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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 far 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.

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 far 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you have a crime to investigate, and you have no suspects, where do you start? Obviously you begin by looking at the person or persons who have the most to gain by perpetrating the crime.

This is why we must consider: who had something to gain from the disasterous crimes of September 11th? Obviously not Osama Bin Laden, who would net no financial windfall from the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Although he has loudly applauded the "terrorist" acts of September 11th and even tacitly taken credit for them, there is no reason to believe that he is anything more than a bandwagon jumper. Being blamed for the destruction of the World Trade Center has done more for his image than any amount of militant Islamic rhetoric.

But if not Bin Laden, then who?

It so happens that on December 11th, "coincidentally" 2 months after the tragedy, Credit Suisse First Boston quietly agreed to pay out US$100 million in order to settle an 18 month old investigation into its handling of certain high-profile technology IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). One of the most controversial amongst these being the IPO of VA Linux Systems, Inc. (LNUX) .

VA Linux Systems, Inc., now known as VA Software, is widely derided as a poster child of the dot-com bust, though inexplicably still in business. At the time of the IPO, VA Linux (Software) shares opened trading at nearly 10 times their $30 offer price, closing the first day of trading at $239.25. This meteoric rise made many early investors rich, strangely on account of a company which purports to sell a hobbyist operating system which can be obtained for free on the Internet. "The VA Linux initial public offering is a prime example of market manipulation in an IPO by investment banks, their customers and the issuing firm," said Steven Schulman, a partner in the law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, which specializes in filing shareholder suits.

"Because certain favored customers of the investment banks agreed to buy shares in a new issue at inflated prices in the aftermarket (in return for getting an allocation of the shares at the initial offering price) the share prices to which the IPO eventually soared were actually driven by artificial market forces," continues Schulman.

But what does the VA Software (Linux) IPO have to do with the attacks on September 11th, and what has that to do with the Credit Suisse settlement? Well, considering that VA Linux (Software) got CSFB into trouble in the first place, it stands to reason that the VA Linux (Software) Board of Directors were complicit in the stock fraud from beginning to end. As the investigation progressed against CSFB, the unscrupulous VA Software/Linux executives, their pockets bulging with filthy lucre plundered from trusting, hard-working investors, must have realized that their days in the country club were numbered if the SEC discovered their wrongdoings.

The SEC, or Securities Exchange Commission, is a federal regulatory agency, and cannot be bribed. Therefore, with a possible stint in federal prison looming large, Larry Augustin and the rest of the crooks, including outspoken gun violence advocate Eric S. Raymond, decided to undertake more active means to halt the investigation.

The Plan

It so happened that all the evidence in the CSFB/

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.

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 [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

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.

ESR has given us a compelling essay on the benefits of communal non-property. He has enriched our lives with a collection of stirring poetry. He has left an electronic legacy of just how gruesome the human form can get. And he has given every underdog geek hope with an inspiring account of his meteoric rise to unheard of riches.

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks. After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks.

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message allowed, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. A

ESR has given us a compelling essay on the benefits of communal non-property. He has enriched our lives with a collection of stirring poetry. He has left an electronic legacy of just how gruesome the human form can get. And he has given every underdog geek hope with an inspiring account of his meteoric rise to unheard of riches.

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks. After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks.

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message allowed, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. A

ESR has given us a compelling essay on the benefits of communal non-property. He has enriched our lives with a collection of stirring poetry. He has left an electronic legacy of just how gruesome the human form can get. And he has given every underdog geek hope with an inspiring account of his meteoric rise to unheard of riches.

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks. After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks.

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message allowed, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. A

ESR has given us a compelling essay on the benefits of communal non-property. He has enriched our lives with a collection of stirring poetry. He has left an electronic legacy of just how gruesome the human form can get. And he has given every underdog geek hope with an inspiring account of his meteoric rise to unheard of riches.

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks. After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks.

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message allowed, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. A

ESR has given us a compelling essay on the benefits of communal non-property. He has enriched our lives with a collection of stirring poetry. He has left an electronic legacy of just how gruesome the human form can get. And he has given every underdog geek hope with an inspiring account of his meteoric rise to unheard of riches.

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks. After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks.

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message allowed, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. A

Fork.

______
Like any public domain or copyleft project, it doesn't really matter what kind of job the maintainer does with the Jargon File, since alternate versions may be created effortlessly. ESR should be free to do whatever he likes with the thing, even if it's a bit silly. And since ESR isn't bothering anymore to host the definitive version himself, and hasn't for like a year or something, and 90% of the jargon file mirrors found on google are old versions anyway, it isn't like a forking would even be noticed.

