I wrote the Houston BBB. They, in near real-time, wrote back. Here is an excerp from their email:
The media's very interested in the story but we need a local victim. Any ideas? If you can let people know that we do share info with the Attorney General and the DA but we need the complaints filed with us on our online complaint form.
The Houston BBB can be reached at:
Better Business Bureau
5225 Katy Freeway, #500
Houston, TX
Fax: 713-867-4947
www: http://www.bbbhou.org
email: bbbinfo@bbbhou.org
They encourage anyone that has a complaint to file a complaint using their web form. If you live in or around Houston and have ordered but not received products, by all means email them ASAP. You can also contact Stacey Allen at the BBB at her direct tx number: 713-341-6165.
I had the not so hot task of being the production manager for a company that was dieing (sales force? what's that? You mean these things just don't sell themselves?). I succeeded in out-placing nearly 30 and was left with 15 to lay off. Not a good thing but 2 out of 3 left with real jobs. You've not lived until you've had a 61-year-old male sitting across from you crying and saying, "now what will I do?".
I did fire one with cause. He was perpetually drunk and though we'd cycled him through the warning system and suspension several times, he never came around. It hasened his beginning a real trip to AA and a better life which was excellent.
There are good ways to do this, especially firings for cause. I always try to put myself in the shoes of the person sitting across from me. That should mostly avoid the guy coming back with grandfather's shot gun looking for humans (which happened to an acquaintance I know). It takes just a tiny bit more time but everyone feels better about it over the long term.
Now if the current folks that work for me would just understand that we'd all get along a bit better.:-)
--Multics
P.S. of the 15 I laid off I still, more than decade later, get Xmas cards from 9 of them. Proof in my book I did what I could and they believed that.
The Movie. It seems very clear to me, having watched the original in a real theater in Super-Cinerama/Super Panavision 70 that the various mutiliations to get it down to television haven't helped it. All the same, it was 1966-1968 and we'd yet to land on the moon. Look at the images they thought that they'd see and what ultimately was seen on the moon. They came damn close. So look at the special effects and understand that Star Wars was still 9 years off and doesn't look nearly as functional.
Perhaps those of you who don't get it should look at what you have for an imagination and what you have for an attention span. This is a thinking person's movie, not a movie that will whack you over the head with "get it, moron!". Further, until you've made a movie and dealt with all the problems that come with one, ponder what you say. This was a spectacular thing that we're still talking about 32 years later.
The Technology. My bigger bitch is with the people here that bitch about the technology. Perhaps you've been standing behind the door, but it is you and I that make the technology happen. If we want video phones then we should get off our collective asses and code the damn things up.
And, if we want the things this movie guessed would happen, they're not beyond the edge of our technology. All it takes is a political will to do these things and it will happen. What happened to the US space program, post Apollo 11, can only be considered a travesty. There was a viable team of very smart, can-do people that attained a spectacular goal. What did we did to the team? We laid most of them off and said, 'thanks guys'. That NASA was capable of all sorts of cool things but instead the press and hence the country looked at Vietnam instead.
So if you want the BIG technology this vision of the future offers, argue for it with your government critters. They will listen if you will take the time to clearly state the case. They're actually there to do the right thing, if only they can figure out what that is.
--Multics
P.S. don't whine at me about the Space Shuttle either. They went from an Apollo command module (think row-boat) to a reusable space truck (think modern cargo ship) in one step. They're allowed to have made (and continue to make) some blunders along the way -- after all this is rocket science.
NYT started with a popup served by Doubleclick about Tide Laundry Detergent.
*EVERYTIME* I got the popup I wrote NYT and said don't do this. If even 5% of the people that read the NYT on the Web did this, they'll either make their paper's email unusable or they'll quit doing it.
I haven't seen that advertisement in about a month, so perhaps they got the lesson. We'll soon see.
Bobby is excellent. Just use it and it wouldn't hurt to give them a little money to help their efforts.
Also be sure that the site works OK in Lynx, a unix-based all text (no graphics) web browser. Many vision impared people use a reader based from Lynx (& Lynx-like) to have the site read to them.
