All operating systems suck

At least, all operating systems that I’ve worked with suck in some way or another. These are not minor quibbles, but major problems. It seems these fundamental problems are present in both open and closed source OSen.

You’ve probably read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond, so you know the difference between the two methodologies. Most of the open source development that I’ve come into contact with adheres to the Bazaar philosophy. The problem with the Bazaar philosophy is that almost anyone is allowed to contribute to the code (of Linux for instance). A few of these contributers are very clever people, but in a maverick kind of way. Whatever the case may be, they do not work together in the close-knit coordinated groups that you find in good software houses with effective leadership, but rather in a hackish manner. This wouldn’t have been such a problem, were it not for the fact that the rest (and the majority) of the contributers are not sufficiently experienced, inept or just plain stupid. Partly due to these phenomena, open source software seems to suffer from a total lack of consistency (in form, function and quality). In addition, one finds hundreds of half-assed software efforts on the web that will NEVER be completed. Compare this image to what you read here for instance.

Read More

Happy me

As I was downloading OpenOffice for the wif last night, I couldn’t help noticing that it was coming down at a very respectable 110KByte/s via my home ADSL link. This of course means that my bandwidth upgrade is complete. Rejoice!

Read More

Death to censorship

Yahoo reports that a group of record labels (UMG, Sony, RCA and Warner Brothers Records) are suing American back-bone providers because they allow end-users to download illegal music from Listen4ever.com.

The preposterousness of this aside, should they succeed, a precedent for backbone-level censorship on the internet will be created. Personally, I don’t condone the illegal download of music (and I also don’t care if you do download your music like that), but I do feel very strongly about the current freedom of information flow.

Read More

William Gibson knew it then…

This article in Wired documents the efforts of a scientist to restore sight with brain implants and external signal processing and optical acquisition equipment. It also mentions the work of one or two other scientists in the field.

I read Neuromancer years ago and it was very good. I read it very recently again and suffered a severe attack of goose-flesh. Gibson’s visions of the future are super-naturally accurate: if you haven’t read this book yet, stop what you’re doing now and start. You’ll see that virtual reality (AFAICR, Gibson coined the term “cyberspace”), brain implants, artificial human augmentation and artificial intelligence are all there and that the current state of affairs is excitingly close to the bleak picture that Gibson paints. I hope I live long enough to see where it ends…

Read More

76

We went to Köln (Cologne, yeah?) this weekend. The Dom is incredible, but I guess that’s what you get if you spend a few hundred years constructing a masterpiece. The Cathedral and the Bazaar? The Cathedral wins, hands down…

Sipping Kölsch on the bank of the Rhine in the summer sun is also an activity that I can highly recommend. :)

I managed to update my laptop page as things have been moving quite fast on the DRI front. My kludge idea has been reworked/redone by Michel Dänzer and it is now actually about ready for prime-time. XFree86 can now seamlessly drop back into software rendering if it can’t regain DRI resources after a VT switch.

Read More