I think it's funny that/. points to a review that concludes that Netscape 4.7 is the best of the bunch, when the most reliable way I've found to crash Netscape 4.7 is to point it at http://slashdot.org. Something about the/. site just blows that sucker away. Then load the same page later and it loads just fine. Not just the front page, either. I run Netscape 4.61 just to cut down on the crashes, but when I hit the -REPLY- button to write this message the first time, Netscape traded itself in on a 10Mb core file.
What the heck is it about/. that crashes Netscape, anyway?
The Apple Newton was the most advanced piece of computer technology ever to hit the consumer market. It's application language, NewtonScript, was based on Self, a classless derivative of Smalltalk. That makes the Newton the closest thing going to Alan Kay's original vision of the Dynabook.
It was too big, too expen$ive, and Apple spent about $1.98 marketing it from first to last.
Half the time, when I use my 2100 on an airplane, it stops the stewardesses dead in their tracks. Every time I take my eMate down to the local coffeehouse to work on my novel, people come up and go ga-ga over it. When I show them that it isn't an iBook, costs about 1/3 as much as an iBook, is way lighter than an iBook and is instant-on, they want to know why they haven't seen it in stores. When I tell them it's been in the coffin for over two years, their jaws drop.
The Palm is a perfect device for its niche, but for me it's too small, too slow and too stupid. It's much harder to develop for, that's certain. And it outsold Newton eight ways from Sunday because the form factor was right and because Palm knows how to market.
The fact that Steve Jobs proved he was a big fat boob when the Newton was "Steved" is emotionally satisfying, but, sadly, was almost an afterthought. Newton might have survived if it was properly marketed - the numbers that leaked out of Newton, Inc. showed it was profitable way before it should have been - but that's history.
Newton cannot be reconstructed. Nothing on the market, not even a Psion, can do what a Newton can do. As a result, I've adopted a "bunker mentality". I have several 2100s, several 130s, and an eMate, and I plan to hang onto these and use them for the three to five years it'll take for someone to bring something better to market. For my needs, Palm isn't in the running.
Movies that haven't gone in front of the cameras are ephemeral as mayflies (and some of the ones that do make it that far die too), but one hard fact is that the Spiderman movie has moved along far enough to have signed Ian McKellan to play Magneto. That sure as heck got my attention. Made my eyes cross.
The folks who don't know anything about China say that Red Flag Linux will be closed-source by Chinese government mandate. People familiar with China say it's technically open, if politically closed, and that the first group are a bunch of noodnik know-nothings. Debate went rapidly downhill from there.
I'll point out one fact: Microsoft tried to enforce their trademark in China and not only lost, but created a firestorm by the very attempt.
How much luck do you think you're going to have enforcing GPL in a Chinese court?
Red Flag Linux is going to be as open or closed as the Chinese government wants it to be, and nothing any of the GPL fans say or do is going to matter one bit. China conforms to international trade law when it suits them, and it suits them when their trading partners have the economic clout to enforce it.
The open-source movement does not have that clout.
I take this as unalloyed good news. As far as I can tell the FCC was intended to regulate the use of the radio spectrum. It has had more and more stuff shuffled off onto it, and more and more of its critical decisions taken out of its hands by special-interest legislation in Congress.
Dave has always enjoyed being in the thick of things. It was one of his grad students (Dave Crocker) who, while at Rand, wrote RFC 822. Dave was one of the prime movers behind CSNET, which as far as I can tell was the first ISP...run with government seed money as a trial baloon to see if the Internet could be financially self-sufficient. Dave was not only on the board of directors, he contributed software which he'd had written for other purposes.
The reason that I'm heartened is that Dave isn't an expert in just one thing. He's one of the very few Renaissance men of the Internet, with a perspective far wider than most folks running around today. This is just the sort of person that the FCC needs. Those who think he should be elsewhere, where the "really interesting" stuff is happening, I think underestimate what the FCC is going to be doing (forced into doing) over the next few years.
This is a skirmish in a wider war, a war that's going to go on for a long, long time.
We live by the rule of law. Man, there are times when it hurts to say that. The Internet wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for the secret (and sometimes not-so-secret) admiration of many of its builders for the outlaw image. Except for Peter Neumann, of course. However, I live in a neighborhood where I'm glad the police saturate the streets, having had many personal belongings appropriated by other residents of the neighborhood in my absence, over the years.
But in any frontier, society arrives first and the law plays catch-up. These are the Good Old Days of the Internet, folks, and you should enjoy them while you can. Trademark law, copyright law, trade secret protection, contract law, all are having real, and in some cases severe, problems adapting to the new territory.
Eventually, all of this will get fixed. But it's going to get fixed in the light of what we do now, during the period of time when things don't work so good. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and the Internet violates so many of the assumptions under which the existing legal framework was constructed that sometimes it's hard to hear the packets whiz by for all the squeaking.
So when something like this comes up, I think it's a good idea to think about the situation not in terms of "big ugly bad corporation against innocent little guy", but in terms of: "Suppose I owned etoys.com? Suppose I owned etoy.com? Suppose I were a customer of one? Of the other?"
This might help provide a perspective on the real issues. Remember, ownership doesn't depend on how nasty the owner is. Our legal system is founded on the theory that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, even if you're a vegetarian.
Once you've gained that perspective...well, then it's time to beat up on the big ugly bad guy. Hopefully, with better weapons in your intellectual arsenal.
No one seems to have mentioned that this article is shot full of errors. The first one's in the first paragraph: BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. The company BSDI changed the D to Design, for their company name only.
Bill Joy didn't write free UNIX. He wrote a lot of code, but Sam Leffler, Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic et al. are not exactly slouches either. Not to mention the whole effort was overseen on a continuing basis by a design board of academics chosen by DARPA. You like the socket interface? Thank DARPA's board. They pounded Bill Joy really hard (probably for the first time in his career) until he "got it" that most of the brilliant things CSRG came up with originally had been tried and rejected by them severally at their own institutions. The Berkeley socket mechanism was the result of several go-rounds of this sort of thing.
