All Linus did was write a kernel and all of the things that the article credits him with inventing, were already part of the free software landscape prior to his posting to the minix group.
How do I know? BECAUSE I WAS THERE. I remember the posting on the minix group and I remember the first versions of Linux being passed around University of Maryland when I was going there. This so called "Open Innovation" is an emergent property of Free Software. So, please, get your facts straight, and stop your hero worship.
It's emergent same way as democracy is emergent in human society. It's bound to happen, yet it's not automatic, and often it takes blood, sweat and tears to make it happen. Anybody who can pull it off and become "hero" needs luck of course, but luck alone will not make it happen. Minix didn't take over the world, it was left in the dust of history while Linux made history.
Git is quite nice but its impact is miniscule compared to Linux.
Git allows places like gitorious.org, github.org. While seemingly like eg. sourceforge, I think git makes a huge difference here. It's a game changer (which is kinda orthogonal to being "nice" or not).
That's the whole reason the GPL exists and created a model where contributors don't have to fear their work being monetized.
To nitpick (or perhaps not), GPL does not prevent others from monetizing contributions, nor does it try to do this, at all. It's just more difficult while adhering to GPL requirements, and requires a less direct approach than selling draconian licenses to use the software. But some approaches not only work, but also scale very very well, for instance Red Hat's approach.
I think it's quite possible that if not for the legal battles back when Linux was still little more than an interesting toy, BSD would be the dominant free OS today.
I believe the reason Linux rules over BSD is license. BSD license allows companies to "just take", and in short term this is so much more tempting, that rate of "giving back" isn't as high as it could be. There are manager level people in companies using BSD software, who abhor the idea of giving away company secrets built on top of BSD licenesed technology, even when they're not really secrets. They're, perhaps justifiably, afraid the their competitors will just "take" and not reciprocate, and gain advantage.
And then there are more than a few developers, who really don't like a company "taking" their code the way BSD license allows.
With GPL, this is different, and I suspect with operating system and especially it's kernel, the difference gives GPL a clear advandatage. It's got nothing to do with luck, and all to do with basic human feature: greed, which manifests in unwillingness to give without having guarantees of others doing the same.
It's interesting how Apache has been very successful with different license, but I just wonder if Apache software would be better today if it had Affero GPL style license, having gained many many improvementes from everybody using Apache software, or if it would be long dead...
Linus, on the other hand, has the people skills needed to enable innovators to contribute while standing enough out of the way to keep from restricting innovation. That's why he's credited for this model of governance. That's the model we need to figure out how to replicate. Unfortunately, it seems to require a benevolent dictator who is brilliant, has thick skin, and good people skills. If we can figure out how to replicate that kind of success, based on how Linus did it, then we can credit him for the model, but so far it seems that Linus' model requires a very rare kind of benevolent dictator who is brilliant technically, has good people skills, and likes to enable others to innovate as much as they like to contribute themselves.
Biotechnology will soon solve the issue. We have our selection of BDFLs in open source community. All we need to do is create hybrid "clones" of them, raise them as nerds, then a few decades later see which did best, and repeat the process. It won't take many generations until we have the ultimate BDFL at our disposal.
As absurd as the idea of needing to train vultures sounds at first, I'd guess the training has more to do with finding human bodies instead of every road kill in 10 km radius, and vulture coming back instead of heading south after having a quick snack from the body found, and other little practicalities like that.
The good news is that the star which went nova wasn't Betelgeuse.
(Ok, yeah, I know that most likely under current models, Betelgeuse going nova won't be that bad for Earth. However, this joke is slightly justified in that last supernova that was visible from Earth 1987A wasn't even a star that we expected to nova.
To nitpick, "nova" and "supernova" are different, separate things, one is not a subclass of the other. Nova is specifically just a runaway fusion reaction (read: nuclear explosion) of hydrogen that has accumulated on the surface of a white dwarf star. Supernova is entire start exploding due to it's core collapsing, for differrent reasons for different types of supernova.
The only comment I would like to add is that there may be some clever people out there who might be able to devise a simple encryption algorithm that may be stronger than SSL
Either impossible or very easy depending on how you look at it, since SSL is not encryption algorithm... SSL is cryptographic protocol which generally uses two encryption algorithms, an asymmetric one for authentication etc, and symmetric one for session data encryption. It also bunch of other cryptgraphic algorithms, at least a hashing algorithm and a key exchange algorithm.
