I was reading the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago the other night. (For those of you too young to remember either Solzhenitsyn or the Soviet Union it describes, go read it. Along with 1984, it ought to be required reading for citizens of putatively free countries.) The section I was reading dealt with the purges of competing socialist movements once Lenin's party had consolidated its power. Political dissenters were at this time -- 1924 -- being tried by special tribunals, denied counsel and contact with the outside world, and executed, first by tens, and ultimately by the hundreds of thousands.
The official explanation for all this was the accused were terrorists who threatened the security of the motherland. It was Guantanamo Bay writ large, and once it picked up steam, it did not stop until, after somewhere between 20 million and 40 million state murders, the Soviet Union collapsed under its own sheer inefficiency in the early 1990's.
In the Soviet era, the most improbable things were tied to the idea of, as we say today, homeland security. If you twist the logic far enough, and people are either stupid enough or frightened enough, you can get away with claiming that the manufacture of cheese is a matter of homeland security. (And why not? It is a fungal product susceptible to both accidental and intentional contamination with biotoxins; an economic resource vulnerable to sabotage; it is produced by wealthy companies whose political allegiances might not be entirely healthy; and worst of all, it is a national emblem of the hated French.)
This programmer licensing is a ruse. Like the bulk of the Department of Homeland Security, it is a crock of shit designed to convince the public that the government is "doing something" against a threat of dubious reality but great electoral usefulness, and it will serve only to centralize more power and money in the hands of large software companies.
Even if it weren't part of a fairly nefarious political trend, does anyone really believe this will make any damn difference? Commercial programmers don't make the important quality decisions -- they are handed down by management to suit marketing needs and the bottom line. If there's any professional programmer here who hasn't written inferior code to satisfy arbitrary time and resource requirements imposed from above, speak now and be counted with your five or six other brethren.
If you want to improve the quality of software, hold companies and their shareholders financially responsible. In other words, put pressure on the people who actually make the decisions, and they will select those programmers -- licensed or not -- who write quality software and give them the resources to do it.
Of course, the big software houses (read: Microsoft) will never go for that because neither they nor the subversives at the Department of Homeland Security give half a rat's ass about the well-being of the public. What they do care about is enhancing their own prestige, power, and wealth.
Amazing how flat-out nasty the tone has gotten to be on Slashdot lately...
So sure, considered in perspective 22k birds over twenty years is actually pretty damn low. But would some of you too-clever-by-half arseholes stop mocking the tree huggers long enough to actually put some thought into reducing this number without shutting down the turbines or significantly raising the price of wind power? After all, that would be useful, while being a smartass serves no purpose at all.
If that 22k number could be lowered effectively, then yes, it's too many birds. The same would be true if it was only five birds per century if it could be cheaply and effectively avoided.
Hell block everything except http,https,ftp and DNS.
Great, so you can browse the web and transfer files to insecure sites. But then you can't send or receive mail, make secure file transfer (scp) or shell (ssh) connections, or use any kind of instant messaging client. In other words, if your idea of internet access is limited to passively absorbing web pages, you're covered, but if you were thinking of actually doing anything, it's useless.
If you want to avoid abuse of a tiny wireless network, what you're mostly going to be concerned about is bandwidth consumption. There are quite a few tools for controlling bandwidth consumption under Linux; check them out. If you aren't providing all available bandwidth to the first user who tries to hog it, neither Kazaa abusers or coffee-swilling part-time spammers are going to cause you much grief.
If you want to get a bit more fine-grained than that, there are a buttload of tools to help you monitor what your users are doing, and many of them are scriptable and can set off some kind of alarm if someone is behaving badly.
In any event, you'll offer a much better service if you block only those things which you want to always avoid from the outset, and install tools to help you detect and interrupt the occasional abuse of otherwise innocuous services.
That's a great list of obsolete (and in the case of the AS/400, inappropriate) hardware, and really has no bearing on anything at all.
Wikipedia is a high-traffic site with a fair amount of memory-intensive work happening with each page load, and some non-trivial database issues to deal with. $20k is cheap for a real system, folks, and grabbing a bunch of ancient machines of dubious reliability with 256 megs of RAM from eBay just doesn't cut it.
