Brian Behlendorf Interview 46
Robert McMillan writes: "Linux Magazine has an interview with Brian Behlendorf where he talks about what he's up to at Collab.net, and reminisces about the good old days at Wired. Did you know that he registered the macdonalds.com domain?"
Re:Domain name disputes... (Score:1)
nerdfarm.org [nerdfarm.org]
Re:Linux Magazine? (Score:1)
There is also a UK Linux magazine Linux Format [linuxformat.co.uk], published by Future Publishing. It's not a bad mag (I have to say that or i might upset someone i know
Re:web sites for big business (Score:2)
display in extenso the company's organigram but hide information on products
Since we're on the topic of Fast Food, I thought I'd put in a link to www.tacobell.com [tacobell.com]. They have menus, and even Nutritional Information about their food. I think they should be commended on that.
Another thing, is McDonalds' website [mcdonalds.com] has a locater. Handy for when you're doing those special installs for clients out in the middle of nowhere, and you need to know where the nearest Mickey Rara's is.
By the way, the People Eating Tasty Animals site is up (I dunno if anyone linked to this on a previous story), at http://mtd.com/tasty/ [mtd.com].
Re:Linux Magazine? (Score:1)
Most of them come with a couple of CDs with the latest distros and apps - basically all of the stuff you would download if it weren't so expensive to do so here.
None are in English, but I buy them and try to work through some of the articles - a lot of people just buy them for the CDs.
On a side note - I've been trying out RH6.2 using a Japanese install - Wonderful - I switch the default KDE language to English and it retains all of the Japanese display/input, but with messages and menus in English. Bilingual NT is a joke - My company has to do a dual boot just for NT in both languages.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Re:okay (Score:1)
Couldn't do my online banking without it.
And maybe if you wanted to take advantage of the
W3C DOM1 CORE STANDARD!"
Your logic and social skills are well-matched. You still have it backwards. When I ask "why do we need Java/Javascript" the answer is not "because sites use it". What NEED do these pieces of...software...fill?
"I'm the opposite; you need to raise your technology minimum. I'll never design/develop for the lowest common denominator.
Min vs. max makes no difference. Your argument boils down to "I think that the people I perceive as being the majority don't need X". Uh-huh--and if you think or perceive wrong or the majority is oppressive, then what happens?
For instance, if you and I were running a hardware company would you agree with me if I said "we don't need to develop drivers for Linux--who's gonna want to use our FrabJab under a hacker's OS?"
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Re:please, sir... (Score:1)
"Explain to me how javascript is unnecessary, when it is the ONLY cross-browser/platform scripting language on the web.
You've got that the wrong way around. You are the one who needs to explain why we do need it. I keep mine turned off and I function just fine. Same for Flash, we've I've never even installed.
"ps. who's going to McDonalds.com on a 28.8 or going there at all, really..."
Ah, the old "we'll never need more than 640K" argument. You know what they say (or they will know): "Design for 'who's ever gonna' and the answer will be 'nobody'".
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Don't forget hyperreal (Score:1)
Re:MacDonalds? Who cares (Score:1)
I actually remember in '93 or so as I was first getting into the web (the web note, not the Internet ;-), wondering about mcdonalds.com and trying www.mcdonalds.com. At that time it pointed at hyperreal.org [hyperreal.org] which was and is Brian's site.
Could it be the.. (Score:1)
Re:web sites for big business (Score:1)
Its an old old story... Very few folks get the idea that www pages are about their content not the flashy wrappings. A company I used to work for once hired a consultancy firm to develop a web-enabled metadatabase app that was tailored to their business - We had already evaluated the toolsets out there and come to the unwelcome conclusion that for our purposes the only real choice was one that produced apps for NT but that didnt matter too much because just linking to it from our main www servers (apache on solaris) would make the app work - We got the app, it worked and we started moving real data into it and testing. I pointed netscape at it and it died - turns out they'd given us an app that wouldnt work with anything but the latest and greatest version of IE. The IT team then had to convince management that this was a bad thing. Personally I think the only reason we succeeded was that the CEO had an older version of IE on his machine and it croaked there too. I made such a nuisance of myself beating on desks and pointing out that ANYTHING we put on the WWW had to be browser-neutral as far as possible that I almost got canned. We got our way eventually and the app got rewritten to work without the M$ extensions that the developers had assumed would be there but then everyone moaned that it wasnt as pretty as the first demo. They just didnt get it that a page that takes forever to load and then breaks isnt pretty either.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
Knee-jerk reponse? (Score:1)
That way we wouldn't have to waste 10 minutes reading another John Katz article.
