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Another open source system, but implemented in C++ (like all industrial systems I know of) can be found at here (a vision statement is here.

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"a creator of litigation and uncertainty that threatens the innovation process itself"

Sounds like copy & paste from RMS himself, not that I would want to accuse the author of intellectual borrowings, but the quote has that certain unique air of doctrine about it... ;-)

On a more serious note, I hope he gets listened to by some politicians. Maybe the activists of the FFFI can bring the guy together with some decision makers...

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...they are geek-releated (nerd merchandise, cheap hardware, unusual appliances, things geeks might pay for). However, commercial content should remain the exception on ./ rather than the rule.

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...
30. Donald E Knuth

But hey, wait until his volume 4a comes out, he's gonna slash your butts!

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We spent more during the first three months troubleshooting the Linux system than if we had purchased the Windows solution to begin with," she said. "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort."

Note how here what looks like ill-specified application software requirements are mingled with operating system criticism. If your application doesn't handle "layers of information" how you need it, don't blame the OS!

In addition, how can they know that Windows would have been different? (And if so, why haven't they chosen it in the first place?) They might all just be non-experts who blamed Linux for their project's failure.

Who owns that Website, anyway?

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The open source community (and other companies) could freely publish implementations of the code that passed the test suite, but Sun (or at least the JCP) would remain in control of Java as a standard.

That's all fine for Sun to remain in control of Java. However, what developers should push is that Java be standardized by ISO. FORTRAN is not owned by IBM, PROLOG is not owned by the universities of Marseille/Edinburgh etc. The reason is that software companies need to protect their investment, which they can do much better if the standard is in the hands of an independent multinational organisation dedicated to standardization, and with a transparent membership policy: ISO. Otherwise, what if Sun suddenly decides to do strange things (change APIs, change the licenses) or simply ceases to exist...?

Dear Sun: Please free Java!

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Services like these raise interesting questions, such as:

• What happens if the company by error sends around the email when the sender is still alive and kicking? or:
• What if on the deathbed you would actually reconsider and halt the service, if only you had remembered to have set it up 40 years ago in the first place...!

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Yeah, all those geeks, can they not get a life? I mean, instead of all those useless fictional speculations about a movie that are totally unsolicited by its creator, can't they do something useful instead, like... like erm say, write a CTSS emulator for Linux?

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Linux installations are killing commercial unix, more so than MS's server offerings.

Yes, but it's not Linux alone, I believe might be the fact that Linux runs on Intel PC commodity hardware that kills commercial unices more than anything else.

And that they go is actually a shame, because they are very stable and highly standard compliant, exactly what a developer expects from his or her box [there's a HP 715-100XC sitting here under my desk]...

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Great, I'll go search the museum for some books on FAP and MAD, then I'll write an Emulator for a system that's documents probably don't exist anymore, then I'll write a compiler, then install this OS..

I'm pretty sure the emulator guys are working on this already as we speak ;-)

But seriously, I think it's very useful to actually SEE the code of the systems they might mention in operating systems classes, history section. Understanding the progress can be accomplished by letting students play with CTSS or CP/M or a LISP machine, and I daresay in the latter case many students might even ask "So what happened in the meantime?"...

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...at least you can tickle it.

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Slightly off topic, but since it's about life and death...

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That's right.
If you read their technology page you'd think they can read your mind, but ask.com cannot generate answers, not even extract them; it simply responds with link lists like everybody else.

In the old days, they had a feedback mechanism in place where you had to choose what you mean from a list of candidate questions that the system believed you wanted to have answered. It was cumbersome and is gone now, but there doesn't seem to be any improved Natural Language Technology in place (yet).

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I absolutely do not want some human person mucking about through information about my online purchases etc., but - assuming Google can handle their systems well enough not to be rooted by anybody - i really could not care less if some machine decides to flag down my activity and ask me if I wanted yet another SATA drive for a good price (and the answer is yes!).

The totality of information that Google has stored about you already (articles in groups, queries posted, Web sites visited via referer info) might be more of an issue than the potential threat of third parties breaking into their clusters.

Whether you should be concerned depends on how often you change machines, whether you have a static IP address, whether you're protected by an organizational proxy server, and on your cookie settings, of course. However, even many people who know the portential dangers in theory go with defaults in practice, as homo sapiens is a lazy species.

While I currently have no evidence that Google discarded their "Don't be evil" mantra, I'm not so sure about some of their clients...

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...but couldn't log in. A strange metallic voice said "Sorry, Dave, I can't let you in." Duh.

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Windows viruses on the rise!

I often wonder whether there's a relationship between the anti-virus software companies and virus writers, as clearly the former can only stay in business if there's enough of the latter...

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Google's objective is to improve search. One way to do this is to have a client (call it a browser) that transparently allows you to search both the Web and your local drives.

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Maybe there could be a P2P human spam filtering system where privacy concerns are avoided: if humans mark spam as such, a hash value of the spam would be computed and exchanged with other users. In case they had a message with the same hash value in THEIR inbox, it could be marked spam automatically, thus effectively re-using other users' decisions.

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I fully recommend MAPPIT (I've been running the 19" version 24/7 for about a year now, which they shipped from Germany). It's silence, low energy, robust case (mine is black metal).

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If you are unhappy with a product, use an alternative.
If I don't like Mercedes cars, I should buy a BMW car instead, not steal the Mercedes.

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Decentralized search engines (i.e. ones based on P2P) have political advantages, so I'm glad they are paying increased attention to it now.

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...to avoid starvation, you'd think their government had better things to do than develop more nuclear weapons. But then, it's the U.S. who remain the main producer of weapons of mass distructions (such as VX gas), and asymmetries of power work only where there is trust. It appears current US politics has failt to foster trust on North Korea's side, and many other sides, so I am not surprised many states seek new nuclear research programmes, if only to prohibit neocon agenda motivated invasions of their country.

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Michael Chu's charts look like parse trees, where ingredients are displayed as tree nodes ("words") and operations are displayed as edges ("constituents"), which is very cool indeed.

However, what I miss are parametrized recipe algorithms for N persons rather than for a hard-wired N, which would make it much easier to cook for a flexible number of friends invited for dinner.

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When I heard about the whitespace-is-significant, I had nightmarish flashbacks ... As such, I refused to even look at Python seriously for quite some time.

Right, and even worse, its inability to encapsulate class-local methods (no data hiding => no OO!). On the nice side, Python code is terse (unlike Java) yet readable (unlike Perl), and the libraries are rich enough.

I wonder if the book contains a chapter on C++/Python interoperability (site looks slashdotted right now, so I can't check).

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When are Google going to release the Mozilla version of this?

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...(a) the French series "Il était une fois... Les découvreurs" / "Il était une fois... L'homme", (b) the German "Sendung mit der Maus, and of course the more wellknown (c) Gyro Gearloose.

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Worse, it's subject to the biases of whoever writes the article. I've seen some pretty bad stuff, horribly biased, passed off as a real encyclopedia author. It also sucks that people around here tend to insert Wikipedia links, thus inferring that they're somehow authoritative in any way. They're not.

That may well be true; however, it would be equally naive to believe that a print encyclopaedia has perfect authority or presents an unbiased view. Ultimately, every human knowledge source is subject to error and bias, it's just that the academics commissioned by print media might be conveying theirs in a more fashion.

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One marketing book I found useful was 'Guerilla Marketing', because it told you how to succeed without a lot of capital.

It included tips on how to stand out from the crowd, e.g. by picking unusual stamps and using handwriting instead of sending serial letters to the CEO that just get dumped in the bin by the secretary.

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