The last sentence in your otherwise outstanding comment ruins the entire concept. I don't follow.
I have to note that I committed the standard Slashdot sin of not reading TFA. The NYT doesn't handcode entire pages, as the headline suggests. They just handcode the templates that the articles get inserted into. I stand by my other comments though.
1. Handcoding takes a lot more effort and needs more 'actual' writers than before. So more techies keep their jobs in a recession. Typical Slashdot economics.
When recessions happen, people look for ways to cut costs. What's a good way to cut costs? Automate your operations.
A lot of newspapers, including the NYT, realized early on that they had to move onto the web in order to retain their readers. But despite this early insight, and 10+ years struggling to get viewers to come to their sites, none of them have figured out how to do a proper news web site. Not one.
Absurdities like use of hand-coded HTML and CSS are just the tip of the iceberg. What really bothers me is that nobody seems to have thought of a way, or even tried to think of a way, to properly use the Inverted Pyramid on a web site.
The Inverted Pyramid, for those of you who didn't take Journalism (I took it in high school) is a stylistic technique where you put the most important and newsworthy details of a story in the first paragraph. Slight less important stuff goes in the next paragraph, and the next, until you trail away with trivia at the end. That makes it easier for your editor to trim a story so it fits in the available space. More importantly (especially for an online newspaper, where space is not finite), it makes it easier for the reader to graze the news. You can be your own editor, on stop reading a story when the details are too fine to attract your interest.
You'd think that this would actually be easier to support online than in a physical newspaper. But news sites don't even try. They just dump the print edition online, then provide link farms for the stories, with a few stories getting special summaries.
And they're been similarly stupid with their classified ads. These used to make up something like a third of their income, before Craigslist stole all their customers. Now, you might think that there's no hope of competing with Craigslist, since most of its advertisers get a free ride. But classified ads aren't all that expensive, and advertisers wouldn't have stopped using them if Craigslist didn't do a better job of connected the right advertisers with the right customers.
The print classifieds were doomed in any case, but newspapers were ideally set up to turn their print classifieds business into an even more lucrative online classifieds business. But, as with so many other things, they never really tried.
Probably most of you don't care — you get your news from blogs. Me, I prefer to get my news from somebody who knows something about finding stuff out, who has some sense of professional ethics, and who doesn't simply regurgitate every rumor that sounds vaguely plausible. Unfortunately, that option is rapidly disappearing.
I would certainly argue that Apple-DOS is not an OS, not in the sense that it's a full programming platform.
You point about the 6502 machine language (assembly language is not intrinsic to a computer, it's a software layer that often includes instructions the machine doesn't actually support!) is an bananas-and-oranges comparison. (I can't say "apple and oranges" for obvious reasons.) On the one hand, an operating system is defined by the services it provides. A computer, on the other hand, is any machine that can be programmed to run any arbitrary algorithm. The requirements for that are pretty basic; the machine doesn't need to know how to multiply and divide, or even add and subtract, because those things can all be implemented in software. The instructions set, beyond the basics laid out by Turing back in 1937, is nothing more than an optimization.
Some people might call a programmable calculator a kind of computer. But it's not, not unless its programming language has the same kind of general-purposeness. Doesn't matter how powerful the instruction set is. And nowadays even the most basic calculator has fancier hardware than was even available when the 6502 came out.
I think you have your argument backwards. When the lead developer of a OSS project goes away, the code still remains. When a closed source company decides a project is dead, it's dead. Irretrievably, totaly dead. You're responding to an argument I didn't make. I wasn't talking about open source versus closed source. I was talking about open source projects managed by some individual who may not be there tomorrow versus open source projects managed by companies with the resources and motivation to keep the project alive, regardless of which individuals come and go.
Having the source code public is not a guarantee that the project will continue to live. If it were, Hans Reiser's legal problems would have no bearing on the future of ReiserFS, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. In theory, anybody could grab the ReiserFS source tree and set themselves up as the successor to Namesys. But nobody seems to be interested in doing so. TFA doesn't even suggest that as an option. Instead, it points to ext4 (backed by IBM) and zfs (backed by Sun). Oh, and there's also NTFS-3G, backed by some Russian guy.
No mention at all of XFS, which SGI GPLed to great fanfare some years ago. What's wrong with XFS? Technically, nothing — it's a proven file system widely used on graphic workstations, servers, and supercomputers. Businesswise, though, it's dead, because its sponsor went bankrupt.
