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I'm all for fining the company who's product is advertised. $100 per reported spam.

Yes, this would make Joe jobbing so much more fun.

You might wanna have a look at this site..

And I don't usually have bare arms when I bear arms...

Dammit. Preview Button, Preview Button, Preview Button.

The Story of Mel was supposed to be linked.

We sincerely apoligize and those responsible for the error have been sacked.

1. Release Early
2. Release Often
3. Listen to your customers

I think Linus has proven the effectiveness of that one, and Eric S. Raymond happens to agree with me ;)

So they quick bought spyglass, renamed it I.E., knitted it into Windows 98. To get around "bundling" provisions in Anti-Trust law they wrote the browser into the OS as the file manager. This "functionality" is the infection vector used by most viruses. Since you use it to browse your files, as well as the Internet, the software requires far more privileged access to the OS than any Internet-Only browser would require.

File this under Evil and Rude.

> I see your "Turing Complete" and raise you a "Von Neuman Machine". Random use of technical terms are always good for a few mod points.

The term Turing-complete is specific to the taxonomy of computer languages. Just because they didn't cover it when you got your MCSE doesn't mean it is a random term!

Well, he wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which has helped to show people that the open-source model of development is viable. He personally talked with executives at Netscape, who had previously read this paper, and convinced them to open-source their browser product, which we know today as Mozilla and its derivatives.

He also maintains the Jargon File, and as you probably know, he published the Halloween Documents, which give the open-source community a look into Microsoft's "attack plans" so we know what to expect and can respond accordingly.

On a smaller scale, he's also one of the founders of CCIL, a freenet in Chester County, Pennsylvania, USA which provides Internet access to people who live or work in the area. This was my first exposure to the Internet (aside from a few emails to AOL and Compuserve members back when I was using Prodigy) and I still use my account, so I think it's a very worthwhile project.

Well, he wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which has helped to show people that the open-source model of development is viable. He personally talked with executives at Netscape, who had previously read this paper, and convinced them to open-source their browser product, which we know today as Mozilla and its derivatives.

He also maintains the Jargon File, and as you probably know, he published the Halloween Documents, which give the open-source community a look into Microsoft's "attack plans" so we know what to expect and can respond accordingly.

On a smaller scale, he's also one of the founders of CCIL, a freenet in Chester County, Pennsylvania, USA which provides Internet access to people who live or work in the area. This was my first exposure to the Internet (aside from a few emails to AOL and Compuserve members back when I was using Prodigy) and I still use my account, so I think it's a very worthwhile project.

In a similar vein, I would calssify ESR as Chaotic Neutral...Libertarian Gun Nut. Unless, of course, Eric means Eric Allman (or some other member of the Eric Conspiracy)

what has ESR brought to the Open Source community ?

The Jargon File comes to mind. I owe quite a bit of my knowledge of computer history to its print form, the New Hacker's Dictionary.

He also brought us the infamous Aunt Tillie Builds a Kernel lkml thread.

-jim

I hope this is a joke or a provocation...
But if not, i suggest you read some of his work;
You can begin with the reference The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
or if you're too lazy his short chapters in O'Reilly's 'Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution'.

A few things although I agree with you that predicting the future is not his strong point.

Oh, just one more thing: mod parent up!

Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!" And his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry.

That day I was reborn; from a skinny lame kid with a flute into a shaman and a vessel of the Goat-Foot God, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Horned Lord. And the music was my first power, but not my last.

ESR is off the deep end.

how many attoparsecs is that?

How many of those ISPs were caught in pink contracts?

Remember,

• VoIP requires H323 and other setuid scripts, potentially opening your network to crackers.
• The internet was simply never designed for realtime interaction, and post-hoc hacks won't make it realtime: instead the system would probably have to be redesigned from the ground up using realtime-XML.
• VoIP completely bypasses the government's anti-terrorist infrastructure, which depends on intercepting phone calls arbitrarily: it is estimated that each percentage point of calls which are transferred to VoIP will result in 600-800 American deaths per annum through terrorism

Q: When will 1024x768 replace 800x600 for web design?

Helpful links:

• Viewable with Any Browser: Campaign
• The HTML Hell Page

ESR seems to have the best reference to it: Intercal, a language not for the squeemish.

Even if the writer's conclusion is true, it is not so obvious as to justify stating it without argument.

All computer programs may be mapped to integers. ("It has been shown")
The integers are a denumerable set. (basic set theory 101)
The set of all computer programs that generate numbers, is itself a subset of the set of all computer programs. (Duh?)
The subset of any denumerable set is denumerable. (basic set theory 101)
All numbers, generated by computer programs that generate numbers, are memebers of a denumerable set. Trivially, QED.

Now, if you want proof of the premise-- that the set of all computer programs may be mapped to integers-- that's another story. (Hint: use a Turing machine and RTFB.) But the conclusion seems blindingly obvious.

