I think you should post your notes (if you have 'em in postable form) from your Thursday talk -- at least the part concerning patents.
How many of the loudmouth ACs here who don't think that patents matter have seen many GIFs on the web recently, for example. Wanna know why? There is this little matter of the Unisys patent claim on LZW compression, that's why (one of the points Bruce mentioned).
Microsoft's patent claim on cascading style sheets might or might not matter, but the fact is, the gates have been flung open by the PTO and we are already sliding down the slippery slope. This is a sleeper issue and few people seem to be paying enough attention to it.
The other comment Bruce made Thursday is about the looming internationalization of this and other intellectual property issues. Even though Bruce is wrong about no-code licensing for ham radio (sorry, had to get that in), his point about being basically unable to even raise the issue effectively before an international forum is correct. Patent rights are now entangled with, among other things, the ongoing development of GATT and the World Trade Organization and, get this, the biodiversity treaty first launched at the Rio world environmental conference in 1992. The reason for that is Monsanto and other companies paving the way for patenting gene sequences in their plants, fertilizers and insecticides (and you thought Microsoft had a plan for world domination! hah! ever think about where your *dinner* comes from?!?!).
By the way, this would be a very good time for the open source folk to talk with the organic ag folk. We will need to GPL genetic sequences real soon, or else the likes of Monsanto will own most if not all of the genetic material for food production within your lifetime. They've even developed a product called the Terminator which prevents seeds from regerminating, thus forcing farmers to re-buy seeds from them every year.
It's timing, it's all a matter of timing. Someday I'm gonna dial up at 1200 using my old Anchor modem and get first post running lynx, just to prove it can be done. Otherwise, though, you'll pry the Cisco 675 out of my cold, dead fingers.
I've noticed that a lot of the net goes just as fast (slow) as it did before I got DSL. But it's a lot easier to tell who's sitting next to an OC3 now:)
I love Opera, been using it almost exclusively for two years. I lost faith in Netscape after 3.x, and I have erased IE from any system that I have control of.
Opera is basically shareware. I have no problem with that. They bootstrapped a project to hire programmers and port it to other OSes, now finally Linux will get a shot. I am very pragmatic about this. I didn't mind sending them $35 to get me a browser I can count on, that is fast, that crashes (as they all do) at least with some sensibility, and that is more-standards oriented than the others.
Sure, I would rather have them give it to me for free. But let's get real. Here are two guys operating out of their homes in Norway, offering a not-stupid browser to the world for a fair price.
Eventually I think they may wake up and GPL it, but for the time being give credit where it's due, they provide a reasonable alternative to Netscape and IE. I have hopes for Mozilla but it ain't there yet, not for me anyway.
By the way, because I like Opera a lot, I read through all the comments on this, and it simply reinforced my view that reading AC stuff is not worth the time. Those who have something interesting to say are outblathered by 10:1.
--------
Perl? Microsoft? Been there, done that.
on
Unix in Perl
·
· Score: 1
I don't expect we'll ever see a federal judge hollering at a Microsoft witness to shut up already when testifying about how they messed with Perl (as happened indirectly when ActiveState started forking Perl a while back; saner heads including Larry prevailed, fortunately). That unique scene is reserved for Microsoft's testimony on Java, which closed the trial this past week.
As for Perl on Microsoft platforms, I've been using it daily since 1991 and it has made my professional life worth living, I can tell you. That and 4DOS/4NT, the command shell Microsoft should have done in 1983. (How they bought and butchered an already cut-down version of 4DOS from Norton/Symantec in the early 1990s is a story in itself.)
All the pols in DC, from Clinton to Lott to almost all of 'em, are beating the drums for another big military buildup right now. So now that they can't have the annual sightings of Russky warships off the east coast when the defense budget gets taken up in Congress, we have this instead.
Otherwise, old, old news.
signed, member of Portland Year 2000 Ready Group since 9/97
I find Jon Katz' stuff mildly interesting at best. But I have now learned to ignore all the blather that follows whenever one of his pieces is posted here. The kind of stuff in this thread has quite clearly got the lowest signal-to-noise ratio on/., getting down into Usenet territory -- and that's saying something.
