Slashdot Mirror

• http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sound (Check bottom)
• Internet Archive: Open Source Audio
• Free Classical Music Archive recordings performed by the MIT choir and other amateurs (quite high quality)
• The Choral Public Domain Library describes itself as 'A Free Sheet Music Archive'
• Mutopia: a collection of public domain sheet music
• Project Gutenberg music section
• MusicBrainz: a database of structured metadata about audio releases

You're absolutely right.

Software along with dirt cheap ubiquitous wireless kit. Adhoc grid routing, anonymous nodes in a wireless network.

e.g. something like:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/grid/

Information is, and always has been power and guess who can do something about it...

I think this is basically taken from the media lab idea:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nanda/design/electronics /byob/byob.html

Not really, as far as I know (I did say it was a slightly less accurate answer).
It can spawn child processes though, so you can edit something while M-x compile output is filling another window, and http://www.mit.edu/~raeburn/guilemacs/ says Guile supports multiple threads.

The space shuttle costs 450 million dollars per launch. This would cost much more than that, but the upkeep should cost a small enough amount that it might pay off in the long run (Depending upon it's projected lifespan).

In an article by Bradley Carl Edwards in the August 2005 print issue of "IEEE Spectrum", he writes "The estimated operational cost for the first elevator is several hundred dollars per kilogram to any Earth orbit, the moon, or Mars, a drop of two orders of magnitude over the cost of current launch technologies. With the completion of subsequent elevators, the cost would drop even further, to a few dollars per kilogram." So using a space elevator to transport whatever is cheaper than using rockets for transportation.

I have been following the progress of research concerning space-elevator for some time now. The LiftPort Group of companies working towards a space-elevator are making a great deal of progress. See here and here for more LiftPort specific information. Slashdot reported on the faa approval of their high altitude tests several days ago -- refer to that thread for some interesting discussion. Check here and here here for several reports concerning the viability of the elevator -- be sure to check the NIAC pdf. Also, Blaise Gassend has a great collection of information. Finally, though carbon nanotubes are still in their infancy (its been a little over 12 years since they were discovered) - their theoretical tensile strengths are perfect for use in the construction of a space elevator tether. This recent development spells a rosy future, and many innovations yet to come.

"Absurdly over-inflated sense of own intellectual superiority only offset partly by the fact that he's a professor at MIT? check... (dammit!)"

Greenspun does seem to teach at MIT, but his resume doesn't claim that he is a professor. Courses are frequently taught with people from industry. Greenspun doesn't show up in the MIT staff directory.

Does a GPS guided cruise missile qualify? Here's an article about a predator UAV equipped with a hellfire missile killing 5 in Yemen: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N54/long4-54.54w.html

You get the best of both worlds; ability to install your own apps and no need to physically maintain a machine.

The system administration could be drastically simplified for the common case, and security issues could be patched by an automated updater, similar to Debian apt-get.

The problem is that ISP's don't want this model; they want to lock people into keeping their data in proprietary systems.

Yeah, I don't quite know why the question is being asked of /. but anywho, glad it is...

I don't particularly trust anything at all I read on "physorg" unless it is also published somewhere else and this search is not boosting my confidence in the article's validity. Other things which make me doubt the clam VERY VERY MUCH are the fact that lightning has a temperature usually not reported in the literature to be above 40-50,000 Kelvin while virtually all fusion devices (which are in thermal equilibrium, as this would also be the mechanism here presumably unless they are proposing some super exotically weird non-equilibrium mechanism) need to attain temperatures in the MILLIONS of K range to even begin seeing neutrons. The fact that they are also claiming that this explains why they see "100 times the background" levels of neutrons during lightning storms is, I think, bordering on the ridiculous. There is a reason it took us until just 2 years ago to discover that lightning emits x-rays, and that is because uhmmm it involves studying lightning at very close range! Interference effects in sensitive electronic equipment caused by the insanely huge magnetic and electric field pulse very close by are extremely hard to eliminate. Until I read the paper, I'll very highly doubt this neutron/fusion "discovery".

Anyway, I think the following line in the submission needs some factual clarification:
"Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs."