Here's another example that's personal for me: my favorite X server is Cygwin/X. It's pretty bug free, which I'm very grateful for because there hasn't been an update for almost 4 years. Why not? Somebody hired away its maintainer. Nobody else has stepped into the void. I've thought of doing it myself, but this is way beyond my level of software skill.
When MS-DOS came out, I was working for a company that was busy porting Unix to microprocessors. The people who were doing that found DOS's status as an OS pretty laughable.
To most people, the "operating system" is the user interface. That's why some vendors get away with calling a collection of AJAX applications a "web OS". But we're not talking about what people perceive an OS to be, we're talking about what an OS does.
The question of whether some software is an OS is not a religious issue. You take the services a typical OS provides and match them against what the software actually provides. 86DOS provided almost nothing behind the very basic service of loading executable images into RAM and invoking them. Applications had to provide their own functionality for services that any Unix or CP/M user would consider part of the OS: buffered IO, processes scheduling, etc.
Ironically, that's what created the lockin that made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet: MS-DOS applications were poorly insulated from the underlying hardware, and were thus not very portable. That destroyed the market for platforms that didn't have a high level of compatibility with the original IBM PC. (Which is why IBM's own PS/2-OS/2 effort went nowhere.) And to achieve that level of compatibility, you had to have MS-DOS. Not despite its bugs and limitations, but because of them!
Unfortunately, ZFS is currently licensed under Sunâ(TM)s CDDL Open Source license, which is incompatible with GPLv2, the license that the Linux kernel uses â" so at this time, it runs as âoeuserspaceâ code and is not integrated into the upstream kernel source. So? What's the impact of this? Performance?
Also, why no mention of XFS? I would have thought this was obvious alternative to ReiserFS.
This whole episode points out one of the weaknesses of open source projects. Unless project management is donated by some corporate heavy hitters, there's too much dependency on a few key people. Yes a lot of people contribute, but when the software gatekeeper goes offline, the project is more likely than not to die, despite the free availability of the source code.
Programmer's don't often get sent to prison, but they do die, change careers, achieve the singularity, or whatever. It's not smart of people who want to build their businesses around Open Source to be this dependent on specific individuals.
Now that I think of it, I guess that's why we're not talking about XFS: SGI no longer has a lot of spare resources to support it. And Sun does have the resources to support ZFS, which would seem to outweigh the licensing issues.
NTFS is technically a good option, especially for desktop systems. But the Linux version doesn't have any real corporate backing, just Microsoft's promise to cooperate with its developers. So really, it's not a better choice than XFS or ReiserFS.
That weird sound you just heard was me laughing. The idea of Paterson designing a file system, even a limited hack job like FAT, is absurd. What, you ask, didn't he write an operating system? No, in point of fact, he didn't. 86-DOS was never really an OS. It was a bunch of libraries that pretended to implement the same APIs as CP/M, but never had anything like CP/M's functionality. Microsoft spend years kludging real OS functionality onto Paterson's shoddy framework.
If you want to spend all that money to eliminate spin-up delay, it's yours to spend. But the hard drive in my tablet makes almost no noise. And the heat generated by a hard drive motor is trivial; most of the heat in any electronic system comes from circuits, and an SSD actually has more of those. Though the main source of heat in your typical portable system is your CPU, which contains millions of transistors.
As a matter of fact, it's Hollywood's tendency to eroticize violence that's created the marketplace for violent porn. So yeah, if they're logically consistent, this law will ban horror movies. Which might be its undoing. Or they might just choose to be illogical — the law often works that way.
As for terrorists using the Die Hard movies to train: I bloody well hope so. If we have to have terrorists, we might as well have inept ones.
Dude, you've reverse-jacked the thread! You've put us back on topic! The horror!
I think everybody who cares about the OLPC project doesn't want it to become just another Wintel vendor. What isn't clear to me is that porting Sugar to Windows or porting Windows to the XO will do that. The first thing will make Sugar accessible to kids in the developed world who would never bother with the XO. The second thing is just a pointless exercise that MS will go through for prestige reasons; Windows is too bloated to be an effective OS for the XO, and even if it were, few XO users can afford even token license fees to run it.
(One last word on Twitter: he likes to dominate a discussion, but he isn't at all interested in actually talking to people. So his lengthy, rambling posts make it hard for the rest of us to get down to the nitty gritty details like the above.)
