This is a device for assisting in processor emulation: I believe it will hold commands in memory until it knows that they will execute without error. Quite a good idea.
Simple, elegant, and not obvious. All the requirements for a good patent.
This is really the sort of thing that Windoze really needs: a 'this instruction would cause the program to do "bad stuff(TM)", so I won't allow it. It should stop a single process for taking whole systems down.
Dear oh dear.. Rob wonders why no-one will tell him anything. Here's a parallel that might put it into some clarity.
I've got a friend (maybe acquantiance is a better word) who threw in his job as a web designer to become a latex models technician on the Lord of The Rings project that is happening down country here with Peter Jackson's Weta company.
His first reply back said something along the lines of: I'm here, I'm safe, I've got somewhere to live. I'm seeing lots of really cool things here, but I can't tell anyone, or else I'll be fired. Apparently this has already happened to someone...
Transmeta people can't say anything, because they all want to continue to do the cool work for Transmeta.
Since I leave myself logged in to slashdot (in theory anyone) I wonder about the possiblity of individual users applying "kill-file" techniques on individual posters.
E.g.: If I think that user #5431 (just a random number) has opinions I don't care to see ever, I can add them to be ignore list, and never have to see them ever.
Every one's freedom remains intact, regular reader's experiences are improved. Posters are encourage to be consistent in order to be heard when they do have good opinions.
Fairness of voting is a strange thing to ask for, but I can give feedback on the system of voting we implemented recently here.
Background: The system of government here consists of one House of Representatives, originally of 99 members, made up by representives of individual constituencies around the country. There is no real President-equivalent: in theory the governor-General (this is a commonwealth country) has to ratify all new laws, but this is mostly a rubber-stamp procedure, by a political appointee. Previously there were two major parties, and government swung back and forth between them. At one election a major third party succeeded in gathering ~30% of the popular vote, but due to it's distrubution only won a handful of seats (Social Credit).
About 4 years ago, we all voted via a special referendum to switch to a form of Proportional representation known as Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP). This was put in place for the previous election. The system now has 120 MPs (Members of Parliament): half constituency based, and the rest chosen from the "party lists". At election time you vote for your representative, and for the party you want to see in government. The number of seats a party obtains is based on the percentage of the party vote they obtain. If Party A only win 5 seats, but receive 20% of the party vote, they will be given more seats to make up the difference. There is a 5% threshold that says: if no constituencies are won, a party must hit this threshold before any party seats are given.
At the previous election the government only received ~45% of the party vote, and didn't have the muscle to form a government. After a long period (4-6 weeks) they formed an coalition with a third party (a mildly Xenophobic group lead by an ex-party member with a Napoleon complex (just my spin)). They later split with this party and continue to govern from a minority (with co-operation from others on day-to-day issues and some legislation).
The country as a whole feels they've been "held to ransom" by this smaller party, and seem almost ready to chuck the whole MMP thing in. The media have been convinced the government is lurching from crisis to crisis. Some how they've survived the full term.
And now it's almost election time again. No date announced, but there's all sorts of campaigning happening again. It should be soon.
Oh, and the Prime Minister (PM) is a woman. All the signs are that next year the PM will still be a woman, because the leader of the opposition as also a woman. Both seem to have public image problems.....
Firstly: P.I.R.H.L.: In the tradition of G.N.U. I suggest PIRHL, standing for PIRHL is not Red Hat Linux. Recursive acronyms are cool (plus the whole point is that it is RH, just like GNU is only not Unix legally....) Plus it sounds like a certain programming language that I think is really quite neat....
Secondly, as the nice people from Debian suggested the other day, this is about build integrity. The Debian project insist, for you to call you disc "Official Debian Linux" you must be able to trace the ISO image of it to a genuine disc.
This ensures that if a disc claims to be of Debian vX.Y it is exactly the same (ie bootable and everything) as the one the OSF are selling.(Certainly, my copy of RH is from Mcmillian (sp?) It isn't bootable, ie it doesn't behave exactly the same as the original.. This is not a good thing in the eyes of RH.
