Our Tesco is so large...

...I bought a branch of Sainsbury's there last week.

In a totalitarian regime, the state owns and controls everything. It sets quotas and prices for goods, services and wages. It owns and controls the means of production and sets the factory gate price of raw materials and finished goods. Everything is controlled to ensure that everything runs according to plan. Totalitarian regimes, unless they're seriously incompetent at all but repressing their own people (as in North Korea and Burma), also tend to be expansionist or at least keen on neutralising their neighbours.

It occurred to me recently that, at least from a capitalist perspective, there's a satirical parallel to be drawn between this and large UK supermarket chains. I'm not suggesting they're anything sinister; they're retail corporations with all that entails. But supermarkets have undeniably grown to become huge, multinational concerns, employing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, and by effectively having the power to set factory gate prices, they control the means of producing food, clothing and so on in a large number of countries.

Supermarkets also have very strong core identities and values. For example, Tesco's corporate description of its values and purpose is enshrined in "The Tesco Way". It's just too obvious to create cheap satire comparing this and those of other supermarkets to "manifestos".

Okay, supermarkets are just shops, and like all retailers they're geared to producing profit, but will there come a time when the only shops, other than those serving niche markets, are predominantly supermarkets? I think we've all seen them move into small towns and gradually strangle much local commerce by providing under one roof all the goods and services traditionally provided by individual retailers. This is simply capitalism, but somehow it feels wrong, even if it is convenient.

When I was a kid and my grandparents visited, I remember my Granddad giving me 50p and saying, "Don't spend it all in the same shop". Increasingly, this is impossible.

Servos...

How sad (by normal standards, anyway) is it that I am gradually falling in love with my Arduino Diecimila robot controller?

I now have 6 tiny little Ultrafly ST-9 micro-servos, which simply plug into the PMW sockets on the Arduino. The Arduino servo library then allows you to simply send an angle to each and the servo whirs into position. How much simpler could this be?

The more I investigate the online Arduino community and discover the strange and interesting libraries people have written, the more I realise that open source hardware is a viable alternative to closed source, propriatary kit. I've long believed that open source software has the potential to become a major force in computing, and to a very great extent that faith is paying off. How long before somoene decides to create a seriously powerful open source computer, I wonder, or even a cluster of them? I'm not holding my breath, but I don't think we'll have to wait an eternity for the first models to appear either.