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What we have here is an ecosystem. Drupal has a problem, the community notices, Slashdot broadcasts, we help them out, a nice piece of infrastructure is strengthened, the tide rises and all our boats float a little higher.

Now will it be pushed though ISO (prefereably
though a fasttrack). The ISO stamp carries far
more weight for governements agencies and this
could cange a lot of things. See for example
Tim Bray's log on the subject
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/09/24/ SmartEC

Daniel

BTW: wasn't the September 2004 LSB spec supposed to be fasttracked though the ISO process too ?

"At last we have a nice concrete example of a large corporation admitting that they're going to spread their propaganda through blogs."

Wasn't that exactly what Sun did with Tim Bray? It's been very open e.g. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/ Policy

It's wise not to put all your eggs in one basket, but a lot of your arguments feels non the less as FUD and "chicken little" argumentation, since I can't see why they would want to put themselves out of business.

I guess it's the same instinct that makes me prefer open source software.

Also read this piece about sharecropping.

Actually, null characters are used to terminate strings, so if there's one byte left to be read and it's a null character, the read routine would just return a string with length of zero. If it's the EOF character, it would return -1.

That's true in C, but not in Java. Try this code fragment:

byte[] bytes = {0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00};
String string = new String(bytes, "UTF-16LE");
System.out.println(string.length());
System.out.println("'" + string.codePointAt(1) + "'");

The first println will output "3" and not "0", even though it is a string of just null characters. You can verify this by the second println, which prints the bytes (as an integer) of the second character. It will ouptut "'0'" too.

Just one of the advantages of Strings as Objects. Of course, sometimes you just have to dig into the bytes as I did in this project (comments encouraged!).

My suggestion to you: don't put too much weight on Tim Bray's bet. If you look carefully at his rdf.net challenge you will notice that the wording leaves him ample space to maneuvre were things to turn out agains him:

• This has to happen before January 1, 2006, and
• I am the sole judge and jury, but
• Ill publicize anything thats submitted formally, and my comments on it, so Im doing this in the open, except for
• Im busy, so I may exercise fairly brutal triage on incoming proposals and take a while to get to the ones really worth looking at, and
• If theres serious money in it, the recipient of RDF.net is morally obligated to find a way to cut me in for a piece of the action.

Tim Bray is switching his development environment from OSX/Linux to Solaris. His diary of the switch is here (Note, as he does, that Mr. Bray is a Sun employee)

Tim Bray is blogging his move from his current dev platform of linux/osx to Solaris 10. Very honest, and very interesting.

If Sun is doing a database, somebody better tell Tim Bray:

Other Questions [from the Sun Analyst Summit] There were lots of questions, most of them good; here are the ones that stuck in my memory...

Why Doesn't Sun Do a Database? Well, it would be nice to have one, but does the world need another?

So, is McNealy just being coy, or is Bray terminally out of the loop?

You may well be right about OO being a dog to use, I've never tried it so I can't say. But the OO file format appears to have traction with the EU at least.

Which must surely be of concern to MS and even if OO is as bad as you say, if the OO file format gains parity with .doc then it can be adopted by any number of competing applications, Wordperfect, AppleWorks, ThinkFree etc.

New entrants will be able to compete with established players hopefully bringing us new ideas and ever better office suites.

Actually, you're wrong, and right. This proposal for Binary XML is ASN.1, according to Tim Bray's blog posting.

Tim Bray concurrently covered a simmlar topic in Software in the TLP Era and offers some strategies to deal with the coming MultiCore chips.

As he mentioned in his weblog, Tim Bray had nothing to do with this list.

they never adapt the lexical model of LISP

Ever heard of something called XML?

As Tim Bray points out, "XML does a lousy job of what Lisp S-expressions could do decades ago."

Value judgements aside, we can at least all agree that it's trivial to interconvert lexically between a LISP expression and an XML expression.

Further discussion on the C2 Wiki.