This is a bit of a convoluted misconception. Firstly when NIF (if they ever finish the damn thing) compresses and ignites its DT capsules, they will theoretically produce a gain of something like a maximum of ~50. That is to say, they will release ~50 times more energy than was delivered to them by the lasers which are used to start the reaction and this will result in the emission of a neutron pulse and other thermal and electromagnetic energy in the 10s of megajoules range. This is exactly a replica of a thermonuclear bomb in the lab (without the primary). They ARE "micro-H-bombs", that's the whole idea of the thing. Secondly NIF want's to use uranium and plutonium as reported recently not because they will increase the fusion yield of the micro-bombs but rather because the megabar, megakelvin conditions achievable with NIF will allow the examination of these metals at the conditions which are found at the cores of imploding primaries (and secondary "sparkplugs"). These are called "subcriticals" and they allow the examination of the equation of state" of these metals at energy regimes pertinent to A-bombs without having an actual chain reaction occur.

As for the question "With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'"...
Don't count on it. There are lots of very promising and very very exciting ideas out there, but fusion on an economic (and laboratory; ie. not H-bombs) scale is just damn hard to do. The 30 year rule, sadly, still applies. T

None of these is a complete solution, but they may help you.

http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html Password safe - This uses strong encryption with a master password to store all your other passwords. You still have to cut'n'paste them everywhere, though. Keep it on a USB key with the encrypted passwords.

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?application=firefox&id=670 Password Composer - Takes the md5 of your master password and the hostname of a site to generate a unique password for each site. It's available as a Firefox extension, or as a bookmarklet. The method is simple, so you can get your password back with nothing more than echo and md5sum on the command line, so you're not at the software's mercy. However, there's not a good way to change either your master password or a site password if they're compromised. And it's only good for the web. But it's still a good improvement for handling tons of sites that don't need the very highest security.

http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/ Kerberos - Use a password to log in once, and then you're authenticated for all the services you need. This works great, but it has to be supported by each site that uses it. It's great for intranets, but it doesn't help for random web sites.

link
another link

From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use. ...just now that MS Office has totally updated its interface and made it greatly simplified and easier (I've seen the videos, and it does). I'm not MS fan, but I recognize when they do a good job in usability. This time they got it right.

It's a shame that OOo will have to start the catch-up game again, and it's a shame because FOSS should be the one leading in discovering new ways of interaction (fortunately, there are areas where it does).

I posted this on the Sunday /. space elevator article, I'm going to repost here. Thoughts on Space Elevators [mit.edu] by Blaise Gassend has a lot of good info & links on space elevators

The LiftPort Group of companies working towards a space-elevator are making a great deal of progress. Slashdot reported on the faa approval of their high altitude tests, for example. See here and here for more LiftPort specific information. Check here and here here for several reports concerning the viability of the elevator -- be sure to check the NIAC pdf. Blaise Gassend has a great collection of information. Finally, though carbon nanotubes are still in their infancy (its been a little around ten years since they were discovered) - their theoretical tensile strengths are perfect for application in a space elevator construction. This recent development spells a rosy future, and many innovations yet to come.

But to say that all this Hurricane activity is the result of Global Warming isn't science, it's speculation.

Science involves speculation. But if what you are saying is the drawing a link between increasing hurricane and global warming is pure speculation, lacking any scientific backing, you are sadly mistaken.

Knutson and Tuleya's simulation modeling shows increasing hurricane activity in high CO2 environments, however they argue that given the great interannual variation and the relatively and the poor historical storm data, it will be decades until this effect can be conclusively shown. (Knutson & Tuleya, 2004, 'Impact of C02-induced Warming on Simulated Hurincane Intensity and Precipitation', Climate 17, 3477-3495)

I haven't read Kerry Emanuel's (MIT) paper (see this press release) nor the Webster (Georgia Institute of Tech) paper (which I'm led to understand claim such an effect can already be demonstrated), however before dismissing them as pure speculation without having read them. Nor would I rely on a source such as freerepublic.com nor "Reason" magazine for my science.

Anyways, let us examine the different components and see how far OSS can take us. Maybe it can't go the whole journey, but if it can do some, then a hybrid solution will work.

Open Groupware, SuSE's Open Exchange and OSER will handle the Exchange part, including support for all those MS Exchange clients, such as Outlook.

