dfrage

Link to that particular blog posting?

Here you're blatantly accusing ESR of fraud, which per you "requires an active intent to acquire something of value through misrepresentation", to wit, soliciting money for "attaching his name to things".

We have no basis for a discussion of the work you claim he's not doing.

Accusing ESR and the rest of the NTPsec project of fraud is a very serious claim. Could you explain in more detail why contemplating rewriting of most or all of the project in Go as he was learning the language is such a definitive tell?

This is merely a list of the "critical Internet services or libraries" that he claims in one way or another, and ensuring the maintenance of such software is part of the whole thesis.

To scare quote that, and denigrate it over "substantive changes" ... well, I must thank for your solid support of his thesis.

The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not....

This attitude denies support to projects like NTPsec, for which he's the technical lead, your take on this concept only applies to current maintainers of existing projects.

Even then, he's converting GCC to git, the latter indirectly bears a great deal of "Internet Load".

I'll repeat the claim from the NTPsec project page:

GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.

And tools, to support for example the development of tools like Emacs and GCC, indirectly support "core networking or services".

You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.

NTPsec aspires to be "Internet Load Bearing Software".

A perfectly cromulent reply, you're welcome. :-)

Who just happens to be the tech lead to a partial answer to this problem: http://ntpsec.org/ Which implicitly criticizes the reference implementation.

Second item from the top:

gpsd

gpsd is a service daemon that monitors a GPS attached to a serial or USB port, decodes the position/velocity/time information it sends, and republishes in a simple uniform format on an IANA-designated TCP/IP port. This enables multiple applications to read from a GPS without contention. The distribution also provides C and Python libraries to encapsulate the client side of talking with gpsd.

From the core team page on the following project (https://ntpsec.org/core-team.html), with at least one falsifiable claim:

Eric S. Raymond has been the technical lead of GPSD, a close peer project of NTP and one of its principal time sources, since 2004. GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.

The top item, where he's also the technical lead:

NTPsec

A stripped down-security-hardened and generally improved version of the NTP reference code. Features code bulk reduced by a factor of 4, better monitoring and diagnostic tools, and Network Time Security.

Aspires to become one, but it's early in the process to see if it'll succeed.

Those are projects I've vaguely followed over the years. Reading down the list, this claims to be one, and the claim is partially falsifiable:

giflib

The ubiquitous service library for rendering GIFs. I handed off the project 1994 to avoid problems with the U.S. patent system, but accepted back the lead in 2012. This code had the odd effect of making me virtually omnipresent; it seems nobody has ever bothered to write a replacement, and it's now ubiquitous in web browsers, cellphones and gaming consoles. In a nicely ironic touch, it earned me an appearance in the credits of the Microsoft XBox.

People who follow his blog will be familiar with at least some of the following:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html

Some distance down the list is reposurgeon, which has been used to convert Gnu Emacs and many smaller/younger repositories to git, and is in the process of converting GCC: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?tag=reposurgeon

Not directly software: http://www.catb.org/~esr/projects.html

What generation of tape technology exhibited the problems you describe? I've never suffered such problems with original 1/2 mag tapes, DDS, or LTO.

BD-XL is wildly more expensive than LTO, although that won't matter if you can't get LTO to be reliable for you. Just checking now, B & H Photo which tends to have good prices and a good supply chain, $54.57 for 10 100GB BD-XL or a terabyte (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1101544-REG/verbatim_...), not so cutting edge and still with competition LTO-6 from Fujifilm, quantity 20, $11/TB (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1096090-REG/fujifilm_...). We also have a problem with no one worth trusting making cheapest single level BDR discs, the least worst is CMC, and I wonder how long before BD-XL sufferer the same problem.

And Soma wouldn't be useful in pacifying a population if it induced tolerance in a few weeks like Xanax and the other GABA influencing drugs do.

You can't disconnect that bit of Newspeak from what really happened, a hostile takeover of the Navy Department by the Army and Air Force that previously comprised the War Department (all this a couple of year before publication). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals for just one bit of fallout from this.

Realistically, companies keep making older generation tape drives for a long time, for example, HP LTO-5 drives are still widely available from normal vendors like Newegg. And except for one discontinuity that's pretty clearly due to the change from metal particulate to BaFe, which is at the heart of this patent dispute, LTO offers two generation back read capability, and one generation back write capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compatibility

Backblaze's system architecture is fairly failure tolerant, so they use a huge number of "consumer" grade drives that would cause enterprise people to run away screaming.

I think what would "cause enterprise people to run away screaming" is that your data is stored by them in only one data center, and they don't offer a S3 compatible API (although someone may have addressed the latter).

Backblaze however correctly notes that if you really want redundancy, you get that from using two or more vendors.

Tape is physically a lot more robust than hard drives, the single endurance advantage the latter have is better tolerance of environmental extremes, heat and humidity.

From previous reading, both are banned, Fuji recently: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/31/lto_patent_case_hit... (Although previously I remember it was Sony that declined to start up LTO-8 production, after getting their importation of similar BaFe LTO-7 tapes banned, maybe el Reg got which was which confused in the article.)

The Intel Atom C2000 product family had a terrible problem which would brick systems, see for example https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-failure-atom-pro... or https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline...

