PK Dick's oft-cited "paranoia" is in fact a classic theme in literature-- self doubt. In particular, it's self-mistrust, and as with any work on the theme, the best way to make the theme stick with the reader is to leave the quandry unresolved-- if the narrator's self-mistrust is unresolved, then the reader's sympathetic self-mistrust is left for the reader to resolve.
Providing a resolution (and I don't think it is Scott's place to provide one for Dick's story) leaves the us, the audience, with nothing to figure out, and little to learn about ourselves.
While Ridley Scott has made one great movie (Alien) and a couple of good movies (Bladerunner, The Duellists, some would say Thelma and Louise), he's also made a steaming pile of crap: GI Jane, 1492,Legend,Gladiator. I'll take Paul Verhoeven's lousy movies over Scott's lousy movies any day. And yes, that includes Showgirls.
DNS now fails to resolve domain.com (can't remember if this was by design), but mail sent to domain.com (via smail and sendmail, at any rate) still evaporates. Looks to me like a well designed MTA tries to avoid clogging networks with attempts to deliver to Tattooine. Needless to say, the days where humor lurked in the belly of NSI are long gone, but domain.com is still reserved, and there are still records for it in the indicated name servers. A whois domain.com now returns a circular reference error, and no contact info.
Ah, another Speakeasy customer. Sort of sounds like you work for them, too.
I switched to Speakeasy from US West a while ago. My 1929 apartment building only has a single twisted pair (cloth covered!) coming into the unit, so I had to ditch US West for local phone service and go wireless, but I haven't looked back. It doesn't cost me much more.
Yes, the DSL line is pretty solid. If anything does go wrong, though, I find myself sitting on the phone for at least half an hour before anyone picks up. When they do pick up, you tend to get a pretty clueful tech, so I can't complain, but waiting is always frustrating.
Though the network is solid, the software/sysadmin side of things seems lax. This past weekend, *.dsl.speakeasy.net fell out of DNS, while the reverse mapping was still working. This screwed with just about all of the services I have running at home. I think this persisted for as much as 48 hours before I noticed and picked up the phone. I called in the report on memorial day (the only time I haven't had to wait for a tech to pick up:), and not only did the tech know exactly what I was talking about when I told him what was wrong and how to use nslookup to diagnose the problem, he also had the right people on the phone and the problem fixed within an hour.
I've also had lots of trouble with http://www.speakeasy.net/tac -- it looks like that system is still in beta. Frustrating to no end, but then, I used to work for a colossal internet retailer, and I know how hard it can be to debug a complex cgi app.
The one I worked with was thrown together in a hurry and then balooned by an army of amateurs working for a hoarde of ambitious, feature-happy managers (result: 75MB compiled executable with its own garbage collector and ad-hock scripting language). But it worked, damnit.
Um, are the non-US ISP going to stop paying US-owned undersea-cable companies under this plan?
No. They'll pay a bit less, but all of the money spent will still end up inside the borders of whoever owns the cables -- Japanese, US, UK, take your pick. What percentage of the bandwidth connecting oz to the rest of the world is owned by Aussies?
It looks to me like we're moving from a system resembling colonialism to a system resembling sharecropping.
the economics of the situation would be completely different if we were talking about the UK or Japan (but probably only the UK or Japan).
If we're going to rate separately for Sex, Violence, and Bad Words, then we definitely need to add ratings for Advertising.
Something like:
1 (G). No commercial consideration of any kind recieved by producers of the work. 2 (PG-13). Some product placement 3 (R). Heavy product placement or investment from commercial interests. 4 (NC-17). Program paid for entirely by a company that stands to benefit from the work.
If you read the article closely, you will see that the quote citing production dificulties is in reference to Intel, not AMD. AMD implies that the reason demand has been high enough for them to sell out their inventory (of released product-- no doubt they're building inventory of their soon-to-be released chips) is that Intel can't meet its quotas.