Okay, I may be wrong here, but you're certainly implying that if /. were to implement a rating system then you'd automatically rate down every Jon Katz story you saw rather than "wasting 10 minutes" reading it. If you hate Jon Katz that much, then why haven't you filtered his articles from the frontpage? Personally, I just think you like bitching.
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Jon E. Erikson
I Never Thought... (Score:3)
To see more of his past and and present... (Score:2)
Domain name disputes... (Score:3)
Eventually Josh gave it back to McDonald's in exchange for McDonald's funding a T-1 in perpetuity to a high school in the Bronx.
At least somebody somewhere got something useful out of it. Now if we could just convince other corporations that being charitable can often be more productive and better for their public image (not to mention cheaper!) than calling in the lawyers.
Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to cede their domain so easily...
Doug
Linux Magazine? (Score:1)
That's what i call domainjacking... i hate it when people register the domains of others if they want to get rich of it.. but this? Gotta love these guys....
On a side note:
I didn't know there was a linux magazine? LJ i know but... Can anyone tell me if this mag is any good?
Re:web sites for big business (Score:1)
The only solace I can receive from this is believing there is a ring in hell for Webmasters where they would be forced to look at Java, ActiveXing, 100+forced cookie sites via a 386 and 1200baud modem.
Re:I think he misses the point with IIS (Score:1)
How's about OpenSSL [openssl.org] and modSSL [modssl.org]? Verisign is now officially supporting SSL patches to Apache [verisign.com] which are based on SSLeay.They say:Pete C
This is like two or three months old... (Score:1)
This article was Linux magazine months ago. It's a pretty good interview, don't get me wrong, but isn't that an awful lot of lag time? It was an interesting read though. I particular;y like the Apatchy history stuff. It was interesting to see how much of what I'd heard about the history was actually true.
BASIC was Gates' first IP dispute (Score:1)
Just to set the record straight, it was paper tape copies of a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 that Gates and Paul Allen complained about, not people copying DOS.
mahlen
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
--Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, French author-dramatist
(1732-1799)
whew... (Score:1)
"What NEED do these pieces of...software...fill?" ;)
A: Whatever you program it to do. It fills the need to run a function.
That reasoning is in err; I could say, what need does the web fill? or any software?
So does this make sense:
Since NetPositive on BeOS doesn't support javascript, we should never use javascript?
<//-------------//> /. but you can tell it was designed by programmers..."
"I like
Re:web sites for big business (Score:1)
>contain lots of unnecessary junk like Flash, >animated GIFs, sounds and Javascript.
It's funny you mention that. I have 2 examples.
I wanted to get some support for my TV card. The vendor site(being devoid of any useful informatinon to me) was really snotty about me contacting them. I had to submit a form giving out my TV card's serial #, etc(like I'm gonna open my case for that), and didn't simply provide me with an email address to write to you. Nice way to brush off loads of emails like that. Your customers will really appreciate that. I submitted the loan application, um, I mean form, and it bounced back anyways. Wow, real top notch tech support there.
In terms of over-flashy websites, I've often seen cases of the opposite. I have a coffee shop review web page, and one shop has their own website. It mainly consists of a 1-sentence blurb about their shop, the address, and of cousre, the URL that I'm already at(how informative!). My review of their shop has much more detail(and probably would attract more customers than their site). To think they paid for the domain name only to have it point to a content-free website. Some webhosting company made a quick buck off of them.
I did not meant ALL Javascript was unnecessary (Score:1)
I actually did not want to mean that all Javascript was useless. It is sometimes very useful. On the other hand, very often, it serves no useful purpose (what is the use of replacing a direct link to a site by a script that simply follows that link?).
As for the 28.8: I have an E1 at work (2Mbits/s), but some sites are darn sluggish because of congestion in the middle of the US. Perhaps that if they did not send a 40k page where 3k would be sufficient...
Actually it's because corporate spuds won't pay (Score:1)
Re:It's even more frustrating from the inside (Score:3)
disclaimer: not a flame
I can appreciate the importance of the questions you raised.
Suits probably cannot, and you need to speak to them using their language. Calmly, coolly, civilly, and with facts and figures of research.
I am guessing you were more civil in that design meeting than you were in the posting ("I told them again and again", "People hate", "I don't want", "java crap", "marketing nitwit", "stared blankly"). If someone was invited to a design meeting spoke so brusquely, then they probably wouldn't be invited to another.
Introducing new concepts to people who don't have your experience and background takes patience, clarity and civility. Often, people reject others' ideas, simply because they're not very familiar with the concept. Be a politician to get a politician to listen to you. Be a suit to get a suit to listen to you. Arrogance is a valuable tool, but only if skillfully applied. :)
Re:please, sir... (Score:1)
Huh? I've installed Netscape, Lynx, Mozilla, Konqueror and several other browsers and have never had Flash included.
