Kid, this was the old days. The original series wasn't taped. It was filmed.
And to watch Star Trek way back then, we had to walk all the way into town, where the only TV in the county was, in the window of the hardware store. It was five miles, in the snow all the way up to our shoulders, uphill both ways!!! And if The Brady Bunch happened to be on instead of Star Trek, well dadgummit we just held our noses, stood there and watched the danged thing!! And we were THANKFUL for it!!!
OK, I'll change my complaint to, "Why can't a supposedly futurist organization like The Planetary Society have a competently designed webpage that all browsers can display without any problems?" With Netscape 4.6, the email link appeared against a black background without any surrounding text. It all becomes clear with IE 4.0.
As for Neil Gaiman, everything he touches is gold. I havn't seen the dubbed version yet, but I have total faith in Neil Gaiman's ability. His Sandman series is a work of true genius, and I have no doubt that he did a good job with this.
I have to disagree. Sandman is an example of a splendid idea that was only mediocre in execution. With a more competent writer it could have been a work of genius. It had been tolerable up to "The Kindly Ones" arc, when it tanked completely. The ending had been telegraphed at the climax of the previous arc. When it eventually arrived, having taken far too long, it was an anticlimax. Perhaps this is the preferred arrangement in whatever poststructuralist aesthetic Gaiman subscribes to, but it left me flat. Good Omens was excellent, but I ascribe that to Terry Pratchett's influence - the man is incapable of telling a bad story. I therefore find Gaiman's involvement in Mononoke Hime worrysome.
After all, why should people who aren't using modems, or are using them less, pay for upgrades the phone company makes only for the modem users.
What upgrades? Over POTS lines of average quality, with no upgrades in particular for the benefit of modem users, one ought to be able to achieve a 45K connection with a V.90 modem. In my area this is impossible due to the degraded condition of the lines. I cannot connect from home any faster than 26.6k myself. No, it's not my ISP - the owner lives right around the corner from me, and he can't connect any faster than I can.
If you're talking about the sort of upgrades that enable such services as DSL, then the users are already charged for it by paying a premium rate for the service.
It seems to me the FCC, goaded by the local telcos, is approaching this from the wrong direction by aiming the tax at the ISPs. The analogy with long distance service is faulty. In that case, the long distance company is connecting to me - for the benefit of their customer on the other end of the line, who ultimately bears the cost of completing the connection through the local telco at my end. But in this case, I'm the one who connects to my ISP, not the other way around. I have a contract with my local telco to provide me with local connections at a flat rate. If the telco wants to do things differently, then they ought to do so by dealing directly with me. But they don't dare directly approach their customers for higher rates, which customers invariably feel that they're paying too much for substandard service already. So instead, they're trying to make it look as if the ISPs are the ones tying up the lines. This way they can make the ISPs do their dirty work for them, since they're the ones who are going to have to pass on the additional costs in order to stay in business.
In a place with a lot of earthquakes, like California or Taiwan, a 5.x quake isn't news. It's not going to interfere with chip production. It probably didn't even get most people out of bed.
Note that the photo accompanying the article was a file photo. It was probably taken last month.
Is it [1]the source code? [2]The compiled objects? [3]The linked executables? [4]The algorithms? [5]The tasks performed by the software?
It can't be[1], which is covered by copyright law. It can't be [2] or [3] because they are unpredictable in detail depending on the design of the compiler and its optimizers, the linker, etc. In fact, it seems to me that the top-level design is almost always impossible to deduce from the resultant binaries, particularly with OO languages. It can't be [4] because, as the department tag on the topic points out, algorithms are usually mathematical construct and as such is an inherent property of whatever mathematical system it falls out of, and is thus (I would think) unpatentable. It can't be [5] because that's just the purpose of the "invention," not the invention itself.
Have I missed something?
I get the feeling that what is needed here is a patent lawyer, with enough of a software background to understand what this is all about, challenging one or two of the more prominent software patents. If done with care, it could bring this whole evil legal edifice down on top of the corporations who built it.
Does anyone know when this will be out? I browsed all the articles I could find on it, and the release date was not mentioned anywhere that I could see.
Hey, I don't know where you got those stupid ideas about Europe and liberty (or lack of). I've NEVER heard of such things, and so far I've lived in 4 different European countries
I get them from paying attention to current events. It was just a year or so ago that the UK tried to institute mandatory bedtimes for all school children. The attempt failed, not because it was seen as something outside the purview of government (as it would be in the US), but because the government lacked the will to put the plan into effect over the objections of the parents. With slightly less willfull parents, or a more determined government, it might have happened. Would you want a cop knocking on your door every night at 8PM to enforce "lights out"?