In my mind reading (or if I could, attending) Larry's speeches is inherently cool. Why?
I started (and continue) as a programmer in order to a:stretch my mind, and b:have a laugh. Larry does both very well.
Larry's language is the one I have found that gives me the best ability to write tight, efficient, outright sexy code, and maybe embed an in-joke in it as well, that I have found in any language.
I'm sorry, the man is a legend.
2.0.38? What happened to the 2.2 tree?
on
Kernels Galore
·
· Score: 2
Excuse me for being overly ignorant, but why does anyone care about the 2.0 tree? I had convinced myself that the main code base was in 2.2.0.
And on that note, why isn't anyone working on 1.2 anymore?:-)
If I wanted to set reasonable limits on the internet (without trying to scare the privacy people I would):
Remind law enforcers that it's the creation that matters, the internet is just the transport medium.
Amend the law so web sites/news postings/email/other electronic forms are admissable as evidence and create a legal preservation method (printouts are the best we have so far, but not good enough).
Try and encourage other countries to pursue similar legislation.
Establish protocols for co-prosecution of law-breakers across multiple boundaries (especially international) where similar legislation exists.
Breaking the law is still illegal if it happens to involve the internet. Freedom of speech retains whatever status it had elsewhere: those who control the medium control the content (you can't use bad language in letters to newspapers, as the editors choose to censor them: it's their freedom of speech.)
You should bear in mind that I'm not a US Citizen, or even in the US. These comments are written without reference or even care about local standards: it's goal is simply to extend those standards to new mediums..
Re:Maybe it is redundant.
on
On Perl 5.6
·
· Score: 1
Which is of course exactly the behaviour that I decided I wanted! I was trying to make reasonable assumptions about what the supplied code would look like. Assuming > was only used with a preceding < seemed OK....
Also, my job title at the time was PC Development/Support, which seemed to mean all the fun of being a developer, with all the hassle of doing end-user support.: Teaching yourself regexp (with the help of the camel book, thanks to Larry, Tom, and Randal) whilst being interrupted for trivia at 10 minute intervals is an overly sadistic torture.As for the problem with the/. engine (this is notes for rob+co, it'll probably get formulated an email later on): If you enter HTML attributes into a message box for posting, hitting preview resolves those attributes into single characters, but doesn't load the original code back into the text box. Thus, discussions using the < and & characters have to be done without the benefit of preview (especially some perl and certainly HTML).
Just my 4c worth (inflation adjusted).
Maybe it is redundant.
on
On Perl 5.6
·
· Score: 1
It's entirely possible that part of my code is redundant (and yes, slashdot garbles HTML attributes).
I was struggling at the time I wrote that to understand regexp, and I haven't felt the need to fix working code, as it has other bottlenecks way more serious than bad pattern-matching.
On an aside: if the Slashdot maintainers read this, could you please add support for HTML entities (the ones with those funky &'s in them: preview will sort let you but it is broken....
Better Balanced regexp, cool!
on
On Perl 5.6
·
· Score: 2
Speaking as a perl developer I can only be very happy about increasing features in the regexp code.
Where previously I had to settle for using something like s/<.*?>//g; to discard all tags, I can now pretend to be intelligent and search and discard seperate matched tags? Lots and lots of cool implications for HTML, CGI, and XML developers there.
Big catch is, as it's magnetic based, it uses iron as an "toner" stlye media. The downside of that is it'd be only black and white for a while, and 220 dpi isn't really that great (and won't get you nicely varied greys either).
Still, I'm going to mentally file this under "If we can dream it, we can build it" and dig it out in a few years time.
I really like the idea of having ~zero thickness addressable media. Throw away your CRT (or even LCD) based monitor. Now your PC talks to the walls. Moving house would be a bit annoying though. (I have to paint/paper the wall before I can get the computer working again. No email for weeks (months, given me organisational skills) Playing Need For Speed/Quake etc on the bedroom wall seems like a worthwhile goal.....
