dfrage

This attitude denies support to projects like NTPsec, for which he's the technical lead, your take on this concept only applies to current maintainers of existing projects.

Even then, he's converting GCC to git, the latter indirectly bears a great deal of "Internet Load".

Comment · 7 years ago

I'll repeat the claim from the NTPsec project page:

> GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.

And tools, to support for example the development of tools like Emacs and GCC, indirectly support "core networking or services".

You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.

Comment · 7 years ago

NTPsec aspires to be "Internet Load Bearing Software".

Comment · 7 years ago

A perfectly cromulent reply, you're welcome. :-)

Comment · 7 years ago

Who just happens to be the tech lead to a partial answer to this problem: http://ntpsec.org/ Which implicitly criticizes the reference implementation.

Comment · 7 years ago

Second item from the top:

> gpsd

> gpsd is a service daemon that monitors a GPS attached to a serial or USB port, decodes the position/velocity/time information it sends, and republishes in a simple uniform format on an IANA-designated TCP/IP port. This enables multiple applications to read from a GPS without contention. The distribution also provides C and Python libraries to encapsulate the client side of talking with gpsd.

From the core team page on the following project (https://ntpsec.org/core-team.html), with at least one falsifiable claim:

> Eric S. Raymond has been the technical lead of GPSD, a close peer project of NTP and one of its principal time sources, since 2004. GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.

The top item, where he's also the technical lead:

> NTPsec

> A stripped down-security-hardened and generally improved version of the NTP reference code. Features code bulk reduced by a factor of 4, better monitoring and diagnostic tools, and Network Time Security.

Aspires to become one, but it's early in the process to see if it'll succeed.

Those are projects I've vaguely followed over the years. Reading down the list, this claims to be one, and the claim is partially falsifiable:

> giflib

> The ubiquitous service library for rendering GIFs. I handed off the project 1994 to avoid problems with the U.S. patent system, but accepted back the lead in 2012. This code had the odd effect of making me virtually omnipresent; it seems nobody has ever bothered to write a replacement, and it's now ubiquitous in web browsers, cellphones and gaming consoles. In a nicely ironic touch, it earned me an appearance in the credits of the Microsoft XBox.

Comment · 7 years ago

People who follow his blog will be familiar with at least some of the following:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html

Some distance down the list is reposurgeon, which has been used to convert Gnu Emacs and many smaller/younger repositories to git, and is in the process of converting GCC: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?tag=reposurgeon

Not directly software: http://www.catb.org/~esr/projects.html

Comment · 7 years ago

What generation of tape technology exhibited the problems you describe? I've never suffered such problems with original 1/2 mag tapes, DDS, or LTO.

BD-XL is wildly more expensive than LTO, although that won't matter if you can't get LTO to be reliable for you. Just checking now, B & H Photo which tends to have good prices and a good supply chain, $54.57 for 10 100GB BD-XL or a terabyte (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1101544-REG/verbatim_...), not so cutting edge and still with competition LTO-6 from Fujifilm, quantity 20, $11/TB (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1096090-REG/fujifilm_...). We also have a problem with no one worth trusting making cheapest single level BDR discs, the least worst is CMC, and I wonder how long before BD-XL sufferer the same problem.

Comment · 7 years ago

And Soma wouldn't be useful in pacifying a population if it induced tolerance in a few weeks like Xanax and the other GABA influencing drugs do.

Comment · 7 years ago

You can't disconnect that bit of Newspeak from what really happened, a hostile takeover of the Navy Department by the Army and Air Force that previously comprised the War Department (all this a couple of year before publication). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals for just one bit of fallout from this.