The unintentional theme of today’s Link-o-Rama is, apparently, tech nostalgia and why old tools are the best tools. The File Transfer Protocol is now 50 years old. 50. FTP has outlasted quite a few protocols in that time, evolved a great deal, and been used to transfer Heaven only knows how many files. I hope that Abhay Bhushan is basking a bit in the knowledge that his creation is still widely used half a century later. ...
A few of the posts I found interesting this week. 17 (ever so slightly) weird facts about the most popular dictionary format: " the dictionary format of Hunspell has a lot of peculiarities. Depending on your mindset, you might find the facts below curious, fascinating, ridiculous, or just plain boring. " ( zverok with ruby) Q&A with John Kozubik: Long-form Q&A with the CEO of rsync.net on console.dev. Interesting for his discussion of personal technology / tools. I loved using rsync.net but it was just too pricey for the storage allotted for personal use. Glad they continue to have a successful business. Daniel Stenberg has a nice post about the 23rd anniversary of the first official release of curl. “That was the day the first ever tarball was made available that could build a tool named curl. I put it together and I called it curl 4.0 since I kept the version numbering from the previous names I had used for the tool. Or rather, I bumped it up from 3.12 which was the last version I used under the previous name: urlget.” A worthwhile response to the flatkill.org site that tries to spread FUD about Flatpaks. “A lot of flatkill.org’s statements are made to incite fear in the Linux community. Given that all Flatpak packages are available and able to be edited by anyone, the appropriate response is to educate on why this is a problem, and then fix it. The way that flatkill.org approached this issue says a lot.”
Doom: Eternal is a pretty good name for a franchise that keeps getting ported, updated, and rebooted more than 25 years after it first launched. Though I don’t do much gaming these days, the siren song of Doom was just too much for me and I caved and bought a PS4 and a copy of Doom: Eternal a few weeks ago and have been playing it off and on for about a week. Here’s one old guy’s take on the reboot so far, after completing several levels and maybe 15 hours of gameplay. ...
Pink Floyd responded in part to the punk rock movement’s fast, short, and aggressive tunes by… putting out an LP with five complex and relatively languid songs, three of which are longer than 10 minutes. And it is awesome. 1977’s Animals is an album that’s best experienced as an album. I suppose you could play “Sheep” or “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” as stand-alones, but why would you? If you’ve never listened to this one, you need to clear an hour (actually about 45 minutes) and sit down and give it some attention.
A few days ago, Microsoft announced that it has released PowerShell under the MIT license for Linux (and Mac OS X). Perhaps surprisingly, this has brought a number of folks out of the woodwork to gripe about Microsoft… releasing something as open source. Microsoft isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but this is not Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. This isn’t Bill Gates’ Microsoft. The days when Microsoft and the open source community are mortal enemies are behind us. (At least for now, anyway. Companies don’t always move in a straight line.) The company still has plenty of flaws (its position on software patents, its Windows 10 update policies, for example), but the knee-jerk “anything Microsoft does is terrible!” attitude needs to go. ...
Here’s a pet peeve of mine, because I see it time and time again: Folks work on software or projects, put in a ton of effort, and then do nothing to promote the project or release. (And, for bonus points, complain that they don’t understand why the project isn’t getting more attention!) This doesn’t mean developers have to do double-duty as marketeers and public relations folks. Well, not if they can pass the torch onto interested contributors who are happy to do it for them, anyway. It requires a little coordination and effort, but why put all the work into a project and then not get the attention of the users (and potential contributors) you’re trying to reach? ...
I think Lawrence Lessig puts his finger on it pretty well with this post about the problems with Apple’s “communication” strategy about bugs/feature removal in upgrades: But the argument I want to advance here is different. It is that in the “hybrid economy” that the Internet is, there is an ethical obligation to treat users decently. “Decency” of course is complex, and multi-faceted. But the single dimension I want to talk about here is this: They must learn to talk to us. In the face of the slew of either bugs or “features” (because as you’ll see, it’s unclear in some cases whether Apple considers the change a problem at all), a decent company would at least acknowledge to the public the problems it identifies as problems, and indicate that they are working to fix it. ...
If you haven’t heard that Yahoo is buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion (mostly cash), then you’re probably not paying a lot of attention to tech news. Here’s my off-the-cuff predictions: Despite Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s promise, yes, Yahoo will screw it up. A company that can’t seem to get a grip on its own direction isn’t going to be able to execute on integrating a new company with such a different personality and sizable user base without effing it up. Most acquisitions don’t do well, and in its entire history, I’ve yet to see Yahoo do well by an acquisition. Mayer has not explained why this will be any different. Yahoo will futz with the Tumblr terms of service soon to disallow a lot of the content (read: adult content) that drives Tumblr. At some point, Yahoo will insist on integrating the account systems between the two companies. Yahoo will start pushing ads into Tumblr, pissing off the Tumblr user base. Yahoo will be a target for copyright vultures going after content being reshared on Tumblr that isn’t being shared legally. The Tumblr folks will make out like bandits and walk away from Yahoo the moment they’re contractually able to. Yahoo will have overpaid for a property it doesn’t know what to do with, and Yahoo will continue flailing. ...
Yes, like thousands of others yesterday I decided to plunk down a little cash for a spanking new iPad. Like thousands of others, I figured I’d give a couple of quick thoughts on my experience with it so far. I’m looking at the iPad in a couple of ways: As a writer, as a journalist, as a geek and sometimes system administrator, and as an open source advocate. Naturally, the iPad is unsatisfying for open source folks. It’s a device. It’s not really meant to be tinkered with by the end user – and I’d agree it’s not really well-designed to encourage people to create software. Some folks have argued that the device isn’t designed for creators at all, and I have to disagree with that. ...
I was surprised, to say the least, this morning to read Simon Phipps’ tweet that “ Richard Stallman and others declare GPL inadequate to protect software freedom.” Lack of caffeine, maybe? Nope. Stallman and Knowledge Ecology International really have sent a letter to the European Commission saying that Oracle shouldn’t be permitted to acquire MySQL in its merger with Sun. Why? Because Oracle would then be the only party able to release MySQL under licenses that are not the GPL, and because Oracle could prevent MySQL from forking under a license other than GPLv2. ...