I work for a company that handles about six times the traffic Wikipedia does with a similar growth rate, and we spend an average of $5k per month in hardware and network connectivity, and well over $20k per month in labor -- the care and feeding of programmers and sysadmins ain't cheap. And we're all open source users/producers/advocates with a tendency to frugality when it comes to hardware. (None of our webservers have less than 1GB of RAM, incidentally, and they need every byte of it.) For the Wikipedia folks to come forward and ask for $20k is a freaking pittance. It's frankly amazing that a complex, high-traffic site like Wikipedia can run at all without any discernable for-profit operations -- not even banner ads. This is more than Slashdot has been able to accomplish.
That there's so much nastiness about Wikipedia here is just unbelievable. In what is really a very short time, Wikipedia has gone from being a barely credible plan to being an increasingly serious competitor to most of the print encyclopedias out there. Oh sure, it's spotty in places and overly opinionated in others -- though mainly on political topics that most encyclopedias wouldn't touch to begin with -- but it's no longer hard to believe that the day may come when Wikipedia will surpass its printed, for-profit competitors.
Wikipedia is to open content what Linux, Apache, and gcc are to open software: exemplars of how fabulously great things can be outside of the proprietary model. Give generously; they deserve it.
The programmer who works next to me used to be a construction worker. Every so often, I come up for an idea for some kind of home project, explain it to him, and he tells me a way to accomplish it that is much simpler and more reliable.
This MS solution is almost a caricature of one of my own over-done home improvement ideas. Why bother with some elaborate cryptographic system to delay inbound emails? Why not just have the receiving SMTP process call sleep(10) at the beginning of the SMTP session? You get the same desired slowdown, and all you have to change is the SMTP server software. There's no need to modify MTAs, promulgate new standards, or fit yourself more tightly into the MS monopoly noose.
We just deployed six 1U dual Xeon boxes and a 16-blade Tatung box, all running Linux. We'll be doing more soon. Management is aware of the SCO imbroglio but unconcerned.
It helps that we have a clear escape route, though. If Linux is taken down, we move to FreeBSD. If FreeBSD is taken down, we move to Solaris. If Solaris is taken down, we move to Microsoft. If Microsoft is taken down, then we'll shut down the company and hitch a ride with a swarm of flying pigs to a happier place.
Is this legal, for a company to go about talking crap that's as yet unproven?
Of course it's legal -- the First Amendment covers pretty much anything they could want to say unless Darl starts cranking out kiddie porn.
The question you really want to be asking is: Is this actionable? In other words, can they be sued for it? The answer to that question is yes, they can, but doing so essentially requires the injured parties to wait until SCO's claims against IBM have been resolved. Until then, they can spout whatever crap they want, hoping all the while that it won't come back to haunt them later.
When I was a kid, one of the books in the local library -- which had a misogynistic title along the lines of The Boy's Book of Science or somesuch -- had a variety of fascinating projects, including building a wax-cylinder recording phonograph. Does this ring a bell for anyone? I'd love to find it again, but there must be a blue million books with vaguely similar titles.
Well, shit, I guess that Linux probably uses something dangerously close to SCO's code in stdio.h, stdlib.h, string.h, assert.h, malloc.h, and about a dozen other header files.
How long before Dennis Ritchie gets a knock on the door from the SCO gestapo? Gosh knows what notorious Unix IP thieves shelter in the shadow of the Ritchie-Kernighan-Thompson cartel!
So I have to wonder how much POVray could be sped up -- if any -- by modifying it so that suitable calculations were run on the GPU, in parallel, while the CPU took care of the rest.
Here's a clue for you: He's no longer at Red Hat. The original poster's question is valid: why is he here?
Damn, did anyone RTFA? Bob Young is speaking on the subject because McBride's latest open letter attacks the legal foundation of his new business. Entirely aside from this, he still has a considerable interest in Red Hat since he's on the freaking board of directors. Sheesh.
You have grounds to sue the consultant for slander and defamation of character. An attorney can get the secret report through discovery, and the odds are that you can rip them to shreds and obtain substantial damages. Your former employer, who will probably settle rather than face a full-blown unlawful termination suit in open court, is also highly vulnerable.
No, it won't get your job back, but this sort of thing is as close to a lottery ticket as you're likely to get without the CEO grabbing your nads in public.
