The Twilight Report

2008-12-05T02:53:00

27 November 2008 05:38pm: We're having leftovers for turkey day because we're having our bird on sunday.
1 December 2008 10:21am: Conference this week so I only have to work two days this week. Larry Wall is the keynote on Thursday. I know I know, who?
Yesterday at 10:42am: Made it to the conference of geek. First rule: no language bashing. Guess how long it took for someone to bash ruby.
Today at 08:53am: Day two of the conference and the internets are working this time. I think Larry Wall is wearing the same Hawaiian shirt as yesterday.
Today at 10:21am: In the microsft presentation the queen's portrait is on the wall. Guy is obsessed with lolcats :/
Today at 11:32am: Walked to the confrence today. Going to walk home too. Nice to not need a train or car or bus or stuff like that for once.
Today at 01:48pm: FOSS vs. The World talk is just as bad as I expected it would be. The ghost of Richard Stallman haunts these halls. Jerk.
Today at 09:48pm: Arianna Huffington made a terrible pitch about blogging on the Daily Report Colbert Report and so I decided to micro blog it on the twitter.

P.O. Box 1663

2006-02-14T01:51:00

e and d came out for a few days. I'm sad because now that they are gone again I realize it will be a long time before I see them again. Tell me again why I can't just bring my friends to Australia with me? e said she would try to come out within a couple of years. It's going to be hard getting used to not being able to meet up with her and Jack after herding practice to go for a hike in New Jersey.

On the bright side, It was great to see them, and I was pleased that e finally got to meet my mum. The first day they were here we went skiing at Brighton. d said that he actually liked skiing so he may be back for more at some point.

That night we had Posole (prepared by myself) and invited Clare and Val over as well so we had an interesting discussion about whether or not Biology could ever be a predictive science or not. We also discussed the stupidity of large organizations, such as IBM and LANL, and how open systems are safer to closed ones.

Everyone had seconds, and some even had thirds. Right before I left New York, e told me that she likes Mexican food... all these years I thought she was just being polite and eating the food that I make for Enchilada Night. Seriously.

The second day we took a drive to Park City to see two photography galleries. We drive through the mountains and took a number of pictures and had lunch at somebodyorother's Grill. That night e and d took us to the Red Iguana, where we had more good Mexican food.

Internet: For Porn

2005-12-06T18:03:00

Google maybe loves books, but then you'd have to say it loves porn too, because it traffics in a lot of that.

Christopher Lydon on Radio Open Source in response to a Google representative's assertion that Google loves books

Steve Gilmore

2005-01-15T05:07:00

The year is 1997. The treacherous Lecturians have conquered the student residential network. But, from secret staging grounds from two of the campus dorms, the students prepare to SYN flood Steve Gilmore's PC.

White Dactyl The ResComp chronicles

So this obsession with the toothbrush picture of mine has more layers than an onion. I was re-reading the article Mitch Gitman wrote about ResComp back in 1997 and noticed it quotes Steve Gilmore's e-mail threat to crack down on software piracy and pornography. I greped for the e-mail in question using the text in the article and sure enough, I found it in my mail archive. [ side note: before there was the verb to google, there was the verb to grep. I never even thought about that because it seems like to grep has been around forever, but of course it has not. Even relatively pedestrian verbs, such as to search or to find have not. ]

(Gilmore's Rant...)

"What" "I" "find" "amusing" "about" "this" "e-mail" "is" "the" "words" "which" "Gilmore" "decided" "to" "put" "into" "double" "quotation" "marks". Whew! That's enough of that; beginning to sound like William Shatner. Take this sentence for example:

All you own is a "license" to "use" that software.

Steve Gilmore The ResComp chronicles

What is remotely confusing or foreign about the words "license" and "use"?

Some prankster then spoofed this e-mail in response to Gilmore's rant:

(Spoofed...)

Let me just say that spoofing e-mail is the lowest form of hacker expression. It was a little funny though. But anyway, it was a really sad comment on the state of affairs on the ResComp LAN that the mailing list was unsecured and apparently not moderated correctly. Gilmore was totally out of his depth. Tyler was called into his office once for using a port scanner. Actually they didn't call him into his office, they just turned the ports off in his room and Tyler had to do some digging to even find out why. The point is that when Tyler finally talked to him, it became quite clear that Gilmore had no idea what was going on at all; this is apparently why he didn't see disabling his port as an unreasonable escalation. If I recall, there was no specific ban on port scanners in the ResComp user agreement, although I base this statement in part on the fact that ResComp had difficulty dealing with spoofed e-mail let alone understanding the simplicities of port scanners.

(Gilmore's Response)

I wonder if they ever worked out who sent that spoofed e-mail.

