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Link.

Two words: gorilla arm.

The rule was formulated and named by Eric S. Raymond in his essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". It was not very hard to find after wikipedia article.

"the real reason they are exposing source is so that developers of products that compete with MS products like Word or Excel aren't at a competitive disadvantage that could result in expensive lawsuits"

Microsoft was scared of 'Open Source' a long time before the EU ruling. And it's 'shared source' but only under the Microsoft platform.

"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market"

"Microsoft today announced a partnership with open source solution vendor SpikeSource to eventually certify all of SpikeSource's SpikeIgnited solutions on the Microsoft Windows platform"

"what Microsoft really wants is to prevent defections--customers replacing some of their software with open-source alternatives"

If you read http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html#id247954 you will much better understand why they are pushing for a 'clean' 1.0 release. Its 'now or never' ...

Personally I 'need' support for Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, not for myself, but for my girlfriend. It is the single showstopper for her linux experience, and until it is fixed, I'll never hear the end of it :(

Before the world wide web, when the internet was mainly news groups, uucp and email (with pling addresses, because there was no dns for routing.

According to RFC 921, the host table was to be decommissioned in September 1984, although it notes that hadn't been done yet. I don't think they were off by much, however, so that was a long time before the WWW.

Or perhaps by "the internet" you meant the Matrix (Quarterman coined the term long before the movie...)? At that point, the ARPANET and Internet were mainly for academic institutions and large technology companies; most other organizations and individuals had UUCP connections for e-mail and netnews. In the late 1980's Internet connections started being offered to a wider set of users, but I think there was still a period between that point and the point at which consumer ISPs started appearing.

This is where internet2 is currently. It doesn't mean it will be in a couple of decades.

Or perhaps not, if, instead, Internet2 remains as a dedicated network and the technologies developed for it filter down to the mainstream Internet.

They aren't digging into their capital, they are digging into their savings

Get off our lawns.

Indeed, "X Considered Harmful" is such a common title that the Jargon File has a whole entry for it. And the entry, of course, cites Djikstra as the inspiration for the meme. (Others have disputed this, and claim it was common in mainstream journalism even earlier, but Djikstra's famous essay clearly put the phrase on the map in the CS/IT world.) Merely using the phrase hardly indicates that a comparison to Djikstra's classic work is necessary or justified.

There has been, at least according to the aforementioned Jargon File, an essay in CACM called "GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful. I have to wonder if we don't need an essay simply titled "Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful". :)

Furthermore, the Slashdot summary is (as usual) badly flawed: Knuth didn't say that threads were harmful, he simply said that he didn't find them useful. Not that I want to defend threads--I've pulled out enough of my own hair because of them--but, as long as we're on the topic of inappropriate comparisons.... I don't know who this James Nobody is, but I'm pretty sure that he's not in the same league as Djikstra or Knuth, and the inappropriate and misleading attempts to convince me that he his makes me less, not more, interested in reading TFA.

Actually, as per the definition laid down by the creators of Unix, Linux IS Unix, it is simply not UNIX(tm) (as per the Open Group.) If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then for our purposes it is a duck. If you go try to carry out the stuff you'll find in The Unix Programming Handbook then you'll find that Linux is Unix. Seriously. Because all that stuff still works, and it works in the same way and for the same reason.

However, this distinction would only have been extremely confusing in court and probably not at all germane to the actual issue of who owns what. And so, Darl's statement is not true because he is not talking about Unix, but about UNIX(tm). When you hear Darl (or anyone else in court relating to this whole SCO thing) refer to "unix", they're actually saying "UNIX(tm)". It's just not clear how to pronounce the (tm)... currently the argument is between a click and a cluck.

Well, that's poor design - blinking bright green on black? :-\

ESR's HTML Hell page comes to mind.

TINC!

Jargon
secret labs

Can be considered a spoof of the backbone cabal.

TINC!

Jargon
secret labs

Can be considered a spoof of the backbone cabal.

That was a case under very specific circumstances. The takedown notice was actually filed with the copyright office before being sent. It specifically contained a "do not publish" clause within the takedown notice. And it was sent specifically to goad the recipient into publishing the takedown notice, as other very suspect takedown notices sent by that law firm had been published publicly by that particular site.

That's not to say that the big guns wouldn't just follow suit with that strategy, but the easy way around it has been around for years - although admittedly it doesn't scale very well.

