> Pushing a hostile fork of a popular project, raising money for it, and then abandoning the codebase entirely for a rewrite takes a "special" kind of chutzpah.
Now you're just straight up lying, and contradicting your previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20196474 "Raymond was openly discussing rewriting the whole thing in Go". As you yourself said, he discussed the concept of rewriting it in Go, as I recall while he was learning the language for reposurgeon.
Here you're blatantly accusing ESR of fraud, which per you "requires an active intent to acquire something of value through misrepresentation", to wit, soliciting money for "attaching his name to things".
We have no basis for a discussion of the work you claim he's not doing.
Accusing ESR and the rest of the NTPsec project of fraud is a very serious claim. Could you explain in more detail why contemplating rewriting of most or all of the project in Go as he was learning the language is such a definitive tell?
This is merely a list of the "critical Internet services or libraries" that he claims in one way or another, and ensuring the maintenance of such software is part of the whole thesis.
To scare quote that, and denigrate it over "substantive changes" ... well, I must thank for your solid support of his thesis.
> The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not....
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".
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Realistically, companies keep making older generation tape drives for a long time, for example, HP LTO-5 drives are still widely available from normal vendors like Newegg. And except for one discontinuity that's pretty clearly due to the change from metal particulate to BaFe, which is at the heart of this patent dispute, LTO offers two generation back read capability, and one generation back write capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compatibility
> Backblaze's system architecture is fairly failure tolerant, so they use a huge number of "consumer" grade drives that would cause enterprise people to run away screaming.
I think what would "cause enterprise people to run away screaming" is that your data is stored by them in only one data center, and they don't offer a S3 compatible API (although someone may have addressed the latter).
Backblaze however correctly notes that if you really want redundancy, you get that from using two or more vendors.
Tape is physically a lot more robust than hard drives, the single endurance advantage the latter have is better tolerance of environmental extremes, heat and humidity.
From previous reading, both are banned, Fuji recently: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/31/lto_patent_case_hit... (Although previously I remember it was Sony that declined to start up LTO-8 production, after getting their importation of similar BaFe LTO-7 tapes banned, maybe el Reg got which was which confused in the article.)
Officially, Intel says 10nm has lithography problems. They did try a more aggressive node than TSMC's first "7nm", entirely using 193nm UV, and were the only company to attempt Self-Aligned Quadruple Patterning (SAQP) for the top metal layers.