I read the article after writing this comment and noticed NTK kind of makes this point themselves, but I think it's worth reiterating. Esp. since no one reads the article around here.

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks . After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks .

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message aloud, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. After a few minutes of nervous waiting, a

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks . After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks .

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message aloud, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. After a few minutes of nervous waiting, a

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks . After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks .

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message aloud, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. After a few minutes of nervous waiting, a

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks . After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks .

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message aloud, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. After a few minutes of nervous waiting, a

But none of these compares to his Sex Tips for Geeks . After all, if these tips can get ESR into some hottie's pants, then any disgusting slob can get laid!

Seriously, though, how could ESR have developed these valuable mating tips? Nobody can make me believe that even if he offered all of his newfound wealth to the most hard-up crack-whore on the streets of New York he could get his stinger wet. My Philosophy professor always said, "you cannot invoke magic or God and expect to win an argument in this class." I am therefore left to reach only one possible conclusion. What follows is the only possible explanation for ESR's Sex Tips for Geeks .

The room was dark and the night was cold as the rain pelted against the window. Eric paid no attention, though, absorbed as he was in the warm glow of his computer monitor. A raspy voice grated out of the speakers situated on either side of his monitor, "you've got mail!"

It was his mother's voice, which he had recorded to use with the perl AOL interface he had been working on for the past 10 years. Eric smiled and wiped the sweat condensing in his palm on his thin swatch of hair, only to replace the sweat with the grease oozing from his scalp. His hands shaking, Eric simultaneously pressed the ctrl, alt, shift, F1 and page down keys to retrive the new mail message. He read the message aloud, his voice quivering with excitement.

"hi! i will meet with u on chat 7pm tonite! c u then, xoxoxoxo suzee."

Eric expunged a bulb of gas from his spastic bowel as he checked his watch. 6:57 pm. His shaking grew more extreme, more uncontrollable. He could barely press the key sequence alt, space, F10, F3, tab, scroll-lock, page-up and end to bring up his open-source AOL chat client. Eric was barely able to situate his notebook and ink his quil before the chat client began to load. Eight minutes later, the client was ready to go.

"hi eric," came the message.

Eagerly, Eric replied, "hi, suzee! how r u tonite?"

"fine, thanks. u r late! i wuz worried!"

Eric scribbled in his notebook, "women like promptness."

"i am sorry :( what did u do today?"

"it's ok..."

"Politeness goes a long way," he wrote.

"... i got in trouble in school becuz i hit this guy becuz he kept pulling my hair :("

"No hair-pulling," he noted.

"so. what grade r u in?" Suzee asked.

Eric blushed. The large beads of sweat began to roll down his face to fall on his keyboard. He wiped his forhead with his hand and picked up more grease from his thin red hair. Shaking, he replied to Suzee, "i am not in school n e more."

"that is kool! what do u do then?"

"Girls like men who are no longer in school," He scribbled, before replying.

"i write about my newfound riches and how open-source is a superior method of software development."

There was a long pause. Eric's leg began to shake nervously. After a few minutes of nervous waiting, a

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.

Gotta love a bunch of techies who entirely dismiss reason when it's in the way of fantasy.
Okay, let's see if you can figure this out if I say it in small words.
Feynman _ wrote _ those _ books.
And what a surprise, he was biased towards making himself look good. I'ld recomend Gleick's Genius or any of a dozen other sources for a less biased account.
The short form? Feynman was massively insecure, never was as successful at dating as his own writing makes it appear, and spent much of his life paying off one or more women who blackmailed him after some ill-considered romp or other.
Oh, btw, I hung out with one of his former assistants back in '85 to '87 and she was mighty clear about the distance between the reality and his own claims. Let's just say that she was not impressed with his social skills or his appeal to women. (And since she thought *I* was cute, clearly she had no problem with geek guys per se.)

After way too many years of seeing nerds (derogotory term intentional) citing Feynman's misogynist, fictionalized, self-aggrandizing, b*lllsh*t as a training manual, I've really had enough.

Okay, moving on to happier things, you folk really should check /. before wandering off so quickly.
The ever thorough bellus quies put together this far better set of geek dating links. At least a dozen /.ers should by now have mentioned Eric S. Raymond's detailed dating guide, while for the halfway there, need-to-RTFM, folk, here are the man pages on woman parts.
Those, came from $$$exyGal's links.
Or you could try hanging out here or here to finding the geekishly inclined, though first you might want to download and read this painful but excellent overview.

