So, can you have a completely anonymous system in which there is still at least a semblence of accountability? Or, will any channel of communication which completely seperates data from the identity of its creator be overwhelmed with raw noise?
You don't have to store infinite information at any time -- you start with a finite amount, add finite amounts, and keep doing so until the human race no longer needs the system. There's no way to get an "infinite" value from finite inputs -- that's a basic mathematical truism.
Assuming you meant dealing with a very large supply of information, there are any number of possible solutions. However, I think that most people aren't going to be willing to give up any more than a tiny fraction of their hard drive and communications in exchange for a guarantee of their rights. Most likely, you'll see a lot of folks giving Freenet a few hundred megs and using it primarily to find MP3's and porn which they'll then move to more permanent, local storage.
The more "dangerous" or "subversive" content that finds its way out there will only stick around so long as its subject matter is popular. While this could be an interesting phenomenon to watch in and of itself, (like publishing a monthly count of the number of times various 'keyowrds' appear in a Freenet search each month) the end effect will still be far from perfect.
I'm not saying that Freenet won't serve a valuable purpose until a better solution comes along. I just want to debunk the statements that I keep seeing that it will be a perfect and complete means of protecting the right to free expression.
This has always happened -- a group makes an advance in technology that offers them a chance to escape some of the restrictions that everyone has been tolerating, and decide they'll go for it. Spoken language, literacy, radio, the Internet -- even consciousness itself -- were all means of changing the rules for you, and quite possibly taking everyone else along for the ride. The only thing that's changed is the pace.
So, yes, there is a great potential for constructive of dangerous applications of any significant new technology. If you can climb to the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder, I would suggest you do so; those who don't are likely to get stepped on.
The most significant statement in that entire article was, "Unpopular information is dropped from the system." This reflects, in my eyes, dangerous assumption about what kind of data (or free speech) is valuable, and what isn't. The stated goal of Freenet is to allow unbounded free speech, yet it doesn't allow for a record or history of what has already been said. That is where the most dangerous power of censors and opressors lies: the ability to make us forget our own history, so that we can be manipulated in the same ways time and time again.
Think of it this way: If you were trying to build a library, would you only stock periodicals? True, they are updated regularly, and are often a dense source of current information, but they are, by design, transient. Also, assuming you have finite space in which to store them, you will have to start throwing out the ones no one has checked out when the shelves are all full. Some of the old editions might cover popular events or figures, and would therefore stay popular and in cirulation, but the obscure or unknown stories of the past issues would be wiped away without a trace.
The whole point is that universities are ceasing to operate their research programs as publicly funded, not-for-profit programs. When these products are being profitably commercialized, it is because the related research and development was funded either by the company that is now raking it in, or by the university's other revenues. Government funds are becoming a drop in the bucket, compared to what major corporations can offer universities.
It's also truly sad to me to see a "geek" say, "Tech is fine and dandy, but where's my royalty check?" Aren't we supposed to be the ones who can see past the money, and into the value of things like open source? Or even, dare I say it, something being a Good Thing, simply because it is a clever hack or truly new idea?
But I guess I'm just not being a good, productive citizen, 'cause I have hopes and goals in life other than turning a profit.
If haven't learned that corporations and their wealth are more important than you are yet, you must be some kind of freaking Communist, or hippie, or anarchist. I'm just happy that our kind corporate "parents" are looking out for our interests so well. See, they listen to the people who wanted this bad, bad law taken away...and they made it happen! Who needs elected officials when we have the nice men in big offices?
Yes, the RIAA member labels want to hold on to old recordings for as long as they can. However, the revenue generated from compilations, re-issues, etc., pales in comaprison to what they generate of a brand-spankin'-new, Top 40 hit. My guess is that enough artists (and their agents/lawyers) got wind of this thing to start making the labels nervous.
The major record labels are greedy bastards, but I don't think they're especially stupid. Slow to come to grips with their own impending obsolescence, perhaps, but not stupid.