The license of the engine isn't the point. I remember reading an article (I can't remember the source) comparing licensing the Unreal and Quake ][ engines. The editors in question recommended the Unreal engine, if only because it was better supported. The attitude from iD Software seemed to be "Here's the code, have fun", where Unreal came with copious hand-holding.
It's almost a pity that the games on the Unreal engine ended up sucking.
The race is also on to get satellite antennas into the hands of consumers: A satellite antenna can receive only one of the two services, so it's crucial for the two companies to lock up the key retail and content partners early.
Why is this ? Obviously because they're proprietary. If we hack/open the source algorithms for this equipment we can start to offer freedom of choice to listeners. I fail to see the point of having a continous, un-interruptable stream of audio if don't actually have any choice.
I don't actually live in continental America, so I don't have any chance of experiencing this, but good idea!
Okay, I'll admit. That's me. (That's one thing about holding one alias for the 5 or so years I've used this one).
But you have to bear in mind... I was on a computing course. This is a computing website.
If you either aren't a nerd, or don't like nerds you shouldn't be here. I reccommend you leave. You'll find you hands hurt less if you don't drag your knuckles on the ground like that.... (/FLAME)
Telecom is seeming increasingly out of touch with reality...
Ever since Shirtcliffe (Yes, that's right. The dork that campaigned against electoral reform) retired as Chairman, and Rod Deane changed from CEO to Chairman, Telecom seem to be making more strange decisions. I have to wonder if they're trying to alienate the whole population. If that phone card thing didn't upset you, this will for sure!
Background to the phone cards (for foreigners): Some months back Telecom discovered that all the nice ~sorta digital payphones they installed aren't Y2K compliant, and they're all going to have to be replaced. The thing is, these are magnetic card-based phones, and the new ones won't read the old cards. That card you have stashed in your wallet (for emergencies) is now just a hunka-plastic.
The outrage here was huge, and Telecom just said (and I'm paraphasing) "So what? Get over it! We know we never mentioned the possibility they might expire before, but they will now. Life's a bitch".
I have to suspect the new CEO is a few beers short of as six-pack.....
As a NZer who was in living in Canada at the time that GST was implemented, I spent a period laughing hysterically at the farce the Canadians made of GST (which New Zealand had gotten some years earlier).
New Zealand's GST (currently at 12.5%) is charged on absolutely everything (although companies can claim it back). Prices listed on shop shelves include tax on the ticket (this seems to be for everything except computers and computer components, go figure). New Zealand's initial GST introduction (at 10%) was timed to coincide with the removal of a manufacturing tax, prices were supposed to stay the same.
Canada's GST, on the other hand is either 7% or 8% (I forget which, one was GST, the other was Provincial). There are exceptions on all sorts of things, only half of which seem to make sense (Children's clothing and certain food products, for examples, are GST free. A weird twist of nature mad 5 donuts include tax, but made 6 tax free. 6 donuts were cheaper than 5......). dry cleaning companies suddenly started selling expensive potatoes, with dry cleaning as a free service (and thus avoid tax).
This phone tax, however, is not government run. It is an ex-state company abusing it's monopoly presence (Telecom are the only local dial-tone supplier for most of the country). The government would have had more tact (especially as this is an election year).
Also, Telecom's management have just changed their chairs around. This is really a case of a new boy trying to make an impact.
Without trying to actually have much of an opinion, I'd suggest you read a copy of Clifford Stoll's "Silicon Snake Oil".
For the the lazy/poor/librarily-challenged, his basic premise is that if we rely on computers too much, we forget about reasoning and other important things like that.
Cliff's earlier book "The Cuckoo's Egg" on his exploits to catch two West Germans trying to break into security systems is also entertaining.
People, this job is marketing based. While the rest of you argue about how Microsoft are always ranting that Windows XYZ is superior to Alternative OS, Microsoft is jealous of the Press Time and Attitude Linux get.