If on the other hand (heh, heh) you've already given up on finding a human of your own, then you might want to drop by here, here, and here.

Good luck to all of us.

Rustin

When you have a crime to investigate, and you have no suspects, where do you start? Obviously you begin by looking at the person or persons who have the most to gain by perpetrating the crime.

This is why we must consider: who had something to gain from the disasterous crimes of September 11th? Obviously not Osama Bin Laden, who would net no financial windfall from the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Although he has loudly applauded the "terrorist" acts of September 11th and even tacitly taken credit for them, there is no reason to believe that he is anything more than a bandwagon jumper. Being blamed for the destruction of the World Trade Center has done more for his image than any amount of militant Islamic rhetoric.

But if not Bin Laden, then who?

It so happens that on December 11th, "coincidentally" 2 months after the tragedy, Credit Suisse First Boston quietly agreed to pay out US$100 million in order to settle an 18 month old investigation into its handling of certain high-profile technology IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). One of the most controversial amongst these being the IPO of VA Linux Systems, Inc. (LNUX) .

VA Linux Systems, Inc., now known as VA Software, is widely derided as a poster child of the dot-com bust, though inexplicably still in business. At the time of the IPO, VA Linux (Software) shares opened trading at nearly 10 times their $30 offer price, closing the first day of trading at $239.25. This meteoric rise made many early investors rich, strangely on account of a company which purports to sell a hobbyist operating system which can be obtained for free on the Internet. "The VA Linux initial public offering is a prime example of market manipulation in an IPO by investment banks, their customers and the issuing firm," said Steven Schulman, a partner in the law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, which specializes in filing shareholder suits.

"Because certain favored customers of the investment banks agreed to buy shares in a new issue at inflated prices in the aftermarket (in return for getting an allocation of the shares at the initial offering price) the share prices to which the IPO eventually soared were actually driven by artificial market forces," continues Schulman.

But what does the VA Software (Linux) IPO have to do with the attacks on September 11th, and what has that to do with the Credit Suisse settlement? Well, considering that VA Linux (Software) got CSFB into trouble in the first place, it stands to reason that the VA Linux (Software) Board of Directors were complicit in the stock fraud from beginning to end. As the investigation progressed against CSFB, the unscrupulous VA Software/Linux executives, their pockets bulging with filthy lucre plundered from trusting, hard-working investors, must have realized that their days in the country club were numbered if the SEC discovered their wrongdoings.

The SEC, or Securities Exchange Commission, is a federal regulatory agency, and cannot be bribed. Therefore, with a possible stint in federal prison looming large, Larry Augustin and the rest of the crooks, including outspoken gun violence advocate Eric S. Raymond, decided to undertake more active means to halt the investigation.

The Plan

It so happened that all the evidence in the CSFB/VA Linux investigation was held at the SEC Northeast Regional Office in Manhattan. More specifically, 7 World Trade Center, Suite 1300. The board decided that a simple burglary or arson attempt would not be satisfactory to destroy the evidence; anything so simple had a significant chance of being botched, and regardless of success would leave too many witnesses or living accomplices.

It was then that Eric S. Raymond suggested something he had read in a book by Tom Clancy. Crashing two planes into the World Trade Center Plaza would guarantee the destruction of the SEC offices, killing the operatives and possibly a number of SEC investigators at the same time. The plan seemed flawless, and would cost little more than the price of a few plane tickets. In a secret session, the board voted unanimously in favour of Eric's suggestion, and began to put it into action.

VA Software/Linux, at the time of planning the attacks, had no shortage of H1-B visa workers, who they employed for the purpose of writing and improving hacking, encryption, and other terrorist tools for the Linux operating system. It had been decided that a hand-picked few of these foreign H1-B workers would be used as the "patsies" in the operation. A contest was held, and the most zealotous Linux advocates were chosen for this secret assignment, direct from the board of directors. They accepted their mission after being told that, if successful, it would guarantee the adoption of Linux in the desktop market.

Alan Cox was brought into the fold to provide some planning and logistics for the mission. It was he who determined that since there was no adequate flight simulator software for Linux, the patsies would need to train at a flight school in order to pull off the plan successfully. It was also his idea to hijack a third and fourth plane for the purpose of crashing them into Washington D.C., to express his extreme rage over the DMCA, or Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The board of directors agreed with this addition to the plan in the hopes that it would help divert attention from the purpose of the WTC attack.

