where are the reports of "savage molestation and rape?"

Just curious, it looks nothing like that but I'd like to know which news organizations reported that.

It's a certainty. Thing is, google-go is a C competitor, not a C#, Java, etc.. competitor. Not any time soon at least and it's also very much a work in progress.

Sun beat MS in a very similar law suit, I don't see any reasons why Oracle won't win against Google either, that leave google 2 options: 1) buy the rights from Oracle for a huge chunk of cash or 2) create their own tool set and language. They've already built the tool set.

Personally, I see it as a marketing and product positioning problem. There is clearly a market for a C competitor, people have been working at them for years but no real players have backed any until go. Google pretty clearly needs a higher level application tool too. They just need to market both without eating each other or undermining each other, that's the problem.

So if you're a large business, what's the best way to make sure any two devices on your network can easily talk to each other if they need to? Keep in mind that companies like HP and IBM buy other companies on a very regular basis and there are constant collisions with private space when that happens. What's the solution?

The very best solution is to give all the machines unique public IPs that are routable and do your own routing inside your network. A lot more companies than those use that practice.

What OS/2 "services" matter?

Personally, I dropped OS/2 like a hot rock when the community started making up BS rumors like this one. It was worse than the commodore and amiga communities. I just can't think of some good reasons why IBM would want to do that. They've sold the PC Company, now they'd want a beach head in PC software? Secondly, it's not like OS/2 isn't a brand with some baggage... They were smart enough to smell the winds of change when they did (it could have cost IBM billions and billions more to keep fighting that battle) they are certainly smart enough to know better now.

I could sort of see an IBM Linux distribution of sorts, I could even see IBM spending some funds on making it more desktop friendly but anything divided by 2? Not a chance.

There are companies that specialize in grouping together small companies and independents to qualify for group rates. Trinet is an example of a company that specializes in doing that for startups, there are other coops and probably some different local options. In the corporate world you're probably used to paying a fairly small chunk and your employer actually pays the majority of it, when you're on your own you get to pay it all so it's more. It can be afforded though, it's a matter of priorities. We're talking about downgrading the next car you buy kind of a price you might be looking at a Lexus for $40k or something but the insurance costs might drive you down to like a $25k Toyota or Honda, it's that kind of monthly payment.

Another option, and it really depends on what you mean when you say "health insurance" I think the majority of folks just want to go to the doctor whenever they want and not have to pay a lot. Things like checkups and annual exams are the sorts of things that don't really fall under insurance in the classical sense. So what you do is approach BlueCross/BlueShield or some other insurance company and you get quotes for catastrophic coverage with like a $5000 deductible. I've seen this cost families of 4 under $200 a month. So this won't cover checkups, it won't cover child birth, it won't cover the flu and it probably won't cover most simple broken bones like children may get from time to time. What it does cover is a big expense and you'll have to adjust the deductible to something you can deal with: $2000, $5000, maybe $10000, if those are just way out of line for you then maybe this isn't for you. Essentially, you're responsible for health maintenance. Doctor's visits will probably cost like $100 and you'll pay the sticker price for medicine but a lot of doctors are pretty cool about that and then some companies like Walmart (go figure) are very aggressively trying to drive the costs of medicines down and encouraging the use of generics and such and a large scale. You pay for what you need, if you're a tightass or really strapped for cash, you can cut annual visits out and only go when you're really sick, but that's not a good thing to do. If you have a really healthy lifestyle though, it might be a cost effective way to go, you're worried about your kids falling of their bikes or your wife getting in a car accident and you can buy coverage for that type of stuff.

The bigger problem here is that the business model for American insurance companies is pretty broken and they've confused the consumers to the degree that they've pitted them against each other. The healthier/younger folks want doctors visits and medicine for no more than $30 a shot. The middle aged folks want every option in the world when a health issue materializes, regardless of costs and so the insurance companies in the middle of that. It's health maintenance vs. insurance and they play together, the more you maintain your health, generally the less you will need actual insurance. Now the insurance companies are run by legitimate cock suckers, there are some rules about who they can deny and why but as an independent you're on the short end of the stick more often. If you or your wife could return to corporate work pretty easily, that's an option to get coverage again. If you're not careful you go with some low cost catastrophic coverage, one of you children get a cancer or something that's kind of in the grey area between coverage and non-coverage and then they black ball you when you try to upgrade to a more comprehensive plan; at that point you're on the hook for thousands of dollars in treatment (or accept death, I guess) and they won't help you.

Another option is your wife could get a part time job somewhere and work enough to buy insurance for the family. Or depending upon the ages of your kids, colleges and universities often have plans that they can buy in to.

Like I mentioned above, there companies that specialize in forming coops to get group rates, there are also companies that specialize in selling insurance and while it sounds like the wrong thing to do, finding one of those companies or consultants might be a worthwhile thing to do to customize a plan for your family. Almost anything you do will probably cost you more than it did at a large company though, that's just going to be a fact of the matter.

Well these lists are the journalistic equivalent of "mailing it in" so it's hard to nit pick when you're picking at bullshit...

If the PowerPC was a terrible product, then what was the 68000 series?

Yes that's true. I'm just thinking about making Postgresql a little bit easier to get going.

I've suggested this before. Build PostgreSQL and package it with some tweaked configurations, enable all local connections by default, beef up the buffers and some of the memory usage by default, write some install scripts to make accounts for local users, add PLSQL out of the box... I can't help but think that that's like 80% of the problem the Postgresql holdouts have, you do have to do more lifting to get it running. Maybe start writing a Postgresql configuration GUI that will help you tune the config stuff some.

If you want to be fancy include one of the replication packages out of the box too.

Call it "MyPgSQL..."

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.