In my mind this is the key that proves Microsoft simply don't get the whole Free Software thing. Linux doesn't need to be a threat.
People have expressed (here) worries that RedHat could become the next Microsoft, by capturing mind share. I'm often surprised the Microsoft haven't created a distribution themselves, the GPL definitely(IMHO) allows you do what ever you want with the source.
Think about it, a MS Linux would be attractive to the suits, albeit not to the tech-heads. Then X years down the track, the MPM (as opposed to RPM) format rules supreme.
The strength of Linux is it's diversity, but MS are still bigger than all the distributors. The fight is real, it is now. I feel Microsoft could still win (I don't want that, but they could).
Hey, I'm cool with perl's syntax checking. The syntax checker is all that stops me from losing it completely. Having to order my mind enough to fight it within the syntax constraints of any given language is part of the development process, it helps me understand the problem.
As it is, my code is getting looser and looser (is that really a word) to the point while explaining bits to my supervisor (a PhD. equipped scientist, not computing) I have to gloss over the bits that look like line noise "That line that says s/[\_[\. \,\?]//g; does have useful function, it does xxxx"
At least we're writing computer code that looks like computer code, we could all be writing CoBOL, RMS protect us from that....
I mentally went on a step from this and made some interesting(ish) discoveries
The domains sucks.com and rules.com are not being used for this sort of purpose. sucks.com exhibits a "coming soon" sign, and rules.com seems to have been snaffled by a speculator/hosting company.
If I owned these domains I would be selling subdomains, and making lotsa dosh! I shudder to think of the money geeks would pay to get domains like microsoft.sucks.com, or linux.rules.com. People would probably play ~internic rates for subdomains there, IMHO....
Besides, it be much more fun to tease those who only sorta get the tech, but exploiting holes in their knowledge....
I just sent this letter to Steve Litt (editor of the magazine this list came from) and thought you might all be interested in it. I've just read through your "Where have all the heroes gone?" article (via SlashDot). Good job! I wonder though, why you started at so late a year.
My mind suggests a candidate I feel your list is sorely lacking: Ken, Dennis, and Brian (as one).
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, together, in 1969-70, created an operating system known as UNIX that forms the formation of many later operating systems today (certainly of Windows and Linux).
Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan designed a language that made many things possible. This language, called "C" was later used to rewrite the UNIX kernel (until then in assembler). For the first time (ASAIK) it was possible to develop operating systems in 3rd Generation code, rather than in machine language. By far the vast majority of software available today was either written or C (or in C derivatives, like C++), or in languages written in C (the source for Perl, VB etc is C/C++). C is truly the closest thing to a common language in computing today. If a platform can't compile C, it isn't really viable.
As for tomorrows heroes, heroism is only decided in hindsight. However, two candidates suggest themselves easily to me: Eric S. Raymond, and Jamie Zawinski.
Eric Raymond (ESR) is leading the popular front of envangelism for the free software community. This is a position that draws a lot of fire from all concerned.
Jamie Zawinksi (jwz) is the prime instigator (albeit armed with ESR's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay) of Netscape Corp.'s recent push to release their flagship product as open-source.
The best part of this (as far as I can see) is one of the final comments...
"Linux's less-mature setup infrastructure increases the up- front work required to deploy an application, but companies find the struggle worthwhile because Linux is more stable than Windows NT." - Andrew Allison
I don't know about the rest of you, but personally, I'd prefer to choose good over easy every time. This is an intelligence thing. The intelligent would rather struggle than accept inferior solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a device for assisting in processor emulation: I believe it will hold commands in memory until it knows that they will execute without error. Quite a good idea.
Simple, elegant, and not obvious. All the requirements for a good patent.
This is really the sort of thing that Windoze really needs: a 'this instruction would cause the program to do "bad stuff(TM)", so I won't allow it. It should stop a single process for taking whole systems down.
I've got a friend (maybe acquantiance is a better word) who threw in his job as a web designer to become a latex models technician on the Lord of The Rings project that is happening down country here with Peter Jackson's Weta company.