Another example is the fate of Scientology in Germany. As despicable as I find Scientology to be, illegalizing a religion is a degree of governmental intrusion into people's lives that Americans simply would not accept - although, thanks to our radically socialist president, they are getting inured to such things. I fear for the future.
These are just the examples that spring to mind without thinking about it very hard. As I said, the problem is that in principle, the power of the government is unlimited in a socialist society. The freedoms Europeans now enjoy could be obliterated in a very short time by a single capricious government. This is not a canard. It actually happened a little over 60 years ago, as you may recall.
I would be a fool not to acknowlege the flaws in the American system. In particular the tort system is broken, as you have correctly noted. But you are foolish not to acknowlege the flaws in the European system. I don't know what you think of as a prosperous economy, but what they've got in Europe now ain't it. And the potential of, and the mechanisms for, a totalitarian regime are built into those societies. I find this unacceptable, even if that potential is not at this time being fulfilled.
As far as your ridiculous ideas about American society, all I can say is that you must have been watching too much television. Get sent to "jail 'cause you told" your neighbor "he was a dork"? Where on earth are you getting this kind of nonsense from? You may have been to the US, but you can't have paid very close attention to how things really are while you were here.
And just like ESR, you got confused between Stalin and Mao's application of COMMUNISM and socialism.
I don't think so. I didn't have Mao in mind at all, although the Communist Chinese government is certainly an evil regime. As far as the USSR goes, it was communist only in rhetoric. In practice, as well as in name, it was firmly socialist. It was certaintly malevolant, which cannot at this time be said of the European nations, and while its methods were far more draconian than those currently employed in Europe, those methods are not in principle beyond the reach of those governments.
SOCIALISM is the endeavour of many to succeed in a common enterprise, leaving aside personal greed (money, power, etc.). The GNU/Linux development model looks like that to me. Not to you?
No, because you do not go far enough in describing socialism. I stand by my previous characterization of it, which puts it at odds with the OSS model. An OSS developer can participate in precisely the degree he chooses, in the manner he chooses, and by whatever method he chooses, without being answerable for anything to any central authority. His success is determined rather by the free market.
So far, OSS and Linux have been developped [sic] in a very socialist way...
I've been trying to figure out what you mean by "socialist," because you must not be using the definition one usually encounters in the US. To an American, it suggests a strong central government, nationalization of many service industries, high taxes and pervasive regulation. This is most emphatically not the way OSS is developed. One of its key features is extreme decentralization and an astonishingly effective mechanism of self-regulation, with no governmental or central administration at all. This dovetails extremely will with Libertarian ideals.
You don't like ESR's characterization of socialism as evil, but whether you like it or not the most evil regimes of the 20th century referred to themselves as socialist. You'll have to excuse those who choose to believe them. To American - especially Libertarian - eyes, the main difference between those regimes and those of the more benign European states is the amount of actual freedom allowed by their respective governments. What looks dangerous to us is that the power of the government is not apparently limited in principle. Lives of individual Europeans are regulated to a degree that is absolutely abhorrent to Americans, in everything from what churches they may attend to what time they must put their children to bed.
He calls himself a libertarian, but openly promotes the idea of World Domination(TM), which is what we're fighting through OSS.
This is not the contradiction you seem to think it is. He is simply advocating the sort of behavior that he thinks will result in OS becoming the dominant software development model. It is exactly analogous to how a Libertarian might advocate the sort of activity (civic virtue, personal responsibility, self-reliance) that results in a society where Libertarianism can be sustained. This isn't coercion, but education.
By the same token, "go my way or be doomed" isn't a threat, its a prediction based on what ESR thinks will be the most successful software development model based on free-market economics. I realize that socialists feel threatened by the free market, but its a perfectly valid economic system.
I may have jumped to a conclusion. One of the Internet Mapping sites that got/.ed a few weeks ago had a series of maps showing the changes in the.yu domain over the course of the bombing. It immediately occurred to me that some of the outages may have been connected to this cyberwarfare effort and not due directly to the bombs.
The article didn't actually say that, but the official sources weren't saying an awful lot. There's plenty of room for speculation.
I agree. Most of Interent users here are students and generaly speaking educated people, and I can garantee that 90% of them (us) are against Milosevic.
