Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’

How to convert Postscript files to PDF on Debian GNU / Linux with ps2pdf

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

convert ps to pdf linux,Free as in Freedom book cover - Richard Stallman GNU and Free Software Father

I’m currently reading Free as in Freedom (2.0) R. Stallman and the Free Software Revolution
The book includes a reference to Eric S. Raymond ‘s famous The Cathedral and the Bazaar which does makes a point about the important of Open Source . I’ve read the The Cathedral and the Bazaar paper some very long time ago (in my young days so to say) and hence I couldn’t resemble much of the document so I jumped in after the footnote in the FAIF book and decided to take a quick look on The Cathedral and the Bazaar once again to bring up some memories. I was stunned to find the paper is available in many formats but officially not included in PDF . Since i’m a GNU / Linux user I’ve never managed to get into the habit to read postscript documents which from modern day stand point are also already a bit of obsolete and therefore I found it as a wise idea to convert and mirror the POSTSCRIPT (PS) version of the document to PDF on www.pc-freak.net

Happily the ps2pdf command to convert the ps to pdf on my debian gnu / linux is really easy:

ps2pdf cathedral-and-the-bazaar-Eric_Raymond.ps Cathedral-and-the-bazaar-Eric_Raymond.pdf

ps2pdf is part of the ghostscript deb package, so if you can’t find the program you will need to have it installed with apt-get first.

By the way the Postscript file is easily readable using my default gnome PDF reader evince , but anyways I converted and mirrored the paper for all those windows users who might like to take a look at the document in PDF.
I’ve also made a mirror of the original Cathedral and the Bazaaar postscript document here , for all those who want to check out The PDF version of the Cathedral and the Bazaaar is for download here

Even though the “open source” movement is an interesting idea and it had some major impact on the development of some free software the idiology of open source which was very much influenced by this document is very weak compared to the philosophy Richard Stallman indcuded as of the great need of the software to be free.

To be honest looking back in time for a long time being a Linux user I did not make any distinguishment between “Free Software” concept and “Open Source”, even worser I considered to evangelize on Open Source not realizing that initially what attracted me to free software was the idiology of open source and not the real values on which ground free software is built.
This kind of miss understanding between perception of “open source” and “free software” I got and spread for years now I fully realize and I seem like when I red back then The Cathedral and the Bazaar document I didn’t looked any critical at the document but it had a major, I would say “bad” impact on my idiology on software for a long time. So for all those who had not checked it it’s worthy checking but only in case if one fully understands Richard Stallman’s concept of Free Software, without this understanding one can easily slip into the wrong believe (just like me back in thme) that open source is the same as free software. Even though open source can be free software it is not presumably that an open source is free software and that it guarantees that the published source will be free. But I’ll stop now as I slept away from my goal of the article to just log here how a convertion of postscript to pdf on gnu / linux is done.
Just to close up this article I warmly recommend on all people interested into hacking and the history of Free operating systems and Free software as FreeBSD and GNU / Linux the Free as in Freedom (2.0) book ! Its truly a remarkable and great inspirational reading for all people like me involved into free software realm of ICT.

Triumph of the Nerds – A documentary about the rise of Personal Computers

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

Triumph of the Nerds movie cover

Triumph of the Nerds is 3 parts documentary movie on how the Personal Computer was developed. The movie features interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Allan Paul and many other IT veterans who played key roles for the development of the Personal Computer ,

The movie is an interesting watching for people interested into Information Technology and gives some minor insights on the starred interviewed people and their life philosophy. It was interesting times back then and it seems many of the guys who could participate in the PCs were very lucky, where others who made key developments which are de-facto standards today went into history without much being remembered.

Now the trends which these man set in world’s development is not nice. Even though PC brough a lot of fun in our every lives it suddenly started taking over our privacy and made the humanity divided.
The movie is a story of a man motivated by greed arrogancy and exploitation. Even though the movie has historical value it doesn’t even mention about Free Software Richard Stallman and the free software movement.

The movie talks about the development of CP/M the predecessor of Quick and Dirty DOS (QDOS), MS-DOS Windows 1,2,3, Windows 95 etc.

It also tries to picture the events around the raise and fall of IBM and OS/2.