That just leaves the Active Directories part. ISC's DHCP supports Dynamic DNS. However, you may want to add in DHCP2LDAP to get a good link between DHCP and BIND. OpenLDAP provides the LDAP implementation part. Kerberos and DNS are easy (although some may quibble with my choice of Kerberos version!)

Provided you're not planning on having both MS Active Directory and the above amalgam running, you should then be set to go with a comprehensive Active Directory lookalike which will interact with client systems in the same way Microsoft's software will.

The problem I found is that there's almost no way of getting from a Linux solution -to- Active Directory. If AD is present, it must be a root server, which Linux CAN pull from.

Do I recommend this kind of a setup? Probably not. The Exchange and Groupware stuff should be fine, but the Active Directory stuff isn't as coherent as it could be and I've heard of nobody who has completely replace AD with an Open Source solution, even though from a purely technical perspective it should be possible.

In my lifetime, I can see having a calculator built in, sound recorder, video recorder, and brain interfaces.

(Today monkeys can control robotic arms over the internet miles away with brain signals. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2000/monkeys-1206.ht ml/)

What happens when I go to a concert listening live, then choose to replay/relive it at anytime, just as good as the first time. Or tell someone about the show digitally.

The law will have a bit of an issue keeping up.

There will be downsides also...I.E. hit with a virus forcing us to watch Richard Simmons for 30 seconds every hour until we can get a patch from a buddy.

Life will be changing. Soon

No one person can control technology, however, we can guide where it takes us.

Thoughts on Space Elevators by Blaise Gassend has a lot of good info & links on space elevators

Consider another explanation. Pretend the folks who developed the brush worked at the MIT Media Lab. Pretend that they had spent a lot of time thinking about the whole "brush thing". They do a lot of thinking up there - kinda famous for it. If they DID have good reasons for the design, instead of just being "silly", then surely they would have published some sort of academic paper. Them being at MIT and all. They could be very highly accomplished people who have worked on other projects like this one. Could even be in a museum. Or on the Discovery Channel Website. Pretending that all those things were true, wouldn't it also be true that the brush was probably not an "unimaginative copy "which was "silly at best", probably not a "necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults" and not really designed to "make the kids feel at ease" after all. Consider that someone describing the project in those terms either didn't try to or was incapable of understanding the project. Consider that publicly suggesting that they half-assed their interface, compromised for monetary and political reasons, and wound up with something that is little more than a toy is both rude, stupid and illustrates a complete lack of understanding.

This project, particularly the way it addresses sensory/cognitive synthesis has implications in many fields - not the least of which are child development, digital art, interface design, artificial intelligence and the study of how physical reality and abstract thought interact. It also makes REALLY cool pictures. Take a look at one of the videos (at the bottom) and all will become clear. And don't worry about us adults impeding the children's progress - they're already way ahead of us.

"(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)"

billy - "what do expect on /." my ass

Consider another explanation. Pretend the folks who developed the brush worked at the MIT Media Lab. Pretend that they had spent a lot of time thinking about the whole "brush thing". They do a lot of thinking up there - kinda famous for it. If they DID have good reasons for the design, instead of just being "silly", then surely they would have published some sort of academic paper. Them being at MIT and all. They could be very highly accomplished people who have worked on other projects like this one. Could even be in a museum. Or on the Discovery Channel Website. Pretending that all those things were true, wouldn't it also be true that the brush was probably not an "unimaginative copy "which was "silly at best", probably not a "necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults" and not really designed to "make the kids feel at ease" after all. Consider that someone describing the project in those terms either didn't try to or was incapable of understanding the project. Consider that publicly suggesting that they half-assed their interface, compromised for monetary and political reasons, and wound up with something that is little more than a toy is both rude, stupid and illustrates a complete lack of understanding.

This project, particularly the way it addresses sensory/cognitive synthesis has implications in many fields - not the least of which are child development, digital art, interface design, artificial intelligence and the study of how physical reality and abstract thought interact. It also makes REALLY cool pictures. Take a look at one of the videos (at the bottom) and all will become clear. And don't worry about us adults impeding the children's progress - they're already way ahead of us.

