Reading notes

Who is Bill Joy?

Fortune Magazine calls Joy, Sun Microsystems’ chief scientist, “The Edison of the Internet.” Joy is a cofounder of Sun and a member of the Executive Committee. His work on BSD Unix and Berkeley networking qualifies his as one of the founding fathers of both Unix and the Internet. —Linux Today

In the Wired interview, Bill says —

Wired: You’ve been famously cool about Linux.
Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It’s a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that’s beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux. …

Bill is one of the few people on the planet who can legitimately say “re-implementing what I designed in 1979.” At that time I was working with punch cards and trying to figure out what the hell a differential equation was, and Bill was writing industrial-strength BSD OS code.

My goal is to do great things. If I do something great, maybe it’ll beat Microsoft. But that’s not my goal. I find Windows of absolutely no technical interest. They took systems designed for isolated desktop systems and put them on the Net without thinking about evildoers, as our president would say.

Just now noticing this August 15 writeup from Mark, thanks to Daring Fireball —

Several people have noticed that my URL format has recently changed. Previously I was using a munged form of the entry title, but now I’m using a simpler form. For instance, my wildly popular How to install Windows XP in five hours or less has the clean, cruft-free URL http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/04/xp.

Here’s how I did it …

I’m going to have to play with this. My URLs could use some shortening, I know. But dropping filename suffixes (like .html) goes against the grain with me. Hmmm.

2003-12-10 update: Today I see M·r ÷rlygsson’s June 22 howto addresses URL cruftiness as well in Howto: Future-proof URLs in Movable Type.

Here’s another way to look at Panther’s performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release — and not just “faster in the experience of most end users”, but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems. It certainly didn’t apply to classic Mac OS, where every significant new OS version was perceptibly slower than its predecessor on the same hardware. (Yes, System 7 and Mac OS 8, I’m looking at you.) The world of Windows follows a similar trend. It is usually taken for granted that a shiny new OS will not really sing until you upgrade your hardware.

Not so with Mac OS X, as my blue and white G3/400 can attest. It has hosted every version of Mac OS X ever released, and the darned thing just keeps getting faster.

[via Daring Fireball]

As the Bush denials grow more insistent, some of the brightest and most critical thinkers of the Vietnam generation — journalists, historians, soldiers and policy analysts — are seeing stark similarities between the two wars. They defined the popular understanding of the Vietnam era with their works of journalism, memoir and history, and in a series of interviews with Salon they expressed amazement that the United States seems to be blundering its way into another misadventure that soaks up our financial, political and human resources.

This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.

Note that while Mac OS X also provides “colorful screens and buttons,” it also exposes its entire free BSD Unix undercarriage to intellectual discovery, probing, and hacking (in that sense it’s almost indistinguishable from Linux, the self-educational gold standard).

[2004-01-07 update: Well, Linux is the most prevalent self-educational standard, but technically NetBSD qualifies as the self-educational gold standard, I think, as its primary goal is “emphasizing correct design and well written code.” Hence NetBSD code is used to convey exemplary programming in, for example, the Addison Wesley title Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective by Diomidis Spinellis.]

Fortunately, lack of information is not an obstacle to learning about computers. In the west, most people can easily get their hands on books and their eyes on web pages that can take them all the way from complete ignorance to power-user status. But this is not enough on its own; it is also necessary to spend hundreds — no, thousands — of hours at the keyboard. This might sound like hell. But if you want to be truly free, you have no choice but to understand the machines you work with.

Yes! It’s almost indescribably empowering.

[via Tech Observer]

Franks has speculated that in the wake of a major WMD attack, the US will scrap its constitution and adopt a military government. I can’t imagine a more fascist, irresponsible thing for him to say. (I am not saying he advocates such a step. I am saying that for such a high-ranking former officer to even speak of this matter is the most irresponsible thing I have ever seen. …)

I was talking to a former high government official recently, who told me that for the first time in his life he was alarmed about the survival of American democracy. I think we all should be.

[via Body and Soul]