The H1-B workers were given false identities by using Linux hacking tools. Once they had attended the necessary flight training, they stayed at the Massachusetts home of Richard M. Stallman for a brief "faith building" retreat. During this time spent at the house of Stallman, between the nauseating stench of patchouli, Stallman's incessant, pitiful recorder playing, and Stallman's droning seminars on the grammatical and syntactical accuracy of various statements by Microsoft representatives, the H1-B workers were effectively hypnotized to the point that they were ready to lay down their lives for Free Software. It was then that they departed for Boston's Logan International Airport to board the planes.

(The preceding inside information has been obtained from a credible source close to the VA Linux/Software Board of Directors. He/she is in hiding for obvious reasons in light of this damning evidence, but has presented hard, physical evidence of VA Software/Linux's complicity in the events of 9/11 to federal investigators.)

Troll 68 of 208 from the annals of the Troll Library .

Not necessarily-- could be spending more on R&D.

I hope not.

While I am not one to engage in schadenfreude for its own sake and I certainly support people's efforts in the area of embedded technology in certain parts of the home, I think these losses are good news on the whole. It's not that Mr. Gates's presence in the video game console market is itself really that important in real life - it's that Microsoft has repeatedly exhibited expansionist tendencies, and it's been pointed out that the very name "Xbox" is intended to mean "Anything Box" (ie. the "X" is a cheeky metasyntactic variable).

Not to be a conspiracist, but to me this implies that they have much more on their minds than video games. Imagine if their intention is to further expand beyond the digital media space they've so far occupied and on into real-world objects? Imagine if they make something that could be used to (mis)create toast? I find these prospects very alarming, and thus the news of the Xbox's impending failure can't help but be a little bit of a relief.

Perhaps because it's true. Sorry to disturb your cosy worldview, but the sad fact is not -everything- was invented or discovered in America.

And I'm fast starting to believe that the only thing Americans are any good at these days is stealing other people's ideas and claiming them as their own. Bill Gates is of course the first name that comes to mind; esr's rant ends up with a list of every major 'innovation' from MS, and who it was bought or stolen from. Then there's all the business-method patent companies; Amazon, PanIP, etc.

And then there's the entire issue of the wright brothers, philo farnsworth, etc. Sure the wright brothers were scientific about things, but baboo dick managed some fairly well controlled flights as well as his first less than impressive decent and crash into a ditch.
Sure the CRT was a great step forward, but bard invented the basic syncronised scanning of an image.
The camera part of this has already gone to CCD. The basic scanning concept that bard invented is still used; the beam of electrons that farnsworth invented isn't. So who invented the video camera again?
When most TV's go LCD, are we going to forget farnsworth and credit the inventor of the LCD with inventing "television" ?

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.

If there are a small number of honeypots, yes, it's easy to stop them. But what if everybody had one, or at least everybody who didn't need a real smtp server? All those cable modems out there, which aren't allowed to run servers because of blazingly clueless policies by cable companies, could be running honeypots, especially teergruben,
which run valid SMTP vvvv...eeee..rrr..yyyy...sssss...loooowwwww....lyy yyy
and can keep spammers tied up for long times. They don't usually look like open relays; they usually look like end users. Cable modem companies could be heros by having people running the things. (And if spammers respond to this by not sending email to domains hosted on cable modems, that's a big win too....)

J. Random Passerby: "Gee, Mr. Sturgeon, you write scifi? I've read some of this scifi stuff, and honestly, most of it is crud!"

Ted Sturgeon: "Indeed, about 90% of all science fiction is crud, but then 90% of everything, roughly speaking, is crud."

And thus was born Sturgeon's Law.

I used to dabble in scifi

I used to "dabble" in mainstream fiction, and found that most of it was crap. And what do we learn from this? Sturgeon was right.

Actually, I would argue that today, the meta-category of "speculative fiction" has, overall, a higher percentage of good stuff because it simply give the author more scope. All of time and space, all the lands of the imagination, up to and including the real world here-and-now. How can someone who is truly creative and inventive resist this wider scope? I think this is a fairly minor factor, and is partially offset by the stigma of being a "genre author", but I nevertheless think it's a factor.

avoid the topsellers lists, its filled with pedestrian crap

Here I strongly disagree. Sure, 90% of the bestsellers are crap, but remember Sturgeon's law. Throughout history, most of the great writers have been popular writers, at least as far back as Shakespeare. If you're not writing to entertain, then why the hell are you writing? I'd much rather have a novel written by someone who has worked for years to learn how to write an entertaining, popular novel, than by someone who has spent years trying to prove to the world how much smarter he is than the average joe.

