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I guess this is enough to disregard the fact that it was GNU/Linux - *not BSD* - that was the first truely free Unix like OS.

Apparently Bill Joy started putting BSD together in early 1977. The FSF didn't exist until October 1985. From what I've read, the UNIX sources were distributed completely without restriction even earlier than 1977, since due to the antitrust case against them, AT&T weren't allowed to begin selling an operating system. The only charge that was being put on the source was the price of the mag tape, and I also don't know of any license restrictions either. Given the degree of university collaboration that existed early on, I can only assume that there weren't any. AT&T only became restrictive with the source themselves when they were released from the ban on selling it.

AFAIK, the main reason why UNIX wasn't used much outside of universities very early on was because of it originally being written for the PDP-8 and 11, which were very different architectures to the 80386. The first port that I know of to the 80386 that took place that I know of was the one done by the Jolitzes, which ended up becoming (more or less, anywayz) what we now know as FreeBSD.

It sounds like you've got the version of history that Stallman wants people to have; i.e., the one that makes him look like the sole father of the entire practice of releasing source code in general. From what I've been able to figure out anywayz, the truth is a bit different. UNIX was developed very collaboratively from its' inception, and as you yourself probably know, without source, that can't really happen. ;-)

Probably enough to disregard the fact that the "evil" FSF was already making available a shitload of software when Bill Gates was still dabbling in GWBASIC

The ANSI standard for Minimal BASIC is dated 1978, the same year Microsoft was founded. According to Wikipedia, the FSF was founded in October 1985...Looks like you're off by a couple of years. According to that, BASIC existed *before* the FSF. Also...I don't know what your own definition of "free" is, but Stallman himself was selling copies of Emacs during the 80s.

Rewriting history must be a nice hobby.

Reading history is a great hobby, sure...it allows me to know when it's been rewritten by someone else. ;)

You might dislike it, you might have another, but *ours* has been there well before BSD did *anything*.

Unfortunately that simply is not true...it's what you've been told. Don't take my word for it though...Go and do some research of your own. Some links that might help:-

Some accounts of early UNIX history from the UNIX Heritage Society. There's some early source code there as well.
20 Years of Berkeley UNIX.
Some info about where Stallman originally got at least some of his ideas.
The Art of UNIX Programming, which has a fair amount of historical info as well.
A rather non-canon biographical portrait of Stallman.
Another second opinion on Stallman, more or less in general.

Maybe if you take the time to go through this material, you might start to realise what my beef is. I don't like bullies, and I don't like frauds...Stallman is both, which from reading the above, you will learn. I strongly urge anyone else here who views me as merely a baseless troll to go to the above links and read that material as well. If I am a troll, the point of it is very simple:- This Emperor has no clothes.

I guess this is enough to disregard the fact that it was GNU/Linux - *not BSD* - that was the first truely free Unix like OS.

Apparently Bill Joy started putting BSD together in early 1977. The FSF didn't exist until October 1985. From what I've read, the UNIX sources were distributed completely without restriction even earlier than 1977, since due to the antitrust case against them, AT&T weren't allowed to begin selling an operating system. The only charge that was being put on the source was the price of the mag tape, and I also don't know of any license restrictions either. Given the degree of university collaboration that existed early on, I can only assume that there weren't any. AT&T only became restrictive with the source themselves when they were released from the ban on selling it.

AFAIK, the main reason why UNIX wasn't used much outside of universities very early on was because of it originally being written for the PDP-8 and 11, which were very different architectures to the 80386. The first port that I know of to the 80386 that took place that I know of was the one done by the Jolitzes, which ended up becoming (more or less, anywayz) what we now know as FreeBSD.

It sounds like you've got the version of history that Stallman wants people to have; i.e., the one that makes him look like the sole father of the entire practice of releasing source code in general. From what I've been able to figure out anywayz, the truth is a bit different. UNIX was developed very collaboratively from its' inception, and as you yourself probably know, without source, that can't really happen. ;-)

Probably enough to disregard the fact that the "evil" FSF was already making available a shitload of software when Bill Gates was still dabbling in GWBASIC

The ANSI standard for Minimal BASIC is dated 1978, the same year Microsoft was founded. According to Wikipedia, the FSF was founded in October 1985...Looks like you're off by a couple of years. According to that, BASIC existed *before* the FSF. Also...I don't know what your own definition of "free" is, but Stallman himself was selling copies of Emacs during the 80s.

