If by user interface you mean something other than the command line, no that wasn't a job for Linus. It's okay to delegate, especially on an open source project. We need him to design the core architecture, while other people are better at GUI.
The HELP command has no other purpose than to give out exactly the information that Andrew received. To have that command and protest its use makes no sense.
Bitkeeper invented the idea of DVCS, shared his work freely with the Linux community and was rewarded by being put out of business.
Larry had great ideas. It's hard to share with the Open Source community while still insisting on holding the same property close. If you don't want to go open all the way, it is better not to approach them at all. And it's just fatal to piss off an Open Source developer. They really can make a free competitor to your software.
Today it is entirely clear how it could have been monetized as hosted software as a service. I don't think the users would have believed in it as such back then.
It remains a lesson regarding how not to work with Linus Torvalds.
No. Linus would have been happy to continue to use Bitkeeper. What Linus did not understand was the developer community's commitment to Open Source and that they would rebel. I am sure he would have rather spent that time working on the kernel instead of making Git.
so, how exactly does a destroyed company release open source software?
It takes two things. Any remaining owners must write off the property or the entire business, or otherwise authorize the release. Then one person releases the software.
Of course lots of Open Source is released by people working in their spare time, so no way is an operational company required at this point.
I also acknowledge that legacy software businesses can last a long time. I could not believe how long HP was still supporting MUMPS, they still had a few thousand users when I was there.
I think it's time to move on, though. Larry is creative enough that there can be a phoenix.
Well, I guess Linus needed a good tool more than he needed the relationship. Larry was kind of difficult to deal with at the time. Linus was also friends with Andrew had great respect for Andrew, and Larry had publicly threatened to sue Andrew and the Open Source lab where Andrew was doing his research (where Linus also worked and the predecessor of Linux Foundation), so things might have soured between Linus and Larry.
If BitKeeper had done that in the first place they'd still be relevant, possibly even the market leader.
Maybe not immediately. The Internet was sort of in its infancy, at least compared to now, when all of this went down. But it's true that if Bitkeeper had been made Open Source then, there would probably be no Git or anything like it. Bitkeeper would be the dominant source-code control system today. Given the way that several companies seem to have made money on Git, Larry might have made that money.
There are a lot of ifs though. We all have 20-20 hindsight but we can't really say that things would have worked out better for Larry. At the time he had a conventional software company and salaries to pay. It would have been difficult for him to get over the economic hump to where things are today.
Andrew did not reverse-engineer the Bitkeeper transfer protocol. What Andrew did was to telnet to the Bitkeeper's server port, and type "HELP". Bitkeeper then obligingly told Andrew what its commands were, in the exact style used by all early TCP daemons like FTP, SMTP, etc.
The problem was that Larry and Linus were good friends, and Larry had convinced Linus to use Bitkeeper even though Bitkeeper was under something less than an Open Source license. Larry had this odd license requirement that if you wanted to use Bitkeeper for free, you had to tolerate it making its logs public, and at some time added a requirement that you not use it to develop competing software. Larry promoted these requirements as a means to make money with Open Source, but his license wasn't really compliant with the Open Source Definition.
Larry also got really nonlinear and pissed off a lot of the kernel developers. Which was probably the fatal step. Linus got tired of trying to hold two things together that did not want to stay together, and wrote git. This eventually destroyed Larry's company.
It remains a lesson regarding how not to work with the community.
Anthropomorphization helps a lot with learning and understanding
I agree that different methods of thinking about things is key to science. The best example is how some math is more easily handled in polar vs. rectangular coordinates.
Metaphorical frameworks can be of assistance, but mainly to introductory students to the sciences. They are actually an impediment to reaching a greater level of understanding. The high mental cost of abandoning them, once learned, might prevent someone from ever achieving that greater understanding. In this case, the misconceptions which they promote are obvious. "How does the microwave know?" implies action at a distance in the macroscopic world, because the microwave must somehow sense the construction of materials before actually acting upon them. That really screws up the student.
To illustrate the "mental cost" problem, it is well known that in learning Morse Code you can think of it as dots and dashes, but that this method fails as you increase in speed. You must unlearn to hear it that way, and then learn it again, as a sound. In doing this, you must resist the urge to decompose it into dots and dashes because you can't do that quickly enough.
The mental cost of abandoning an anthropomorphic framework is often just too high for the student to ever progress on to a greater understanding, and this may be a main reason that students abandon science and math at some point in their career.
We could explain this stuff all day, but you simply don't have the theoretical background. It's just like having a discussion with people who believe in gods. Not worth other people's time.
And tell me, how does the microwave, the actual wave, know the difference between food and foil? It acts one way with food, and another in metal foil?
The microwave does not know anything. And the microwave treats different materials exactly the same. It is the properties of the materials that cause them to absorb energy, reflect it, or transmit it.