It seems to me you're already on the right road just by asking.
It seems to me the bloat ACLs add to the file systems, all the utilities that work with files, AND of course, the kernel need to be considered versus the functionalty that not a lot of people will ultimately need (if ACLS work smoothly everyone will use them, but it will be functionality that the current model does ok...)
Are ACLS a fundamentally good idea?
I think a good question to be asked is "Is Linux/*BSD with ACLs still Unix?". My gut feeling
is that it is not... In Unix, everything is supposed to be a file. Directories are just files that describe files. When ACLs are introduced, where are those lists going to be saved? In the directory (how)? In an entire shadow file system? As secret blocks with the file? Then whatever mechanism is used, it will certainly break ALL of the major file interchange tools (dump, tar, cpio) since they don't support ACLs. Poof, the same problem we have with idiot Macintosh files (namely resource forks) appears in *nix -- UGH! Fsck will be broken too. I, being an old person (at least in this business), don't like the idea that my new tars won't be in the same format of my old tars. I *do* read tapes from the 1970s. And yes, there will be 'compatibility switches' so one can move back and forth, but are these kludges really a good idea?
As a result, perhaps it is time for a fork in the road where the ACLers go their own way and the Unix people go another. Perhaps it is time now to re-assess where this is going. Is it time to build a new O/S that has B1 or B2 as it's goal?
I've worked on ACLed systems both in the pre-computers-are-cool days (IBM mainframes) and I've worked on them in the contemporary world (NT). I find the abstraction painful to deal with and the tools to deal with it nearly impossible to reliably use, especially in the hands of junior system administrators. One of the neat things about Unix is I can teach a new person about the filesystem (FFS for example) in an eligant way in about 3 hours to a level I've not a hope of doing with messes like NTFS or HFS+ no matter what amount of time.
Finally, I think it is also time to ask when is an operating system 'done'? I'm not talking about the continual addition and subtraction of devices and services to keep the O/S vibrant & alive, but new core functionality like changing the security abstraction or the concepts of processes and files. ACLs will change the security abstraction of Unix and introduce a new entire class of functionality along with an entire new class of problems... I think they don't fit well in the normal Unix way of doing things and so I think that this is one feature *nix should probably let go by.
1) Was this the longest lasting O/S thus far? Anyone know of a production O/S that pre-dates mid-1965 that is still running?
2) Multics died mostly from being proprietary and running on proprietary hardware. The first, the Multicians thought could be surmounted by a gift from the current code owners. The second, alas, was fatal.
The industry's fixation (mostly because of the volume curve) on VonNeuman architechtures that lack any real new features cause us all to not have things we could really really use -- like the ring security that Multics offered which had direct hardware support. Too bad ASICs are not yet dense enough... maybe soon.:-)
If you'll mail me names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, contact names, specialties and directions on how to get there I'll put them up on a web site (http://acme.ecn.purdue.edu) by country and state. That would help people build cheap clusters too!
Larry Ellison now tries to do 'open benchmarking' when it is to his advantage. He is famous for filing suit against his own customers for doing exactly what he now wants to do; I.E. publish comparitive benchmarks without asking permission.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
If ever there was a reason to not use either product, this is it. I've not included Oracle in several projects because of this behavior. I figure the $150k Larry didn't get doesn't matter to him but does help the competition. I guess now I need to avoid MS SQL too.
Companies that hide behind 'you don't know enough to benchmark our product' need to slither back into the slime whence they came.
If you are out there and you cracked all of it, how about just posting the plaintext of these puppies somewhere and that will eliminate any possibility of a 'cover-up'.
While we're at it,:-), got any bodies from Area 51 too?
By DOD Lobbiests, I mean the military-industrial companies that want to sell very expensive equipement with very high margins to the DOD instead of low margin (relatively) commercial/industrial goods.
Any way this works, we still don't win. Has anyone a URL on 'lease' lengths?
Presuming many of you have been hiding under a rock, some background information is needed to consider this thing.