Rewriting history must be a nice hobby.

Reading history is a great hobby, sure...it allows me to know when it's been rewritten by someone else. ;)

You might dislike it, you might have another, but *ours* has been there well before BSD did *anything*.

Unfortunately that simply is not true...it's what you've been told. Don't take my word for it though...Go and do some research of your own. Some links that might help:-

Some accounts of early UNIX history from the UNIX Heritage Society. There's some early source code there as well.
20 Years of Berkeley UNIX.
Some info about where Stallman originally got at least some of his ideas.
The Art of UNIX Programming, which has a fair amount of historical info as well.
A rather non-canon biographical portrait of Stallman.
Another second opinion on Stallman, more or less in general.

Maybe if you take the time to go through this material, you might start to realise what my beef is. I don't like bullies, and I don't like frauds...Stallman is both, which from reading the above, you will learn. I strongly urge anyone else here who views me as merely a baseless troll to go to the above links and read that material as well. If I am a troll, the point of it is very simple:- This Emperor has no clothes.

I saw the functionality in one highly refined boot loader but I don't remember what it was called--and I remember that it used framebuffers (which are okay but I'd rather not be setting my system into an fbmode from the bootloader as a fbmode change once in a shell would probably lose the bgpic). I want to use mbr, grub or lilo, the linux kernel, and a shell. Surely something could be done between the kernel and svga libs. Maybe some hints could be taken from X11 and eterm or aterm.

The Instruction Set of a processor architecture with so many resources available to it doesn't really matter, so long as it isn't utterly and completely braindead. X86 isn't braindead enough to qualify... if you had an intercal instruction set or an One Instruction Set Computer it might.

You really want to do several things to get performance out of an instruction stream -- register renaming, instruction manipulation (breaking them apart or joining them together or changing them into other instructions), elimination of some bad instruction choices, and a host of other things. You would want to do these things even on a "clean" ISA like Alpha or PPC or MIPS. And if you are doing them, the x86 instruction set suddenly becomes much less of a problem. There are even advantages: the code size on x86 tends to be better than a 32-bits-per-instruction architecture.

Instruction sets are languages with exact meanings. Which means that you can precisely translate from one instruction set to another. And, as it turns out, you can do it fairly easily and efficiently. Which is why Transmeta did pretty well. Which is why Apple's rosetta and Java JIT compilers work (and Alpha FX32 before that). Which is why AMD and Intel are right there at the top of the performance curve with x86-style instruction sets, because it JUST DOESN'T MATTER THAT MUCH.

Why didn't Transmeta kick more butt? Because they didn't have the economies of scale that AMD and Intel have. Because they didn't have the design resources that AMD and intel have. Because AMD and Intel had better-tuned processes faster than TSMC or whoever was fabbing Transmeta's chips. THOSE are the most important things, not the instruction set that you have on disk.

Now a good ISA can help in many ways: SIMD instructions really help to point out data level parallelism. More registers helps a wee bit to prevent unnecessary work done around the stack for correctness. You can get rid of a bit of logic if you can execute without translation. But these things can either be added to x86 (SSE/x86-64) or aren't expensive enough to be worth it on a 100 sq mm, >50W processor. Maybe in an embedded, low-power processor.

Come the revolution, the x86 will be the first against the wall!! Eh.. maybe.

Here's an paper by Eric S. Raymond describing his (and a couple friends) reasons for believing that there very much is a revolution in hardware coming soon to a technological infrastructure near you.. as soon as next year.

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

Star Wars uses the force as a large plot device when essentially it's nothing but magic.

Contrary to what Apple's marketing department claims, Apple doesn't really innovate. They don't try to implement all the latest features into their products. However, I think that's what makes them so successful.

