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What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Why is it that you only hear about microkernels and monolithic kernels? I want an exokernel based OS dammit!

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/exo.html

They should hire those kids who automated their dormroom http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/midas.html. It's not like they have anything important to do.

their robot's mouth
http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/sara.html
doesnt have an uncanny resemblance to a blow up doll. and what do you think that robotic arm is used for?

In many other places this may actually be a problem. However, there are a few things you should know about their dorm.

EAsT CamPUS was built early last century and has fairly liberal rules. Students are encouraged to paint their room and hall walls in any way they would like. You will note that the two beds in this room are lofted above their desks. These lofts were built by the students and most students move them from room to room. The items hanging throughout the room are mounted on their lofts and other personal items instead of being mounted to the wall. So, they should have no issue next year.

Not so very MIT like. There are lots of 12 year olds who do a more decent job. The OP was probably meant to be funny...

Not so very MIT like. There are lots of 12 year olds who do a more decent job. The OP was probably meant to be funny...

Is it just me, or is this 10x as complex and imperceptibly better than "hey, lets get a bunch of x10 shit and control our $300 party lights".

The disco dance floor guys did it sooo much better than this gimmick. And they had a girl!

But, as other Algol-variant programming languages begin to get Lisp-y (C# is slated to get Closures, after which Sun will probably end up re-introducing it into Java), I think it would be better to know in advance what others will have to catch up on ;-)

= 9J =

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (first 4 lectures at least): http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-s ussman-lectures/
  
• The Art of Computer Programming: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201485419
  
• Computer Networks: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0130661023/
  
• Object Oriented Software Construction (first 120 pages at least): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0136291554
  
• The Pragmatic Programmer: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/020161622X/
  
• The Psychology of Computer Programming: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0932633420
  

Good suggestion! I would supplement it with the following as well:
1. Episodic Learner Model/An online Lisp tutorial
2. Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
3. How to Design Programs
4. Practical Common Lisp
5a. The book - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
5b. The movies - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
6. Loving Lisp - the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon
7. Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition
8. On Lisp
9. common lisp: a web application tutorial for beginners
10. JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language
11. Free JavaScript Learning Center
12. JavaScript for Scared People
13. JavaScript Closures
14. Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

= 9J =

Good suggestion! I would supplement it with the following as well:
1. Episodic Learner Model/An online Lisp tutorial
2. Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
3. How to Design Programs
4. Practical Common Lisp
5a. The book - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
5b. The movies - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
6. Loving Lisp - the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon
7. Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition
8. On Lisp
9. common lisp: a web application tutorial for beginners
10. JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language
11. Free JavaScript Learning Center
12. JavaScript for Scared People
13. JavaScript Closures
14. Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

= 9J =

Start with the one and only: "structure and interpretation of computer programs" (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/).

Actually, they already did, four years ago at Ye Olde MIT Media Lab. Check out the videos.

What goes on at 77 Mass Ave? (Genuinely curious: 77 Mass Ave in Cambridge is an MIT address, isn't it?)

TinFoil hat's aren;t the best protection, according to some research.

There already is a smaller scale version of Silicon Valley roughly centered on Boston, Massachusetts. The partial circle defined by Route 128 (and to a lesser extent the larger one surrounding it defined by Route 495) has most of the required properties already. Heck, it even has the same elevated levels of Asperger's Syndrome that Silicon Valley has.

I think a bigger point is the number of colleges and universities in the Massachusetts area (like MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, and Boston University, to name just a few). Plus, besides Boston, there are numerous other technologically advanced places in that ring (including Cambridge, Saugus, Waltham, and Billerica, to name just a few). If you do a look-up on the saga of ODF and the history of OASIS and/or GNU you'll find a lot of these places mentioned -- OASIS originated in Massachusetts, the Free Software Foundation is headquartered in Massachusetts, and AFAIK Massachusetts was the first government to sanction a special "Open Source Software Trough" to encourage the usage of open source software within both its own branches as well as its local community governments. It's not clear to me where the weird view that Massachusetts is somehow against free software, open source and information sharing that some are espousing is coming from...

And it looks like the stripped-down version of Fedora will be available from the Red Hat public repository, so we can all benefit from the optimisations.

