humdumb

- hackers don't read source code

All one has to do is look at the source for ping and questions like these are answered.

"excessive meetings"

Based on that criteria we could probably cut some 15% of the total workforce. For many employees, that's all they do is attend meetings, all day long. We call these employees managers. :)

Startups where almost everyone is actually working (save VC chosen CEO's) and there's no room for corporate welfare I guess bigger companies might perceive them as "nimble".

Is that a euphemism for efficient?

I'd say this is a flaw of the "web" and relying on hyperlinking and "HTML forms" as a means to access all content. That's what web crawlers do.

Better would be putting databases on certain known ports, with no "hostname" requirements and let search engines scan IP ranges for openings on those ports. You send a ping to the port and if a "Welcome" response comes back, then you have a public database to explore. The response might even describe the contents of the database. (Yikes, I'm having flashbacks to gopher.)

What's funny is that "port scanning" is like the term "hacker" it has a negative connotation even though there's nothing inherently devious about it. Pinging a port to detect if there's a public database open on it is actually a more efficient less resource intensive means of service discovery than crawling hyperlinks in HTML generated by some web developer (maybe even one employed by a governemnt agency with a tight budget) hoping to stumble upon every possible data resource.

Check out the Merck v Integra case on the page you linked to.

That was what I was thinking of. Section 271. Subsection (e) and maybe another one or two.

Bacteria vs. Human body^1.

1. Specifically, teeth and saliva, but you must always consider the whole organism.

Drink soda pop --> Advantage, Bacteria.

Don't drink soda pop. --> What do you think?

Bacteria need acidic conditions and they are happy to have plenty of sugar. Preserving your teeth means giving your body the best possible chance against bacteria, slowing the process of decay as much as you can. But in the end, on every front, bacteria will always win. It's just a matter of time. If they don't consume you while you're alive, they will after you're dead.

With respect to tooth decay, drinking soft drinks surely helps bacteria, not the human body. But then, maybe people derive other benefits from drinking these concoctions. (Jolt?) Maybe preserving their teeth is not their number one priority?

Factoid: George Washington had wooden teeth?

So, _hypothetically_, what if you don't use a third party email provider? That is, all your mail is delievred directly to you and is stored on your local machines/devices.

Does that give you more privacy protection than keeping messages stored with some third party in the cloud? Or does it give you less protection?

The title could be better. What he's describing with the term "dark social" is not the "Web", it's the internet. That's a distinction that is important to understand. There is much you can do over the internet that is difficult to do over the "web". Moreover, the "web" is still quite centralized in the sense that there are a disproportionate number of servers to clients. It has been called the "calf-cow" model. Some are calling for an end to that.

Someone correct me if this is wrong but I think Dylan's Infidels was the first digitally recorded LP. I should probably Google it. Anyway, that was released in 1983, the same year as Zappa wrote this.

Blah, blah, home taping, blah, blah, CD's, blah, blah.

"Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar" :)

Some people miss Steve Jobs. I miss Frank Zappa. Genius.

Maybe I'm reading the story you linked to incorrecty but wasn't that a quote from his friend, Lars Wirzenius?

The gist of what I was trying to say, poorly perhaps, is that in 1993 Linux was available, it was free and it worked on previously DOS-controlled, home PC's. BSD wasn't as available nor as ready for use on the home PC. At least not as I remember it. It certainly is now. But it wasn't then.

"cleaner, consistent.. better documented"

I think that sums it up. Why should I use Linux?

BSD definitely can't do everything that Linux can do, but it can do most things, normally the most important things, and it can do some interesting things that Linux cannot.

For programs that only are available on Linux, BSD kernels can run Linux applications.

It's a little painful using Linux after you become accustomed to BSD. Linux is really fast, but it's too random, sometimes even chaotic, and it seems disorganized by comparison.

But for people who are used to Linux there seems no reason to switch. Linux has lots of resources behind it to keep up with new hardware. BSD will never be as quick to produce drivers.

Actually because of senior managment who told the company lawyers to take action. But yeah, this is the correct answer. Go figure it's at the bottom of the thread.

Linus was a 386BSD user, or hoped to be. A lawsuit stopped people like him from getting their hands on the BSD code to play with, so he wrote a UNIX clone himself using MINIX as a model. Eventually the legal situation with BSD was cleared, and BSD became free and available to everyone, but that wasn't until 1993 or so. And even after the lawsuit some people still wanted to make money selling BSD for the PC. (They failed.^1) By that time, lots of people had already shifted to Linux as the "free" available UNIX as it was readily available. Why pay for CD-ROMs of BSD when you could freely download Linux via FTP?

1. But just look at Apple. BSD is in lots of commercial products, though you might not always realize it.

"... without authority makes, ..."

There are exceptions, e.g., for research and development.

Would printing a prototype of a product to be produced overseas (and never imported) be infringement?

When patent trolls start being linked to loss of jobs, i.e. linked to impeding the creation of new jobs, then IV is going to have a more serious PR problem.

pIt is the aggressive pursuit of the small inventor^1 that will signal the eventual demise of the trolling business, because at that point it will have become more than just tax collection on innovation from existing businesses. It will be an impediment to the formation of new businesses and the creation of new jobs.