Let's see-- full color screen, 200mhz processor, and at least twice the RAM of a Pilot-- so how long do two AA batteries last on one of these suckers? MS isn't saying, but of course, it's not their problem-- that's a hardware issue, right?
Seriously, how long does one of these things last before it craps out?
Oh, lordy. Jamie didn't do his/her homework on this one.
One look at the "research" done by venture-capital driven enonymous would have been enough to figure out that this "story" didn't merit a post, not even in the comment-free void of the "second" pages. The marketing drivel would be funny if it weren't so depressing
enonymous is very, very interested in selling data that you might consider private to other companies-- they're obviously collecting things like age and gender, but if you read between the lines, you can see that they're trying to make money collecting other things-- like your web browsing profile, and, especially, your online purchasing history. Your name won't be sent back to enonymous along with the profiling data. That's nice, but what if your employer is a client of enonymous, and you find their "browser assistant" software preinstalled on your computer? The data that enonymous designates as "private" won't be transmitted back to enonymous, but it will certainly be available to your employer (minus the credit card number-- they can figure it out because they know your name, your social security number, and your IP number). And they can do whatever the hell they want to with it. Or how about your ISP? Did the enonymous software install itself as part of your ISP's bloated mass of "setup" software?
Any company that buys enonymous' service will deserve to be flattened by the cluetrain, if it ever arrives.
Frankly, I think privacy is dead (in the US, at least). The sooner I get over it, the better.
Sigh. I can't stand it when journalists use the word "libertarian" when they write about the political composition of the high-tech community. Using the term is just plain lazy.
People whose politics are "libertarian" believe in a fairly strict lassaize-faire approach to solving social problems.
If there is any unifying thread in the political thinking of the high-tech community, then it is a tendency to believe that technologically engineered solutions to social problems should be attempted before or in place of socially engineered solutions.
These two positions are vastly different, but journalists don't seem to be able to make the distinction, probably because no-one has coined a convenient "ism" for the latter-- let me suggest "technologism", "anti-luddism," or the perversely confusing "mechanism."
As a result, discussion of the conference, like discussion of so many other events that conflate the political with the technical, is being derailed into an utterly irrelevant poli-sci wonk session focused on libertarianism.
My apologies to the libertarians out there-- I don't mean to disparage anyone's political beliefs, I'm just angry that the culturally loaded term "libertarian" is so often allowed to distract attention from the issues at hand.
People use BladEnc because there are so many old, non-updated web pages (I wouldn't call them sites) out there that recommend it. Nevermind the fact that bladenc-encoded music sounds like it is being piped through a flatulent weasel-- if a brief web search says it's best, then by gum, it must be the best.
I know it's a lot to ask of a slashdot editor, but I think that they ought to be reading competing tech sites, and avoiding "me too" postings-- or at least crediting other sites with the scoop.
The Advogato interview was brilliant, representing hours of effort, while the slashdot post was just a link to the project homepage.
Again, I know it's a lot to ask, but remember-- the slashdot editors are getting paid now, so I think it's reasonable to ask them to behave professionally-- and a professional news editor is expected to keep a very close eye on the competition (not just to give credit where credit is due, but to stay on top of the breaking stories that his or her reporters inevitably miss).
"if you want your Oracle Database to go fast, you jam as much of it as you can into RAM..."
No, sir.
That only speeds things up if your database is read-only! Every db write must be written to disk immediately to satisfy the "Durability" requirement of RDBMS design. Combine Durability with the problem of Concurrency, which Oracle solves with separate rollback segments (PostgreSQL now uses versioned records), and Oracle is even more disk-dependent (i.e. if you want speed, you need your rollback segment(s) on a separate disk).
If you've got a pile of RAM and a bunch of data in Oracle that you're only interested in reading, then the best way to do it is to take a snapshot of your data out of oracle, stuff it into a berkeley DB, and then keep that in RAM-- no RDBMS will ever be as quick as a berkley DB if all you're interested in doing is reading a bunch of static data.