Here's another. "When Berkeley stopped funding the project..." Hoo-hah. Berkeley never funded the project. DARPA did. They did it because they got tired of paying all of their research institutions in parallel just to support their computing environments: they wanted a stable base of Internet code that would be used by everybody, and they figured they'd pay for it just until commercial versions became viable. When the Internet took off the funding stopped. CSRG hung on for a year or two looking for other funding, didn't find any, and folded. There was a tag end of work there, by the way: 30,000 lines of OSI networking code (think X.25 & Co.) was inserted. I think it's probably gone by now, but it left its mark in the data structures, at least.
Then there's that amazing quotation: "In terms of sophistication, the BSD operating system is better than Linux. What flame-bait. This was definitely true in earlier days, but these days it's probably a push, for most applications. I believe that BSD may be better for truly huge server installations, but in comparison with the total installed base, this isn't a very high percentage.
Looking back, I think the history of Linux and BSD can be compared with current theories of the early universe. Very small things result in huge differences later on. Frankly, I don't think the preponderance of Linux over BSD has squat to do with licenses. The BSD system was designed in an encumbered environment, with everyone under license. It took two years in court to get out from under the AT&T license, which was the exact opposite of free software ("You can exchange software freely!...so long as the other guy has this license too."). Those two years were all it took to give Linux the edge. Linux was at that time clearly less stable than BSD, which had had fifteen years to get the kinks out. But Linux was freely available and BSD wasn't. That made all the difference. I daresay that in those days the only contribution of the GPL (and it was a minimal contribution) was negative. Several largish institutions (including, as I recall, Purdue University) wouldn't let GPL software onto their campuses because their lawyers got wind of the GPL, read it, said, "We have no idea what this would really mean in court. Don't you dare go there." And, let's face it, while you can't have a software revolution without thousands of individuals pushing things at a grass-roots level, that isn't enough. Big institutions have to pick it up and support it, too, or the revolution doesn't happen. The GPL has, arguably, been of assistance in preventing some large corporations from forking private versions of Linux, but it has been of no assistance in convincing large institutions to adopt the software in the first place. Quite the reverse.
I grew up in a BSD world. (Truth in advertising: I was on that DARPA board.) I recommend FreeBSD for really large server applications. For smaller outfits, and for desktops, I recommend Linux enthusiastically. Not for the GPL, on which I'm neutral (now THAT makes me a rarity, I think!), but for the ease of acquisition, the base of available software, and the size of the support community. (My understanding is that ease of installation for many of the Linux distributions has a ways to go yet, at least compared to FreeBSD.)
Those actively involved in development know that GPL or not, Linux and the BSD movement trade software back and forth all the time, freely, openly, and in an atmosphere of mutual support. The bigots for one side or the other are, in the main, out of the loop. I hope it stays that way.
I've seen all the Bond films first run. I believe Q appeared in more films than anyone else...all but two, I hear.
Desmond Llewelyn was one of a vanishing breed, the old-line British stage actor with Shakespearean training. Britain is still producing them, viz. Kenneth Branaugh, but they're becoming increasingly rare. I was thinking, just as the latest film was released, that it would be interesting to see Llewelyn cast in some other role, against type.
Now I'll never see it. But my, what a body of work to leave behind. And what an "escape plan". *sigh*
I got copies of the Lions books when I was working at The Rand Corporation, the first commercial licensee of UNIX. We did a lot of userland stuff, some of which is still around (like MH). However, we were equally active in kernel-whacking, and invented things equivalent to named pipes, extremely buffed-up disk drivers, and a truckload of networking code.
The Lions books were a godsend. I'd learned UNIX by reading the source to Version 5 back at the U. of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Version 5 had no comments, except for one or two in the assembly-language assist, locore.s. Version 6 had comments! Wonderful! But the Lions books were a huge help in keeping us on track, and filled in an awful lot of background.
My originals remain at Rand. There's always the samizdat copies, but it's nice that they're in print again.
I never got to meet John Lions, but he was a huge help, at least to our corner of the early UNIX world.
FreeBSD does not intend to displace Linux. It represents a choice in the market, not a competitor aiming to crush the competition. It is currently most popular among those who run large servers, and the tools for mounting large servers do run as native ports.
However, it is a strongly stated goal of FreeBSD to be binary-compatible with Linux to the greatest extent possible, and I think this article indicates that FreeBSD is far along the path to that goal. Again, the aim is maximum freedom of choice, which is why I believe that the FreeBSD camp sees the port of the Debian user-space software to a FreeBSD kernel as a good thing.
It is not that FreeBSD wants to displace Linux on the desktop. It is that FreeBSD wants to support those who want to run FreeBSD on their desktops, without penalizing them for choosing something other than Linux.
Futurists are just never right. I mean, never. The only spot-on predictions I can think of offhand came from people who were just grotting over the facts and came up with something - they were labeled 'futurists' after the fact.
What futurists come up with sounds plausible because their scenarios allow for the interplay of a few more factors than we generally allow ourselves to play with when we daydream. This air of verisimilitude breaks down when confronted with the real world's blizzard of interacting effects.
Take personal fliers. When you read about it in Popular Science it sounds reasonable enough: you avoid poky ground traffic and zip from here to there. Economies of scale would allow anyone to afford one, just like a car.
We still don't have 'em. The energy budget just isn't there - they still cost too much to fly - and besides, The Vision doesn't allow for what will happen when one comes crashing down into a neighborhood. At least autos mostly only crash into other autos. Only extraordinarily do they crash into living rooms. Not so personal fliers.