The big losers are apt to be DOD and the Amateur Radio community. DOD lobbiests will not have enough clout to protect the relatively vast amount of bandwidth that they have compaired with the communications lobbiests. Too bad, who needs militiary communications anyway right?
The Amateurs respond to attempts to take bandwidth on nearly a weekly basis. Usually they're successful, but in cases like the 220MHz band, the United Parcel Service had better lobbiests than the amateur community and 2ish MHz of bandwidth was lost. Ironically, UPS ultimately didn't use the spectrum it acquired.
So now Bill (or Hillary) gets lobbiest money to 'assist' the telecommunications industry in doing yet another land grab that makes the US treasury a little more money. If they think that March 2001 is realistic for the auction date for non-DOD bandwidth they're going to be very very wrong. It will be held up in court for years.
In the end, we've not got a telecommunications policy any more than we've got an energy policy. Both are important plans for mapping out the future. Whose fault is it? Your choice. I tend to think that fixed location systems shouldn't waste radio bandwidth that should be saved for mobile users. So much of the current initative (radio broadband) is just to get around the increasingly incompetent "last-mile" carriers.
Finally a question. When these 'bandwidth' are auctioned, how long is the 'ownership' period? If it isn't time-limited, then the bandwidth is essentially infinitely valuable and we've been screwed once again by lobbiests and the technical morons in Washington.
On the bottom of their www page on privacy, there is an email address:
privacy@motorola.com
How about we write them as a group... and say they're full of it?
I'll be voting with my $ too ($53k last year in motorola equipment that clearly won't be repeated no matter what they do now). Motorola's CEO is (last I checked) the kid or grand kid of the founder. Someone should do some research to get his email address too.
TeX wasn't viable in 1977. troff was. LaTeX even later. If I were starting over, perhaps I'd choose TeX. Though many of you will argue, there are people that think that Professor Knuth's vision of typeography isn't the world vision. TeX looks ok. Troff looks ok. Both could probably be better, not that most of us would recognize better if it walked up and bit us.
MathML is way to new to know if it is going anywhere real -- eligance not withstanding (I like MathML). MS Word version 6.0 is older than MathML is and we know how viable that format is over the long-haul. Now a MathML to troff converter (I've not looked, is there one?) might be interesting in oh say another 5 years after we know if MathML is done or going to suffer from creaping featureism.
In the end, there are markup languages and there are WYSIWYG editors. The markup languages tend to stabile longer and that makes them a much more viable candidate for words that have any hope of being reused.
I'll note here (marginally) that if you are under 25 or 30 years old, the idea of a document being a program is probably just weird. Most big documents should be viewed as such. My books, my PhD dissertation and most of my other major documents are under revision control (RCS) and are constructed with make(1). It is neat to be able to go back and get an old paper and know that it can be reprinted reliably, it will look the same, and that I can steal pieces of it with zero trouble. Ponder doing that with a Wordstar document made on your CPM system in 1977...
Oddly, make(1) has become the largest stability issue to going back to older documents since Berkeley and GNU keep screwing with make in a mis-guided vision of 'oh we'll make it better'. Make is a time dependency file constructor. If you want to make it something else, then call it bmake, gmake, mmake, lmake, fake or weve_lost_sight_of_makes_purpose, just leave the original make alone please.
Pretty much every day I still use eqn(1). It provides a clean, straight-forward, easy to remember way of describing equations. It's about 600% faster than using MS Word's whacked out equation editor.
I'll note here that unlike TeX, Word Perfect, MathML, MS Word, WordStar or whatever other thing you've got, my eqn/tbl/troff from 1977 still formats correctly and gracefully. The only thing about my documents had that changed were SCCS became RCS.
Those who use fads to create their documents (MS Word version XXX for example) don't plan on reusing their words which is just as stupid as not reusing code.
It turns out, for all you lame, system-hacking, children, that there are other applications other than Linux and related system tools. You couldn't tell by the comments posted here of course.
You've seen nothing yet with respect to open source. Open Source will be a massive success when specialty applications like this one are available.
