What if RMS got run over by a bus?
on
RMS The Coder
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· Score: 2
People are always asking "What if Linus got run over by a bus" -- or Alan Cox, or Guido or Larry or even (shudder) ESR.
Most of these people are expendable. Great guys, sure (ESR I reserve judgement on. Sorry. The guns scare me. British.), great guys whos projects will live on thanks to the licences under which they've placed their work, and the openness of the systems they have produced.
RMS, however, is a different matter. He's coded some great stuff, (I'm not an EMACSer myself, mind you) but as the interview states, he's moving into a more managerial role because he has the drive and the conviction to push for libre software. Plenty of people can code -- the FSF employs some of them. Very few people can campaign like RMS can -- and fewer still share his convictions. ESR won't do -- he doesn't feel the same way about freedom of software, he cares more about the bazaar than about the freedom.
SO: what *if* RMS got run over by a bus tomorrow? We need some fault tolerance here. --
An S/390 has features the UNIX world dreams of. Forget hot-swappable HDDs, RAID blah -- you can rip a network card out of these things, and it'll just keep going.
The nice thing about running Linux on a VM is that now you can have linux running on the most reliable hardware there is: virtual hardware.
Also, IBM may have liked to port, say, Apache or Lotus Domino to VM -- now there's no need. They can run domino on Linux on VM. Trust me, that'll be one *reliable* Domino server. Performance might not be the highest (mainframes prefer batch-oriented stuff, and those extra levels of abstraction won't help) but in terms of uptime -- whew!
While I don't give a toss about religious objections to creating life (leaving aside the argument about whether this lot can actually walk the talk), I *do* find this kind of thing deeply scary.
Think BSE, think Ebola, think any number of fictional sc-fi rampant bugs.
Now think how easy it is to get things wrong -- for a metaphor, just look at the Morris Worm; not indented to run rampant and destructive, but it did nonetheless.
More knowledge is never a bad thing (whatever John Katz said t'other day) and if creating life from scratch can prove anything to us (possibly give us more clues about the origin of life on Earth), I'm all for it: but for pity's sake, kill it *as soon* as you've proved it's alive.
Anyhow, the Free Mozilla is available for anyone patient enough to run it (I tried it, but I'm back with 4.7 for now). Proprietary Navigator is delayed, but i'd rather see that than a buggy product. --
It's a sad state of affairs, but it seems the HTML "spec" is almost irrelevant. For every site which serves proper, compliant HTML, there are 3 which do not, and to be considered usable, a browser has to handle whatever shit is thrown at it.
Ever since I got involved (about 1993), the Web has been based on "it seems to work, it'll do" - and Mosaic and Netscape are partly responsible, by being so liberal with the HTML they were willing to accept and (attempt to) render.
Don't blame Tim Berners-Lee, his HTML was designed for a specific type of structured document. Tables, frames, BODY BACKGROUND=, these were all snuck in by Netscape, whereupon the W3C had their hand forced into including these features in later HTML specs.
I remember early CERN documents, which discussed the attribute=value pairs within an HTML tag. (to paraphrase) it said "In future, the <A$gt; tag might have an attribute which indicates whether the link is the next page, a footnote, an image, a reference to another part of the document, etc. A browser would do certain things with these attributes, whereas an application printing the document would use the information in a different way."
Has the HTML standard fulfilled that kind of promise? Nope. It's been shoehorned into a layout language, which is something it was never intended to do.
Here's hoping that XML fulfills its promise, and once again structure and layout are properly separated.
In the meantime, though -- formal "standards" don't matter one jot in the current browser market. While there's so much non-standard-compliant junk being spewed out by http servers, to succeed in the marketplace a browser has to accept it. Since a de-facto standard is no standard at all, I guess we have no standard.
(My apologies to the few sites still using pure, W3C compliant HTML. I salute you.) --
There's no such thing as a "Spectrum ZX81". The ZX81 was the precursor to the ZX Spectrum.
