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I think you've just described the decades old concept of The Wheel Of Reincarnation

And that's why libertarians are very supportive of the first amendment.
Oh, wait....

http://www.lp.org/issues/freedom-of-speech
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2007/04/libertarianism-the-stuggle-ahead/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/libertarianism.html

[Once, when we were at a Chinese restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" -- GLS]

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/p-convention.html

See Light Emitting Resistor http://catb.org/jargon/html/L/LER.html

http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html Sometimes the movies don't consider the ergonomic problems of "clever" interfaces.

Not everything that looks vaguely latin should be pluralized with an i

No, but it's fun.

I suppose next you're going to object to "VAXen" and "boxen"?

Get off my damn lawn.

Philosophy is a good source for dealing with abstract ideas. The truth is Philosophy is part of all science, and computer science being more abstract and mathematics oriented than some other science is even closer to philosophy.

Consider the field of Artificial Intelligence. Computer Scientists are trying to solve a problem, which they know exists, "How do we make machines think?" However, in order to proceed to the solution to this they have to answer other questions of a philisophical nature such as "What is thought?" and "What is free will?"

Heck, I know the Rootless Root is semi-humorous, but I still find Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface to be a good way to explain the value of a command line to people who don't understand it.

Ahh, but but my patent on infinitely recursive patenting of patent trolling trumps all!

While you may have patented infinite recursion, I have patented http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/smash-the-stack.html, which will likely happen after a couple hundred-thousand iterations of infinite recursion.

Wrong. The correct answer is mu, and you are a moron.

What you describe is called the "gorilla arm problem", in some circles.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html

Where have you been? Our dear and glorious leader Eric Raymond has redefined hacker politics, and we're now all moderate-to-neoconservative. Some of us reject left-right politics altogether, like Eric. And Dr. Breen.

If you thought there was whining aplenty about how there are no conservatives here before the election, you haven't seen anything yet. Soon enough, the vast majority of comments will be complaints modded +5 about how no one's left who's brave enough to stand up against the liberal menace, and if so, they're invariably modded down.

Let us review some basic truths:

        1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
        http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

I don't think 'wanting someone else to do it for you' quite falls into this category.

Yes and no. While they have been at work improving their products (and really, when aren't they?), they're also not above things like rigging ISO votes and asking to be shepherds of ODF.

I think a large amount of the slashdot crowd's specific gripes stem from the so-called Halloween Documents". Also there evidence that MS was involved in SCO's case against IBM.

Simply put, they never really stopped doing despicable things. So on one hand, I like their products and am not afraid to admit that. On the other, I'm actually surprised that they find time to work on them in between all of the evil shit they pull.

BTW: How does one ork a cow?

You're kidding, right?

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html

We at ADempiere FOSS project can relate to many of the comments in this story as we have our very own wars all the time particularly this present fiery one in our forum here.

3 off us due to disagreement and disgust at each other, resigned this week our benevolent positions but still work on the sidelines. I am not sure to cry or to laugh. I trust Eric Raymond's Cathedral and The Bazaar story.

Somehow when you adopt what Linus Torvalds did for Linux, you got a revolution, but you have to survive the egos especially your own. GNU was going ok, but ok is not enough to take on the world giants. Linus finished off the game via his attitude of giving and not caring for kudos back.

red1
ADempiere Bazaar
(evangelist/former benevolent dictator - September 2006 - Today)

Because you might think of new, better ways of doing old things. Just being educated by other viewpoints can improve your approach to problems and give you a more comprehensive outlook on your craft. If your entire universe is your job right now, then that's all you'll be able to do.

I used ASP.NET full time for a few years, and then did a couple of projects in Ruby on Rails, then Django. When I came back to ASP.NET there were a couple of things I did differently, and quite successfully, that were more similar to approaches I used in Python, even though it was still ASP.NET.

If you're note even willing to entertain the idea of learning new things just for the sake of improving yourself and learning, then you're even more of a dinosaur than any of us might have guessed.