Software

2005-01-13T14:55:00

I was researching Wikis using (appropriately enough) Wikipedia just now to see if I could harness the technology for HVOC. While I was at it, I came across a reference to the hacker and free software advocate Richard Stallman, also known as rms. My friend, Richard Ess, also has the same initials; and only a few people know this: the M. in Richard M. Ess either doesn't stand for anything (as in "J Robert Oppenheimer") or it stands for "middle".

Anytime Stallman's name brought up it summons in me a feeling of low intensity rage. If all politics are local, and you live in the world made up of software known as the Internet, which is by its nature global, then you may come to appreciate that the world of software is in fact political. If this is the case than I think it could be fairly said that if Bill Gates were the Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan of software, then Richard Stallman would be Ralph Nader; although I think this is being unfair to Nader, as Stallman is petty and childish (If you believe this to be true of Nader, then maybe it is not unfair).

One of Stallman's pet peeves is that people insist on calling Linux Linux. You will find that I am one of these people, because 1) that is what it is called and 2) even if it weren't I would probably not call it that other name simply to spite Stallman. I won't repeat what he calls it, but I will say that he wants credit for Linux because his software plays a part in the success of Linux. Instead of being happy that free software is being used, he is being petty and demanding credit. This causes divisiveness in the free software community, which if you use my political analogy to software, you can see is prevalent in American politics too.

The other charge is that he is childish. I won't go into too much detail but I read an article about him where the interviewer described an episode where Stallman flipped off a building that was named after Bill Gates. In another episode, he was invited to talk at a conference for free software that was sponsored by a number of free software companies. Instead of being a positive voice, he took the opportunity to attack the sponsors, all of which make money from free software. It is, to an extent, a "free country" so he is free to express himself thus. If I were to analyze his behavior (which I am), I would say that he is resentful of the fact that these companies are making money off of, and getting credit for free software, including free software that he wrote.

If you view that companies are doing a bad thing by exploiting free software commercially, or that they are not being "true" to the free software spirit, or more to the point that they are not properly reverent to Stallman, then this is a limitation of the Copylefted license that not only did he use to release his software; but he even wrote the license and invented the term Copyleft. I actually don't think this is a limitation of the license, although I do think it is a limitation of individuals when they believe that all software should be distributed under the same copylefted license.

Stallman resents the fact that when the PC was born and gave rise to the commercial software industry as it exists today, it lead to what he saw as a decline in his hacker community. I think that everyone in the free software community should recognize and appreciate what commercialization of computers has done for society. I can't think of too many people who like Bill Gates, or his henchman the Microsoft Word Paperclip, but even I have to give him credit for turning the PC into a commodity, and making it widely available. I would argue that a big part of the reason that PCs are so affordable today is that Micro$oft, along with others, such as Apple, have made computers accessible to regular people. The creation of this enormous market has consistently driven the price of PCs down, while at the same time the speed and quality of hardware goes up.

Just to give you an idea, I gave Tyler Tron 2.0 for his birthday, and picked up a used copy for myself on half.com. If you have seen the original 80s movie on which it is based you know that the graphics are limited and simplistic. Those scenes were rendered in a batch process; meaning each frame did not have to be rendered quickly enough to be displayed real-time. This game, by contrast has much more sophisticated graphics and thanks to 3D hardware acceleration, all the frames are rendered real-time.

This is something that free software, which existed long before PCs, and long before Stallman claimed to have invented it, could never do. Free software is good for many things, particularly for constructing server software and for niche application development, and I will quite often choose a free software product over a commercial one based on quality rather than price. On the other hand, there are certain commercial software applications that are hands down the best available, and far outperform their free software equivalent. From my own point of view I would say Micro$oft Word and Adobe Photoshop fit this description. The free software community has put together some good WYSIWYG editors, but with the exception that none of them include a talking paper clip, they just don't have as rich a feature set as Word. As for Photoshop, while The GIMP is quite good, and was adequate for my needs for a long time, it is simply not good enough for professional photographers, and after having learned how to use Photoshop I realize that The GIMP just isn't good enough for my need either.

Fortunately, in this world of extremes, there are also moderates. People who exist somewhere between Bill Gates and Richard Stallman who see the benefit of both free software, the commercialization of free software, and fully commercial software. The best examples, I think, are Linus Torvalds original author of the Linux kernel, which serves as the core of the Linux operating system, and Larry Wall, the original author of Perl. I think people like these have so much more to offer the free software community than the zealots do. I think that it is telling that these two characters still play a major contributing factor to the projects that they created, while Stallman has delegated his coding responsibility to others for a life of advocacy. Those who can, do; those who can't, tell other people what to do.

The Twilight Report

tweet

P.O. Box 1663

Internet: For Porn

Steve Gilmore

Software