This makes it sound like futurism is a useless occupation. Not so. It at least provokes valuable discussion. Epcot Center, the subject of a bunch of use and abuse on/. recently, is a prime example. Many of the arguments against it, why it's a failure, etc., are arguments against it, not as an example of successful or failed futurism, but against the vision of the future that it represents: that there are fundamental flaws in that vision, which we need to scramble to avoid in building the real future. Similarly, Buckminster Fuller's designs arent universal today. We have no Dymaxion Cars, geodesic domes are prevalent only in certain specific arenas, such as highway equipment maintenance huts. Nevertheless, his way of looking at the world, and the principles behind his designs, have influenced a generation not just of futurists, but of actual designers.
It isn't the confection that's important, but the flavor is.
Has anybody ever notice how the nerds in Star Wars are like nerds everywhere else, but the computer stuff is all different? I don't mean just more advanced, I mean different. We're good at tracking trends in the industry, but we're terrible at predicting sea changes. Who knew IBM was going to crash?
We're in the middle of doing it again, it seems. Microsoft is being pulled down. Linux is in a good position to change it, but who knows how it'll fall out, specifically? IBM turns into General Electric, Microsoft crashes like IBM, and Red Hat turns into Redmond Hat? Could be, could be.
So let's take a look. We need someone emblematic of that sort of Brave New World to play 19-year-old Anakin. He's got to be youthful, presentable, dynamic, fiercely intelligent, someone people will sit up and pay attention to.
I nominate Linus Torvalds.
Here are his qualifications:
1) He's well-spoken. Sure, he has a slight accent. But Anakin's mother had an accent. The actress was very worried about this but Lucas told her not to worry: "You're from the European part of the planet."
2) He's from Finland. Anybody seen Finland? He qualifies for work on the ice planet Hoth better than anybody else I can think of.
3) He could fix R2D2.
4) He could out-talk C3PO.
5) If anybody's been tempted by circumstance to go Darth Vader, it's him. ""
It's true that IBM mainframe hardware is ungodly complex, but this wouldn't be the first version of UNIX to run on it. Amdahl created UTX for the S/370 architecture many years ago. I taught a course on UNIX (back when that wasn't a laughable notion) to some folks who'd bought one of these. Amdahl had a full-screen half-duplex editor that ran on 3270s. Pretty amazing. Typing 'ls' on a 3720 and having file listings come up was even more amazing.
Then on other mainframes there's UNICOS and whatever they call the flavor of UNIX that runs on Crays.
It's a big piece of work but it certainly isn't out of the question. IBM ignored the Next Big Thing once and it cost them big-time: they're no longer king of the hill. If (as many/.ers take as an article of religious faith) Linux is the Next Big Thing, it's not out of the question that IBM would have one or two projects on the back burner, just in case.
Seems to me that the Seti@Home people are caught between a rock and a hard place. In order to attract lots of cycles, they've made a contest out of it. That's what posting team rankings on number of results returned amounts to, after all. And that inflames the folks who know they could rise in the rankings if only they could optimize their clients.
On the other hand, they prize uniformity of results over speed. Hmmmm.
Well, if they already have too many volunteers, the answer is simple: dump the contest and make it a lottery with one winner. No more rankings, no more teams. Just tap the guy who finds the aliens.
All the contesters will drop out and go back to cracking RC5. The hard core will remain, consisting of the ones who agree that uniformity is more important than speed, together with the ones who seriously want to mess with the project. There'll still be the need for security but at least most of the results will be consistent.
Some folks want Gutenberg to move past ASCII and become more web-friendly, more non-English-language friendly, more Y2K-friendly, whatever. I happen to believe they're on the right track. They are trying to provide a baseline of texts which can be adapted to specific purposes.
That's how I use 'em. I've downloaded a few such texts and made them into Newton books, which I put on my Web site. (I'm a retro-geek. I prefer Newton to Palm.) I couldn't do that with an HTML page, or at least, not as easily.
The one thing I found in doing this myself is that some Gutenberg texts, at least, aren't error-free, even if they have been proofread. I've proofed two such books so far and I h've had to correct around a dozen errors in each. Now, the books I'm converting are by a British writer named Ernest Bramah who's completely obscure today. I happen to have original editions in hardback, but with a writer as obscure as Bramah, there are damn few of us out here with original editions to check. I could wish the Gutenberg proofing process were a little more thorough. There isn't even a central place to report such errors to: the Gutenberg help line just told me to forward the corrections to the original text provider, which I did.
On the other hand it does make me feel like I'm actually giving something back.
Today, I type this in a room with hardwood floors, in a building older than my parents. Outside, I see asphalt, cars, and people braced against the cold. They wear natural-seeming fabrics, not aluminum foil Intel bunny suits.
I think this is due to unintended consequences. An ubergeek interpretation would be that the sociology of Disney's thinking failed to take complexity theory into account.
We don't wear futuristing metal foil bunny suits because they're effing uncomfortable. We do wear futuristic materials, but they look and act like natural ones, because those work better.
We don't live in places like Disney's Epcot model because people don't want to live in places like that. Every fanciful view of the future looks like that model because they look pretty from a distance. They have living and working quarters bunched together like hives, and then lots of big empty parks to satisfy people's desires for open space. Well, guess what? People want to live in the parks! So we have the big downtown cores, but we also have lots and lots and lots of suburbs full of green lawns: all the parks, subdivided, with everyone getting his own tiny piece of the park.
The end of the first millenium
on
The Year 1000
·
· Score: 1
I wrote a column about Millenialism and the upsurge of millenial cults some time back, and called up an old college friend of mine, Prof. Steven Muhlberger of the University of Ipissing, for some perspective. He is a medieval scholar, and was kind enough to fill my ear for some time.
His take on the matter is that there was enough unrest all throughout Europe at the end of the first millenium that it is difficult to make any general statements with certainty. He believes that there is some evidence that there were millenial cults back then, but that times were so generally rotten everywhere that most people had other things to worry about.