You might as well ask how a helium balloon "knows" to rise instead of sink. It happens because of fundamental physical properties of materials.
Couple this with the fact that the em-drive, astonishingly, has passed 6 tests so far and seems not to be pseudo-science. I wasn't expecting that. They need to get one on ISS and see if they can raise the orbit.
I think the launch cadence law with Brownsville might change eventually. Brownsville wants jobs and that little neighborhood near Boca Chica isn't going to stand in the way.
I don't believe that two F9 launches a month per pad presents any logistical complications. Recovery would need more vessels. They aren't yet ready to launch FH that fast, so 1 FH/month. So, say 12/year for Boca Chica, 24 for Vandenberg, 24 for KSC LC-39a, and 24 for Canaveral AFB pad 40 are the maximum they could do right now. That's a lot of room for growth.
The funny thing is that when he went back to Apple, he described it as "like a strung-out old girlfriend who you want to help, but you don't want to get too involved."
Fuel isn't a big part of the cost. It's around $200K for the entire load.
We have yet to find out about the refurbishment costs, they haven't even done the test burns on the second returned booster yet, but they are trying for essentially no refurbishment.
This latest rocket came in at twice the speed (2 km/sec through the atmosphere) and had a 12-G burn at the end, and there might have been damage that wasn't on the other two recovered boosters.
They just published a 71% increase of the mass fraction. See this.
Not having a boost-back burn means the barge is 660 km out to sea instead of 270 km. They'd better get really good at their at-sea operations if they want to do a lot of those.
I had an office across the hall from Steve at Pixar for some years. I wasn't that important, maybe they just wanted to keep an eye on me. One day, he made his peace with Bill Gates, and sometime that day I looked up and the NeXT workstation wasn't on his desk any longer. There was a Windows laptop there.
Maybe Elon will get that sort of rude awakening sometime.
I don't put much credence in his ego driven preening.
Much as I am blown away by all of this, I agree that Elon can't always be taken at face value. He reminds me of when I worked for Steve Jobs and we had to account for the "reality distortion field".
There is more than just refurbishment cost. SpaceX has very large fixed costs. Only the operational costs will be changed by recovery.
Consider the first airplane crashed at the end of every flight. Eventually we got to the point of minimal refurbishment necessary per flight. If they can do that and if the launch demand expands with lower prices, which I think it will, they can drive the prices much lower.
Slashdot Mirror
If by user interface you mean something other than the command line, no that wasn't a job for Linus. It's okay to delegate, especially on an open source project. We need him to design the core architecture, while other people are better at GUI.
The HELP command has no other purpose than to give out exactly the information that Andrew received. To have that command and protest its use makes no sense.
Larry had great ideas. It's hard to share with the Open Source community while still insisting on holding the same property close. If you don't want to go open all the way, it is better not to approach them at all. And it's just fatal to piss off an Open Source developer. They really can make a free competitor to your software.
It used to be that everything I'd written on Slashdot in its infancy was still online. If anyone cares enough, you can probably find the links.
Today it is entirely clear how it could have been monetized as hosted software as a service. I don't think the users would have believed in it as such back then.
No. Linus would have been happy to continue to use Bitkeeper. What Linus did not understand was the developer community's commitment to Open Source and that they would rebel. I am sure he would have rather spent that time working on the kernel instead of making Git.
It takes two things. Any remaining owners must write off the property or the entire business, or otherwise authorize the release. Then one person releases the software.
Of course lots of Open Source is released by people working in their spare time, so no way is an operational company required at this point.
I also acknowledge that legacy software businesses can last a long time. I could not believe how long HP was still supporting MUMPS, they still had a few thousand users when I was there.
I think it's time to move on, though. Larry is creative enough that there can be a phoenix.
Well, I guess Linus needed a good tool more than he needed the relationship. Larry was kind of difficult to deal with at the time. Linus was also friends with Andrew had great respect for Andrew, and Larry had publicly threatened to sue Andrew and the Open Source lab where Andrew was doing his research (where Linus also worked and the predecessor of Linux Foundation), so things might have soured between Linus and Larry.
I remember him taking around 5 weeks off from kernel development. So, 2 weeks for the core is plausable. It proved that he's no one-hit wonder.
Maybe not immediately. The Internet was sort of in its infancy, at least compared to now, when all of this went down. But it's true that if Bitkeeper had been made Open Source then, there would probably be no Git or anything like it. Bitkeeper would be the dominant source-code control system today. Given the way that several companies seem to have made money on Git, Larry might have made that money.
There are a lot of ifs though. We all have 20-20 hindsight but we can't really say that things would have worked out better for Larry. At the time he had a conventional software company and salaries to pay. It would have been difficult for him to get over the economic hump to where things are today.