Officially, Intel says 10nm has lithography problems. They did try a more aggressive node than TSMC's first "7nm", entirely using 193nm UV, and were the only company to attempt Self-Aligned Quadruple Patterning (SAQP) for the top metal layers.

The number of calories lower class Indians are consuming is dropping, which your link has got to in part be reflecting. It's a mess.

EUV is in production today with Samsung and TSMC's "7nm" processes, and the latter has started "5nm" risk production which uses even more EUV. Here's a recent SemiWiki article on details of what Samsung's foundry business is doing: https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor/259664-samsung-foundry-up...

Intel's all 193 UV "10nm" node (roughly equivalent to the above 7nm) is a failure, we'll see if they can get their EUV using "7nm" node to ship in quantity. In all these cases the demand for less power consumption in battery powered devices continues to drive demand, even if that demand isn't as healthy as it used to be.

As I recall it's for Day, because there's also H-hour for the time of the day to start, per Oxford Dictionaries "the time of day at which an attack, landing, or other military operation is scheduled to begin." "they assured the Marines that at H-hour the reef would be covered by five feet of water"

If I was the Taiwanese leadership, I'd make it very clear we'd prepositioned enough explosives that in a matter of hours all the top fabs and the like could be turned into junk, denying the PRC these crown jewels.

Just speaking for myself, I've got plans for the inevitable disruptions such a war would create. We'd be throwing away a lot less electronic gear for quite some time.

In case of soviet space program, this worked too, soviets had a lot of success, only the american program was more successful in the later years.

A lot of that had to do with America deliberately holding back, to the point of putting ballast in Team von Braun's rockets, so that the Soviets would be the first to orbit the Earth and thus not be able to argue endlessly about the US violating their airspace with its satellites. And there was internal military rivalry in America's early response to Sputnik, the Navy had been designated as the service to first get into orbit, but they failed quite dramatically, then Team von Braun was given "rush, rush" orders to get something, anything into orbit ASAP.

A whole lot of post-WWII history pertains to bitter fighting between the War Department/Army, the Navy, and the independent Air Force spawned from the Army.

Meanwhile, based on reading some Wikipedia articles, the Soviet space program was riven by grudges going back to the Great Purge. Turns out denouncing your fellow engineers and helping to put them in the GULAG where they suffer greatly does not encourage smooth relations after WWII.

The Allies, more specifically the U.K. and the US, and the Soviets through their pervasive spying. I changed the original.

The two are not mutually exclusive, and Microsoft had to worry about antitrust action if they priced their tools too low or made them free.

Here's a much better article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/31/lto_patent_case_hit...

TL;DR, including knowledge prior to the latest wins by Sony: Fujifilm and Sony, the last two remaining manufacturers of high end LTO tapes have removed each other from the US market through legal actions. Sony as a result previously ended manufacturing of LTO-7 and never fielded LTO-8, more recently Fujifilm ended LTO-8 production. The theory a few months ago was that they'd get together and hammer out an agreement that would prevent a supply disruption, but that doesn't seem to have happened.

And for a bit of Original Research, maybe Sony wants people to switch to their and Panasonic's proprietary Archival Disc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc

In this instance, you can factor in the sense of urgency, which the Germans lacked because they thought the problems would take many many years to solve, while the Allies increasingly knew how practical it was.

Heisenberg, the distinguished senior scientist who was basically running the whole affair to the extent that was true, was a great theoretician, "the first quantum mechanical mind" per Jeremy Bernstein, author of Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall of 10 German scientists captured by Project Alsos, but was awful with numbers, let alone experiments (Fermi was the only top mind of the period great at both). It's in fact a very good thing his reactor didn't go critical, because for some reason he though the reaction would be self-regulating....

Whereas on the other side the concept of an atom bomb of modest size through fast neutron fissioning was realized very early by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, authors of the critical document on the topic published in March 1940 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...). While they underestimated the amount of pure U235 needed, they were in the right ballpark, something that took the Germans at Farm Hall several rounds after Hiroshima to start approaching.

Another critical scientific error was not trying hard enough with graphite, which required purification way beyond the industrial state of the art to get rid of enough neutron poisons. Resulting on a total dependence on heavy water, which the Allies were able to thoroughly sabotage.

Organizationally, I think it was Rhodes who observed that it was not probable that wartime Germany would develop a bomb, or peacetime America. And if you're interested in that, read up on Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, without the extraordinarily good leadership he provided the Manhattan Project wouldn't have finished by the time we'd conquered Japan with liberal use of chemical weapons.

To quote Wikipedia it is:

attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and "rules of thumb" about how the world works (think common sense knowledge but focusing more on things that rarely get written down or said, in contrast with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia), with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations that were not preconceived.

As explained by Douglas Lenat in a talk in the 1980s, he said his AI efforts had reached a point where there was a mattress on the road blocking him, and he decided to do something about it. As the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc) alludes to in passing, it started out as an effort to capture the information needed to understand all the entries in a 2 volume encyclopedia", "Cyc" itself is from encyclopedia.

Image recognition? Well, I suppose once you identify an object, Cyc might be useful to reason about it, but....

The good will generated by the stream of customer testimonials of this process we hear about is priceless.

The proposition seems to go something like this: it's a new thing, mistakes are statistically expected, you make an honest one and plead "oops!" and we refund you, no doubt pointing you to resources on best practices and account throttling. As long as the customer takes the lesson to heart, everyone wins.