It's OK though, the more time some people waste calling Katz names here the less time they have to mess up other topics.
I saw my first Compaq in December 1993. We bought Columbia instead, for good reason. It went downhill from there. Columbia had great engineering but terrible marketing and folded, Compaq went on to buy DEC and Altavista (sob). I still have my first two Columbia PCs -- 2 floppy drives and 512K. Later we put a 5 MB drive (that's 5000 kilobytes) in one of them. I made my first BBS call on one in 1984 and never looked back. Great machine, the Columbia. The Compaq the guys next door had was a dog, although the idea of a luggable computer was kind of neat and it was, in truth, a better machine than a Kaypro.
But Compaq was the original "NIH" company in the PC world. Love those Torx screws! You want better performance? Sure, no problem. Compaq would happily modify the BIOS and make you pay out the nose for non-standard memory and peripherals. I once spent 45 minutes wrestling to get a case off a 286e and replace a broken floppy drive. I had to disassemble the entire drive cage to remove the drive.
I had an original Compaq 386 with the 120 MB drive for a long time, but it finally crapped out in about 1990 due to a slowly deteriorating power supply. I don't remember what the replacement price was but it was exorbitant. That 386 -- an important machine in the history of desktop computing by the way, and also the one and only time Compaq produced a truly innovative design -- went to the scrap heap.
I used to use QEMM all the time because it was a much better memory manager than anything Microsoft could provide for its own damn operating system. About half of the special parms in QEMM seemed to relate to little Compaq fiddles with the DOS user memory, and a lot of the time you had to use them to make QEMM work at all in a Compaq machine. In 1996 I remember installing NICs in two identical Presarios, and being able to configure one and not the other. Big phantom IRQ problems. And so on.
My unfortunate Novell admin friends tell me they love their Compaq servers but would chainsaw and then burn the Compaq desktops and laptops if they could. Myself, I won't ever touch any of their equipment due to over 15 years of engineering snobbery and marketing bullshit.
In contrast, I've had a few minor problems with Dells over the years but I would heartily recommend them on the whole.
For myself, I have a local clone shop build to my specs, including my exact mobo pick. There is no other way to do it any more.
Just by coincidence (naaaw!) tonight, my Moby Database box (PII 300, 256 MB RAM, 30 gig of disk) running NT 4 SP 3 refused to reboot with the lovely classic C000021A Fatal Error. Eschewing the idiotic Microsoft "Lack of Knowledge" Base instructions (run Dr. Watson [on a non-bootable machine, duh] and then process everything through the Debug Symbols [dub cubed]), I plugged in the backup disk drive I have ready for just such occasions and was running again in three minutes. When I reinstall it will probably be my last EVER Windows install on my stuff (can't prevent clients from having me do it, though).
Nowadays, the purpose of copy protection is (1) to insure that millions of middle class mommies and daddies will buy overpriced copies of games for their kids, and (2) to provide an endless source of convenient whining when some fraction of said kids gets fed up with the attitude of said greedy companies and breaks them open anyway.
I'm not even a gamer and I think the whole thing is ludicrous. I thought we cured the PC industry of this scourge in 1983. I *still* have a clear copy of Lotus 1-2-3 version 1.1. When they later unprotected it, they turned me into a lifetime supporter of 1-2-3. I still use it (though I have Excel for those unfortunate people who are stuck sending me Excel 97 things). The world of software did not end -- nay, Lotus did not even become smaller -- when they unprotected 1-2-3.
Only those damn Californians would ask you Michigan types to take your coats off outside in the winter. I mean, winter in Michigan is *hard*. It *builds character*. It means *lots of time indoors drinking beer*. Or so my friends from Detroit, Kzoo and Lansing tell me:)
The whispered-about Wired Effect doesn't apply in this case though, because you didn't get the cover. (It works like the Sports Illustrated Cover Effect, except faster -- remember how much faster a Web year is).