What features their products do have work extremely well and are easy to use. Apple knows how to keep things simple.

From a geek standpoint, they are closer in my view than most other folks to the elusive moniker of elegance.

Good. I've recently tangled with Nagios: I cannot believe that of the dozen or so open source configuration tools for it, nost of them hosted on sourceforge.net, *none* follows Eric Raymond's old standards of how to build open source GUI's as described at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html . Configuration systems that have to be hand-edited from never-explained and never-documented text files because the authors can't bother to learn autoconf or MakeMaker or other software building tools and other such foolishnesses litter the debris of such tools.

Even worse, most of the freeware Nagios configuration tools treat the security of the configuration tool itself as an afterthought, with policies that "you shouldn't run it on a network you don't trust!". Nagios and its ancestor, Netsaint, knew better than this 10 years ago, but with all of the configuration tools, attempting to secure them properly requires understanding of sudo or suid operations that are well beyond the knowledge of the newby systems admin.

The cathedral model doesn't even really refer to proprietary development. You might term the closed proprietary development model the prison model or something, the code only gets out when it has done its time. CatB discussed two open source development models, one in which potential changes were submitted to the monarch or oligarchs of a project for consideration, and one in which pretty much anybody could add stuff whenever. Microsoft uses neither of these.

In short, the difference between the cathedral and the bazaar is not and has never been the difference between closed and open source. It is the difference between two open source development strategies. If you're not sure of this, go read ESR's essay again. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar /cathedral-bazaar/

what cathedral ? what bazaar ? what relation does any cathedral and bazaar have, what kind of metaphor is this, and just what the heck does that mean ?

This is an (indirect) reference to Eric S. Raymond's seminal paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (actual essay is here), in which he talks about software development being done in one of two ways, by huge development companies in commercial environments, being similar to the way medieval cathedrals were constructed, versus open-source development in which just about anyone can get involved if they want, and that development is closer to the typical bazaars where anyone can walk up and put up a booth to sell rugs. It is this paper that was basically the cause of Netscape deciding to open-source its browser.

You are new here?

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar /cathedral-bazaar/

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar /
Written by Eric Raymond about the differences between open and closed source, pretty much.

Hot geeky girls, on the other hand, are much more elusive. A geek in a small town could easily go his whole life without meeting a HGG. As a student at a large public university, I've met 0 hot, seriously-geeky girls and a few hot, sorta-geeky girls.

That's because they are hiding from you. Quite apart from the fact that they are geeks in the first place which tends to lead to a reclusive lifestyle, especially in college (they're studying!), anyone who knows they will basically cease to exist as a person and become an instant target for horndoggery the minute you find out something about them is likely to hide these things to a certain extent. The fact geeks tend to be shy does not help. Rinse and repeat this a few times and it's a wonder that someone hasn't created a secret bunker only accessable through obscure mathematical codes where women can evade such depredations. Then again maybe they did.

I was looking for, and have once again found, the HOWTO that talks about the problems women have with the men who hound them from the fields they might have trod, and how to prevent yourself from being one of those guys. If you really want to "score" a "geek chick," the first step, I would think, is to stop treating them the way men usually do (especially maladjusted ones). Some people also enjoy ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks, but you aren't old enough to read that until you've finished the other and done penance to linuxchix.org for your many failings :D.

Shotgun Debugging: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/shotgun-debuggi ng.html . Sadly, I've seen it too often for comfort.

Because it's a toy supercomputer. If I find a way to expand its IO, I'll have a $600 supercomputer, scalable into a supercomputer cluster.

If I listen to you, Anonymous defeatist Coward, and just cry "waaaahhh, I'm too dumb to hack a toy into a tool", then I'll just have a really cool toy.

Allow me to introduce you to the term hack, which is what Slashdotters used to do before we were mostly posers.

Because it's a toy supercomputer. If I find a way to expand its IO, I'll have a $600 supercomputer, scalable into a supercomputer cluster.