The Bush Administration policy is just a throwback to the Middle Ages, when the Church prohibited the dissection of cadavers for medical research. Anyone remember that one? Damn near a millennium and a half of such wretched conditions that the population of cities had to be maintained by constant migration from rural areas because chronic disease and filth caused urbanites to die faster than they were being born.
Do we really have to repeat this? Isn't it time to demystify the whole reproductive process and stop attributing some special religious status to the act of ejaculating inside a vagina? Do we really need our scientific and medical priorities hobbled by lunatics who believe in the literal truth of Genesis? Sheesh.
how about the X Window Server... that just got forked in the last couple months.
If both forks are still around and actively developed in a year's time, you might have yourself an example there. Odds are, though, that the "renegade" fork won't be. That's the other force that discourages forking: the very personality type that is most likely to participate in a fork is unlikely to be prone to the sort of cooperation that makes large projects possible.
I can count the number of significant projects that have forked on one hand and still have a finger free for Darl McBride. Sure, forking happens all of the damn time with silly stuff like MP3 players and web-based BBS software, but aside from the BSDs, when was the last time you heard of a significant infrastructure project forking?
Only the gcc/egcs split comes to mind, but the two were folded back into one tree and the result was a better compiler. There's the StarOffice/OpenOffice split, but that's also largely collaborative. Most other forks are dead ends that wither away quietly, no matter how loud and vociferous the original argument was.
This is just more Microsoft FUD coming from one of the most Microsoft-saturated countries on the planet.
I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, but the first thing I thought when I looked at the rendering was, "Gee, the interior of the earth looks like a lava lamp."
The second thing I thought, of course, was, "Well, duh."
Reading this and the rest leads me to believe that they are NOT preventing people from reverse engineering FAT. Rather, they are selling their 'true' implementation of the filesystem. Nowhere does it say that companies providing their own 'clean room' implementation of the FAT filesystem will have to pay.
That seems dubious at best. You could easily create a filesystem that is functionally identical to FAT, but unless the implementation is identical as well, it wouldn't work with Windows, and with an identical implementation you'd be infringing on Microsoft's patent.
Still, the typical knee-jerk reactions here are as yet unwarrented.
That's because the moderation system does not yet support -1 RTFA, -1 Ill-informed, -1 Reactionary, -1 Overexcited, or -5 STFU. I've been lobbying for these for years, but my posts keep getting modded down.;)
So what makes them think this was for gaming? Given the religious significance of regular polyhedra in the classical era -- including but not limited to the Pythagoreans -- it's much more likely that this was either a divination tool or a model representing someone's cosmological theory.
As for the rest of your generalizations, I resent being painted with such a broad brush. Sure, there are zealots in the open source community; they're present in any and every community.
Personally, I fail to see why there is such a strong reaction to the suggestion that there is an unusually high asshole-density in the open source community, except that it's true and truth is often painful.
Everything in the referenced article is essentially spot-on. Of course, all of the author's points are tangential to the real problem, which is that open source, for all of its many and varied advantages, is immune to end-user reactions. If Microsoft behaved towards users the way the most vocal and visible OSS developers do, Microsoft would be gone overnight. If your only contact with MS (or Oracle, or Sun, or any other large software firm) is reading Slashdot articles, you'll end up with the false impression that their representatives are all overbearing assholes. However, out in the real world, their sales reps are generally very nice, polite, accommodating people. Why? Because they understand their respective monopolies, contrary to popular belief, could evaporate very quickly if their customers were genuinely fed up with them. OSS developers have no such safeguard against their own excesses.
Lest this be dismissed as an empty generalization or an unsupported assertion (which it will anyway), consider some of the most polished and/or user-friendly Linux software: Evolution, Nautilus, Mozilla, KDE, MySQL, OpenOffice.org. All of these either originated as non-free software or were specifically aimed at being adjuncts to some sort of commercial venture.
This is not to say that there aren't tons of excellent packages that are "pure" open source (postfix, apache, gcc), but the majority of them are aimed at technical users, and even there, the documentation is typically quite poor. Nor is this to say that OSS developers couldn't produce much more polished and user-friendly software, but it would require stepping down from the arrogant high horse too many developers ride on -- Theo de Raadt and Dan Bernstein spring immediately to mind -- and treating end-users with respect instead of contempt.
