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Just an off-topic shout-out to the memory of Phil Katz, designer of the zip file format and related compression routines, now found everywhere in the industry. Phil died in 2000 as a result of alcoholism/depression.

Sidenote: He would have made a great /.'er... He hated Windows.

Katz Obit
Katz Remembrance

Just an off-topic shout-out to the memory of Phil Katz, designer of the zip file format and related compression routines, now found everywhere in the industry. Phil died in 2000 as a result of alcoholism/depression.

Sidenote: He would have made a great /.'er... He hated Windows.

Katz Obit
Katz Remembrance

Gary Kildall eventually died in a bar, but many (including myself) would say that Bill Gates drove Kildall toward suicidal drinking, which lead to him being killed in a bar with other drunks.

By contrast, Kildall did not even get the fame, i.e. the recognition that he deserved. Ask any Windows/MS-DOS user who Kildall is, and she will scratch her head with ignorance. If I were in Kildall's shoes, I would have been bitter every day of my life and would have probably committed suicide too.

Here's the rest of the story.

Rather than a 1/4 mile horizontal drag race, make it ia 1 mile vertical drag race with total flight staying within the limits of Class E airspace, preferably below 14,500 ft.

Start with the Rocket Guy's 15,000 ft flight as a standard and do exhibitions involving dual launches of these vehicles. Grandstands must of course be at a safe distance but you don't need to be too close to something like this for the thrill of your life. There's a lot more energy being released in these drags than a typical 1/4 mile drag of course, and a lot higher likelihood of fatalities to the "drivers" but if you move it out to a remote area you can have some serious fun while developing the flight systems needed to carry men to orbit.

I like the X-Prize and all but really there needs to be some serious motor-head madness here with the motor babes and all.

A side benefit of this sort of competition is we get to find out if the spam in a can idea of manned rocketry is actually superior to human guidance. We all know someone will just have to attempt human guided rockets.

It should be noted that Mr. P.K. had some murky IP issues of his own. Basically he did some assembly level editing & optimizing of Thom Henderson's .ARC format and released it as his own, which grew to be .ZIP..
He basically stole it.

http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html


Any karma really belongs to the person who posted this last time it came up on slashdot, but I thought this should be mentioned at +2.

Except that they started out in hell, because their founder ripped off Thom Henderson's ARC to make his original program.

Back in the BBS days, we were all rallied to support good ol' Phil against the evil Big Company, System Enhancement Associates, who was suing to keep Phil's faster PKARC from eating the original ARC program's lunch. BBS sysops were encouraged to boycott ARC. It worked. It ruined System Enhancement Associates.

Except the funny thing is, SEA was right. They won the lawsuit because Katz hadn't just reimplemented ARC, he stole their source code. That always gets left out of the retelling, even though the reason ZIP exists as a format is because Katz was ultimately prevented from using the ARC format and compression routine. The reality is also that even then, PKWare was a bigger company than SEA ever was. ARC was a commercial program, but had a very unusual license (for the time) allowing people free access to the source code if they wanted to port it to non-DOS platforms. Katz baldly abused this license and, in the end, got away with it. ZIP did end up with an improved compression scheme which I presume PKWare came up with, although there's some evidence that the all-but-ignored ARC 7 outperformed it. (PKARC was, IIRC, based on ARC 5.)

Ben Baker has a description of the history of this whole affair at the website of Thom Henderson (ARC's author). Henderson also has his own commentary, which I would describe as "gently acid."

Can't innovate anymore? How about can't innovate to start with? Phil Katz took an open-source program, copied it wholesale, rewrote some stuff in assembler, and ignored the original author's license entirely.

Slightly more depressing was Thom Henderson's dance on his grave.

Thom Henderson, author of ARC, principal of SEA

Lest you wonder why SEA lost the market. Can you imagine something with less class? Wouldn't 'keeping your mouth shut' and letting Katz's awful life speak for itself be more rewarding?

Apparently not.

Some folks have asked me what I know about Jon Katz. It occurs to me
that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who
have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I
know about Jon Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The
dates could be off a bit. I also have a copy of Ben Baker's take on the whole deal, which goes into a lot more detail.

In 1985 I wrote a program called ARC. It became very popular with the
operators of electronic bulletin boards, which was what the online world
consisted of in those pre-Internet days. A big part of ARC's popularity
was because we made the source code available. I know that seems strange
these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source.
Every company that made computers made a completely different computer.
Different architectures, operating systems, languages, everything.
Getting a program written for one computer to work on another was often a
major undertaking.