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No, I did all these things (Score:1)
I was patient (for instance, I explained the popup window thing 3 times--twice to marketing and once to the web designer), clear and civil.
But I got the distinct impression that the VP of "Operations" (which mostly meant "Marketing") Wanted It This Way. He didn't spend any time online, but he knew what he liked. And the idiot^H^H^H^H^H, sorry, web designers didn't help by not even acknowledging that I had a point.
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okay (Score:1)
Couldn't do my online banking without it.
And maybe if you wanted to take advantage of the
W3C DOM1 CORE STANDARD!
I suppose XML is out of the question too huh?
Ah, the old "we'll never need more than 640K" argument.
I'm the opposite; you need to raise your technology minimum. I'll never design/develop for the lowest common denominator. It's a shame that you aren't really taking advantage technology.
<//-------------//> /. but you can tell it was designed by programmers..."
"I like
Re:Pioneer.... (Score:1)
I doubt it, because they didn't do it with the intent of holding the domain hostage. Around that time, Brian and his friends registered dozens of domains, many of which are still hosted on hyperreal.
Small world (Score:1)
I used to know this guy back when I was in high school. We were both members of an Explorer Post at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. I had no idea I had him to thank for Apache. Small world.
Thanks, Brian. Good luck in the future.
Re:It's even more frustrating from the inside (Score:1)
Actually, I find this a fairly efficient way to browse certain sites (such as freshmeat, slashdot and other news portals). You can launch an article or announcement in a new window and just kill it when you're done rather than having to navigate backwards. However, I still agree with you that it shouldn't be the default behavior. I can choose to open a link in a new window by middle clicking, but the reverse isn't true. I'd rather be the one making that decision.
Re:MacDonalds? Who cares (Score:1)
"I can only conclude that Mr. Behlendorf is a Wired wannabe."
I don't understand why you'd say this. Brian makes it pretty clear how this went down in the Linux Magazine interview:
So Josh and I sat there and did a whole bunch of whois lookups on the Fortune 500 companies. Most of them were registered, except for McDonald's. So I sent in the form and pointed it at a hobbyist site of mine and set up the e-mail address ronald@mcdonalds.com to go to me and to Josh Quittner.
IBM's mantra (Score:2)
However, you can not say the same thing about Microsoft. At least not without adding the lines from the Dilbert comic -> I (almost) quote "There we're a few suicides and more than our share of lynches but those have statistcal clustering written all over them"
Devil Ducky
Re:Pioneer.... (Score:1)
Maybe not for personal gain, but he does say he traded it for a T-1 for a highschool. I thought the admission that they deliberately looked for Fortune 500 names fit the cyber squatter M.O. but my post was intended to be facetious.
carlos
This could never happen today (Score:2)
If he had registered the mcdonalds.com name today, they would have gone medievel on him before you can say "libertarianism".
nuclear cia fbi spy password code encrypt president bomb
Pioneer.... (Score:1)
carlos
MacDonalds? Who cares (Score:1)
- http://www
I can only conclude that Mr. Behlendorf is a Wired wannabe.
Re:Linux Magazine? (Score:1)
Oh you mean the name...'macdonald'...man...I know a good number of people with that last name, born long before the fastfood chain....interesting.
web sites for big business (Score:5)
It does not surprise me in the least that companies such as McDonald's, a few years ago, would not even know what registering a domain name means. The truth is that today most big companies make a Web site (because everybody does it) but more often than not it is absolutely pitiful.
Web sites for big business often have the following characteristics:
It is funny that those big companies pay so much for PR services that cannot even understand:
It is interesting to note that after a few years of experience with the Minitel in France, the successful Minitel sites had the following characteristics:
I guess that corporations do not learn from experience sometimes.
It's even more frustrating from the inside (Score:3)
Because I was a "team leader" I was invited to ONE design session and I also participated in some of the in-house beta-testing (plus overhearing conversations among the real bigwigs).
I told them again and again that:
1) People hate "intro pages" that do nothing
2) Not everyone wants to spend time downloading graphics and java-crap--so make it optional at worst
3) The point of hyperlinks is to MOVE you around a site--not to popup new windows. I don't want the main page to be a "base station" from which other pages launch.
4) Not everyone has IE 5.x (and this was about 1.5 years ago--not everyone has IE 5.x NOW)--some people use Netscape (actually, they did finally listen to this one when USERS started calling in saying that they couldn't use the site)
But the marketing nitwit in charge of the web project (IS was only involved to purchase hardware and such) just stared blankly at all these objections. And the web people had no idea what I was talking about when I said "will I be able to view it in Lynx"?