With respect to medical records, this is a really hard problem. On one side, EVERY STATE has a different set of requirements. On another side, the federal government (US of course) can't make up it's mind about where it is going so EVERY YEAR there are massive changes to the system with poor documentation of what must be done, unrealistically short time-frames (5k lines changed in 45 days -- sure with no bugs right!), conflicting/impossible requirements (page 3 says so X, page 11 says absolutly don't do X), awful contractor-implemented (read EDS) government systems (design reviews? don't make us laugh!) and a constant "we're not wrong, it's YOUR application that is obviously wrong." (oh so you hanging up in the middle of the transaction is my doing? NOT).
Then add to that an industry that has its cost structure being fiddled with every moment by 'managed care', an obsurdly low medicare/medicaid reinbursements and of course huge politics at both the state and federal levels. Add no one who wants to pay for software that they know will be out-of-date next year (from the aforementioned changes). And then add a constant moral problem from zero sense of completion and you'll begin to understand this problem.
Part of medical records is a system called 'care plans' which is designed to push patients to get better rather than sit in some care facility sucking dollars and not getting better. Care plans generally improve the quality of life of the people they describe while attempting to be sure that everyone is working toward a common goal. Even in terminal cases (Alzheimers comes to mind) a well considered care plan can make the bad parts shorter duration and the suffering considerably less.
Open sourcing this application would be a blessing to everyone and might, just might, save some lives since common problems would be fixed or at least discussed quicker than all the proprietary systems presently out there.
Things are not good in the computer history business. In part because the main-line companies that felt this was important have faded into oblivion (think mainframe and mini) and the dot coms are too interested in wasting their venture capital on roll-out parties.
The sadest example of the problem is the death of the Boston Computer Museum. Strongly supported by DEC, when DEC went away, so did their funding (and yes there were other reasons including some idiots for executive directors). I was in it several weeks before it closed and a pretty sad thing to see. It has been 'moved' to the Boston Science Center.
The actual museum for the BCM is in California and can be found at Computer History Center. It looks to be alive and interested in history, not 'gee, look, computer interactive toys for school bus loads of children to play with instead of learning how to add, subtract, multiply or heaven forbid divide without a calculator'.
Probably the most respected computer history place at the moment is the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota.
In any case, learn more, subscribe to IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and remember that the dot comes have mostly forgotten/ignored all of this and so you can make money consulting on 'NEW' ideas that are actually old things revisited.
I attended a presentation he made at Purdue on Monday, 7/24/00 to the PLUG (Purdue Linux Users Group). He gave an hour presentation and dealt with an hour of formal questions and more than an hour of one-on-one questions. Several things struck me about his presentation:
1) In the hour presentation, he spent 40 minutes talking about Unix history. Sadly, he was wrong about lots of little things, such as Unix was designed to be a time-sharing system -- NOT. I would have hoped for 10 minutes of history and 50 minutes of NOW.
2) In the remaining 20 minutes, he described NOW. It sounded much like Athena and especially Plan-9. It is problematic that Plan-9 solved many of his problems and took 10 years to do that while they have far less time than that. He was "not familier" with MIT Oxygen
3) NOW's time-line seemed unrealistic. NOW's lack of core PhD class CS problem solvers was notably missing. NOW's goals (given the time line) should have been aggresively well defined and yet "we're looking at that" was often an answer.
4) He was factually incorrect about the features of Plan-9. If he'd even read and absorbed Plan 9 from Bell Labs he'd have been in better shape.
5) The company is missing a definitive business plan. It shows already and they're barely off the ground.
6) The office location they've selected in Indianapolis, is one of, if not the most expensive locations in the entire city. This means their venture capital burn rate will be extremely high. Within 5 minutes of that location there are places that cost 25% of that location.
7) The presentation was an un-abashed hunt for warm bodies that know something about Unix (Indianapolis is a nice place, but far from a hot-bed of computing -- Unix or otherwise).
So I came away with the feeling that they'd not done their homework before they started. Further that their venture capitalists said, "Linux is hot, who is available? Ian? oh good. Let's give him buckets of money and see if he can do 'stuff'."
In the end, they're destined to fail. They have a poor grasp of Linux pre-history (Multics & Unix real history) and lack good technical management to judge wisely how to spend their finite amount of money.