That is funny. You must be new to the industry. One of the first things anyone in employee/contractor position learns (should learn) in their first 5 or so years is that EVERYONE is replaceable.
Not really. World is full of projects that failed or at least were severely delayed because wrong person left the project. And when ever such a project failure happens in a small company that is in a make-or-break-it situation, it often means death of the entire company. And yes, world is also full of failed startup companies.
Everyone is replaceable only if there's infinite tries in finding a new person, or a clairvoyant picking the replacement. But of course spending enough money (both in screening the applicants, and in paying the new contractor/employee) in getting the replacement increases the chance of success. Too bad startups rarely are in position to spend a lot of money here...
So, as a biz owner, if a contractor feels unhappy with current situation, and really wishes equity, what would you suggest?
Just start looking for a new gig, then leave once his name is in a new contract? Of course giving as long notice as possible, but not telling anything before having a new contract, just to play it safe.
Look for new gig, then after finding one, ask for equity, even though this will look like blackmail?
Ask for equity before starting to look for a new thing, risking termination of contract before finding a new one, if client starts to feel insecure and gets a new contractor?
You'd obviously prefer the last one yourself, but what would you advice the contractor should do from his own point of view?
But I'm sure you agree that not all people have same number of surviving children. I'd say genetics play a big role in that. Which means, there's natural selection going on based on genes, which inevitably leads to biological evolution. But I think there's more "noise" in the selection process than ever, since world is changing so rapidly in the timespan of just one generation, so it's hard for any changes to get fixed, unless they're generally benefical.
Also, right now in large parts of the world, available resources like food aren't a limiting factor. This leads to exponential population growth, until a we reach the limit where resources are a limiting factor. All we can hope is hitting the limit gently, and limit taking shape in the form of people just not having kids, instead of people breeding then starving to death. And I'm not talking about current situation here, I'm talking about the situation where world population reaches the actual amount of food we can produce.
Sure it does. Evolution of certain features can be seen as distinct steps, such as our physiological ability to have more complex, "proper" speech, unlike our ancestors before that step, who only had chimpanzee-level sound communication.
But I'm sure you actually mean, evolution doesn't have steps towards any particular goal, which is certainly true. There are step to all kinds of directions all the time, and only in hindsight it's possible to see which steps lead to new things and which were just dead ends.
That's thinking the wrong way around. Why would you want to bother closing tabs manually? And if you don't, tabs start to crop up... And then if the browser can't cope, it is a problem with the browser, not user who doesn't want to do manual organizing just to please his browser.
No it's not. Daytime dreaming costs our economy billions, even trillions of dollars every year! What society needs is a brainwave analyzer and a dream counter, so dreams can be taxed and lost productivity converted to money, to be funneled back to the economy through the usual channels.
Roguelikes are games that are like Rogue both in game play and in appearance (IMHO graphical tiles and even isometric or 3rd person 3D are allowed, as long as it doesn't affect game play, though purists may disagree).
The summary tries to imply there's some deeper meaning behind the word, but really, there isn't.
Deniability gets less and less plausible every time you get hit with a $5 wrench.
No, the deniability gets more and more plausible every time you get hit with the wrench and still just keep begging for mercy. It's just that it gets harder and harder too with every impact. But I'm sure that's what you actually meant, so this is just nitpicking.
Then the question becomes: Will they keep hitting you with the wrench until you die just in case, even if they start to believe you're telling the truth?
And then: If you're still alive when they're through with using the wrench, are they going to bury the evidence (that means you), move to more effective and probably even less pleasant information extraction methods, or (yeah, right) just let you go?
With this issue, the two camps appear to be coming down to, "this may not be a huge issue; hopefully Apple will begin truncating this file with an upcoming update" and "fucking Apple fanbois will take anything that His Steveness rams up their rear! This is an outrage!"
To me it seems more like "this may not be a huge issue; hopefully Apple will begin truncating this file with an upcoming update, even if fucking Apple fanbois sure will take anything that His Steveness rams up their rear!"
Actually, the real problem is corporate attitudes spilling over into academia. Maybe an insurance company or a sprocket manufacturer can lock-down its network to run only the handful of services that an obedient little cubicle-dweller at needs - but part of the point of academia is to experiment and investigate, so that system is really not fit for purpose.
That's why there must be separate RD/lab/whatshamacallit network (usually several, so things like DHCP can be set up as needed). Experimentation and investigation has no place in any office network (at least after all users aren't within shouting distance of each others). Regular company/office network is indeed not fit fo the purpose of research and development work, for very obvious reasons.
