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I know that someone mentioned it already but there was a good paper published on it, it's a good read. There was a similar incident a few years ago with the Therac-25 machine. Supposedly the manufacturer installed a computer and removed hard wired safetys out of the system, running everything by software. They also forgot to put in some interlocks and other good stuff, the net result being that several people died. Or it seems that there is a book here although I have not read it myself.
A lot of people forget that software can have devastating affects on things and even with the best of programming you can't beat a hardware safety for the "just in case."

send individual to tech schools; we have LOTS of people that don't comb hair or talk.

How true...how very true.

evelio (evelio) wrote, @ 2004-01-23 15:24:00

I love MIT

>Geek thing #1
A friend of mine won the Integration Bee at MIT. He got $50 of Certificates to Toscis (Ice cream place) and a baseball cap.

>Geek thing #2:
Another friend wrote him this poem:

I love you;
You are my hero.
My love for you is 1/x
as x approaches 0.

>Geek thing #3:
To which another friend of mine replied: Wait Wait! As x approaches zero from which direction?

Yes we are geeks. And damn proud of it too.

ah but bill gates doens see it that way. He believes the future of computers is in the software. Pack it full of "features".

Here read up on what he said at MIT on computers.

This story is a little old, but back in 1994, Siegel was interviewed by K. K. Campbell. She's just a little out there. You can read the interview here

PGP was a good start, it is basically an uncrackable form of cryptography based on public keys, that a very brave guy almost spent his life in prison for posting on a BS back ni the day. Click here for info on it.

Many Slashdot'ers probably are already familiar with this, but hey, you never know. We will all be fighting for privacy in the coming years it seems, best to know what tools are available to you. :)

PGP is available on almost every OS, Windows 95/98/NT/2000, MacOS, AIX, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, and DOS. And can be easily configured to work with most popular email programs as well.

Privacy means that only the intended recipient of a message can read it. By providing the ability to encrypt messages, PGP provides protection against anyone eavesdropping on the network. Even if the information is intercepted, it is completely unreadable to the snooper. Authentication identifies the origin of the information, certainty that it is authentic, and that it has not been altered. Authentication also provides an extremely valuable tool in network security: verification of the identity of an individual. In addition to secure messaging, PGP also provides secure data storage, enabling you to encrypt files stored on your computer. Version 6.5.8 also includes PGPnet - a powerful VPN client which enables secure peer-to-peer IP-based network connections - and Self-Decrypting Archives (SDAs) which allow you to exchange information securely even with those who do not have PGP.

Since SPAM has propogated on to email, I am reminded of my favorite lines out of the Unix Haters Handbook.

The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments that landed Robert Morris, author of "the Internet Worm" in jail was all the sysadmins' time his prank cost. Yet the author of sendmail is still walking around free without even a U (for Unixery) branded on his forehead. -- An email from dm at hri dot com dated 12-Oct-93 in Garfinkle, Weise and Strassman; Unix Haters Handbook; May, 1994; IDG Books Worldwide

The interesting thing is that all this was published before the C&S Usenet spamming. How much time are admins spending on email management now?

SPAM has killed Usenet's usefullness for me. At least filters like Popfile and such are keeping SPAM over email bearable; even if they are not fixing the problem.

Events have twisted full circle.

If you go back about 5 years, David Boies was an attorney for the Justice Department, where he did a bang-up job prosecuting Microsoft for anti-trust violations.

Of course, we all know how that turned out, with a settlement that doesn't seem to have visibly shaken Microsoft's business.

Then, about a year ago, the SCO debacle starts up with Boies leading the charge.

"How could Boies betry us?!?" cry the Linux zealots.

Ignore that and consider the implications of these recent revelations. Doesn't this evidence beg for a re-examination of the terms of the settlement or the opening of a new investigation?

Haystack should also be considered next-gen. Or maybe next-next-gen.

When an IBM laptop exhibits a problem there's no 'community' to coagulate into a problem in the first place.