Oh I see, you don't believe me about the Wired Effect. Oh yeah? You remember that cover about "Push"?
COMPUTER is not peer-reviewed, so this is a matter of the editor choosing to print an article by someone who is well known and perhaps a friend in old-time military computing circles. That world, like the corporate glass house mainframe one, works quite differently than ours. For example, most people don't know that Ada is still a key language in military computing. (Actually, Ada is pretty cool in a lot of ways.)
But the spec-driven project development and management perspective of the military is drilled deep down into the ethos there, as well as a certain type of "analysis" that Lewis' piece typifies, which manages to miss both the forest and the trees.
The outrage here is not misplaced, but I see no need to flame the guy. He's just lording it over us in the good old fashioned way.
I didn't even bother to point out to Ted Lewis that the article doesn't print properly in Acrobat.
Instead, I sent him a rather fierce response, accusing him of doing a hatchet job on Linux and open source. For example, Figure 1 shows the code base of Linux rising by an order of magnitude in the next four years (with no factual basis whatsoever provided for the claim! -- the worst kind of chartjunk), yet the article directly contradicts that by noting the difficulty Linus and the core team are having these days just doing normal tree maintenance.
Frankly, I write this off to pure polemics. I told him if he wanted to write about this subject again he should start from scratch and do it right. But I'm not holding my breath. Lewis is a dinosaur and we can't save him.
That the Dead (well, remaining members of the band grouped as The Other Ones) are doing this is cool, but didn't the Beasties already steal their thunder on this?
I went to two Other Ones shows last year (Camden and the first one at Mountain View) and thought they were quite good -- and I was at over 200 shows over the years.
By the by, one of the June 1986 shows at the Greek Theatre at Berkeley plays a role in Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg." He was a modest sysadmin at LBL, toiling away trying to track down the wily Pre-Cambrian Cracker D00dz (turned out they were from Chaos in Germany) when he heard the band playing outside his window and went down to listen to the show in Strawberry Meadow . . . No kernel hacker he! (They were all in the pit zooming along with Playin' in the Band).
When Jerry died that era had already been on the wane for some time. I think the band made the right decision to gracefully exit before another ABEND. I had already been drifting away from all of that for some time, nowadays I spin house, Detroit techno and the odd bit of old skool jungle. But I do recommend The Other Ones, those were nice shows last year.
I don't belittle people who use Microsoft stuff for the Web, or otherwise for that mater. I'm basically a pretty satisfied user of NT 3.51 and only run 4.0 because it's needed for a lot of the new apps. But *I* am the boss of my machine, not Microsoft.
What I observe is that people feel obligated to stick with Microsoft and the whole range of their software. They kind of know what they'll get -- a lot of fairly complete but complicated pieces that are difficult to manage and offer far more functionality in a "flat" undifferentiated space than they really know what to do with.
They then start to discover all the little gotchas, like Microsoft's shall we say cavalier attitude about the TCP/IP stack, their sincere but misguided attempt to steer HTML and so on.
Actually, there is one thing Microsoft has done that I have few qualms with, and that is ODBC. Sure it's slow and not well documented. It's almost like Microsoft didn't really want it to be accepted so that they could clear the way for their various lunges at "distributed" "object" management (ho ho). But ODBC was designed by some good people at Redmond who played nice with the other kids, paid attention to existing standards and user preferences, and produced something that has joined CGI and Perl as a true Web standard.
Sure, this is like Sun sponsoring Tcl. A pretty good analogy, that.
I would rather raise awareness of the limitations of Microsoft stuff even as I help people work with it. It's on their desks, they need to do work, and they need to exchange stuff with other people.
I just let them find out that I was running Perl scripts to manage Novell servers in 1993, and that there is a whole world of other alternatives out there. If they don't want Linux on their desktop -- and I don't want it there yet either -- I can have them gracefully accept it off in the corner, serving their offices by being a good-neighbor fence and conduit for the net. Plus it lets me use all the nice post-1993 486 machines that are orphaned out there.