MIT has another initiative that is trying to address the guide part of this. You should check out MIT's OpenCourseWare. This is another part of this solution that dovetails nicely with the laptop project. It's a website with all the MIT course materials made freely available. They have also received a donation of hard drives to supply mirrors of the site to places like Africa.

Photos have been out for some time, actually.

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

Do you (or anyone) have any suggestions for a book that teaches beginning concepts, as you say?

I'm currently having some fun with the How to Think Like A Computer Scientist series - http://www.canonicalbooks.com/free-ebooks.shtml
I'm reading the Python version right now, and it's pretty easy to follow.

You might also want to take a look at MIT OpenCourseWare - http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html - I'm slowly working through their computer science courses. Emphasis on slowly.

OCW@MIT: Java Preparation
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-092January--IAP--2006/Course Home/index.htm

OCW@MIT: Software Engineering for Web Applications
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-171Fall2003/CourseHome/index .htm

Webcast@Berkeley: With real video and/or MP3 : Data Structures
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?se riesid=1906978271

Web development using XML:
http://cscie153.dce.harvard.edu/

OCW@MIT: Java Preparation
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-092January--IAP--2006/Course Home/index.htm

OCW@MIT: Software Engineering for Web Applications
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-171Fall2003/CourseHome/index .htm

Webcast@Berkeley: With real video and/or MP3 : Data Structures
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?se riesid=1906978271

Web development using XML:
http://cscie153.dce.harvard.edu/

better videos:

Version 4 in eLens - better movie big (58.5mb)
Version 4 in eLens - better movie small (22.3mb)

better videos:

Version 4 in eLens - better movie big (58.5mb)
Version 4 in eLens - better movie small (22.3mb)

its only 'podcasting' in the sense that you're recording audio for others consumption. its much more about the discussions within a community (local physical/social context)....

For more info here's the project website

this was recently used in the elens project, and its video can be found here.

a live demo should be up this weekend

its only 'podcasting' in the sense that you're recording audio for others consumption. its much more about the discussions within a community (local physical/social context)....

For more info here's the project website

this was recently used in the elens project, and its video can be found here.

a live demo should be up this weekend

its only 'podcasting' in the sense that you're recording audio for others consumption. its much more about the discussions within a community (local physical/social context)....

For more info here's the project website

this was recently used in the elens project, and its video can be found here.

a live demo should be up this weekend

A beautiful piece of art: i love my thinkpad even though i know macs are better

What about Exokernels? An optimized webserver running 8 times faster then Apache on Linux? Sounds like preformance to me.

As others have pointed out, IP Multicast is tough to deploy, fragile, and not particularly scalable. What you really want is so-called Application-Level Multicast: distributed construction of p2p multicast trees (or other similar structures) among end hosts, without help from routers. See: Scribe/SplitStream, End System Multicast (ESM), Overcast, etc.

-MIT's Open Courseware at: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

-Textbook revolution at http://textbookrevolution.org/

-Physiscs texts at: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#langua ges

-The assayer at http://www.theassayer.org/

-Open content at http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/Technolo gy/OpenContent/opencontent.htm

I also know a number of econometric and statistics texts that are also available as free Ebooks, but they are of interest only to specialists.

I guess my answer is best given as a quote from some other web site, "First of all, Finnish is currently spoken by a mere .05% of the world's population; secondly one cannot learn the language in ten easy lessons; thirdly, a large number of Finns still do not understand it."

http://www.mit.edu/~tahnan/finnish.html

...That, and so the English speaking world could enjoy the film too. If it's subtitled, might as well just throw it into a PDF story book format.

"Why? Why are online scams so much more successful than offline?"

Dhamija, R., Tygar, J. D., and Hearst, M. 2006. http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~rachna/papers/why_ phishing_works.pdfWhy Phishing Works. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 601-610

Wu, M., Miller, R. C., and Garfinkel, S. L. 2006. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/phishing/ chi-security-toolbar.pdfDo security toolbars actually prevent phishing attacks?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 601-610

No matter how you try to sugar coat it, everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

"It's getting innocent people out of prison and it's putting guilty people away."