Yes, but the influence of the market continues to grow as the market itself expands. Of course money has long been an issue for universities, just it has been for individuals or businesses. However, the continuing growth of capitalism, the total wealth of corporate entities, and the Westernization of every major world economy has pumped up the power that business leaders, rather than government ones, have over every facet of our lives.
The CEO of a major corporation is not elected; his appointment is decided by a small group of peers. Business, therefore, is essentially an aristocracy. How many complaints have we seen in this thread about Katz's "old world" ideas? Well, an aristocracy is a very, very old idea. Most of them have eventually been torn down by popular revolutions or major wars.
Business, however, has been given free run of the world's social and economic fabric. The tax laws and antitrust legislation that are complained about so vigorously by so many are not serving to stunt this growth in any significant way. This is where the problem lies -- not in any fundamental inflection point, where everything changed, but in a steady and almost unnoticed trek down the road to corporate control of society.
No, I am not completely in support of the Communist model of government, or Anarchy; both are extreme over-simplifications of an incredibly dynamic and mutable set of issues. However, I think that the evidence speaks for itself: governments are more or less powerless against the largest corporations in the world, children take in more advertising that public education, and no one is considered a successful contributor to society unless they "make it".
Is it really reasonable to try to stretch UNIX into being a file-based and object-oriented operating environment? The beauty of UNIX to me, anyway, is the flat-text universe it creates; I can perform most any major task with a text editor, Perl, and a few command-line tools. The more layers of abstraction we try to pile on top of that model, the more strained it becomes. The classic justification for the rapid rise of Linux was its adherence to those standards, and the developer base that brought. Now it sounds as though a flat-file universe isn't enough for some applications. Fine; I like object-oriented development, and I can see the usefulness component-based programming. However, UNIX is, at heart, the playground of C, Perl, and shell programmers. Object-oriented tools never fit the system as well, simply because they weren't prevalent when it was being created.
Now, I hate Windows as much as any loyal/.'er, but Microsoft has made a concerted effort to make object-oriented programming easy on their systems. It may run like crap and be painful to anyone who knows better, but Visual Basic does make OO a breeze to understand and work with, and COM is so tightly integrated into Windows these days that you can't sneeze without hitting it.
So, where does that leave us, the Linux/BSD/(insert-your-*NIX-flavor-here) faithful? Well, we have a few options. We could continue to try to pile layer after layer of abstraction on top of the core system, ending up with something that's highly understandable at the top levels, but an ugly mess of spaghetti code in the middle. Personally, I suspect that much of the bloat and instability of Windows comes from just this kind of sandbagging. Alternately, we could leave all that new-fangled OO stuff to the boys in Redmond, and continue happily spending our days piping text from place to place.
Personally, neither of these sounds all that great to me. I think we need to step back a bit, and start working OO services in at the operating system level. C++, Java, and the rest of the object-oriented languages are here to stay, and they deserve to made the be equals of C, Perl, and assembler in the UNIX programming model. Right now, what we have are wrappers for a bunch of C libraries -- a layer of interference that shouldn't be necessary. From a developer's standpoint, it's much easier to feed flat data to an object than it is to feed an object to something that's expecting text; doesn't it make sense to put the power at the low levels of the system, then, and simplify as we move up?
Regardless of the future of Objective-C, OS-X has the nice advantage of offering an almost identical runtime environment for Java. Hell, even if Apple's hardware business tanks (which I think unlikely any time soon), or no one upgrades to OS-X (even less likely, given the response it seems to be generating), Apple could probably wrap the runtime services it's built into WebObjects and have one the best freaking Java server platforms on the market.
Really, the use of Objective-C in OS-X is probably more about leveraging the NeXT codebase than any strong desire on Apple's part to reintroduce the language. Rather than try to struggle through morphing all the NeXTStep code to a different OO language and its less-elegant model, I'm sure it was easier for Apple to just hire a bunch of old NeXTStep/GNUStep coders, and port the whole package to the Mac.
Buying NeXT wasn't just a way for Apple to get Jobs back on baord; they really did (still do?) have some cutting-edge code, and it'll put them light-years ahead of where they would be if they tried to incrementially adapt the old Mac OS -- just look at how long it took MS to get rid of DOS, and imagine an equally daunting task being completed by the relatively tiny MacOS development crew.
Why? OS-X already has a great shared runtime derived largely from NeXTStep, with support in the first release for Objective-C and Java. I'd rather have a nice, clean, UNIX-centric platform to develop my code on than some bastardized MicroSpawn.
NeXT boxes were actually cheaper than equivalent Macs -- it's just that they were much higher-end than your average office/educational/home user's machine. There was an article in Macworld many, many years ago, right after the first color NeXTcubes and stations came out, that benchmarked and cost-compared them to high-end Quadras, and they smoked 'em on both fronts. Remember, this was in Macworld, in an issue with Jobs' replacement CEO at Apple on the cover.
The original Mac was also spendy as hell, and eventually took off only because of hefty student discounts and the rise of DTP and multimedia. NeXT failed because they never really had a niche -- their systems weren't quite as easy to use as a Mac, due to their UNIX heritage, but weren't quite as powerful as a Sun or SGI; they had great multimedia support in hardware, but initially shipped with a low-bitdepth greyscale monitor; etc., etc.
Personally, I think that the NeXT systems would have done much better if they had come out a little later...like 1997, when Apple was licensing for clones. The hardware could have been updated for PowerPC, and they would have been kick-ass workstations and lightweight servers. Development on NeXTStep is as easy as development on Windows, without the lobotomizing effects of excessive exposure to Microsoft tools.
I suppose we're getting pretty close with OS-X. The development environment is incredibly NeXT-like, with a few modern updates (like kick-ass Java support). G4 hardware is considerably cheaper than the old NeXT gear, and they've certainly improved in a number of areas of usability. Then there's the one ingredient that NeXT never had: the laptop. I'll sign whatever I have to for a G4 PowerBook with OS-X...drool...
Having had some experience with (shudder) VJ++ development, I would guess that the answer to your question about native code would most likely be: "If you include native code, then your IL will be completely tied to the platform(s) you compile for." Such is the way of "unsafe," low-level code, right? You can't guarantee it'll port, so a given VM can only allow it if it's been compiled for that specific architecture/OS combination. Just look at WFC in J++ -- if you use them, your Java code might as well be VB, because it sure as hell ain't gonna run on anything besides 32-bit Windows systems.
Of course, Microsoft isn't exactly the only group doing this. As much as I may like the looks of OS X, the development environment is, once again, highly dependent on a number of proprietary, platform-specific libraries and services. Linux and the rest of the UNIX-esque system benefit from the basic POSIX standard, but I think what we're seeing more and more lately is that that's not quite far enough these days. If the UNIXes of the world can't come up with a system that's as brainless to use as Visual Basic, Microsoft will continue to lure developers who can't, don't want to, or don't need to learn the intricacies of OO, and just want to quickly build applications with the benefits of pluggable components.
With the similarities between C# and Java, I worry less about language lock-in than reliance on a set of system libraries and object models. In this case, the C# focus on COM objects would prove to be a greater barrier to porting a lot of code to another platform, not the basic language syntax. Add the new shared.NET libraries to the mix, and suddenly, you have mission-critical applications being developed in a completely platform, vendor, and version-dependent environment.
Java may not be the ultra-portable platform it originally claimed to be, but at least companies who develop with it are not signing their eternal soul (and support contracts) away to a single vendor. If you start down the road of.NET, you are now committing not just your desktop applications and documents, but all your business logic and data, to the benevolent guidance of Microsoft.
The silver lining to all this is the fact that there will be those business analyst-types who will realize the same thing, and say so.
And there's the secret we've all been looking for...namely, why MS would go to all this trouble to create a Java-alike. Windows 2000! They need a way to strongarm developers onto the new system, and away from NT or 98. If the development tools are only available for Win2k, then you're going to have to upgrade if you want to stay ahead of the curve.
As I'm not an experienced VM or compiler programmer, I hope you'll al forgive me if this is a stupid question, but here goes: If the C# VM is basically a slightly tweaked version of the MS Java VM internally, then wouldn't it stand to reason that another VM could be adapted to handle C# code? How unique is the design of their Java virtual machine?
I think your point is valid, in part -- there are a lot of programmers who just mindlessly crank out redundant code and tools. However, would you say that Windows developers, as a general rule, are much more innovative and clever in their development style, or that their code is usually better?
The primary difference, in my eyes, is that with open source, there's a chance of breaking this cycle. If people can be persuaded to support a larger project, or combine efforts when their applications are similar in purpose, then they can learn from each other's mistakes, and come up with a much better product. And, the little projects that fork off from the "core" codebase sometimes evolve into something that's better suited to a particular niche.
Would a tool like thttpd still exist if it had been written exculsively for Windows, and the source had been closed? Sure, Microsoft might have simply bought the rights to it, if users wanted that functionality, and rolled it into the IIS codebase. But then it would just be another checkbox on the same monolithic monster, instead of a tiny, hella-fast "ace in the hole" for certain applications.
I would hardly say that Windows programmers don't "recycle shit that's already written," since they largely put together their projects out of Microsoft-supplied code. The Windows platform basically forces you to use the "blessed" libraries. That may help to limit duplication of effort, but it also limits your choices.
Better yet, they offer DSL, and throttle your bandwidth based on the amount of data you process per month. Build a home cluster, run their software, and they'll connect you at T-1 speeds for free...
Anybody wanna start looking for some VC?
Is it just me, or does it seem like complex biochemical simulations might not be quite so efficient for this kind of loose, massively-parallel processing? With, say, the SETI data, is makes sense, since there are relatively few operations to be performed on a given data set. To model the action of drugs on cancer cells or the influenza virus, though, you'd either need complete simulations running on each node, or a lot of interaction between them.
I'm not a biochemist, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me like running a complete sim of that type in a screensaver is a bit, shall we say, ambitious? That leaves parting them out, which is exactly the kind of process that clusters are poor at. If every atom in the simulation is bouncing off of an atom that 'lives' on another user's machine, modem-speed latencies will kill the whole thing.
There is a fair portion of any high-profile protest group that is made up of posers and media hogs. It's unavoidable, and happens in most every area of life. However, I think that lumping the entire group together under the same blanket description is rude, overly simplistic, and not unexpected from a/.'er running on AC.
How many true anarchists, Communists, or even just plain old-fashioned liberals have you known? I, for one, have known a good number; some of them settle down and sell out, (or buy in, depending on your POV) others just keep on bucking the system when they can.
Yes, "causes" can be hip, and can attract people who care about nothing but the attention. Don't assume that automatically means they're *all* just in it for the glory.
Actually a very good point. I haven't seen the same amount of attention devoted to stripping BSD variants down to simple setups for anything other than network appliances, though. Is there some architectural issue that makes it more difficult to minimize a BSD system, or is it just the hype that Linux has right now that's making people want to hack it?
Okay, so the Internet is not *technically* alive. However, it displays the *attributes* of a complex biological system...which is what the quotes above from Dyson seem to indicate, as well. You yourself said that it "develops" and that "parts die"; how is that not the behavior of life?
This is where complexity theory comes from -- the observation that these same kinds of patterns show up in wildly different systems.
...where I think we'll see Linux start cleaning up in the next few years is the portable and embedded markets. Windows CE makes no sense for most small, low-power devices; it's just not worth the overhead for all that Windows-alike functionality when a device has very few resources to spare.
