Free as in Freedom

I just finished Sam Williams's biography of Richard Stallman, the infamous RMS of the GNU movement and the creator of the GNU Public License. In the book, Stallman comes of as an off-the-charts-brilliant hacker who considers himself absolutely right and moral. He prefers freedom to progress. He would be happy if we all were hacking on dumb terminals running our web browsers through EMACS, as long as the software were freely-distributable.

Stallman is only relevant to a small subset of a small subset of the software world. I think his contribution is important, but ultimately limited and flawed.

The book is freely available online.

Here's the home page for O'Reilly's Open Books Project.

I suppose I should look through Learning Debian GNU/Linux.   

The Uptime Greens

Normally, it's supposed to be the blues, right? Windows -- that crummy operating system -- is as unstable as hot Jello.

So I'm about to head off on vacation and I want to make sure that the computers are all OK. I'm making backups, I'm testing remote access schemes, etc. All good. I plan on restarting my workstation so things run well.

Wonder how long my Windows XP Professional workstation has been running? 29 days and 22 hours at last count. The last reboot was for a software installation; this one will be prophylactic. I'll wait a couple of hours so it can hit 30 days. Only fair. I'm tempted to leave it! Nah.

The Linux server in my basement has had 144 days of uptime as of today. The live server at the data center has 209 days of uptime.

Thanks Microsoft, thanks Linux developers!  

The Onion: Finances

The WorldCom Scandal:

"If investors divested from every corporation guilty of corruption and fraud, it would only precipitate a deep, years-long recession. It's our patriotic duty to look the other way."

Tom Dyson
Systems Analyst

and

Lou Dobbs Hosts Moneyline From Window Ledge

On Monday, Dobbs alerted CNN by handwritten memo that he would be broadcasting from the ledge for "the foreseeable future." In the memo, Dobbs noted that, given the state of the economy, he had "no clue how long the foreseeable future might be."

  

WaPo: Briefing depicted Saudis as enemies

“Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies,” said the briefing prepared by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand Corporation analyst. A talking point attached to the last of 24 briefing slides went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” in the Middle East.

Finally!

Christopher pointed me here.

Update: Pentagon Disavows Briefing

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said disclosure of details of the classified briefing was harmful because it incorrectly created the impression that the briefing represented the government's view on Saudi Arabia.