This is different from Racter in that Racter used templates and simple variable substitution, claims made by the vendor notwithstanding, while Kurzweil's program uses Markov chains and n-gram analysis.
The question that everyone should be asking is what exactly is new about any of this? If you dropped all the applicable prior art on Ray Kurzweil from a height of two inches, not even dental records would suffice to identify him afterwards. People have been writing software to do this kind of thing since computers were available. Claude Shannon used to do ad hoc construction of probabilistically chained text by hand using nothing more than pencil, paper, and a book.
..really any point upgrading? 2.6 should be out in a couple of weeks.
Did you miss the early 2.4.x kernels? The 2.4 kernel was nicknamed "the kernel of pain" for a reason. The VM madness was so horrid where I work -- it could be relied upon to clobber MySQL every time the load got moderately high -- that we immediately rolled back to whatever the latest 2.2.x kernel was at the time.
The fact that Linux is the product of an open development process certainly improves code quality, but it doesn't mean that all of the major bugs have been worked out before it's been subjected to the full power of real world production use.
In fact, why would balance checking be available from anyone but your bank itself? They'd only be able to perform an actual transfer, and the balance would either be sufficient or not.
Not so. I have a merchant account, and I can easily perform pre-authorization on a credit card transaction. I typically do it when someone wants to reserve an expensive piece of rental equipment and I want to make sure they can actually afford it before I turn down other potential rental customers. It's not quite the same thing as balance checking -- but I can progressively try to pre-authorize various sums until I hit your limit. In fact, assuming that you have $25,000 or less in your checking account -- a safe assumption for most people -- a simple binary search will let me determine your balance to within $200 or so within seven tries.
That would, of course, be an abuse of the system, but it's not illegal, and if I were a big enough merchant, odds are I could induce my transaction gateway service to overlook the indiscretion.
Slashdot Mirror
I was reading the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago the other night. (For those of you too young to remember either Solzhenitsyn or the Soviet Union it describes, go read it. Along with 1984, it ought to be required reading for citizens of putatively free countries.) The section I was reading dealt with the purges of competing socialist movements once Lenin's party had consolidated its power. Political dissenters were at this time -- 1924 -- being tried by special tribunals, denied counsel and contact with the outside world, and executed, first by tens, and ultimately by the hundreds of thousands.
The official explanation for all this was the accused were terrorists who threatened the security of the motherland. It was Guantanamo Bay writ large, and once it picked up steam, it did not stop until, after somewhere between 20 million and 40 million state murders, the Soviet Union collapsed under its own sheer inefficiency in the early 1990's.
In the Soviet era, the most improbable things were tied to the idea of, as we say today, homeland security. If you twist the logic far enough, and people are either stupid enough or frightened enough, you can get away with claiming that the manufacture of cheese is a matter of homeland security. (And why not? It is a fungal product susceptible to both accidental and intentional contamination with biotoxins; an economic resource vulnerable to sabotage; it is produced by wealthy companies whose political allegiances might not be entirely healthy; and worst of all, it is a national emblem of the hated French.)
This programmer licensing is a ruse. Like the bulk of the Department of Homeland Security, it is a crock of shit designed to convince the public that the government is "doing something" against a threat of dubious reality but great electoral usefulness, and it will serve only to centralize more power and money in the hands of large software companies.
Even if it weren't part of a fairly nefarious political trend, does anyone really believe this will make any damn difference? Commercial programmers don't make the important quality decisions -- they are handed down by management to suit marketing needs and the bottom line. If there's any professional programmer here who hasn't written inferior code to satisfy arbitrary time and resource requirements imposed from above, speak now and be counted with your five or six other brethren.
If you want to improve the quality of software, hold companies and their shareholders financially responsible. In other words, put pressure on the people who actually make the decisions, and they will select those programmers -- licensed or not -- who write quality software and give them the resources to do it.
Of course, the big software houses (read: Microsoft) will never go for that because neither they nor the subversives at the Department of Homeland Security give half a rat's ass about the well-being of the public. What they do care about is enhancing their own prestige, power, and wealth.
Amazing how flat-out nasty the tone has gotten to be on Slashdot lately...
So sure, considered in perspective 22k birds over twenty years is actually pretty damn low. But would some of you too-clever-by-half arseholes stop mocking the tree huggers long enough to actually put some thought into reducing this number without shutting down the turbines or significantly raising the price of wind power? After all, that would be useful, while being a smartass serves no purpose at all.
