Sometimes, learning something is its own goal. Learning Linux is a good thing, I would think, because it expands one's mind, just like learning FreeBSD would be an equally good thing.
Just like any worthwhile task, there is a learning curve for Linux. I'm surprised that you were able to use FreeBSD so quickly without surmounting the same learning curve. Of course, that wouldn't fit in with the general theme of your comment: linux sucks, bad design, BSD better, yadda yadda.
I'm glad that Jon is now using Linux regularly; he's climbed a fair distance from being an average user. I don't have an ideological bone to pick that he should use Linux rather than anything else. The important thing is that he is learning and more importantly that he is immersing himself in the linux community.
More journalists, especially those on the tech beat, should do the same. I don't expect them to become programmers or administrators, but the will to learn about what one is reporting goes a long way.
It's not hard to be convinced, I see, by a writer who tells us that we're smart (or gifted, or whatever). Most movements, philosophical, political, or religious, gain and retain membership by this very trait.
Still, he doesn't go into great depths to explain why some people hecome "packers" and some "mappers". There's a lot of new-agey claptrap as well - that the modern man is essentially brilliant, but the strictures of (western) civilization have dulled his brain.
In doing so, he neglects the main question: if there are packers and mappers, and a real difference between the learning processes of the two, then why the different outcomes given an essentially identical education and upbringing?
It's interesting and I'm sure it's easy to buy, but it's harder to believe when put to a decent critical read.
I think that you're missing the point. The person is not the project; even if I am a big meanie, that doesn't necessarily make me an incompetent programmer. The article that you seem to approve of is following that line of illogic rather than citing the specific charges against AntiOnline that have been referred to.
Personally, I can't testify whether the charges are valid or not - I'm not a security expert, more of a security dabbler. I do know that they were nowhere to be found in the Forbes article.
Consider that this kind of attack has been made before, to great outrage from the/. crowd. Who can forget the past characterizations of Linus Torvalds as a pimply-faced college kid? And you, as a responsible professional, would never use an OS programmed by a horde of pimply-faced college kids, would you?
When you let journalists get away with this kind of shoddy reporting, you're just encouraging laziness and intellectual dishonesty. When it goes along, even without the applause it's been getting on/., it will go on and bite you in the ass. How long do you think it'll be before Forbes tackles something important? They're not going to stick to relatively safe subjects forever, you know.
The times I've visited AntiOnline (and that not often, but still), it has struck me as being much more of an information clearing house than a source for original content, which Forbes seems to be insinuating. Visiting today, it really still is. Which isn't a bad thing, either (look at/.)
Any reader of Brill's Content will note that most journalists aren't formally or practically educated in the fields which they cover. Whether this should be so is grounds for another post, of course, but I'd think that Vranesevich, as operator/publisher/editor of AntiOnline would qualify as a journalist. Not a great one, either, but still.
Any attack on AntiOnline should be made regarding AntiOnline's quality of reporting. Has AntiOnline (rather than Vranesevich) been incorrect? Has it disseminated false information? Have the scoops, such that they are, been important? And so on, and so forth. Instead, Forbes has taken the easy way out: slam AntiOnline by insisting that Vranesevich has insufficient "street cred" and that he's litigious.
No doubt Forbes would shy away from the same argument, applied to themselves: since Steve Forbes is a trust-funded, socially conservative wingnut, Forbes Magazine is obviously a rag.
While an electrical impulse travels along the length of a single neuron, the transmission in the gap between neurons (which takes up most of the time and gives you most of the interesting side effects), or synapse, is actually a matter of chemistry.
Which isn't to say that you wouldn't be able to reengineer the brain with electromechanical implants or somesuch - there are some things, like rote memory (as Norman and the reviewer point out), which the brain is bad at. Our eyes, as well - the primary processing could be very much improved, and the brain itself would almost certainly adapt to the increased or more acute signal coming to it. What would be needed is a method to both read and write to the brain, but I think that that is certainly possible given time and dollars.