There are actually only very few companies in the world who sell software -- for all the rest, paying someone to fix a software bug is a cost just like having someone come over to repair your central heating system:

Your job may yield the central heating mechanic enough profit to buy better equipment, so he becomes more competitive, and repairs your competitor's central heating system for less:

better wait until one of your competitors' heating systems break down too, and then get yours repaired afterwards for less money!

P.S. I recommend that ESR essay "The Magic Cauldron", it's fun to read, and even on-topic.

The original meaning is closer to manipulation of systems:

"A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular."

Personally, I prefer using it in the most expansive sense: "One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations." Hackers would, therefore, include engineers, surgeons, editors, lawyers, politicans and so forth. You can have interesting discussions with people when you start off making a connection between what they do and hacking.

I wonder how many hours Édouard-Léon pondered over this piece of paper, trying to devise some way to play it back. I think it's just spectacular that we are able to do so 150 years later.

Not just the world's first sound recording, then, but also the world's first Write-only memory!

Most programmers do not work for Software Companies.

Hence, their renumeration is not tied to the "sale" of software. They are paid to create/modify software for their employer's use. A lot of the time, it makes sense to share the work on a reciprocal basis, because it lowers everyones costs and improves the quality of the software for everyone ("Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.") Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar , by Eric S. Raymond. It's online for free.

INTERCAL is a bit like learning FORTRAN - it's a bit long of tooth - maybe try bf, unlambda, whitespace or my personal favorite, java2k. Any base 11 probabilistic programming language is tops in my book.

INTERCAL That which does not kill you makes you stronger. And builds character.

Because anyone who worked for years in the tech industry and managed to confuse a kill file with an assassination list, in a lawsuit on the topic is a legend in his own mind^h^h^h^h time.

Have you read the Halloween Documents?

Notable quotes:
OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.
* Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence ... that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects.
* ...to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a process rather than a company.
* OSS is long-term credible ... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.
* Linux and other OSS advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that OSS software is at least as robust -- if not more -- than commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world.
* Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities.
* OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
* The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale.

There was more stuff linked to here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/03/1524250 but its fallen off the web, and I'm not sure where to find archives of it.

In short, its out there; internal stuff thats been leaked.

It saves seven bytes.

Microsoft built its business on tools for the BASIC programming language, and M$ is a valid name for a string variable in BASIC. The biggest difference that I can see between this and Eric S. Raymond's example of "$PHB" is that one is BASIC and the other is Perl.

From The Jargon File:
hacker: A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities....
cracker: One who breaks security on a system.....
script kiddies: [very common] The lowest form of cracker....

From RFC 4949:

$ cracker
            (I) Someone who tries to break the security of, and gain
            unauthorized access to, someone else's system, often with
            malicious intent. (See: adversary, intruder, packet monkey, script
            kiddy. Compare: hacker.)
            Usage: Was sometimes spelled "kracker". [NCSSG]

$ hacker
            1. (I) Someone with a strong interest in computers, who enjoys
            learning about them, programming them, and experimenting and
            otherwise working with them. (See: hack. Compare: adversary,
            cracker, intruder.)
            Usage: This first definition is the original meaning of the term
            (circa 1960); it then had a neutral or positive connotation of
            "someone who figures things out and makes something cool happen".
            2. (O) "An individual who spends an inordinate amount of time
            working on computer systems for other than professional purposes."
            [NCSSG]
            3. (D) Synonym for "cracker".
            Deprecated Usage: Today, the term is frequently (mis)used
            (especially by journalists) with definition 3.

$ script kiddy
            (D) /slang/ A cracker who is able to use existing attack
            techniques (i.e., to read scripts) and execute existing attack
            software, but is unable to invent new exploits or manufacture the
            tools to perform them; pejoratively, an immature or novice
            cracker.
            Deprecated Term: It is likely that other cultures use different
            metaphors for this concept. Therefore, to avoid international
            misunderstanding, IDOCs SHOULD NOT use this term. (See: Deprecated
            Usage under "Green Book".)

From The Jargon File:
hacker: A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities....
cracker: One who breaks security on a system.....
script kiddies: [very common] The lowest form of cracker....