If that 22k number could be lowered effectively, then yes, it's too many birds. The same would be true if it was only five birds per century if it could be cheaply and effectively avoided.
Hell block everything except http,https,ftp and DNS.
Great, so you can browse the web and transfer files to insecure sites. But then you can't send or receive mail, make secure file transfer (scp) or shell (ssh) connections, or use any kind of instant messaging client. In other words, if your idea of internet access is limited to passively absorbing web pages, you're covered, but if you were thinking of actually doing anything, it's useless.
If you want to avoid abuse of a tiny wireless network, what you're mostly going to be concerned about is bandwidth consumption. There are quite a few tools for controlling bandwidth consumption under Linux; check them out. If you aren't providing all available bandwidth to the first user who tries to hog it, neither Kazaa abusers or coffee-swilling part-time spammers are going to cause you much grief.
If you want to get a bit more fine-grained than that, there are a buttload of tools to help you monitor what your users are doing, and many of them are scriptable and can set off some kind of alarm if someone is behaving badly.
In any event, you'll offer a much better service if you block only those things which you want to always avoid from the outset, and install tools to help you detect and interrupt the occasional abuse of otherwise innocuous services.
That's a great list of obsolete (and in the case of the AS/400, inappropriate) hardware, and really has no bearing on anything at all.
Wikipedia is a high-traffic site with a fair amount of memory-intensive work happening with each page load, and some non-trivial database issues to deal with. $20k is cheap for a real system, folks, and grabbing a bunch of ancient machines of dubious reliability with 256 megs of RAM from eBay just doesn't cut it.
I work for a company that handles about six times the traffic Wikipedia does with a similar growth rate, and we spend an average of $5k per month in hardware and network connectivity, and well over $20k per month in labor -- the care and feeding of programmers and sysadmins ain't cheap. And we're all open source users/producers/advocates with a tendency to frugality when it comes to hardware. (None of our webservers have less than 1GB of RAM, incidentally, and they need every byte of it.) For the Wikipedia folks to come forward and ask for $20k is a freaking pittance. It's frankly amazing that a complex, high-traffic site like Wikipedia can run at all without any discernable for-profit operations -- not even banner ads. This is more than Slashdot has been able to accomplish.
That there's so much nastiness about Wikipedia here is just unbelievable. In what is really a very short time, Wikipedia has gone from being a barely credible plan to being an increasingly serious competitor to most of the print encyclopedias out there. Oh sure, it's spotty in places and overly opinionated in others -- though mainly on political topics that most encyclopedias wouldn't touch to begin with -- but it's no longer hard to believe that the day may come when Wikipedia will surpass its printed, for-profit competitors.
Wikipedia is to open content what Linux, Apache, and gcc are to open software: exemplars of how fabulously great things can be outside of the proprietary model. Give generously; they deserve it.
The programmer who works next to me used to be a construction worker. Every so often, I come up for an idea for some kind of home project, explain it to him, and he tells me a way to accomplish it that is much simpler and more reliable.
This MS solution is almost a caricature of one of my own over-done home improvement ideas. Why bother with some elaborate cryptographic system to delay inbound emails? Why not just have the receiving SMTP process call sleep(10) at the beginning of the SMTP session? You get the same desired slowdown, and all you have to change is the SMTP server software. There's no need to modify MTAs, promulgate new standards, or fit yourself more tightly into the MS monopoly noose.
We just deployed six 1U dual Xeon boxes and a 16-blade Tatung box, all running Linux. We'll be doing more soon. Management is aware of the SCO imbroglio but unconcerned.
It helps that we have a clear escape route, though. If Linux is taken down, we move to FreeBSD. If FreeBSD is taken down, we move to Solaris. If Solaris is taken down, we move to Microsoft. If Microsoft is taken down, then we'll shut down the company and hitch a ride with a swarm of flying pigs to a happier place.
Is this legal, for a company to go about talking crap that's as yet unproven?
Of course it's legal -- the First Amendment covers pretty much anything they could want to say unless Darl starts cranking out kiddie porn.