His first reply back said something along the lines of: I'm here, I'm safe, I've got somewhere to live. I'm seeing lots of really cool things here, but I can't tell anyone, or else I'll be fired. Apparently this has already happened to someone...
Transmeta people can't say anything, because they all want to continue to do the cool work for Transmeta.
E.g.: If I think that user #5431 (just a random number) has opinions I don't care to see ever, I can add them to be ignore list, and never have to see them ever.
Every one's freedom remains intact, regular reader's experiences are improved. Posters are encourage to be consistent in order to be heard when they do have good opinions.
Background: The system of government here consists of one House of Representatives, originally of 99 members, made up by representives of individual constituencies around the country. There is no real President-equivalent: in theory the governor-General (this is a commonwealth country) has to ratify all new laws, but this is mostly a rubber-stamp procedure, by a political appointee.
Previously there were two major parties, and government swung back and forth between them. At one election a major third party succeeded in gathering ~30% of the popular vote, but due to it's distrubution only won a handful of seats (Social Credit).
About 4 years ago, we all voted via a special referendum to switch to a form of Proportional representation known as Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP). This was put in place for the previous election. The system now has 120 MPs (Members of Parliament): half constituency based, and the rest chosen from the "party lists". At election time you vote for your representative, and for the party you want to see in government. The number of seats a party obtains is based on the percentage of the party vote they obtain. If Party A only win 5 seats, but receive 20% of the party vote, they will be given more seats to make up the difference. There is a 5% threshold that says: if no constituencies are won, a party must hit this threshold before any party seats are given.
At the previous election the government only received ~45% of the party vote, and didn't have the muscle to form a government. After a long period (4-6 weeks) they formed an coalition with a third party (a mildly Xenophobic group lead by an ex-party member with a Napoleon complex (just my spin)). They later split with this party and continue to govern from a minority (with co-operation from others on day-to-day issues and some legislation).
The country as a whole feels they've been "held to ransom" by this smaller party, and seem almost ready to chuck the whole MMP thing in. The media have been convinced the government is lurching from crisis to crisis. Some how they've survived the full term.
And now it's almost election time again. No date announced, but there's all sorts of campaigning happening again. It should be soon.
Oh, and the Prime Minister (PM) is a woman. All the signs are that next year the PM will still be a woman, because the leader of the opposition as also a woman. Both seem to have public image problems.....
This ensures that if a disc claims to be of Debian vX.Y it is exactly the same (ie bootable and everything) as the one the OSF are selling.(Certainly, my copy of RH is from Mcmillian (sp?) It isn't bootable, ie it doesn't behave exactly the same as the original.. This is not a good thing in the eyes of RH.
I started (and continue) as a programmer in order to a:stretch my mind, and b:have a laugh. Larry does both very well.
Larry's language is the one I have found that gives me the best ability to write tight, efficient, outright sexy code, and maybe embed an in-joke in it as well, that I have found in any language.
I'm sorry, the man is a legend.
And on that note, why isn't anyone working on 1.2 anymore? :-)
- Remind law enforcers that it's the creation that matters, the internet is just the transport medium.
- Amend the law so web sites/news postings/email/other electronic forms are admissable as evidence and create a legal preservation method (printouts are the best we have so far, but not good enough).
- Try and encourage other countries to pursue similar legislation.
- Establish protocols for co-prosecution of law-breakers across multiple boundaries (especially international) where similar legislation exists.
Breaking the law is still illegal if it happens to involve the internet. Freedom of speech retains whatever status it had elsewhere: those who control the medium control the content (you can't use bad language in letters to newspapers, as the editors choose to censor them: it's their freedom of speech.)You should bear in mind that I'm not a US Citizen, or even in the US. These comments are written without reference or even care about local standards: it's goal is simply to extend those standards to new mediums..