Andrew did not reverse-engineer the Bitkeeper transfer protocol. What Andrew did was to telnet to the Bitkeeper's server port, and type "HELP". Bitkeeper then obligingly told Andrew what its commands were, in the exact style used by all early TCP daemons like FTP, SMTP, etc.
The problem was that Larry and Linus were good friends, and Larry had convinced Linus to use Bitkeeper even though Bitkeeper was under something less than an Open Source license. Larry had this odd license requirement that if you wanted to use Bitkeeper for free, you had to tolerate it making its logs public, and at some time added a requirement that you not use it to develop competing software. Larry promoted these requirements as a means to make money with Open Source, but his license wasn't really compliant with the Open Source Definition.
Larry also got really nonlinear and pissed off a lot of the kernel developers. Which was probably the fatal step. Linus got tired of trying to hold two things together that did not want to stay together, and wrote git. This eventually destroyed Larry's company.
It remains a lesson regarding how not to work with the community.
I agree that different methods of thinking about things is key to science. The best example is how some math is more easily handled in polar vs. rectangular coordinates.
Metaphorical frameworks can be of assistance, but mainly to introductory students to the sciences. They are actually an impediment to reaching a greater level of understanding. The high mental cost of abandoning them, once learned, might prevent someone from ever achieving that greater understanding. In this case, the misconceptions which they promote are obvious. "How does the microwave know?" implies action at a distance in the macroscopic world, because the microwave must somehow sense the construction of materials before actually acting upon them. That really screws up the student.
To illustrate the "mental cost" problem, it is well known that in learning Morse Code you can think of it as dots and dashes, but that this method fails as you increase in speed. You must unlearn to hear it that way, and then learn it again, as a sound. In doing this, you must resist the urge to decompose it into dots and dashes because you can't do that quickly enough.
The mental cost of abandoning an anthropomorphic framework is often just too high for the student to ever progress on to a greater understanding, and this may be a main reason that students abandon science and math at some point in their career.
We could explain this stuff all day, but you simply don't have the theoretical background. It's just like having a discussion with people who believe in gods. Not worth other people's time.
The microwave does not know anything. And the microwave treats different materials exactly the same. It is the properties of the materials that cause them to absorb energy, reflect it, or transmit it.
You might as well ask how a helium balloon "knows" to rise instead of sink. It happens because of fundamental physical properties of materials.
Yes, it looks pretty much like what we saw.
Couple this with the fact that the em-drive, astonishingly, has passed 6 tests so far and seems not to be pseudo-science. I wasn't expecting that. They need to get one on ISS and see if they can raise the orbit.
I think the launch cadence law with Brownsville might change eventually. Brownsville wants jobs and that little neighborhood near Boca Chica isn't going to stand in the way.
I don't believe that two F9 launches a month per pad presents any logistical complications. Recovery would need more vessels. They aren't yet ready to launch FH that fast, so 1 FH/month. So, say 12/year for Boca Chica, 24 for Vandenberg, 24 for KSC LC-39a, and 24 for Canaveral AFB pad 40 are the maximum they could do right now. That's a lot of room for growth.
It's only a "race to the bottom" if the product quality is worse. We have no evidence that SpaceX product quality is worse in any way.
As far as I can tell it's just price competition, and darn it's about time!
This was before Steve went back to Apple, so earlier than '97.
The funny thing is that when he went back to Apple, he described it as "like a strung-out old girlfriend who you want to help, but you don't want to get too involved."
Fuel isn't a big part of the cost. It's around $200K for the entire load.
We have yet to find out about the refurbishment costs, they haven't even done the test burns on the second returned booster yet, but they are trying for essentially no refurbishment.
This latest rocket came in at twice the speed (2 km/sec through the atmosphere) and had a 12-G burn at the end, and there might have been damage that wasn't on the other two recovered boosters.
They just published a 71% increase of the mass fraction. See this.
Not having a boost-back burn means the barge is 660 km out to sea instead of 270 km. They'd better get really good at their at-sea operations if they want to do a lot of those.
I had an office across the hall from Steve at Pixar for some years. I wasn't that important, maybe they just wanted to keep an eye on me. One day, he made his peace with Bill Gates, and sometime that day I looked up and the NeXT workstation wasn't on his desk any longer. There was a Windows laptop there.
Maybe Elon will get that sort of rude awakening sometime.
Much as I am blown away by all of this, I agree that Elon can't always be taken at face value. He reminds me of when I worked for Steve Jobs and we had to account for the "reality distortion field".
There is more than just refurbishment cost. SpaceX has very large fixed costs. Only the operational costs will be changed by recovery.
Consider the first airplane crashed at the end of every flight. Eventually we got to the point of minimal refurbishment necessary per flight. If they can do that and if the launch demand expands with lower prices, which I think it will, they can drive the prices much lower.
It effects you the way early sea exploration did. Without that, I would be living in some other country, if I was living at all.