The question you really want to be asking is: Is this actionable? In other words, can they be sued for it? The answer to that question is yes, they can, but doing so essentially requires the injured parties to wait until SCO's claims against IBM have been resolved. Until then, they can spout whatever crap they want, hoping all the while that it won't come back to haunt them later.
But don't worry. It will.
When I was a kid, one of the books in the local library -- which had a misogynistic title along the lines of The Boy's Book of Science or somesuch -- had a variety of fascinating projects, including building a wax-cylinder recording phonograph. Does this ring a bell for anyone? I'd love to find it again, but there must be a blue million books with vaguely similar titles.
DMCA Must gooo! its gayer than the YMCA
Would you say the DMCA is more niggery than the NAACP? How about being more kikey than the ADL?
And if not, why not? It's the same difference -- casual and stupid use of an offensive slur.
Whatever point you may have had was obscured by the white hood.
Well, shit, I guess that Linux probably uses something dangerously close to SCO's code in stdio.h, stdlib.h, string.h, assert.h, malloc.h, and about a dozen other header files.
How long before Dennis Ritchie gets a knock on the door from the SCO gestapo? Gosh knows what notorious Unix IP thieves shelter in the shadow of the Ritchie-Kernighan-Thompson cartel!
So I have to wonder how much POVray could be sped up -- if any -- by modifying it so that suitable calculations were run on the GPU, in parallel, while the CPU took care of the rest.
Whenever I read his argument I imagine either:
1. Mr. Burns pulling his hair out, unable to comprehend this new "madness" of non-profit work.
2. Sauron, unable to imagine what the little geeks have in mind for Linux's profit potentials...
Sauron? Really, that's far too grand for Darl McBride. He always makes me think of Frank Burns from M*A*S*H.
Here's a clue for you: He's no longer at Red Hat. The original poster's question is valid: why is he here?
Damn, did anyone RTFA? Bob Young is speaking on the subject because McBride's latest open letter attacks the legal foundation of his new business. Entirely aside from this, he still has a considerable interest in Red Hat since he's on the freaking board of directors. Sheesh.
You have grounds to sue the consultant for slander and defamation of character. An attorney can get the secret report through discovery, and the odds are that you can rip them to shreds and obtain substantial damages. Your former employer, who will probably settle rather than face a full-blown unlawful termination suit in open court, is also highly vulnerable.
No, it won't get your job back, but this sort of thing is as close to a lottery ticket as you're likely to get without the CEO grabbing your nads in public.
The Bush Administration policy is just a throwback to the Middle Ages, when the Church prohibited the dissection of cadavers for medical research. Anyone remember that one? Damn near a millennium and a half of such wretched conditions that the population of cities had to be maintained by constant migration from rural areas because chronic disease and filth caused urbanites to die faster than they were being born.
Do we really have to repeat this? Isn't it time to demystify the whole reproductive process and stop attributing some special religious status to the act of ejaculating inside a vagina? Do we really need our scientific and medical priorities hobbled by lunatics who believe in the literal truth of Genesis? Sheesh.
how about the X Window Server... that just got forked in the last couple months.
If both forks are still around and actively developed in a year's time, you might have yourself an example there. Odds are, though, that the "renegade" fork won't be. That's the other force that discourages forking: the very personality type that is most likely to participate in a fork is unlikely to be prone to the sort of cooperation that makes large projects possible.
Open source flying cylinder of death == bad
Oh right, and those closed source flying cylinders of death are a real bouqet of roses, too.
I can count the number of significant projects that have forked on one hand and still have a finger free for Darl McBride. Sure, forking happens all of the damn time with silly stuff like MP3 players and web-based BBS software, but aside from the BSDs, when was the last time you heard of a significant infrastructure project forking?
Only the gcc/egcs split comes to mind, but the two were folded back into one tree and the result was a better compiler. There's the StarOffice/OpenOffice split, but that's also largely collaborative. Most other forks are dead ends that wither away quietly, no matter how loud and vociferous the original argument was.
This is just more Microsoft FUD coming from one of the most Microsoft-saturated countries on the planet.
I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, but the first thing I thought when I looked at the rendering was, "Gee, the interior of the earth looks like a lava lamp."
The second thing I thought, of course, was, "Well, duh."