Not to mention the Serbian Orthodox Church which seems to be pretty heavily wired. They've been vociferously anti-Milosevic.
Does this make sense as a srategy? Demand that the Serbs throw out Milosevic, then proceed to cripple the primary infrastructure used by the anti-Milosevic factions. I'd wonder about it if I already weren't so damn certain.
This isn't a real limitation. Others have pointed out that the 128Mb ceiling no longer exists; but even if it did, you were always able to spread your swap space out over multiple physical volumes since Linux doesn't care where your swap partitions are relative to anything else. This can make paging highly efficient. Constrast with Windows where, AFAIK, your swap space must reside on the same disk as the OS. Obviously, this disk will already be busy enough.
Having delved deeper into the corporate website, I have discovered that LM Astronautics is in fact responsible for flight ops on the spacecraft. So is is LMCO's fault.
I'm telling you, things just haven't been the same around here since that damn merger.
Well, that's my point. You use what's comfortable. The aerospace industry works off a pool of expertise dating back from the 50s - a few of the engineers have actually been at it that long. English measurements are what they're used to.
Mind you, I've never worked on a NASA project. Maybe things are different in that world.
How the hell do you get to design flights for spacecraft and not know that you're supposed to use metric units?!!?! This is just bizarre, truly unthinkable idiocy.
You'll learn differently if you ever get a job in aerospace. The particular system of measurement you're using isn't important; what is important is that everyone uses the same one. Why do you assume that the metric system was the one that was "supposed" to be used? I work for Lockheed Martin, in a military space program. For orbital analysis, spacecraft telemetry, and every other measurement pertaining to flight ops, both the contractors and customer personnel use English measurements, with no confusion whatsoever. The metric system simply is not the darling of real engineers the way it is of the academicians. The fact is that everyone uses the system they are most comfortable with, be that English or metric. I see no evidence that one is inherently better than the other in all respects, other rants in this discussion notwithstanding.
It is evident that you have been brainwashed by your deficient education. I mean, really! What possible justification could there have been for neglecting to teach you about the system of measurement commonly used where your own country? That's "truly unthinkable idiocy" if I've ever heard it.
The story said the confusion was between Lockheed Martin and JPL...
The story said nothing of the sort. It did not identify where the affiliation of the two teams lay, nor did it identify which team had final responsibility for verifying the commands before they were sent, nor did it state what the acutal measurement standards for the program were, assuming that explicit standards exist. The story actually said the "spacecraft team in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California" were involved. For all we know at this point, both teams work directly for JPL. Lockheed Martin is the "industrial partner", which in this case simply means that they built the thing. As far as I can tell, they are not involved in flying it.
According to Miss Manners, only MDs generally use "Dr." as a social title. This is especially true in academia, where all persons in academic positions are presumed to have doctorates. They are therefore called "Mr." or "Ms." (!?)
Academicians in general are particluarly sensitive about titles. If you really want to piss off a bastardly professor, try addressing him as "Dr." a couple of times. Some of them take it very badly indeed.
Small local ISPs are definitely the way to go. In my case, the owner of the ISP lives right across the creek from me. When I get slow connection speeds, as has been the case lately, I know that he's not just brushing me off when he says that it's the lousy phone lines in our area, because he can't connect from his house any faster than I can. When I've had other problems in the past, I've been able to take my machine down to the office, plug it in right there, and show him. We worked out the problems together. This is a level of service you just can't get from a national ISP.
In my view, there's also a good philosophical reason for using local ISPs. The Internet's great strength for promoting freedom of expression, the free exchange of ideas, and the subversion of dominant paradigms (for want of a more pithy phrase) lies in its decentralized nature. There is no one computer - or even one network - that an oppressive authority can shut down to silence the ideas for which the Internet acts as a medium. Insofar as these mega-providers represent a trend towards centralization of the Internet's resources, they threaten an attenuation of that strength. If there is a responsibility to resist this trend, it belongs to the technologically literate.
I saw the Corel Linux demo at LWE a few weeks ago, and was favorably impressed. It was so easy to install, it was based on Debian, and the presenters seemed like such nice GeekBabes. We cheered, we clapped, we took the t-shirts home, full of warm fuzzies about how, at long last, Linux was being taken seriously by Real Software Companies and, more importantly, their customers.
Who knew that Corel would turn out to be a scum-sucking, lying, rotten, thieving, back-stabbing, Nazi, double-crossing BUNCH OF PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE BASTARDS FROM HELL??!?!!!??