Microsoft is big and round and we can throw rocks at it and stamp our little feet, or we can work around them and help people get actual value from their computer systems -- a big anxiety out there about that, by the way, if you haven't noticed. At least, unlike ten years ago, people aren't putting them in the closet because they can't use them. Now they just get stuck when Win 95/98 crashes a lot and starts not running the programs they used to.
Eventually we might even have Linux file and program servers running Samba over Fast Ethernet networks (which eliminate the perceived delay in transferring files across a normal office net), and thin Microsoft clients that have just enough local stuff to boot up and do basic things.
Sure, Front Page is a dog, but people are using it successfully to create Web pages, and who am I to get in the way of that. We have a big educational process ahead of us, that's for sure. But we don't get anywhere by asking everyone to join our Microsoft Whine Club first.
Just show 'em how it's done. They'll figure it out.
That's funny. I thought Linux and other *xes had a 2038 problem. Well, the 32 bit ones do. Any guesses what architecture we'll be using by then? Maybe we won't even bother to measure in bits any more.
A couple of efforts predate Linux and other widely acclaimed "free" or "open source" software projects. The earliest I'm aware of is RBBS, which started in 1983 and is still nominally active, although there is little development apparently going on now. The current release level is *18*. The RBBS license is more similar to the *BSD than to the GPL, but I think that's a minor point given the antiquity:) of the project. It was coordinated from the very beginning across a series of PC BBSes from virtually the time the IBM PC escaped from Don Estridge's labs and multipled like rabbits. It has always been free and always has had a more bazaar than cathedral approach to development.
The other notable project of yore was info-zip (which still continues, mostly in maintenance mode). Jean-Loup Gailly and a bunch of others put together a reconstructed version of PKZip (with Phil Katz' support) which makes zip and unzip now the *second* most widely available program in terms of number of platforms supported (that one that puts "Hello world" on the screen is #1). Again, info-zip pioneered the development of free software with literally an international group of developers corresponding and co-developing the code.
I first joined the info-zip mailing list in 1990, I think; along with the RISKS-L version of comp.risks those were the first net mailing lists I ever subscribed to.
Now comes the millenium (well, almost) and all the trade rags are falling all over themselves to praise Linux (while they're at it, they should be praising *BSD, that's one of the pass/fail tests for these mainstream observers to see if they understand what they are talking about rather than just repeating the latest pack journalism buzz).
But be careful what you wish for. Behind the buzz is the inevitable backlash when people discover that Linux is *not* like NT and that GUI-based program installation and system management is a bit funkier and requires a different mindset (thank Gopod for that).
However, as anyone who has wrestled with the update-and-rebind-and-reboot SEVEN times process when trying to work on TCP/IP configuration in Win 95/98/NT will attest, this is where Linux has it all over the Microsoft stuff. I installed DHCP on my Debian box, hooked it up to my DSL router and it just . . . worked. Not so with NT, which required a fair bit of finagling to figure out a very simple change I needed to make.
"Monopoly" means the ability to prices and availability through market power. "Oligopoly" means the ability to do so in conjunction with only a few other competitors. What we have now is government-sanctioned monopoly. What we want is competition. What NSI probably wants is oligopoly.
Certainly their recent moves to buddy up with Netscape, Yahoo and American Express show they are moving to consolidate their "branding" leadership on domain name registration.
I don't trust them much at all. Their service record is abysmal. I've only registered a couple of domains and they managed to mess them up. Their bills always arrive promptly, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
He's very fond of guns, it's true, but I think
his social and political views tend toward moderate-libertarian.
-------
I think you should post your notes (if you have 'em in postable form) from your Thursday talk -- at least the part concerning patents.
How many of the loudmouth ACs here who don't think that patents matter have seen many GIFs on the web recently, for example. Wanna know why? There is this little matter of the Unisys patent claim on LZW compression, that's why (one of the points Bruce mentioned).
Microsoft's patent claim on cascading style sheets might or might not matter, but the fact is, the gates have been flung open by the PTO and we are already sliding down the slippery slope. This is a sleeper issue and few people seem to be paying enough attention to it.