I would dare say that these would be implemented before a true artificial brain, because when compared to an artificial brain they seem so much easier to accomplish. (Not to mention that they're necessary preliminary steps to creating the artificial brain).
This is horrible news. Not only because it shows Microsoft gaining a ready-made venture in another sector of the computing industry and Visio losing its autonomy, but also because Visio, not too long ago, introduced a pseudo-Open Source program for IntelliCAD.
I should say that the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium will either be quietly killed or merely allowed to wither, with no infusions of new work.
Apache pre-forks but only to a certain extent; for any connection above and beyond your baseline, it creates a new instantiation. You are, of course, 100% correct in differentiating pre-forking and forking, but at high load levels you will be creating and destroying instantiations of Apache quite regularly.
As for Greenspun, I'm not quite sure if you're correct. True, many sites of his are really databases, but in Philip and Alex's Guide he advises that pages contain as much plain static content as possible, so as to be servable as static pages if worst comes to worst (say, under high load). Not to mention that it's faster that way.
Dynamic parts are for the ruffles and flourishes of a website - formatting, images, dynamic content which has to be dynamic, etc.
What makes you think that I haven't used Apache for win32? In fact, I have. I've also used Notes/Domino (since Domino 1.0) and IIS. I have a MCSD and a Principal CLP on my wall to boot.
None of these would be my preference for a webserver because of the weaknesses of the underlying operating system. It's easy to crash Domino (less easy to crash IIS or Apache, of course) but the bad thing is that many application crashes will leave the system in an unstable state. I've never had that happen with Linux or BSD.
It's easy to whine about people 'mindlessly' bashing MS, but there is such a thing as educated criticism. (Kindly get used to it).
I dunno. I rather like dselect because it's good for what I do. (Then again, I know linux pretty well, and have been using it for going on five-six years).
That said, using the debian core functionality would be an excellent way to implement this. Start off with basic install, use apt to get what you need to start off and no more, and most importantly have apt periodically update packages from dists/stable. Security flaws will "fix themselves" (or at least be fixed seamlessly and without needing too much user intervention) as Debian maintainers get around to patching and updating the relevant packages.
Maybe the underlying distribution doesn't have to be debian, but Debian is well suited to this kind of automation.
Consider the source of this article: The National Post, or The Daily Tubby, a cruel perversion of a once good financial paper, the Financial Post. It's widely thought to have the content of the Toronto Sun (a tabloid like the New York Post) wrapped in the layout of the Globe and Mail (a reputable and venerable broadsheet like the New York Times).
Of course, you might like the Sun or the Post, and you might even subscribe, but you probably don't mistake them for quality journalism.
As for the article: Shadow Syndromes is indeed a good read, but the central premise, that psychiatric disorders are only the severe end of a continuum of human behaviour, is not new. Nor does it support the conclusion that many single-minded geeks have an attenuated form of autism: autism is not a psychiatric or behavioural disorder but a neurological one, with manifest and concrete differences between the normal brain and the autistic one.
A corresponding argument might be that a broken arm is merely at the far range of variation in normal arms. Which it isn't. It's a broken arm.
It may be that parents of autistic children are themselves autistic. It is already known that autism is heritable. It is already known that autism varies widely in severity. But to paint all geeks with that broad brush, without any but anecdotal evidence, is irresponsible. To buy the conclusion is also equally irresponsible, and I'm glad to see that most/.ers aren't.
Consider also Occam's Razor, where the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. Do you think that many geeks find social activity difficult because they are relatively inexperienced in it, or because they have a mild form of a rare neurological disorder?
Well, cable's just a phase shift, no? So it's more analogous to letter-switching or some other orthography than encryption, but it's certainly encoding.
That's a well-written response and I don't have that much to add to it except that perhaps Apache isn't the best platform for generating dynamic content (even with mod_perl) in a high-load situation.