"(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)"

billy - "what do expect on /." my ass

Consider another explanation. Pretend the folks who developed the brush worked at the MIT Media Lab. Pretend that they had spent a lot of time thinking about the whole "brush thing". They do a lot of thinking up there - kinda famous for it. If they DID have good reasons for the design, instead of just being "silly", then surely they would have published some sort of academic paper. Them being at MIT and all. They could be very highly accomplished people who have worked on other projects like this one. Could even be in a museum. Or on the Discovery Channel Website. Pretending that all those things were true, wouldn't it also be true that the brush was probably not an "unimaginative copy "which was "silly at best", probably not a "necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults" and not really designed to "make the kids feel at ease" after all. Consider that someone describing the project in those terms either didn't try to or was incapable of understanding the project. Consider that publicly suggesting that they half-assed their interface, compromised for monetary and political reasons, and wound up with something that is little more than a toy is both rude, stupid and illustrates a complete lack of understanding.

This project, particularly the way it addresses sensory/cognitive synthesis has implications in many fields - not the least of which are child development, digital art, interface design, artificial intelligence and the study of how physical reality and abstract thought interact. It also makes REALLY cool pictures. Take a look at one of the videos (at the bottom) and all will become clear. And don't worry about us adults impeding the children's progress - they're already way ahead of us.

"(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)"

billy - "what do expect on /." my ass

Consider another explanation. Pretend the folks who developed the brush worked at the MIT Media Lab. Pretend that they had spent a lot of time thinking about the whole "brush thing". They do a lot of thinking up there - kinda famous for it. If they DID have good reasons for the design, instead of just being "silly", then surely they would have published some sort of academic paper. Them being at MIT and all. They could be very highly accomplished people who have worked on other projects like this one. Could even be in a museum. Or on the Discovery Channel Website. Pretending that all those things were true, wouldn't it also be true that the brush was probably not an "unimaginative copy "which was "silly at best", probably not a "necessery evil to get funding and potentially have the technology picked up by other adults" and not really designed to "make the kids feel at ease" after all. Consider that someone describing the project in those terms either didn't try to or was incapable of understanding the project. Consider that publicly suggesting that they half-assed their interface, compromised for monetary and political reasons, and wound up with something that is little more than a toy is both rude, stupid and illustrates a complete lack of understanding.

This project, particularly the way it addresses sensory/cognitive synthesis has implications in many fields - not the least of which are child development, digital art, interface design, artificial intelligence and the study of how physical reality and abstract thought interact. It also makes REALLY cool pictures. Take a look at one of the videos (at the bottom) and all will become clear. And don't worry about us adults impeding the children's progress - they're already way ahead of us.

"(Note this isn't a real criticism just a general observation and nit picking)"

billy - "what do expect on /." my ass

Inspite of sucking, Itanium was still a brilliant business decision for Intel. They, in one short swoop, managed to kill the DEC Alpha, PA-RISC, and MIPS, leaving only AMD, IBM, and Sparc. At the time, DEC Alpha was probably their most formidable competitor (indeed, AMD is now a competitor mostly because, as an unintended consequence of killing the Alpha, the Alpha design team went to work for AMD en masse, and designed the Athlon). MIT had an an old GSB posting about this.

All they did was promise to dump a bunch of cash into developing a new processor, and wave around PowerPoint numbers showing it creaming the competition. Moments later, the competition packed up shop and went home.

III.

Conclusion Because we hold that the Lotus menu command hierarchy is uncopyrightable subject matter, we further hold that Borland did not infringe Lotus's copyright by copying it. Accordingly, we need not consider any of Borland's affirmative defenses. The judgment of the district court is

Reversed.

III.

Conclusion Because we hold that the Lotus menu command hierarchy is uncopyrightable subject matter, we further hold that Borland did not infringe Lotus's copyright by copying it. Accordingly, we need not consider any of Borland's affirmative defenses. The judgment of the district court is

Reversed.

The correct address for MIT's "Mobile Landscape" project can be found here.

Open Source Artificial Intelligence requires a clunker old computer that can run Java, JavaScript, Forth and so on -- that's all.

The Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) has a slight advantage with some good beaches nearby.

The MIT AI Lab has a lot of old AI curmudgeons to confab with.

The German AI Institute -- davor schreckt man zurueck.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence does the scutwork of informing the world population about what the Mentifex AI Lab is quietly, inexorably doing.