Much of Oracle's success has been in areas that they share with OS designers-- filesystem design, memory management, process control. When Larry Ellison spouts off on one topic or another and implies that Oracle should be thought of as an OS, he's not engaging in hubris-- he's just reflecting the problems that his engineers have to face.
If you're a CS grad student, and you want to do an interesting open source project, try designing a generic database filesystem for Linux/BSD-- (sqlfs, perhaps?). An fs with so many constraints (typed data, stored in records, flushed to disk before returning a successful write, presenting consistent views to concurrent access, etc.) would be more difficult to implement than a traditional fs, but it would also present many more avenues for optimization. At the end of the project, you'd have a pretty useful abstraction layer, and the free RDBMS folks could potentially spend their time implementing new features, instead of putting so much work into reinventing the wheel.
None of this ever occurred to me until I had to install Oracle one day-- I'd been used to using free dbs on debian, where installation is essentially transparent, and you can just start hacking away on SQL immediately. Installing Oracle, on the other hand, was a lot like the first time I installed Linux back in '95-- it was rediculously time-consuming, but when I was done, I understood many of the design principles of the system, not just how to use it.
If cheap+fast permanent storage arrives quickly, then Oracle, for one, will be in deep trouble.
Durable storage without moving parts could easily be three orders of magnitude faster than magnetic disk tech.
With permanent storage that fast, PostgreSQL 7.0 would perform on a par with, if not faster than, Oracle 8i. All the work Oracle has done to optimise around magnetic disks would be rendered worthless or worse-- imagine how annoying it could be for a newly hired developer to slog through all of that newly-obsolete disk "wizardry" just to fix a bug...
"...the man wrote vi, I doubt he needs to be told to turn on the mic."
You're quite right. He needed instead to be told to put the mic in on mode.
Sorry, I couldn't resist:). This thread just seems to beg for a devolution to the Great Editor Debate-- so who do you think would win in a fight, Bill Joy or Richard Stallman?
Real ethical issues here
on
The Cat Cam
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· Score: 3
It's easy to dismiss ethical issues as "crazed ravings by animal rights nuts," so I feel I have to state up front that I eat meat, wear leather, and use personal hygiene products tested on animals.
The ethical questions would be much more obvious if the test subject were human, of course.
A couple of starting points:
When do we have the right to monitor the perceptions of a living organism?
What effects does this procedure have on the organism? Can it lead a normal life once the probes have been removed?
I think this is good research. I'm not opposed to it. But that's because I've thought these things through.
I interviewed at N2H2 before taking my present job at a Large Internet Retailer in the same city. So here's a load of irony for you:
1) Bess runs on Linux. Exclusively.
Yes, the whole system. When a company or school (they have a near-lock on the academic market) decides to buy Bess, N2H2 sends out a tech to install a linux box (or boxen). Those boxen all talk to more linux boxen to keep the URL lists current.
2) N2H2 funds free software projects.
They paid for outside developers' time to get ipfwadm finished, and they are active in the perl circuit.
3) Most of the people who work there don't think that censorware should be installed for anyone older than 12, but they can't say no to a client.
4) Robots go out on the net and flag suspect sites, and the call on whether or not to block a flagged site is made by a human. So if something is being blocked, then someone decided to block it. The converse, of course, is not the case.
5) They drag their feet when making offers to perl hackers, and the perl hackers go to work for Large Internet Retailers instead:).
I'm sorry I came to this discussion late-- hopefully this post will bubble up a bit.
So this was an "art movie" produced by "a bunch of students." Fine, I'll take that at face value. But does that change the ethics of the promotional tactics? I think not. Friends of the filmakers who put up falsified fan sites are no better than paid advertising flacks who fake fan sites for the studios.
I'm also glad to see someone calling bullshit on Harry Knowles-- early on, he seemed simply naive and easily decieved by manipulative studio flacks, but now it's obvious that he's willfully participating in the Hollywood "backscratching" economy, and profiting from it.
There are many complaints with Red Hat that bear consideration:
1. Timely security updates don't always happen. Go over to Linux Weekly News and read the back issues-- Red Hat has dropped the ball several times with regard to security updates, and there has been no indication of how this will be consistently addressed in the future.
2. A history of upgrade problems. Every distribution has had upgrade difficulties at some point, of course, but it seems like RH has had more than its share.
3. Immature bug tracking. Red Hat did not have a public bug tracking system before bugzilla was released.
4. Lack of update tools. e.g.: no single, approved command to check for and install any "errata" patches over the internet.
5. Frequently inaccessible ftp server, hard to locate list of mirrors.
6. $99 for a proprietary secure web server.
7. Please add to this list.
These are largely management problems rather than technical problems. If Red Hat resembles Microsoft, it is in putting publicity and financing before the needs of its customers. As to any sort of "monopoly" power-- no chance. RH knows damn well that any attempt to monopolize the Linux market will destroy it.
Original licenses only separate for GPL'd tools.
on
APSL 1.1 Released
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· Score: 1
You may not have realized that I and others who object to the co-opting of the BSD code have looked at the source repository, and do understand what is and what isn't covered by APSL.
The bulk of the tools separated out and not covered by APSL are separate because they are covered by GPL, and Apple can not legally apply the APSL to them. None of the source in the non-apple tree is required to boot a system, though it might be nice to have a shell...
There is a substantial amount of code in the "Apple Projects" tree that was developed by the BSD project, and is largely unmodified. There is other code that has been more heavily modified, but the bulk of the development, at least a decade of it, was done by the BSD project (or the Mach project). For those files that are not heavily modified, some of us feel that Apple should simply assume stewardship, without modifying the license, rather than co-opt more than ten years of public money and research for their own ends (though it is perfectly legal for them to do so).
Slashdot Mirror
Providing a resolution (and I don't think it is Scott's place to provide one for Dick's story) leaves the us, the audience, with nothing to figure out, and little to learn about ourselves.
While Ridley Scott has made one great movie (Alien) and a couple of good movies (Bladerunner, The Duellists, some would say Thelma and Louise), he's also made a steaming pile of crap: GI Jane, 1492,Legend,Gladiator. I'll take Paul Verhoeven's lousy movies over Scott's lousy movies any day. And yes, that includes Showgirls.
Example Domain (DOMAIN-DOM)
DNS now fails to resolve domain.com (can't remember if this was by design), but mail sent to domain.com (via smail and sendmail, at any rate) still evaporates. Looks to me like a well designed MTA tries to avoid clogging networks with attempts to deliver to Tattooine. Needless to say, the days where humor lurked in the belly of NSI are long gone, but domain.com is still reserved, and there are still records for it in the indicated name servers. A whois domain.com now returns a circular reference error, and no contact info.Seems to me that any CPA (let alone tax attorney) would have to know which taxes are due and on what.
Perhaps this audit isn't random?
Ah, another Speakeasy customer. Sort of sounds like you work for them, too.
:), and not only did the tech know exactly what I was talking about when I told him what was wrong and how to use nslookup to diagnose the problem, he also had the right people on the phone and the problem fixed within an hour.
:)
I switched to Speakeasy from US West a while ago. My 1929 apartment building only has a single twisted pair (cloth covered!) coming into the unit, so I had to ditch US West for local phone service and go wireless, but I haven't looked back. It doesn't cost me much more.
Yes, the DSL line is pretty solid. If anything does go wrong, though, I find myself sitting on the phone for at least half an hour before anyone picks up. When they do pick up, you tend to get a pretty clueful tech, so I can't complain, but waiting is always frustrating.