This isn't a knock against the apache group - they made a great webserver. But their emphasis has been on modularity and extensibility. The great drawback of apache is that it forks for each new connection - this can eat up a lot of RAM very quickly.
I would think that a non-forking webserver, such as AOLServer or Zope, would serve you better. Perhaps AOLServer more than Zope, as Zope has to interpret a lot of python on execution.
As endorsements go, Bruce Perens runs Zope for his site (although I'm not sure how much traffic it gets, but it's been mentioned on slashdot at least a half dozen times and should have taken the slashdotting to end all slashdotting by now). Philip Greenspun, the author of Database-Backed Web Sites and Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (not to mention the brain behind Ars Digita and hence scads of corporate sites), uses AOLServer.
Not to be too blunt, but that's overkill. Way, way (way way way) overkill.
An old pentium can serve sufficient static pages to saturate your bandwidth. For that matter, an old *macintosh* can serve sufficient pages to saturate your bandwith.
The major thing will be all the side processing that you do to generate the pages and content. In this case, his webcam, probably dynamic generation of archive pages and the like (although a better idea would be to regenerate all the active pages once - your last archive page, the index of the archive page, and the new cam pic page - when the new cam pic comes up.
Especially for a high traffic site, doing it once and then serving from the filesystem will be much more important.
As for your analysis: you forgot the biggest server system speed-up. RAID. Multiple disks on multiple controllers. A single controller and a single disk like you suggested, no matter how fast, will always pale to this relatively low-cost solution (and, for that matter, his data will be much safer, too).
You've illustrated both sides of the coin, really. It makes plenty of sense for any company to use BSD or BSD-like licensed code written elsewhere, since they can modify at will without releasing source of the end product.
Conversely it makes plenty of sense for any company to release their own code under the GPL, since no one else can modify at will without releasing source of the end product.
Fair's fair - these two competing urges drive licenses and by extension drive development methadologies and organizations. Personally, I prefer the GPL and use Linux, but that hasn't kept me from dabbling in BSD.
Seriously, Netscape's cachet has been dropping for ages, and its relative importance within the AOL universe has been falling along with it. AOL probably couldn't give the assets and staff of the former Netscape away, much less sell them for the exorbitant price that they paid.
Therefore, the political necessity for having old Netscape hands in AOL at a senior level is over, no matter how competent a CTO marka was (and I don't doubt that he was competent). Offering the position as a plum to Sun was probably inevitable.
In preindustrial societies, strategic alliances between family groups were cemented by cross-marriages and exchanges of material gifts. It seems that nothing much has changed.
Remember that AOL's already put a large chunk of source code under GPL - the AOLServer (www.aolserver.com), their (formerly) proprietary webserver. If you know about Philip Greenspun and Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (IMHO the best web book ever printed), then you'll know that he's a big booster of the AOLserver as a web apps platform.
I thought that it was a caveat of journalism that when you write an article about a horse, you get your information right from the horse's mouth.
This article gets its information from MS marketdroids and management staff, shoehorning a comment in from Eric Troan at the very end.
For that matter, it wastes nearly two thirds of its length nattering on about Sun and Java.
Even if you don't bother to comment on the factual errors of this article (and there are plenty - doesn't anyone fact-check anymore? Has it somehow gone out of style?), it's an awful piece of work.
I helped pay for my final year of university with a campus newspaper editor's honourarium. If I'd put out a piece like that, read it and signed off on it and initialed the proofs for the issue, I'm sure my editorial board would have sacked me. At best, this belongs in a low-quality campus rag. The Boston Globe should be terribly, terribly ashamed.
I used to work for Siemens, fwiw. Even if this isn't a hoax, I doubt that they could get a hard-core software project like this out the door - there's just too much to be done in a company that doesn't necessarily admit that kind of stuff into its (straight laced, buttoned-down) culture.
It's a very big deal; all this is is another attempt by a company to destroy a competitor by releasing a pseudo-free version of the relevant software. I don't see much cheering around here when it comes to IE, and you shouldn't be cheering when it comes to Star Office (except, of course, that it's available for linux).