I doubt there's the browser for either, but I'm sure I recall mention somewhere of a TCP/IP stack and a WWW browser for the Commodore 64, the Spectrum's main rival. So you're not making as funny a joke as you thought you were:P --
Re:Internet Explorer on Windows 2000 Professional
on
21 Linux Web Browsers?
·
· Score: 4
If I was currently a moderator, I'd have moderated that last comment back up. It's really only mild flamebait, and there's a strong element of truth.
Navigator is "good enough" for me, and since I need xterms, bash, vi, cron, mutt, etc to get my job done efficiently, I stick with Linux and therefore Navigator.
However, this means I have to put up with frequent hangs and crashes and "killall -KILL netscape; rm ~/.netscape/lock"s, when the Java VM ain't up to scratch. And this is on content that I *should* be able to view. I can do without ActiveX etc, since usually if the site requires ActiveX, it's of no interest to me anyway.
Browsing using IE *is* faster than Nav4.7, more reliable, and altogether an easier and more pleasurable experience (once you turn off that dreadful smooth scrolling).
Hopefully, Mozilla/Netscape 5 will fix a lot of these issues. I'm hearing hints from various places that Nav5's XML support won't be as complete as IE5's (anyone know?), and this worries me a little.
Two (almost opposite) things I hope happen:
Mozilla/Nav5 are success, and prove that Free Software can be good GUI software for non-nerd end users.
A surge in the popularity of dumbed-down browsers (e.g. mobile phones, web TV, "games machines", palmtops) lead to more content which does not rely on Java/Flash/DHTML/etc.
Perhaps browsers should have a button in the corner which automatically brings up a form email adressed to the current page's maintainer, making it easy for the irritated Dreamcast user (for example) to send "Dear GamesIsUs, I attempted to reach your Web site using the Dreamcast's browser, because I was eager to buy $300 worth of goods online. However, I was informed that the site required IE4 or greater and that I needed to upgrade my browser. Since there is no browser upgrade available, I was forced to order the goods from another company over the phone".
Enough letters like that ought to wake a few Webmonkeys up. BTW http://special.reserve.co.uk has already done the right (ish) thing and launched a sister site with the same content optimised for 640x480 TV screens. --
While I've had some headaches fighting with SNA, and I'll be the first to admit I don't know everything about it, I'm led to believe that SNA offers a lot of QOS features missing from IP.
I think the whole Creationism in schools thing is equivalent to expecting teachers to stand up in front of a class saying:
"Many scientists believe that a rainbow is caused by the refraction of sunlight through raindrops. However, another equally valid theory is that the rainbow is a bridge built by fairies, enabling them to get from their home in the clouds to the pot of gold below".
(Of course, Mr Babcock would have us also include many other cock-and-bull explanations of what a rainbow is, just so no crackpot feels left out.)
The rain-and-refraction theory, like Neo-Darwinism, is based on observation and backed up with a lot of experimental data. That said, one day a prism may behave oddly, and physicists will shrug and say (correctly) "That was a perfectly good model, which held up well until we found the Slimohedron prism, wherupon we revised the model." cf Bohr's model of the atom, which allows you to make accurate predictions about the way chemicals behave, but turns out to be quite, quite wrong when you get down to a small enough scale.
The fairy-bridge theory is just like Creationism (I don't know why I dignify it with capitalisation) -- there is no observation to uphold it. What's more, like Creationism, it allows lack of evidence to be explained away using nothing but imagination. "Well, of course you can't see the fairys. They're invisible."; "Yes, yes, God put the fossils there to test your faith, they were never alive / fossils were a prototype / blah".
Creationism is not an impossibility -- but neither is the theory that the universe and everything in it was created 30 seconds ago, including you, me, Slashdot, Nintendo, Coke, Uranus, The Life of Brian, On the Origin of the Species, Caligula, all my memories and the act of typing the preceding paragraph. Neither theory can be disproved, neither have any observational evidence. --
IN the UK, to much controversy, a National Curriculum was introduced about 10 years ago, which pretty much set in stone what should be taught and what should be in examinations from nursery up to A-Level education.
While I'm a little concerned that it takes away teacher's flexibility, it does ensure that content is reasonably up-to-date (since there are bodies constantly revising the curriculum for every subject). I know that fractal geometry and some basic chaos theory has been introduced somewhere in the curriculum since when I was at school, for example.