If Linux is going to take off in the *consumer* mobile/appliance market, though, there are a few things missing -- like a lightweight GUI toolkit with sufficient support and applications available for it, hardwriting recognition, and a slim, usable browser (preferably something open source, so it can be modified for different target uses).
I know there are efforts underway in most of these areas -- anyone more up-to-date on it than I want to weigh in with some names and URL's?
Slashdot Mirror
So, can you have a completely anonymous system in which there is still at least a semblence of accountability? Or, will any channel of communication which completely seperates data from the identity of its creator be overwhelmed with raw noise?
Assuming you meant dealing with a very large supply of information, there are any number of possible solutions. However, I think that most people aren't going to be willing to give up any more than a tiny fraction of their hard drive and communications in exchange for a guarantee of their rights. Most likely, you'll see a lot of folks giving Freenet a few hundred megs and using it primarily to find MP3's and porn which they'll then move to more permanent, local storage.
The more "dangerous" or "subversive" content that finds its way out there will only stick around so long as its subject matter is popular. While this could be an interesting phenomenon to watch in and of itself, (like publishing a monthly count of the number of times various 'keyowrds' appear in a Freenet search each month) the end effect will still be far from perfect.
I'm not saying that Freenet won't serve a valuable purpose until a better solution comes along. I just want to debunk the statements that I keep seeing that it will be a perfect and complete means of protecting the right to free expression.
Okay, I guess I don't make it up a rung -- the second-to-last sentence should have read: "...potential for constructive or dangerous applications..."
So, yes, there is a great potential for constructive of dangerous applications of any significant new technology. If you can climb to the new rung that's just been built on the ol' ladder, I would suggest you do so; those who don't are likely to get stepped on.
Think of it this way: If you were trying to build a library, would you only stock periodicals? True, they are updated regularly, and are often a dense source of current information, but they are, by design, transient. Also, assuming you have finite space in which to store them, you will have to start throwing out the ones no one has checked out when the shelves are all full. Some of the old editions might cover popular events or figures, and would therefore stay popular and in cirulation, but the obscure or unknown stories of the past issues would be wiped away without a trace.
It's also truly sad to me to see a "geek" say, "Tech is fine and dandy, but where's my royalty check?" Aren't we supposed to be the ones who can see past the money, and into the value of things like open source? Or even, dare I say it, something being a Good Thing, simply because it is a clever hack or truly new idea?
But I guess I'm just not being a good, productive citizen, 'cause I have hopes and goals in life other than turning a profit.
If haven't learned that corporations and their wealth are more important than you are yet, you must be some kind of freaking Communist, or hippie, or anarchist. I'm just happy that our kind corporate "parents" are looking out for our interests so well. See, they listen to the people who wanted this bad, bad law taken away...and they made it happen! Who needs elected officials when we have the nice men in big offices?
The major record labels are greedy bastards, but I don't think they're especially stupid. Slow to come to grips with their own impending obsolescence, perhaps, but not stupid.
The CEO of a major corporation is not elected; his appointment is decided by a small group of peers. Business, therefore, is essentially an aristocracy. How many complaints have we seen in this thread about Katz's "old world" ideas? Well, an aristocracy is a very, very old idea. Most of them have eventually been torn down by popular revolutions or major wars.
Business, however, has been given free run of the world's social and economic fabric. The tax laws and antitrust legislation that are complained about so vigorously by so many are not serving to stunt this growth in any significant way. This is where the problem lies -- not in any fundamental inflection point, where everything changed, but in a steady and almost unnoticed trek down the road to corporate control of society.
No, I am not completely in support of the Communist model of government, or Anarchy; both are extreme over-simplifications of an incredibly dynamic and mutable set of issues. However, I think that the evidence speaks for itself: governments are more or less powerless against the largest corporations in the world, children take in more advertising that public education, and no one is considered a successful contributor to society unless they "make it".