Bruce makes a great point when it comes to contrasting Star Office licensing with Java's. There's a good reason (both business-wise and software-wise) for Java to be under the SCSL - whether it should be or not is another debate, but there's a valid reason for it. Those reasons really aren't valid for Star Office.
What Sun, IMHO, should do is release Star Office under a parasitic license such as the GPL. Persistence of the license is exactly what Sun wants here - MS can't scarf Star Office code and release their own version because it would have to be free. At the very least, it would force MS to create a better MS Word to compete.
The regulatory process is a way of ensuring that any doctor you go to conforms to a good standard of practise. Given the modern world (yes, the modern world)'s plethora of specialists, it is unfeasible to comparison shop for each and every doctor that you may encounter.
Consider the simple example of breaking your leg. You will see an emergency physician, most likely, and be treated primarily by an emergency medicine resident. The X-ray may be taken by, or will be taken under the supervision of, a radiologist. If it requires surgery (like severe breaks do), you'll be operated upon by a surgeon and watched over by an anaesthesiologist. Finally, your general physician will supervise your recovery. That's a half dozen doctors. You may not even meet half of them (the surgeon, anaesthesiologist, and radiologist), much less establish a relationship.
The "high price" of medicine is a function, quite honestly, of the free market in medical services. Doctors, given a monopoly on their profession, charge as much as they can. Why wouldn't they? That's what the free market is intended to promote. If it seem that doctors collude to establish high prices, remember that it's in their interests to charge as much as they can for every service they preform.
In systems which don't establish a free market but instead a salary or a state set fee for service, costs are much lower. Admittedly, availability of medical services suffers as well.
As for the government providing testing and certification, it doesn't. Or at least it doesn't in Canada; the College of Physicians and Surgeons is run by its members and doctors. Likewise for the provincial Law Societies (legal licensing) and Associations of Professional Engineers (engineering licensing). I believe that the various state licensing and accreditation boards in the US (and I assume that you're from the US) operate on the same principle.
Would doctors go without licensing, perhaps? I don't think that there's a chance that they would. The cost of malpractise insurance for a board-certified physician or surgeon is already immense (and rightly so, given the high cost of someone's good health). If a two-tier system evolved, no doubt the uncertified physicians would get an even worse deal.
That'll only happen if unfit commenters weigh against a negative selection criterion. As it is, you have just as good a chance to reproduce as anyone else;-).
I'd be surprised if Bowie wasn't pushed towards a "secure" audio format by his record label. So far, major labels have been cool at best towards the idea of digital distribution.
Bowie probably has enough economic clout (and willingness, and tech savvy) to force a lukewarm reception through to completion. However, a non-secure format would have got the corporate knee jerks going and the project stopped from the get-go.
This begs the question: what is it to win, and should linux strive to win at it?
The implicit assumption is that linux will become a mainstream, Joe Lunchbox operating system, to the detriment of Microsoft (Apple, Be, etc).
I really don't see the advantage in that. It'll certainly up the demand for commercial applications, and corporations will move to fill that demand. Is that what we really want?
So many linux users (both way back when and now) couldn't give a rat's ass for free software; they want applications. I'm afraid that if we court the commercial market too strongly, we'll lose, not gain, developers - that great mass of developers who create free software.
What linux should strive to gain is more developers and especially more free software developers. Commercial ventures seeking to distribute non-free software for linux should be given a run for their money; they should be pressed to advance the state of the art as fast as they can. The point is that we, as a community, don't need more users; we need more developers. Linux users should aspire to become developers, and existing developers should aspire to use their skills on Linux. If we slowly give that up and let corporations handle it for us, then we're also giving up control of Linux, GPL notwithstanding.
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Sometimes, learning something is its own goal. Learning Linux is a good thing, I would think, because it expands one's mind, just like learning FreeBSD would be an equally good thing.