The other comment Bruce made Thursday is about the looming internationalization of this and other intellectual property issues. Even though Bruce is wrong about no-code licensing for ham radio (sorry, had to get that in), his point about being basically unable to even raise the issue effectively before an international forum is correct. Patent rights are now entangled with, among other things, the ongoing development of GATT and the World Trade Organization and, get this, the biodiversity treaty first launched at the Rio world environmental conference in 1992. The reason for that is Monsanto and other companies paving the way for patenting gene sequences in their plants, fertilizers and insecticides (and you thought Microsoft had a plan for world domination! hah! ever think about where your *dinner* comes from?!?!).
By the way, this would be a very good time for the open source folk to talk with the organic ag folk. We will need to GPL genetic sequences real soon, or else the likes of Monsanto will own most if not all of the genetic material for food production within your lifetime. They've even developed a product called the Terminator which prevents seeds from regerminating, thus forcing farmers to re-buy seeds from them every year.
Don't stop with GNOME, folks. Think genome.
--------
Yeah, if it gets warm enough you can get an NHL team in Minneapolis again just like Dallas...
========
Tweet!! Two minutes for obstruction SYN flooding!
========
It's timing, it's all a matter of timing. Someday I'm gonna dial up at 1200 using my old Anchor modem and get first post running lynx, just to prove it can be done. Otherwise, though, you'll pry the Cisco 675 out of my cold, dead fingers.
:)
I've noticed that a lot of the net goes just as fast (slow) as it did before I got DSL. But it's
a lot easier to tell who's sitting next to an OC3 now
========
I'll be flying in from Portland early Thursday. I hope there is still a /. tshirt I can get -- it's my #1 objective for this show!
Watch for me with my nifty Canon ZR digital video camera that looks just like a snapshot camera.
-----------
I love Opera, been using it almost exclusively for two years. I lost faith in Netscape after 3.x, and I have erased IE from any system that I have control of.
Opera is basically shareware. I have no problem with that. They bootstrapped a project to hire
programmers and port it to other OSes, now finally Linux will get a shot. I am very pragmatic about this. I didn't mind sending them $35 to get me a browser I can count on, that is fast, that crashes (as they all do) at least with some sensibility, and that is more-standards oriented than the others.
Sure, I would rather have them give it to me for free. But let's get real. Here are two guys operating out of their homes in Norway, offering a not-stupid browser to the world for a fair price.
Eventually I think they may wake up and GPL it, but for the time being give credit where it's due, they provide a reasonable alternative to Netscape and IE. I have hopes for Mozilla but it ain't there yet, not for me anyway.
By the way, because I like Opera a lot, I read through all the comments on this, and it simply reinforced my view that reading AC stuff is not worth the time. Those who have something interesting to say are outblathered by 10:1.
--------
I don't expect we'll ever see a federal judge hollering at a Microsoft witness to shut up already when testifying about how they messed with Perl (as happened indirectly when ActiveState started forking Perl a while back; saner heads including Larry prevailed, fortunately). That unique scene is reserved for Microsoft's testimony on Java, which closed the trial this past week.
As for Perl on Microsoft platforms, I've been using it daily since 1991 and it has made my professional life worth living, I can tell you. That and 4DOS/4NT, the command shell Microsoft should have done in 1983. (How they bought and butchered an already cut-down version of 4DOS from Norton/Symantec in the early 1990s is a story in itself.)
--------
All the pols in DC, from Clinton to Lott to
almost all of 'em, are beating the drums for
another big military buildup right now. So
now that they can't have the annual sightings
of Russky warships off the east coast when the
defense budget gets taken up in Congress, we
have this instead.
Otherwise, old, old news.
signed,
member of Portland Year 2000 Ready Group since 9/97
--------
I find Jon Katz' stuff mildly interesting at best. But I have now learned to ignore all the blather that follows whenever one of his pieces is posted here. The kind of stuff in this thread has quite clearly got the lowest signal-to-noise ratio on /., getting down into Usenet territory -- and that's saying something.
It's OK though, the more time some people waste calling Katz names here the less time they have to mess up other topics.