The most notable parts for me in the movie are the showing off of some old computer hardware and Mainframe servers as well as the quick explanation on how Mainframes irons predecessed the PC. Another interesting moment in the movie is displaying Steve Jobs demonstrating the Xerox’s Alto graphical interface. Talking about Jobs it was quite shocking for the world his sudden death just 3 days ago so (R.I.P).

The movie author Robert X. Cringery stress out in the movie the great struggle between the so called “the blue Elephant” IBM and the just emerging early Microsoft Corporation

Triumph of the Nerds slightly mentions Digital Equipment Corporation / DEC or COMPAQ as later known. DEC is company less known in todays world which had historically great impact on computer market, so its a pity the movie part mentioning DEC is so short.

What the movie misses is to aforemention About’s Digital Equipment VMS operating system known under the code name OpenVMS. OpenVMS even of today is believed by many to be the most secure Operating System ever developed.
The movie part that talks about DEC is the second part of movie it shows a nice COMPAQ portable computer.

DEC Compaq portable II Computer

One should admit COMPAQ portable Computer is a really trendy for its time, Also the way it sticks the keyboard to the screen does remind seriously the opening and closing of a modern laptop 😉

The movie includes some interesting, so called crash courses where the movie author gives some insight on elementary computing, so for those new to informatix the movie will surely be educative as well, though for a UNIX gurus this elementary computing scenes will look kinda ridiculous 😉

One serious flaw with this movie is the complete lack of interviews with Richard Stallman and the importance of Free Software for the development of modern PC and the influence of the free software culture on todays latest Macintosh and PC developments.

A related movie which probably most IT geeks already know / seen is Pirates of the Sillicon Valley
, hence large chunk of Triumph of the Nerds gives another point of view on the ideas and stories presented in Triumph of the Nerds

Triumph of the Nerds brings back some good memories of the glorious PC computer past for all of us who had been a DR-DOS/MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 / 95 users.

The no-ego deadly body and soul (anti-christian) philosophy a trend in modern Business – think always positive be always positive

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Modern day Business training Sect picture

These days it’s ultra modern in Business and Business Communities, that the way business is made or business possibilities are discussed are directly influenced by altered understanding of Buddhistic world views.

Today less and less people realize that the modern day Western and Eastern Christian countries are rapidly loosing their Christian mark.
It was Christianity and Christian philosophy, thanks to which Christian countries has advanced to the material goodness level, architectural greatness, science improvements and civilization achievements that we the Europeans and other Western societies like Americans enjoy today.

As time ticks on the world is constantly becoming more and more Anti-Christian. From the times when Christianity was officially wide-spread and accepted and being a Christian was a sign for personal qualities and goodness, it’s now considered to be almost a crime or being insane if you have faith in Jesus Christ as God’s Son and a Saviour of mankind.

Business ethics practices from the past, which were often based on Christian ethics has also seriously changed these days.

It was due to Christianity and the Christian civillization due to which we had a dozens of genuine musician like: J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, Brahms, Tschaikovsky etc. the list of great people and musicians goes innumerous here.

The Roman Catholic and Easter Orthodox Christians thanks to which works, science has advanced is also innumerous, just to name a few for instance:

Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Johannes Kepler

again this is just a small chunk of all the great Christian people who by their talents has revolutionized the world for good.

However nowdays education is changed seriously and as many people should have noticed Christianity and historic relation between science and Christianity is trying to be covered.
Moreover the historic importance of Christian faith and it’s surrounding philosophy is forgotten, not to mention that officially the history of the world until the 18 century is mostly, a history of Christianity and it’s influence on society.

In these days of Christian apostacy, many of the business people in their look up for ways to become superior and rule over the masses has turned into various long forgotten sects and heresies which were publicly announced by ancient Christian Church as body and soul destroying dangerous teachings.

It’s trendy today that the confucionism or hindu influenced beliefs about the world and the way stuff works, are preached and used in businesses and business organizations.
Dalai Lama Enemy of Christianity

It’s classics nowdays that people run a business, after building a group of people, over which hierarchical manipulation based leadership is exercised.