Too bad. NOW as a concept doesn't seem like a clunker as little as we were told about it.
Every time you plant a person you plant with them a current version of the damn disk. Surely a few corpses will make it into the next civilization? Then a few disks will too.
Slashdot Mirror
The media's very interested in the story but we need a local victim. Any ideas? If you can let people know that we do share info with the Attorney General and the DA but we need the complaints filed with us on our online complaint form.
The Houston BBB can be reached at:
Better Business Bureau
5225 Katy Freeway, #500
Houston, TX
Fax: 713-867-4947
www: http://www.bbbhou.org
email: bbbinfo@bbbhou.org
They encourage anyone that has a complaint to file a complaint using their web form. If you live in or around Houston and have ordered but not received products, by all means email them ASAP. You can also contact Stacey Allen at the BBB at her direct tx number: 713-341-6165.
--Multics
Perhaps it is time for the local police to be called?
--Multics
I'll also bet that these folks would be interested in knowing they were hosting a non-shipping site. As would, their email drop.
Good luck with getting money back from 'safe & secure' Paypal!
--Multics
Or from a less reputable vendor: 10-cds for a gob of different stuff. --Multics
I did fire one with cause. He was perpetually drunk and though we'd cycled him through the warning system and suspension several times, he never came around. It hasened his beginning a real trip to AA and a better life which was excellent.
There are good ways to do this, especially firings for cause. I always try to put myself in the shoes of the person sitting across from me. That should mostly avoid the guy coming back with grandfather's shot gun looking for humans (which happened to an acquaintance I know). It takes just a tiny bit more time but everyone feels better about it over the long term.
Now if the current folks that work for me would just understand that we'd all get along a bit better. :-)
--Multics
P.S. of the 15 I laid off I still, more than decade later, get Xmas cards from 9 of them. Proof in my book I did what I could and they believed that.
Perhaps those of you who don't get it should look at what you have for an imagination and what you have for an attention span. This is a thinking person's movie, not a movie that will whack you over the head with "get it, moron!". Further, until you've made a movie and dealt with all the problems that come with one, ponder what you say. This was a spectacular thing that we're still talking about 32 years later.
The Technology. My bigger bitch is with the people here that bitch about the technology. Perhaps you've been standing behind the door, but it is you and I that make the technology happen. If we want video phones then we should get off our collective asses and code the damn things up.
And, if we want the things this movie guessed would happen, they're not beyond the edge of our technology. All it takes is a political will to do these things and it will happen. What happened to the US space program, post Apollo 11, can only be considered a travesty. There was a viable team of very smart, can-do people that attained a spectacular goal. What did we did to the team? We laid most of them off and said, 'thanks guys'. That NASA was capable of all sorts of cool things but instead the press and hence the country looked at Vietnam instead.
So if you want the BIG technology this vision of the future offers, argue for it with your government critters. They will listen if you will take the time to clearly state the case. They're actually there to do the right thing, if only they can figure out what that is.
--Multics
P.S. don't whine at me about the Space Shuttle either. They went from an Apollo command module (think row-boat) to a reusable space truck (think modern cargo ship) in one step. They're allowed to have made (and continue to make) some blunders along the way -- after all this is rocket science.
*EVERYTIME* I got the popup I wrote NYT and said don't do this. If even 5% of the people that read the NYT on the Web did this, they'll either make their paper's email unusable or they'll quit doing it.
I haven't seen that advertisement in about a month, so perhaps they got the lesson. We'll soon see.
--Multics
Also be sure that the site works OK in Lynx, a unix-based all text (no graphics) web browser. Many vision impared people use a reader based from Lynx (& Lynx-like) to have the site read to them.
It seems to me you're already on the right road just by asking.
All the same, if they can integrate it, more power to them! IBM fab just continues to rock.
It seems to me the bloat ACLs add to the file systems, all the utilities that work with files, AND of course, the kernel need to be considered versus the functionalty that not a lot of people will ultimately need (if ACLS work smoothly everyone will use them, but it will be functionality that the current model does ok...) Are ACLS a fundamentally good idea?