I'm particular taken by the possibilities that open up when developed-world children get their hands on this stuff. They go beyond the educational to the social, as this article shows.
In my pre-internet days, I used to hang out at a BBS where there was this one guy who was always getting into flame wars with everybody. You know the type, can't let things go, even when he's run out of arguments. At one point, he started claiming that some of the other users were my sock puppets. This resulted in several complaints, directed at me, from people who felt I had done an inadequate job of imagining them, and could I please provide them with more interesting social lives!
Dude, if you're going to pretend to be a dozen different people, you need to vary your rhetoric a little. Just calling people "nutjobs" over and over makes it painfully obvious that it's you again.
I agree, Willy's obsession with Twitter's attempts to game the system are pretty lame. (Hey, I just thought of a new Law: "Obsession with Lameness is Lame.") On the other hand, Twitter's ability to dominate a conversation without actually saying anything is very irritating. He does that partly through sockpuppets, but mainly by regurgitating complex arguments I'm pretty sure he doesn't understand himself.
It's weird, that someone actually has a skill that lets them write things that look interesting but convey no meaningful information whatsoever. You make him sound like a kind of chatterbot. Which, come to think of it, is not totally impossible....
OK, fine, MS is on an evil crusade to make us all use DRM and wipe out free media. Just one question: how does the availability of Windows for the XO accomplish this goal? It's not like the typical XO user can even afford a Windows license.
Also, this isn't just about textbooks. Yes, the XO is a good way to deliver free textbooks. But that's not all it's about, not by a long shot. There's the whole Sugar educational software stack, which I find pretty impressive. A Windows port of this stack would make it accessible to millions of kids who won't get an XO because they already have a Windows box.
In this particular issue, I'm less concerned about MS trying to infiltrate the OLPC project than I am about PC makers who are trying to sabotage the project because they want to sell cheap PCs to the same customer base. Not that I'm against the free market, but I'd hate to see Sugar replaced by the usual spreadsheets and word processors.
I'm bothered less by his fondness for sockpuppets than his weird talent for spouting reasonable-sounding nonsense. I guess he just regurgitates other people's arguments without really trying to understand them. I wasted a solid minute trying to parse his "argument" before noticing who was writing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to note that I committed the standard Slashdot sin of not reading TFA. The NYT doesn't handcode entire pages, as the headline suggests. They just handcode the templates that the articles get inserted into. I stand by my other comments though.
It's as good as any of the online papers I read. Maybe a little more interesting than most, because they seem to have a photo editor with a good eye.
But see my previous post re link farms and lack of support for the inverted pyramid. The SMH is pretty standard in that respect.
When recessions happen, people look for ways to cut costs. What's a good way to cut costs? Automate your operations.
A lot of newspapers, including the NYT, realized early on that they had to move onto the web in order to retain their readers. But despite this early insight, and 10+ years struggling to get viewers to come to their sites, none of them have figured out how to do a proper news web site. Not one.
Absurdities like use of hand-coded HTML and CSS are just the tip of the iceberg. What really bothers me is that nobody seems to have thought of a way, or even tried to think of a way, to properly use the Inverted Pyramid on a web site.
The Inverted Pyramid, for those of you who didn't take Journalism (I took it in high school) is a stylistic technique where you put the most important and newsworthy details of a story in the first paragraph. Slight less important stuff goes in the next paragraph, and the next, until you trail away with trivia at the end. That makes it easier for your editor to trim a story so it fits in the available space. More importantly (especially for an online newspaper, where space is not finite), it makes it easier for the reader to graze the news. You can be your own editor, on stop reading a story when the details are too fine to attract your interest.
You'd think that this would actually be easier to support online than in a physical newspaper. But news sites don't even try. They just dump the print edition online, then provide link farms for the stories, with a few stories getting special summaries.
And they're been similarly stupid with their classified ads. These used to make up something like a third of their income, before Craigslist stole all their customers. Now, you might think that there's no hope of competing with Craigslist, since most of its advertisers get a free ride. But classified ads aren't all that expensive, and advertisers wouldn't have stopped using them if Craigslist didn't do a better job of connected the right advertisers with the right customers.
The print classifieds were doomed in any case, but newspapers were ideally set up to turn their print classifieds business into an even more lucrative online classifieds business. But, as with so many other things, they never really tried.