Also, my job title at the time was PC Development/Support, which seemed to mean all the fun of being a developer, with all the hassle of doing end-user support.: /. engine (this is notes for rob+co, it'll probably get formulated an email later on): If you enter HTML attributes into a message box for posting, hitting preview resolves those attributes into single characters, but doesn't load the original code back into the text box. Thus, discussions using the < and & characters have to be done without the benefit of preview (especially some perl and certainly HTML).
Teaching yourself regexp (with the help of the camel book, thanks to Larry, Tom, and Randal) whilst being interrupted for trivia at 10 minute intervals is an overly sadistic torture.As for the problem with the
Just my 4c worth (inflation adjusted).
I was struggling at the time I wrote that to understand regexp, and I haven't felt the need to fix working code, as it has other bottlenecks way more serious than bad pattern-matching.
On an aside: if the Slashdot maintainers read this, could you please add support for HTML entities (the ones with those funky &'s in them: preview will sort let you but it is broken....
Where previously I had to settle for using something like s/<.*?>//g; to discard all tags, I can now pretend to be intelligent and search and discard seperate matched tags? Lots and lots of cool implications for HTML, CGI, and XML developers there.
Good thinking guys!
Commander Burrito is obviously a Rob Malda left too long alone with the salsa, ie all damp and pliable.
Big catch is, as it's magnetic based, it uses iron as an "toner" stlye media. The downside of that is it'd be only black and white for a while, and 220 dpi isn't really that great (and won't get you nicely varied greys either).
Still, I'm going to mentally file this under "If we can dream it, we can build it" and dig it out in a few years time.
I really like the idea of having ~zero thickness addressable media. Throw away your CRT (or even LCD) based monitor. Now your PC talks to the walls. Moving house would be a bit annoying though. (I have to paint/paper the wall before I can get the computer working again. No email for weeks (months, given me organisational skills) Playing Need For Speed/Quake etc on the bedroom wall seems like a worthwhile goal.....
It's almost a pity that the games on the Unreal engine ended up sucking.
Why is this ? Obviously because they're proprietary. If we hack/open the source algorithms for this equipment we can start to offer freedom of choice to listeners. I fail to see the point of having a continous, un-interruptable stream of audio if don't actually have any choice.
I don't actually live in continental America, so I don't have any chance of experiencing this, but good idea!
Alas, the canonisation of St Jon the creator has been lost in the Postel.
(Collapses into hysterical laughter)
But you have to bear in mind... I was on a computing course. This is a computing website.
If you either aren't a nerd, or don't like nerds you shouldn't be here. I reccommend you leave. You'll find you hands hurt less if you don't drag your knuckles on the ground like that.... (/FLAME)
Ever since Shirtcliffe (Yes, that's right. The dork that campaigned against electoral reform) retired as Chairman, and Rod Deane changed from CEO to Chairman, Telecom seem to be making more strange decisions. I have to wonder if they're trying to alienate the whole population. If that phone card thing didn't upset you, this will for sure!
Background to the phone cards (for foreigners):
Some months back Telecom discovered that all the nice ~sorta digital payphones they installed aren't Y2K compliant, and they're all going to have to be replaced. The thing is, these are magnetic card-based phones, and the new ones won't read the old cards. That card you have stashed in your wallet (for emergencies) is now just a hunka-plastic.
The outrage here was huge, and Telecom just said (and I'm paraphasing) "So what? Get over it! We know we never mentioned the possibility they might expire before, but they will now. Life's a bitch".
I have to suspect the new CEO is a few beers short of as six-pack.....
New Zealand's GST (currently at 12.5%) is charged on absolutely everything (although companies can claim it back). Prices listed on shop shelves include tax on the ticket (this seems to be for everything except computers and computer components, go figure). New Zealand's initial GST introduction (at 10%) was timed to coincide with the removal of a manufacturing tax, prices were supposed to stay the same.