Most oftenly people who enter into a new business field, try build a groups of people who are introduced without having conscious idea to veiled alterated buddhistic philosophy to match certain people’s idea or beliefs about the world.

These groups usually consist of people ranging from hundereds to thousands. Usually each of these business groups created, has a leader who is both leader in terms of (being the group boss / executive) and also a spiritual leader.

Interaction between the group members are purely based on manipulation. People are teached they have some special sensitivity for the surrounding environment which they can develop.
They’re teached they must always be positive, the group leaders (teachers) does try to suggest to the group what the group members understanding of positive should be.

In those business groups, people are taught by the leaders to be positive, while the leaders themselves are not positive (one cannot be positive without God!). People are constantly told “be positive”, “be positive”, while the people who teach them this are not positive at all and evil often cruel!
In other words group members are being re-taught the basics of how they perceive themselves and how they should perceive the world around them in a light that fits well with the business organization they’re membering in.
Consequently people are taught to loose their ego.
Loose Ego surrealism picture

This is one of the most essential parts of this modern day business false teachings. In reality loosing the ego is loosing one’s standing ground and through that the person in the group becomes easily manipulated by other group members.

When people loose their ego basicly they loose their protection against being easily manipulated, they loose their idea about what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong and who in reality they’re.

I believe also the no-ego philosophy has also a straight relation with the modern day society problem of NO IDENTITY issue , I have previously blogged about.

Being exposed to this “business” approaches in that poor state one start easily accepting suggestions from the group leaders or other group members and could end up in a state where he is totally manipulated (a spiritual slave of the group leader GURU).

After time passes and a person is involved in so many meetings, the group members gets so much bounded together that they have to constantly meet each other and discuss things, (often senseless things), nevertheless the pointlessness of the many discussions this meetings starts giving them the feeling of great importance or in other words reveals them the ultimate life meaning.

Consequently, when the new business group entity is tight enough, the group is instructed by the leaders about what kind of business moves will be best for each of the group individuals and the overall business the group belongs to.
At this state each of the members should obey wholeheartedly, if somebody tries to question the leadership decisions, the leader does incite the whole group members against the disobeying member and usually the members gets destroyed.

These business group building philophy is also influenced by antrophology and observence of animal behaviour’s let’s say coyottes or wolves.

In animal world usually each pack of wolves had their leader and the pack only attacks if the leader hits and if the whole group is together.
Same kind of thing comes to business built entities based on this loose your ego / no-ego philosophies.
modern business group building - a spiritual babylon

A lot of pseudo beliefs about para-psychology and experimental western psychology is also involved and preached to the group members.
Loosing the ego philosophy in Business is directly influenced by buddhistic idea about Nirvana and spilling the self in the ultimate worldly reality (e.g. becoming one with the whole nature).
This kind of belief is seriously anti-christian and against the spiritual goal in christianity which is not the emptiness like in buddhism and the other eastern religions, but the goal is fullness in God.

We the Christians are striving to fill ourselves with God’s Spirit – The Holy Spirit, whether buddhists are trying to empty themselves by everything that’s binding them to reality (obviously they also try to empty themselves by God who has initially created man as his vessel).

Also in business, I’ve noticed in my experience that it’s common people who are taught business in universities or are introduced to business are taught philosophies which are very typical for western buddhist teachings.
Just like in buddhism people are taught there is no absolute good or evil and there is no good and bad and everything one does is good, if he sees it as good (we’re the one who define our lifes and realities)!!

Think for a while and see for yourself how insane this kind of philosophy is, let’s say I kill a man who I hate, that’s fine according to this philo because I believe this man’s existence was not good in my view and his unexistence will make the world a better place, since I believe it’s that way then it’s that way DOT!!!As a Christian I must confess this is ULTIMATE INSANITY, AN ULTIMATE LIE obviously inspired by the evil which is an enemy to us the Christians as the Holy Bible teaches.

This kind of “no good and bad” philosophy is a hidden assault against our Christian roots society, faith and civillization. In Christianity we’re clearly taught there is ultimate good an ultimate evil and there is no in between!
We are also taught one can become part of the ultimate good or ultimate evil by his daily choice, e.g. (get closer to God and his Holy Angels or distance himself from God and come near the devil and his fallen angels).

