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When I write something that I want people to see, I put it on the web somewhere under a Creative Commons license.

I don't do that only out of namby-pamby group-hug altruism. I do it also to maximize exposure, in the (probably fruitless) hope that someone will see my work and pay me to help them with something. It feels good when someone links back, or gives kudos, too. And when a piece gets picked up, I have a sense of accomplishment even if I don't have a sense of cash in my pocket for it. Would I otherwize, without the CC?

It's a new economy in a new medium, and the ways of working from the old media need to be adjusted. The CC is one such adjustment.

The days of the paid columnist are probably numbered. In our future, I am afraid, are the increasingly frantic shots from Senior Tour players trying to prove they still belong in the game.

(Sorry for the golf reference - I'm not a golfer, but it seemed to fit)

Oh, man, I'm sorry. You were well on your way to the hallowed 2-year mark, too.

What strikes me about your anecdote is your comment "Universes collide!". I was trained on Big Iron, IBM and Amdahl mainframes in the early 80's. Those things only went down when they were replaced.

Before 4BSD, ca 1980, Unix had MTBF of less than a day. Gradually, things got better, until by the late 80's Unix had real uptime ability. Unfortunately, at about that time the Unix Wars were in full swing, but that's a different story.

Windows suffers from two problems: its history as a single-user OS and its utter dominance of that category for so long. The mindset that accepts rebooting the OS as a matter of course, and even the amazing "best practice" recommendation to reboot on a regular basis, ultimately stem from its history.

But you knew all of that.

Here is a more complete searchable timeline.

I've been working recently on a language I call 'verbal'. My goal initially was a language I could use in the car, while driving. (I love to code.)

I realized that such a language would be useful for blind people and anyone who couldn't type.

The target is a language that will mimic a subset of English, so that a program might be:

Let number be seven.
While number is greater than zero, do
print number;
number is number minus one;
done.

I've written a compiler that translates that kind of thing into C, but I'm not releasing it just yet. It only has the type int, and no functions or objects. As soon as it can handle objects, I'll post it quietly.

(I got stuck for a day doing an elegant itoa.c, but that's done now. All I needed it for was to generate good labels for constants on the symbol table, and sprintf didn't fit right. Of course I found a slightly simpler one after I got it done.)

• "Tell them that we're returning to our roots," Schwartz said, referring to the company's renewed focus on the Solaris operating environment.

Does that mean they're going back to BSD? Oh, I see: Motorola hardware.

• "And we want developers back on our side. If there's more for us to do, we'll go do it," McNealy added. ...

How about solving the chick problem! We really could use some help on that one.

3BSD didn't even have virtual memory. See a timeline.

You mean the timeline that says "3BSD is 32-bit port of 2BSD w/virtual memory and C shell" (although it really was a derivative of UNIX/32V with VM and the 2BSD changes - i.e., Berkeley didn't independently port 2BSD to the VAX, they built on AT&T's VAX port and added demand-paged VM).

I think NeXT never made it out of the 3.x series in terms of BSD capabilities.

No, it was certainly 4BSD. It may have been 4.2, though. 3BSD didn't even have virtual memory. See a timeline.

They weren't real good about updating the OS, though, especially after money got tight. Or maybe it was always tight.

You are either an unfortunate sucker, a subtle humorist, or a pointless troll.

The Internet was not invented by any one person, and it happened without Senator Gore's participation.

Here's a timeline. The script can be slow for some reason (probably related to a recent IP change), so be patient.

The Internet started in 1969, when Gore was a senior at Harvard. He wasn't involved in the ARPANet project. By the time he got to Congress in 1977, it already had over 100 hosts at dozens of sites, and was already showing exponential growth.

Gore supported the technology when he got to Congress, especially in the Senate in the early 90's. Claiming he invented it is just a lie. Claiming he funded its invention is also a lie. Claiming to fund its growth is semantically null; nothing could have stopped it. He was just grandstanding, and doing it so badly it became a joke.