I don't want it to be customizable. I'm more than happy if it looks exactly the same as XP, and everything would be in the same place.
About everything being the same place... Are you aware that with Win7 (and Vista, I think), you can just hit windows key and start typing whatever you want to do, and it'll find the right action for you? In Win7, I have no idea where anything is, because I don't browse menus and windows and whatnot to get there. Which is a problem when I use XP, and suddenly have to find everything "manually" again. I mean, it'll even find things like modifying environment variables, when you type "path", which was a pain to navigate to in XP, IIRC.
Eehhhh.... OS does not have user-visible parts. OS have only API/ABI interfaces what other software use so they do not need to include code how to move HDD head or anything else.
That's not what "operating system" normally means. "Operating system" most commonly means the software thingy you can get, for example, by buying a "retail version" box from a shop, or downloading an ISO image. Kernel and drivers are kernel and drivers, they're not the whole operating system. Even embedded operating systems usually have a shell as "user visible part", and not just "any shell", but the specific shell of the operating system (such as dash as/bin/sh for Debian-based Linux variants, which I believe is quite popular choice for certain type of embedded applications).
There's an implication beyond "Vista support is dropped", which considering the number of companies that avoided Vista on the desktop itself isn't a big deal... Server 2008 support is also dropped. R2 is the Win7 kernel so that's still valid, but my users on Terminal Servers as little as three years old won't have access to the next IE version.
That's only going to be problem when IE9 support is dropped, and/or IE9 becomes too outdated. And with the types of sites that require IE, I don't see the "outdated" problem, and support should last as long as Vista support too (for obvious reasons).
"We are so proud to launch this new ( moon ) rocket 50 years after the United States using past US & Russian R&D" Go China!
The sad thing is, it'd still be more than what US & Russia are able to pull off... Russia is likely to still be too poor, US may be too poor too but will certainly not have long enough financial attention span to do something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
All Linus did was write a kernel and all of the things that the article credits him with inventing, were already part of the free software landscape prior to his posting to the minix group.
How do I know? BECAUSE I WAS THERE. I remember the posting on the minix group and I remember the first versions of Linux being passed around University of Maryland when I was going there. This so called "Open Innovation" is an emergent property of Free Software. So, please, get your facts straight, and stop your hero worship.
It's emergent same way as democracy is emergent in human society. It's bound to happen, yet it's not automatic, and often it takes blood, sweat and tears to make it happen. Anybody who can pull it off and become "hero" needs luck of course, but luck alone will not make it happen. Minix didn't take over the world, it was left in the dust of history while Linux made history.
Git is quite nice but its impact is miniscule compared to Linux.
Git allows places like gitorious.org, github.org. While seemingly like eg. sourceforge, I think git makes a huge difference here. It's a game changer (which is kinda orthogonal to being "nice" or not).
That's the whole reason the GPL exists and created a model where contributors don't have to fear their work being monetized.
To nitpick (or perhaps not), GPL does not prevent others from monetizing contributions, nor does it try to do this, at all. It's just more difficult while adhering to GPL requirements, and requires a less direct approach than selling draconian licenses to use the software. But some approaches not only work, but also scale very very well, for instance Red Hat's approach.
I think it's quite possible that if not for the legal battles back when Linux was still little more than an interesting toy, BSD would be the dominant free OS today.
I believe the reason Linux rules over BSD is license. BSD license allows companies to "just take", and in short term this is so much more tempting, that rate of "giving back" isn't as high as it could be. There are manager level people in companies using BSD software, who abhor the idea of giving away company secrets built on top of BSD licenesed technology, even when they're not really secrets. They're, perhaps justifiably, afraid the their competitors will just "take" and not reciprocate, and gain advantage.
And then there are more than a few developers, who really don't like a company "taking" their code the way BSD license allows.
With GPL, this is different, and I suspect with operating system and especially it's kernel, the difference gives GPL a clear advandatage. It's got nothing to do with luck, and all to do with basic human feature: greed, which manifests in unwillingness to give without having guarantees of others doing the same.
It's interesting how Apache has been very successful with different license, but I just wonder if Apache software would be better today if it had Affero GPL style license, having gained many many improvementes from everybody using Apache software, or if it would be long dead...