Mixing spirituality and business concepts has become a sad reality of our age, I’ve seen many books being sold which were claiming to teach, “how to do business based on Zen Buddhism and other eastern religions and philosophies.

What’s even worse is that people who are involved into this kind of “innovative” taught business approaches guarantee themselves to get exposed to the ultimate evil spirituality (devilish spiritual influence), as they openly reject God’s dominion over one’s self and the world around them.

The good news is that they’re many Christian Business communities as I’ve checked online, there are many people yet who do their best to do business with other Christians or people who still keep the Christian faith and morale.

A few words on Pseudo Christian Spirituality. A false “Spiritual” Movies and Books which we as Christians should Fully Avoid

Monday, April 18th, 2011

Heresies and How to Avoid them

We live in the age of the boom of sects, false prophets and false “messiahs”. Today it’s common that the bookstores are filled in with all kind of occult literature and magic teaching literature, agnostic books, horoscopes and all kind of empty modern day philosophy books which teaches evil, the so called “Get rich for a day”, “The secrets of success”, “How to take advantage over the others”, “How to be succesful”, “NLP for your success”, “How to enter into business”, “How to become rich quickly” etc. are e very short list of all the non-sense literature one can meet on the books market.

Along with the books we are being offered all kind of movies and philosophies “teaching us” about the life meanings, trying to explain the meaning of life and the universe and the meaning of each self as a human being.

From Christian perspective, most of this movies and books which plead to contain “a deeper life meaning” are empty of any real pure spiritual contents but are simply a mixture of various religious beliefs belonging to different group of worldy faiths and mostly targets to make the authors of the story or screen play rich.

This movies are not being inspired by God – The All Holy Trinity and they reject Christ as a founding stone on which to stand over, it’s clear that they contain an anti-christian content and every truly devoted Christian should try to abstain from watching them.

To name just a few of asuch a movies which are ecumenical (preach for unification of world religions) and from Orthodox Christian perspective are anti-christian in essence:

  • What the Bleep Do we Know – Down The Rabbit Hole
  • The Great Secret of Water
  • The Secret
  • The Fountain

We as Christians should try not watch this movie or praise them as something which confirms our faith, as they don’t confirm our faith in Christ but they try to spread up a “sick spirituality” and insane ideas.
This is just a small list of movies I have encountered which has influenced my spiritual health in a really negative way, therefore I hope if you’re a Christian you will take my warning and CHOOSE NOT TO WATCH THESE MOVIES!.
The reason for choosing not to watch this movies would be purely to prevent yourself from experiencing a spiritual (soul) damages by exposing yourself to the heretical teachings and ideas of the aforementioned ones.

Also try to get astray from all the genres of boks which I have mentioned above which try to teach you how to become sucessful in life, I have personally read a book I’m not sure about the exact name but it was similar to:

  • “The subsconscious could do everything / (Psyche can achieve everything) / The power of Mind etc.”

The book teaches the false idea that with our subconscrious mind we built our own current realities and promotes “positive thinking” as a way to attract wealth, personal success and happiness to yourself.

You can see yourself that this is insane not only from a Christian perspective but even for any rational person.

The idea of this false teachings is to convince you that man is undeveloped god and that we are masters of our own reality.

Therefore it is in direct contrast with even basic Christian beliefs, we Christians do belief that our reality and existence is completely in God’s hands and nothing could happen without God to allow it to happen.
Therefore from a Christian perspective if you, “during the whole day think about how you will get rich and how you will have millions in a bank account” as many of the up-mentioned devilish movies and books teaches, nothing will happen if God does not allow it.

We’re clearly said and taught from the Holy Bible and the Livings of the saints that all our life and daily goods we attain through our life are given by mercy, the saints has taught us that our lives and all we’re and possess are from God for God and through God! To whom be glory now and forever and ever! Amen.

Watch out for this heretical false doctrines which might separate you from Christ and our mother the Orthodox Church. The appearance of all this kind heretical literature and movies is in accordance to the prophecies by our Lord Jesus Christ who said that in the last days there will be many wolves in sheeps clothes, who will deceive and be deceived.

