When word came in that John Perry Barlow had died, I thought of some particular comments that have stuck with me, relating his experiences interceding between FBI agents and their hacker quarry, right around the time the Cold War was ending.
I've usually thought of Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown …
I'd already been struggling with how to scope an introduction to the struggle over ZFS licensing and the relative positions of the various players, but this news Friday about open legal battle breaking out between the SFLC and SFC makes this too timely to sit on any further. Suffice to …
I'd been aware of version control for years, in the pre-distributed era of CVS, as SVN started to be a thing. I never used it much other than sometimes to check out code to take a look at it. Usually tarballs were available and there seemed to be little point …
It's common in free software circles to try to disambiguate which sense of the English word free we mean by saying "think free as in speech not free beer".
Though one can still presumably get free beer from friends (or friends of friends) at parties and …
With hurricane Irma (September 2017) lining up to hit Florida, and Harvey having just walloped Houston, storms of the past are part of the background.
I figured I'd just put some links here to some climatological happenings over the years.
(There's nothing about this that is meant to be comprehensive …
There's an old saying "change is inevitable, progress is not".
Searching for it shows some attributing it to some business guru or another, but I know it pre-dates those references, having seen it in email signatures at least going back to the early years of the 21st century, well before …
a phrase for talking about decentralized freedom
Given my long stint doing a lot of sysadmin type work, which saw me working across many machines, often of disparate types, I have tended to customize my environment very lightly.
Doing less of that and more of other things, I've really begun to add some dependencies to my environments …
People I talk with about my resistance to cloud-centric, consumer-like computing have a hard time understanding my reticence. Many, in learning of my choices tend to cast them as an indictment of their own. This discomfort with pluralism of approach is a problem too big to address here, now, but …
Studies show that people can with around 7 items in their short-term memory.
Another truism is that notable deaths come in threes. That may be perceptual bias of some kind, because people die all the time, and how notable any given death is is pretty subjective.
It may be that …