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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.

This is how you produce hydrogen. Notice the part about "electricity." That's right, in order to produce hydrogen you need the very same energy that we were trying to save in the first place. Your hydrogen-powered Prius may run as pure and clean as fresh snow, but if a coal-fired generator is supplying the electricity needed to electrolyze water and make hydrogen, then it's all for naught.

So let's stop beating around the bush: the only technology we have today that does not produce carbon and comes anywhere close to supplying Terra's present-day energy needs is good old nuclear. Or, nucular in the parlance of our current administration. Wind, water and/or solar simply don't. I think we need to bite the bullet, recognize this fact, and start building. The nuclear stigma is very unfortunate given the stakes of the global warming game we're playing. The fact is it can be done cheaply and safely, and few bad eggs seem to have spoiled the bunch... unless you have complete idiots at the helm, living in the proximity of a modern, well-managed nuclear power plant is probably a lot, lot safer than strapping into a rickety box of sheet metal and hurtling yourself down the freeway to work every morning in the presence of countless other drivers about whose skills and preoccupations you know nothing.

The depressing sticking point is that with a $100 billion, Manhattan-style research project we could probably get something like fusion power off the ground, thus solving our energy and pollution woes for basically forever.

By the way, that's about the same amount of money as we will be spending in Iraq in the coming years to ensure our oil supply and with it our ability to pump astronomical quantities of carbon into the air for the foreseeable future. Gallingly ironic.

Here?

In short, unencrypted steganography isn't particularly useful, but encrypted, you can really hide things.

Would mass use of Ron Rivest's cleartext 'chaffing' technique offer suitable 'deniable encryption' to the masses?

Chaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption


This is the Ron Rivest of RSA fame...

In short, unencrypted steganography isn't particularly useful, but encrypted, you can really hide things.

Would mass use of Ron Rivest's cleartext 'chaffing' technique offer suitable 'deniable encryption' to the masses?

Chaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption


This is the Ron Rivest of RSA fame...

I haven't heard of any great indian computer scientist. The good ones will always survive.

Colleges and universities have a huge amount of power to influence this debate

Perhaps you mean individuals or groups in colleges or universities. The actual institutions are generally heavily funded by private corporations looking for research and patents. And so these institutes of higher learning are normally more than happy to comply with big business.
Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but the difference between an institute, and an individual at that institute can be stark.

Colleges and universities have a huge amount of power to influence this debate

Perhaps you mean individuals or groups in colleges or universities. The actual institutions are generally heavily funded by private corporations looking for research and patents. And so these institutes of higher learning are normally more than happy to comply with big business.
Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but the difference between an institute, and an individual at that institute can be stark.

There was a project at MIT that had some "AI" qualities to it. Possible that this is in use already? http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/vision/app/www/capa bilities.php/

True, although despite appearances ClarisWorks used no code whatsoever from MacWrite, even though that was also a Claris product. Not that that matters, the original message was talking about the word processing concepts established by MacWrite (not Word) that were themselves a leap forward in their day.

In fact the threat that MS could have pulled Office off the Mac if Apple had competed is irrelevant - MS were much smaller back then and there was no platform like the Mac that would have supported Office. In fact one could say that MS's desire to develop Windows was exactly because of this - MS realised that the Office/Word approach was the way forward and so they needed way to bring the functionalirty of the IBM PC up to a point where it could support Office in the same way as the Mac. I guess Apple's error was to assume that the IBM was so inferior it would never compete, and so they left it to MS to provide Mac versions of Office. Somewhere in there is possibly the one, true "what they should have done was..." that would have led to a different outcome, but so what? It's not important now.

The interesting story of ClarisWorks' development is available here

.

The LPF has mentioned a cartoon about the U.S. Patent Office. The cartoon shows a military aircraft carrying a black monolith (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey) towards the USPTO building. The "sorely needed" delivery is being done by "two geeks."

Mesh networks have been around for years, but have not reached the masses because they just aren't ready. They're fine for experimental uses, and maybe even for community networks, but as industrial sensors? No thanks.