Let we as an Orthodox Christians be careful about what kind of books we read and keep our selves away from these and the similar kind of poisonous teachings.

Let we be fully delivered by God’s grace from being exposed to this kind of faith tempting books by the Holy Prayers of The Theotokos and all the Saints. Amen

Upgrade Ubuntu from 9.04 to latest Ubuntu

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Updating a version of Ubuntu version 9.04 to the latest stable release is actually very simple and BORING.

It takes some long time and a lot of clicking, however eventually, the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu will be at hand.
The whole upgrade philosophy to Upgrade an outdated Ubuntu distribution to the newest supported stable Ubuntu release is in a consequentual number of release to release upgrades.

Let’s say you’re running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope and) you want to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 TLS
then you will have to to the following step by step upgrades;

Upgrade Ubuntu from;

  • Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10
  • Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04
  • Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 10.10
  • Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04
  • Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.11

Now let’s start upgrading …
1. Upgrade Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10

Press Alt+F2 and type:

update-manager -d

Update Manager Ubuntu

Press the Run Button afterwards to launch the command.
You will be prompted for your Linux administrator password, so type it in.

Next the command will launch the Update Manager . The update manager will show you all the available updates.

The Update Manager will show you the update options, it should say something like:

New distribution release ‘9.10’ is available

update manager ubuntu 9.10

Click Over the Update button and wait.

The Ubuntu update will went by by few steps:

1. Preparing Updates
2. Setting new software channels
3. Getting new packages
4. Installing the updates
5. Cleaning up
6. Restarting the computer

You will see further on a screen reading “Support for some applications ended”, on that screen simply press the Close button.

Further on you will be prompted with a windows reading:

Do you want to start the upgrade? You have to click over Start Upgrade button to finally begin with the upgrade process.
Getting new packages screen Ubuntu Update procedure

Now a prompt window will appearing asking you to reboot the system, when the prompt appears click over:

Restart Now

After the upgrade the new release of Ubuntu 9.10 will start booting up, and you will see a screen similar to the picture below:

Ubuntu 9.10 boot screen

Now as you have updated from Ubuntu 9.04 next step is to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04

Now guess what you will have to upgrade the trivial quick update procedures once again.

Once again launch the Ubuntu Update Manager

System -> Administration -> Update Manager Now as you have updated from Ubuntu 9.04 next step is to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS – Lucid Lynx)

Now guess what you will have to upgrade the trivial quick update procedures once again.

Once again launch the Ubuntu Update Manager

System -> Administration -> Update Manager

Now follow the above described procedure with update-manager -d

After repeating the few trivial steps you will have Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on your Desktop

Further on complete the trivial update steps with the update-manager to update to Ubuntu release 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat).

After having succesfully upgraded to version 10.10, now repeat the boring update procedures described in the beginning of the article to update to Ubuntu 11.04

Now as you should be with Ubuntu 11.04, upgrade once again with update-manager to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

And ast a last, once again with the update-manager -d update following the instructions to Ubuntu 11.10.

I’m pretty sure this is one of my most boring articles ever …
It’s interesting fact that I learn once from a friend of mine about the Ubuntu distribution. The Ubuntu distribution has it’s versioning based on months and year whether a version is out for instance Ubuntu 9.04 means this Ubuntu release is released on (Month 04 (April), year 2009)), Ubuntu 11.10 Means this distribution is released in (year 2011, month 10 (October)).

3 minute philosophy of Aristotle and st. Thomas Aquinas

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

During my Business Ethics classes today, in order to show what is Virtue Ethics the class was presented by a videocreated by some freak.
It’s a well known fact that schools and universities are constantly trying to re-organize their teaching methodologies. However I seriously doubt how much educational this interactive and modern approaches are. Well at least they are funny.

Check out the two videos and you will fully understand how ridiculous it’s to present in your lecture such a profane videos.

Yes modern world is getting more and more profane. Aristotle would probably turn in his grave if he sees how this video represents his philosophical views 🙂

Anyways enought talk just check the two videos:


Three Minute Philosophy: Aristotle


3 Minute Philosophy – St. Thomas Aquinas (without anti-Catholic bias and fallacies)

Anyways I should admit that the video author is quite of an Artist.