Even better, while giving the adversary some additional workout, by using tamper-evident packaging you can easily discern if the given package was opened or not. By statistical processing of a large number of such shipment, and cross-correlating with the age (important for outgassing of the volatile components in the plastics), type, and packaging style of the disc, we may be able to find points of low efficiency in their system. Essentially a reapplication of the Carnival Booth algorithm.

Over in the U.S., yes. Actually that's being charitable--it never got started in the U.S. And I say that as a daily Linux user who could easily wipe Windows off his machine. Windows is entrenched and inertia will keep it going. OS X will have more impact on US desktops than Linux ever could, and even OS X will not deliver some knockout blow.

I'm not so sure about other countries though. There are political reasons why other governments wouldn't want too much riding on the fortunes of a big U.S. software company. We Americans got hooked on expensive proprietary software, but I'm not sure other countries will make the same mistake as they develop. And if initiatives like One Laptop Per Child take off, they probably won't use Windows either.

Furthermore, computing tends to take unforseen turns, even in developed markets like the U.S. People are using new devices to do computing tasks, like cell phones and digital cameras. These gizmos don't use Windows. Neither will the new Play Station.

So no, I don't think we'll ever see a "Linux Desktop Revolution" in the US. The "this will be the year of the Linux desktop" people really just need to give up on that fantasy and focus on something more productive: There are vast new markets out there for computers, and I don't see why MS will necessarily dominate those markets.

What you're talking about is very close to CPS.

There are some ways to convert normal function calls to CPS.

And there is something called monads used to convert imperative algorithms to functional style.

And yes, continuations can be a very powerful technique.

However, CPS functional code is still coding an algorithm. Any way to compute something is an algorithm. May be you should name your critic "I dislike imperative algorithms, and I like CPS functional algorithms."

Probably because Ivy League schools are almost exclusively focused on Accounting, Economics, Business, Law, etc. They're not hard-numbers schools. Our policy makers and politicians and lawyers and fortune-500-scandal-hiding accountants go to Ivy League schools, along with a number of kids from American dynasty families that are still here from the 1800's. Ivy league schools are hard to get into like Country Clubs are hard to get into. You need to be white anglo, rich, and have connections. Academics rarely has anything to do with it.

If you want hard sciences, you go to a school that focuses on hard science. Try sending the same people to MIT, or Cal Tech, or the University of Michigan.

In the same token, if you send your kid to MIT for Piano performance, or Business Management, don't be surprised when that isn't the focus of the school.

~W

Gas pressure isn't the only way to provide the pressure to the human body.

That pressure can also be applied mechanically, by tensioned materials.

Check out the Bio-suit research at MIT.

I happen to be working on a box thats about to get reinstalled so I broke my usually rule of allways monitoring what new software does in a virtual machine first.

On slackware 9.1 I get this

root@obfusticated:~# ./spoofer
>> Spoofing Tester v0.4
>> Rob Beverly
>> More information: http://spoofer.csail.mit.edu/
>>
>> Source 5 non-spoofed packets...
Broken pipe

tracert shows a load of packets between here and fyodor.emailtester.net (18.26.0.235)

strace shows it stopping at
write(3, "DISTANCE LINUX 4\n", 17) = -1 EPIPE (Broken pipe)

Well, it's *kind of* interesting, espcially if you peek at the source first. Probably the most interesting thing to me is the pie chart here which shows Linux at about 22% of the participants vs. 5% for OSX and 6% for BSD. Anyhow, there's nothing malicious in the source code, wouldn't run something unknown without looking, greping, and compiling it myself first.

I'd say, "How Intel outfoxed IBM, Apple, SGI, Compaq, HP, Dell and DEC. " This old story gets more true every day.

Apple's wrists are slit. Give it a year or so and Intel will extinguish them for their old palls in Redmond.

They need a PARENT to encourage them ...
They need the right environment at home.
And they don't need competing forms of passive entertainment (TV).
Don't expect the school system to do it for you.