From RFC 4949:

$ cracker
            (I) Someone who tries to break the security of, and gain
            unauthorized access to, someone else's system, often with
            malicious intent. (See: adversary, intruder, packet monkey, script
            kiddy. Compare: hacker.)
            Usage: Was sometimes spelled "kracker". [NCSSG]

$ hacker
            1. (I) Someone with a strong interest in computers, who enjoys
            learning about them, programming them, and experimenting and
            otherwise working with them. (See: hack. Compare: adversary,
            cracker, intruder.)
            Usage: This first definition is the original meaning of the term
            (circa 1960); it then had a neutral or positive connotation of
            "someone who figures things out and makes something cool happen".
            2. (O) "An individual who spends an inordinate amount of time
            working on computer systems for other than professional purposes."
            [NCSSG]
            3. (D) Synonym for "cracker".
            Deprecated Usage: Today, the term is frequently (mis)used
            (especially by journalists) with definition 3.

$ script kiddy
            (D) /slang/ A cracker who is able to use existing attack
            techniques (i.e., to read scripts) and execute existing attack
            software, but is unable to invent new exploits or manufacture the
            tools to perform them; pejoratively, an immature or novice
            cracker.
            Deprecated Term: It is likely that other cultures use different
            metaphors for this concept. Therefore, to avoid international
            misunderstanding, IDOCs SHOULD NOT use this term. (See: Deprecated
            Usage under "Green Book".)

From The Jargon File:
hacker: A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities....
cracker: One who breaks security on a system.....
script kiddies: [very common] The lowest form of cracker....

From RFC 4949:

$ cracker
            (I) Someone who tries to break the security of, and gain
            unauthorized access to, someone else's system, often with
            malicious intent. (See: adversary, intruder, packet monkey, script
            kiddy. Compare: hacker.)
            Usage: Was sometimes spelled "kracker". [NCSSG]

$ hacker
            1. (I) Someone with a strong interest in computers, who enjoys
            learning about them, programming them, and experimenting and
            otherwise working with them. (See: hack. Compare: adversary,
            cracker, intruder.)
            Usage: This first definition is the original meaning of the term
            (circa 1960); it then had a neutral or positive connotation of
            "someone who figures things out and makes something cool happen".
            2. (O) "An individual who spends an inordinate amount of time
            working on computer systems for other than professional purposes."
            [NCSSG]
            3. (D) Synonym for "cracker".
            Deprecated Usage: Today, the term is frequently (mis)used
            (especially by journalists) with definition 3.

$ script kiddy
            (D) /slang/ A cracker who is able to use existing attack
            techniques (i.e., to read scripts) and execute existing attack
            software, but is unable to invent new exploits or manufacture the
            tools to perform them; pejoratively, an immature or novice
            cracker.
            Deprecated Term: It is likely that other cultures use different
            metaphors for this concept. Therefore, to avoid international
            misunderstanding, IDOCs SHOULD NOT use this term. (See: Deprecated
            Usage under "Green Book".)

death code

"It was made very clear to him, in all but two answers, that he was not welcome, the wrong kind of user, morally inferior for wanting to play non-free games."

It's not that at all. He just doesn't know how to ask questions. ESR says it a lot better than I ever could. That essay is literally life changing. Read the whole thing.

http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

In my experience, the open source environment has changed remarkably in the ten years I have been exposed to it. The amount of relevant information that can be found by a simple google search is staggering. That is the first stop, and is far quicker and more considerate of other people's time than posting to a forum.

Typing "wine " into google and scanning even the first page of results should have given your friend a good idea of whether he could have played the games he wanted to or not.

Yes, the guy is a weirdo.. but so are a lot of people I respect. He rubbed me the wrong way about a decade ago and I wrote the guy off, but after reading this I came to see that I was just being too damn harsh. Which led me to write this. I try to be more tolerate these days, but I tell ya, posting on Slashdot really doesn't help in that department.

"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket. See also KISS Principle, elegant.

I'd say that IBM knows how to build a pretty reliable basket..

http://catb.org/jargon/html/A/airplane-rule.html

If you look at ESR's projections based upon market dominance at tipping points between dominant processor architectures of the past, there should be a clear 64bit market winner in 2008. Winning means more than 50% market share. It's obviously speculation, but well reasoned...

I noticed something interesting in Myers Department Store. Most of the interest in eeepcs was from 20 something uni/office women. They had one real question. Does this do what I want. I was only there for about half an hour, so not a huge sampling, but it was rather interesting.

...and the current shift away from DRM by large music studios is removing one of the principal blockers he lists to linux uptake as the dominant software platform of the 64bit era... ...so there's still hope. Just blue-ray regional price fixing codecs left really :-)

alternatively we could start aiming for the 128bit processor market. :-)

Guido's Time Machine will cure what ails ya.

