Not too bad an article. There's nothing wrong with advocacy, or saying you like something. A couple points though:
-- BSD is not a decendant of the GNU Project. It uses some GNU tools such as gcc, but largely it has an independent lineage.
-- Stability and security. This is the same thing Linux partisans talked about for a long time. The reply was always, "but what about applications and support". Now with the commericalization of Linux, it's the Linux camp bragging about apps and support. This is really where Linux has an edge today.
Re:The other books in the series?
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
Children of the Mind, I believe is another one, though I haven't read it.
I mentioned my review of Ender's Shadow on my website. I am pretty much a major SF fan (though you won't find me at cons) and started a series of books reviews earlier this year in an attempt to revive the dead rec.arts.sf.reviews newsgroup. I put them up on my web site as well, and you can see them at:
The opinions on Sedgewick are similar to those for Walter Rudins's Principles of Mathematical Analysis. Namely, you get a bi-modal distribution of people who love it and hate it. I agree that the code could be better, but I found the difficulty level and subject area breadth ideal for a motivated beginning student. (BTW: Sedgewick is far more suitable as a beginning text than Rudin, for those who've encountered that book).
My recommendation is Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick. It's one of the classic texts of the field. I think its a good text for a motivated beginner to learn algorithsm and some data structures. It's not as watered down as a lot of intro texts. But it's not as overwhelming as Knuth or something like that. Plus the examples are written in C, if not particularly readable C. (Be careful, there is another edition that does not use C. Buyer beware).
I don't know about that. Eric Raymond is an anarcho-capitalist, so obviously he doesn't think that is incompatible with a gift culture. Anarcho-capitalism is not even necessarily in conflict with the GNU/FSF view of free software, if you assume that software is something that is not subject to property rights. (There's a big schism among libertarians (US sense) on this one).
The key to both anarchy (or anarcho-communisim or simply communism if you prefer) and anarcho-capitalism is that both are based on voluntary associations. As long as force or private property rights aren't involved (which generally they aren't with free software), both of them explain the free software phenomeon adequately. Another thing they have in common is that neither of them exist in the real world.
The ironic thing about that piece I thought was that he was describing the hacker "gift culture" at the same time his own paper is limited to "non-commerical" use only. In other words, it's not DFSG compliant!
I don't agree that the hacker culture is a "communist" one. Voluntary associations and donations are very much a feature of such anti-communist systems as anarcho-capitalism as well as anarchy/communism. However, I did love the way he compared the current proprietary software industry to Stalinism.
There, I've said it. I've got a lot of respect for some BSD developers/users, but the FUD and hatred that some of these people have towards the FSF/GNU/RMS is simply ridiculous.
It didn't take long for this guy to fall into the mold. He wants to replace the GNU tools with "freely redistributable implementations". Last I checked the GNU tools were freely redistribable. Why in the world would anyone want to write a replacement grep? I can understand that some people have a problem with the GNU definition of free software, but the BSD definition is something out of the realm of the bizarre. They remind me of fringe libertarians who claim you aren't really free unless you have the freedom to sell yourself into slavery.
With beliefs like that it's not wonder people have a bad impression of FreeBSD. Even in a supposedly conciliatory argument these people can't resist taking pot shots at GNU.
The first thing is this is not "passed" until various states enact the model legislation. The first line of defense is to write your state legislators and get active at the state level to oppose this legislation.
Second, write your US Senators and Representatives. The federal government has typically left this type of regulation to the states but the federal gov't has the power to set nationwide standards in this area tha override the states. I wrote my Congressman (woman, actually) already (there's a copy of my letter someplace in the slashdot archives. Search for me and UCITA. I think it's a pretty good template letter).
Third, use free software! Reject all proprietary "solutions".
Esther Dyson? Pray tell, what qualifications does Dyson have for anything? One look at the fiasco that is ICANN should tell you to keep Dyson well away from anything important.
I judge search engines by the most important criteria of all - how many references to me they have. Alltheweb now has vastly more than runner up Google, making them the biggest ever. I type in "Aaron M. Renn" and I got 1604 on AllTheWeb, ~500 on Google and only ~180 on AltaVista. Even if that number drops as I searched through the pages, it's still impressive. I did look through the plain "Aaron Renn" listings too, where they also crushed the competition (though it's a much smaller number of pages since I virtually always use my middle initial). Believe it or not, there is a page out there with another "Aaron Renn" on it. Pretty weird.