Check out Tim Bray on software patents.

His basic conclusion is that every significant piece of software infringes on some patent, so get over it.

This has probably been covered elsewhere, but I found that Tim Bray's short essay on WS-Overload summed it up better than I could have:

"I'm going to stay out of the way and watch the WS-visionaries and WS-dreamers and WS-evangelists go ahead and WS-build their WS-future. Because I've been wrong before, and maybe they'll come up with something that WS-works and people want to WS-use. And if they do that, I'll stand up and say 'I was WS-wrong.'

The God Emperor of XML, Tim Bray, doesn't seem to know of any such software so he posted a challenge.

Yep it's seeks that hurt. Tim Bray observed something interesting from the reiser4 benchmarks. That within 1 Gig of data you can do about 120 to 130 random seeks. Within 3 Gigs of data you can only do about 90 to 105 random seeks a second. Thats why having good readahead sizes and ordering your seeks can be really helpful. At 10,000 RPM it's 166.7 RPS -- thats 6 milliseconds to do a complete revolution. So the latency from that is on average 3 milliseconds. Reading 150K Bytes at a time would be another 3 milliseconds so the other 4 should be the track shifting time and other overhead. Upping the RPMs should decrease the rotational latency and read time even if it didn't effect track switching. Of course if you don't also increase track seeking time than you can only double the amount of seeks you can do in second even if you make a 100,000 RPM or faster drive...

This is just messed up.

Are you talking about replacing Java applets with Perl scripts? What? And who does serious web development with Perl CGI!? I'm a full-time perl programmer and won't touch CGI. CGI.pm, sure, but not unless it's under mod_perl.

And Java not good for web-based applications? Have you not even considered the enormous rise of Java as a popular back-end server language purely for large-scale websites? And hey, in some cases Java's regexps are faster than Perl's!

I love perl. I make money writing perl. I teach people perl. But I also know Java (mostly from college) and can tell you don't know what you're talking about.

In light of the Reiser4 release, Tim Bray makes an interesting observation that, while the performance of CPUs has increased by a factor of 645 in the last 14 years, the speed of disk seeks has only increased by a factor of 3 to 4.

'... In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent. patents and linux ...'
[tim bray]

must make a mention of tim brays article on software patents that I've recycled from a while ago.

what adam said

• 
  In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent. patents and linux, tim bray
  

• 
  In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can't build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone's patent. patents and linux, tim bray
  

It's been said before don't be a sharecropper.

If you must work on proprietary OSes then don't do something that extends the Operating System itself. Widgets are a classic example. If you read Konfabulator's post about it - they do not seem totally surprised.

Software development is a Red Queen Race - you've got to stay ahead of the competition by being better faster cooler. The race that Apple is running is not against its developers but Windows. All power to them. Sure it would be nice for them to buy up innovative products like they (supposedly) did with the original multi-finder.

Not sure why they don't. It seems obvious that Windows developers half hope that MS would buy them out. But it could be argued that this would open Apple up to problems of intellectual property challenges that they couldn't afford to pay for. If you've another idea way they don't play more fair then post here.

But they do buy out good software products. Some of the Pro software has been bought from other developers.

But if you develop software too close to Apple's core business then I guess you have to look at that Sharecropper paradigm again and avoid it.

So lookout if you work on the following plots of ground...

Search (Watson)
Music (Audion)
Networking (Dave)
Desk Accessories / OS extensions (Konfabulator)
Browsers / Internet Content & Search (Camino, NewsNetWire)
Video editing

I think you'd be foolish to develop a PVR for Mac OS X for instance - that covers several of the above fields... basically a Video iTunes with search and networking - perhaps that RSS stuff as well. Expect Apple to run with this for sure - that new codec H.264 should run pretty well over AirPort Express... and wait until wireless UWB Firewire hits silicon.