My 11 years old son Daniel programs using a variety of tools and has been doing so for a couple of years already (Visual basic, a variety of flavors of Logo, Game Maker. I'll let /.ers find out what he's using in this photo). He also does other creative things like creating scenes and animations using Art of Illusion - this also involves kind of programming, like creating procedural textures/materials. He learns some math/geometry doing this, since his programming experience drives him to manipulate the data (coordinates) directly to get exact results. He also learns some physics for getting the right results, like making gravitation work close to correct in this game (/.ers should be able to tell what link is the game. Hint: the file extension is .exe*). (well... It not just parent encouragement. After school activity played an important role. School only taught him to use the computer as a typewriter).

His 5 year old brother Jonatan already learned to do some "visual programming" using Game Maker, producing working games (though still not one another kid would want to play with. He does get useful things produced this way: Birthday "greeting cards" that can only be made using programming). The need to do everything that his big brother does is enough motivation.

___________________________
* I thought that the game should really be open sourced (or "free-softwared") but the Game Maker "sources" (.gm6 files) are actually binary, and though the license allows distribution of the created games, it's not clear to me how exactly it can be done with an Open source or CC license. Compiling the "sources" requires (gratis) proprietary software.

** comments, and suggestions of useful software that can encourage kids to becreative are welcome.

I think part of the reason kids don't program is because programming, especially for large projects, is very hard and complex to tackle. Take, for example, your average computer game from 2006. Most of them will have 3d graphics, physics engines, fancy shaders or whatever new 3d card feature is popular at the moment. Making a modern computer game is extremely hard and requires advanced programming and math (e.g. linear algebra) to program.

Now, what does that have to do with being motivated to program? Well, kids are inspired by the software they use and play with. While kids play video games they eventually decide they want to go off and make their own games. However, they can be discouraged by the immense complexity and difficulty in accomplishing that task.

This applies to non-game software too. A kid might look at some cool open source software, say Firefox, and want to start making his own web browser. Or maybe he'll be fascinated by editors and want to make his own text editor. But where should he start?

I've been programming since I was ten, and even I stumble on these issues. There are lots of cool projects I have in mind, but I don't know where to start. I've found that the only way to get around this is to pick up experience building small programs and reading good textbooks (I like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman and Software Tools by Kernighan), but that's hard for an impatient teenager who wants to get a lot done.

Check out this English -> Python interface.

embraced and extended(tm) LDAP with kerberos authentication that is not industry-standard or cross-platform compatible

If Kerberos isn't "industry-standard" or "cross-platform" enough for you, what is? RADIUS? Don't make me laugh...

The $100 laptop project is being developed by a non-profit organization and is not intended to make a profit. That cuts out some percentage of markup--admittedly not a huge difference, since hardware tends to have slim margins, but still a difference. It is also innovative technically; they are using a dramatically less expensive LCD display.

"Realistic" is a fairly arbitrary term that means little in the context of an altruistic project like the $100 laptop initiative. If you want to be realistic, stop giving food to starving people, and Darwinian principles will prevail. However, compassionate people are not "realistic" in that sense.

I think the Chinese $150 PC is a nice idea, although it's certainly neither original nor all that attractively priced; you still need to buy a display, or have a very clear, sharp TV set that won't ruin your eyesight.

Walmart marketed a $199 linux PC for a while, though they seem to have discontinued it. Some people mentioned a similar Tigerdirect model, but I haven't found it on their site. You have to really look for these deals.

I suspect that as Linux matures and especially as Wine improves, the cheap Linux PC will make a comeback, though it's awfully hard to sell the public on something that works with about 50% of the stuff out there--devices, software, peripherals--when for another $50 you can get something that works with 90% or 100%. I just did my taxes using Turbotax 2005 running in Crossover/Wine on my fedora workstation, and while it basically worked, a few features such as help pop-ups were broken and I had to do a lot of manual data entry because the stock investments download feature didn't work perfectly. Would I pay $50 more to avoid this kind of aggravation? Of course and so would everyone else.

The other thing I would worry about is compatibility. Is it worth paying $150 for a machine that uses a non-Intel compatible CPU? Especially when slower Intel/AMD cpus can be had for quite cheap these days. If it's just a matter of national pride--it has to be all Chinese-built--well, come on, almost all computer parts are made in China already, so just go buy any PC you like--Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba--and chances are it'll be 80-90% Chinese content.

I'm sure some of you have already seen this:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

This has been around for quite a while and works great to generate CS papers.