If I listen to you, Anonymous defeatist Coward, and just cry "waaaahhh, I'm too dumb to hack a toy into a tool", then I'll just have a really cool toy.

Allow me to introduce you to the term hack, which is what Slashdotters used to do before we were mostly posers.

Meh, it's been documented before. I'd be more interested in other known-geek activities (I'm not much of a D&D geek). For example, martial arts -- it's been mentioned before in in the jargon file, and (IME) has a higher correlation than even D&D.

When I joined the dojo here, one of the instructors asked me what I did. After having explained it to several others there (who had turned out to be hackers), I naturally started to explain my job in computer science terms. This was the one guy there who wasn't a hacker (oops), so he stopped me, saying "Wait, computer stuff? Just say computer stuff. OK".

They have nothing to gain from such a bias, and everything to lose.

From who? Anyone who calls them on it is automatically a shill and had their credentials stripped, right? Or else they're a geophysicist and not a climatologist so everything they say is automatically invalidated since they're out of their specialty. Who is going to publish it? Not the media that hypes up disaster left and right for ratings, right?

Well, 100 years ago, we didn't have computers to run the models. So are you really so surprised?

I say tell me what is going to happen in 10 years and you focus on us not having computers 100 years ago. Run the simulation now and tell me what our climate will be in 10 years. I don't care if it takes 20 years to run it as long as no new variables are added, no formulas tweaked, etc (otherwise, that's admitting that the current model is flawed and thus, we don't know what we think we know).

You walk into a room and flip a switch. The lights come on. Once, it's maybe a coincidence. How many times do you have to see the lights go on and off when you flip the switch before you're willing to admit that they're connected? Or do you always have to tear open the walls and see the wiring before you allow yourself to come to a conclusion?

ok... you walk into a room and you flip your switch. What you don't see is that I'm flicking a switch on the other side of the room at the same time you flipped yours. Correlation is not equal to causation. You don't know for sure that your switch was turning the light on and off unless you scientifically experiment with it and then confirm your theory. Eliminate outside factors. Test the continuity of the wires. Pull off the drywall and look at the wiring runs. Bypass the switch and supply a direct voltage to the wires. If you don't, sooner or later, you're going to be made a fool for not realizing it was the other switch that was doing it.

Also, see the MIT magic switch story.

The ice core data is like flipping the switch for 650,000 years. And it's not so surprising that the temperature increases predate the CO2 increases - the temp increases (probably due to solar cycles and changes in the Earth's inclination) stimulate the release of CO2 gas, which drives the warming higher, beyond the forcing from the insolation. Like in a candle, the way the heat of the flame is needed to melt the wax for combustion.

I noticed you pretty much ignored about the correlation pointing the other way... that it is the increased temperature which increases CO2. In fact, increased temperature would also increase methane and water vapor. Also, just because something works the way you expect it to in a laboratory doesn't mean that is how it works in the real world when you have unknown factors at play and a massively larger scale. A single threaded app might work great on a single core computer but when you try distributing it across a 128 node system, you wouldn't get the performance you expected from your smaller experiment.

It's not exactly clear to me how you expect me to show you accurate predictions of the future before the future has happened.

See... it is called a prediction. That means that you take your knowledge and guess what is going to happen based on your knowledge. I will predict that the sun will come up tomorrow and give myself a margin of error of 0.0001%. Chances are pretty good that I'm right. We'll see when tomorrow comes. Now, give me one scientist who can tell us what the climate will be like in 10 years based on the knowledge he has today. As I said before, even if it takes 20 years to compute, that's fine as long as nothing is tweaked as we go... if it can't predict it without being tweaked, well, the model is simply wrong. That also ties in with this:

What we can do is "predict" the past; that is, deter

...it'd probably have one of these; I've already ran out of windows+* shortcuts to assign.

I've been ignoring ESR since I first saw this. (Warning: Knowledge of that particular writing will scar the psyche, go here to detox)

Either way, it never hurts to feed the NSA line eater.