This cerebellar slowness may also explain some of the intellectual feats of the mildly autistic "computer nerds" that are now reorganizing the planet. (Bill Gates, according to Shadow Syndromes, is reported to rock himself, spend hours on the trampoline, not make eye contact, and have trouble making social conversation.)
Does it bother anyone else that Billy Boy is being identified here as a "computer nerd"? Accepting for a moment the geek/nerd equivalence assumed in the article, just how can they say this? Has he written any code at all since Altair Basic? Has his entire company ever had a single, decent, original idea, or produced a robust, high quality product?
His wealth and evil power come not from any particular computer skill, but from the deal he cut with IBM. Negotiating skill, I would think, would be a contraindicator of autism, and is certainly not something your average nerd can manage well. (I think this has something to do with the working conditions under which most nerds/geeks suffer: they're doing for money what they would otherwise do for free and are not good enough negotiators to conceal that fact even if they were so inclined.) His subsequent successes are a result of marketing, which is not exactly a nerdly activity either.
It's interesting that Linus, the "computer nerd" who is now genuinely reorganizing the planet, doesn't fit this profile at all.
"The people responsible for coding the obtuse beast in binary..." Cute phrase, but ENIAC was a base-10 machine. It was designed to electronically emulate a mechanical adding machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Kid, this was the old days. The original series wasn't taped. It was filmed.
And to watch Star Trek way back then, we had to walk all the way into town, where the only TV in the county was, in the window of the hardware store. It was five miles, in the snow all the way up to our shoulders, uphill both ways!!! And if The Brady Bunch happened to be on instead of Star Trek, well dadgummit we just held our noses, stood there and watched the danged thing!! And we were THANKFUL for it!!!
I have to disagree. Sandman is an example of a splendid idea that was only mediocre in execution. With a more competent writer it could have been a work of genius. It had been tolerable up to "The Kindly Ones" arc, when it tanked completely. The ending had been telegraphed at the climax of the previous arc. When it eventually arrived, having taken far too long, it was an anticlimax. Perhaps this is the preferred arrangement in whatever poststructuralist aesthetic Gaiman subscribes to, but it left me flat. Good Omens was excellent, but I ascribe that to Terry Pratchett's influence - the man is incapable of telling a bad story. I therefore find Gaiman's involvement in Mononoke Hime worrysome.
Why can't a supposedly futurist organization like The Planetary Society catch up the the 1990's and accept email submissions?
So now do you want fries with that?
What upgrades? Over POTS lines of average quality, with no upgrades in particular for the benefit of modem users, one ought to be able to achieve a 45K connection with a V.90 modem. In my area this is impossible due to the degraded condition of the lines. I cannot connect from home any faster than 26.6k myself. No, it's not my ISP - the owner lives right around the corner from me, and he can't connect any faster than I can.
If you're talking about the sort of upgrades that enable such services as DSL, then the users are already charged for it by paying a premium rate for the service.
It seems to me the FCC, goaded by the local telcos, is approaching this from the wrong direction by aiming the tax at the ISPs. The analogy with long distance service is faulty. In that case, the long distance company is connecting to me - for the benefit of their customer on the other end of the line, who ultimately bears the cost of completing the connection through the local telco at my end. But in this case, I'm the one who connects to my ISP, not the other way around. I have a contract with my local telco to provide me with local connections at a flat rate. If the telco wants to do things differently, then they ought to do so by dealing directly with me. But they don't dare directly approach their customers for higher rates, which customers invariably feel that they're paying too much for substandard service already. So instead, they're trying to make it look as if the ISPs are the ones tying up the lines. This way they can make the ISPs do their dirty work for them, since they're the ones who are going to have to pass on the additional costs in order to stay in business.
In a place with a lot of earthquakes, like California or Taiwan, a 5.x quake isn't news. It's not going to interfere with chip production. It probably didn't even get most people out of bed.
Note that the photo accompanying the article was a file photo. It was probably taken last month.
It can't be[1], which is covered by copyright law. It can't be [2] or [3] because they are unpredictable in detail depending on the design of the compiler and its optimizers, the linker, etc. In fact, it seems to me that the top-level design is almost always impossible to deduce from the resultant binaries, particularly with OO languages. It can't be [4] because, as the department tag on the topic points out, algorithms are usually mathematical construct and as such is an inherent property of whatever mathematical system it falls out of, and is thus (I would think) unpatentable. It can't be [5] because that's just the purpose of the "invention," not the invention itself.