The first step to enlightenment is to be a book snob.

Yeah, I tried that back when I was a young student, a couple of decades ago. Now, looking back, I realize what a pretentious young idiot I was. Back then, I thought James Joyce was the height to which literature could and should aspire. Now I realize that it's simply an interesting side-branch of literature. Worth investigating, but no better in any absolute sense than the best of the popular best-selling authors.

As for learning something, I think that in general, you'll do better to read some non-fiction. I read fiction for entertainment, and thus, I expect it to be entertaining. If it isn't, it's probably just a waste of my time.

Mary Kate and Ashley???


Mountain Dew was not intended to be used nasally.

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.

Very true. The main problem with looking for stuff over at mp3.com and what not is that one needs a broadband connection and some patience. Patience because Sturgeon's Law is definitely in force with those kinds of sites; I usually have to download five or six songs from different bands to get one that is listenable (ObShamelessPlug). Broadband, because downloading and sifting through that many mp3s is downright painful on a dialup. I've done it; never again.

The other problem is that, there is a pretty strong herd mentality with music. Many people don't just want to listen to a band; they want the feeling that they are part of a community of people who listen to the same band.

Because of a combination of these factors, I bought a CD by an RIAA supported band today. I know these guys' music; I know that even their weaker songs will be listenable. I am part of an online group of fans; I know I can share my experiences of listening to this album with them. I didn't have to wait for a download, and I don't have to worry about mp3 compression artifacts.

- Sam

It is Nybble. It's a pun on "byte".

I want my computa to run a language/os based on intercal.

Do you mind if I fuck your sister's ass while I wait for it? I'm sure she will enjoy the ftp process (get/put) running or her slot. Thank you for your cooperation.

w007!

By the power vested in me by Godwin's Law, I hereby proclaim this thread closed.

TRY THIS LINK INSTEAD...(left default text mode on)

You're using the wrong sense of hacker. Most security hackers won't have much use for the tricks in this book, either.

The hacker referenced in the book's title is this one.

Also there is no real-world application for hacking. Anyone who says that deserves to be butt-raped in jail.

Tell that to anyone who's ever worked on a tiger team (or opfor, in military terms).

That's not to say that I don't enjoy reading about these clever things; there is a lot to be learned by studying this stuff. But implementing them is usually a mistake these days, if for no other reason than because there's already a portable way to do it which is probably more efficient. To go back to the Duff's Device example, almost all compilers will implement loop unrolling already. And that's a C-language trick, supposedly already a high-level language. Note I said supposedly! :-)

It's illegal for me to remove this stuff? Isn't it mine?

Legislators aren't above telling you what you can do with the stuff you think you own. All you have to do is convince them that there are negative effects to the public at large if you're allowed to do what you want with your own property. In theory, I can go along with this. But where do you draw the line? Where do things get silly?

Let me give you three examples:

Example one:

In the west, "land use" and "property rights" fights have been going on for decades. "How dare the damn new world order guvment tell me I can't do what I want with my own land! I own it! That gives me the absolute God-given right to stripmine it to the center of the earth and fill the hole with toxic waste if want to, by gum!" I've known ranchers who hold views this extreme. I've known ranchers who literally plowed up access roads on their property because the state passed a law saying that through-roads (roads connecting one publicly accessible road to another) had to be publicly accessible.

Example two:

In your own house, I'm willing to bet you have more than one cleaner with a label that reads "It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling" or words to that effect. So here's a couple of household cleaning tips: #1 - The best bathtub cleaner in the world is to take liquid drain opener and brush it on all the surfaces then sprinkle it with a scouring powder that will form a sort of paste and hold the liquid in place. Let it sit for an hour (with windows open and good ventilation) then come back and scrub. You'd be amazed at some of the greasy, stained, crudded-up salvaged tubs and sinks I've rescued with this method. Tip #2 - This method is illegal. Consider that and consult your conscience before employing it.

Example three:

The New Jersey state legislature has proposed legislation designed to make repairing firearms so ridiculously burdensome that no one will do it. Check out this link.s What that means is that if the extractor (a $5, easily-replaceable part) on the 1911 Colt left to you by your grandfather breaks, you have to fill out forms and turn the gun over to the state police for examination (with no guarantee written into the law that they'll ever have to give it back to you) and jump through all sorts of other hoops to get the thing fixed in-state. Or just break the law, fix it yourself, and risk a $10,000 fine and 18 months in jail. What's that, you say? It's yours? It's legal to own? You think you should be able to repair stuff you own without going, hat-in-hand to the state police for permission and procedures? Not if enough legislators can be convinced that the public has an legitimate interest in what you do with your own private stuff.