He did say that there is evidence being uncovered of late that our Christian calendar was developed around 600 A.D. as an anti-millenial device; that according to at least one of the calendars in general use, the timetable given in the Book of Revelations could be regarded as just about expired. The Church was very much against Millenialism because people who are expecting the imminent end of the world do not a) harvest crops, b) sell crops, or c) use the money to tithe to the Church. Much badness. Therefore, they put it out that years really should be numbered starting with the birth of Christ, which put us at a nice safe 600 A.D. and nowhere near the Millenium.
400 years later, of course, this came back and bit them in the tuchus, but by this time the calendar was so firmly entrenched that they couldn't futz with it again. Besides, there was enough trouble from the Knights Chevalier (I think) and others that they weren't about to borrow more trouble.
This millenium is peachy-keen compared with the last one.
I visited Epcot Center a number of years back, knowing nothing of Disney's original vision for Epcot Center. Partway through my first day there I noticed something very odd. Most of the pavilions were of the people-mover variety which I have been known to characterize as "slow rides to nowhere for people with IQs in the single digits." Then there was the Universal Products pavilion The Living Seas. I was staggered by that place. Gigantic donut-shaped Lexan salt-water tank several stories high. You walk right through the middle of it.
I later asked someone who was presumably in the know, why this pavilion was such a technological triumph and all the others were kiddie rides. It was explained to me that Disney's original conception of Epcot was of a permanent World's Fair, with each company putting its major technological triumphs on display. Not just dioramas, but real technology. However, there was a disagreement about how that was to be done. Disney wanted the companies to pay for the big displays, and the companies wanted Disney to pay for them. When it became clear that the companies were the stuckees, only Universal came through and did it right; everyone else built dioramas and people movers.
Enigma was broken by a machine (or set of machines) called the Bombe. A more complex wheel-cypher machine, called the Lorentz, was broken using Colossus. I hope to heck they show the rebuilt Colossus that Tony Sale put together at Bletchley Park. I had the privilege of standing in the middle of that thing when Tony turned it on around me. It runs on +400 volts.
That was one of the high points of my professional career.
People's perceptions are so odd. They hate Microsoft. They hate MS Office. They hate Word.
On the other hand, everyone loves Xerox PARC. They have so many neat toys. They invented personal computers and local area networks. They had this wonderful windowing technology that Apple stole. They had Smalltalk. They had the Bravo editor, just about the first windowing editor.
The funny thing is that I have been given to understand that the first version of Word was based on Bravo. And once I heard that and took a dispassionate look, I was aghast. Guess what? Word does look'n'feel somewhat like Bravo!
It's mighty scary. I personally am glad to see commercial office suite software on FreeBSD because that's what I run. I run it because I have a personal fondness for it, being a BSD user since 3BSD for the VAX. I know it and am comfortable with it, and I'll be happy to be able to do stuff on FreeBSD that I use Lotus SmartSuite for under Windows (I don't run Office either).
But really, I don't think FreeBSD is going to do much in the desktop market. Unless there are strong reasons for running it on the desktop, I think its future lies mostly in serverland. As far as desktop users can tell, Linux and FreeBSD are sort of a push, and Linux has a lot more how-to-do-it books on the market. (Except in Japan, where I hear there are just scads of FreeBSD books!)
And that doesn't matter either. It's a good thing to have tools available on servers. So, hurrah for Applixware. I'm looking forward to it. I just hope it turns out to be usable and stable. I wasn't too happy by that Forest Service guy's experiences. I hope that was an anomaly.
I love this. As far as I know, the most recently created guild is the Worshipful Company of Data Processors, whose flag in the London Guild Hall has as its emblem a big honking 9-track tape drive.
I confidently look forward to the rapid approval of the guild charter of the Worshipful Company of Open Source Developers...whose emblem is a patchwork of the flags of all the other guilds.
Some folks may recall the Plato computer-based education system at the U. of Illinois in Shampoo-Banana. Plato IV introduced a lot of people to the notion of truly large numbers of players in an on-line game. It also taught some people some stuff.
Plato IV's predecessor, Plato III, ran on a CDC 1604 or 1800 or whatever. Core memory, cathedral doors, built like a bank vault. 18-bit machine, if I remember correctly.
Plato was housed in CERL, the Computer-based Education Research Lab, which in turn was housed in a very old building. The building air conditioner was the same one which had cooled the lab in that building that worked on radar during WW II. When it finally blew up, parts had been unavailable for decades. An entire new unit had to be ordered. This being a university (i.e. zero clout), delivery time was quoted in months.
Obviously no project could survive months of downtime. Now, it happens that the project director, Dr. Donald Bitzer, had his office across the hall from the machine room. So, a square tunnel was constructed of wooden lathes and plastic sheeting, about two and a half feet on a side. The CPU's cathedral doors were opened, exposing the core memory. The tunnel started flush against the face of the machine, ran across the machine room, out the door, across the hall (!), through Dr. Bitzer's office, and straight to his window.
It worked. The machine ran this way for over a month.
I've been involved with several projects of this nature. Most folks here have been touting the benefits of one toolset or another, or one abstraction or another.
I've seen some very nifty toolsets. We've invented one or two ourselves - in at least one case, what we came up with is better than I've ever seen commercially, or open source. But, like any other toolset, it's geared toward only one sort of problem.
"Distributed computing" covers a lot of ground. If you need lots of transactions in an object-oriented framework, then yes, CORBA is worth a good hard look. If, on the other hand, you want to rework existing applications so that they trade data over a network, then a software bus architecture is something to look at. We implemented one of these, and it allowed us to change from a Smalltalk-based GUI to a C++/Interviews-based GUI without changing a single line of code in the back-end application. But this architecture was useful only because the problem could be decomposed into fairly large lumps with fairly high-level, low-volume traffic between them. An end-to-end heavy transaction system would lose big with this architecture.
So, tell us a little bit about the application and its architecture, and you might get more useful information (less flamage would be too much to hope for around here:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, SecureCRT from VanDyke implements SSH protocol as well as Telnet. Very good terminal emulator.