Just like any worthwhile task, there is a learning curve for Linux. I'm surprised that you were able to use FreeBSD so quickly without surmounting the same learning curve. Of course, that wouldn't fit in with the general theme of your comment: linux sucks, bad design, BSD better, yadda yadda.
I'm glad that Jon is now using Linux regularly; he's climbed a fair distance from being an average user. I don't have an ideological bone to pick that he should use Linux rather than anything else. The important thing is that he is learning and more importantly that he is immersing himself in the linux community.
More journalists, especially those on the tech beat, should do the same. I don't expect them to become programmers or administrators, but the will to learn about what one is reporting goes a long way.
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It's not hard to be convinced, I see, by a writer who tells us that we're smart (or gifted, or whatever). Most movements, philosophical, political, or religious, gain and retain membership by this very trait.
Still, he doesn't go into great depths to explain why some people hecome "packers" and some "mappers". There's a lot of new-agey claptrap as well - that the modern man is essentially brilliant, but the strictures of (western) civilization have dulled his brain.
In doing so, he neglects the main question: if there are packers and mappers, and a real difference between the learning processes of the two, then why the different outcomes given an essentially identical education and upbringing?
It's interesting and I'm sure it's easy to buy, but it's harder to believe when put to a decent critical read.
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I think that you're missing the point. The person is not the project; even if I am a big meanie, that doesn't necessarily make me an incompetent programmer. The article that you seem to approve of is following that line of illogic rather than citing the specific charges against AntiOnline that have been referred to.
/. crowd. Who can forget the past characterizations of Linus Torvalds as a pimply-faced college kid? And you, as a responsible professional, would never use an OS programmed by a horde of pimply-faced college kids, would you?
/., it will go on and bite you in the ass. How long do you think it'll be before Forbes tackles something important? They're not going to stick to relatively safe subjects forever, you know.
Personally, I can't testify whether the charges are valid or not - I'm not a security expert, more of a security dabbler. I do know that they were nowhere to be found in the Forbes article.
Consider that this kind of attack has been made before, to great outrage from the
When you let journalists get away with this kind of shoddy reporting, you're just encouraging laziness and intellectual dishonesty. When it goes along, even without the applause it's been getting on
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The times I've visited AntiOnline (and that not often, but still), it has struck me as being much more of an information clearing house than a source for original content, which Forbes seems to be insinuating. Visiting today, it really still is. Which isn't a bad thing, either (look at /.)
Any reader of Brill's Content will note that most journalists aren't formally or practically educated in the fields which they cover. Whether this should be so is grounds for another post, of course, but I'd think that Vranesevich, as operator/publisher/editor of AntiOnline would qualify as a journalist. Not a great one, either, but still.
Any attack on AntiOnline should be made regarding AntiOnline's quality of reporting. Has AntiOnline (rather than Vranesevich) been incorrect? Has it disseminated false information? Have the scoops, such that they are, been important? And so on, and so forth. Instead, Forbes has taken the easy way out: slam AntiOnline by insisting that Vranesevich has insufficient "street cred" and that he's litigious.
No doubt Forbes would shy away from the same argument, applied to themselves: since Steve Forbes is a trust-funded, socially conservative wingnut, Forbes Magazine is obviously a rag.
Well, it is a rag, but that's not why.
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While an electrical impulse travels along the length of a single neuron, the transmission in the gap between neurons (which takes up most of the time and gives you most of the interesting side effects), or synapse, is actually a matter of chemistry.
Which isn't to say that you wouldn't be able to reengineer the brain with electromechanical implants or somesuch - there are some things, like rote memory (as Norman and the reviewer point out), which the brain is bad at. Our eyes, as well - the primary processing could be very much improved, and the brain itself would almost certainly adapt to the increased or more acute signal coming to it. What would be needed is a method to both read and write to the brain, but I think that that is certainly possible given time and dollars.
