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It wasn't always that way, and the degree of open source's dependency on corporate sponsorship is debatable. I'm not going to deny it exists or speculate on whether or not this is a Good Thing, but if it didn't there would still be open source development: remember the cash the government spent on BSD via DARPA and the NSA pumped into SE Linux and the continuing support from universities and academia to open source. Not to mention the thousands of developers who devote their spare time and personal resources.

What corporate sponsorship there is exists because the sponsors have something tangible to gain, not just goodwill. IBM saw the writing on the wall for proprietary UNIX and embraced Linux to poise itself for the future and strike back at HP, DEC, Microsoft, and Sun. Over the weekend news broke that Apple was going to be buying some new chips from IBM for future computers, but the article also said that IBM was considering running Linux on them as well:

Big Blue is being equally cautious about revealing its own 970 system plans, but analysts say the chip could provide the basis for an IBM Linux system.

Now, that right there shows that IBM is looking after their own bottom line with the 970 chip in more ways than being a vendor to Apple, and dollars to donuts Red Hat has the specs on it and is likely gearing up to port future versions of its Linux distro so they'll run not only on x86 gear, but IBM 970 boxen and Apple Macs as well.

I think Sun's embrace on StarOffice was McNealy's ego wanting to undermine MS-Office, which he was willing to spend some cash to do. Profiting from it was a secondary consideration at best. So now it's mostly morphed into an open source project that is finally getting enough quality under its belt to be a serious Office competitor.

The reason I used Sun as an example has nothing to do with its StarOffice foray....I was referring to the rock and a hard place it finds itself in with Linux/BSD competing against Solaris and Intel/AMD competing against Sparc64. Sun saw the threat and lost sales that Cobalt represented, which was why they bought them up at a fat price and have neglected the product line. Not a good move if you ask me....Linux ain't going away, and nothing is preventing someone else from entering the free OS server appliance industry with newwer and better stuff.

> Has Jake Barnes every met a linux user? Or a BSD
> user? Or a VMS user? Or hell, a BeOS or OS/2
> user?

Or a sports nut? Or a car nut? Or a gun nut? Everyone knows someone who is pretty passionate about something. However, being passionate about an operating system isn't as socially acceptable as painting yourself the team colors of some football team and screaming like a moron.

Personally, I think the "Mac nuts" are as nuts as all the other nuts. I like my Mac and I own shares in Apple, but why someone would get an Apple tattoo is something I don't understand.

neal stephenson wrote about his 'round the world vacation in wired 4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board about getting (transcontinental fibre :) laid!

The Wired Magazine article Mother Earth, Mother board is an article written by a hacker/tourist.
I've always liked reading this article, and it lists neat places to visit

I've never seen Dell or Linus at any of the Linux conventions I've attended. What the hell does Apple do but assemble the boxes and write the operating system? They don't make the applications or the user community that surrounds them, the community makes that themselves. What the hell do they need Apple for?

But then again, I guess for Mac fanatics this is like the Vatican saying there won't be Christmas this year.

They need to quick licking Steve's boots. This is the perfect opportunity to begin standing upright.

This article states that we can only involves replacing the liquid fuel without shutting down the computer. But how do you get to the battery without shutting down the computer?

Since that article appears short, here are some more interesting links on mini fuel cells powering gadgets:

Discussion from January of the concept
Apple Laptops
Air clearance for them

All the article on one nice page.

wired is also reporting the same story. click here to read it.

Wired news is also running a story about this.

Microsoft owns a big chunk of Corel. As part of the deal, Corel dropped support for all operating systems other than Windows.

Ye Gods, Man! Have you gone insane?!

I eagerly await the day when X is replaced by a much better structure, but why on earth would I want to replace *everything* -- from simple ASCII text on up -- with someone else's dipshit idea of "the Next Great Thing"? PDF? I say "buy a clue!"

Wanna talk bloat? Have you bothered to check what your memory usage is lately?

Quartz? Sure, very sweet, and I'm even hoping that some of that snazzy tech leaks back and influences whatever replaces X. However, I would hope that the Free/Open version DOES NOT take a page from Apple's new playbook and screw people out of one of the best parts: skins, themes, and the ability to tweak to your heart's content.

And finally...gee, how to put this nicely?...Ummm, OS X IS NOT UNIX! [look at the definition of "netinfo"] I've been hearing all this harping about how it is a "revelation" and "UNIX GUI done right", etc. ad naseum. Sadly OS X has more in common with Windows than it does UNIX. It lends itself to some of RedHat's goofiness and I gave up on them a loooooooong time ago.