Have I missed something?
I get the feeling that what is needed here is a patent lawyer, with enough of a software background to understand what this is all about, challenging one or two of the more prominent software patents. If done with care, it could bring this whole evil legal edifice down on top of the corporations who built it.
Does anyone know when this will be out? I browsed all the articles I could find on it, and the release date was not mentioned anywhere that I could see.
I get them from paying attention to current events. It was just a year or so ago that the UK tried to institute mandatory bedtimes for all school children. The attempt failed, not because it was seen as something outside the purview of government (as it would be in the US), but because the government lacked the will to put the plan into effect over the objections of the parents. With slightly less willfull parents, or a more determined government, it might have happened. Would you want a cop knocking on your door every night at 8PM to enforce "lights out"?
Another example is the fate of Scientology in Germany. As despicable as I find Scientology to be, illegalizing a religion is a degree of governmental intrusion into people's lives that Americans simply would not accept - although, thanks to our radically socialist president, they are getting inured to such things. I fear for the future.
These are just the examples that spring to mind without thinking about it very hard. As I said, the problem is that in principle, the power of the government is unlimited in a socialist society. The freedoms Europeans now enjoy could be obliterated in a very short time by a single capricious government. This is not a canard. It actually happened a little over 60 years ago, as you may recall.
I would be a fool not to acknowlege the flaws in the American system. In particular the tort system is broken, as you have correctly noted. But you are foolish not to acknowlege the flaws in the European system. I don't know what you think of as a prosperous economy, but what they've got in Europe now ain't it. And the potential of, and the mechanisms for, a totalitarian regime are built into those societies. I find this unacceptable, even if that potential is not at this time being fulfilled.
As far as your ridiculous ideas about American society, all I can say is that you must have been watching too much television. Get sent to "jail 'cause you told" your neighbor "he was a dork"? Where on earth are you getting this kind of nonsense from? You may have been to the US, but you can't have paid very close attention to how things really are while you were here.
And just like ESR, you got confused between Stalin and Mao's application of COMMUNISM and socialism.
I don't think so. I didn't have Mao in mind at all, although the Communist Chinese government is certainly an evil regime. As far as the USSR goes, it was communist only in rhetoric. In practice, as well as in name, it was firmly socialist. It was certaintly malevolant, which cannot at this time be said of the European nations, and while its methods were far more draconian than those currently employed in Europe, those methods are not in principle beyond the reach of those governments.
SOCIALISM is the endeavour of many to succeed in a common enterprise, leaving aside personal greed (money, power, etc.). The GNU/Linux development model looks like that to me. Not to you?
No, because you do not go far enough in describing socialism. I stand by my previous characterization of it, which puts it at odds with the OSS model. An OSS developer can participate in precisely the degree he chooses, in the manner he chooses, and by whatever method he chooses, without being answerable for anything to any central authority. His success is determined rather by the free market.
I've been trying to figure out what you mean by "socialist," because you must not be using the definition one usually encounters in the US. To an American, it suggests a strong central government, nationalization of many service industries, high taxes and pervasive regulation. This is most emphatically not the way OSS is developed. One of its key features is extreme decentralization and an astonishingly effective mechanism of self-regulation, with no governmental or central administration at all. This dovetails extremely will with Libertarian ideals.
You don't like ESR's characterization of socialism as evil, but whether you like it or not the most evil regimes of the 20th century referred to themselves as socialist. You'll have to excuse those who choose to believe them. To American - especially Libertarian - eyes, the main difference between those regimes and those of the more benign European states is the amount of actual freedom allowed by their respective governments. What looks dangerous to us is that the power of the government is not apparently limited in principle. Lives of individual Europeans are regulated to a degree that is absolutely abhorrent to Americans, in everything from what churches they may attend to what time they must put their children to bed.
He calls himself a libertarian, but openly promotes the idea of World Domination(TM), which is what we're fighting through OSS.
This is not the contradiction you seem to think it is. He is simply advocating the sort of behavior that he thinks will result in OS becoming the dominant software development model. It is exactly analogous to how a Libertarian might advocate the sort of activity (civic virtue, personal responsibility, self-reliance) that results in a society where Libertarianism can be sustained. This isn't coercion, but education.
By the same token, "go my way or be doomed" isn't a threat, its a prediction based on what ESR thinks will be the most successful software development model based on free-market economics. I realize that socialists feel threatened by the free market, but its a perfectly valid economic system.