--------
I saw my first Compaq in December 1993. We bought Columbia instead, for good reason. It went downhill from there. Columbia had great engineering but terrible marketing and folded, Compaq went on to buy DEC and Altavista (sob). I still have my first two Columbia PCs -- 2 floppy drives and 512K. Later we put a 5 MB drive (that's 5000 kilobytes) in one of them. I made my first BBS call on one in 1984 and never looked back. Great machine, the Columbia. The Compaq the guys next door had was a dog, although the idea of a luggable computer was kind of neat and it was, in truth, a better machine than a Kaypro.
But Compaq was the original "NIH" company in the PC world. Love those Torx screws! You want better performance? Sure, no problem. Compaq would happily modify the BIOS and make you pay out the nose for non-standard memory and peripherals. I once spent 45 minutes wrestling to get a case off a 286e and replace a broken floppy drive. I had to disassemble the entire drive cage to remove the drive.
I had an original Compaq 386 with the 120 MB drive for a long time, but it finally crapped out in about 1990 due to a slowly deteriorating power supply. I don't remember what the replacement price was but it was exorbitant. That 386 -- an important machine in the history of desktop computing by the way, and also the one and only time Compaq produced a truly innovative design -- went to the scrap heap.
I used to use QEMM all the time because it was a much better memory manager than anything Microsoft could provide for its own damn operating system. About half of the special parms in QEMM seemed to relate to little Compaq fiddles with the DOS user memory, and a lot of the time you had to use them to make QEMM work at all in a Compaq machine. In 1996 I remember installing NICs in two identical Presarios, and being able to configure one and not the other. Big phantom IRQ problems. And so on.
My unfortunate Novell admin friends tell me they love their Compaq servers but would chainsaw and then burn the Compaq desktops and laptops if they could. Myself, I won't ever touch any of their equipment due to over 15 years of engineering snobbery and marketing bullshit.
In contrast, I've had a few minor problems with Dells over the years but I would heartily recommend them on the whole.
For myself, I have a local clone shop build to my specs, including my exact mobo pick. There is no other way to do it any more.
--------
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/02/biztech/ articles/16windows.html
Just by coincidence (naaaw!) tonight, my Moby Database box (PII 300, 256 MB RAM, 30 gig of disk) running NT 4 SP 3 refused to reboot with the lovely classic C000021A Fatal Error.
Eschewing the idiotic Microsoft "Lack of Knowledge" Base instructions (run Dr. Watson [on a non-bootable machine, duh] and then process everything through the Debug Symbols [dub cubed]), I plugged in the backup disk drive I have ready for just such occasions and was running again in three minutes. When I reinstall it will probably be my last EVER Windows install on my stuff (can't prevent clients from having me do it, though).
--------
Nowadays, the purpose of copy protection is (1) to insure that millions of middle class mommies and daddies will buy overpriced copies of games for their kids, and (2) to provide an endless source of convenient whining when some fraction of said kids gets fed up with the attitude of said greedy companies and breaks them open anyway.
I'm not even a gamer and I think the whole thing is ludicrous. I thought we cured the PC industry of this scourge in 1983. I *still* have a clear copy of Lotus 1-2-3 version 1.1. When they later unprotected it, they turned me into a lifetime supporter of 1-2-3. I still use it (though I have Excel for those unfortunate people who are stuck sending me Excel 97 things). The world of software did not end -- nay, Lotus did not even become smaller -- when they unprotected 1-2-3.
--------
I don't know which was first, but SNAFU is probably about the same age as FUBAR.
System Normal: All Fucked Up
--------
Only those damn Californians would ask you Michigan types to take your coats off outside in the winter. I mean, winter in Michigan is *hard*. It *builds character*. It means *lots of time indoors drinking beer*. Or so my friends from Detroit, Kzoo and Lansing tell me :)
The whispered-about Wired Effect doesn't apply in this case though, because you didn't get the cover. (It works like the Sports Illustrated Cover Effect, except faster -- remember how much faster a Web year is).