... and of course it means that nobody ends up with great big holes in their education because their teacher was biased against a certain subject.
I know very little about the US education system, though, except what I've seen on Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Weird Science. Oh, and Heathers.
I'm on a salary, and wouldn't have it any other way. As it is, I can spend an afternoon, say, with a book on my lap, boning up on a subject which is only borderline relevant to my job. A current example is XML, which may become an important part of my area in the next 6 months, but at present is nothing to do with our current project.
It's work, and I deserve to get paid for it, but I can't see it going down very well in an "hourly pay" environment.
The culture here is "you have these jobs to do, and these nominal hours to do them in. You may browse the web all day and get the work done at night if you prefer it that way, but don't expect overtime. You may work your arse off for a short day, then go home at 4:30 if you prefer, as long as the work gets done." (oh, and we're expected to maintain core hours of 10:30-4:30; whether we work the remaining hours before 10:30 or after 4:30 is our decision.)
... if a customer problem comes up which involves working out of ours, *then* we get compensated with pro rata overtime. --
.... and of course, the US phone companies I hear of (can anyone confirm it's not a myth) who charge extravagant prices, and call themselves "whatever" or "I don't care".
"I'd like to make a long-distance call please, operator"
A friend of mine used to own the Python record (which does not mean I can remember it's name, unfortunately).
Apparently in the 50s/60s there were moderately popular horse racing records, with several concentric spiral grooves. The idea was that you'd have a load of people 'round, everyone would bet on a horse, then depending on where the needle landed, you'd get a different horse race commentary.
Do you understand this, youngsters? My SO's brothers (now 18 yrs old), when faced with a turntable, said "so how do you skip tracks?"...
They took the girl band/boy band formula, and bumped the body count up to 7. Hence, they could split into two groups, and overrun two kids TV shows at once.
Emulation never ceases to impress me, especially when the host is an unconventional platform, or the emulated system is obscure, or the emulated system is new enough to be considered "unemulatable".
So:
MAME in general, for completeness, and for the insight involved in realising there was enough overlap for it to make sense to put so many systems into one executable.
Mame ported to a Kodak digital camera! Silly, and therefore a great hack.
xzx, since it was the first emulator I saw (running on a Sun Sparc), and I thought it was phenomenal.
That Spectrum emulator for PSX, written without official PSX dev tools.
.. because sh/ksh/csh are *evil* for anything more than a very simple job. The bugs that creep into shell scripts are subtle, and sometimes don't show up for years.
.. but of course, you can also write buggy Perl.
I think the "beads" piece at the start of the (Camel|Llama) book (I forget which), sums it up -- Larry combined the "awk bead", the "sed bead", the "shell bead", a few other influences, and came up with a new bead which was more powerful than the sum of the other beads.
It was a great hack, and the Perl community has done a great job of taking the hack, and fixing the problems which came about as a result of its hacky beginnings.
While I agree, sofas and big screens are great, Quake does benefit from a mouse (for which you need a table/desk in front of you) and outrageous resolutions (so you can shoot your enemy when he's only a 500th of a screen high). If *you're* not running at 1280x1024, your enemy will be!
It was widely believed that Quake II could not be done on a Playstation. That they managed it, and did it so well (I hear) is a minor miracle, although I gather they had to change the level designs to suit the engine's capabilities.
You won't see Quake III on Playstation. Dreamcast is a possibility (Half Life is confirmed for DC), Playstation 2, who knows. --
... and the most popular online games today are things like Chess/Draughts/Backgammon/Bridge games on the Zone.
My favourite game ever is a toss-up between Saturn Bomberman and Super Puzzle Fighter -- neither of them games which require big iron to run.
That said, if you *must* want to play pretty first-person shooters like Quake 3, then correct: you'll need a monster of a PC (or a Dreamcast, and a few months' wait) --
Slashdot Mirror
People are always asking "What if Linus got run over by a bus" -- or Alan Cox, or Guido or Larry or even (shudder) ESR.