I think a good question to be asked is "Is Linux/*BSD with ACLs still Unix?". My gut feeling is that it is not... In Unix, everything is supposed to be a file. Directories are just files that describe files. When ACLs are introduced, where are those lists going to be saved? In the directory (how)? In an entire shadow file system? As secret blocks with the file? Then whatever mechanism is used, it will certainly break ALL of the major file interchange tools (dump, tar, cpio) since they don't support ACLs. Poof, the same problem we have with idiot Macintosh files (namely resource forks) appears in *nix -- UGH! Fsck will be broken too. I, being an old person (at least in this business), don't like the idea that my new tars won't be in the same format of my old tars. I *do* read tapes from the 1970s. And yes, there will be 'compatibility switches' so one can move back and forth, but are these kludges really a good idea?
As a result, perhaps it is time for a fork in the road where the ACLers go their own way and the Unix people go another. Perhaps it is time now to re-assess where this is going. Is it time to build a new O/S that has B1 or B2 as it's goal?
I've worked on ACLed systems both in the pre-computers-are-cool days (IBM mainframes) and I've worked on them in the contemporary world (NT). I find the abstraction painful to deal with and the tools to deal with it nearly impossible to reliably use, especially in the hands of junior system administrators. One of the neat things about Unix is I can teach a new person about the filesystem (FFS for example) in an eligant way in about 3 hours to a level I've not a hope of doing with messes like NTFS or HFS+ no matter what amount of time.
Finally, I think it is also time to ask when is an operating system 'done'? I'm not talking about the continual addition and subtraction of devices and services to keep the O/S vibrant & alive, but new core functionality like changing the security abstraction or the concepts of processes and files. ACLs will change the security abstraction of Unix and introduce a new entire class of functionality along with an entire new class of problems... I think they don't fit well in the normal Unix way of doing things and so I think that this is one feature *nix should probably let go by.
1) Was this the longest lasting O/S thus far? Anyone know of a production O/S that pre-dates mid-1965 that is still running?
2) Multics died mostly from being proprietary and running on proprietary hardware. The first, the Multicians thought could be surmounted by a gift from the current code owners. The second, alas, was fatal.
The industry's fixation (mostly because of the volume curve) on VonNeuman architechtures that lack any real new features cause us all to not have things we could really really use -- like the ring security that Multics offered which had direct hardware support. Too bad ASICs are not yet dense enough... maybe soon. :-)
--Multics
If you'll mail me names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, contact names, specialties and directions on how to get there I'll put them up on a web site (http://acme.ecn.purdue.edu) by country and state. That would help people build cheap clusters too!
mail to: moffett@acme.ecn.purdue.edu
Perhaps it is time to have a bake sale for this group? $10/each from each /.er and they'd be set for the year.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
If ever there was a reason to not use either product, this is it. I've not included Oracle in several projects because of this behavior. I figure the $150k Larry didn't get doesn't matter to him but does help the competition. I guess now I need to avoid MS SQL too.
Companies that hide behind 'you don't know enough to benchmark our product' need to slither back into the slime whence they came.
If you are out there and you cracked all of it, how about just posting the plaintext of these puppies somewhere and that will eliminate any possibility of a 'cover-up'.
:-), got any bodies from Area 51 too?
While we're at it,
By DOD Lobbiests, I mean the military-industrial companies that want to sell very expensive equipement with very high margins to the DOD instead of low margin (relatively) commercial/industrial goods.
Any way this works, we still don't win. Has anyone a URL on 'lease' lengths?
Presuming many of you have been hiding under a rock, some background information is needed to consider this thing.
The big losers are apt to be DOD and the Amateur Radio community. DOD lobbiests will not have enough clout to protect the relatively vast amount of bandwidth that they have compaired with the communications lobbiests. Too bad, who needs militiary communications anyway right?
The Amateurs respond to attempts to take bandwidth on nearly a weekly basis. Usually they're successful, but in cases like the 220MHz band, the United Parcel Service had better lobbiests than the amateur community and 2ish MHz of bandwidth was lost. Ironically, UPS ultimately didn't use the spectrum it acquired.
