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Provisioning for the Next Year (Linux Journal)
Doc Searls reflects
on the past, present and future. "In the old days--the mid-late
1990s--"world domination" was an article of faith. Now it's a fact of
life. There are still struggles, of course. But the ones that matter most
are not at the operating system level. Linux is solid infrastructure
now. For many--perhaps most--computing purposes, it's a default first
choice. That choice will only get easier to make as Linux evolves."
(Log in to post comments)
Provisioning for the Next Year (Linux Journal) Posted Dec 24, 2005 10:34 UTC (Sat) by dalesc (guest, #31194) [Link] You mean Providing. Provisioning is a corruption of provision created by the illiterate military.
Provisioning for the Next Year (Linux Journal) Posted Dec 25, 2005 9:33 UTC (Sun) by ninjaz (guest, #2083) [Link] Actually, he's talking about 'provisional', i.e., tentative, and has tried to make 'provisioning' a verb for it. Probabably 'provisionalizing' would be a better fit, even though it's not standard English.
Here's a snippet of where he's coming from:
"If what matters most in life is progress and growth and improvement of ourselves and our societies, we need journalism to be speculative as well as factual, provisional as well as final."
Basically, he's suggesting that as a journalist he wants to get involved in the process of events by floating ideas, rather than passively reporting, then goes on to float some.
Provisioning for the Next Year (Linux Journal) Posted Dec 26, 2005 16:26 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] Provisioning is a verb created, actually, by the telecommunications industry to describe a very specific task: installing and configuring access to and transit over fungible facilities that they already operate for their paying customers, and logging the necessary information to permit future billing and support.
I don't, in fact, think it ties in all that well with Doc's piece, though I think it would have only taken a graf or two to make it do so, conceptually.
I love, Doc, though.
He's one of our biggest thinkers.
I can only stop in occasionally at his weblog, alas; it's like trying to taste the water coming out of a fire hydrant: there's so much of it there, I can waste entire days.
(Well, not "waste"... but I don't get paid to read what he does get paid to write...)
Provisioning for the Next Year (Linux Journal) Posted Jan 6, 2006 17:14 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Provisioning is a verb created, actually, by the telecommunications industry I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that. The military is much older than telecommunications, and the military definitely uses the term. The military uses "provisions" to mean a military unit's supplies, and "to provision" to mean to supply with provisions. Provisioning is part of executing a mission, for example. It's hard for me to see how the telecommunications people got to that word, but I assume it was inpsired by the military use of it (to supply with provisions). Engineers also talk about "deploying" machinery, which is term best known for its military application. The thought process that leads one to invent the term "to provision" for "to provide" is a common one. Nouns are more abstract and harder to understand than verbs, so intellectuals tend to like them (as in, "provision of food is important," instead of "it is important to provide food." The noun is abstract enough that people think it's a new concept and forget that it's just an abstraction of a verb that's been spoken by the common folk for centuries. So when one eventually needs a verb form of the word, he derives a new one from the noun. I've seen "to solution," "to dialogue," and of course, "to impact."
Provisioning for the Next Year (Linux Journal) Posted Jan 6, 2006 17:31 UTC (Fri) by tgb (guest, #745) [Link] According to OED, the word was being used in the early 1800's to talk about food supplies. Thanks to a wonderul BBC program running at the moment, you can browse all words beginning with P in the OED. Here's the entry for "provisioned", which has its earliest usage in 1805 (click-through licence, basically saying you won't download huge numbers of word definitions)
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