Probably most of you don't care — you get your news from blogs. Me, I prefer to get my news from somebody who knows something about finding stuff out, who has some sense of professional ethics, and who doesn't simply regurgitate every rumor that sounds vaguely plausible. Unfortunately, that option is rapidly disappearing.
Do you actually have any bricks in your house? If not, then you're wrong: all the bricks in your house are made of spaghetti.
Yes, anything that computes is a computer, and anything that swims in the ocean is a fish. Now go away, the grownups are talking.
I would certainly argue that Apple-DOS is not an OS, not in the sense that it's a full programming platform.
You point about the 6502 machine language (assembly language is not intrinsic to a computer, it's a software layer that often includes instructions the machine doesn't actually support!) is an bananas-and-oranges comparison. (I can't say "apple and oranges" for obvious reasons.) On the one hand, an operating system is defined by the services it provides. A computer, on the other hand, is any machine that can be programmed to run any arbitrary algorithm. The requirements for that are pretty basic; the machine doesn't need to know how to multiply and divide, or even add and subtract, because those things can all be implemented in software. The instructions set, beyond the basics laid out by Turing back in 1937, is nothing more than an optimization.
Some people might call a programmable calculator a kind of computer. But it's not, not unless its programming language has the same kind of general-purposeness. Doesn't matter how powerful the instruction set is. And nowadays even the most basic calculator has fancier hardware than was even available when the 6502 came out.
You can blame anybody you want. Victimhood has a logic all its own.
Having the source code public is not a guarantee that the project will continue to live. If it were, Hans Reiser's legal problems would have no bearing on the future of ReiserFS, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. In theory, anybody could grab the ReiserFS source tree and set themselves up as the successor to Namesys. But nobody seems to be interested in doing so. TFA doesn't even suggest that as an option. Instead, it points to ext4 (backed by IBM) and zfs (backed by Sun). Oh, and there's also NTFS-3G, backed by some Russian guy.
No mention at all of XFS, which SGI GPLed to great fanfare some years ago. What's wrong with XFS? Technically, nothing — it's a proven file system widely used on graphic workstations, servers, and supercomputers. Businesswise, though, it's dead, because its sponsor went bankrupt.
Here's another example that's personal for me: my favorite X server is Cygwin/X. It's pretty bug free, which I'm very grateful for because there hasn't been an update for almost 4 years. Why not? Somebody hired away its maintainer. Nobody else has stepped into the void. I've thought of doing it myself, but this is way beyond my level of software skill.
When MS-DOS came out, I was working for a company that was busy porting Unix to microprocessors. The people who were doing that found DOS's status as an OS pretty laughable.
To most people, the "operating system" is the user interface. That's why some vendors get away with calling a collection of AJAX applications a "web OS". But we're not talking about what people perceive an OS to be, we're talking about what an OS does.
The question of whether some software is an OS is not a religious issue. You take the services a typical OS provides and match them against what the software actually provides. 86DOS provided almost nothing behind the very basic service of loading executable images into RAM and invoking them. Applications had to provide their own functionality for services that any Unix or CP/M user would consider part of the OS: buffered IO, processes scheduling, etc.
Ironically, that's what created the lockin that made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet: MS-DOS applications were poorly insulated from the underlying hardware, and were thus not very portable. That destroyed the market for platforms that didn't have a high level of compatibility with the original IBM PC. (Which is why IBM's own PS/2-OS/2 effort went nowhere.) And to achieve that level of compatibility, you had to have MS-DOS. Not despite its bugs and limitations, but because of them!
Also, why no mention of XFS? I would have thought this was obvious alternative to ReiserFS.
This whole episode points out one of the weaknesses of open source projects. Unless project management is donated by some corporate heavy hitters, there's too much dependency on a few key people. Yes a lot of people contribute, but when the software gatekeeper goes offline, the project is more likely than not to die, despite the free availability of the source code.
Programmer's don't often get sent to prison, but they do die, change careers, achieve the singularity, or whatever. It's not smart of people who want to build their businesses around Open Source to be this dependent on specific individuals.
Now that I think of it, I guess that's why we're not talking about XFS: SGI no longer has a lot of spare resources to support it. And Sun does have the resources to support ZFS, which would seem to outweigh the licensing issues.
NTFS is technically a good option, especially for desktop systems. But the Linux version doesn't have any real corporate backing, just Microsoft's promise to cooperate with its developers. So really, it's not a better choice than XFS or ReiserFS.