I think it's funny that /. points to a review that concludes that Netscape 4.7 is the best of the bunch, when the most reliable way I've found to crash Netscape 4.7 is to point it at http://slashdot.org. Something about the /. site just blows that sucker away. Then load the same page later and it loads just fine. Not just the front page, either. I run Netscape 4.61 just to cut down on the crashes, but when I hit the -REPLY- button to write this message the first time, Netscape traded itself in on a 10Mb core file.
/. that crashes Netscape, anyway?
What the heck is it about
Ooops. Who can keep these villains straight?
(Yeah, yeah: YOU can.)
The Apple Newton was the most advanced piece of computer technology ever to hit the consumer market. It's application language, NewtonScript, was based on Self, a classless derivative of Smalltalk. That makes the Newton the closest thing going to Alan Kay's original vision of the Dynabook.
It was too big, too expen$ive, and Apple spent about $1.98 marketing it from first to last.
Half the time, when I use my 2100 on an airplane, it stops the stewardesses dead in their tracks. Every time I take my eMate down to the local coffeehouse to work on my novel, people come up and go ga-ga over it. When I show them that it isn't an iBook, costs about 1/3 as much as an iBook, is way lighter than an iBook and is instant-on, they want to know why they haven't seen it in stores. When I tell them it's been in the coffin for over two years, their jaws drop.
The Palm is a perfect device for its niche, but for me it's too small, too slow and too stupid. It's much harder to develop for, that's certain. And it outsold Newton eight ways from Sunday because the form factor was right and because Palm knows how to market.
The fact that Steve Jobs proved he was a big fat boob when the Newton was "Steved" is emotionally satisfying, but, sadly, was almost an afterthought. Newton might have survived if it was properly marketed - the numbers that leaked out of Newton, Inc. showed it was profitable way before it should have been - but that's history.
Newton cannot be reconstructed. Nothing on the market, not even a Psion, can do what a Newton can do. As a result, I've adopted a "bunker mentality". I have several 2100s, several 130s, and an eMate, and I plan to hang onto these and use them for the three to five years it'll take for someone to bring something better to market. For my needs, Palm isn't in the running.
Movies that haven't gone in front of the cameras are ephemeral as mayflies (and some of the ones that do make it that far die too), but one hard fact is that the Spiderman movie has moved along far enough to have signed Ian McKellan to play Magneto. That sure as heck got my attention. Made my eyes cross.
The folks who don't know anything about China say that Red Flag Linux will be closed-source by Chinese government mandate. People familiar with China say it's technically open, if politically closed, and that the first group are a bunch of noodnik know-nothings. Debate went rapidly downhill from there.
I'll point out one fact: Microsoft tried to enforce their trademark in China and not only lost, but created a firestorm by the very attempt.
How much luck do you think you're going to have enforcing GPL in a Chinese court?
Red Flag Linux is going to be as open or closed as the Chinese government wants it to be, and nothing any of the GPL fans say or do is going to matter one bit. China conforms to international trade law when it suits them, and it suits them when their trading partners have the economic clout to enforce it.
The open-source movement does not have that clout.
I take this as unalloyed good news. As far as I can tell the FCC was intended to regulate the use of the radio spectrum. It has had more and more stuff shuffled off onto it, and more and more of its critical decisions taken out of its hands by special-interest legislation in Congress.
Dave has always enjoyed being in the thick of things. It was one of his grad students (Dave Crocker) who, while at Rand, wrote RFC 822. Dave was one of the prime movers behind CSNET, which as far as I can tell was the first ISP...run with government seed money as a trial baloon to see if the Internet could be financially self-sufficient. Dave was not only on the board of directors, he contributed software which he'd had written for other purposes.
The reason that I'm heartened is that Dave isn't an expert in just one thing. He's one of the very few Renaissance men of the Internet, with a perspective far wider than most folks running around today. This is just the sort of person that the FCC needs. Those who think he should be elsewhere, where the "really interesting" stuff is happening, I think underestimate what the FCC is going to be doing (forced into doing) over the next few years.
This is a skirmish in a wider war, a war that's going to go on for a long, long time.
We live by the rule of law. Man, there are times when it hurts to say that. The Internet wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for the secret (and sometimes not-so-secret) admiration of many of its builders for the outlaw image. Except for Peter Neumann, of course. However, I live in a neighborhood where I'm glad the police saturate the streets, having had many personal belongings appropriated by other residents of the neighborhood in my absence, over the years.
But in any frontier, society arrives first and the law plays catch-up. These are the Good Old Days of the Internet, folks, and you should enjoy them while you can. Trademark law, copyright law, trade secret protection, contract law, all are having real, and in some cases severe, problems adapting to the new territory.
Eventually, all of this will get fixed. But it's going to get fixed in the light of what we do now, during the period of time when things don't work so good. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and the Internet violates so many of the assumptions under which the existing legal framework was constructed that sometimes it's hard to hear the packets whiz by for all the squeaking.
So when something like this comes up, I think it's a good idea to think about the situation not in terms of "big ugly bad corporation against innocent little guy", but in terms of: "Suppose I owned etoys.com? Suppose I owned etoy.com? Suppose I were a customer of one? Of the other?"
This might help provide a perspective on the real issues. Remember, ownership doesn't depend on how nasty the owner is. Our legal system is founded on the theory that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, even if you're a vegetarian.
Once you've gained that perspective...well, then it's time to beat up on the big ugly bad guy. Hopefully, with better weapons in your intellectual arsenal.
No one seems to have mentioned that this article is shot full of errors. The first one's in the first paragraph: BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. The company BSDI changed the D to Design, for their company name only.