The article didn't actually say that, but the official sources weren't saying an awful lot. There's plenty of room for speculation.
Not to mention the Serbian Orthodox Church which seems to be pretty heavily wired. They've been vociferously anti-Milosevic.
Does this make sense as a srategy? Demand that the Serbs throw out Milosevic, then proceed to cripple the primary infrastructure used by the anti-Milosevic factions. I'd wonder about it if I already weren't so damn certain.
This isn't a real limitation. Others have pointed out that the 128Mb ceiling no longer exists; but even if it did, you were always able to spread your swap space out over multiple physical volumes since Linux doesn't care where your swap partitions are relative to anything else. This can make paging highly efficient. Constrast with Windows where, AFAIK, your swap space must reside on the same disk as the OS. Obviously, this disk will already be busy enough.
I'm telling you, things just haven't been the same around here since that damn merger.
Mind you, I've never worked on a NASA project. Maybe things are different in that world.
You'll learn differently if you ever get a job in aerospace. The particular system of measurement you're using isn't important; what is important is that everyone uses the same one. Why do you assume that the metric system was the one that was "supposed" to be used? I work for Lockheed Martin, in a military space program. For orbital analysis, spacecraft telemetry, and every other measurement pertaining to flight ops, both the contractors and customer personnel use English measurements, with no confusion whatsoever. The metric system simply is not the darling of real engineers the way it is of the academicians. The fact is that everyone uses the system they are most comfortable with, be that English or metric. I see no evidence that one is inherently better than the other in all respects, other rants in this discussion notwithstanding.
It is evident that you have been brainwashed by your deficient education. I mean, really! What possible justification could there have been for neglecting to teach you about the system of measurement commonly used where your own country? That's "truly unthinkable idiocy" if I've ever heard it.
The story said the confusion was between Lockheed Martin and JPL...
The story said nothing of the sort. It did not identify where the affiliation of the two teams lay, nor did it identify which team had final responsibility for verifying the commands before they were sent, nor did it state what the acutal measurement standards for the program were, assuming that explicit standards exist. The story actually said the "spacecraft team in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California" were involved. For all we know at this point, both teams work directly for JPL. Lockheed Martin is the "industrial partner", which in this case simply means that they built the thing. As far as I can tell, they are not involved in flying it.
Academicians in general are particluarly sensitive about titles. If you really want to piss off a bastardly professor, try addressing him as "Dr." a couple of times. Some of them take it very badly indeed.
In my view, there's also a good philosophical reason for using local ISPs. The Internet's great strength for promoting freedom of expression, the free exchange of ideas, and the subversion of dominant paradigms (for want of a more pithy phrase) lies in its decentralized nature. There is no one computer - or even one network - that an oppressive authority can shut down to silence the ideas for which the Internet acts as a medium. Insofar as these mega-providers represent a trend towards centralization of the Internet's resources, they threaten an attenuation of that strength. If there is a responsibility to resist this trend, it belongs to the technologically literate.
I don't know. I had intended it to be humorous. Perhaps it wasn't sufficiently over-the-top.
Who knew that Corel would turn out to be a scum-sucking, lying, rotten, thieving, back-stabbing, Nazi, double-crossing BUNCH OF PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE BASTARDS FROM HELL??!?!!!??
Ahem.
Thank you and good night.
-- Captain Carrot
Does it bother anyone else that Billy Boy is being identified here as a "computer nerd"? Accepting for a moment the geek/nerd equivalence assumed in the article, just how can they say this? Has he written any code at all since Altair Basic? Has his entire company ever had a single, decent, original idea, or produced a robust, high quality product?
His wealth and evil power come not from any particular computer skill, but from the deal he cut with IBM. Negotiating skill, I would think, would be a contraindicator of autism, and is certainly not something your average nerd can manage well. (I think this has something to do with the working conditions under which most nerds/geeks suffer: they're doing for money what they would otherwise do for free and are not good enough negotiators to conceal that fact even if they were so inclined.) His subsequent successes are a result of marketing, which is not exactly a nerdly activity either.
It's interesting that Linus, the "computer nerd" who is now genuinely reorganizing the planet, doesn't fit this profile at all.
-- Captain Carrot
"The people responsible for coding the obtuse beast in binary..."
Cute phrase, but ENIAC was a base-10 machine. It was designed to electronically emulate a mechanical adding machine.