Most of these people are expendable. Great guys, sure (ESR I reserve judgement on. Sorry. The guns scare me. British.), great guys whos projects will live on thanks to the licences under which they've placed their work, and the openness of the systems they have produced.
RMS, however, is a different matter. He's coded some great stuff, (I'm not an EMACSer myself, mind you) but as the interview states, he's moving into a more managerial role because he has the drive and the conviction to push for libre software. Plenty of people can code -- the FSF employs some of them. Very few people can campaign like RMS can -- and fewer still share his convictions. ESR won't do -- he doesn't feel the same way about freedom of software, he cares more about the bazaar than about the freedom.
SO: what *if* RMS got run over by a bus tomorrow? We need some fault tolerance here.
--
An S/390 has features the UNIX world dreams of. Forget hot-swappable HDDs, RAID blah -- you can rip a network card out of these things, and it'll just keep going.
The nice thing about running Linux on a VM is that now you can have linux running on the most reliable hardware there is: virtual hardware.
Also, IBM may have liked to port, say, Apache or Lotus Domino to VM -- now there's no need. They can run domino on Linux on VM. Trust me, that'll be one *reliable* Domino server. Performance might not be the highest (mainframes prefer batch-oriented stuff, and those extra levels of abstraction won't help) but in terms of uptime -- whew!
Oh, and a new S/390 isn't as big as you think.
--
You know what? Nobody is making you read Slashdot.
Or post.
Without you it'd be, erm, about the same.
So piss off.
--
While I don't give a toss about religious objections to creating life (leaving aside the argument about whether this lot can actually walk the talk), I *do* find this kind of thing deeply scary.
Think BSE, think Ebola, think any number of fictional sc-fi rampant bugs.
Now think how easy it is to get things wrong -- for a metaphor, just look at the Morris Worm; not indented to run rampant and destructive, but it did nonetheless.
More knowledge is never a bad thing (whatever John Katz said t'other day) and if creating life from scratch can prove anything to us (possibly give us more clues about the origin of life on Earth), I'm all for it: but for pity's sake, kill it *as soon* as you've proved it's alive.
--
Change Runlevels?!?!
What's wrong with "startx"?
--
You seem to think we all speak with one voice.
Is it really the same people saying both things?
Anyhow, the Free Mozilla is available for anyone patient enough to run it (I tried it, but I'm back with 4.7 for now). Proprietary Navigator is delayed, but i'd rather see that than a buggy product.
--
It's a sad state of affairs, but it seems the HTML "spec" is almost irrelevant. For every site which serves proper, compliant HTML, there are 3 which do not, and to be considered usable, a browser has to handle whatever shit is thrown at it.
Ever since I got involved (about 1993), the Web has been based on "it seems to work, it'll do" - and Mosaic and Netscape are partly responsible, by being so liberal with the HTML they were willing to accept and (attempt to) render.
Don't blame Tim Berners-Lee, his HTML was designed for a specific type of structured document. Tables, frames, BODY BACKGROUND=, these were all snuck in by Netscape, whereupon the W3C had their hand forced into including these features in later HTML specs.
I remember early CERN documents, which discussed the attribute=value pairs within an HTML tag. (to paraphrase) it said "In future, the <A$gt; tag might have an attribute which indicates whether the link is the next page, a footnote, an image, a reference to another part of the document, etc. A browser would do certain things with these attributes, whereas an application printing the document would use the information in a different way."
Has the HTML standard fulfilled that kind of promise? Nope. It's been shoehorned into a layout language, which is something it was never intended to do.
Here's hoping that XML fulfills its promise, and once again structure and layout are properly separated.
In the meantime, though -- formal "standards" don't matter one jot in the current browser market. While there's so much non-standard-compliant junk being spewed out by http servers, to succeed in the marketplace a browser has to accept it. Since a de-facto standard is no standard at all, I guess we have no standard.
(My apologies to the few sites still using pure, W3C compliant HTML. I salute you.)
--
There's no such thing as a "Spectrum ZX81". The ZX81 was the precursor to the ZX Spectrum.