I helped a small company in the Chicago area do exactly the same thing that AutoZone did, a few years back, replacing SCO with Linux to run their core business app - compiled and sold as running under SCO Unixware.

Firstly, the emulator program the parent poster is referring to is actually called IBCS, for Intel Binary Compatibility Standard. Intel binaries are the formal name for the SCO system V's executable binary format. Linux now uses the ELF format for the same purposes.

By using the IBCS emulator, Linux can run the older SCO binaries directly, with the addition of a shared library; either taken from the old, licensed SCO distribution, or available for _public download_ from:

ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/BETA/ibcs2

Note that the SCO agreements do not prohibit anyone from using SCO's shared libraries under another OS. In fact, SCO themselves allowed the SCO Unixware and Svr4 binary libraries to be posted to MIT's tsx-11 server as early as 1994.

So, other than the publicly-available libraries that are required for this migration, no other part of SCO Unixware is required to make the transition from SCO to Linux, running smoothly, and perfectly.

Points made: 1) SCO's inference that they must have used SCO's code to make the transition work smoothly is patently and blatantly false. The only SCO component used is one they themselves have relinquished to the public domain.

2) My counterpart that did the conversion for AutoZone probably forgot about the core SCO or Svr4 libs required to run IBCS, but since they are publicly available, I can't blame him for not remembering about them (In fact, I had to do a little research to refresh my memory about the shared libs, it's only been about 4-5 years since I did the aforementioned migration).

3) The fact that the original SCO system was licensed for say, 5 users, doesn't restrict the APPLICATION from servicing more users. In the case of my customer, their SCO license limited them to 5 users max, but their application also enforced it's own 5 user limit. After upgrading the underlying OS to RedHat, they gladly paid the addtional licensing fees to their custom software supplier for additional licenses, having been freed from SCO's extortional upgrade pricing.

It's no wonder people were flocking to Linux in droves - the base SCO package for 5 users at the time cost $5000.00. Then, they had the nerve to charge ANOTHER $5000.00 for 5 more users, $2000.00 for the addition of simple TCP/IP services *(Who the HELL ever heard of *NIX with no networking??)* and they actually wanted another $3,000.00 for a graphical desktop at the server (read: X-Windows). Unbeliveable! They wanted $15000.00 U.S. for a system that STILL wasn't as cool as Linux (only 10 users max!). Migration to Linux was the obvious choice, brought on by SCO's ridiculous policy and pricing structures.

That's why some researchers in the field of lazy functional language have developed techniques for "optimistic evaluation" -- basically, the compiler uses strict evaluation until it's determined that the object it's evaluating can't be evaluated strictly (for example, in the case of a conceptually infinite list). You still get lazy semantics, and you have most of the performance benefits of a strict language. See the work of Robert Ennals and Jan-Willem Maessen.

So the headline should have read "Former MIT Professor." Or maybe "World's Largest Book." For the record, it's 99% likely that CBS reported him as a "former MIT professor," but I mis-heard (and mis-transcribed) it. Oh well - I'm not sure how this affects the story.

Anyway, you comment that he's "no longer a professor of any sort." While it's true that he's no longer part of the faculty, this press release from December still refers to him as being "of the MIT Media lab" and his homepage is still on their server. So I think your clause "of any sort" is not entirely accurate.

Incidentally, the CBS This Morning piece noted that MIT denied him tenure, but I decided to leave it out of my submission because a) I thought it wasn't really relevant to the point of the story; and b) I didn't want to color the story as an "injustice sympathy" piece.

Another thing...being denied tenure doesn't necessarily indicate inferior merit.

My father runs a state-level professional organization for college professors, so I growing up I got to hear all sorts of wacky stories about professors being denied tenure. True Fact: many professors that do solid research are denied tenure. Reasearch is only a part of the criteria.

For starters, professors are expected to regularly (read: constantly) publish long, dry articles in acadmeic journals for peer review. "Publish or Perish." Given Hawley's diverse interests and apparent passion for working with undergraduate students (always a negative in academia), it wouldn't suprise me if he didn't get around to writing boring research articles as often as he should have.

Furthermore, bullshit politics often plays a BIG factor tenure decisions. As noted, Hawley was popular with his students and had a reputation for "relying on hype and PR" in his work (read: jealous colleagues). From the sound of it, he had the tenure odds stacked against him before he even made it to the hearing.

Of course, my impression from the interview was that it didn't seem like he cared too much about tenure anyway.

BTW - Hawley's PR and hype skills obviously suck - compare with Brian Greene. His research on String Theory has - by his own admission - no practical application and is impossible to conclusively prove. Meanwhile, he has two best-selling books and a PBS mini-series. Take note: that's how it's done.

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.

Programming is essentially a creative endeavor where beauty emerges from the harmonious implementation of function - i.e. a function (creation) in harmony with the object (material or imagined) which is the program's intention to model and with a given set of factors or rules (the API, language, instruction set.) This kind of creativity is in this sense more akin to that expressed in building architecture and industrial design than that expressed in the fine arts and philosophy.

Terming programming as a fine art is quite a stretch apart from the latter's primary concern - which is the creation of beautiful objects. Programming's primary concern is the creation of interactive models of objects in harmony with their material or imaginary counterparts and the boundaries that define the model space.

In this other sense, the aesthetic pleasure derived from programming or observing beautiful code is similar in nature to that derived from the construction or contemplation of philosophical concepts - both can recur to visual metaphors but are in essence invisible.

Now that I have your attention, I'll let you in on a little secret: to get tenure at MIT you have to have a ton of publications and citations. There ain't no other way, no matter now much money you raise. The esteemed Professor Hawley is a case in point: raised millions, but was denied tenure. On the other hand, some folks you might not have heard of, such as Pattie Maes, Justine Cassell, Ted, Adelson, Neil Gershenfeld, Steve Benton, Sandy Pentland, Roz Picard, and others I can't think of at the moment, have earned MIT tenure, published influential work, and graduated PhD students many of whom teach and train PhDs at well known schools.

Disclaimer: I got my PhD at the Media Lab, but I don't teach or train PhDs at any well-known school.

Now that I have your attention, I'll let you in on a little secret: to get tenure at MIT you have to have a ton of publications and citations. There ain't no other way, no matter now much money you raise. The esteemed Professor Hawley is a case in point: raised millions, but was denied tenure. On the other hand, some folks you might not have heard of, such as Pattie Maes, Justine Cassell, Ted, Adelson, Neil Gershenfeld, Steve Benton, Sandy Pentland, Roz Picard, and others I can't think of at the moment, have earned MIT tenure, published influential work, and graduated PhD students many of whom teach and train PhDs at well known schools.

Disclaimer: I got my PhD at the Media Lab, but I don't teach or train PhDs at any well-known school.

There is at least one major astrophysics experiment planned for ISS: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a huge particle-physics detector with a superconducting magnet. It will sit on the truss, facing out into space, and measure cosmic rays. From anomalies in high-energy particle and antiparticle spectra, we can learn about dark matter, antimatter, and other topics. Launch in 2007. 13 nation/55 university/488 physicist collaboration. Check it out!

Listen up everybody out there in Geek Land! User interface design is hard . Read Landauer's The Trouble With Computers .
I like "free as in freedom" software, and I fear the society that will be created by proprietary stuff like Windows, but we won't get the freedom we want if we can't deliver the benefits of freedom to the average user. If you can't be bothered to read the book, remember this: test, test and re-test. For really important stuff, borrow the most clueless of your relatives and friends, and have them try to use it while you are watching (keep your damn mouth shut, though). If you do this, you will create easy-to-use software, and if you believe in the political value of F/LOSS, you need to take this seriously.

I'm a little confused as this isn't really your rights online and anyone that think that it is obviously didn't read the article. This is just and article talking about the information system that Bud uses to track sales of their products. It's a supply chain thing. They're not doing anything devious to go about this, just having people track prices and sales and actually doing something with data.

Anyone can tell you that beer distribution is complicated, this just helps them better their distribution. Take off the tinfoil hats, nothing to see here.

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.

There is also the paper "The Art of the Interpreter" by the same author (one of the Sussmans) - other papers by Sussman available from http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html. The Art of the Interpreter is all about implementing mini-languages in interpreters. Using Lisp. Making an interpreter in Lisp is easy, since the whole language runtime gives you an interpreter, so you just define your parser and your evaluator...

This is almost certainly using a technique usually called called super-resolution. The basic idea is:

• Take multiple offset images with a low resolution sensor (usually a motion sweep)
• Stitch the images together
• In the overlapping areas, you can now generate the most probable underlying pixels at a higher resolution.

The asteroids need to see this video. That'll make them think twice before landing on us.

That's rather vague. What's better about Arch's core design?

Well, for instance, it actually can support things like history-sensitive merges without substantial rearchitecting. After RMS asked for a revision control system with digital signature support, Arch's design was flexible enough that it had a finished implementation while the SVN folks were still debating over how they wanted to implement it. Those are just examples, though.

If you want something a bit better, let me point you to a missive by Tom Lord (the Arch maintainer), entitled Diagnosing SVN, and a refutation by Greg Hudson, Undiagnosing SVN. Note in particular Greg's response to Tom's "under-developed notion of version control" claim.

That's rather vague. What's better about Arch's core design?

Well, for instance, it actually can support things like history-sensitive merges without substantial rearchitecting. After RMS asked for a revision control system with digital signature support, Arch's design was flexible enough that it had a finished implementation while the SVN folks were still debating over how they wanted to implement it. Those are just examples, though.

If you want something a bit better, let me point you to a missive by Tom Lord (the Arch maintainer), entitled Diagnosing SVN, and a refutation by Greg Hudson, Undiagnosing SVN. Note in particular Greg's response to Tom's "under-developed notion of version control" claim.

It's true that entropy can decrease when matter/energy enters a spontaneously ordered state, e.g. all the gas collects in the corner of the room. In itself that's infinitesimally unlikely, yet still possible. But in the case of the universe we live in, there's an additional wrinke. The edges of the "room" are expanding faster than the speed of light. Which means, eventually, every particle will disappear over every other particle's event horizon, and it will be impossible to put them back together again.

Another person downthread alludes to the idea of surviving through increasing entropy by presumably using decreasing amounts of energy. In other words, as the universe gets older and colder, there will be, say, 1/100th the free energy available utilizable by a heat pump. So a form of alife could simply run itself 100 times more slowly and thereby experience time subjectively at a linear rate. Right? Wrong. Two problems pop up. One is proton decay, which means the building blocks of any sentient computer will eventually decay on their own. And second is the cosmic background radiation. Machines work on the principle of taking in energy and outputting it in the form of waste heat. But once the universe has cooled down to the same temperature as the CBR, it will be impossible for any machine to output waste heat. It will cease to function. There is some work being done on reversible computing which might, in the long run, be able to tackle the second problem, but not the first.

>Appletalk ships in every Linux distro.
Yup. And so does XT HDD support. You point, if you have one?

>You're a fucking idiot.
Ad hominem attacks are something I've come to expect from Apple Zealots.

>Gigabit ethernet does speed up TCPIP connections on your LAN.
No shit. And a 747 would get me to work faster. Does that make it useful to me, or the vast majority of users? HELL NO.

>Apple users are apparently better informed about technology than you.
And they apparently have more attitude problems to boot.

>SCSI is still shipped in high volume today.
High volume being 1/10th of a percent of all drives sold?

>As is postscript.
1/100th of a percent of all printers shipped, if you're LUCKY. And I mean LUCKY.

>For every one of those stupid things I can name ten or a hundred failed attempts by microsoft or intel to introduce standards.
Good. Show me 150 failures by each. Have fun.

>EG: by your argument the X86 market is a failure because microbus was not successfu.
Of course, unlike older Macs, there were many choices for buses back then, ISA being on every PC sold, apart from a select few. Can you show me that it was the case, for older Macs, that NuBus was just a sideshow, that the real action was something more popular with the computer industry? I so highly doubt it.

>Never mine that NuBus was a standard bus used by many besides apple (like SCSI), while the "IDE" and "ISA" busses-- which are really the same signalling thing-- are non-standards, and default standards.
Yes, and, like a lot of unpopular standards that were used by the underdog, it died. It died really well.

>RISC processing
Bzzt! HP, 1986, *WAY* before Apple even thought about that.

>The GUI
Debateable, but legend puts it this way, despite Xerox PARC.

>The freakin; CD-ROM! You have apple to thank for that.
How the fuck is that possible when the CD-ROM was invented in 1983? You're claiming things for Apple that happened prior to the Mac being released? Are you nuts?

>USB
I think we've beat that one to death, TWO AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS Intel beat Apple to the punch on that one. Fuck, can you read what I wrote? Are you that stupid?

>FireWire
You mean IEEE-1394, right? Apple wanted to keep the iron fist on firewire, make sure it was dead out of the gate. That's why nobody wanted it. Nobody knew that the hell it was: i.Link? S400? IEEE-1394? All because Apple is a greedy bastard company. They got what they deserved here.

>Flat Panel Displays
What the FUCK are you smoking man? LCDs were invented WAAAAAY before Apple existed. Heck, I had a digital watch before the Mac existed. You can't claim shit that's older than the whole company. Get real.

>Tower cases!
Whaaaaat the hell are you talking about? You have NEVER been to a computer junk sale, have you?

>the 3.5 inch floppy drive
Yawn... same as before. Claiming shit that happened before the Mac was invented.

>The Laser Printer
Again... And there's a tasty tidbit that I must remember the next time someone claims the GUI was first sold in the Mac:

1981 May Xerox unveils the Star 8010, at the National Computer Conference. Many features that were developed on the Alto are incorported. It includes a bitmapped screen, WYSIWYG word processor, mouse, laser printer, Smalltalk language, Ethernet, and software for combining text and graphics in the same document. At a starting price of US$16-17,000, the computer is not a commercial success. During its lifetime, 100,000 units are produced.

>The

And he also makes the rest of us scientists look good. :-)
You may be right about that. Now if he could just come up with a cheap desktop salon system... ;-)

Here's his first glasses prototype! Welcome back to the eighties! ;)

Here's his first glasses prototype! Welcome back to the eighties! ;)

Here's his first glasses prototype! Welcome back to the eighties! ;)

Actually, according the link in the original post "molds eyeglasses", he has come up with a goggle-like device that you wear, and as you look around it observes how your eyeballs and lenses change, using feedback to determine the correct prescription... it's in the article about halfway down.

To me, this seems at least as interesting as being able to actually manufacture eyeglasses. I mean, that's great, but cheap and quick fabrication is ... not really old news, but ... people have been working on that kind of thing for a while, right? How much of his eyeglass fabricator represents significant new advances, versus putting known techniques to a new (and highly laudable!) use? Maybe I'm wrong there, I don't know. But this prescription sensor seems really amazing. Being able to monitor the shape of the lens and cornea as they flex around.... Am I wrong? That seems pretty amazing to me. But he didn't win any awards for that part of it, so maybe that's actually less significant?...

zach

The game dates from far back in the mists of time; it was originally adapted from a CYOA published in a magazine in 1977. It's a suprising amount of fun for something so small.

I use this to test new compilers and the such; it's a much more interesting variant on 'Hello, world!' (and not a lot more complicated).

File header follows:

/* This is a solo paranoia game taken from the Jan/Feb issue (No 77) of
* "SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer" magazine.
*
* Article by Sam Shirley.
* Implemented in C on Vax 11/780 under UNIX by Tim Lister
*
* This is a public domain adventure and may not be sold for profit
*
* $Source: /mit/softbone/source/src/paranoia/RCS/paranoia.c,v $
* $Author: tjcoppet $
*
*/

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.

Simple. Be honest...It'll be worth it in the end.

Strange that every exhortation to be honest seems to give honesty as a means to an end in employment. I'd recommend honesty because it's virtuous.

Belloc

"The next point is that many iBCS2 binaries will require shared libraries."

Liquid waste is collected and jettisoned now and then, while solid waste is freeze-dried and brought back to earth.

As a side note, I worked for a time at the company that makes the space toilet. The lead engineer is now legendary (and known as "Dr. Flush"). There are some great stories that people tell about when it was being developed. In order to test it properly for things like odor containment, they had to have real samples... so they had a trailer out back for employees to go, uh, contribute to science.

There's also a story about a toilet malfunction and an astronaut eating M&Ms (on a live feed back to earth), but I won't get into that...

Now, to figure out why I'm spending this much time posting about space toilets...

link Now mod parent down. This is an anonymous post.

This isn't like any executive summary I've read, because at least half the article focuses on things that I wouldn't consider part of the official open source movement (if there is such a thing). Things like OpenCola, the Human Genome Project, open educational materials (a movement which--according to my credit card statement--isn't going nearly quickly enough).

Yep, lots of electricity to get bauxite to Al, since bauxite is not so clean. But then if you were able to capture the 'cleaner' aluminum oxide from these H2 generators and recycle it back into aluminum, it would probably take less to convert it back into pure Al than from bauxite. The aluminum could be a mostly closed system with enough recycling, and the recycling would be easy with the proper design. Put in a new spool of Al wire, change out the aluminum oxide collector for a new one - maybe free with exchange to encourage recycling, add some distilled water, and you're ready to keep producing more H2 on demand.

Seeing how much energy we use as a society, we're not going to get away with pure solar. Just not enough energy density per square foot using today's technology. Something like a few pebble bed nuclear reactors, or maybe throw in some solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro, whatever other energy sources we have access to, and we can probably get mostly away from fossil fuels... at least as a fuel source for vehicles.

Fossil products will probably still be used for a long time for plastics and such...

When you rely on proprietary products you often get the shaft, especially if you cannot audit and compile the code yourself. See:

• AARD
• NSA key in Lotus
• NSA key in MS-Windows

'Live begins at conception'

Praytell, oh wisened one with woman. When does it start if not after Meiosis?

Holy early-nineties webdesign, Batman!

Early 90's? Frames didn't get introduced until netscape 2.0 in 1996.

I feel so old for remembering the web from before frames even existed, and I'm not even 25 yet.

several small furry animals

Like this??

...not to be confused with the MIT IHTFP Hack Gallery, the REAL hack ;)

Don't know why, but when searching for Guy Steele on images.google.com, this picture is shown on the first page...

"Learn Scheme. Download "DrScheme" and use it while you go through "How to Design Programs," a free online book for learning to program with Scheme. After that, go to half.com and buy "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" for around $10 (it'll be an old edition, but that's alright) and read through it, doing all the exercises it suggests.

If you do that, you'll not only know how to program, but you'll be a better programmer than probably 97% of the people on this board. Which doesn't say much, to be sure, but you'll find that the solid basis in programming that you've developed will allow you to learn any language you want easily. And you'll be able to program well in those languages."

Dr. Scheme
How to Design Programs (Uses Scheme to teach programming)
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (also uses Scheme to teach programming)

For those who're interested in Ruby, I've found a tutorial on that as well.

= 9J =