Now, I hate Windows as much as any loyal /.'er, but Microsoft has made a concerted effort to make object-oriented programming easy on their systems. It may run like crap and be painful to anyone who knows better, but Visual Basic does make OO a breeze to understand and work with, and COM is so tightly integrated into Windows these days that you can't sneeze without hitting it.
So, where does that leave us, the Linux/BSD/(insert-your-*NIX-flavor-here) faithful? Well, we have a few options. We could continue to try to pile layer after layer of abstraction on top of the core system, ending up with something that's highly understandable at the top levels, but an ugly mess of spaghetti code in the middle. Personally, I suspect that much of the bloat and instability of Windows comes from just this kind of sandbagging. Alternately, we could leave all that new-fangled OO stuff to the boys in Redmond, and continue happily spending our days piping text from place to place.
Personally, neither of these sounds all that great to me. I think we need to step back a bit, and start working OO services in at the operating system level. C++, Java, and the rest of the object-oriented languages are here to stay, and they deserve to made the be equals of C, Perl, and assembler in the UNIX programming model. Right now, what we have are wrappers for a bunch of C libraries -- a layer of interference that shouldn't be necessary. From a developer's standpoint, it's much easier to feed flat data to an object than it is to feed an object to something that's expecting text; doesn't it make sense to put the power at the low levels of the system, then, and simplify as we move up?
Really, the use of Objective-C in OS-X is probably more about leveraging the NeXT codebase than any strong desire on Apple's part to reintroduce the language. Rather than try to struggle through morphing all the NeXTStep code to a different OO language and its less-elegant model, I'm sure it was easier for Apple to just hire a bunch of old NeXTStep/GNUStep coders, and port the whole package to the Mac.
Buying NeXT wasn't just a way for Apple to get Jobs back on baord; they really did (still do?) have some cutting-edge code, and it'll put them light-years ahead of where they would be if they tried to incrementially adapt the old Mac OS -- just look at how long it took MS to get rid of DOS, and imagine an equally daunting task being completed by the relatively tiny MacOS development crew.
Why? OS-X already has a great shared runtime derived largely from NeXTStep, with support in the first release for Objective-C and Java. I'd rather have a nice, clean, UNIX-centric platform to develop my code on than some bastardized MicroSpawn.
The original Mac was also spendy as hell, and eventually took off only because of hefty student discounts and the rise of DTP and multimedia. NeXT failed because they never really had a niche -- their systems weren't quite as easy to use as a Mac, due to their UNIX heritage, but weren't quite as powerful as a Sun or SGI; they had great multimedia support in hardware, but initially shipped with a low-bitdepth greyscale monitor; etc., etc.
Personally, I think that the NeXT systems would have done much better if they had come out a little later...like 1997, when Apple was licensing for clones. The hardware could have been updated for PowerPC, and they would have been kick-ass workstations and lightweight servers. Development on NeXTStep is as easy as development on Windows, without the lobotomizing effects of excessive exposure to Microsoft tools.
I suppose we're getting pretty close with OS-X. The development environment is incredibly NeXT-like, with a few modern updates (like kick-ass Java support). G4 hardware is considerably cheaper than the old NeXT gear, and they've certainly improved in a number of areas of usability. Then there's the one ingredient that NeXT never had: the laptop. I'll sign whatever I have to for a G4 PowerBook with OS-X...drool...
Of course, Microsoft isn't exactly the only group doing this. As much as I may like the looks of OS X, the development environment is, once again, highly dependent on a number of proprietary, platform-specific libraries and services. Linux and the rest of the UNIX-esque system benefit from the basic POSIX standard, but I think what we're seeing more and more lately is that that's not quite far enough these days. If the UNIXes of the world can't come up with a system that's as brainless to use as Visual Basic, Microsoft will continue to lure developers who can't, don't want to, or don't need to learn the intricacies of OO, and just want to quickly build applications with the benefits of pluggable components.