So now Bill (or Hillary) gets lobbiest money to 'assist' the telecommunications industry in doing yet another land grab that makes the US treasury a little more money. If they think that March 2001 is realistic for the auction date for non-DOD bandwidth they're going to be very very wrong. It will be held up in court for years.
In the end, we've not got a telecommunications policy any more than we've got an energy policy. Both are important plans for mapping out the future. Whose fault is it? Your choice. I tend to think that fixed location systems shouldn't waste radio bandwidth that should be saved for mobile users. So much of the current initative (radio broadband) is just to get around the increasingly incompetent "last-mile" carriers.
Finally a question. When these 'bandwidth' are auctioned, how long is the 'ownership' period? If it isn't time-limited, then the bandwidth is essentially infinitely valuable and we've been screwed once again by lobbiests and the technical morons in Washington.
Multics
On the bottom of their www page on privacy, there is an email address:
privacy@motorola.com
How about we write them as a group... and say they're full of it?
I'll be voting with my $ too ($53k last year in motorola equipment that clearly won't be repeated no matter what they do now). Motorola's CEO is (last I checked) the kid or grand kid of the founder. Someone should do some research to get his email address too.
TeX wasn't viable in 1977. troff was. LaTeX even later. If I were starting over, perhaps I'd choose TeX. Though many of you will argue, there are people that think that Professor Knuth's vision of typeography isn't the world vision. TeX looks ok. Troff looks ok. Both could probably be better, not that most of us would recognize better if it walked up and bit us.
MathML is way to new to know if it is going anywhere real -- eligance not withstanding (I like MathML). MS Word version 6.0 is older than MathML is and we know how viable that format is over the long-haul. Now a MathML to troff converter (I've not looked, is there one?) might be interesting in oh say another 5 years after we know if MathML is done or going to suffer from creaping featureism.
In the end, there are markup languages and there are WYSIWYG editors. The markup languages tend to stabile longer and that makes them a much more viable candidate for words that have any hope of being reused.
I'll note here (marginally) that if you are under 25 or 30 years old, the idea of a document being a program is probably just weird. Most big documents should be viewed as such. My books, my PhD dissertation and most of my other major documents are under revision control (RCS) and are constructed with make(1). It is neat to be able to go back and get an old paper and know that it can be reprinted reliably, it will look the same, and that I can steal pieces of it with zero trouble. Ponder doing that with a Wordstar document made on your CPM system in 1977...
Oddly, make(1) has become the largest stability issue to going back to older documents since Berkeley and GNU keep screwing with make in a mis-guided vision of 'oh we'll make it better'. Make is a time dependency file constructor. If you want to make it something else, then call it bmake, gmake, mmake, lmake, fake or weve_lost_sight_of_makes_purpose, just leave the original make alone please.
Pretty much every day I still use eqn(1). It provides a clean, straight-forward, easy to remember way of describing equations. It's about 600% faster than using MS Word's whacked out equation editor.
I'll note here that unlike TeX, Word Perfect, MathML, MS Word, WordStar or whatever other thing you've got, my eqn/tbl/troff from 1977 still formats correctly and gracefully. The only thing about my documents had that changed were SCCS became RCS.
Those who use fads to create their documents (MS Word version XXX for example) don't plan on reusing their words which is just as stupid as not reusing code.
It turns out, for all you lame, system-hacking, children, that there are other applications other than Linux and related system tools. You couldn't tell by the comments posted here of course.
You've seen nothing yet with respect to open source. Open Source will be a massive success when specialty applications like this one are available.
With respect to medical records, this is a really hard problem. On one side, EVERY STATE has a different set of requirements. On another side, the federal government (US of course) can't make up it's mind about where it is going so EVERY YEAR there are massive changes to the system with poor documentation of what must be done, unrealistically short time-frames (5k lines changed in 45 days -- sure with no bugs right!), conflicting/impossible requirements (page 3 says so X, page 11 says absolutly don't do X), awful contractor-implemented (read EDS) government systems (design reviews? don't make us laugh!) and a constant "we're not wrong, it's YOUR application that is obviously wrong." (oh so you hanging up in the middle of the transaction is my doing? NOT).