Still - shame on Apple - seems like they could do better. They even had the gall to present this stuff at the WWDC - where the developers would surely know where they were getting the inspiration from.... amongst the ranks of those in the audience. Hell the Konfabulator guys, Arlo Rose & Perry Clarke, were probably in the audience!

You don't need fancy software to write in a blog. Jeffery Zeldman used to write his blog exclusively in a text editor, in fact! I think Tim Bray and Norman Walsh use still use Emacs to do the majority of their writing (augmented with some client-side scripts) before uploading their content, but I may be wrong.

There is no meaningful technical conflict between RSS and Atom. RSS is widely deployed and is not going away any time soon.

Do something different. For example, follow the lead of Hometown Wireless and expand as a wireless ISP. Focus on areas without DSL, cater to customers who don't want home voice service by offering optional VOIP, or who may want a dedicated 54Mbps wireless pipe.

Another example. Focus on the "triple play" of voice, video, and data services. Deploy high speed VDSL gear or ethernet, get your own T1s and your own phone numbers for voice. Use Cisco voice termination equipment over VDSL or ethernet, ang get video feeds from Direct TV.

Someone in another comment said that becomming a CLEC will cost you $500,000. I don't doubt it. There are a lot better and cheaper investment and growth strategies out there for you.

For a overview of the field that is full-text search (of which web search engines is an important, but not the only, part), you should read Tim Bray's essays on search. He's been working on full-text search for a long time, knows his stuff and explains it in a very readable manner.

This is older than 10 years, but Tim Bray tells a funny story about how he might have brought down AOL back in 1988 in response to getting a spam email from someone with the email address lipstick@aol.com.

He launched a job to send an angry response email every 10 seconds. He forgot about it until he heard a couple of guys talking a few days later about how their aol accounts were down over the weekend.

Check it out, it's pretty hilarious.

This is older than 10 years, but Tim Bray tells a funny story about how he might have brought down AOL back in 1988 in response to getting a spam email from someone with the email address lipstick@aol.com.

He launched a job to send an angry response email every 10 seconds. He forgot about it until he heard a couple of guys talking a few days later about how their aol accounts were down over the weekend.

Check it out, it's pretty hilarious.

What you want is a Relax-NG Schema. DTDs only define the barest bones of XML structure.

Except that DTDs are also currently the only standard way to expand general entities in a document. I wish there was a standard entity definition language independent of validation languages such as RELAX NG. Tim Bray once had an idea, but that seems to have gone nowhere. :-( XSLT could be used to do it, but transformations of that nature are slow and clunky when compared with entities. XML 2.0 needs a new doctype declaration mechanism. The SGML-inherited one is too limited!

That's the life of a sharecropper.

This goes back to Tim Bray's Sharecropper Analogy.

Essentially, the idea is that if you're not developing for an open platform, you're a sharecropper. Your entire existance as a developer is predicated on the fact that you're working for someone else's platform that they own and control. If they decide that they like your product's functionality, they can either buy you out, or simply integrate it into the platform, most likely putting you out of business.

Apple has does this in the past, with Watson & Sherlock, and Microsoft has done this many, many times. Netscape, Winamp, and now Norton & McAfee. Microsoft has a pattern of simply offering a product as an additional download, then tying it into the next version of the OS with no real way to remove it.

What this means for Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro, and the dozens of other AV people is not exactly clear yet. But it's a good possibility that many of their employees will be touching up their resumes once this Service Pack gets released. Unless, of course, they sue MS. Either way, I see this as a major strain on their business relationships with Microsoft.

Also, what is the basis of a search engine? Sparse-matrix navigation? How does this stuff really work? Any links to summaries of this stuff?

check out this series of essays related to search technology, as mentioned in a previous slashdot article.

It's always interesting reading his journal and here's his take on the camp.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/10/11/ FooNotes

subscription-based digital VCR makes you a TV sharecropper. Just say no.

for example, I saw no mention of the Semantic Web

Everything beyond the TOC (which I loaded onto my browser) is slashdotted. The problem with the links to the different articles is that its not part of a tree hierarchy, I cant just say "wget all pages beyond point X", nor can I make a guess and do a regex download of all URLs with "search" in them, because some articles do not conform to that pattern.