Then sometime around 1987 or so Jon Katz came out with PKARC, which was
basically my ARC program with the compression/decompression routines
rewritten in assembler, which made it run a lot faster. I have to hand it
to him, he had a real talent for assembly coding.

We approached him about licensing, but he rejected the idea. One thing
led to another, and eventually we sued him. Fortunately his program was
such a blatant copy of mine that we were able to win the lawsuit before we
ran out of money. In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any
suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for
most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime
in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to
PKZIP, and kept right on selling it.

We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in
touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue
for anyway. None of us was getting rich.

So now Jon Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel
room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can
only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting
demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the
original ARC copyright statement:

"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your
conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."

Some folks have asked me what I know about Jon Katz. It occurs to me
that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who
have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I
know about Jon Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The
dates could be off a bit. I also have a copy of Ben Baker's take on the whole deal, which goes into a lot more detail.

In 1985 I wrote a program called ARC. It became very popular with the
operators of electronic bulletin boards, which was what the online world
consisted of in those pre-Internet days. A big part of ARC's popularity
was because we made the source code available. I know that seems strange
these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source.
Every company that made computers made a completely different computer.
Different architectures, operating systems, languages, everything.
Getting a program written for one computer to work on another was often a
major undertaking.

Then sometime around 1987 or so Jon Katz came out with PKARC, which was
basically my ARC program with the compression/decompression routines
rewritten in assembler, which made it run a lot faster. I have to hand it
to him, he had a real talent for assembly coding.

We approached him about licensing, but he rejected the idea. One thing
led to another, and eventually we sued him. Fortunately his program was
such a blatant copy of mine that we were able to win the lawsuit before we
ran out of money. In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any
suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for
most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime
in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to
PKZIP, and kept right on selling it.

We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in
touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue
for anyway. None of us was getting rich.

So now Jon Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel
room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can
only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting
demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the
original ARC copyright statement:

"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your
conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."

Some folks have asked me what I know about Jon Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Jon Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I also have a copy of Ben Baker's take on the whole deal, which goes into a lot more detail.

In 1985 I wrote a program called ARC. It became very popular with the operators of electronic bulletin boards, which was what the online world consisted of in those pre-Internet days. A big part of ARC's popularity was because we made the source code available. I know that seems strange these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source. Every company that made computers made a completely different computer. Different architectures, operating systems, languages, everything. Getting a program written for one computer to work on another was often a major undertaking.

Then sometime around 1987 or so Jon Katz came out with PKARC, which was basically my ARC program with the compression/decompression routines rewritten in assembler, which made it run a lot faster. I have to hand it to him, he had a real talent for assembly coding.

We approached him about licensing, but he rejected the idea. One thing led to another, and eventually we sued him. Fortunately his program was such a blatant copy of mine that we were able to win the lawsuit before we ran out of money. In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it.

We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue for anyway. None of us was getting rich.

So now Jon Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:

"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."

Some folks have asked me what I know about Jon Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Jon Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I also have a copy of Ben Baker's take on the whole deal, which goes into a lot more detail.

In 1985 I wrote a program called ARC. It became very popular with the operators of electronic bulletin boards, which was what the online world consisted of in those pre-Internet days. A big part of ARC's popularity was because we made the source code available. I know that seems strange these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source. Every company that made computers made a completely different computer. Different architectures, operating systems, languages, everything. Getting a program written for one computer to work on another was often a major undertaking.

Then sometime around 1987 or so Jon Katz came out with PKARC, which was basically my ARC program with the compression/decompression routines rewritten in assembler, which made it run a lot faster. I have to hand it to him, he had a real talent for assembly coding.

We approached him about licensing, but he rejected the idea. One thing led to another, and eventually we sued him. Fortunately his program was such a blatant copy of mine that we were able to win the lawsuit before we ran out of money. In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it.

We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue for anyway. None of us was getting rich.

So now Jon Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:

"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."

Some folks have asked me what I know about Jon Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Jon Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I also have a copy of Ben Baker's take on the whole deal, which goes into a lot more detail.

In 1985 I wrote a program called ARC. It became very popular with the operators of electronic bulletin boards, which was what the online world consisted of in those pre-Internet days. A big part of ARC's popularity was because we made the source code available. I know that seems strange these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source. Every company that made computers made a completely different computer. Different architectures, operating systems, languages, everything. Getting a program written for one computer to work on another was often a major undertaking.