Use RS422.

YATTA? With Shatner? Now that's scary!

It's been done, well kinda ... in that MIT hack, they rigged up the lights on the building's floors to act as a VU meter and provide assorted other visuals. The scary part I suppose is how easy it was to remotely control a major office complex's lighting system. And that was before IPv6...

Wow! 54? That is impressive.

Once low-sulfur diesel does phase in diesels will be interesting in the US.

Hybrids still have substantial advantages (especially in traffic jams) - but of course there's no reason you couldn't build diesel-electric hybrids. This study shows that a diesel hybrid could be even better than a fuel cell vehicle.

UAV research has become more and more popular over the last 10-15 years. A couple of cool projects worth checking out:

MIT Autonomous Vehicle Formation Flying
Frontier Systems unmanned helicopter - sadly, not much info. Of course, they are a military contractor, so that's to be expected. The thing just looks cool, though.
UAV Forum - big listing of commercial UAV projects

Tarzan is a peer-to-peer anonymous IP network overlay. Because it provides IP service, Tarzan is general-purpose and transparent to applications. Organized as a decentralized peer-to-peer overlay, Tarzan is fault-tolerant, highly scalable, and easy to manage.Tarzan achieves its anonymity with layered encryption and multi-hop routing, much like a Chaumian mix. A message initiator chooses a path of peers pseudo-randomly through a restricted topology in a way that adversaries cannot easily influence.

Your organization isn't likely to be sued for patent infringement by IBM, particularly if your organization holds any patents. Your organization is more likely to be pressured into cross-licensing. Don't take my word for this, read it from IBM's own Assistant General Counsel, Roger Smith. In IBM's "Think" magazine Smith said that IBM gets "perhaps an order of magnitude" more value from their patents by cross-licensing than from lawsuits.

I take them seriously on this matter because they hold more patents than anyone or any other organization. I would not expect that IBM will refrain from suing Linux kernel developers if need be. There's no point in owning the patents if they pose no threat to compel the behavior of others.

Cross-licensing is also one of the key reasons why software patents fail to promote the innovation a limited monopoly ostensibly exists to provoke.

But you'd think that the ATM company, who has a paper receipt printer (or two!) in every ATM, could add in a voter-verifiable paper trail to those systems it acquired with no troubles at all! Wouldn't you?

Of course they insist it can't be done. [While admiting in private email that they'll charge out the yin if required to do it.]

More fun Diebold quotes

But you'd think that the ATM company, who has a paper receipt printer (or two!) in every ATM, could add in a voter-verifiable paper trail to those systems it acquired with no troubles at all! Wouldn't you?

Of course they insist it can't be done. [While admiting in private email that they'll charge out the yin if required to do it.]

More fun Diebold quotes

Sigh. Here is a better link.

Tatoo it on your arm. Then tell them it's your shrinkwrap license.

Yes, because keeping everything proprietary and under tight restrictions is guaranteed to make you rich and powerful.

(I'm going to use success rather than power from now on, since I imagine that is the goal for more people)

Success, alas, is the exception to anything. If any one strategy guaranteed success everyone would do it and nobody would be having this discussion.

Since success is a crap shoot anyway, I would rather become successful (which is a relative term anyway) doing something I believed in and enjoy doing. If I were working for a dilbertesque software company that tried to lock everyone into their proprietary solutions, litigate away competition, and produced crappy software I might be more successful. I might even be driving a Mercedes instead of a Civic and live in a huge house instead of renting a duplex. But you know what, I wouldn't be believing in what I do every day and I would likely be miserable. I might not even be that successful since I don't know where I would find motivation.

No thanks, I'll just keep my non-competitive University job where I love what I do, I get to play with cool open source technology, and I get to keep my lofty ideals. I'm happier this way. And, dare I say, more successful :)

Finkployd

The best place to learn, FOR FREE, from one of the best universities for science, goto MITs Open Courseware. Enjoy!