If they'd bothered to wrap a proper container around mp3 to begin with, adding tags would be a lot easier and junk like the Xing header wouldn't be necessary. It doesn't help that ID3v2 is a prime example of the second-system effect. If a bit more foresight was taken when mp3 was pushed out the door, I expect it'd be a much better format than it is now.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnati on.html

Here spins the Wheel Of Reincarnation http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-re incarnation.html watch how everything comes back and then goes away again and then comes back . . .

Imminent Death of the Net Predicted!

• People who are keen to try stuff early can do so
• The costs of development of a game will be reduced (and hopefully the sales price too)
• The risks of developing a game will be reduced (since you'll know earlier whether the game is viable)
• Game quality will simply become better! Customer feedback will play a bigger part in shaping the game from much earlier on.
• More development shops will open as the hurdle to entry lowers
• Games which are fundamentally shit will be canned earlier
• More risk can be taken by trying something different if you're only going to invest 3 months of dev time rather than 3 years! Plus you get immediate customer feedback so you can quickly find out whether your new idea is brilliant or a dog.

I try to see both sides of the FLOSS-coin. If you want to define Open Source, you'll have to start at the source of that term. ESR, as we know, is the main proponent, with people like Bruce Perens and Linus who hopped on at the start. He is one of the people behind OSI, and the OSI definition is as close as you'll get to a formal definition of "open source". A few lines that Linus once said aren't enough as a formal definition. And by this definition and comparing this with (for example) the DFSG, what is Open Source is Free Software. SugarCRM is neither.

The Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2. Linus' opinion on the hoops Tivo has set up for it's users is irrelevant, IMHO. According to the GPLv2, users are allowed to use the Tivo-modified kernel source in exactly the same way as the vanilla source. What Tivo allows its users to do isn't relevant to Linus because Tivo adheres to the GPLv2. The question then becomes: even if he didn't agree with Tivo, does it matter? He wouldn't be able to do anything about it, because the GPLv2 doesn't state anything about the openness (or freeness) of the device the free software is running on. Ergo, even if Linus was a FS-proponent, he wouldn't have been able to do a thing about it.

The point I'm trying to make, is that the statement of OSS ?= FS depends both on what you are comparing and your definition of OSS and FS! If you simply look at the law, the rights in both definitions, then they are equal (if they are not, feel free to put me on track). If you look at the philosophy, they emphasize different rights. Saying OSS != FS is just as misinformed as saying OSS == FS (and note I didn't state the latter). It's a matter of what you are comparing, rights or philosophy.

Now having said this, I find both terms to be vague and ambiguous so I tend to FLOSS myself. But I must admit that I write code to reach a technical goal and not a philosophical one, and am perfectly happy with the GPLv2 license. Once the GPLv3 has been tested in court I'll try to wrap my misinformed head around it. In the mean time, my answer to OSS ?= FS is simple: Mu. The question needs to be unasked.

I'll listen to him for this, if nothing more.

Best thing around. "Tell me how to do X!" Give 'em the link, and they either realize that they've been assholes, apologize, and try again, or they storm off in a huff and never come back. Both are good.

Given what ESR has written, I've never been able to understand why he uses the more canned/"user friendly," distributions. I would have expected him to use something a lot more old school, like Slackware or LFS with pkgsrc.

As for Alan Cox, he's the kernel team's resident GNU troll...he was pestering Linus for a while on kerneltrap about migrating the kernel to version 3 of the GPL. Raymond has his ideosyncracies, but being Stallman's bitch and aggressively advocating that the rest of us become the same isn't one of them.

Raymond is a fairly extreme narcissist, with some political ideas that I definitely do not agree with, but at the same time I have an enormous amount of respect for his writings where software is concerned. If you've never read this before, you might want to go and check it out...it's an awesome book IMHO.

People are probably going to call me a hypocrite for the above, given the amount of time I devote here to trashing Stallman...but one of the biggest differences between the two men is that I've never seen Raymond display the attitude, "This is how you must think," the way Stallman does. He writes what he does, but then it's entirely up to us as to whether we want to accept it or not. In the book I linked above, he actually lists reasons for ignoring him.