So this guy empties out his safe deposit box and bets all the money he's saved to pay off his student loans on Red Hat stock? That's the reason E*Trade has these rules. Investing is risky. Putting all your money into one stock believing it's a sure thing is sheer folly. Some IPO's have fallen flat. Even net stock Quokka (or something like that) went down, not up after it's IPO this week. The previous article on the Red Hat road show brought to light what appears to be a lack of enthusiasm about Red Hat's business model among sophisticated investors. People are treating stocks like tulips these days and brokerages are establishing rules to help keep people from getting burned. If all these hackers lost their meager savings in Red Hat, you can believe that they'd also be bitter about the whole thing. At least this way they still have their money.
Now I'll be the first to admit that most of my investment is tied up in shares of the company I work for. (A double no-no since I already work here, I should diversify into other investments in case the company has a downturn and I not only lose my stock investment, but my job as well). But I am taking a calculated gamble knowing that I have invested no more than I can afford to lose. If my stock ends up worth $0, it will hurt, but I won't be losing my whole life's savings and it won't jeopardize my ability to service my debt load (which is just my mortgage). You've got to take a hard look at this stuff and be willing to plop down your money knowing there is a chance you might lose a lot of it.
Just for the record, they didn't post my "feature". Not that I expected them to, but I figured would take up your challenge anyway. At least that Roblimo dude was nice enought to actually write back and say he wasn't going to post it.
In Chicago, a company called 21st Century Telecom - a total startup no less - is laying their own fiber all over the north side of the city. They plan to offer cable TV, phone, and internet. If a startup can build that kind of network, why can't a mega-billion company like AOL?
You are correct! AOL could have approached AT&T like businessmen and said, "Let's make a deal". With AOL's huge market value, they could easily have afforded to sink a little money into this and be a partner in the venture. Look at the $5 billion MS investment for an example of how this works. Instead, they went whining to the gov't demanding a handout.
1). AOL could become certified as a CLEC and lease copper from the local phone company. This also gives them access to telephone poles and other structures to lay their own wires if they want.
2). AOL could get a competitive cable franchise and lay their own cable. The days of monopoly cable franchises is on the way out.
3). AOL could actually invest in AT&T's cable venture and actually risk a little of their own money. If AOL agreed to help finance this network, I'd guess AT&T would be happy to give them spectrum space.
I don't get it. You don't want to give AOL the right to "tresspass" on your property, but you think it would be great if AOL had the right to tresspass on AT&T's? Why is AT&T's property any different than yours?
I can't believe Rob let this guy who is an admitted lobbyist for one of the interested parties to just come in here and write this editorial. That disclaimer is pure shit. I sure hope that he allows AT&T and others to respond. Otherwise I can only assume that this does represent slashdot (or andover.net's?) official position on the issue. Let this guy purchase ad banners if he's looking for a way to get across his message.
This is the same Janet Reno who turned down a request to look at the computer files of a suspected Chinese gov't spy at a nuclear weapons lab (the only denial of such as request during her tenure) at the same time her boss Bill was pocketing millions in illegal Chinese gov't campaign contributions. She's got bigger problems than crypto.
You're referring to "pooling of interests" accounting. FASB wants to eliminate or severely restrict this and require companies to account for these as purchases. The tech companies are screaming bloody murder about it because under purchase accounting the excess payment over book value would have to be recorded as goodwill and amortized over many years, which would deflate future earnings. Many of these acquisitions would be something like 99% goodwill since the companies are virtually worthless on paper.
I've used Sequents for a large clustered Oracle implementation and as application servers going back to the old Symmetry 2000 line. The idea of Sequent was to build an SMP box based on stock Intel chips. They apparently were one of the first people to solve the SMP problem in Unix with their Dynix/ptx operating system. The 2000 series was horrible junk, IMO. We ended up upgrading to their Symmetry 5000 line (the based on Pentiums) which was much better. The last time I worked with them (about two years ago), we were playing with the NUMA line.
Sequent had two problems in my opinion. First, they were charging an outrageous amount of money for their equipment. Despite claims to use off the shelf components such as the Intel chip, virtually everything they had was proprietary. They even used non-standard SCSI connectors. The machines were supposed to be "mainframe class" and were priced like it. The second problem was their proprietary Unix OS. Sequent was always a niche player and it was problematic getting support tools to run on them. Everybody's first platform is Sun, then HP, IBM, etc. Sequent was way down the list if supported at all. Plus being a minor platform app vendors always tried to blame their problems on OS bugs.
Having said that, the app I worked on is now running on all NUMA's and is doing quite well. We were able to run some serious transaction volume through these machines. Though I'm not sure how they stack up versus the competition today.
Slashdot Mirror
Not too bad an article. There's nothing wrong with advocacy, or saying you like something. A couple points though:
-- BSD is not a decendant of the GNU Project. It uses some GNU tools such as gcc, but largely it has an independent lineage.