I would dare say that these would be implemented before a true artificial brain, because when compared to an artificial brain they seem so much easier to accomplish. (Not to mention that they're necessary preliminary steps to creating the artificial brain).
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This is horrible news. Not only because it shows Microsoft gaining a ready-made venture in another sector of the computing industry and Visio losing its autonomy, but also because Visio, not too long ago, introduced a pseudo-Open Source program for IntelliCAD.
I should say that the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium will either be quietly killed or merely allowed to wither, with no infusions of new work.
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Linux supports software RAID. You don't have to go to the extent of buying a RAID controller and a huge chunk of disk space to go with it.
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Apache pre-forks but only to a certain extent; for any connection above and beyond your baseline, it creates a new instantiation. You are, of course, 100% correct in differentiating pre-forking and forking, but at high load levels you will be creating and destroying instantiations of Apache quite regularly.
As for Greenspun, I'm not quite sure if you're correct. True, many sites of his are really databases, but in Philip and Alex's Guide he advises that pages contain as much plain
static content as possible, so as to be servable as static pages if worst comes to worst (say, under high load). Not to mention that it's faster that way.
Dynamic parts are for the ruffles and flourishes of a website - formatting, images, dynamic content which has to be dynamic, etc.
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What makes you think that I haven't used Apache for win32? In fact, I have. I've also used Notes/Domino (since Domino 1.0) and IIS. I have a MCSD and a Principal CLP on my wall to boot.
None of these would be my preference for a webserver because of the weaknesses of the underlying operating system. It's easy to crash Domino (less easy to crash IIS or Apache, of course) but the bad thing is that many application crashes will leave the system in an unstable state. I've never had that happen with Linux or BSD.
It's easy to whine about people 'mindlessly' bashing MS, but there is such a thing as educated criticism. (Kindly get used to it).
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I dunno. I rather like dselect because it's good for what I do. (Then again, I know linux pretty well, and have been using it for going on five-six years).
That said, using the debian core functionality would be an excellent way to implement this. Start off with basic install, use apt to get what you need to start off and no more, and most importantly have apt periodically update packages from dists/stable. Security flaws will "fix themselves" (or at least be fixed seamlessly and without needing too much user intervention) as Debian maintainers get around to patching and updating the relevant packages.
Maybe the underlying distribution doesn't have to be debian, but Debian is well suited to this kind of automation.
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Consider the source of this article: The National Post, or The Daily Tubby, a cruel perversion of a once good financial paper, the Financial Post. It's widely thought to have the content of the Toronto Sun (a tabloid like the New York Post) wrapped in the layout of the Globe and Mail (a reputable and venerable broadsheet like the New York Times).
/.ers aren't.
Of course, you might like the Sun or the Post, and you might even subscribe, but you probably don't mistake them for quality journalism.
As for the article: Shadow Syndromes is indeed a good read, but the central premise, that psychiatric disorders are only the severe end of a continuum of human behaviour, is not new. Nor does it support the conclusion that many single-minded geeks have an attenuated form of autism: autism is not a psychiatric or behavioural disorder but a neurological one, with manifest and concrete differences between the normal brain and the autistic one.
A corresponding argument might be that a broken arm is merely at the far range of variation in normal arms. Which it isn't. It's a broken arm.
It may be that parents of autistic children are themselves autistic. It is already known that autism is heritable. It is already known that autism varies widely in severity. But to paint all geeks with that broad brush, without any but anecdotal evidence, is irresponsible. To buy the conclusion is also equally irresponsible, and I'm glad to see that most
Consider also Occam's Razor, where the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. Do you think that many geeks find social activity difficult because they are relatively inexperienced in it, or because they have a mild form of a rare neurological disorder?
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I'd rather do almost anything than set up a webserver (at least for my own use) on an MS box. That said, you're quire correct.
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Well, cable's just a phase shift, no? So it's more analogous to letter-switching or some other orthography than encryption, but it's certainly encoding.