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Replies to this article (Score:1)
MS hates Apache but there are more sites running it. I have built servers on Apache and IIS and thouroughly enjoyed configuring Apache. After messing with IIS for a week (to build a somewhat secure, working system - not what came in the box), I found myself on the 7th floor of our building pondering how much of a mess I would make in the parking lot.
Herd reply
As for domain registration, days after our company was purchsed, two persons registered variations of the new company name. The reason? To sell to us at considerably more than the $70 registration fee. Nothing more. They had no sites up or even an MX record, just the desire to turn a quick buck around with less than honorable intentions. This sure sounded like an issue of individual greed in this case, wouldn't you think?
The lesson: Get a real job, come up with a real startup idea and get to work. The courts have already put the whomp on this practice to the point complaints are almost automated (PETA yesterday, member?). It sucks when an individual and their work is ruined by a johhny-come-lately with a good lawyer, (that whole etoy vs. etoys.com thing last year), but the reality of the situation is there are innumberable individuals registering domain names of established companies and organizations in order to make a quick buck. What would you do?
I think he misses the point with IIS (Score:2)
The big thing is (has been?) that with NT/IIS, strong encryption and certificates for SSL are much easier to obtain. The only other common option is Solaris/Netscape, so where does Apache fit in?
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Full article re: mcdonalds.com (Score:3)
"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald's media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago. Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.
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Re:I think he misses the point with IIS (Score:4)
BB came to meet with our company's developers and server jocks and discuss collab.net as an outsourcing model, and had some interesting things to say about his former employer, C2net.. He basically said that when Stronghold came out there was really no useful, viable SSL for Apache (he's right: SSL support at the time was difficult and tenuous IMHO). Then mod_ssl came along and out of the gate it was (his words) like 60% of Stronghold's speed/reliability/usability, and it increased rapidly, then surpassed Stronghold. The only reason to buy Stronghold/RedHat/Raven is for the US privilege of a licensed copy of R$A. C2 started deluding itself regarding the value of its proprietary software/features, and BB (rightly) bailed.
BTW, I had a chance to ask a couple of Qs to Dr. Eugene Spafford of Tripwire (he cowrote COPS, Tripwire, Practical Unix and Internet Security) yesterday, at a demo/pitch for Tripwire and some related security software (think MetaDirectory for ISS/FW-1/Nessus, etc). He was pretty down on OSS as a security solution, stating that the most secure software comes from small teams of competent designers and coders. While this may be true, I then asked him that given that almost any system can be penetrated, which system provides the best response (open or closed)? He said that it was dependent on the vendor, then proceeded to tell us that we should only select software vendors that implement high-quality security designs. I then also mentioned that, as a die-hard cynic, UCITA would probably become the best asset Open Source ever had, should it pass, since OSS provides the source and concrete licensing terms that are user and developer friendly, and corporate IT would then need to take EULAs extremely seriously. He said (to the effect) that I was being a bit glib, which is correct.
The upshot: putting aside the whole issue of objectivity (his bread is partially buttered by closed-source security solutions) I think our disagreement basically fell down along academic/engineering lines. He basically said that, in an ideal world, closed-source software would provide the most secure solutions. I'm not qualified to really argue that point, but I _am_ qualified to say that in the _real_ world, there are enough issues with availability, accountability and talent in the closed-source world that open-source moves ahead in terms of rapid response fixes and peer/quality review. When I asked him about the patch issue, he said, essentially, that responsible software companies can have patches out faster than OSS projects. My one word rebuttal: Microsoft. He really didn't have any further comment
I respect his opinions and expertise, but I feel that where the rubber meets the road, some of his preconceptions are off-base.
Your Working Boy,
One-stop shopping (Score:2)
please, sir... (Score:1)
Explain to me how javascript is unnecessary, when it is the ONLY cross-browser/platform scripting language on the web.
And as for Flash, I'm sorry but I have created and seen plenty of navigation schemes that are more efficient than constantly sending http requests back to the server to get a bit more info on something. (and oh yeah it's included on all new browser installers and 90% of the browsers in use)
ps. who's going to McDonalds.com on a 28.8 or going there at all, really...
<//-------------//> /. but you can tell it was designed by programmers..."
"I like
Re:I think he misses the point with IIS (Score:1)
I think he is right that responsible software companies could have patches out faster than OSS projects. They could, especially for less popular projects (they could have a group of coders working through the night or being woken up to fix a bug), however this is not particurly common because it's expensive and most companies see it as a PR issue