Oh I see, you don't believe me about the Wired Effect. Oh yeah? You remember that cover about "Push"?
--------
COMPUTER is not peer-reviewed, so this is a matter of the editor choosing to print an article by someone who is well known and perhaps a friend in old-time military computing circles. That world, like the corporate glass house mainframe one, works quite differently than ours. For example, most people don't know that Ada is still a key language in military computing. (Actually, Ada is pretty cool in a lot of ways.)
But the spec-driven project development and management perspective of the military is drilled deep down into the ethos there, as well as a certain type of "analysis" that Lewis' piece typifies, which manages to miss both the forest and the trees.
The outrage here is not misplaced, but I see no need to flame the guy. He's just lording it over us in the good old fashioned way.
--------
I got a similar reply. Let me quote Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter, whose words zero in on the heart of the issue in cases like this:
"You ain't gonna learn what you don't wanna know."
--------
I didn't even bother to point out to Ted Lewis that the article doesn't print properly in Acrobat.
Instead, I sent him a rather fierce response, accusing him of doing a hatchet job on Linux and open source. For example, Figure 1 shows the code base of Linux rising by an order of magnitude in the next four years (with no factual basis whatsoever provided for the claim! -- the worst kind of chartjunk), yet the article directly contradicts that by noting the difficulty Linus and the core team are having these days just doing normal tree maintenance.
Frankly, I write this off to pure polemics. I told him if he wanted to write about this subject again he should start from scratch and do it right. But I'm not holding my breath. Lewis is a dinosaur and we can't save him.
--------
So I downloaded and printed out this article using Acrobat. It printed the first page OK and then printed only the graphics on the following pages.
If he had used Ghostscript no doubt it would have printed it all just fine.
--------
That the Dead (well, remaining members of the band grouped as The Other Ones) are doing this is cool, but didn't the Beasties already steal their thunder on this?
I went to two Other Ones shows last year (Camden and the first one at Mountain View) and thought they were quite good -- and I was at over 200 shows over the years.
By the by, one of the June 1986 shows at the Greek Theatre at Berkeley plays a role in Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg." He was a modest sysadmin at LBL, toiling away trying to track down the wily Pre-Cambrian Cracker D00dz (turned out they were from Chaos in Germany) when he heard the band playing outside his window and went down to listen to the show in Strawberry Meadow . . . No kernel hacker he! (They were all in the pit zooming along with Playin' in the Band).
When Jerry died that era had already been on the wane for some time. I think the band made the right decision to gracefully exit before another ABEND. I had already been drifting away from all of that for some time, nowadays I spin house, Detroit techno and the odd bit of old skool jungle. But I do recommend The Other Ones, those were nice shows last year.
--------
I don't belittle people who use Microsoft stuff for the Web, or otherwise for that mater. I'm
basically a pretty satisfied user of NT 3.51 and only run 4.0 because it's needed for a lot of the
new apps. But *I* am the boss of my machine, not Microsoft.
What I observe is that people feel obligated to stick with Microsoft and the whole range of their software. They kind of know what they'll get --
a lot of fairly complete but complicated pieces that are difficult to manage and offer far more functionality in a "flat" undifferentiated space
than they really know what to do with.
They then start to discover all the little gotchas, like Microsoft's shall we say cavalier attitude about the TCP/IP stack, their sincere but misguided attempt to steer HTML and so on.
Actually, there is one thing Microsoft has done that I have few qualms with, and that is ODBC. Sure it's slow and not well documented. It's almost like Microsoft didn't really want it to be accepted so that they could clear the way for their various lunges at "distributed" "object" management (ho ho). But ODBC was designed by some good people at Redmond who played nice with the other kids, paid attention to existing standards and user preferences, and produced something that has joined CGI and Perl as a true Web standard.
Sure, this is like Sun sponsoring Tcl. A pretty good analogy, that.
I would rather raise awareness of the limitations of Microsoft stuff even as I help people work with it. It's on their desks, they need to do work, and they need to exchange stuff with other people.