-- Stability and security. This is the same thing Linux partisans talked about for a long time. The reply was always, "but what about applications and support". Now with the commericalization of Linux, it's the Linux camp bragging about apps and support. This is really where Linux has an edge today.
Children of the Mind, I believe is another one, though I haven't read it.
I mentioned my review of Ender's Shadow on my website. I am pretty much a major SF fan (though you won't find me at cons) and started a series of books reviews earlier this year in an attempt to revive the dead rec.arts.sf.reviews newsgroup. I put them up on my web site as well, and you can see them at:
arenn's SF Book Reviews
To keep it marginally on topic, of course there is a link to my review of Ender's Shadow.
Just posted to the web this week:
Ender's Shadow
The opinions on Sedgewick are similar to those for Walter Rudins's Principles of Mathematical Analysis. Namely, you get a bi-modal distribution of people who love it and hate it. I agree that the code could be better, but I found the difficulty level and subject area breadth ideal for a motivated beginning student. (BTW: Sedgewick is far more suitable as a beginning text than Rudin, for those who've encountered that book).
Just to let you know, that run-on link was correct in my preview and in my HTML, which I verified after I saw what got posted. Very curious.
My recommendation is Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick. It's one of the classic texts of the field. I think its a good text for a motivated beginner to learn algorithsm and some data structures. It's not as watered down as a lot of intro texts. But it's not as overwhelming as Knuth or something like that. Plus the examples are written in C, if not particularly readable C. (Be careful, there is another edition that does not use C. Buyer beware).
I don't know about that. Eric Raymond is an anarcho-capitalist, so obviously he doesn't think that is incompatible with a gift culture. Anarcho-capitalism is not even necessarily in conflict with the GNU/FSF view of free software, if you assume that software is something that is not subject to property rights. (There's a big schism among libertarians (US sense) on this one).
The key to both anarchy (or anarcho-communisim or simply communism if you prefer) and anarcho-capitalism is that both are based on voluntary associations. As long as force or private property rights aren't involved (which generally they aren't with free software), both of them explain the free software phenomeon adequately. Another thing they have in common is that neither of them exist in the real world.
The ironic thing about that piece I thought was that he was describing the hacker "gift culture" at the same time his own paper is limited to "non-commerical" use only. In other words, it's not DFSG compliant!
I don't agree that the hacker culture is a "communist" one. Voluntary associations and donations are very much a feature of such anti-communist systems as anarcho-capitalism as well as anarchy/communism. However, I did love the way he compared the current proprietary software industry to Stalinism.
Did I get enough -ism's in there?
There, I've said it. I've got a lot of respect for some BSD developers/users, but the FUD and hatred that some of these people have towards the FSF/GNU/RMS is simply ridiculous.
It didn't take long for this guy to fall into the mold. He wants to replace the GNU tools with "freely redistributable implementations". Last I checked the GNU tools were freely redistribable. Why in the world would anyone want to write a replacement grep? I can understand that some people have a problem with the GNU definition of free software, but the BSD definition is something out of the realm of the bizarre. They remind me of fringe libertarians who claim you aren't really free unless you have the freedom to sell yourself into slavery.
With beliefs like that it's not wonder people have a bad impression of FreeBSD. Even in a supposedly conciliatory argument these people can't resist taking pot shots at GNU.
The first thing is this is not "passed" until various states enact the model legislation. The first line of defense is to write your state legislators and get active at the state level to oppose this legislation.
Second, write your US Senators and Representatives. The federal government has typically left this type of regulation to the states but the federal gov't has the power to set nationwide standards in this area tha override the states. I wrote my Congressman (woman, actually) already (there's a copy of my letter someplace in the slashdot archives. Search for me and UCITA. I think it's a pretty good template letter).
Third, use free software! Reject all proprietary "solutions".
Esther Dyson? Pray tell, what qualifications does Dyson have for anything? One look at the fiasco that is ICANN should tell you to keep Dyson well away from anything important.
I judge search engines by the most important criteria of all - how many references to me they have. Alltheweb now has vastly more than runner up Google, making them the biggest ever. I type in "Aaron M. Renn" and I got 1604 on AllTheWeb, ~500 on Google and only ~180 on AltaVista. Even if that number drops as I searched through the pages, it's still impressive. I did look through the plain "Aaron Renn" listings too, where they also crushed the competition (though it's a much smaller number of pages since I virtually always use my middle initial). Believe it or not, there is a page out there with another "Aaron Renn" on it. Pretty weird.
