News You Can Bruise for 2000 August 18

I don't know how this ended up in my referrer logs, but I'm glad it did. I guess that IE 5 bug can be a force for good as well as for evil.

My two goals for today are to reach consensus with Jason and Ryan on the new Helm/Tigris database schema, and to use the phrase "Shall he/she/I dance for your amusement?" in a sentence.

I have a confession to make. I don't like osOpinion. I can't read an OS Opinion piece all the way through. Just the fact that an article was published on osOpinion means, to me, that it is no good.

I've always felt sort of bad about this, since OS Opinion has the same reader-submitted article system that Segfault does. I like this system a lot, and I want to support it. But I don't need to read about other people's wild speculations. It's the equivalent of stretching Slashdot comments into full-length articles.

That said, there's an osOpinion piece published today which starts out with a very good line: "In the realm of computers, history will record the names of four significant men: Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling." I would have used words other than "realm" and "significant", but that's a really good opening line which is unfortunately left stranded at the beginning by the rest of the article.

Hey Dan, what do you think about osOpinion?

Sci Tech Daily gleans from an article the question, Could your next ski holiday be on Titan? My sources say no.

Oh, that's how the Atari docs got into my referrer log. They were posted on Slashdot beforehand. Damn that infernal IE bug!

FHW: Scientists Advance on Tiny Computers. They're wily, those tiny computers.

A plea: when talking about software, please don't say "commercial" when you mean "proprietary". A lot of people do this. A lot of free software people do this. Hell, people from CollabNet do this. Commercial/non-commercial and proprietary/free are axes of a plane, not ends of a continuum. 

I'm not trying to pull some ideological stunt here. I'm just trying to clear up the terminology. I ran a BBS for three years, and offered for download hundreds of packages of non-commercial but proprietary software. Nowadays, I get paid to write software which is both commercial and free. If I can't express these facts, there's a problem with the terminology.

Good Segfault article from foaf: VAX Retirement Bodes Ill for Windows 2000. He snuck in a plug for Unuseless, and I let it stand, even though a link to the relevant Infoworld story would have been more appropriate.

Debian-Advantages HOWTO. Is this really a HOWTO?

I got that spam again. It's not as funny the second time. They should at least have varied it a little. Someone who was bored could implement that spam in the Dada Engine.

I love you, Celeste.

Manoj and I finally bothered to decode the Segfault background graphic (I don't know where we got it; I've got a message to Scott in the pipe about it). I recommend you try it.