True AI is here.

Show me PHP websites of this magnitude...

Let's see...there's Yahoo, for one. Then there's also MIT who seems to process 3 million hits on over 1.1 million documents a day, according to their reported stats.

Throwing a couple high-profile links out to websites using foo on the backend does not a good language make. Coders with style and best practices a good backend make.

You should check out cilk. Two of the people behind the project used to work for Thinking Machines, the company that made one of the best supercomputers of its day. Cilk adds a few key words to C and it requires much less effort than most other parallel programming models. Unfortunately, the distributed version of it was only a prototype and isn't included in the latest release. If nothing else, you should read the papers these guys have written.

They also had a couple of graduate students that made Jilk (Cilk for Java). From the sound of their papers it isn't ready for production use yet, but it's something to keep in mind if you prefer writing code in Java.

Wait a second. I suddenly realize that you seem to think I'm talking about some kind of pluggable single device, like a laptop with drive bays or something. That's not what I'm talking about at all! I mean "modular" in the sense that the modules are completely separate devices. They're only connected by a communications protocol, and can be put in different locations around the body.

It's not "all with the same pocket-sized device;" it's quite the opposite! It's all with separate pocket-sized modules that are designed to work together.

My concept supports both a large hard drive and a small flash drive in the same way that you could put a 20GB Archos or whatever in one pocket, and a 32MB Rio in another.

I suppose that the closest thing to what I'm talking about is actually this, although it's way too clunky and Borg-like (then again, it's a research prototype, so that's understandable). It's not quite comparable, but the general idea that you should take away is the concept of the different circuit boards being distributed in different locations.

By the way, before you claim that that's not what I said before, recall that the original post was talking about getting his PDA (device 1) to talk to his cellphone (device 2). Multiple devices! Apparently you didn't understand what I was talking about, and considering that everyone else in the thread did, I think that says something about exactly which of us is truly the idiot!

Banking with CitiBank supports terrorism?

In a sense you can say Citigroup does support terrorism, state terrorism. Citigroup is a leading financier of the Three Gorges Dam China is building and China has used the military to forcibly relocate millions of people who are being displaced and will have their land flooded by the dam. The flooding will also destroy valuable archeological sites. Yet according to this news item from CNN there's already problems with the dam, cracks found in Three Gorges Dam.

the works of william shakespeare didn't start out their star studded lives as computer code. They went through a lengthy evolution through at least several iterations of printing presses before they made their way to a digital medium.

Data evolves. If theres one thing that google searches have shown it is that the demand of information is always changing, people arent going to want the same chicken noodle soup that they had fifty years ago because we make better chicken noodle soup now.

If the census 2000 information really deserves saving it will be copied hundreds of times into different isolated servers by individuals or companies who use the information. it will be ported to a new format, it will evolve.

-----

prior art?

http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/watchmakers/

there is a book by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournell called "The Mote in God's Eye" and the moties are some interesting charactors...

A seemless open standard DRM could open up huge markets

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 [theos.com] 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.

I think the big deal is that he did TCP/IP before anybody else. He was the first.

Since then there are all sorts of protocols that fix flaws in TCP/IP. There are even protocols implemented in languages (not C) amenable to machine proofs of correctness. That's Ensemble (originally developed at Cornell)

However, I suspect the main problem is getting those rolled out -- given that TCP/IP is jammed in the kernel, and given that we don't use exokernels or something similar that would allow for radical experimentation with network protocols, we'll be using TCP/IP forever.

Lenny Foner wrote a great article about this sort of thing back in 1993. I still recommend it.

"Fusion "experiments" have been "beginning" for over three decades, to the tune of over $60 billion dollars when last I checked. It will take an enormous amount of power to break even on that -- and every year the bar gets higher. *We're* nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!"

Whatever are you talking about? The Z-machine at sandia has only produced millijoule fusion yields, the JET at cullham has produced kilojoules.

"Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor."

There's no money for it because that is a nonequilibrium system which was proven impossible for generating excess energy.

I can't quite make much sense of the rest of your post.....

What about the Farnsworth EIC devices?

They don't even approach being power-generation schemes.