I sense that I already know Py3K somehow.

Every time I hear about the Year Of Linux, I think of this:
World Domination 201

According to Eric Raymond, YoL = 2008, originally calculated in 2003 to be the year everyone switches to 64-bit. In theory, even low-end buyers would be getting 64-bit machines this year, and the race would be between Microsoft getting every hardware vendor on the planet to update all their drivers, Apple releasing an operating system for the masses (meaning, cheap commodity hardware), and Linux basically just being usable and keeping its source code open and 64-bit clean.

So far, 64-bit Vista is its own saga, Apple's new lightweight laptop costs $1,800, and in Linux's corner -- KDE 4, Ubuntu, and lots of love from hardware manufacturers, IBM and Sun.

While high-end computers are definitely in 64-bit territory now, I think the low end these days would be happy to dwell on 32-bit machines awhile longer -- which actually works in Linux's favor, since open-source development overall seems to be progressing much faster than whatever's going on internally at Microsoft.

Basicly, the microkernel is a horrible example of bondage and discipline programming. In order to solve the low level problem of stray memory references, the professors from academia have come up with a low level solution, using the Memory Management Unit, (MMU) to prevent these errors. Unfortunately, this "solution" does high level collateral damage. By breaking the OS into a lot of little pieces, the u-kernels intoduce inefficiency. By putting constraints on how OSes are designed, ukernels make design, coding, and debugging more difficult. All of this to do checking, that at least in theory, could have been done at design, compile, or link time.

This error is basicly caused by wishfull thinking. The u-kernel advocates wish that Operation Systems design were less difficult. To Quote Torvalds:

So that 'microkernels are wonderful' mantra really comes from that desperate wish that the world should be simpler than it really is. It's why microkernels have obviously been very popular in academia, where often basically cannot afford to put a commercial-quality big development team on the issue, so you absolutely require that the problem is simpler.

So reality has nothing to do with microkernels. Exactly the reverse. The whole point of microkernels is to try to escape the reality that OS design and implementation is hard, and a lot of work. It's an appealing notion.

In 1992, Tanenbaum said "LINUX is obsolete" and "it is now all over but the shoutin'" and "microkernels have won". It is now 2008, and the micro kernel advocates still have nothing that can compete with LINUX in its own problem space. It is time for micro kernel advocates to stop shouting.

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html

But isn't handling my data exactly what "actually matters"? An idle CPU does me no good.

As for "offloading some instructions", there are also hardware implementations of TCP/IP, too. Linux doesn't use them. They're usually slower, and impossible to fix when (not if) a bug is found. I've also seen hardware for JVM, floating-point, and graphics come and go. Unless you're playing Doom5 with all the effects maxed out, the cheapest integrated graphics on the market is *fine* (and 1000 times better than the most expensive card from a decade ago).

This debate has been going on so long we named it back in 1968. Don't think you can settle it by saying 'SCSI, Firewire good'.

http://catb.org/~esr/guns/

I guess I'm an idiot for this

Perhaps your definition of hack is not broad enough.

You could look at the jargon file.

I rarely use definition 2 there (something difficult and clever). It tends to be 1. (something quick and dirty)

Like "I hacked a shell script to work around your kernel module's bugs."

(semi) seriously:
  This article may explain 'stereotypical managers' aka PHBs. Some of them were apparently once-competent.
  They may have bought-in to the multitasking meme and suffered the long-term consequences.

  In short that which SEEMS to be the result of brain-damage ...IS ,
  and it's not (just) the necktie http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/suit.html

Sometimes I wish the reply all button had a molly-guard on it. Or at least add a dialog box on it that says something like "Using this constitutes spamming, does your message really need to be spammed to everyone in the From and CC field of this e-mail?".

"Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise get trashed.

This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one day when a DEC field circus engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.

It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?" Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at the local 'humane' society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a scratch monkey.

How can a discussion on bad keyboards be complete without the space cadet keyboard? How much worse can you get than the keyboard responsible for emacs key bindings?

That obscure link you posted claims "bondage and discipline" languages to be lacking compared to opposing (and superiour) Languages of Choice. The latter to which the author of this strange theory counts Python. Duh.

I'd say your plan to get all smart-assy on Python backfired big time.

Just say no to Bondage and Discipline Languages!

...any language where the author thinks lambda is "too confusing" and should be removed is doomed from the start.