Comment Re:Only the failures? (Score 4, Informative) 122
+1
You beat me to it. I'll just mention Abraham Wald, who worked on this.
+1
You beat me to it. I'll just mention Abraham Wald, who worked on this.
I expect to see a working prototype of this patent: Photon push-pull radiation detector for use in chromatically selective cat flap control and 1000 megaton earth-orbital peace-keeping bomb by Arthur Paul Pedrick before any of Pais' work.
Their previous attempt to screw their customers: forcing adverts into their html and a cock up that broke connectivity haven't stopped people buying their products.
My Blackview BV9600 pro (bought because it was cheap and rugged) is still running on firmware dated 20190430 - it will be its 1st birthday in two days.
Just a fortnight ago: Van Dyck painting stolen from University of Oxford gallery
+1 on this.
About 20 years ago I was responsible for taking the code for OpenSTA, a web/database server performance measuring tool and releasing it under the GPL. As the OP points out, 3rd party code, and unsavoury comments, plus all the personal names/IDs needed to be removed. Not an quick or easy task, even for (sloccount) 235k lines of code, never mind a full OS.
Its a noble, yet futile gesture.
Interviews, with Carolyn Porco, Garry Hunt and Alan Stern at The Register
Having identified the image of the plane as an F104 Starfighter, and doing a bit of googling, it turned out I wasn't the first.
Summarising from comments on his blog post:
NASA: Starfighters Ready to Launch Research, Satellites
CubeCap
And remember that he's written a book on Digital Typography, and after being disappointed with the typesetting of the second volume of TAOCP, wrote TeX.
San Serriffe was a 1977 April Fools' day spoof special report in the UK Guardian newspaper. Everything connected with San Serriffe was named after printing and typesetting terms.
If it was essential, they wouldn't have to advertise it, would they?
From the spoof travel documentary: "Balham, Gateway to the south":
https://youtu.be/6ewUOSlRDkk?t...
There a spoken Peter Sellers version, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Coincidentally, Eric Raymond has just written an apposite article:
An LBIP is a person who maintains the software for a critical Internet service or library, and has to do it without organizational support or a budget backing him up.
That second part is key. Some maintainers for critical software operate from a niche at a university or a government agency that supports their effort. There might be a few who are independently wealthy. Those people aren’t LBIPs, because the kind of load I’m talking about isn’t technical challenge. It’s the stress of knowing that you are it and you are alone, the world out there has no idea what a crapstorm it would be if you failed at your self-imposed duty, and goddammit why doesn’t anybody care?
He then proposes a scheme: "Loadsharers" to fund LBIPs.
Happiness is a hard disk.