What did this blog writer actually ever do that's worth a shit? Shouldn't that be one of the first things mentioned? Far as I can tell, he's a nobody that writes a blog. I can't find any references to any important pieces of software he's worked on that makes me think I should give a shit what he thinks. Moreover, the ideas he's propagating are bullshit, what he says is true if you don't write software, don't work on important software, and don't play on teams, otherwise it's just stupidity and he's showing his youth. Nothing to see here, move on.

Taco, Hemos, Slashdot, et al.., remember way back in the day when we were infested by all those Katz articles and so they implemented the Katz-block technology to let us remove that crap from the front page? I like the developers section but this is a bullshit article, we need to introduce a more fine grained Katz-block. We need an "everything you know is wrong" subsection, a "new language or some shit like that" subsection, and a "technology x is dead" subsection so I can block that crap out of the front page.

As far as I can tell, they weren't serious about that, though most of the scientists do seem to be seriously fed up with dubious FOIA requests for data they can't release by people who'll just end up misinterpreting it anyway...

How common is this? Is there are lot of science that is subjected to FoIA "harassment?" Seriously, call me naive on this one. I understand the premise, I understand intellectual property and proprietary data I just can't remember Feynman and Gell-Man evoking FoIA to challenge each other or really any other example in science.

I disagree with this. I've run Linux on Alphas, PowerPCs, Itanium, and MIPS over the years and you're on an island, even with the opensource stuff. It's usually solvable but it can be a lot of work and the bottom line is that while many distributions supported alternative platforms with gusto at one point, all but PowerPC is pretty much dead ended and practically unsupported and PowerPC support isn't great. It would be kind of nice if build tools would just automagically add support for those platforms, it'd give them more relevance.

It's more of an argument that these kinds of binaries aren't needed. What is needed, if you ask me, is an easy way to do bundles so people can install and delete applications as easily as they can on Mac OSX. If that provides a mechanism for universal binaries then so be it. It's the libraries and all that versioning that is the headache.

I've had the same experience. I've generally only bought brand named, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, TDK is what I think they have at Costco. I've got a couple CD-Rs from around 1993-1994 and they're still fine.

I also keep them in a fairly dry and cool spot in my basement. I happen to live in Colorado which is naturally very dry.

Maybe 2 years ago I went through and did a full audit of sorts and backed-up CD-Rs on to new DVD-Rs but I didn't find a single bad one. Clearly there have to be some additional variables. I have about 50 CD-Rs of music I keep in my car and maybe 20% of those have terrible skipping problems now, I can only assume that's from getting cooked nearly every day for about 6 months of the year though.

This whole "backup" and "archive" subject seems to come up semi regularly here. Basically, a lot of the data from the mid-1990s are mostly a lot of opensource stuff, copies of distributions and such, data that seemed really important to have around at the time but probably isn't. The really important data, my family pictures, my important documents, personal source codes, and some other files I deem too important to lose, I kind of keep assembled in a "master" backup and I sort of aggregate data to that and re-back it up a couple times a year. Until the last couple years it could easily fit on a CD. Now I've got about 20GB of photos and it stretches across a few DVDs. Bluray burners are affordable and they can hold 50GB, which is compelling, it's just a matter of enough devices being able to read them in my house.

I'd go with 2.6. I doubt there are any features that will substantially change anything, it does get you a bit closer to "main street" though should you start adding new stuff.

Truer words. I think there are some interesting questions to ask here though.

Mozilla isn't terribly different, it also sort of languished for years, it wasn't even possible to build it when it was "open sourced" the need Mozilla filled is a big part of the problem, it's a hard project to get into though. OpenOffice, Ingres, Firebird, and if you take a longer view projects like Zope, Chandler, and other projects that started out with either a corporate idea and code base or just really grand and public ideas have seemed do less well ('fail' is a strong word, there is code to use, it's just not highly used.)

Did Mozilla sort of take off because of the need? Or was it the combination of need and reduction in focus? Firefox is quite a bit less than netscape communicator or the full seamonkey mozilla (no email, no editor, no chat, etc..).

Ingres and Firebird are both easier to explain and harder to explain. There has been a tide of MySQL backlash in some circles and from all indications it looks like there is some kind of trouble in Sun with MySQL. Remarkably, most seem to have gone to Postgresql from MySQL or to like sqlite, hsqldb, and derby. Firebird, Ingres and throw SAPDB in to the mix are really good databases but you'd never know that from the community. I'd have expected at least a few more pockets of people trying them out, choosing them and making noise about it. Ingres does have that look of decay about it though, you can't see through that.

Zope and Chandler? I don't know what to say or where to target their wrong turns. Chandler seems to just have been over hyped from the start. Zope on the other hand produced a remarkable stack a decade ago, well documented, fairly easy to use, just completely missed the market and then was unable to adapt over time. I wonder how it could have been if they had produced something like a "zope in a box" that was a single one shot package that got a full Zope with database running, kind of like rails, just a run a few commands and you made a database backed zope app... things could have been different, I remember jerking around with different python postgresql connectors trying to figure out which worked and which was supported..

OpenOffice is a good piece of software, I'd say it's a very important and needed piece of software. For reasons I don't understand at all, geeks just don't like it. (They don't particularly like java or mono either, at least a large and vocal chunk of geekdom doesn't.) Part of it is the giant amount of time it takes to compile openoffice. Part of it is that there was some engineering that went in to it and whenever that happens there is a great debate, small things tend to take more effort. Part of it is this belief that it's incredibly slow, those rumors never go away and on a machine capable or running a modern distribution well it seems to run pretty well. There are probably some other little things too, language choices, quality concerns (they won't just include any patch) part of it is the audience. GIMP doesn't appear to be thriving, it's chugging along. There is not great opensource CSS editor either, go figure. These are products that are needed for the platform to reach a more broad audience but they are also products that don't really appeal to geeks, I hardly ever use a word processor or graphic editor. Somehow it seems the community has to either navigate this chasm or it's reached the limit of what opensource can really do.

The other part of it might be that people really just don't contribute but bit patches and it's a thankless job running such a project. The Linux kernel might be the exception but when you really cut through it all, there are a lot fewer contributors than you might think and there are a core of 10-20 guys that run the whole show. I tend to think it's a gap for the community to cross though, the community sort of thinks easy to use or wysiwyg or office like apps are the land of microsoft and apple and copying them is taboo (look at mono, another incredibly fine piece of software that people will fight to keep out of a linux distribution)

I don't really understand it. It's somewhat puzzling though, kernel hacking clearly isn't for every hacker, you'd think there'd be this pool of application hackers that would be pushing openoffice in different directions.