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One of my commenters reports that he showed my essay on evaluating the harm from closed-source software to Richard Stallman, who became upset by it. It shouldn’t be news to RMS or anyone else that I think he’s a fanatic and this is a problem, but it seems that every few years I have to explain the problem again. I…
I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to…
Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire.
I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.
The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.
A British tabloid revealed today that Apple has filed for a patent on a system for disabling the video camera on an iPhone or iPad when its user attempts to film a concert or other interdicted live event. This is a much more threatening development than most may realize.
In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom , which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom . Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open…
Massive concurrency and hardware parallelism are sexy topics in the 21st century. There are a couple of good reasons for this and one rather unfortunate one.
The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone , ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
I’m the lead of the GPSD project , a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it’s decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining tale of…
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…