Miscellaneous

An archive, in reverse chronological order, of miscellaneous essays, interviews, and talks.

Get Your Hands Dirty! — January 2005. Hackers of all stripes refuse to just take what they’re given. They’re driven to remake it, and getting there is more than half the fun. In the latest O'Reilly catalog, Tim writes about the host of new books and products within that celebrate the hacker impulse. We've got the information you need to hack, remix, and master technology at home and at work. So go on, get your hands dirty!

MacDirectory Interview: Tim Loves His G4! — September 2004. I talked with Simon Hayes at MacDirectory.com about the success of the Mac platform, Apple's innovative support of digital media and networking (exemplifying David Stutz's "software above the level of a single device"), and what O'Reilly Media has in store for Mac users and administrators.

We're All Mac Users Now — January 2004. Wired News talked to a bunch of folks (including me) for comments on the 20th anniversary of the Mac. Nice words from all of us about just how important the Mac has been to the computer industry.

Apple has been able to reinvent itself because it has what is, at bottom, an aesthetic vision, rather than one that is solely based on profit and loss. Like Shaw's proverbial "unreasonable man," they try to bend the world to their vision. And they articulate that vision consistently, and persistently.

Foo Camp — In October 2003, O'Reilly held Foo Camp, a fun, concentrated, and efficient way to find out about new, transformative technologies and connect with the people who have deep knowledge of them. Foo Camp was very exciting. Business 2.0 columnist John Battelle did a nice job of capturing the spirit and importance of the event. His column in the December issue of Business 2.0 is available as a PDF from Jeremy Zawodny's weblog. (It also got picked up by CNN: When geeks go camping, ideas hatch.) Battelle's headline reads, "What happens when 200 hackers and visionaries camp out in the hills of Northern California? If you have a stake in the future of business, you'll want to find out." The Foo Camp wiki outlines the weekend's events and attendees, and a number of O'Reilly Network weblogs convey some of the ideas we shared, and the energy and enthusiasm we experienced at Foo Camp: Rob Flickenger's Rendezfoo; Andy Oram's Camping out with 200 innovators at Foo camp and AMD 64-bit Opterons brought to O'Reilly Foo camp; and William Grosso's Foo Camp.

The 1996 Controversy about the 10-Connection Limit on TCP/IP in NT Workstation — My open letter to O'Reilly customers urged them to spread the word that Microsoft's limits on the use of TCP/IP in NT Workstation was an attack on the freedom of individuals to publish on the web. Microsoft later responded by claiming that this policy was based on technical differences between NT Workstation and NT Server, a claim that was proven untrue by Andrew Schulman and Mark Russinovich. Here are links related to the 10-Conn controversy.