I'd have to say "Microsoft Bob" peaked pretty early.

I'm pretty sure that you meant that facetiously, but I'll bite and point out that MS Bob was simply an early (bad) implementation of a context-sensitive help system. In ten years, the ways that everyday computers will be able to deduce and anticipate users' needs and desires is going to be light years ahead of this. For examples you can check out any number of academic research programs - MIT's Media Lab http://www.media.mit.edu/ is a good place to start. In particular, the Things That Think group, and the research of Maes, Leiberman, Ariely and Selker.

How about we read books on the subject written by software engineering researchers and not programming language researchers? See the Dynamic Analysis lecture notes.

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.

Actually no one knows what the precursor protein does in the brain.

I didn't say people knew, I said that they appear to have important functions.

Translation:
help me troll...
please, I am a wanker, and can not do it on my own, also please forward your shemail porn to at dsaklad@zurich.ai.mit.edu

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.

We should never forget that the first software company that the FSF and Stallman openly attacked was Apple. Long ago, and under Jobs' watch as once again, Apple sued all and sundry over the "look and feel" of their systems. Of course they're going to threaten anyone who breaks their stranglehold on the iPod. It's what Apple does - they develop monopolies and try to maintain hard them, often at the expense of their own "partners". Anybody seen a "clone Mac" lately?

Somewhere I still have an LPF button with the seven-color apple logo and a snake coming out of it, with the caption "Keep your lawyers off my computer!".

"We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker "

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.

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.

But it was, to the limit of patentability that was available at the time. This was before Diamond v. Diehrand the US patent office deemed software as "pure mathamatics" and unpatentable. The patent that was developed from Unix, the setuid patent was written in terms of the gates in memory that got flipped and read to check access control.

If Bell Labs hadn't assigned the patent to the public domain (supposedly over the cost of collecting license fees) Then development on Unix clones would have started much later.

I assume, also, that the GC controllers are a bit more complex than just some pushbuttons hooked up to some wires as the old controllers were.

For those interested in dual mode transportation, I'll recommend University of Washington's Dualmode Debate Page. The page mentions all the projects and has a lot of papers describing the systems and discussing the benefits and problems with them.

Also MIT Alumni brought an article proposing the US should invest $1000 billion in dual mode over the next 10 years. According to the author the investment would pay back in only 2 years! What are we waiting for?

Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950.
That doesn't seam likely:
Clouds Written in 419 B.C.E, mentions an eclipse of the moon. The Moon in Ancient Egypt is often discussed. The moon is also mentioned many times in the Bible, eg. Psalms 8:
" When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; "
I imagine quite a few people will have access to a bible printed before 1950 and will be able to check that out. If you do check and find it missing - do post here - we may really be onto something!

Okay, so I tried to find a website for this Studio Roc place, and simply can't. Anyone have any suggestions?

Aside from that, I think this is really great. For the last seventy or so years, new buildings have been devoid of the beautiful, distinguishing sculptures that used to adorn every building out there--the columnades, the lions heads, the leafy designs, all that stuff that you only find on/around the ritziest places now. Hopefully we can get back to having architecture that's creative and beautiful rather than creative and hideous (that's MIT's Stata, designed by Frank Gehry, if you don't follow these things).

We have nearly a monoculture, but it's http://www-tech.mit.edu/V119/N19/history_of_athe.1 9f.htmlours [mit.edu], and open source to boot.

People, give Macromedia some credit. Without Flash we wouldn't have some of the movies that defined a generation. Some of the classics are:

All Your Base
Yatta
Eat Your Oatmeal
This Land is Your Land

And all the other bizarre flash that lives HERE Without Flash we'd be living in a world on Animated GIFS or worse yet ASCII art. Sure Flash is proprietary, has a less than optimal IDE, and costs way to much just to make screwy videos, but it sure has brightened up the web. Additionally, Flash has given me more than one much needed side-splitting laugh. Long live FLASH!

'What the hell is "GNOME-gegl2.png"? "That's disgusting!"'