:P
I doubt there's the browser for either, but I'm sure I recall mention somewhere of a TCP/IP stack and a WWW browser for the Commodore 64, the Spectrum's main rival. So you're not making as funny a joke as you thought you were
--
Navigator is "good enough" for me, and since I need xterms, bash, vi, cron, mutt, etc to get my job done efficiently, I stick with Linux and therefore Navigator.
However, this means I have to put up with frequent hangs and crashes and "killall -KILL netscape; rm ~/.netscape/lock"s, when the Java VM ain't up to scratch. And this is on content that I *should* be able to view. I can do without ActiveX etc, since usually if the site requires ActiveX, it's of no interest to me anyway.
Browsing using IE *is* faster than Nav4.7, more reliable, and altogether an easier and more pleasurable experience (once you turn off that dreadful smooth scrolling).
Hopefully, Mozilla/Netscape 5 will fix a lot of these issues. I'm hearing hints from various places that Nav5's XML support won't be as complete as IE5's (anyone know?), and this worries me a little.
Two (almost opposite) things I hope happen:
does not rely on Java/Flash/DHTML/etc.
Perhaps browsers should have a button in the corner which automatically brings up a form email adressed to the current page's maintainer, making it easy for the irritated Dreamcast user (for example) to send "Dear GamesIsUs, I attempted to reach your Web site using the Dreamcast's browser, because I was eager to buy $300 worth of goods online. However, I was informed that the site required IE4 or greater and that I needed to upgrade my browser. Since there is no browser upgrade available, I was forced to order the goods from another company over the phone".
Enough letters like that ought to wake a few Webmonkeys up. BTW http://special.reserve.co.uk has already done the right (ish) thing and launched a sister site with the same content optimised for 640x480 TV screens.
--
While I've had some headaches fighting with SNA, and I'll be the first to admit I don't know everything about it, I'm led to believe that SNA offers a lot of QOS features missing from IP.
--
I guess it's a little late to be posting this, but I feel I should respond the suggestion that my company is "hard assed".
The very fact that they pay salary, rather than expect me to clock on and off, indicates that they are not "hard assed" (or arsed, as I'd put it)...
We are expected to account for our time, and "education" is one of the categories on the spreadsheet.
--
I think the whole Creationism in schools thing is equivalent to expecting teachers to stand up in front of a class saying:
"Many scientists believe that a rainbow is caused by the refraction of sunlight through raindrops. However, another equally valid theory is that the rainbow is a bridge built by fairies, enabling them to get from their home in the clouds to the pot of gold below".
(Of course, Mr Babcock would have us also include many other cock-and-bull explanations of what a rainbow is, just so no crackpot feels left out.)
The rain-and-refraction theory, like Neo-Darwinism, is based on observation and backed up with a lot of experimental data. That said, one day a prism may behave oddly, and physicists will shrug and say (correctly) "That was a perfectly good model, which held up well until we found the Slimohedron prism, wherupon we revised the model." cf Bohr's model of the atom, which allows you to make accurate predictions about the way chemicals behave, but turns out to be quite, quite wrong when you get down to a small enough scale.
The fairy-bridge theory is just like Creationism (I don't know why I dignify it with capitalisation) -- there is no observation to uphold it. What's more, like Creationism, it allows lack of evidence to be explained away using nothing but imagination. "Well, of course you can't see the fairys. They're invisible."; "Yes, yes, God put the fossils there to test your faith, they were never alive / fossils were a prototype / blah".
Creationism is not an impossibility -- but neither is the theory that the universe and everything in it was created 30 seconds ago, including you, me, Slashdot, Nintendo, Coke, Uranus, The Life of Brian, On the Origin of the Species, Caligula, all my memories and the act of typing the preceding paragraph. Neither theory can be disproved, neither have any observational evidence.
--
IN the UK, to much controversy, a National Curriculum was introduced about 10 years ago, which pretty much set in stone what should be taught and what should be in examinations from nursery up to A-Level education.
While I'm a little concerned that it takes away teacher's flexibility, it does ensure that content is reasonably up-to-date (since there are bodies constantly revising the curriculum for every subject). I know that fractal geometry and some basic chaos theory has been introduced somewhere in the curriculum since when I was at school, for example.