I'm also aware that people who worship Stallman consider Raymond a moral sellout...but that's part of the whole point. Raymond's position is about advocating that people should be able to be self-determining; Stallman's is creating a rigid moral code and then vitriolically condemning people when they don't follow it. I know which I prefer...and which I consider to be more about genuine freedom.

ESR really likes to rewrite history with his jargon file. The one that galls me the most is his claim that he coined the term "open source". He provides a specific date of March 1998. This claim is easily refuted by a Google groups search limited to all posts from before 1998. The earliest relevant hit is from 1993.

Changed the statement in the jargon file that most hackers tend to be somewhat libertarian, which is probably true, whether you agree with that philosophy or not, to read that most hackers are Neoconservative, which is demonstrably false...

Formerly vaguely liberal-moderate, more recently moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism). There is a strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both paleoconservatism and 'hard' leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.

> * Regularly sends "open letters", ostensibly to some party he disagrees with, but really to the public.

Perhaps you're unaware of what "open letter" means? But yes, he writes a fair number of rants disguised as "open letters".

> * His obnoxious "travel rules" -- http://www.catb.org/~esr/travelrules.html

I don't think demanding business class is exhorbitant, which is all he wants for speaking engagements. Yikes, I just looked at that -- he really expanded the hell out of it with minutae. Objection retracted.

I used to think highly of him, but now I see him as an overall embarrassment that far outstrips RMS's worst behaviors. The guy's a complete narcissist. That's all.

Same thing I posted to LWN yesterday --

  ESR seems to be very unprofessional and childish. Examples:

* Regularly sends "open letters", ostensibly to some party he disagrees with, but really to the public. These should either be privately directed to the intended party, or should be addressed to the public.

* Sends this drive-by flame about how he is switching to Ubuntu, without mentioning his financial relationships with Linspire, and by extension, Canonical.

* Makes a speech about how Linux should have nonfree codecs WITHOUT disclosing his financial relationship with a distro that specializes in that. It comes out some time later.

* Made up that stupid story about how Bill Gates insulted him at a conference once, and told it to lots of reporters.

* Threatens people with physical/gun violence (like Bruce Perens), thus hurting the cause of gun rights which he seems to care about.

* His obnoxious "travel rules" -- http://www.catb.org/~esr/travelrules.html

* Claims to speak for everyone in "his movement". Uses "we" a lot when making claims.

* Changed the statement in the jargon file that most hackers tend to be somewhat libertarian, which is probably true, whether you agree with that philosophy or not, to read that most hackers are Neoconservative, which is demonstrably false, again whether or not you agree with that philosophy. He did this because he HIMSELF had become a neoconservative and warblogger.

'the Linux world can replace that code with something else that is not infringing'

I think he realises they claims that OSS violates MS Intelluctual Property are void. Else why are they going about reinventing open protocols. According to the Halloween documents one way of deny OSS projects entry into the market is to de-commoditize protocols & applications.

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

So, here we go into the 64bit market.

Anyone have details on Microsofts 64bit offerings? I've never kept up on it.

I hereby declare March 2007 the March that never ended, in spirit of September that never ended.

I think Linus's point was that certain GNOME developers refuse features not because they're too hard to do but because UI is some cathedral that requires perfection. Take the first question in the FAQ from the metacity README : "Will you add my feature?"

The guy basically says "Only if everyone would like it to be there." And lets take the article linked to after that explanation: http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html The contradiction of "Not enough UI designers" and "Too many cooks" might not be obvious, especially if you feel that designers aren't programmers. But open source software doesn't make that distinction. I actually find it nice in this regard: it avoids situations in which some volunteers tell other volunteers what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. There's a fairly recent parable of the mice and the bell. It can easy to propose and vote that something should be done, but sometimes doing it is another thing. Open source projects focused on patch sets eliminate this.

GNOME is not a platform for programmers. GNOME developers should not be surprised then, when programmers notice this and either avoid it or complain in some fashion.

Everything old is new again. Something similar happened years ago with Eric Raymond and CUPS, where Eric pointed out a clear set of flaws in the CUPS configuration tools in http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html , "The Luxury of Ignorance". And his suggestions have been completely ignored.