Dude, lighten up and grow up. How do you know what TPP's point was? I rather doubt he even had one.
That weird sound you just heard was me laughing. The idea of Paterson designing a file system, even a limited hack job like FAT, is absurd. What, you ask, didn't he write an operating system? No, in point of fact, he didn't. 86-DOS was never really an OS. It was a bunch of libraries that pretended to implement the same APIs as CP/M, but never had anything like CP/M's functionality. Microsoft spend years kludging real OS functionality onto Paterson's shoddy framework.
If you want to spend all that money to eliminate spin-up delay, it's yours to spend. But the hard drive in my tablet makes almost no noise. And the heat generated by a hard drive motor is trivial; most of the heat in any electronic system comes from circuits, and an SSD actually has more of those. Though the main source of heat in your typical portable system is your CPU, which contains millions of transistors.
As a matter of fact, it's Hollywood's tendency to eroticize violence that's created the marketplace for violent porn. So yeah, if they're logically consistent, this law will ban horror movies. Which might be its undoing. Or they might just choose to be illogical — the law often works that way.
As for terrorists using the Die Hard movies to train: I bloody well hope so. If we have to have terrorists, we might as well have inept ones.
Write speed may be irrelevant to the applications you happen to run. But it's pretty relevant to your OS.
Dude, you've reverse-jacked the thread! You've put us back on topic! The horror!
I think everybody who cares about the OLPC project doesn't want it to become just another Wintel vendor. What isn't clear to me is that porting Sugar to Windows or porting Windows to the XO will do that. The first thing will make Sugar accessible to kids in the developed world who would never bother with the XO. The second thing is just a pointless exercise that MS will go through for prestige reasons; Windows is too bloated to be an effective OS for the XO, and even if it were, few XO users can afford even token license fees to run it.
(One last word on Twitter: he likes to dominate a discussion, but he isn't at all interested in actually talking to people. So his lengthy, rambling posts make it hard for the rest of us to get down to the nitty gritty details like the above.)
I'm particular taken by the possibilities that open up when developed-world children get their hands on this stuff. They go beyond the educational to the social, as this article shows.
In my pre-internet days, I used to hang out at a BBS where there was this one guy who was always getting into flame wars with everybody. You know the type, can't let things go, even when he's run out of arguments. At one point, he started claiming that some of the other users were my sock puppets. This resulted in several complaints, directed at me, from people who felt I had done an inadequate job of imagining them, and could I please provide them with more interesting social lives!
I thought that movie was about bare-knuckle fighting? This is just a bunch of geeks with a typical geeky argument.
Dude, if you're going to pretend to be a dozen different people, you need to vary your rhetoric a little. Just calling people "nutjobs" over and over makes it painfully obvious that it's you again.
I agree, Willy's obsession with Twitter's attempts to game the system are pretty lame. (Hey, I just thought of a new Law: "Obsession with Lameness is Lame.") On the other hand, Twitter's ability to dominate a conversation without actually saying anything is very irritating. He does that partly through sockpuppets, but mainly by regurgitating complex arguments I'm pretty sure he doesn't understand himself.
OK, fine, MS is on an evil crusade to make us all use DRM and wipe out free media. Just one question: how does the availability of Windows for the XO accomplish this goal? It's not like the typical XO user can even afford a Windows license.
Also, this isn't just about textbooks. Yes, the XO is a good way to deliver free textbooks. But that's not all it's about, not by a long shot. There's the whole Sugar educational software stack, which I find pretty impressive. A Windows port of this stack would make it accessible to millions of kids who won't get an XO because they already have a Windows box.
In this particular issue, I'm less concerned about MS trying to infiltrate the OLPC project than I am about PC makers who are trying to sabotage the project because they want to sell cheap PCs to the same customer base. Not that I'm against the free market, but I'd hate to see Sugar replaced by the usual spreadsheets and word processors.
I'm bothered less by his fondness for sockpuppets than his weird talent for spouting reasonable-sounding nonsense. I guess he just regurgitates other people's arguments without really trying to understand them. I wasted a solid minute trying to parse his "argument" before noticing who was writing it.
In other words, it's not a hoax, but it is an ineptly implemented, poorly supported, piece of crap. That will show all the naysayers!</sarcasm>
This whole episode is a reminder of Hanson's Law: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity!