It's bad enough when random companies do this, but Internic has had a monopoly on URL registration, so to make full use of the net, people have been forced to use Internic. (Sure, that's changing, but they've already got that huge database.)
It's one thing for people to be able to contact the owner of a particular IP/URL, but it's quite another for them to do massive, indeed internet-universal, privacy violation.
And selling to spammers...that adds insult to injury.
I know, I'm preaching to the choir, but still, this really bugs me.
I was briefly confused too...it turns out that the Slashdot link is in two adjacent parts; click on the first part (as you and I did), and it takes you to an uninteresting internic page. Click on the second part to get to the actual story.
Nice FUD moron. If you're jealous of FreeBSD, don't whine about it.
That wasn't FUD. He said "both are good" (after quoting a sarcastic Linus comment, granted).
As for the comparison, I share his experience. One of my boxes is an ancient 90 Mhz Pentium running Linux 2.0.x, and it has no problems at all saturating my 100mbps ethernet. E.g. I use it to burn CD's from a master over the net at 4x, which I believe is pushing the limits.
I've kept the network and that box otherwise fairly quiescent while doing so, figuring there's no point in asking for coasters, but still, it's handling the net, the scsi device, and the CD burner software all at once.
I personally have no idea if FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD are better or worse in these regards, and it doesn't matter to me (except for being interested in knowing when to recommend one thing or another for various purposes). If Linux didn't exist, I'd be using BSD; I have a personal interest in it.
The 3 day rule throws away most of the inertia in the moderation system, which will cause chaotic instability: moderation will become much more noisy.
Consider that people will lose moderation points semi-randomly: if there's a three day weekend when they're offline, or few interesting stories, etc -- it rewards only extremely recent behavior, yet it's people's long term behavior that you want to reward.
It's also true that, the more capricious and unpredictable a reward system, the less it is perceived as a reward system, and therefore the less it tends to motivate behavior.
(I don't mean "reward" here necessarily in a moral sense, just in a behavior modulation sense.)
Certainly the compiler is known to be a difficult important issue with Merced, so that part is sort of right -- although I don't see that as a reason for them to slip ship dates.
But I don't know where he got this idea that Merced automatically makes all applications multi-processor ready; that's just plain wrong. High end processors have had multiple execution units for many years, which allows them a small amount of very fine grain parallelism: on average perhaps two instructions can be executed at once. Sometimes when you're lucky it can be more than two for a short burst. Merced will *not* be able to keep all 7 of their execution units busy 100% of the time, but they may get lucky and do so for an instant every once in a while, if their compilers are really good.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with multiple cpu's. The situation with those will be unchanged from the situation today with multiple e.g. Pentiums: applications won't take advantage of more than one cpu unless they are explicitly coded to do so.
Therefore the conclusion of the article is dead wrong: the business model won't change, because he just misunderstood the issue with parallelism.
The thing that puzzles me is that he doesn't say a word about Sun Microsystems. Exactly how things will shake out with the Alliance isn't clear to any of us at Sun or Netscape yet, and the cross-company meetings just barely started, so I can only assume that he made up his mind to leave a long time ago, and didn't care what the future with Sun might bring: he was just bummed out that the early days of Netscape are gone.
I sort of understand and I sort of don't. I know what it's like to be burnt out, but this is right on the cusp of major changes.
Of course, his vesting party was a long time ago now, so I would presume that he is now financially independent, and therefore, why work for someone else at all, if it's not rewarding every day? I guess I would have left a while ago, if I were in his shoes.
If someone has to choose between commenting and moderating, that forces a conflict of interest. If they choose moderating, then it will encourage them to give positive points to comments they agree with, as a way of voicing their opinion.
Yet you've said that, ideally, moderation shouldn't be about agreement, it should just be about accenting worthwhile comments.
So I think that particular change goes against your intended goal.
I understand that this is an intricate business to figure out, and will likely undergo changes for a long time.
Now that's a twist, usually it's us 'Mericans complaining about the obscurity and low-level of British humor.;-)
I have to admit, though, the Register piece about the UserFriendly/Segfault/Bedope shutdown was by far the funniest part of this whole affair. Story here.
P.S. The U.S. love affair with The Three Stooges was over decades ago.
I can't make a tax practice work today without MS in the mix.
I can easily believe that, and certainly in a circumstance like that, most people should put pragmatism first. It's just a side effect of the whole situation.
Nope, that's not right either. There was a standard platform: 8080 (and soon the z80) cpu, the S100 bus, and the CPM "operating system" (too strong a word, but never mind).
It's true that this standard platform did not dominate 90% of the market, and it's true that the market was tiny compared with what came later. You're partly right, but in a very misleading way. What's "standard", only something that is 90% of the market?
There was a point where, if you wanted to pick just one platform to write software for, or to buy and have the most software available, that was it. Going for anything but CPM was as nonstandard as Macs and Linux are today: they had their followers, but the market was smaller. The issue at times of 8080 versus 8085 versus z80 was a little like 486 vs pentium or P5 vs K6 etc -- minor.
(This is not a negative comment about the competition for that platform, by the way... other cpu's such as the 6502 and 6800 had many good points, and in some circles, were more widely used. But I digress.)
The real answer to "What made the IBM PC revolutionary" is utterly trivial: IBM made it, and everyone had been waiting with bated breath for years to see if and when IBM would leap into the microcomputer market, and thereby give it legitimacy. After reading hundreds of articles saying precisely that, IBM wised up and made the plunge, and thereby changed history.
If IBM had not done so, most people would never have heard of Microsoft (I was unfortunately already acquainted with their sucky 8080 CPM products), and the 8080/8086 line of processors might well have withered away in the face of competition from e.g. the technically superior 68000 (16 bit successor to the 6800).
I was working at a company that made a 64 processor CPM product, which died when the PC and DOS became so popular that DOS compatibility was more important than anything else. That was in the early 80's. When was the last time you saw a 64 processor DOS or Windows box?
Anyway many of your other points are on target, but it doesn't paint quite the right picture; we all would have done better without Microsoft (who originally was just lucky, as you said), and also without IBM. Innovation died almost instantly, sacrificied for compatibility with utter crap.
This time everything you said is correct (assuming you're the same A.C.) However, none of that is relevant to my comment nor the one I responded to, so this is just a non sequitur.
Microsoft was outselling the Mac even just with DOS. It never had anything to do with technical merit. "Technically good enough" isn't even the point, it was that the PC dominated the market, and the PC was based on DOS, so DOS apps dominated the market. Microsoft gradually played on that to gain control of the applications market themselves.
Microsoft has been riding on top of that ever since -- doing a brilliant job of staying on the horse, yes, but to quote you, so what?
We ought to have some kind of automatic mirror system at slashdot -- if just to take any page directly pointed at and have it at slashdot for a day or so.
I would love it -- we all would -- however, this would be a technical violation of copyright in all cases except those where the author explicitly gave permission for the text to be mirrored or otherwise copied.
99 per cent of the mirrored authors wouldn't mind, but eventually someone would complain, possibly even sue, and then Slashdot would have to permanently stop the mirroring anyway.
IANAL, but the above seems fairly obvious even so.
There's a technical problem, too: the bandwidth load on Slashdot would go way up, slashdotting Slashdot. I would guess their bandwidth would increase 100-fold on average, 10,000-fold peak. Think about what's on the far end of those links we click on here...
Your premise is incorrect. If Microsoft had never existed, we'd be doing just fine, thank you.
And I've been a professional programmer for two decades, but have almost never had to use a Windows box at work, so it's just plain wrong for you to say "...is because people do not want to use Microsoft's OS in the workplace. Well what if you didn't have a computer in the workplace TO use?" That is an impossible assumption; Microsoft didn't invent computers, not even in the workplace. They simply managed to force a large number of workplaces to run their monopolistic software.
Don't forget that the spreadsheet was not invented as a windows app, nor was email, nor were databases, nor was presentation software (Xerox PARC may again win that one), etc, etc, etc.
Go check your history before you started assuming things right and left.
Also, don't post inflammatory posts and then say "let's not start a flame war!" You just did. Back off, jack.
but it eluded me, unless it was "I like computers. Computers suck. I like Linux. Linux sucks.
Contradiction does not always mean bad writing nor unclear thinking, all by itself!!!
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way-- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
From A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
Another example:
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (book III, Song of Myself)
A tolerance for ambiguity leads to an effective increase in wisdom and intelligence, and indeed it's ironic that the author of this Slashdot essay claimed that it was about conflict -- perhaps even self-conflict? Let paradox and contradiction reign.
Incorrect. Look at the slashdot stats page - more than half the slashdot visitors read the page using Windows.
Oh. Okay, okay. In that case, I should have said that most nerds don't WANT to use M$ apps.;-)
I also think that the appeal of/. has been steadily broadening. I'm much less sure of who is the readership than I was last year.
...Except that I keep seeing more and more names I recognize, such as some of the (in-)famous Net God Cabal people from the 80's, and other previously high profile folks that I'd completely lost track of.
...And by the same token,/. seems to be getting more and more of the general public than before. I mean, lawyers and columnists, fer krisake! (just kidding)
I think the Melisa virus is much more likely to matter to the average nerd than yet another OSS peice.
Nope...because the average nerd doesn't use M$ apps, and hence is immune to Melissa.
Interestingly enough, although I get a ton of email, I've gotten zero Melissa-virii emailed to me, which implies that no one I know uses M$-based-email, either! Kind of surprising, since that includes my non-nerd family. But encouraging.
He made a lot of good points; I even agree that Pliant is an interesting language (although be warned that it's not currently for the typical programmer).
However, aside from his advice about approaching conflict in a positive way, he had little to say about what to do about the problems he raised.
So in that sense, he's preaching to the choir here at Slashdot, to very little point. It's relatively easy to identify problems, but it's often quite difficult to solve problems.
On the other hand, there's a place for this... I've been complaining about Microsoft for ages, but I didn't have a concrete suggestion about what to do about them, I've just been frustrated.
The famous one is for the SETUID bit mechanism -- first software patent I ever heard of, way back when. Fortunately Bell Labs assigned this patent to the public domain almost immediately, so it never hurt anyone.
Forced absence from the computer && linux games
on
Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 1
How about the ACM SigGraph journal?
You got me, I do subscribe to that, and hence get CACM as an unavoidable side effect, sigh.
The 20 million yen / $166k didn't go to Thompson, that was the total endowment of the award!
"The award, endowed with a 20-million yen grant from Hitachi Ltd. in 1995, was established in honor of Dr. Kanai, who joined Hitachi as a researcher in 1958 and retires as president this month."
It's nice that he gets honors like this, and the National Medal of Technology that he and Ritchie will recieve from Clinton next month, but it'd be nice if someone gave him a cash award, too. I'd thought it'd finally happened. Alas.
Forced absence from the computer && linux games
on
Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 1
Why should I use a lot of money getting another unit doing that work, when I could buy some MIT Press books and an Communications of the ACM subscribtion for those money instead?
I agree in principle, but CACM went to pieces a good decade ago, and is barely ever worth reading anymore. Try e.g. IEEE Computer instead (with all that money you saved from not buying a Playstation, it'll be easily affordable;-)
What are you talking about!? Complie a compiled language? What does that have to do with anything the other guy said?
All of his comment was humor. Try reading it again, keeping that in mind.;-)
(The compiler part of it isa bit obscure, but I thought it was fairly inspired, too.)
SDL already killer game api?
on
Gaming on Linux
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· Score: 2
Perhaps a killer game API already exists: SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) is being used e.g. by Loki Entertainment for their Linux port of "Civilization: A Call to Power", and similarly for a number of other games (here's a list). I don't know much about it, so I don't really know if it's in the "useful" versus "killer app/api" category. There are quite a few other game and graphics API projects going on, and of course there's the definitive www.linuxgames.com and www.golgotha.org (which arose from the ashes of the late crack.com) I agree that having a good selection of great games available under Linux can only help.
(e) Remove GNU libc. Pretty much everything breaks.
By that argument, you should remove the Linux kernel itself, and guess what, everything breaks. Your logic therefore forces calling it "Linux" and nothing else.
I don't accept that conclusion nor that reasoning, and after seeing this reductio ad absurdum, perhaps you'll want to find either a new conclusion and/or new reasoning.;-)
(I favor the "call it whatever you like" argument, since I'm already gauche enough to talk about "X Windows".)
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing for people to be able to contact the owner of a particular IP/URL, but it's quite another for them to do massive, indeed internet-universal, privacy violation.
And selling to spammers...that adds insult to injury.
I know, I'm preaching to the choir, but still, this really bugs me.
I was briefly confused too...it turns out that the Slashdot link is in two adjacent parts; click on the first part (as you and I did), and it takes you to an uninteresting internic page. Click on the second part to get to the actual story.
That wasn't FUD. He said "both are good" (after quoting a sarcastic Linus comment, granted).
As for the comparison, I share his experience. One of my boxes is an ancient 90 Mhz Pentium running Linux 2.0.x, and it has no problems at all saturating my 100mbps ethernet. E.g. I use it to burn CD's from a master over the net at 4x, which I believe is pushing the limits.
I've kept the network and that box otherwise fairly quiescent while doing so, figuring there's no point in asking for coasters, but still, it's handling the net, the scsi device, and the CD burner software all at once.
I personally have no idea if FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD are better or worse in these regards, and it doesn't matter to me (except for being interested in knowing when to recommend one thing or another for various purposes). If Linux didn't exist, I'd be using BSD; I have a personal interest in it.
Consider that people will lose moderation points semi-randomly: if there's a three day weekend when they're offline, or few interesting stories, etc -- it rewards only extremely recent behavior, yet it's people's long term behavior that you want to reward.
It's also true that, the more capricious and unpredictable a reward system, the less it is perceived as a reward system, and therefore the less it tends to motivate behavior.
(I don't mean "reward" here necessarily in a moral sense, just in a behavior modulation sense.)
But I don't know where he got this idea that Merced automatically makes all applications multi-processor ready; that's just plain wrong. High end processors have had multiple execution units for many years, which allows them a small amount of very fine grain parallelism: on average perhaps two instructions can be executed at once. Sometimes when you're lucky it can be more than two for a short burst. Merced will *not* be able to keep all 7 of their execution units busy 100% of the time, but they may get lucky and do so for an instant every once in a while, if their compilers are really good.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with multiple cpu's. The situation with those will be unchanged from the situation today with multiple e.g. Pentiums: applications won't take advantage of more than one cpu unless they are explicitly coded to do so.
Therefore the conclusion of the article is dead wrong: the business model won't change, because he just misunderstood the issue with parallelism.
I sort of understand and I sort of don't. I know what it's like to be burnt out, but this is right on the cusp of major changes.
Of course, his vesting party was a long time ago now, so I would presume that he is now financially independent, and therefore, why work for someone else at all, if it's not rewarding every day? I guess I would have left a while ago, if I were in his shoes.
Yet you've said that, ideally, moderation shouldn't be about agreement, it should just be about accenting worthwhile comments.
So I think that particular change goes against your intended goal.
I understand that this is an intricate business to figure out, and will likely undergo changes for a long time.
I have to admit, though, the Register piece about the UserFriendly/Segfault/Bedope shutdown was by far the funniest part of this whole affair. Story here.
P.S. The U.S. love affair with The Three Stooges was over decades ago.
I can easily believe that, and certainly in a circumstance like that, most people should put pragmatism first. It's just a side effect of the whole situation.
LOL! :-)
It's true that this standard platform did not dominate 90% of the market, and it's true that the market was tiny compared with what came later. You're partly right, but in a very misleading way. What's "standard", only something that is 90% of the market?
There was a point where, if you wanted to pick just one platform to write software for, or to buy and have the most software available, that was it. Going for anything but CPM was as nonstandard as Macs and Linux are today: they had their followers, but the market was smaller. The issue at times of 8080 versus 8085 versus z80 was a little like 486 vs pentium or P5 vs K6 etc -- minor.
(This is not a negative comment about the competition for that platform, by the way... other cpu's such as the 6502 and 6800 had many good points, and in some circles, were more widely used. But I digress.)
The real answer to "What made the IBM PC revolutionary" is utterly trivial: IBM made it, and everyone had been waiting with bated breath for years to see if and when IBM would leap into the microcomputer market, and thereby give it legitimacy. After reading hundreds of articles saying precisely that, IBM wised up and made the plunge, and thereby changed history.
If IBM had not done so, most people would never have heard of Microsoft (I was unfortunately already acquainted with their sucky 8080 CPM products), and the 8080/8086 line of processors might well have withered away in the face of competition from e.g. the technically superior 68000 (16 bit successor to the 6800).
I was working at a company that made a 64 processor CPM product, which died when the PC and DOS became so popular that DOS compatibility was more important than anything else. That was in the early 80's. When was the last time you saw a 64 processor DOS or Windows box?
Anyway many of your other points are on target, but it doesn't paint quite the right picture; we all would have done better without Microsoft (who originally was just lucky, as you said), and also without IBM. Innovation died almost instantly, sacrificied for compatibility with utter crap.
Microsoft was outselling the Mac even just with DOS. It never had anything to do with technical merit. "Technically good enough" isn't even the point, it was that the PC dominated the market, and the PC was based on DOS, so DOS apps dominated the market. Microsoft gradually played on that to gain control of the applications market themselves.
Microsoft has been riding on top of that ever since -- doing a brilliant job of staying on the horse, yes, but to quote you, so what?
I would love it -- we all would -- however, this would be a technical violation of copyright in all cases except those where the author explicitly gave permission for the text to be mirrored or otherwise copied.
99 per cent of the mirrored authors wouldn't mind, but eventually someone would complain, possibly even sue, and then Slashdot would have to permanently stop the mirroring anyway.
IANAL, but the above seems fairly obvious even so.
There's a technical problem, too: the bandwidth load on Slashdot would go way up, slashdotting Slashdot. I would guess their bandwidth would increase 100-fold on average, 10,000-fold peak. Think about what's on the far end of those links we click on here...
And I've been a professional programmer for two decades, but have almost never had to use a Windows box at work, so it's just plain wrong for you to say "...is because people do not want to use Microsoft's OS in the workplace. Well what if you didn't have a computer in the workplace TO use?" That is an impossible assumption; Microsoft didn't invent computers, not even in the workplace. They simply managed to force a large number of workplaces to run their monopolistic software.
Don't forget that the spreadsheet was not invented as a windows app, nor was email, nor were databases, nor was presentation software (Xerox PARC may again win that one), etc, etc, etc.
Go check your history before you started assuming things right and left.
Also, don't post inflammatory posts and then say "let's not start a flame war!" You just did. Back off, jack.
Contradiction does not always mean bad writing nor unclear thinking, all by itself!!!
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
From A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
Another example:
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (book III, Song of Myself)
A tolerance for ambiguity leads to an effective increase in wisdom and intelligence, and indeed it's ironic that the author of this Slashdot essay claimed that it was about conflict -- perhaps even self-conflict? Let paradox and contradiction reign.
Oh. Okay, okay. In that case, I should have said that most nerds don't WANT to use M$ apps. ;-)
I also think that the appeal of /. has been steadily broadening. I'm much less sure of who is the readership than I was last year.
Nope...because the average nerd doesn't use M$ apps, and hence is immune to Melissa.
Interestingly enough, although I get a ton of email, I've gotten zero Melissa-virii emailed to me, which implies that no one I know uses M$-based-email, either! Kind of surprising, since that includes my non-nerd family. But encouraging.
However, aside from his advice about approaching conflict in a positive way, he had little to say about what to do about the problems he raised.
So in that sense, he's preaching to the choir here at Slashdot, to very little point. It's relatively easy to identify problems, but it's often quite difficult to solve problems.
On the other hand, there's a place for this... I've been complaining about Microsoft for ages, but I didn't have a concrete suggestion about what to do about them, I've just been frustrated.
The famous one is for the SETUID bit mechanism -- first software patent I ever heard of, way back when. Fortunately Bell Labs assigned this patent to the public domain almost immediately, so it never hurt anyone.
You got me, I do subscribe to that, and hence get CACM as an unavoidable side effect, sigh.
"The award, endowed with a 20-million yen grant from Hitachi Ltd. in 1995, was established in honor of Dr. Kanai, who joined Hitachi as a researcher in 1958 and retires as president this month."
It's nice that he gets honors like this, and the National Medal of Technology that he and Ritchie will recieve from Clinton next month, but it'd be nice if someone gave him a cash award, too. I'd thought it'd finally happened. Alas.
I agree in principle, but CACM went to pieces a good decade ago, and is barely ever worth reading anymore. Try e.g. IEEE Computer instead (with all that money you saved from not buying a Playstation, it'll be easily affordable ;-)
All of his comment was humor. Try reading it again, keeping that in mind. ;-)
(The compiler part of it isa bit obscure, but I thought it was fairly inspired, too.)
By that argument, you should remove the Linux kernel itself, and guess what, everything breaks. Your logic therefore forces calling it "Linux" and nothing else.
I don't accept that conclusion nor that reasoning, and after seeing this reductio ad absurdum, perhaps you'll want to find either a new conclusion and/or new reasoning. ;-)
(I favor the "call it whatever you like" argument, since I'm already gauche enough to talk about "X Windows".)