I used to wonder at the blinders-on group think of the hidden source folks. The elaborate unreality of their arguments was a puzzle, until I figured it out. Now I understand; it's all about the dream.

While some might dismiss the article because he is a Linux advocate, that's missing the point. His piece is geared toward Linux advocacy, but avoids the usual rhetoric. I kept looking for the usual Gates bashing, but didn't find any.

What I found instead were hard facts, distilled from public data. He didn't say, "I performed some tests which prove Linux is better." He took the publicly available information, analyzed it, and reported the results.

The response by the Microsoft marketing droids and vassal fudmeisters will be instructive to anyone who really thinks about it. Don't take away their dreams of a gold mine, at least not until they've got a Ferrari just like the guy in the next cube.

I make my living as a Unix sysadmin, to support my hobby as a Real Programmer :-p.

Without shell scripts, I'd be lost.

Shell scripts provide the ability to leverage the work of every well-behaved perl (etc.) script, binary in /bin, and other shell script ever written. While the same can be said for perl scripts (which I happily use or write when needed), with shell scripting this is the intended paradigm.

Scripts are intrinsically open source, even if copyrighted and under a closed license. The techniques are visible, and thus instructive.

Given Unix's design attribute of easy process creation, shell scripting is often the best way for me to handle a task.

See some examples here.

See my RFC on Spam Eradification.

The advantages are

1. Zero overhead for non-spam messages (as compared to what we have now)
2. Disincentive to forward spam, as well as to create it
3. Works within existing RFCs for SMTP, and retains the spirit of the Free Internet.

O'course, there have to be flaws with it, but no one has pointed them out to me yet.

Note: this document is available here.

I believe it's possible to defeat spam on the Internet. It will take some bitter medicine, but I think it would help a lot more than it would hurt.

Anti-spam efforts historically have focused on alleviating symptoms. We've mostly used a "greedy algorithm", trying to limit spam's effects on the local environment, hoping that this will change the global situation. It obviously has not.

Spam is an error condition, and should be treated as such. It should not be ignored, but ruthlessly searched out and debugged. We should not distinguish between hardcore professional criminal spammers, 'legitimate email marketers', unwitting ISPs, or unfortunate virus victims who send spam. All are generating errors, and the problem should be debugged and eradicated.

The optimistic nature of SMTP allows the spam error to occur. Spammers send thousands of messages at a time. No response to a message means to the spammer that the address is viable. A bounce message means the address should be culled from the spammer's list. The protocol design thus assists the spammer in his work.

The method I propose should cause spam to reflect back as close as possible to the sender, while removing the ability to improve his list from response data.

RFC on Spam Reduction

Compliant MTAs must honor an email header "X-Spam-Alert".

The format of the header is

X-Spam-Alert: yourhostname.message-id-you-sent

Spam alerts must be addressed to 'abuse@servername'

On receipt of a message containing a valid "X-Spam-Alert" header, the spam alert may be delivered to 'abuse'. The MTA must then remove all references to the previous alerting site and forward a new spam alert to the next server listed in the headers. If the alert indicates that a spam message originated from this server, the spam alert must be delivered to 'abuse', and the site may also choose to notify the user who apparently sent the original spam message.

On receipt of a message containing an invalid "X-Spam-Alert" header, the MTA can do any of

1. deliver the message to 'abuse'
2. send a standard bounce message
3. silently drop the message.

How Spam Alerts are Generated

Sites have considerable latitude as to their definition of incoming spam. Spam detection must be done by the MTA, and should also be done by individual users (with the help of anti-spam filters). Some mandatory spam indicators are DNS errors (No DNS entry, PTR/A mismatch, etc.). Other techniques for spam detection (e.g., use of blacklists, content pattern matching, invalid sender or recipient address) may be used.

The spam alert must not indicate whether or not a recipient address is valid.

Users with anti-spam filters may generate spam alerts. A user-generated spam alert may arm the spammer with more information, by letting him see which messages are returned with spam alerts and how.

Sites may set limits on the number of spam alerts they will send.