Pick any web developer and ask them whether they have more problems making websites work with IE or making them work with Mozilla. They'll ALL tell you that IE is a pain in the ass and doesn't comply to standards.

You must not have met many web developers. There are plenty of them who believe that IE is the be-all and end-all. If it works in IE but not another browser then that other browser is broken.

Now if you'd said any good web developer, I might agree with you.

Internet Explorer: Proving that Sturgeon's Law is highly optimistic.

Here's a great freeware UNIVAC simulator you can use until you get your own UNIVAC off eBay. MTBF on those babies was somewhere around 10 hours due to the use of vacuum tubes...hopefully your PC running this sim will post somewhat better reliability numbers. :D If you'd like to see some dino-iron in person, a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. This page is full of good information and links. Also, check out this list if you're interested in restorations of other ancient machines such as Crays and Cybers; my favorites are the Royal-McBee LGP 21 and 30 machines, immortalized in the Jargon File mythologies about Real Programmers. Read The Story of Mel and be enlightened (as well as entertained) about how a True Master thinks when dealing with the limitations of old hardware. It's so Zen it will make you clap with one hand.

Here's a great freeware UNIVAC simulator you can use until you get your own UNIVAC off eBay. MTBF on those babies was somewhere around 10 hours due to the use of vacuum tubes...hopefully your PC running this sim will post somewhat better reliability numbers. :D If you'd like to see some dino-iron in person, a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. This page is full of good information and links. Also, check out this list if you're interested in restorations of other ancient machines such as Crays and Cybers; my favorites are the Royal-McBee LGP 21 and 30 machines, immortalized in the Jargon File mythologies about Real Programmers. Read The Story of Mel and be enlightened (as well as entertained) about how a True Master thinks when dealing with the limitations of old hardware. It's so Zen it will make you clap with one hand.

Besides 42, some other special numbers are listed on this page: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/R/random-numb ers.html. But there is no 53 there...

More juice? Why not say more wirewater?

The GNU General Public License (GPL) was written years before there was an "open source" movement. Linking together the open source movement with the GPL misstates history and authorship. The language used in the GPL and the freedoms it talks about are not part of the philosophy of the open source movement, they are part of the free software movement which created the free software community we still enjoy today 20 years later. The real author of the GPL is the FSF (most notably, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen). In a post to the GCC mailing list responding to someone who wanted to help the "open source community", RMS said

Open source advocates do contribute to our community, when they work on free software packages, but our community is older than that movement, and owes its existence to the idealism that movement rejects. It was built by the free software movement, so it is the free software community. If you help us, please keep in mind that what you're helping is the free software movement.

ESR would similarly miscredit the open source movement when he referred to a number of programs as "open-source" projects even though they were written before that movement existed:

[...] Many other open-source projects of the order of complexity of the early Linux kernel predated it; the BSD Unixes, for example, or the Emacs editor. [...]

Maybe the authors of the various BSD OSes and the authors of the Linux kernal don't mind being lumped in with that movement, but ESR also includes Emacs which was co-written by RMS, founder of the free software movement. Emacs was most certainly not written with the open source movement in mind nor to benefit those ideals. Emacs was written to benefit the free software movement. RMS has repeatedly stated how he does not want to be lumped in with the open source movement. The FSF provides a concise and informative description of the differences between the two movements which includes RMS asking the reader to know enough about the movements to distinguish between their philosophies.

So what did the open source movement do? The Open Source Initiative placed the GPL on a list of approved licenses. Open source advocates have contributed to practical projects and endorsed the GPL. I'm sure the free software advocates have no issue with endorsing the GPL and increasing its use. But the reason this license protects ones freedoms to share and modify software so well is not due to anything anyone at the OSI or the open source movement has done. Thus it is not fair for that movement to receive credit for the GPL.

Several books I have sitting on the shelf over my monitors - that I occaisionally peek into:

Sparc Architecture, Assembly Language Programming & C - Paul - Prentice Hall

Using Assembly Language 2nd Edition - Wyatt - QUE programming series

Turbo Assembler 3.0 - User Guide - Borland

Mastering Turbo Assembler - Swan - Hayden Books

Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC - Revised and Expanded - Norton & Socha - Prentice Hall

Ahhh - reminds me of the good old days! Back when Real Programmers roamed the Earth...

Yeah, 'cuz everyone knows only people who live in trailers own guns.

Oh wait, Linus likes to shoot. (Third line from the bottom.)

Depends what platform and browser you use. Beanie-W, problem go bye-bye.

But definitely don't try it on Windows/IE.

Countermeasures designed to incapacitate (or kill) the intruder. Think Indiana Jones movies.

Their answer was to knit it as tightly into the operating system as possible. The Jargon's dictionary would file the move under Evil and Rude.

In accordance with Godwins Law, i hereby declare this thread over.