Though the network is solid, the software/sysadmin side of things seems lax. This past weekend, *.dsl.speakeasy.net fell out of DNS, while the reverse mapping was still working. This screwed with just about all of the services I have running at home. I think this persisted for as much as 48 hours before I noticed and picked up the phone. I called in the report on memorial day (the only time I haven't had to wait for a tech to pick up
I've also had lots of trouble with http://www.speakeasy.net/tac -- it looks like that system is still in beta. Frustrating to no end, but then, I used to work for a colossal internet retailer, and I know how hard it can be to debug a complex cgi app.
The one I worked with was thrown together in a hurry and then balooned by an army of amateurs working for a hoarde of ambitious, feature-happy managers (result: 75MB compiled executable with its own garbage collector and ad-hock scripting language). But it worked, damnit.
Say, are you guys hiring ?
Never mind Samba, I think about that every time I use non-crippled crypto.
Um, are the non-US ISP going to stop paying US-owned undersea-cable companies under this plan?
No. They'll pay a bit less, but all of the money spent will still end up inside the borders of whoever owns the cables -- Japanese, US, UK, take your pick. What percentage of the bandwidth connecting oz to the rest of the world is owned by Aussies?
It looks to me like we're moving from a system resembling colonialism to a system resembling sharecropping.
the economics of the situation would be completely different if we were talking about the UK or Japan (but probably only the UK or Japan).
Who owns the undersea cables?
If they're mostly owned by US-based companies, then the US negotiators were probably laughing up their sleeves when they made this "concession."
Maybe Neal Stephenson can track it down for us...
If we're going to rate separately for Sex, Violence, and Bad Words, then we definitely need to add ratings for Advertising.
Something like:
1 (G). No commercial consideration of any kind recieved by producers of the work.
2 (PG-13). Some product placement
3 (R). Heavy product placement or investment from commercial interests.
4 (NC-17). Program paid for entirely by a company that stands to benefit from the work.
If you read the article closely, you will see that the quote citing production dificulties is in reference to Intel, not AMD. AMD implies that the reason demand has been high enough for them to sell out their inventory (of released product-- no doubt they're building inventory of their soon-to-be released chips) is that Intel can't meet its quotas.
Sounds reasonable, I suppose. Might be a good idea to get me a set of AA LI for the old pilot :).
Is that Cassio one of the new devices that was released today, or an older WinCE PDA?
Seriously, how long does one of these things last before it craps out?
One look at the "research" done by venture-capital driven enonymous would have been enough to figure out that this "story" didn't merit a post, not even in the comment-free void of the "second" pages. The marketing drivel would be funny if it weren't so depressing
enonymous is very, very interested in selling data that you might consider private to other companies-- they're obviously collecting things like age and gender, but if you read between the lines, you can see that they're trying to make money collecting other things-- like your web browsing profile, and, especially, your online purchasing history. Your name won't be sent back to enonymous along with the profiling data. That's nice, but what if your employer is a client of enonymous, and you find their "browser assistant" software preinstalled on your computer? The data that enonymous designates as "private" won't be transmitted back to enonymous, but it will certainly be available to your employer (minus the credit card number-- they can figure it out because they know your name, your social security number, and your IP number). And they can do whatever the hell they want to with it. Or how about your ISP? Did the enonymous software install itself as part of your ISP's bloated mass of "setup" software?
Any company that buys enonymous' service will deserve to be flattened by the cluetrain, if it ever arrives.
Frankly, I think privacy is dead (in the US, at least). The sooner I get over it, the better.
Sigh. I can't stand it when journalists use the word "libertarian" when they write about the political composition of the high-tech community. Using the term is just plain lazy.
People whose politics are "libertarian" believe in a fairly strict lassaize-faire approach to solving social problems.
If there is any unifying thread in the political thinking of the high-tech community, then it is a tendency to believe that technologically engineered solutions to social problems should be attempted before or in place of socially engineered solutions.