So this guy empties out his safe deposit box and bets all the money he's saved to pay off his student loans on Red Hat stock? That's the reason E*Trade has these rules. Investing is risky. Putting all your money into one stock believing it's a sure thing is sheer folly. Some IPO's have fallen flat. Even net stock Quokka (or something like that) went down, not up after it's IPO this week. The previous article on the Red Hat road show brought to light what appears to be a lack of enthusiasm about Red Hat's business model among sophisticated investors. People are treating stocks like tulips these days and brokerages are establishing rules to help keep people from getting burned. If all these hackers lost their meager savings in Red Hat, you can believe that they'd also be bitter about the whole thing. At least this way they still have their money.
Now I'll be the first to admit that most of my investment is tied up in shares of the company I work for. (A double no-no since I already work here, I should diversify into other investments in case the company has a downturn and I not only lose my stock investment, but my job as well). But I am taking a calculated gamble knowing that I have invested no more than I can afford to lose. If my stock ends up worth $0, it will hurt, but I won't be losing my whole life's savings and it won't jeopardize my ability to service my debt load (which is just my mortgage). You've got to take a hard look at this stuff and be willing to plop down your money knowing there is a chance you might lose a lot of it.
Just for the record, they didn't post my "feature". Not that I expected them to, but I figured would take up your challenge anyway. At least that Roblimo dude was nice enought to actually write back and say he wasn't going to post it.
In Chicago, a company called 21st Century Telecom - a total startup no less - is laying their own fiber all over the north side of the city. They plan to offer cable TV, phone, and internet. If a startup can build that kind of network, why can't a mega-billion company like AOL?
You are correct! AOL could have approached AT&T like businessmen and said, "Let's make a deal". With AOL's huge market value, they could easily have afforded to sink a little money into this and be a partner in the venture. Look at the $5 billion MS investment for an example of how this works. Instead, they went whining to the gov't demanding a handout.
1). AOL could become certified as a CLEC and lease copper from the local phone company. This also gives them access to telephone poles and other structures to lay their own wires if they want.
2). AOL could get a competitive cable franchise and lay their own cable. The days of monopoly cable franchises is on the way out.
3). AOL could actually invest in AT&T's cable venture and actually risk a little of their own money. If AOL agreed to help finance this network, I'd guess AT&T would be happy to give them spectrum space.
I don't get it. You don't want to give AOL the right to "tresspass" on your property, but you think it would be great if AOL had the right to tresspass on AT&T's? Why is AT&T's property any different than yours?
I sent him one. We'll see if he posts it.
I can't believe Rob let this guy who is an admitted lobbyist for one of the interested parties to just come in here and write this editorial. That disclaimer is pure shit. I sure hope that he allows AT&T and others to respond. Otherwise I can only assume that this does represent slashdot (or andover.net's?) official position on the issue. Let this guy purchase ad banners if he's looking for a way to get across his message.
This is the same Janet Reno who turned down a request to look at the computer files of a suspected Chinese gov't spy at a nuclear weapons lab (the only denial of such as request during her tenure) at the same time her boss Bill was pocketing millions in illegal Chinese gov't campaign contributions. She's got bigger problems than crypto.
You're referring to "pooling of interests" accounting. FASB wants to eliminate or severely restrict this and require companies to account for these as purchases. The tech companies are screaming bloody murder about it because under purchase accounting the excess payment over book value would have to be recorded as goodwill and amortized over many years, which would deflate future earnings. Many of these acquisitions would be something like 99% goodwill since the companies are virtually worthless on paper.
I've used Sequents for a large clustered Oracle implementation and as application servers going back to the old Symmetry 2000 line. The idea of Sequent was to build an SMP box based on stock Intel chips. They apparently were one of the first people to solve the SMP problem in Unix with their Dynix/ptx operating system. The 2000 series was horrible junk, IMO. We ended up upgrading to their Symmetry 5000 line (the based on Pentiums) which was much better. The last time I worked with them (about two years ago), we were playing with the NUMA line.
Sequent had two problems in my opinion. First, they were charging an outrageous amount of money for their equipment. Despite claims to use off the shelf components such as the Intel chip, virtually everything they had was proprietary. They even used non-standard SCSI connectors. The machines were supposed to be "mainframe class" and were priced like it. The second problem was their proprietary Unix OS. Sequent was always a niche player and it was problematic getting support tools to run on them. Everybody's first platform is Sun, then HP, IBM, etc. Sequent was way down the list if supported at all. Plus being a minor platform app vendors always tried to blame their problems on OS bugs.
Having said that, the app I worked on is now running on all NUMA's and is doing quite well. We were able to run some serious transaction volume through these machines. Though I'm not sure how they stack up versus the competition today.
Hehe! You're the only one who caught that! I was wondering who would nail it.