Then sometime around 1987 or so Jon Katz came out with PKARC, which was basically my ARC program with the compression/decompression routines rewritten in assembler, which made it run a lot faster. I have to hand it to him, he had a real talent for assembly coding.

We approached him about licensing, but he rejected the idea. One thing led to another, and eventually we sued him. Fortunately his program was such a blatant copy of mine that we were able to win the lawsuit before we ran out of money. In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.

Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it.

We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue for anyway. None of us was getting rich.

So now Jon Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:

"If you fail to abide by the terms of this license, then your conscience will haunt you for the rest of your life."

Ummm, what "hassle"? I've found that it's much more effective to type everything, so that I'll have a record of what commands I executed. Then, if something goes wrong, I can always backtrack to the command and change an incorrect attribute of it.


b.j.m.
reflections of my imagination

So, why not use something as powerful as Objective C? It's fast, extremely flexible, and can be strongly typed.


r e f l e c t i o n s o f m y i m a g i n a t i o n

• Well, the sad but true facts are most admins have been lured into believing that if they start with "something simple like NT", then they will be able to learn how Unix / GNU methodologies work.
• 
  
  Though, what often occurs is that they get sucked into all the awful Microsoft marketing hype, and lose interest in other OS's.
  
  As a former BSDI system admin (who now prefers the title, "Software Engineer"), I have worked with Linux network/system administration tools for almost 5 years and found them to be quite idiot-proof. Then again, such things as their interfaces are built exactly like the way I think. So, maybe we're dealing with lots of "dummies"?!

• All hail this Linux "expert"!! :-) Seriously though, most people think they are so dumbfounded that they need these "wizards" to help them with simple tasks. I've also played around with such wizards, and I often feel like they're taking away all the fun stuff -- you know, the things you should be learning instead of letting a machine do it for you!
• 
  
  Well, maybe we're back to square one: that is, trying to compare apples-to-oranges, hackers-to-computer illiterates, you get the point.

I already see a big mistake (regardless of what you think of Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0):

Under Web-Server Performance Analysis, you'll see that the Linux machine is using Apache vs. the Windows NT box running Internet Information Server (IIS). Why not run the Win32 port of Apache, instead of an entirely different piece of software? How stupid!!

Secondly, if they want to conduct this benchmark with all the most recent software, why are they still using Windows 95 as their client platform? Yet again I say, "How stupid"!!

Does anyone disagree with me?


Brian

Why don't people just get the stupid browser OUT THE DOOR? It's been over a year, and we're still stuck with 4.5 while Microsoft has released a new browser that is _better_ in many people's opinion. Has anyone else noticed that many people say the browser war is over, and Microsoft has won?

...And I quote the famous ketchup, "Good things come to those who wait". Seriously though, it sounds like you have never been involved in a long-term software development project (if I'm wrong, please forgive me...). You see, the Q&A factor is a major phase of any product, including Open Source Software. I'm also guessing you haven't kept abreast of all the excellent ideas coming out of mozilla.org -- well, those ideas will soon become a "shipping version" of my favorite browser....patience, my dear. Patience.


What does it say about the Open Source community that we can't put out a web browser? Instead of doing something _well_, just do it. Because Mozilla is modular, we can plug the net stuff in later.

No, it does not say that the Open Source community cannot put out a decent web browser. It does say that we enjoy some amount of quality over the legacy code (e.g. -- see the latest, Internet Explorer 5.0 or Netscape Communicator 4.51).

As far as modularity goes, what do you mean by "plug the net stuff in later"? Or did you mean to say "neat"?? Regardless of what you really meant to say, one of the basic rules of any good life-cycle is producing a stable product with your inital public release. Remember, Mozilla isn't using most of the old Navigator code anymore....so, what we're really seeing is a totally engine. Once you have this *stable engine*, then you begin to "plug-in" the other stuff!

Hope you understand my points...


B R I A N

Nor most any alternative product (e.g. -- Apache, *BSD, MacOS, etc.), for that matter...

Once again, I've got to agree with you. Most (and I use the term with its full meaning) consultants are quite hip on the "Wintel-way" (or more specifically, Microserf philosophies). Yet, when it comes to any alternative operating system, Open Source Software, or even non-x86 hardware, most so-called consultants are either not up-to-date or completely out of the loop.

And lots of them aren't in it for the "thrill of new technology" (just take a look at a PR video at your local high-tech college), they simply want the money! Sad, isn't it?
Plus, many companies do not give the proper training to analyze any corporate environment and apply the appropriate technology.

As a somewhat recent college student, I know exactly what you mean.