...so long as the other guy has this license too."). Those two years were all it took to give Linux the edge. Linux was at that time clearly less stable than BSD, which had had fifteen years to get the kinks out. But Linux was freely available and BSD wasn't. That made all the difference. I daresay that in those days the only contribution of the GPL (and it was a minimal contribution) was negative. Several largish institutions (including, as I recall, Purdue University) wouldn't let GPL software onto their campuses because their lawyers got wind of the GPL, read it, said, "We have no idea what this would really mean in court. Don't you dare go there." And, let's face it, while you can't have a software revolution without thousands of individuals pushing things at a grass-roots level, that isn't enough. Big institutions have to pick it up and support it, too, or the revolution doesn't happen. The GPL has, arguably, been of assistance in preventing some large corporations from forking private versions of Linux, but it has been of no assistance in convincing large institutions to adopt the software in the first place. Quite the reverse.
Bill Joy didn't write free UNIX. He wrote a lot of code, but Sam Leffler, Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic et al. are not exactly slouches either. Not to mention the whole effort was overseen on a continuing basis by a design board of academics chosen by DARPA. You like the socket interface? Thank DARPA's board. They pounded Bill Joy really hard (probably for the first time in his career) until he "got it" that most of the brilliant things CSRG came up with originally had been tried and rejected by them severally at their own institutions. The Berkeley socket mechanism was the result of several go-rounds of this sort of thing.
Here's another. "When Berkeley stopped funding the project..." Hoo-hah. Berkeley never funded the project. DARPA did. They did it because they got tired of paying all of their research institutions in parallel just to support their computing environments: they wanted a stable base of Internet code that would be used by everybody, and they figured they'd pay for it just until commercial versions became viable. When the Internet took off the funding stopped. CSRG hung on for a year or two looking for other funding, didn't find any, and folded. There was a tag end of work there, by the way: 30,000 lines of OSI networking code (think X.25 & Co.) was inserted. I think it's probably gone by now, but it left its mark in the data structures, at least.
Then there's that amazing quotation: "In terms of sophistication, the BSD operating system is better than Linux. What flame-bait. This was definitely true in earlier days, but these days it's probably a push, for most applications. I believe that BSD may be better for truly huge server installations, but in comparison with the total installed base, this isn't a very high percentage.
Looking back, I think the history of Linux and BSD can be compared with current theories of the early universe. Very small things result in huge differences later on. Frankly, I don't think the preponderance of Linux over BSD has squat to do with licenses. The BSD system was designed in an encumbered environment, with everyone under license. It took two years in court to get out from under the AT&T license, which was the exact opposite of free software ("You can exchange software freely!
I grew up in a BSD world. (Truth in advertising: I was on that DARPA board.) I recommend FreeBSD for really large server applications. For smaller outfits, and for desktops, I recommend Linux enthusiastically. Not for the GPL, on which I'm neutral (now THAT makes me a rarity, I think!), but for the ease of acquisition, the base of available software, and the size of the support community. (My understanding is that ease of installation for many of the Linux distributions has a ways to go yet, at least compared to FreeBSD.)
Those actively involved in development know that GPL or not, Linux and the BSD movement trade software back and forth all the time, freely, openly, and in an atmosphere of mutual support. The bigots for one side or the other are, in the main, out of the loop. I hope it stays that way.
I've seen all the Bond films first run. I believe Q appeared in more films than anyone else...all but two, I hear.
Desmond Llewelyn was one of a vanishing breed, the old-line British stage actor with Shakespearean training. Britain is still producing them, viz. Kenneth Branaugh, but they're becoming increasingly rare. I was thinking, just as the latest film was released, that it would be interesting to see Llewelyn cast in some other role, against type.
Now I'll never see it. But my, what a body of work to leave behind. And what an "escape plan". *sigh*
I got copies of the Lions books when I was working at The Rand Corporation, the first commercial licensee of UNIX. We did a lot of userland stuff, some of which is still around (like MH). However, we were equally active in kernel-whacking, and invented things equivalent to named pipes, extremely buffed-up disk drivers, and a truckload of networking code.
The Lions books were a godsend. I'd learned UNIX by reading the source to Version 5 back at the U. of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Version 5 had no comments, except for one or two in the assembly-language assist, locore.s. Version 6 had comments! Wonderful! But the Lions books were a huge help in keeping us on track, and filled in an awful lot of background.
My originals remain at Rand. There's always the samizdat copies, but it's nice that they're in print again.
I never got to meet John Lions, but he was a huge help, at least to our corner of the early UNIX world.
Mike O'Brien
FreeBSD does not intend to displace Linux. It represents a choice in the market, not a competitor aiming to crush the competition. It is currently most popular among those who run large servers, and the tools for mounting large servers do run as native ports.
However, it is a strongly stated goal of FreeBSD to be binary-compatible with Linux to the greatest extent possible, and I think this article indicates that FreeBSD is far along the path to that goal. Again, the aim is maximum freedom of choice, which is why I believe that the FreeBSD camp sees the port of the Debian user-space software to a FreeBSD kernel as a good thing.
It is not that FreeBSD wants to displace Linux on the desktop. It is that FreeBSD wants to support those who want to run FreeBSD on their desktops, without penalizing them for choosing something other than Linux.
Futurists are just never right. I mean, never. The only spot-on predictions I can think of offhand came from people who were just grotting over the facts and came up with something - they were labeled 'futurists' after the fact.
/. recently, is a prime example. Many of the arguments against it, why it's a failure, etc., are arguments against it, not as an example of successful or failed futurism, but against the vision of the future that it represents: that there are fundamental flaws in that vision, which we need to scramble to avoid in building the real future. Similarly, Buckminster Fuller's designs arent universal today. We have no Dymaxion Cars, geodesic domes are prevalent only in certain specific arenas, such as highway equipment maintenance huts. Nevertheless, his way of looking at the world, and the principles behind his designs, have influenced a generation not just of futurists, but of actual designers.
What futurists come up with sounds plausible because their scenarios allow for the interplay of a few more factors than we generally allow ourselves to play with when we daydream. This air of verisimilitude breaks down when confronted with the real world's blizzard of interacting effects.