You have some good points: I've found a lot of KDE "configurability" to be a lot feature-filled, unnecessary crap on top of tools that don't do the basic work, and Gnome tools to be lighter and cleaner to run. Flexibility is good: features are good: unreliable and inconsistently implemented features that no one but the original developer wants are the bane of user interfaces. I'd actually like to see the patches Linus wrote: does anyone have a pointer or access to them, so we can look at the code instead of articles about the argument?

There's actually a pretty good write-up about this from years ago by Eric Raymond, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html . It's called "The Luxury of Ignorance", and the Gnome "interface nazis" have been much better about avoiding the booby traps of developing options at the expense of usability.

With that in mind, there have been some very good tools out of the KDE world that do use such good standards of usefulness. Konqueror is one of them: it's a very useful tool for SMB, FTP, and WebDAV cutting and pasting and browsiing with a good consistent interface.

Well, there are still a few bugs in the watergates.

I think I've heard of this somewhere before...

Guy L. Steele sketched this amusing commentary on problems in '70s fluidic computing, one episode of the Crunchly saga now entwined with the Jargon File.

Guy L. Steele sketched this amusing commentary on problems in '70s fluidic computing, one episode of the Crunchly saga now entwined with the Jargon File.

Coincidentally, I was just re-reading ESR's The Magic Cauldron. He analyzes several open source models as profitable business models and specifically discusses when open sourcing code makes more money that closed source.

As he points out (perhaps in one of this other essays) There are a lot of OSS types who just plain think it's better, not just (or not even) more morally correct.

From my perspective, that the "Johnnie-come-latelys" are all trying to "jump on the bandwagon" means someone has figured out not that open source is socially better or more altruistic or better in the long run, but that it's just better.

> Microsoft manufactured OSes for PCs, not mainframes

Oh, so we chose the wrong market, is that it? It's interesting how Microsoft's disadvantages were by choice, but Linux's were just luck.

> If, the part that renders the GUI is not well writen,
> it will cause crashes.

But regardless of how well it is written, the part that renders the GUI is not the GUI.

> But if I want the Vista GUI, I will have to buy Vista,
> so there is a price.

It's still not part of the GUI. I keep asking you what's important in a GUI, and you keep dodging the question.

> An empirical fact from a Microsoft employee.

A fact is a fact. It doesn't matter where you get it, it's still a fact.

> Why? Don't you want to know?

It's not that I don't want to know. It's that the subtleties don't matter. Joe User doesn't give a tin shit in a wicker basket whether the thread scheduler uses a more efficient context switching algorithm. Sure, that's nice, and I'd love to see the performance difference - but I'm not going to do it with normal use. I'm going to do it with a throwaway driver that spawns hundreds of thousands of threads and monitors system load. But that's because I'm a GEEK, and I think this stuff is FUN. I am not and will never pretend to be a normal user.

> First, I remind you that OSX and XGL preceded
> Vista.

Not really. Microsoft blathers endlessly about what we're doing. We understand that if you try to build it yourself and shove it on the market first, it will suck anyway, because you weren't smart enough to think of it yourself - so you're not going to be smart enough to build it yourself, either. We learned this from the open source community.

You're still doing the same things in the same ways and getting the same results. That's why I need to read the changelog to see what you did over the last two years.

> Second, XGL uses system resources way more efficiently.

Volume shadow copy lets you recover previous versions of documents you've changed.

So when your boss says "rewrite this whole presentation" and then comes back just after you save it and says "hey, get me the old presentation", you right-click and select "Restore Previous Versions", then pick the one you want.

That saves your ass way more efficiently.

Oh, but system resources are important, too. Just not to the boss.

``Java (the language)is far too purely object oriented to be as specialist-efficient as some of the less object-oriented languages''

You probably mean "bondage and discipline" or "verbose", rather than "object-oriented". Object orientation is more pervasive in Ruby than it is in Java, and yet, Ruby allows for things to be coded up more efficiently than does Java.