A tarball for offline browsing would be nice ? didnt see it on the page, though. Save you a part of a slashdotting, Tim.. how about it ? :)

I'm reading John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider at the moment, and the DARPA Policy Analysis Market seems eerily similar to Brunner's idea of Delphi boards. Interestingly, in the novel the government manipulates the odds slightly in order to undermine dissent. People checking the Market for (rigged) odds of an event happening might conclude that a vote against the government or a protest against a controversial policy would be pointless.

Linkfest: look here here and here.

Don't be a Sharecropper.

There are actually quite a few workable schemes for preventing spam. Tim Bray is right that any system where sending is both free and anonymous will always be open to spam, but it's not necessary to charge on a per-message basis. One system that is beta-testing right now is Bonded Sender. With this system, the owner of an outgoing mail-sending server puts up money to guarantee that his system won't be sending spam (on the order of $1000 per server, with $500/year renewal). There's a contract that specifies what is spam and a third-party arbitrator for handling disputes. Existing mail-filtering software can easily check the BondedSender status via the DNS system, as they generally already check the DNS status of senders.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this. First, the IP verification won't work with dynamically-assigned addresses. Second, some smaller email senders may not want to spend as much as $1000 on this. Third, it doesn't help you if your ISP is not participating. All of these can be overcome by using a paid relayer, as Tim Bray suggests. It would be up to the relayer to determine how to prevent abuse of its own system.

Other systems work by verifying a digital signature and certificate of the sender, either on a per-message basis (S/MIME or PGP) or on a per connection-basis (using SMTP over TLS). This doesn't require a static IP address to verify identity.

Although it may seem complex and even chaotic, more than one mechanism will exist to prevent spam, even in the long-term. For a variety of legal, political, and financial reasons, no one solution will please everyone. We need to have some sort of meta-email system for allowing these to co-exist effectively.

What I propose is that an independent group be established which will provide a framework for interoperability. What needs to be done?

• A description of anti-spam policies. For example, Tim Bray's proposed SMTP4ALL charges $.01 per message. Or FirstClassEmail may charge $1 per message. BondedSender contractually forbids spam and requires a cash bond up front, as well as identity verification.

  There are a lot of possible policies. It should be up to the recipient to specify what policy is acceptable, but there needs to be a concise list so that the decision can be coded in a program.

• There also needs to be a way for the recipient to find the policy. For certificate-based systems, the policy can be encoded directly into the certificate, but the exact syntax needs to be defined. For other systems, something else needs to be devised.
• A way to describe the properties of an individual sender or message. It may be part of the sender's anti-spam policy that unsolicited mailings are allowed, but that each mail will be labeled with what type of mail it is, e.g. commercial, personal, political, charitable soliciting, etc. Similarly, a system such as Hotmail may want to label each user as to whether they are a verified, paying customer, or an anonymous, free customer.
• Some sort of meta-enforcement scheme. There needs to be a way of knowing if SMTP4ALL is really charging $.01 per message or if it's letting spammers send through at 1/1000 of that price. Is a CA shirking its duties?

  We don't want the chaos of the current RBL system. This is not something that should be c

No not REAL RAID 1, I was using RAID 1 as an example of the type of mirroring I was looking for.

Basically I have two servers, one is the active server one is the fall over backup. Now my nightly tar backup is good enough, but I was wondering if there was a better solution. A way to sync the two /home every so often, or even on an on-going basis so my clients can be sure their data is backed up fairly frequently in case a server fallover is needed.

Java is still strongly typed, but weak typing is good now in large part because of test driven development. Unit tests that you design yourself and run as part of the build process enforce your constraints much more effectively than strong typing does.

For more, read Tim Bray's piece on this.