1. Ironically it was the small inventor, with the help of an enterprising litigator like Niro, approaching the large company producing products, like Intel, that motivated to the term "patent troll". But truthfully, some small inventors do want to produce products. Some of them do start companies. All large companies were once small ones. If the trolling business is taken to its natural end, building an impenetrable thicket that can block any player in a given industry, are potential entrepreneurs going to pay a troll for a license just to _start_ a business? What do you think?

I have done good. =D Laughing is healthy.

I probably shouldn't have phrased the statement as I did. What I meant was projects that are _potentially_ open to anyone, but which are highly selective about who is allowed to contribute.

The numerous references to hardware in your comment only serve to illustrate my point.

Of course there have been some new algos and improvements to existing ones since 1984. But nothing approaching a Moore's Law. The dramatic changes the blog post highlighted are due to hardware, not software.

Take away the hardware advances (hold the hardware as a constant), then look at software as the variable. Then we can have a meaningful discussion of software improvements over time. IOW, run new software on old hardware.

To measure advances in hardware, hold software as the constant. IOW, run old software on new hardware.

If both are variables, it's difficult to assess how much software has improved on it own, without the benefit of new hardware.

Linus Torvalds' comments on the future of RISC, CPU instructions, and compatibility versus "cool new features" in the /. interview were interesting.

I love the PWB! [line break] Sometimes the best stuff does not have the best marketing.

Any chance the author can post a copy of the documentation his father had saved for the Documenter's Work Bench?

So many UNIX utilities are line-based, paragraphs just complicate things. [line break] Yet we still type in paragraphs.

You can take the above text and feed it through fmt (one of my favorite utilities) and you get an opening paragraph with two sentences, a single line paragraph, and a final paragraph with two sentences. You can control the line length too. Want 40-column output for better readability? Easy, when using fmt. But you need input that is single lines.

Have you ever ran PDF's through pdftotext or pdftohtml and been frustrated by the formatting? Line breaks from hell.

If documents were distributed in the format the author describes we could convert them into PDF's and other pretty printing formats. But converting from these "paragraphed" formats into readable plain text can be a real nuisance.

The "threat" of 3D printing is not piracy it's prototypes. Potentially anyone can make a prototype, find a manufacturer in Asia and start a business. In other words, it spreads the power of creativity to more people. Patent trolls, the parasites that they are, want to piggyback on others' creativity.

My theory: He's a wannabe lawyer.

As CTO at Microsoft he probably had to deal with lawyers and patent issues constantly. Maybe they upset him? Or they excited his curiousity?

I could be wrong, but with IV, he is running what amounts to a patent law firm or a corporate patent department that has no corporate client. They just obtain patents and collect payments. They produce nothing, except patents and lawsuits, hiding behind shell companies. They take no risks and thus can offer no gains to society. They just collect money. They are a tax on creativity and production.

You are not the only one who has pondered this question. Why? He put up his own money to finance this business.

I liked this blog entry a lot. A wee bit of multi-core/threads anti-hype is healthy.

The comment about people wanting a single absolute measure of something is also spot on.

The biggest bottlenecks to me were (and still are) memory and the network. Mult-cores are nice, but given the choice I'd still trade additional CPU's for more memory or a faster network.

Could you define "practical OS"?

What specifically do you want this OS to be able to do? (Note that we've reached a point where no user necesarily needs to restrict themselves to a single OS. They could use different OS's on the same computer for different purposes. This was not always so easy to do. It will continue to get easier.)

I think we need more open source projects that are not open to contribution from anyone. This may upset some people but will keep the bar for quality high. Linus' original work has been tarnished by too many eager but unqualified contributors.

If he had just chosen a small team, I think Linux could have been a real contender to BSD in terms of quality. It would have taken time to do, but they have had a loyal user base (of non-contributors) and demand from early on due to the legal problems with obtaining BSD and that is I think what has pushed Linux forward.

"That's progress."

Yes, but not in software. It's the hardware that's improved. So the sw can be sloppy and inefficient and most people won't notice.

Hardware has improved. Software has not. This is hard for some folks to accept. But it is a plain truth. Take away the added power of new hardware and what's left? You wouldn't want to know.

It is easier to do the same basic computing tasks as in 1984, with less effort, but it's not easier to exceed what you could do in 1984 because you have better software. It's because you have better hardware and can afford to be sloppy. 2-3 lines of perl/Python but how many lines are in the binary or the libraries? (e.g. what if you discovered there was gratuitous use of backtracking in _all_ perl's regex, even for the simplest matching; who would care?) There is no Moore's Law for software. To put it another way, most of the computing tasks being done today are the same ones (albeit on a different scale) and use the same methods (or even lazier ones) as in 1984. Hence the example of spellcheck. It's one of many tasks performed in 1984 and today and it will be performed in the future.

It's easy to mistake advances in hardware (more power) for advances in software (novel and more efficient approaches to problems).