Canada's GST, on the other hand is either 7% or 8% (I forget which, one was GST, the other was Provincial). There are exceptions on all sorts of things, only half of which seem to make sense (Children's clothing and certain food products, for examples, are GST free. A weird twist of nature mad 5 donuts include tax, but made 6 tax free. 6 donuts were cheaper than 5......). dry cleaning companies suddenly started selling expensive potatoes, with dry cleaning as a free service (and thus avoid tax).
This phone tax, however, is not government run. It is an ex-state company abusing it's monopoly presence (Telecom are the only local dial-tone supplier for most of the country). The government would have had more tact (especially as this is an election year).
Also, Telecom's management have just changed their chairs around. This is really a case of a new boy trying to make an impact.
For the the lazy/poor/librarily-challenged, his basic premise is that if we rely on computers too much, we forget about reasoning and other important things like that.
Cliff's earlier book "The Cuckoo's Egg" on his exploits to catch two West Germans trying to break into security systems is also entertaining.
In my mind this is the key that proves Microsoft simply don't get the whole Free Software thing. Linux doesn't need to be a threat.
People have expressed (here) worries that RedHat could become the next Microsoft, by capturing mind share. I'm often surprised the Microsoft haven't created a distribution themselves, the GPL definitely(IMHO) allows you do what ever you want with the source.
Think about it, a MS Linux would be attractive to the suits, albeit not to the tech-heads. Then X years down the track, the MPM (as opposed to RPM) format rules supreme.
The strength of Linux is it's diversity, but MS are still bigger than all the distributors. The fight is real, it is now. I feel Microsoft could still win (I don't want that, but they could).
As it is, my code is getting looser and looser (is that really a word) to the point while explaining bits to my supervisor (a PhD. equipped scientist, not computing) I have to gloss over the bits that look like line noise
"That line that says s/[\_[\. \,\?]//g; does have useful function, it does xxxx"
At least we're writing computer code that looks like computer code, we could all be writing CoBOL, RMS protect us from that....
The domains sucks.com and rules.com are not being used for this sort of purpose. sucks.com exhibits a "coming soon" sign, and rules.com seems to have been snaffled by a speculator/hosting company.
If I owned these domains I would be selling subdomains, and making lotsa dosh! I shudder to think of the money geeks would pay to get domains like microsoft.sucks.com, or linux.rules.com. People would probably play ~internic rates for subdomains there, IMHO....
Besides, it be much more fun to tease those who only sorta get the tech, but exploiting holes in their knowledge....
I just sent this letter to Steve Litt (editor of the magazine this list came from) and thought you might all be interested in it. I've just read through your "Where have all the heroes gone?" article (via SlashDot). Good job! I wonder though, why you started at so late a year.
My mind suggests a candidate I feel your list is sorely lacking: Ken, Dennis, and Brian (as one).
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, together, in 1969-70, created an operating system known as UNIX that forms the formation of many later operating systems today (certainly of Windows and Linux).
Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan designed a language that made many things possible. This language, called "C" was later used to rewrite the UNIX kernel (until then in assembler). For the first time (ASAIK) it was possible to develop operating systems in 3rd Generation code, rather than in machine language. By far the vast majority of software available today was either written or C (or in C derivatives, like C++), or in languages written in C (the source for Perl, VB etc is C/C++). C is truly the closest thing to a common language in computing today. If a platform can't compile C, it isn't really viable.
As for tomorrows heroes, heroism is only decided in hindsight. However, two candidates suggest themselves easily to me: Eric S. Raymond, and Jamie Zawinski.
Eric Raymond (ESR) is leading the popular front of envangelism for the free software community. This is a position that draws a lot of fire from all concerned.
Jamie Zawinksi (jwz) is the prime instigator (albeit armed with ESR's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay) of Netscape Corp.'s recent push to release their flagship product as open-source.
"Linux's less-mature setup infrastructure increases the up- front work required to deploy an application, but companies find the struggle worthwhile because Linux is more stable than Windows NT."
- Andrew Allison
I don't know about the rest of you, but personally, I'd prefer to choose good over easy every time. This is an intelligence thing. The intelligent would rather struggle than accept inferior solutions.