I just let them find out that I was running Perl scripts to manage Novell servers in 1993, and that there is a whole world of other alternatives out there. If they don't want Linux on their desktop -- and I don't want it there yet either -- I can have them gracefully accept it off in the corner, serving their offices by being a good-neighbor fence and conduit for the net. Plus it lets me use all the nice post-1993 486 machines that are orphaned out there.
Microsoft is big and round and we can throw rocks at it and stamp our little feet, or we can work around them and help people get actual value from their computer systems -- a big anxiety out there about that, by the way, if you haven't noticed. At least, unlike ten years ago, people aren't putting them in the closet because they can't use them. Now they just get stuck when Win 95/98 crashes a lot and starts not running the programs they used to.
Eventually we might even have Linux file and program servers running Samba over Fast Ethernet
networks (which eliminate the perceived delay in transferring files across a normal office net), and thin Microsoft clients that have just enough
local stuff to boot up and do basic things.
Sure, Front Page is a dog, but people are using it successfully to create Web pages, and who am I to get in the way of that. We have a big educational process ahead of us, that's for sure. But we don't get anywhere by asking everyone to join our Microsoft Whine Club first.
Just show 'em how it's done. They'll figure it out.
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That's funny. I thought Linux and other *xes had a 2038 problem. Well, the 32 bit ones do. Any guesses what architecture we'll be using by then? Maybe we won't even bother to measure in bits any more.
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A couple of efforts predate Linux and other widely acclaimed "free" or "open source" software projects. The earliest I'm aware of is RBBS, which started in 1983 and is still nominally active, although there is little development apparently going on now. The current release level is *18*. The RBBS license is more similar to the *BSD than to the GPL, but I think that's a minor point given the antiquity :) of the project. It was coordinated from the very beginning across a series of PC BBSes from virtually the time the IBM PC escaped from Don Estridge's labs and multipled like rabbits. It has always been free and always has had a more bazaar than cathedral approach to development.
The other notable project of yore was info-zip (which still continues, mostly in maintenance mode). Jean-Loup Gailly and a bunch of others put together a reconstructed version of PKZip (with Phil Katz' support) which makes zip and unzip now the *second* most widely available program in terms of number of platforms supported (that one that puts "Hello world" on the screen is #1). Again, info-zip pioneered the development of free software with literally an international group of developers corresponding and co-developing the code.
I first joined the info-zip mailing list in 1990, I think; along with the RISKS-L version of comp.risks those were the first net mailing lists I ever subscribed to.
phred@sunlight.portland.or.us
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tweet! BAD GEEK, NO JOLT.
/. is never a p--, a p----, a p------,
I sure hope
portal. Sheesh. It's even hard to say that.
phred@sunlight.portland.or.us
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Now comes the millenium (well, almost) and all the trade rags are falling all over themselves to praise Linux (while they're at it, they should be praising *BSD, that's one of the pass/fail tests for these mainstream observers to see if they understand what they are talking about rather than just repeating the latest pack journalism buzz).
But be careful what you wish for. Behind the buzz is the inevitable backlash when people discover that Linux is *not* like NT and that GUI-based program installation and system management is a bit funkier and requires a different mindset (thank Gopod for that).
However, as anyone who has wrestled with the update-and-rebind-and-reboot SEVEN times process when trying to work on TCP/IP configuration in Win 95/98/NT will attest, this is where Linux has it all over the Microsoft stuff. I installed DHCP on my Debian box, hooked it up to my DSL router and it just . . . worked. Not so with NT, which required a fair bit of finagling to figure out a very simple change I needed to make.
phred@sunlight.portland.or.us
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"Monopoly" means the ability to prices and availability through market power. "Oligopoly" means the ability to do so in conjunction with only a few other competitors. What we have now is government-sanctioned monopoly. What we want is competition. What NSI probably wants is oligopoly.
Certainly their recent moves to buddy up with Netscape, Yahoo and American Express show they are moving to consolidate their "branding" leadership on domain name registration.
I don't trust them much at all. Their service record is abysmal. I've only registered a couple of domains and they managed to mess them up. Their bills always arrive promptly, of course.
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