Where I live, it's de facto illegal for me to paint my garage door without approval of a quasi-governmental committee. (It's called a "home owners association" and where I live, the state grants it major power over my life and property. YMMV.)

So your example of, basically, "Why shouldn't I be allowed to do what I want with my own property?" doesn't really hold water. Governments make rules that often forbid it. Men and women with badges and guns enforce those rules. Individuals enter into contracts that encumber them with silly rules because life is darn near impossible to get through otherwise if you live near other human beings.

So where do you draw the line? Do you refuse to have a credit card out of high-minded principle and a practical concern for your own privacy and then make an inconsiderate ass out of yourself, causing problems for those around you just so you can say you adhere to your principles? Do you become a hermit, squatting in a shack in the forest? Or do you do as I have done - figure out where you draw the line (I disagree with the ranchers in example 1 and the legislators in example 3, but will take my chances by continuing to violate the law as in example 2) and accept that life involves compromises and that it's really OK for the government to tell me I can't do certain things even if I wish they'd just leave me alone?

It's a tough lot of thinking you're getting yourself into when you decide to be aware of what's going on around you, when you lose your innocence of the greed that underlies so much of our rules of personal, professional, and business interaction. Sometimes I wish I had never started down that path.

What about the insidious banana problem?

Eric Raymond has gone to the trouble of preparing an entire faq on Libertarianism. Perhaps you would care to read it before heedlessy dispensing unsupported and belligerent accusations?

The story about the moth is true. The female programmer in question (Grace Hopper) worked on the project but she wasn't actually there when the bug was found. Also, the term "bug" was already in use before that time. See also the Jargon File entry.

Contrary to stereotype, hackers are not usually intellectually narrow; they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even interestingly on any number of obscure subjects -- if you can get them to talk at all, as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.

It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent.

All dialects, including those who developed in England, are incorrect. Most dialectic differences were develloped by illiterate people. There is a correct way to use plurals in English which is well-documented, and it does not matter where you are from.

This is misinformation. All dialects are correct, in that all dialects are self consistent with their own sytaxes and vocabularies. One can speak of the standard dialects, for instance, Received Standard Southern British, which is the canonical British dialect for public discourse, and Standard American English, which is the canonical American dialect for public discourse, or . Another widely used dialect in the United States is African-American Vernacular English, which is sometimes called by linguists Standard African American English, and politically sometimes called "ebonics" and distinguished as a different language by well-meaning idiots who have no background in linguistics.

If one wishes to take part in public discourse, particularly in print, and especially "learned" discourse, it is necessary to learn one of the standard dialects, and it is helpful to learn more than one (e.g., both the American and British standard dialects). If one wishes to converse with persons from other regions that speak English and be sure to understand them, it is helpful to know something about the non-standard dialects which we all use (for instance, The Jargon File is in part a dictionary of a particular non-standard dialect used by self-identified "hackers," and like all dialects, its use is part of that process of self-identification).

One's speech can be incorrect with reference to a particular dialect; for example, one who speaks of a cracker as a "hacker" is not speaking in correct hacker dialect, and is thus identifying himself (or herself) as a poser (i.e., is unintentionally emphasizing an false affectation). Thus one can, in the schools (one of whose primary purposes is the teaching of the local standard dialect), speak of right or wrong use of plurals, in reference to that standard dialect. But one cannot apply the rules from one dialect to others and necessarily identify what are right or wrong uses correctly. Indeed, this is a case in which the American and British standard dialects differ; if one says "Apple is," one is identifying oneself as an American or a wannabee; if one says "Apple are," one is identifying oneself as a Brit/Canadian/etc. (I think this is the usage in the various Commonwealth countries) or a Brit wannabee.

Here's an excellent thread on a linguists list that talks a little bit about prestige or canonical dialects and standards.

I leave the enumeration of the number of different dialects intentionally used in this posting as an exercise to the reader, though I point out that it is an exercise intended to show how shifts in dialect can change one's sense of the "identity" of a writer/speaker.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of...a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.

The bytes were only 7 bits. The drive was introduced in 1956.

IBM started moving to 8 bit bytes later that same year, and the word "byte" was also coined that year, at IBM.

Latitude : 42.5460
Longitude : 83.4284

Also colloquially known as ICBM address, in case anyone feels like pulling this stunt.