Don't panic! A 'hacker' is different from a 'cracker'!

They didn't invent PCI-X or PCI-Express or whatever but that's irrelevant. If they're even using one or the other now (in the G5 pictures it looked more like 64 bit PCI) then they're the first people to do so in a big way, or more to the point to standardize on it.

It seems they're also going to hobby OS developers as part of their "research". Probably trying to find out if it is credible that someone could build an operating system by themselves, or something.
The name Justin Orndorff also appears in the ESR response.

That's great, and CPython (the C implementation of Python -- as opposed to Jython) can directly call C modules like Python modules. Optimize your modules in C that need the speed, write everythong else in Python.

see: http://docs.python.org/ext/intro.html for more on that.

On windows you can access COM components from Python.

By the way, did you know that Python is really OO with multiple inheritance (diamond-style class traversing added recently) and has hundreds of built-in libraries?

ultimately, stay with the UNIX philosophy. more here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s 06.html

They probably forgot to flip the switch back to "More Magic".

The ONLY thing which is outright impossible is One Time Pad

Well, yes, which is the point: Quantum encryption is a one time pad, furthermore with absolutely guaranteed security in pad generation and distribution. There are several possible non-algorithmic weaknesses to an ordinary one-time pad:
* Alice must make a truly random pad.
* The pad must not be intercepted and copied by Eve when Alice attempts to securely send it to Bob.
* The pad must NEVER be reused.

The laws of quantum mechanics insure that the QE pad is random and non-reusable, and that any interception of a QE message precludes the message from being transmitted, while alerting Alice and Bob to Eve's presence.

it's not truly practical, unless...

EXACTLY! It's that "unless" that some people are worried about. Some secrets need to be kept secure against even 50 years or more of advancing technology. Quantum encryption seems to be the trump card, taking code breaking that final step from the impractical to the impossible. The only attack remaining is interception of the plain text that exists at either end-- a weakness of all encryption methods that do not use Write-Only Memory storage. =)

ESR has something to say about free hardware.

Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence.

Hate to break it to you, bub! It's a piece of jargon that's been documented at least since 1994.

ESR has a Continuity Page for his projects.

Don't get me wrong. I think Brazil is a beautiful and wonderful place. And in general Brazilians are very kind, intellegent people. I purposefully used Brazil as an innocent target in my posting to show how wrong China's expansionism is.

As for CNN and the rest of the American media, I'd like to think that nobody takes them too seriously. But I am probably being over optimistic.

We have recall elections in the US to recall elected officials who the people decide are doing a bad job. Although it's not on a national level, and not all states have recall elections. (this is how Arnold Schwarzenegger became governer of California. This is a push to apply recall elections to all levels of government. But there is also a push from the other end to eliminate all recalls.

Also America didn't destroy Iraq, someone called Saddam did that. If the UN didn't pussyfoot around with Iraq for 10+ years maybe there could have been peaceful reforms.

Hopefully President Bush has the balls to go after N. Korea the way he is cleaning up Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm pretty sick of countries with unjust rulers, as is the rest of America. The 9/11 tragedy woke most Americans up. We used to be world famous as a people who buried our heads in the sand and didn't know or care about what happened beyond our own borders. Now that we're realizing what's going on, the international community is condemning us. Apparently we can't win for losing.

If you have a solution to the problems of corrupt governments. Please, share with us. I will certainly send letters to all my representives telling them of the idea. Of course the idea has to be something that wasn't tried repeatly for 10 years with no results.

Military forces are costly, but effective means of triggering change. A would very much like to hear a better and cheaper way of doing this.

Why We Fight -- An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto

Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

1. Have her read ESR's How to Become a Hacker.

2. After that, start her on Learning to Program.

3. From there you can cover a little review material as well as some more advanced topics in Dive Into Python.

I made the mistake of leaving "Learning Perl" and "Learn to Program in C in 21 Days" lying around the house. My wife read them and understood them for the most part, but she's not exactly whipping out kernel modules. The track mentioned above is definitely better for, as you put it, a "terrified adult".

fuck you, you fucking fuck.
Why do you lie? If you're going to quote something that changes regularly, at least have the courtesy to quote the current version. Better yet, look at the current version (4.4.7 as of 31 May 2004) before mouthing off.

fuck you, you fucking fuck.
Why do you lie? If you're going to quote something that changes regularly, at least have the courtesy to quote the current version. Better yet, look at the current version (4.4.7 as of 31 May 2004) before mouthing off.

(Check out this cool little ROT13 program written in INTERCAL)

Goddamn right. "I resemble that remark" too. About time we got credit where credit is due; we need more libertarian nutcases in this world! Like my hero esr, the gun-carrying geek!

I'm sorry to inform, but your slashdot account will be suspended until you have read what ESR has to say about Open Source security on this paper: The Case of the Quake Cheats