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." - Pablo Picasso "LISP is worth learning for a different reason -- the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself..." Eric Raymond

I read it as KIDS-P Act.

A couple of years ago, perhaps in retaliation over ESR's publication of the Halloween Documents, Bill Gates apparently used one of the back doors in NT to "borrow" time on the gov'ts orbital mind lasers. Alas, ESR was not wearing his tin foil hat, and now he has sadly been reduced to a raving fucktard.

He _was_ right about Aunt Tilly, but I hope he didn't buy stock in Linspire... Rest in peace, you crazy diamond you.

Yes, funding for FOSS dries up as well. However, the codebase for OO.org and other projects is not going anywhere. Even Microsoft is aware that "OSS is long-term credible".

I had the same reaction to the title. "[T]he teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." —Edsger W. Dijkstra

I agree that Python would almost definitely be the best first choice as far as language. It has simple syntax without sacrificing expressive power. Dynamic typing and native lists defer the need to understand memory-related details, and may encourage students to write flexible code without having to learn about explicit polymorphism. Perhaps most importantly, as an interpreted language, Python allows the students to "be the program" and tinker with the language one line at a time.

Java is a good second choice if you want them to have type-safety and to work with a more conventional syntax, so long as you don't let the students fall into the trap of just using the libraries to do everything without understanding the underlying computational processes, as warned in this essay (and as cited by the great ESR).

While the comic that inspired that is an excellent one, the idea of pulling that prank on Eric S. Raymond is seriously foolish.

Basically, this seems to me like a very high tech, expensive way to so something that's much more effectively and economically done the old-fashioned way.

Word for word, this sounds exactly like the situation with electronic voting machines. One more example and we'll need a new entry for the jargon file. I choose 'Benderize' -- after a robot that mostly sits around, drinks beer, and "Has never made anyone's life easier, and you know it".

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words âmagic' and âmore magic'. The switch was in the âmore magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

I believe this is the link you were looking for?

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Magic... or More Magic?

Yeah, ESR predicted this in 2004. Four years and $60 billion dollars later, it looks like he was right.

The "Open Source Definition"?
What does that have to do with open source? You mean "Open Source (TM)"? Sorry, that doesn't exist.
If you meant "Open Source Initiative Approved License (TM)" then you might be onto something, but that's not what's being claimed.

Open source has a Linux centric background, but nobody can dictate what exactly it means. It is commonly accepted today to mean you can see the source.
GNU's take on "open source"
The original open source announcement
http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines>What it was based on

It's funny it started because "free software" was too ambiguous. ROFL!

GNU's right..

Ambiguity
The term "free software" has an ambiguity problem: an unintended meaning, "Software you can get for zero price," fits the term just as well as the intended meaning, "software which gives the user certain freedoms." We address this problem by publishing a more precise definition of free software, but this is not a perfect solution; it cannot completely eliminate the problem. An unambiguously correct term would be better, if it didn't have other problems.
Unfortunately, all the alternatives in English have problems of their own. We've looked at many alternatives that people have suggested, but none is so clearly "right" that switching to it would be a good idea. Every proposed replacement for "free software" has a similar kind of semantic problem, or worse--and this includes "open source software."
The official definition of "open source software," as published by the Open Source Initiative, is very close to our definition of free software; however, it is a little looser in some respects, and they have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive of the users. However, the obvious meaning for the expression "open source software" is "You can look at the source code." This is a much weaker criterion than free software; it includes free software, but also includes semi-free programs such as Xv, and even some proprietary programs, including Qt under its original license (before the QPL).
That obvious meaning for "open source" is not the meaning that its advocates intend. The result is that most people misunderstand what those advocates are advocating. Here is how writer Neal Stephenson defined "open source":
Linux is "open source" software meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.

Whatever meaning the OSI meant open source to have (the Linux centric ideals) is lost.

Except that you used it as a noun.