These two positions are vastly different, but journalists don't seem to be able to make the distinction, probably because no-one has coined a convenient "ism" for the latter-- let me suggest "technologism", "anti-luddism," or the perversely confusing "mechanism."
As a result, discussion of the conference, like discussion of so many other events that conflate the political with the technical, is being derailed into an utterly irrelevant poli-sci wonk session focused on libertarianism.
My apologies to the libertarians out there-- I don't mean to disparage anyone's political beliefs, I'm just angry that the culturally loaded term "libertarian" is so often allowed to distract attention from the issues at hand.
People use BladEnc because there are so many old, non-updated web pages (I wouldn't call them sites) out there that recommend it. Nevermind the fact that bladenc-encoded music sounds like it is being piped through a flatulent weasel-- if a brief web search says it's best, then by gum, it must be the best.
I know it's a lot to ask of a slashdot editor, but I think that they ought to be reading competing tech sites, and avoiding "me too" postings-- or at least crediting other sites with the scoop.
The Advogato interview was brilliant, representing hours of effort, while the slashdot post was just a link to the project homepage.
Again, I know it's a lot to ask, but remember-- the slashdot editors are getting paid now, so I think it's reasonable to ask them to behave professionally-- and a professional news editor is expected to keep a very close eye on the competition (not just to give credit where credit is due, but to stay on top of the breaking stories that his or her reporters inevitably miss).
No, sir.
That only speeds things up if your database is read-only! Every db write must be written to disk immediately to satisfy the "Durability" requirement of RDBMS design. Combine Durability with the problem of Concurrency, which Oracle solves with separate rollback segments (PostgreSQL now uses versioned records), and Oracle is even more disk-dependent (i.e. if you want speed, you need your rollback segment(s) on a separate disk).
If you've got a pile of RAM and a bunch of data in Oracle that you're only interested in reading, then the best way to do it is to take a snapshot of your data out of oracle, stuff it into a berkeley DB, and then keep that in RAM-- no RDBMS will ever be as quick as a berkley DB if all you're interested in doing is reading a bunch of static data.
Much of Oracle's success has been in areas that they share with OS designers-- filesystem design, memory management, process control. When Larry Ellison spouts off on one topic or another and implies that Oracle should be thought of as an OS, he's not engaging in hubris-- he's just reflecting the problems that his engineers have to face.
If you're a CS grad student, and you want to do an interesting open source project, try designing a generic database filesystem for Linux/BSD-- (sqlfs, perhaps?). An fs with so many constraints (typed data, stored in records, flushed to disk before returning a successful write, presenting consistent views to concurrent access, etc.) would be more difficult to implement than a traditional fs, but it would also present many more avenues for optimization. At the end of the project, you'd have a pretty useful abstraction layer, and the free RDBMS folks could potentially spend their time implementing new features, instead of putting so much work into reinventing the wheel.
None of this ever occurred to me until I had to install Oracle one day-- I'd been used to using free dbs on debian, where installation is essentially transparent, and you can just start hacking away on SQL immediately. Installing Oracle, on the other hand, was a lot like the first time I installed Linux back in '95-- it was rediculously time-consuming, but when I was done, I understood many of the design principles of the system, not just how to use it.
If cheap+fast permanent storage arrives quickly, then Oracle, for one, will be in deep trouble.
Durable storage without moving parts could easily be three orders of magnitude faster than magnetic disk tech.
With permanent storage that fast, PostgreSQL 7.0 would perform on a par with, if not faster than, Oracle 8i. All the work Oracle has done to optimise around magnetic disks would be rendered worthless or worse-- imagine how annoying it could be for a newly hired developer to slog through all of that newly-obsolete disk "wizardry" just to fix a bug...
You're quite right. He needed instead to be told to put the mic in on mode.
Sorry, I couldn't resist :). This thread just seems to beg for a devolution to the Great Editor Debate-- so who do you think would win in a fight, Bill Joy or Richard Stallman?