Now before the whining sets in "it's all supposed to be so easy" and "real people shouldn't have to edit text files to use UNIX", I say "bullshit!" I have yet to meet the person who was born knowing Windows, let alone computers; so why is it that the world suddenly has some great fear of LEARNING? Read a man page, get a clue, hack around, and have some fun for BOB's sake! Think of a GUI as the hard candy shell around the nut of your system: Fancy, nice to look at, but not really the point. Personally, I prefer a customized FVWM2 with all the bells and whistles I want. Not Apple, not RedHat, not some other knob with grandiose ideas of providing me a "pleasent user experience".

If I read all of this right, it appears that the discoverers of the bug copyrighted their white paper in a way that prohibited distribution to anyone in the US. Thereby allowing them to invoke the DMCA if they so choose. As the register article points out, Red Hat was forced to go along with this because the authors of the bug whitepaper wanted to prove a point. With all of the real issues (Here & here) surrounding the DMCA, why are we even wasting our time with this?

If I read all of this right, it appears that the discoverers of the bug copyrighted their white paper in a way that prohibited distribution to anyone in the US. Thereby allowing them to invoke the DMCA if they so choose. As the register article points out, Red Hat was forced to go along with this because the authors of the bug whitepaper wanted to prove a point. With all of the real issues (Here & here) surrounding the DMCA, why are we even wasting our time with this?

Why not read a short story or two

His Saddam Hussein Germ Warfare novel is inexplicably out of print.

Blue is a harder color to generate.

Here's an article that describes some of the history and challenges of creating a semiconductor that emits blue light.

Accessibility is not just for the blind. A Web site builder needs to think about if someone like Stephen Hawkings or Christopher Reeves could navigate the site as well, without just "tabbing" through every link. Also Web standards does not equal accessibility either.

A good example of an accessible site is the one for the School for the Blind.

I don't think Flash should go away, but designers need to decide when is an appropriate time to use it. Games sites like NickJr.com and PBS Kids make good use of Flash and shockwave(I have kids). But band sites and company sites that are all in Flash do little but get real annoying fast and alienate those who can't use the site.

Wired just recently did a complete redesign of their site to follow Web standards and use XHTML and CSS. More info is here.

Accessibility is not just for the blind. A Web site builder needs to think about if someone like Stephen Hawkings or Christopher Reeves could navigate the site as well, without just "tabbing" through every link. Also Web standards does not equal accessibility either.

A good example of an accessible site is the one for the School for the Blind.

I don't think Flash should go away, but designers need to decide when is an appropriate time to use it. Games sites like NickJr.com and PBS Kids make good use of Flash and shockwave(I have kids). But band sites and company sites that are all in Flash do little but get real annoying fast and alienate those who can't use the site.

Wired just recently did a complete redesign of their site to follow Web standards and use XHTML and CSS. More info is here.

He Left

Best of luck with the game company :)

"Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing."
Bill Gates, Jan 15, 2002.

Really, Bill? Is that why you are disguising advertising as customer feedback? To promote trust? Or is it that customers trust each other more than they trust you, so you'll just pretend to be customers and steal some of that trust?

"Theft of trust" - that has a nice ring to it, don't you think? Or how about trust infringement, or trust piracy?

This isn't just a Microsoft thing, it's a good illustration of the absolute contempt people with a lot of money often have for the rest of the world. We are nothing, and lying to us means nothing. If you own enough of the law, getting caught doesn't even mean much.

Corporate America is cutting its own throat day after day. Whether it's inventing demographic data or telling accountants what to make 2 and 2 add up to, every crooked move blackens another tooth in the shining smile. Trustworthy Computing isn't going to be a commercial product, Bill, because you guys just can't be trusted.

Give him a break - he's still got a hangover from the going away party.

I believe he's still recovering from a going away party.

I doubt it's any different today - other than resolution being better (being able to more accurately pinpoint a phone's location).

Here are a few links to similar articles:

Wired

ePinions - cites 164 foot pinpointing US govt mandated

Another recorded use of triangulation

Interesting article about triangulation

Unfortunately, this is old news that has been "hidden" right in plain view of the general public.