I believe that Xerox had these machines in the mid-90s.

Graphic Arts Monthly has a nice blurb about the machines too (from 1996!).

Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital talks all about these and how they will play an important part in the switch from 'Atomic Distribution' to 'Bits-is-Bits' business models.

These machine were either a really slow-burn success, or it's just an insanely slow-news day at OSDN. :-)

Terribly sorry about that.

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 bureacratic 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.

Anyone remember A Little Less Conversation Elvis vs JXL? it reached Number One in 20 countries, including the USA.

This song becoming a hit is more likely than one might imagine.

As for "rights owners" we need to say who this phrase really means: The American monopoly music companies.

They have already said that they will try and block the importation of products containing legally produced public domain works; it would be the most delicious of situations if this song did become a huge smash after it entered the public domain in the UK, and the RIAA tried to block its importation.

One thing is for certain; as more and more works enter the public domain here in the UK, the likelyhood of a hit coming from one of these works increases. This confrontation is going to happen.

Oh for some mod points...
Fortunately, only seven pages later, you too can have the answer:

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.


And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

And while Bobby was just playing a chess match, the Feds were shipping huge amounts of arms to their favorite players in the region, the separatist Bosnian Muslims. As the Guardian newspaper in England documented :

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran... Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft.

Just as the trial of Slobodan Milosevic is exposing the fact that most of the claims used to justify the US's Kosovo war were bogus, maybe poor Fischer's inevitable trial will expose the lies told to justify the Bosnian war.

Now that it's been revealed that al-Qaeda members were fighting for the Bosnian Muslims, maybe the USA will acknowledge their mistaken policy, apologize to poor Bobby, and let him go.

Yeah, right. Being an Empire means never having to say you're sorry.

Chaff it. Confidentiality without encryption.

First of all, to say that "Yugoslavia" caused the Bosnian war is as meaningless as saying that the United States caused the (U.S.) Civil War.

The Bosnian war started because some leaders of the Bosnian Muslims-- who as a people had historically been pro-Yugoslav-- wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and start their own Islamic state, and to impose Islamic law on all the people living there-- including the ethnic Serbs and Croats who made up a majority of the population. This was all detailed in their president Izetbegovic's "Islamic Declaration". Along with taking advantage of all the usual Muslim suspects-- including Osama's right-hand man al-Harbi-- who flocked there to fight the jihad, the Bosnian president also recreated a WWII-era SS Division to help in the fight.

A history lesson, since falcon5768 and probably others need it: hundreds of thousands of Serbian civilians were murdered in concentration camps during WWII, when they were on the Allied side while the Bosnians and Croats were allied with the Nazis. Memories are long in that part of the world, and Islamic law is not much fun either-- so is it any wonder that not just Serbs but moderate Muslims like took up arms to prevent the secession of Bosnia, or at least keep their own land out from under the thumb of Izetbegovic and his cronies?

I am confused why you say that the Bosnian war "DID kill US and UN troops". What US or UN troops were in the region? And as for the "mass slaughter" of Muslims at Srebrenica, the story is now starting to leak out that it's not so clear-cut as that-- most of the bodies have never shown up, and many of the dead turned out to be the troops of Muslim warlord Nasr Oric, who would use the UN-protected "safe areas" as a base from which to launch raids involving beheadings of prisoners... sound familiar?

The most laughable part of your post (and, by extension, the US's case against Bobby Fischer) is when you go on about how the sanctions were meant to prevent the world from contributing to the war. Of course, as the Guardian newspaper in England documented (much later after it was no longer inconvenient for the facts to come out), the US government was violating the embargo all along:

...the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran...

The reason you, and so many other people, hold this inaccurate and deluded view of the Bosnian war, is attributable mostly to the really top-notch propaganda war waged in the U.S. and U.K. media, making the Bosnian Muslims out to be the wonderful, multicultural good guys and the Serbs the baddies. It doesn't matter that so much of the lies have now been exposed-- like