It's easy to dismiss ethical issues as "crazed ravings by animal rights nuts," so I feel I have to state up front that I eat meat, wear leather, and use personal hygiene products tested on animals.
The ethical questions would be much more obvious if the test subject were human, of course.
A couple of starting points:
When do we have the right to monitor the perceptions of a living organism?
What effects does this procedure have on the organism? Can it lead a normal life once the probes have been removed?
I think this is good research. I'm not opposed to it. But that's because I've thought these things through.
> Do they get a discount if they buy from
> themselves?
Nope. My friend there gets free delivery (for books and music only), but no discount.
I interviewed at N2H2 before taking my present job at a Large Internet Retailer in the same city. So here's a load of irony for you:
:).
1) Bess runs on Linux. Exclusively.
Yes, the whole system. When a company or school (they have a near-lock on the academic market) decides to buy Bess, N2H2 sends out a tech to install a linux box (or boxen). Those boxen all talk to more linux boxen to keep the URL lists current.
2) N2H2 funds free software projects.
They paid for outside developers' time to get ipfwadm finished, and they are active in the perl circuit.
3) Most of the people who work there don't think that censorware should be installed for anyone older than 12, but they can't say no to a client.
4) Robots go out on the net and flag suspect sites, and the call on whether or not to block a flagged site is made by a human. So if something is being blocked, then someone decided to block it. The converse, of course, is not the case.
5) They drag their feet when making offers to perl hackers, and the perl hackers go to work for Large Internet Retailers instead
I'm sorry I came to this discussion late-- hopefully this post will bubble up a bit.
So this was an "art movie" produced by "a bunch of students." Fine, I'll take that at face value. But does that change the ethics of the promotional tactics? I think not. Friends of the filmakers who put up falsified fan sites are no better than paid advertising flacks who fake fan sites for the studios.
I'm also glad to see someone calling bullshit on Harry Knowles-- early on, he seemed simply naive and easily decieved by manipulative studio flacks, but now it's obvious that he's willfully participating in the Hollywood "backscratching" economy, and profiting from it.
In fact, the guy who wrote the Blue Screen Of Death runs Linux on his primary desktop system, and he runs it without X.
There are many complaints with Red Hat that bear consideration:
1. Timely security updates don't always happen. Go over to Linux Weekly News and read the back issues-- Red Hat has dropped the ball several times with regard to security updates, and there has been no indication of how this will be consistently addressed in the future.
2. A history of upgrade problems. Every distribution has had upgrade difficulties at some point, of course, but it seems like RH has had more than its share.
3. Immature bug tracking. Red Hat did not have a public bug tracking system before bugzilla was released.
4. Lack of update tools. e.g.: no single, approved command to check for and install any "errata" patches over the internet.
5. Frequently inaccessible ftp server, hard to locate list of mirrors.
6. $99 for a proprietary secure web server.
7. Please add to this list.
These are largely management problems rather than technical problems. If Red Hat resembles Microsoft, it is in putting publicity and financing before the needs of its customers. As to any sort of "monopoly" power-- no chance. RH knows damn well that any attempt to monopolize the Linux market will destroy it.
You may not have realized that I and others who object to the co-opting of the BSD code have looked at the source repository, and do understand what is and what isn't covered by APSL.
The bulk of the tools separated out and not covered by APSL are separate because they are covered by GPL, and Apple can not legally apply the APSL to them. None of the source in the non-apple tree is required to boot a system, though it might be nice to have a shell...
There is a substantial amount of code in the "Apple Projects" tree that was developed by the BSD project, and is largely unmodified. There is other code that has been more heavily modified, but the bulk of the development, at least a decade of it, was done by the BSD project (or the Mach project). For those files that are not heavily modified, some of us feel that Apple should simply assume stewardship, without modifying the license, rather than co-opt more than ten years of public money and research for their own ends (though it is perfectly legal for them to do so).