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That's a well-written response and I don't have that much to add to it except that perhaps Apache isn't the best platform for generating dynamic content (even with mod_perl) in a high-load situation.
This isn't a knock against the apache group - they made a great webserver. But their emphasis has been on modularity and extensibility. The great drawback of apache is that it forks for each new connection - this can eat up a lot of RAM very quickly.
I would think that a non-forking webserver, such as AOLServer or Zope, would serve you better. Perhaps AOLServer more than Zope, as Zope has to interpret a lot of python on execution.
As endorsements go, Bruce Perens runs Zope for his site (although I'm not sure how much traffic it gets, but it's been mentioned on slashdot at least a half dozen times and should have taken the slashdotting to end all slashdotting by now). Philip Greenspun, the author of Database-Backed Web Sites and Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (not to mention the brain behind Ars Digita and hence scads of corporate sites), uses AOLServer.
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Not to be too blunt, but that's overkill. Way, way (way way way) overkill.
An old pentium can serve sufficient static pages to saturate your bandwidth. For that matter, an old *macintosh* can serve sufficient pages to saturate your bandwith.
The major thing will be all the side processing that you do to generate the pages and content. In this case, his webcam, probably dynamic generation of archive pages and the like (although a better idea would be to regenerate all the active pages once - your last archive page, the index of the archive page, and the new cam pic page - when the new cam pic comes up.
Especially for a high traffic site, doing it once and then serving from the filesystem will be much more important.
As for your analysis: you forgot the biggest server system speed-up. RAID. Multiple disks on multiple controllers. A single controller and a single disk like you suggested, no matter how fast, will always pale to this relatively low-cost solution (and, for that matter, his data will be much safer, too).
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You've illustrated both sides of the coin, really. It makes plenty of sense for any company to use BSD or BSD-like licensed code written elsewhere, since they can modify at will without releasing source of the end product.
Conversely it makes plenty of sense for any company to release their own code under the GPL, since no one else can modify at will without releasing source of the end product.
Fair's fair - these two competing urges drive licenses and by extension drive development methadologies and organizations. Personally, I prefer the GPL and use Linux, but that hasn't kept me from dabbling in BSD.
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Seriously, Netscape's cachet has been dropping for ages, and its relative importance within the AOL universe has been falling along with it. AOL probably couldn't give the assets and staff of the former Netscape away, much less sell them for the exorbitant price that they paid.
Therefore, the political necessity for having old Netscape hands in AOL at a senior level is over, no matter how competent a CTO marka was (and I don't doubt that he was competent). Offering the position as a plum to Sun was probably inevitable.
In preindustrial societies, strategic alliances between family groups were cemented by cross-marriages and exchanges of material gifts. It seems that nothing much has changed.
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Remember that AOL's already put a large chunk of source code under GPL - the AOLServer (www.aolserver.com), their (formerly) proprietary webserver. If you know about Philip Greenspun and Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (IMHO the best web book ever printed), then you'll know that he's a big booster of the AOLserver as a web apps platform.
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I thought that it was a caveat of journalism that when you write an article about a horse, you get your information right from the horse's mouth.
This article gets its information from MS marketdroids and management staff, shoehorning a comment in from Eric Troan at the very end.
For that matter, it wastes nearly two thirds of its length nattering on about Sun and Java.
Even if you don't bother to comment on the factual errors of this article (and there are plenty - doesn't anyone fact-check anymore? Has it somehow gone out of style?), it's an awful piece of work.
I helped pay for my final year of university with a campus newspaper editor's honourarium. If I'd put out a piece like that, read it and signed off on it and initialed the proofs for the issue, I'm sure my editorial board would have sacked me. At best, this belongs in a low-quality campus rag. The Boston Globe should be terribly, terribly ashamed.
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I used to work for Siemens, fwiw. Even if this isn't a hoax, I doubt that they could get a hard-core software project like this out the door - there's just too much to be done in a company that doesn't necessarily admit that kind of stuff into its (straight laced, buttoned-down) culture.