Take personal fliers. When you read about it in Popular Science it sounds reasonable enough: you avoid poky ground traffic and zip from here to there. Economies of scale would allow anyone to afford one, just like a car.
We still don't have 'em. The energy budget just isn't there - they still cost too much to fly - and besides, The Vision doesn't allow for what will happen when one comes crashing down into a neighborhood. At least autos mostly only crash into other autos. Only extraordinarily do they crash into living rooms. Not so personal fliers.
This makes it sound like futurism is a useless occupation. Not so. It at least provokes valuable discussion. Epcot Center, the subject of a bunch of use and abuse on
It isn't the confection that's important, but the flavor is.
Has anybody ever notice how the nerds in Star Wars are like nerds everywhere else, but the computer stuff is all different? I don't mean just more advanced, I mean different. We're good at tracking trends in the industry, but we're terrible at predicting sea changes. Who knew IBM was going to crash?
We're in the middle of doing it again, it seems. Microsoft is being pulled down. Linux is in a good position to change it, but who knows how it'll fall out, specifically? IBM turns into General Electric, Microsoft crashes like IBM, and Red Hat turns into Redmond Hat? Could be, could be.
So let's take a look. We need someone emblematic of that sort of Brave New World to play 19-year-old Anakin. He's got to be youthful, presentable, dynamic, fiercely intelligent, someone people will sit up and pay attention to.
I nominate Linus Torvalds.
Here are his qualifications:
1) He's well-spoken. Sure, he has a slight accent. But Anakin's mother had an accent. The actress was very worried about this but Lucas told her not to worry: "You're from the European part of the planet."
2) He's from Finland. Anybody seen Finland? He qualifies for work on the ice planet Hoth better than anybody else I can think of.
3) He could fix R2D2.
4) He could out-talk C3PO.
5) If anybody's been tempted by circumstance to go Darth Vader, it's him. ""
It's true that IBM mainframe hardware is ungodly complex, but this wouldn't be the first version of UNIX to run on it. Amdahl created UTX for the S/370 architecture many years ago. I taught a course on UNIX (back when that wasn't a laughable notion) to some folks who'd bought one of these. Amdahl had a full-screen half-duplex editor that ran on 3270s. Pretty amazing. Typing 'ls' on a 3720 and having file listings come up was even more amazing.
/.ers take as an article of religious faith) Linux is the Next Big Thing, it's not out of the question that IBM would have one or two projects on the back burner, just in case.
Then on other mainframes there's UNICOS and whatever they call the flavor of UNIX that runs on Crays.
It's a big piece of work but it certainly isn't out of the question. IBM ignored the Next Big Thing once and it cost them big-time: they're no longer king of the hill. If (as many
Seems to me that the Seti@Home people are caught between a rock and a hard place. In order to attract lots of cycles, they've made a contest out of it. That's what posting team rankings on number of results returned amounts to, after all. And that inflames the folks who know they could rise in the rankings if only they could optimize their clients.
On the other hand, they prize uniformity of results over speed. Hmmmm.
Well, if they already have too many volunteers, the answer is simple: dump the contest and make it a lottery with one winner. No more rankings, no more teams. Just tap the guy who finds the aliens.
All the contesters will drop out and go back to cracking RC5. The hard core will remain, consisting of the ones who agree that uniformity is more important than speed, together with the ones who seriously want to mess with the project. There'll still be the need for security but at least most of the results will be consistent.
Some folks want Gutenberg to move past ASCII and become more web-friendly, more non-English-language friendly, more Y2K-friendly, whatever. I happen to believe they're on the right track. They are trying to provide a baseline of texts which can be adapted to specific purposes.
That's how I use 'em. I've downloaded a few such texts and made them into Newton books, which I put on my Web site. (I'm a retro-geek. I prefer Newton to Palm.) I couldn't do that with an HTML page, or at least, not as easily.
The one thing I found in doing this myself is that some Gutenberg texts, at least, aren't error-free, even if they have been proofread. I've proofed two such books so far and I h've had to correct around a dozen errors in each. Now, the books I'm converting are by a British writer named Ernest Bramah who's completely obscure today. I happen to have original editions in hardback, but with a writer as obscure as Bramah, there are damn few of us out here with original editions to check. I could wish the Gutenberg proofing process were a little more thorough. There isn't even a central place to report such errors to: the Gutenberg help line just told me to forward the corrections to the original text provider, which I did.
On the other hand it does make me feel like I'm actually giving something back.
Today, I type this in a room with hardwood floors, in a building older than my parents. Outside, I see asphalt, cars, and people braced against the cold. They wear natural-seeming fabrics, not aluminum foil Intel bunny suits.
I think this is due to unintended consequences. An ubergeek interpretation would be that the sociology of Disney's thinking failed to take complexity theory into account.
We don't wear futuristing metal foil bunny suits because they're effing uncomfortable. We do wear futuristic materials, but they look and act like natural ones, because those work better.
We don't live in places like Disney's Epcot model because people don't want to live in places like that. Every fanciful view of the future looks like that model because they look pretty from a distance. They have living and working quarters bunched together like hives, and then lots of big empty parks to satisfy people's desires for open space. Well, guess what? People want to live in the parks! So we have the big downtown cores, but we also have lots and lots and lots of suburbs full of green lawns: all the parks, subdivided, with everyone getting his own tiny piece of the park.
I wrote a column about Millenialism and the upsurge of millenial cults some time back, and called up an old college friend of mine, Prof. Steven Muhlberger of the University of Ipissing, for some perspective. He is a medieval scholar, and was kind enough to fill my ear for some time.
His take on the matter is that there was enough unrest all throughout Europe at the end of the first millenium that it is difficult to make any general statements with certainty. He believes that there is some evidence that there were millenial cults back then, but that times were so generally rotten everywhere that most people had other things to worry about.