Also, a general-purpose language does not necessarily lose out against a domain-specific language when it comes to efficiency of development. The key question is whether the language is flexible enough to be adapted to the domain. Java has a lot of things cast in stone, and there is some verbosity you just can't get rid of in Java, so Java falls short here. By contrast, Common Lisp, and also Perl, allow pretty much any part of the language to be modified by libraries/modules/whatever they're called, making these languages adaptable to any domain.

Uh, no, that's not what I was saying.

There are certainly legitimate arguments for staying on Windows. I could think of half a dozen: hardware support, backwards-compatibility with existing applications, user retraining / changeover costs, ease of procuring knowledgeable staff, lack of feature parity, ease-of-use at certain tasks ... those are all rational, quantifiable arguments, probably each valid in a different case.

However, there are a not-insignificant number of people, particularly management-types, who have already decided to stay with Windows, and then back up the decision with as many justifications as are necessary, creating new ones as old ones are found to be false. This isn't a particularly controversial statement -- people do this all the time. There's probably even some nice psychological term for it, which I can't remember at the moment. But at any rate, people constantly to make irrational decisions, and then will create seemingly rational justifications for them after the fact. It's not unique to computers, or even business.

My point is basically that it's important to separate these two categories of objections -- real objections that are actually prohibiting a would-be switcher from leaving Microsoft, and sham arguments that are simply covering a decision that's already been made for other reasons (rational or irrational) -- because the second are just a sink for time and effort, and worst of all, lead software development in the wrong direction. You can argue all day with someone in the latter category, and never make headway, because the crux of their objection is that 'Linux isn't Windows.' So it's better not to even try, if it seems that they've already made up their mind and are just looking for external confirmation.

Hardware compatibility and feature parity are real problems, and their lack leads to tangible, rational objections. Those are things that need to be dealt with. (And in fact, ESR cites hardware and features, media codecs in particular, as the two most pressing problems with Linux today, and who am I to disagree?)

The key problem is just in sounding out whether a person's stated objections to Linux are real and rational, or just covers for a decision already made for other reasons. Attempting to please people in the second group is dangerous, because ultimately what they want isn't Linux at all, but Windows (just, usually, for free); trying to turn Linux (or any other OS) into something it's not, ultimately weakens it as a distinct product, and diverts attention both from areas that actually use improvement, and from areas which are already at par, and could be made superior and into selling points themselves.

I saw esr's World Comination 201 this evening, and esr says that Linspire has a license to Windows Media Player 10's codecs as a result of the Lindows/Linspire lawsuits. That's in CNR and would probably be free-as-in-beer for any user of CNR.

It doesn't mean that Synaptic will disappear. Just that playing foreign media files should become easier.

I'd read a paper a while back that spoke of the need to provide legal and simple codec plugins for linux. The authors had mentioned that Linspire was in the unique position as the only linux distro with legal right to use wmf.

The paper was Here
The portion about Linspire was towards the bottom.

To the authors: Congratulations and thank you for tackling one of the large hurdles preventing mainstream adoption.

Please review what UNIX is... http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix.html

That defines what UNIX(tm) is, but not what Unix is. Please realize the difference:

So in other words, UNIX is a trademark, while Unix is a style of operating system. And Linux is Unix. So is UNIX. So is *BSD.

As for databases, I think SQL Server isn't that bad but for very large deployments there are a few other options that make more sense. Most people don't need Oracle, SQL Server or DB2. MySQL or Postgresql are adequate. You can get them to run on almost anything.

If SQL Server is the answer, it must have been a stupid question. Not because there is actually anything wrong with mssql itself, but because it only runs on Windows :P

Seriously though, MySQL and Postgresql are missing some features and do not scale as well as all of the alternatives. Luckily you can run DB2 or Oracle on Linux as well.

The first person who figures out how to make a SQL server that clusters, automatically replicates, and blah blah blah to make a cluster perform and behave in most cases as well as a monolithic database server is going to be a hero to all. Of course it won't fit all types of data. But right now that's a horribly hard problem and one of the applications really keeping big iron going.