Reading this and the rest leads me to believe that they are NOT preventing people from reverse engineering FAT. Rather, they are selling their 'true' implementation of the filesystem. Nowhere does it say that companies providing their own 'clean room' implementation of the FAT filesystem will have to pay.
;)
That seems dubious at best. You could easily create a filesystem that is functionally identical to FAT, but unless the implementation is identical as well, it wouldn't work with Windows, and with an identical implementation you'd be infringing on Microsoft's patent.
Still, the typical knee-jerk reactions here are as yet unwarrented.
That's because the moderation system does not yet support -1 RTFA, -1 Ill-informed, -1 Reactionary, -1 Overexcited, or -5 STFU. I've been lobbying for these for years, but my posts keep getting modded down.
So what makes them think this was for gaming? Given the religious significance of regular polyhedra in the classical era -- including but not limited to the Pythagoreans -- it's much more likely that this was either a divination tool or a model representing someone's cosmological theory.
As for the rest of your generalizations, I resent being painted with such a broad brush. Sure, there are zealots in the open source community; they're present in any and every community.
Personally, I fail to see why there is such a strong reaction to the suggestion that there is an unusually high asshole-density in the open source community, except that it's true and truth is often painful.
Everything in the referenced article is essentially spot-on. Of course, all of the author's points are tangential to the real problem, which is that open source, for all of its many and varied advantages, is immune to end-user reactions. If Microsoft behaved towards users the way the most vocal and visible OSS developers do, Microsoft would be gone overnight. If your only contact with MS (or Oracle, or Sun, or any other large software firm) is reading Slashdot articles, you'll end up with the false impression that their representatives are all overbearing assholes. However, out in the real world, their sales reps are generally very nice, polite, accommodating people. Why? Because they understand their respective monopolies, contrary to popular belief, could evaporate very quickly if their customers were genuinely fed up with them. OSS developers have no such safeguard against their own excesses.
Lest this be dismissed as an empty generalization or an unsupported assertion (which it will anyway), consider some of the most polished and/or user-friendly Linux software: Evolution, Nautilus, Mozilla, KDE, MySQL, OpenOffice.org. All of these either originated as non-free software or were specifically aimed at being adjuncts to some sort of commercial venture.
This is not to say that there aren't tons of excellent packages that are "pure" open source (postfix, apache, gcc), but the majority of them are aimed at technical users, and even there, the documentation is typically quite poor. Nor is this to say that OSS developers couldn't produce much more polished and user-friendly software, but it would require stepping down from the arrogant high horse too many developers ride on -- Theo de Raadt and Dan Bernstein spring immediately to mind -- and treating end-users with respect instead of contempt.
This is different from Racter in that Racter used templates and simple variable substitution, claims made by the vendor notwithstanding, while Kurzweil's program uses Markov chains and n-gram analysis.
The question that everyone should be asking is what exactly is new about any of this? If you dropped all the applicable prior art on Ray Kurzweil from a height of two inches, not even dental records would suffice to identify him afterwards. People have been writing software to do this kind of thing since computers were available. Claude Shannon used to do ad hoc construction of probabilistically chained text by hand using nothing more than pencil, paper, and a book.
Did you miss the early 2.4.x kernels? The 2.4 kernel was nicknamed "the kernel of pain" for a reason. The VM madness was so horrid where I work -- it could be relied upon to clobber MySQL every time the load got moderately high -- that we immediately rolled back to whatever the latest 2.2.x kernel was at the time.
The fact that Linux is the product of an open development process certainly improves code quality, but it doesn't mean that all of the major bugs have been worked out before it's been subjected to the full power of real world production use.
In fact, why would balance checking be available from anyone but your bank itself? They'd only be able to perform an actual transfer, and the balance would either be sufficient or not.
Not so. I have a merchant account, and I can easily perform pre-authorization on a credit card transaction. I typically do it when someone wants to reserve an expensive piece of rental equipment and I want to make sure they can actually afford it before I turn down other potential rental customers. It's not quite the same thing as balance checking -- but I can progressively try to pre-authorize various sums until I hit your limit. In fact, assuming that you have $25,000 or less in your checking account -- a safe assumption for most people -- a simple binary search will let me determine your balance to within $200 or so within seven tries.
That would, of course, be an abuse of the system, but it's not illegal, and if I were a big enough merchant, odds are I could induce my transaction gateway service to overlook the indiscretion.