He did say that there is evidence being uncovered of late that our Christian calendar was developed around 600 A.D. as an anti-millenial device; that according to at least one of the calendars in general use, the timetable given in the Book of Revelations could be regarded as just about expired. The Church was very much against Millenialism because people who are expecting the imminent end of the world do not a) harvest crops, b) sell crops, or c) use the money to tithe to the Church. Much badness. Therefore, they put it out that years really should be numbered starting with the birth of Christ, which put us at a nice safe 600 A.D. and nowhere near the Millenium.
400 years later, of course, this came back and bit them in the tuchus, but by this time the calendar was so firmly entrenched that they couldn't futz with it again. Besides, there was enough trouble from the Knights Chevalier (I think) and others that they weren't about to borrow more trouble.
This millenium is peachy-keen compared with the last one.
I visited Epcot Center a number of years back, knowing nothing of Disney's original vision for Epcot Center. Partway through my first day there I noticed something very odd. Most of the pavilions were of the people-mover variety which I have been known to characterize as "slow rides to nowhere for people with IQs in the single digits." Then there was the Universal Products pavilion The Living Seas. I was staggered by that place. Gigantic donut-shaped Lexan salt-water tank several stories high. You walk right through the middle of it.
I later asked someone who was presumably in the know, why this pavilion was such a technological triumph and all the others were kiddie rides. It was explained to me that Disney's original conception of Epcot was of a permanent World's Fair, with each company putting its major technological triumphs on display. Not just dioramas, but real technology. However, there was a disagreement about how that was to be done. Disney wanted the companies to pay for the big displays, and the companies wanted Disney to pay for them. When it became clear that the companies were the stuckees, only Universal came through and did it right; everyone else built dioramas and people movers.
Enigma was broken by a machine (or set of machines) called the Bombe. A more complex wheel-cypher machine, called the Lorentz, was broken using Colossus. I hope to heck they show the rebuilt Colossus that Tony Sale put together at Bletchley Park. I had the privilege of standing in the middle of that thing when Tony turned it on around me. It runs on +400 volts.
That was one of the high points of my professional career.
People's perceptions are so odd. They hate Microsoft. They hate MS Office. They hate Word.
On the other hand, everyone loves Xerox PARC. They have so many neat toys. They invented personal computers and local area networks. They had this wonderful windowing technology that Apple stole. They had Smalltalk. They had the Bravo editor, just about the first windowing editor.
The funny thing is that I have been given to understand that the first version of Word was based on Bravo. And once I heard that and took a dispassionate look, I was aghast. Guess what? Word does look'n'feel somewhat like Bravo!
It's mighty scary. I personally am glad to see commercial office suite software on FreeBSD because that's what I run. I run it because I have a personal fondness for it, being a BSD user since 3BSD for the VAX. I know it and am comfortable with it, and I'll be happy to be able to do stuff on FreeBSD that I use Lotus SmartSuite for under Windows (I don't run Office either).
But really, I don't think FreeBSD is going to do much in the desktop market. Unless there are strong reasons for running it on the desktop, I think its future lies mostly in serverland. As far as desktop users can tell, Linux and FreeBSD are sort of a push, and Linux has a lot more how-to-do-it books on the market. (Except in Japan, where I hear there are just scads of FreeBSD books!)
And that doesn't matter either. It's a good thing to have tools available on servers. So, hurrah for Applixware. I'm looking forward to it. I just hope it turns out to be usable and stable. I wasn't too happy by that Forest Service guy's experiences. I hope that was an anomaly.
I love this. As far as I know, the most recently created guild is the Worshipful Company of Data Processors, whose flag in the London Guild Hall has as its emblem a big honking 9-track tape drive.
I confidently look forward to the rapid approval of the guild charter of the Worshipful Company of Open Source Developers...whose emblem is a patchwork of the flags of all the other guilds.
Some folks may recall the Plato computer-based education system at the U. of Illinois in Shampoo-Banana. Plato IV introduced a lot of people to the notion of truly large numbers of players in an on-line game. It also taught some people some stuff.
Plato IV's predecessor, Plato III, ran on a CDC 1604 or 1800 or whatever. Core memory, cathedral doors, built like a bank vault. 18-bit machine, if I remember correctly.
Plato was housed in CERL, the Computer-based Education Research Lab, which in turn was housed in a very old building. The building air conditioner was the same one which had cooled the lab in that building that worked on radar during WW II. When it finally blew up, parts had been unavailable for decades. An entire new unit had to be ordered. This being a university (i.e. zero clout), delivery time was quoted in months.
Obviously no project could survive months of downtime. Now, it happens that the project director, Dr. Donald Bitzer, had his office across the hall from the machine room. So, a square tunnel was constructed of wooden lathes and plastic sheeting, about two and a half feet on a side. The CPU's cathedral doors were opened, exposing the core memory. The tunnel started flush against the face of the machine, ran across the machine room, out the door, across the hall (!), through Dr. Bitzer's office, and straight to his window.
It worked. The machine ran this way for over a month.
I've been involved with several projects of this nature. Most folks here have been touting the benefits of one toolset or another, or one abstraction or another.
:-).
I've seen some very nifty toolsets. We've invented one or two ourselves - in at least one case, what we came up with is better than I've ever seen commercially, or open source. But, like any other toolset, it's geared toward only one sort of problem.
"Distributed computing" covers a lot of ground. If you need lots of transactions in an object-oriented framework, then yes, CORBA is worth a good hard look. If, on the other hand, you want to rework existing applications so that they trade data over a network, then a software bus architecture is something to look at. We implemented one of these, and it allowed us to change from a Smalltalk-based GUI to a C++/Interviews-based GUI without changing a single line of code in the back-end application. But this architecture was useful only because the problem could be decomposed into fairly large lumps with fairly high-level, low-volume traffic between them. An end-to-end heavy transaction system would lose big with this architecture.
So, tell us a little bit about the application and its architecture, and you might get more useful information (less flamage would be too much to hope for around here