Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Hagiography, Oracle, Fusion
Even lukewarm fusion would be satisfy me. driggers writes: "I wrote a review of the book "Excess Heat" for /. last year. I thought you might (or might not :) be interested to learn that the U.S. Navy in February 2002 issued Technical Report No. 1862 titled "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System," Vol. 1 of which summarizes A Decade of Research at Navy Laboratories."
Dr. Frank Gordon, Head, Navigation and Applied Sciences Department, concludes his foreword with the remark, "It is time for the government funding organizations to invest in this research."
If you modify the source you must keep it accurate, like a Mad Lib. An Anonymous Coward writes "I just noticed the biography of Richard M. Stallman, "Free as in Freedom" by Sam Williams is online at oreilly, released under the GNU Free Documentation License."
What vapors rule the modern day Oracle? MarkedMan writes: "The following CNET article outlines Oracle's reply to the State of California's announcement it was canceling a nearly $100 million dollar contract. It should not come as a surprise, as few companies would give up that kind of money without a fight, not to mention the domino effect if they just rolled over. It would be a tacit admission that they ripped off naive customers."
Are you guys actually paying for this stuff?
Finally, there was the curious nature of Linux itself. Unrestricted by design bugs (like GNU) and legal disputes (like BSD), Linux' high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to make of it. More compilation album than operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from GCC, GDB, and glibc (the GNU Project's newly developed C Library) to X (a Unix-based graphic user interface developed by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science) to BSD-developed tools such as BIND (the Berkeley Internet Naming Daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember Internet domain names for numeric IP addresses) and TCP/IP. The arch's capstone, of course, was the Linux kernel-itself a bored-out, super-charged version of Minix. Rather than building their operating system from scratch, Torvalds and his rapidly expanding Linux development team had followed the old Picasso adage, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." Or as Torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."
Using GPL code is stealing. Right on, Dick. Also, I guess that should be justification of calling it BSD/Linux, huh?
By 1993, the GNU Project's inability to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the GNU Project and within the free software movement at large. A March, 1993, a Wired magazine article by Simson Garfinkel described the GNU Project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.
<nelson>HA-HA!</nelson> Just goes to prove that one clean-cut nerdy Finnish college student can out-code the entire, unshowered GNU/Crew.
My suggestion: Don't spend a single penny on this GNU/Book. Find someone with a copy, and photocopy it! Even better yet, download a scanned copy on KaZaA. After all, who is Dick Stallman kidding, anyway? Information should be free as in speech, right?
I don't like Oracle.
Isn't he the dude that couldn't write his own kernel for like 20 years, and is now trying to attach the GNU brand to Linux?
RMS's biography... by any chance, is the title of that work "Communist Manifesto"..?