny-4-7-kw-reactor
Still, solar energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, and even
small-scale nuclear could also give us all the energy we need, so we are
not dependent on that cold fusion stuff to have a good future.
Here is some stuff I wrote recently on that related ongoing economic
transition, which may be accelerated by cheap energy, as it has been
accelerated by cheap computing:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will
change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the
balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had
(subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled
so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think
about the socioeconomic implications of their invention in causing a
permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will
probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward
greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks
about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the
old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may
be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world
that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where
money does not matter very much anymore. "
I try to continue to have faith in that future, even with some troubles
in the present, and with the burden and honor of trying to carry forward
what I can from the past. :-) Related animations by the RSA on time and
21st century civilization motivation and empathy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.