Generation fusion reactions is easy. Generating them in such a way that you get more energy out of them than you put in is very, very difficult. Farnsworth fusors don't come close. With them, the killer is power density. Charge accumulation prevents a power density greater than a few watts per cubic meter.

Seriously, this paper needs to be read by everyone involved in talking about fusion power. It's pretty much the death knell for any scheme that isn't magnetic confinement of D-T fusion.

I agree with everything you said here. I actually thought VLIW/EPIC had a lot of promise once. My only problem with Itanium is that it was used as a justification to kill off so many other promising designs, a couple of which I thought still had life left in them at the time.

While this is perhaps a bit off-topic, I found this funny:

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.

Dude, you missed your time traveler convention.

The future wants you back.

The signal they are looking for is the 327 MHz emission line of deuterium.

Y'know, you might be onto something there. I'd been thinking of God as the sort of Cosmic Engineer that Doug Adams wrote about (Slartibartfast). But the idea that he might just be the director of a team of engineers with varying degrees of competency.

Some time back, I collected and combined a number of discussions on the topic of Biblical Creation into a treatise summarizing the conclusions. Maybe I'll have to make a new revision that incorporates this new concept.

God: So did you set up that semi-intelligent herding and naming creature that I assigned you yesterday?

Assistant: Yes; take a look.

G: Hmmm ... Looks good. But what's this? You gave it an appendix? That organ's only functional in leaf eaters; there's no sense in using it in a top-level omnivore like this.

A: Oh, sorry. I just used the general mammal model. Should I fix it?

G: Ah, don't bother; it won't bother them much. But wait - you used that inferior design for the eye that I'd just told the team to not try again.

A: Uh, I ...

G: You'd think any intelligent designer would know to put the nerves and blood vessels on the back of the retina, not the front. Well, I guess it's done, and the critter probably won't ever notice. But today's the big day. I'm building the main creature that the planet was designed for. Here's the design. Make sure that you add a blind spot in your creation's brains so they won't bother it.

And God spent his seventh day of creation building a species that was to rule over the oceans that were 70% of the planet's surface, and could dive to great depths, fully using the oceans' volume. First He built a number of small versions as pilot studies. Then he made the crowning glory: the giant squid. It had a large, capable brain that was smart enough to engage in long intellectual and artistic discussions. It didn't have any of those silly mistakes like an appendix or an eye with the nerves and blood vessels in front of the retina. He'd show the bunglers on this team how to do a good job of designing a species.

He was amused when, a few millennia later, a human called Douglas Adams wrote a rather good book that mistakenly made dolphins the top intelligence in the oceans. At least he understood the mice, which were a later infestation. But they didn't interfere, because they couldn't survive in the oceans. Too bad really; they could have some interesting discussions with the squid, if they could just get together somehow. Just shows the real advantage of being a noncorporeal spirit being, I guess; a God can talk to anyone who's worth talking to.

SCIgen anyone?

Well...This guy says it's not global warming.

He said in a Salon article: "When we looked at the historical record, we found that the frequency of storms globally hasn't really changed at all," Emanuel said. "It's about 90 per year, plus or minus 10. The frequency globally appears to be steady."

He's also arguing that over development in these areas is the culprit of so much destruction. I.e. There is more stuff that gets damaged.

The whole article:

Aug. 30, 2005 - Hurricane Katrina has turned New Orleans into "a wilderness," said one public health official, who begged evacuated residents not to return to the city for at least a week. Rife with poisonous water moccasins and fire ants, downed trees and power lines, without fresh drinking water, power, gas or sewage, the storm has made the battered and flooded city uninhabitable.

Katrina is just the latest in a rash of powerful hurricanes that have been pummeling the Atlantic in recent years, including a record-breaking 33 between 1995 and 1999. It's made many wonder if global warming is bringing the wrath of the planet down upon all our heads. Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied historical records of hurricanes around the globe, said the answer is yes and no.

In a recent paper, "Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years," published in the science journal Nature, Emanuel found that as sea temperatures rise, the duration and intensity of hurricanes are going up, too.

The reason for the correlation is pretty straightforward: "Hurricanes derive their energy from the evaporation of sea water," Emanuel explained in a phone interview. "When you evaporate water from the ocean you actually transfer heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. A similar effect happens when you come out of the shower in the morning. You feel cold because water is evaporating from your skin, and taking heat from your body. That heat energy doesn't disappear." Instead, it fuels the intensity of hurricanes.