Java may not be the ultra-portable platform it originally claimed to be, but at least companies who develop with it are not signing their eternal soul (and support contracts) away to a single vendor. If you start down the road of .NET, you are now committing not just your desktop applications and documents, but all your business logic and data, to the benevolent guidance of Microsoft.
The silver lining to all this is the fact that there will be those business analyst-types who will realize the same thing, and say so.
And there's the secret we've all been looking for...namely, why MS would go to all this trouble to create a Java-alike. Windows 2000! They need a way to strongarm developers onto the new system, and away from NT or 98. If the development tools are only available for Win2k, then you're going to have to upgrade if you want to stay ahead of the curve.
As I'm not an experienced VM or compiler programmer, I hope you'll al forgive me if this is a stupid question, but here goes: If the C# VM is basically a slightly tweaked version of the MS Java VM internally, then wouldn't it stand to reason that another VM could be adapted to handle C# code? How unique is the design of their Java virtual machine?
The primary difference, in my eyes, is that with open source, there's a chance of breaking this cycle. If people can be persuaded to support a larger project, or combine efforts when their applications are similar in purpose, then they can learn from each other's mistakes, and come up with a much better product. And, the little projects that fork off from the "core" codebase sometimes evolve into something that's better suited to a particular niche.
Would a tool like thttpd still exist if it had been written exculsively for Windows, and the source had been closed? Sure, Microsoft might have simply bought the rights to it, if users wanted that functionality, and rolled it into the IIS codebase. But then it would just be another checkbox on the same monolithic monster, instead of a tiny, hella-fast "ace in the hole" for certain applications.
I would hardly say that Windows programmers don't "recycle shit that's already written," since they largely put together their projects out of Microsoft-supplied code. The Windows platform basically forces you to use the "blessed" libraries. That may help to limit duplication of effort, but it also limits your choices.
Better yet, they offer DSL, and throttle your bandwidth based on the amount of data you process per month. Build a home cluster, run their software, and they'll connect you at T-1 speeds for free... Anybody wanna start looking for some VC?
I'm not a biochemist, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me like running a complete sim of that type in a screensaver is a bit, shall we say, ambitious? That leaves parting them out, which is exactly the kind of process that clusters are poor at. If every atom in the simulation is bouncing off of an atom that 'lives' on another user's machine, modem-speed latencies will kill the whole thing.
How many true anarchists, Communists, or even just plain old-fashioned liberals have you known? I, for one, have known a good number; some of them settle down and sell out, (or buy in, depending on your POV) others just keep on bucking the system when they can.
Yes, "causes" can be hip, and can attract people who care about nothing but the attention. Don't assume that automatically means they're *all* just in it for the glory.
Actually a very good point. I haven't seen the same amount of attention devoted to stripping BSD variants down to simple setups for anything other than network appliances, though. Is there some architectural issue that makes it more difficult to minimize a BSD system, or is it just the hype that Linux has right now that's making people want to hack it?
And my hope is that the near-automatic market reception OS X is going to receive, the popularity of the entire *BSD family tree will get bumped up.
Okay, so the Internet is not *technically* alive. However, it displays the *attributes* of a complex biological system...which is what the quotes above from Dyson seem to indicate, as well. You yourself said that it "develops" and that "parts die"; how is that not the behavior of life? This is where complexity theory comes from -- the observation that these same kinds of patterns show up in wildly different systems.
...where I think we'll see Linux start cleaning up in the next few years is the portable and embedded markets. Windows CE makes no sense for most small, low-power devices; it's just not worth the overhead for all that Windows-alike functionality when a device has very few resources to spare.
If Linux is going to take off in the *consumer* mobile/appliance market, though, there are a few things missing -- like a lightweight GUI toolkit with sufficient support and applications available for it, hardwriting recognition, and a slim, usable browser (preferably something open source, so it can be modified for different target uses).
I know there are efforts underway in most of these areas -- anyone more up-to-date on it than I want to weigh in with some names and URL's?