Then add to that an industry that has its cost structure being fiddled with every moment by 'managed care', an obsurdly low medicare/medicaid reinbursements and of course huge politics at both the state and federal levels. Add no one who wants to pay for software that they know will be out-of-date next year (from the aforementioned changes). And then add a constant moral problem from zero sense of completion and you'll begin to understand this problem.
Part of medical records is a system called 'care plans' which is designed to push patients to get better rather than sit in some care facility sucking dollars and not getting better. Care plans generally improve the quality of life of the people they describe while attempting to be sure that everyone is working toward a common goal. Even in terminal cases (Alzheimers comes to mind) a well considered care plan can make the bad parts shorter duration and the suffering considerably less.
Open sourcing this application would be a blessing to everyone and might, just might, save some lives since common problems would be fixed or at least discussed quicker than all the proprietary systems presently out there.
Things are not good in the computer history business. In part because the main-line companies that felt this was important have faded into oblivion (think mainframe and mini) and the dot coms are too interested in wasting their venture capital on roll-out parties.
The sadest example of the problem is the death of the Boston Computer Museum. Strongly supported by DEC, when DEC went away, so did their funding (and yes there were other reasons including some idiots for executive directors). I was in it several weeks before it closed and a pretty sad thing to see. It has been 'moved' to the Boston Science Center.
The actual museum for the BCM is in California and can be found at Computer History Center. It looks to be alive and interested in history, not 'gee, look, computer interactive toys for school bus loads of children to play with instead of learning how to add, subtract, multiply or heaven forbid divide without a calculator'.
Probably the most respected computer history place at the moment is the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota.
In any case, learn more, subscribe to IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and remember that the dot comes have mostly forgotten/ignored all of this and so you can make money consulting on 'NEW' ideas that are actually old things revisited.
--multics.
I attended a presentation he made at Purdue on Monday, 7/24/00 to the PLUG (Purdue Linux Users Group). He gave an hour presentation and dealt with an hour of formal questions and more than an hour of one-on-one questions. Several things struck me about his presentation:
1) In the hour presentation, he spent 40 minutes talking about Unix history. Sadly, he was wrong about lots of little things, such as Unix was designed to be a time-sharing system -- NOT. I would have hoped for 10 minutes of history and 50 minutes of NOW.
2) In the remaining 20 minutes, he described NOW. It sounded much like Athena and especially Plan-9. It is problematic that Plan-9 solved many of his problems and took 10 years to do that while they have far less time than that. He was "not familier" with MIT Oxygen
3) NOW's time-line seemed unrealistic. NOW's lack of core PhD class CS problem solvers was notably missing. NOW's goals (given the time line) should have been aggresively well defined and yet "we're looking at that" was often an answer.
4) He was factually incorrect about the features of Plan-9. If he'd even read and absorbed Plan 9 from Bell Labs he'd have been in better shape.
5) The company is missing a definitive business plan. It shows already and they're barely off the ground.
6) The office location they've selected in Indianapolis, is one of, if not the most expensive locations in the entire city. This means their venture capital burn rate will be extremely high. Within 5 minutes of that location there are places that cost 25% of that location.
7) The presentation was an un-abashed hunt for warm bodies that know something about Unix (Indianapolis is a nice place, but far from a hot-bed of computing -- Unix or otherwise).
So I came away with the feeling that they'd not done their homework before they started. Further that their venture capitalists said, "Linux is hot, who is available? Ian? oh good. Let's give him buckets of money and see if he can do 'stuff'."
In the end, they're destined to fail. They have a poor grasp of Linux pre-history (Multics & Unix real history) and lack good technical management to judge wisely how to spend their finite amount of money.
Too bad. NOW as a concept doesn't seem like a clunker as little as we were told about it.
Every time you plant a person you plant with them a current version of the damn disk. Surely a few corpses will make it into the next civilization? Then a few disks will too.