The New Hacker's Dictionary (aka The Jargon File): Chapter 4. Jargon Construction: Overgeneralization

Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some standard nonstandard way.

Depending on which kind of coder you want to be, you can also get inspired for an attitude at http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html?PHPSESSID=22f7378d0d1ea654962a22bf13166a5a#attitude

The needed book I think is for the manager: psychology of the antisocial geek

For the love of $DEITY, do not listen to ESR.

That being said, most geeks aren't truly anti-social - they just work differently. Being cut from a different cloth means that you can't always tailor them to your needs - you may have to modify your pattern a tad.

I've seen where giving an uber-hacker an inexperienced but - and this is key - very bright geek to teach brought them out of their shell a bit. Mostly because he n00b was able to not only learn the methods in coding, but how to properly speak to the geek and have them communicate.

Even then, don't expect them to always fit in a team or be able to communicate exactly what they're thinking. The latter is usually due to bandwidth limitations - hard to explain 500 ideas all at the same time without frustrating the person they're communication with.

Hmmmm...

"Exchange 2007 is as good a POP/IMAP server as anything out there."

Please see
http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/fetchmail-FAQ.html#S2

Small excerpt, "It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message, with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any other RFC-compliant server."

Read the link for how M$ butchered IMAP too; but IMAP to exchange should work.

From personal experience, IMAP on exchange is slower than what I am used to, you can kill exchange by just asking it to expunge each mail immediately after downloading, so you will want to expunge in batches, but other than that, it seems to work ok-ish with fetchmail.

But back to the topic at hand - how does text-based gaming's lack of graphics equate to a better game?

Oh, they don't. I'd never say the lack of something leads to a better game. However, if you have access to something and deliberately leave it out for artistic reason, it could occasionally lead to a better game. Note, that's "could" and "occasionally." Hey, Eddie Casica thinks that old-timey sitcoms went to Hell in a Ham Sandwich when they switched to color. People still occasionally make black and white films, and radio shows.

I had the Lurking Horror and Beyond Zork. Now, I don't know if there is some "souped up" copy of those somewhere that has graphics, but mine didn't have them. I do remember that if you had the right PC, Lurking Horror had sound. However, it's pretty well documented that Cornerstone killed Infocom. There were some games that included graphics, I think Zork Zero was one. Incidentally, the last Infocom branded game I ever played was Tombs and Treasures on the NES, which was sort of similar to Shadowgate. I expect there were others that I didn't play. There were also the digital comics they made a while back, I had one of those...

Homebrew isn't going to produce a much better text parser, and probably text parsers will have the great next leap forward when they are voice parsers. (Phoenix Wright, anyone). My problem is that games that could use text parsers, or games that do use text parsers, tend to use primitive ones. I'm talking about big budget, AAA titles. (Specific Example: Using a computer in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Sure the game failed for various reason, but it was definitely both high budget and high concept. The text interface on the in game PCs was not as robust as it could have been. I was glad they included it, though, and primitive as it was it made the game more fun and increased the immersion.)

As to user interface, a Koan:

One evening, Master Foo and Nubi attended a gathering of programmers who had met to learn from each other. One of the programmers asked Nubi to what school he and his master belonged. Upon being told they were followers of the Great Way of Unix, the programmer grew scornful.

The command-line tools of Unix are crude and backward, he scoffed. Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a graphical user interface.

Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at the master's hand.

I don't understand you! said the programmer.

Master Foo remained silent, and pointed at an image of the Buddha. Then he pointed at a window.

What are you trying to tell me? asked the programmer.

Master Foo pointed at the programmer's head. Then he pointed at a rock.

Why can't you make yourself clear? demanded the programmer.

Master Foo frowned thoughtfully, tapped the programmer twice on the nose, and dropped him in a nearby trashcan.

As the programmer was attempting to extricate himself from the garbage, the dog wandered over and piddled on him.