... and of course it means that nobody ends up with great big holes in their education because their teacher was biased against a certain subject.
I know very little about the US education system, though, except what I've seen on Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Weird Science. Oh, and Heathers.
--
I'm on a salary, and wouldn't have it any other way. As it is, I can spend an afternoon, say, with a book on my lap, boning up on a subject which is only borderline relevant to my job. A current example is XML, which may become an important part of my area in the next 6 months, but at present is nothing to do with our current project.
It's work, and I deserve to get paid for it, but I can't see it going down very well in an "hourly pay" environment.
The culture here is "you have these jobs to do, and these nominal hours to do them in. You may browse the web all day and get the work done at night if you prefer it that way, but don't expect overtime. You may work your arse off for a short day, then go home at 4:30 if you prefer, as long as the work gets done." (oh, and we're expected to maintain core hours of 10:30-4:30; whether we work the remaining hours before 10:30 or after 4:30 is our decision.)
... if a customer problem comes up which involves working out of ours, *then* we get compensated with pro rata overtime.
--
.... and of course, the US phone companies I hear of (can anyone confirm it's not a myth) who charge extravagant prices, and call themselves "whatever" or "I don't care".
"I'd like to make a long-distance call please, operator"
"what carrier would you like, sir"
"err, Whatever"
"putting you through..."
--
A friend of mine used to own the Python record (which does not mean I can remember it's name, unfortunately).
Apparently in the 50s/60s there were moderately popular horse racing records, with several concentric spiral grooves. The idea was that you'd have a load of people 'round, everyone would bet on a horse, then depending on where the needle landed, you'd get a different horse race commentary.
Do you understand this, youngsters? My SO's brothers (now 18 yrs old), when faced with a turntable, said "so how do you skip tracks?"...
--
They took the girl band/boy band formula, and bumped the body count up to 7. Hence, they could split into two groups, and overrun two kids TV shows at once.
Genius
--
So:
Any others I've missed?
--
.. because sh/ksh/csh are *evil* for anything more than a very simple job. The bugs that creep into shell scripts are subtle, and sometimes don't show up for years.
.. but of course, you can also write buggy Perl.
I think the "beads" piece at the start of the (Camel|Llama) book (I forget which), sums it up -- Larry combined the "awk bead", the "sed bead", the "shell bead", a few other influences, and came up with a new bead which was more powerful than the sum of the other beads.
It was a great hack, and the Perl community has done a great job of taking the hack, and fixing the problems which came about as a result of its hacky beginnings.
--
Not all geeks like gaming, but for those of us who do:
Sega Dreamcast
Neo-Geo Pocket Color
Games & Peripherals for the above
Cool retro stuff -- I got a Genesis/Megadrive last Xmas, and I was delighted.
... and if games are too frivolous, get involved with the OpenBSD/SH4 project, and turn the Dreamcast into a BSD box...
--
It's so much fun to be a teenager.
Yes. Don't waste it by spending all your time worrying about proprietary software.
--
I dunno. But I paid real money for the Infocom Collection, Zork included.
--
Still selling well on Neo Geo Pocket...
--
While I agree, sofas and big screens are great, Quake does benefit from a mouse (for which you need a table/desk in front of you) and outrageous resolutions (so you can shoot your enemy when he's only a 500th of a screen high). If *you're* not running at 1280x1024, your enemy will be!
It was widely believed that Quake II could not be done on a Playstation. That they managed it, and did it so well (I hear) is a minor miracle, although I gather they had to change the level designs to suit the engine's capabilities.
You won't see Quake III on Playstation. Dreamcast is a possibility (Half Life is confirmed for DC), Playstation 2, who knows.
--
Deer Hunter made an absolute fortune, didn't it?
... and the most popular online games today are things like Chess/Draughts/Backgammon/Bridge games on the Zone.
My favourite game ever is a toss-up between Saturn Bomberman and Super Puzzle Fighter -- neither of them games which require big iron to run.
That said, if you *must* want to play pretty first-person shooters like Quake 3, then correct: you'll need a monster of a PC (or a Dreamcast, and a few months' wait)
--