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It's a very big deal; all this is is another attempt by a company to destroy a competitor by releasing a pseudo-free version of the relevant software. I don't see much cheering around here when it comes to IE, and you shouldn't be cheering when it comes to Star Office (except, of course, that it's available for linux).
Bruce makes a great point when it comes to contrasting Star Office licensing with Java's. There's a good reason (both business-wise and software-wise) for Java to be under the SCSL - whether it should be or not is another debate, but there's a valid reason for it. Those reasons really aren't valid for Star Office.
What Sun, IMHO, should do is release Star Office under a parasitic license such as the GPL. Persistence of the license is exactly what Sun wants here - MS can't scarf Star Office code and release their own version because it would have to be free. At the very least, it would force MS to create a better MS Word to compete.
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The regulatory process is a way of ensuring that any doctor you go to conforms to a good standard of practise. Given the modern world (yes, the modern world)'s plethora of specialists, it is unfeasible to comparison shop for each and every doctor that you may encounter.
Consider the simple example of breaking your leg. You will see an emergency physician, most likely, and be treated primarily by an emergency medicine resident. The X-ray may be taken by, or will be taken under the supervision of, a radiologist. If it requires surgery (like severe breaks do), you'll be operated upon by a surgeon and watched over by an anaesthesiologist. Finally, your general physician will supervise your recovery. That's a half dozen doctors. You may not even meet half of them (the surgeon, anaesthesiologist, and radiologist), much less establish a relationship.
The "high price" of medicine is a function, quite honestly, of the free market in medical services. Doctors, given a monopoly on their profession, charge as much as they can. Why wouldn't they? That's what the free market is intended to promote. If it seem that doctors collude to establish high prices, remember that it's in their interests to charge as much as they can for every service they preform.
In systems which don't establish a free market but instead a salary or a state set fee for service, costs are much lower. Admittedly, availability of medical services suffers as well.
As for the government providing testing and certification, it doesn't. Or at least it doesn't in Canada; the College of Physicians and Surgeons is run by its members and doctors. Likewise for the provincial Law Societies (legal licensing) and Associations of Professional Engineers (engineering licensing). I believe that the various state licensing and accreditation boards in the US (and I assume that you're from the US) operate on the same principle.
Would doctors go without licensing, perhaps? I don't think that there's a chance that they would. The cost of malpractise insurance for a board-certified physician or surgeon is already immense (and rightly so, given the high cost of someone's good health). If a two-tier system evolved, no doubt the uncertified physicians would get an even worse deal.
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That'll only happen if unfit commenters weigh against a negative selection criterion. As it is, you have just as good a chance to reproduce as anyone else ;-).
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I'd be surprised if Bowie wasn't pushed towards a "secure" audio format by his record label. So far, major labels have been cool at best towards the idea of digital distribution.
Bowie probably has enough economic clout (and willingness, and tech savvy) to force a lukewarm reception through to completion. However, a non-secure format would have got the corporate knee jerks going and the project stopped from the get-go.
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This begs the question: what is it to win, and should linux strive to win at it?
The implicit assumption is that linux will become a mainstream, Joe Lunchbox operating system, to the detriment of Microsoft (Apple, Be, etc).
I really don't see the advantage in that. It'll certainly up the demand for commercial applications, and corporations will move to fill that demand. Is that what we really want?
So many linux users (both way back when and now) couldn't give a rat's ass for free software; they want applications. I'm afraid that if we court the commercial market too strongly, we'll lose, not gain, developers - that great mass of developers who create free software.
What linux should strive to gain is more developers and especially more free software developers. Commercial ventures seeking to distribute non-free software for linux should be given a run for their money; they should be pressed to advance the state of the art as fast as they can. The point is that we, as a community, don't need more users; we need more developers. Linux users should aspire to become developers, and existing developers should aspire to use their skills on Linux. If we slowly give that up and let corporations handle it for us, then we're also giving up control of Linux, GPL notwithstanding.
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