At that moment, the programmer achieved enlightenment. -- Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface

This is one of the prime examples of why measuring code by "lines" is bogus.

After all, in the typical Cobol program, most of the variable names are so long that you can't fit two of them onto a line on your typical cubicle worker's screen. Of course there are zillions of lines of Cobol code. And all those zillions could probably be expressed in perl or python in maybe 100 lines, or 1000 lines of C. (But you wouldn't be able to read them.)

Now if /. only had a HHOS moderation ...

It looks like the final piece has dropped into place for Linux! Linux is getting preinstalls from major vendors (in Netbooks especially, but moreso in general too). Wine had a 1.0 release quite awhile and is still improving rapidly. Now, the multimedia perplex is also solved.

For those of you not already familiar, World Domination 201.

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/G/Godwins-Law.html

However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

Guess I'd choose this page. Not that I'm an expert or anything... I'm probably better at Fortran :-)

Where did you find the 'ck' in HP?

I recycled the one from hockey pucks, n00b.

It's the Windows job creation scheme mentality applied to OS threading: processes are heavyweight in Windows. "Process-spawning is expensive - not as expensive as in VMS, but (at about 0.1 seconds per spawn) up to an order of magnitude more so than on a modern Unix." More work = more hardware.

Oh, you're not a "you mean cracker" adherent. Good.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

See definition 8.

I, personally, think each and every one of those definitions fails to capture the essence of the word in any context of usage that you might care to mention. But definition 8 needs "get off my lawn" at the end of it.

BTW, I otherwise like ESR

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/G/Godwins-Law.html

You may be right about the original law, but apparently you don't know tradition.

No, because what if you have a brain-dead noreply newsletter that sends a "please don't reply" message every time it gets one. Then you get a bit of a problem.

The problem is that java is so f***ing complicated that you would need a 3D map to start with it.

With all respect to you, but I'd say this is complete BS. I am telling you, man, on the time ago when I had to start with Java thing, it took for me a week to figure out entire language and basic frameworks to start making SOA on GlassFish and Swing clients just as it is. All you have to do is to learn how to read books...

Java is very easy language in compare to C/C++...

Answering question to the author, it is like this:

• Get NetBeans IDE at http://www.netbeans.org/
• Go read tutorial on Sun Microsystems: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/
• Get Spring framework and get understand it how it works and why it is good idea.
• Go recursively to each interesting topic and investigate it till the last bit.
• Additionally, as moral support, go read [again] "Hacker Howto" if you have doubts -- http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

• Have fun!

P.S. Works for me...

It's not called gorilla arm for nothing !

Like lots of things in Computing, if you want to make a splash, get out the 20 year old stuff, polish it and see if it flies.

There are cash registers that run Windows?

The cash registers have to run Wintendo. Otherwise, they can't use Nintendo peripherals such as the Zapper.

Well how else you think Schroedinbugs can exist? Microsoft is way ahead of Open Source world on this one.

Except it gets the etymology wrong.

Don't forget, next time you try to simulate the bug mount a scratch monkey first!

Don't be ridiculous. Without government regulation, companies naturally grow into monopolies, like they did in the 1900s.

You're the one being ridiculous, it was government that created most of those monopolies during the 1900s. Pretty much the same can be said of those in the 1800s. It was government that gave the railroads the right of way along with the telephone and cable companies for instance. It was also government that gave corporations their corporate charters and then did not revoke those corporate charters when the corporation no longer served the common good. Libertarians on the other hand know what to do about the concentration of power in corporate hands.

Libertarian nuts like you

You're the nut. Bye

Falcon

My wife is Finnish, and this pretty much confirms my suspicion that she and all other Finns are in fact from outer space.

Please don't let her know that you suspect this, as she might get drunk and kill herself.

HHOS

Exactly - organized crime (ie corporations) would take over if the feds withdrew.

Except Libertarians wouldn't let corporations do what they want: "What would libertarians do about concentrations of corporate power?".

Falcon