So, as global warming increases, expect hurricanes to get stronger. However, that doesn't mean, as some perceive, that there are actually more of them lately. "When we looked at the historical record, we found that the frequency of storms globally hasn't really changed at all," Emanuel said. "It's about 90 per year, plus or minus 10. The frequency globally appears to be steady."

The recent hurricanes in the Atlantic, Emanuel explained, represent a natural fluctuation. Every 20 to 30 years, since records started being kept in the 19th century, there have been big shifts in the frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic. "For example, in the 1940s and '50s, there were very busy years, whereas the 1970s and '80s were very quiet years," he said. "And we've had a big upswing in the Atlantic beginning in about 1995. That's all natural."

The reason violent Atlantic hurricanes like Katrina may strike people as unnatural, and cause them to blame the CO2 pouring out of their neighbors' Hummers, is not because of their frequency but their destruction to people and places.

"This natural fluctuation occurs in a social environment where there is a huge shift in demographic trends, and this makes a big difference in people's perception," Emanuel said. "In the 1940s and '50s, there were lots of hurricanes in Florida, but there weren't lots of people there. So now that we're having this upswing again, it's being perceived very differently" -- for the simple fact that there is a lot more stuff to be ruined.

Meteorologists performed admirably in alerting public officials to Katrina's rising destruction, allowing them to evacuate New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities in plenty of time. But Emanuel said that other warnings by meteorologists have gone unheeded in past decades

Not if they use the Cellular Squirrel!!!

I'm sorry to have caused you umbrage, but I did try to couch my language so as not to state that, we can as yet blame particular weather phenomena on global warming. This is particularly the case in regard to hurricanes where established wisdom is that they follow a cyclical pattern, and where the intensity of hurricane seasons has been predicted with some success by such specialists as William Grey (who dismisses the impact of anthropogenic glob al warming).

On the other hand, some climatologists do feel that global warming is/or will have an impact on hurricane formation. (see for example thispress release re the more recent work of Kerry Emanuel.)

My point was, that we cannot glibly dismiss any connection out of hand.

It is interesting that the reference you provided for to show how controversial the link is, cites Knutson & Tuleya (2004) as bearing out such controversy. Well it's interesting to me, because I had just recently skimmed through that paper.

Far from denying a link between global warming and hurricane activity Knutson & Tuleya's work shows "increased huricane intensities and storm percipition rates in high-C02 environments." Knutson & Tuleya, 2004, 'Impact of C02-induced Warming on Simulated Hurincane Intensity and Precipitation', Climate 17, 3477-3495,at 3494. What they do say is that we are unlikely to be able to detect any changes over the past half century, and given both the interannual variability and the paucity of historical storm data, that any changes "will probably not be detectable for decades to come." (ibid). at 3493) The clear implication being that after some decades it will be.

the melting of Greenland (which is happening faster than the models predict)...

It is certainly a surprise to me that we are seeing such large changes so soon. I suspect that it is possible we will see other changes will occuring faster than the models predict. As Knutson & Tuleya freely admit, theirs is an "idealized framework" and recent empirical work show a greater than expected increase in 'convective available potential energy', in the Atlantic tropical storm basin, as well as those in the NE Pacific and the Indian Oceans, (with the caveat that for the basins other than the Atlantic, the historical data is even poorer). (ibid.)

But please don't read me as saying the ferocity of Katrina is Gaia's vengance or any such thing. What I'm saying is that the link cannot be dismissed out of hand.

It is tempting to want Mother Nature to bash some sense into the right wingnuts in Florida ...

Whenever I feel the temptation the want such a thing, I simply remember that those are human beings who are suffering. I look at my kids and think about theirs. After all, the reason we have to get this message across is so that we can begin to take steps to reduce human suffering, not to wish for it so we can have the satisfaction of wining an argument. What I wish for is that the "boneheads" are right and the GW is nothing but a liberal myth ... oh and I also wish to win the lottery.

Au contraire. A good study from MIT about how hurricane wind speeds are 50% stronger in the past 3 decades, partially due to global warming (although I realize there is a 50% chance this study is false):

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/hurricanes.html