-Rob

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55722,00.html

This is being discussed all over (here, Ars, Macworld) but the Wired article takes a much more "done-deal" tone than any of the other commentary I have seen yet. It suggests the possibility of Macs with 4TB of ram too :-)

the "confirmation of results" & peer review point I was making had to do with crypto and offsite backup software more than with statistical software. When we're talking about crypto or storing someone else's data, it's super important to be transparent. Re: stats, well, one of my slides pointed out that up 'til now, I've always hacked numbers & graphs in Stata, which is proprietary (though most of the really good stuff is published freely, but that's another matter). We should use R, but for cost & "who controls the license" reasons as much as (if not more) than verifiability.

While we're on the verifiability point, human rights data organization techniques tend to be pretty complicated, and it helps to be able to use free software. While distributing the data (via XML) may or may not be useful, it is very important to open the data specifications. I think that means opening SQL scripts, too, and all the database software (in our current mix, the backend is postgres, the front end is Java). That's coming in about a month.

But human rights folks are pretty underfunded, and the "free as in beer" part of open source and free software is a big help, too.

slashdotters might be interested in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Article 15(b), which states that everyone has the right "To enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This is a real, live, human right.

But the real bottom line to human rights and free software has to do with power. Our core rights -- to freedom of speech and free association -- are increasingly exercised in electronic media. Who controls the online world? Can any contractual obligation resulting from a license abridge your human rights? IMHO, these questions make software a human rights concern.

-- PB.

And then of course there are the Kiddie GPS solutions.

Regarding the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, aka the "Steamboat Willie Preservation Act" and Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, there's a great article in this month's Wired magazine that gives a little bit of depth and insight on what the timely extension of copyright law means to the artistic world.

The big problem, as Lessig sees it, is that continual extensions of copyright prevent anything new from entering the public domain. This is most ironic, notes Lessig, since Disney dredged the public domain for its most lucrative properties... Because of the Bono Act, Lessig asserts, "no one can do to Disney as Disney did to the Brothers Grimm."

I think they were all drunk and stoned at a going away party.

I think they were all drunk at a going away party.

We've already discussed the cellphone jamming option , here, referencing this.
Too bad it's illegal.
On the kid thing: sure, it's rude to the other patrons, but more importantly, the poor kid is bored and ignored. I've seen three movies in the theatre since I became Dad over 5.5 years ago, and two of them were in the past 6 months (Lilo & Stitch, and Jonah(Veggietales RULE!)).

who's next?

You:
I just wonder what would China have to gain by saying all their computers are 0w3d?

Reuters:
Computer viruses are small programs often sent via e-mail or hidden in other software. Once inside a computer, they can do malicious tasks like erase data or reproduce and send copies to other machines over the Internet.

You + Reuters = The Great Firewall

You + Reuters = Software Piracy

2 good articles over at Wired. One on the approval of the digital standard and another on the merger rejection.

2 good articles over at Wired. One on the approval of the digital standard and another on the merger rejection.

From the Wired piece:
When justices pressed Olson to explain why Congress should not be limited to extend copyright terms to just future works, Olson said the Constitution requires that Congress -- not the courts -- make that call.

"We're living in an era where piracy is a significant problem," Olson said. . . .

Some one explain to me how the length of a copyright term has anything to do with combating piracy. If piracy is a problem, isn't it roughly the same problem at life plus 70 that it was at life plus 50?

It sure would bring a whole new meaning to the words "dead battery".

And to juice a brick! too.

Funny how chrisd lets this one through the submission queue right around the same time Wired runs an articleabout him leaving VA to go start up a gaming company.

This is not what I would call a good way to start the publicity.

-transiit

This is complete offtopic, but did Slashdot get scooped by Wired on the ChrisD story?

He had a Wired Article about him a few issues back. Very good read.

Or in your tooth.

I think we'll see less problems once biodegradable plastics and organic semiconductors advance further. Until then, the Nokia shitheap grows.

The trend also would decrease if the inverse proportion between cell phone size and imagined dick size were disregarded. :)

A Wired article touched on this previously.

The neat thing are the carbon nanotubes used to drive these things. NEC is working on fuel cells for phones.

---
Interview with GoDaddy President Bob Parsons

Wired had an article about KaZaA's globalization strategy a few weeks ago.

Wired had an article about KaZaA's globalization strategy a few weeks ago.

You don't give the man enough credit.

"Seriously, if CNN.com would have originally linked to DeCSS do you think it would have gotten sued?"

No. Wired has done it too.

Trying to squelch the media is much harder than squelching 2600, they can make their case known to the general public at large.

-Insani Kamil

Half the world's poulation still hasn't made a phone call

Hopefully it's starting to look at lot more like this.

There's a Wired Article that explains the list a little bit more in case security is not your forte.