Linus, on the other hand, has the people skills needed to enable innovators to contribute while standing enough out of the way to keep from restricting innovation. That's why he's credited for this model of governance. That's the model we need to figure out how to replicate. Unfortunately, it seems to require a benevolent dictator who is brilliant, has thick skin, and good people skills. If we can figure out how to replicate that kind of success, based on how Linus did it, then we can credit him for the model, but so far it seems that Linus' model requires a very rare kind of benevolent dictator who is brilliant technically, has good people skills, and likes to enable others to innovate as much as they like to contribute themselves.
Biotechnology will soon solve the issue. We have our selection of BDFLs in open source community. All we need to do is create hybrid "clones" of them, raise them as nerds, then a few decades later see which did best, and repeat the process. It won't take many generations until we have the ultimate BDFL at our disposal.
Either its alive or its dead. There really isnt a middle ground here. Its not mostly alive, or mostly dead. Its one or the other.
You've clearly never explored contents of a feral fridge.
As absurd as the idea of needing to train vultures sounds at first, I'd guess the training has more to do with finding human bodies instead of every road kill in 10 km radius, and vulture coming back instead of heading south after having a quick snack from the body found, and other little practicalities like that.
The good news is that the star which went nova wasn't Betelgeuse.
(Ok, yeah, I know that most likely under current models, Betelgeuse going nova won't be that bad for Earth. However, this joke is slightly justified in that last supernova that was visible from Earth 1987A wasn't even a star that we expected to nova.
To nitpick, "nova" and "supernova" are different, separate things, one is not a subclass of the other. Nova is specifically just a runaway fusion reaction (read: nuclear explosion) of hydrogen that has accumulated on the surface of a white dwarf star. Supernova is entire start exploding due to it's core collapsing, for differrent reasons for different types of supernova.
The only comment I would like to add is that there may be some clever people out there who might be able to devise a simple encryption algorithm that may be stronger than SSL
Either impossible or very easy depending on how you look at it, since SSL is not encryption algorithm... SSL is cryptographic protocol which generally uses two encryption algorithms, an asymmetric one for authentication etc, and symmetric one for session data encryption. It also bunch of other cryptgraphic algorithms, at least a hashing algorithm and a key exchange algorithm.
That is funny. You must be new to the industry. One of the first things anyone in employee/contractor position learns (should learn) in their first 5 or so years is that EVERYONE is replaceable.
Not really. World is full of projects that failed or at least were severely delayed because wrong person left the project. And when ever such a project failure happens in a small company that is in a make-or-break-it situation, it often means death of the entire company. And yes, world is also full of failed startup companies.
Everyone is replaceable only if there's infinite tries in finding a new person, or a clairvoyant picking the replacement. But of course spending enough money (both in screening the applicants, and in paying the new contractor/employee) in getting the replacement increases the chance of success. Too bad startups rarely are in position to spend a lot of money here...
So, as a biz owner, if a contractor feels unhappy with current situation, and really wishes equity, what would you suggest?
Just start looking for a new gig, then leave once his name is in a new contract? Of course giving as long notice as possible, but not telling anything before having a new contract, just to play it safe.
Look for new gig, then after finding one, ask for equity, even though this will look like blackmail?
Ask for equity before starting to look for a new thing, risking termination of contract before finding a new one, if client starts to feel insecure and gets a new contractor?
You'd obviously prefer the last one yourself, but what would you advice the contractor should do from his own point of view?
But I'm sure you agree that not all people have same number of surviving children. I'd say genetics play a big role in that. Which means, there's natural selection going on based on genes, which inevitably leads to biological evolution. But I think there's more "noise" in the selection process than ever, since world is changing so rapidly in the timespan of just one generation, so it's hard for any changes to get fixed, unless they're generally benefical.
Also, right now in large parts of the world, available resources like food aren't a limiting factor. This leads to exponential population growth, until a we reach the limit where resources are a limiting factor. All we can hope is hitting the limit gently, and limit taking shape in the form of people just not having kids, instead of people breeding then starving to death. And I'm not talking about current situation here, I'm talking about the situation where world population reaches the actual amount of food we can produce.
Evolution doesn't have steps.
Sure it does. Evolution of certain features can be seen as distinct steps, such as our physiological ability to have more complex, "proper" speech, unlike our ancestors before that step, who only had chimpanzee-level sound communication.
But I'm sure you actually mean, evolution doesn't have steps towards any particular goal, which is certainly true. There are step to all kinds of directions all the time, and only in hindsight it's possible to see which steps lead to new things and which were just dead ends.
Why the HELL do you need 140 tabs open at once?
That's thinking the wrong way around. Why would you want to bother closing tabs manually? And if you don't, tabs start to crop up... And then if the browser can't cope, it is a problem with the browser, not user who doesn't want to do manual organizing just to please his browser.
Dreaming? Dreaming is free!
No it's not. Daytime dreaming costs our economy billions, even trillions of dollars every year! What society needs is a brainwave analyzer and a dream counter, so dreams can be taxed and lost productivity converted to money, to be funneled back to the economy through the usual channels.
Roguelikes are games that are like Rogue both in game play and in appearance (IMHO graphical tiles and even isometric or 3rd person 3D are allowed, as long as it doesn't affect game play, though purists may disagree).
The summary tries to imply there's some deeper meaning behind the word, but really, there isn't.
...and we still haven't been able to top it? What's wrong with the youth today?
Deniability gets less and less plausible every time you get hit with a $5 wrench.
No, the deniability gets more and more plausible every time you get hit with the wrench and still just keep begging for mercy. It's just that it gets harder and harder too with every impact. But I'm sure that's what you actually meant, so this is just nitpicking.
Then the question becomes: Will they keep hitting you with the wrench until you die just in case, even if they start to believe you're telling the truth?
And then: If you're still alive when they're through with using the wrench, are they going to bury the evidence (that means you), move to more effective and probably even less pleasant information extraction methods, or (yeah, right) just let you go?
Good.
I left it to the excerice for the reader to decide what is good:
A. that at least some kind of war is being fought on Iran
B. that it's viruses instead of bombs that are being delivered to Iran
C. that Iran discovered the virus before it did damage
D. that Iran is fighting it's own propaganda war by these false claims
E. your own choice, explain below
With this issue, the two camps appear to be coming down to, "this may not be a huge issue; hopefully Apple will begin truncating this file with an upcoming update" and "fucking Apple fanbois will take anything that His Steveness rams up their rear! This is an outrage!"
To me it seems more like "this may not be a huge issue; hopefully Apple will begin truncating this file with an upcoming update, even if fucking Apple fanbois sure will take anything that His Steveness rams up their rear!"
Actually, the real problem is corporate attitudes spilling over into academia. Maybe an insurance company or a sprocket manufacturer can lock-down its network to run only the handful of services that an obedient little cubicle-dweller at needs - but part of the point of academia is to experiment and investigate, so that system is really not fit for purpose.
That's why there must be separate RD/lab/whatshamacallit network (usually several, so things like DHCP can be set up as needed). Experimentation and investigation has no place in any office network (at least after all users aren't within shouting distance of each others). Regular company/office network is indeed not fit fo the purpose of research and development work, for very obvious reasons.
I don't want it to be customizable. I'm more than happy if it looks exactly the same as XP, and everything would be in the same place.
About everything being the same place... Are you aware that with Win7 (and Vista, I think), you can just hit windows key and start typing whatever you want to do, and it'll find the right action for you? In Win7, I have no idea where anything is, because I don't browse menus and windows and whatnot to get there. Which is a problem when I use XP, and suddenly have to find everything "manually" again. I mean, it'll even find things like modifying environment variables, when you type "path", which was a pain to navigate to in XP, IIRC.
Eehhhh.... OS does not have user-visible parts. OS have only API/ABI interfaces what other software use so they do not need to include code how to move HDD head or anything else.
That's not what "operating system" normally means. "Operating system" most commonly means the software thingy you can get, for example, by buying a "retail version" box from a shop, or downloading an ISO image. Kernel and drivers are kernel and drivers, they're not the whole operating system. Even embedded operating systems usually have a shell as "user visible part", and not just "any shell", but the specific shell of the operating system (such as dash as /bin/sh for Debian-based Linux variants, which I believe is quite popular choice for certain type of embedded applications).
There's an implication beyond "Vista support is dropped", which considering the number of companies that avoided Vista on the desktop itself isn't a big deal... Server 2008 support is also dropped. R2 is the Win7 kernel so that's still valid, but my users on Terminal Servers as little as three years old won't have access to the next IE version.
That's only going to be problem when IE9 support is dropped, and/or IE9 becomes too outdated. And with the types of sites that require IE, I don't see the "outdated" problem, and support should last as long as Vista support too (for obvious reasons).
"We are so proud to launch this new ( moon ) rocket 50 years after the United States using past US & Russian R&D" Go China!
The sad thing is, it'd still be more than what US & Russia are able to pull off... Russia is likely to still be too poor, US may be too poor too but will certainly not have long enough financial attention span to do something like that.