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Ok, Myself, well I was "Perscribed" the use of a computer for my deslexiya at 7 years of age. Since I'm almost 30 now that was a long time ago. Bieng Deslexic (IE: a visual thinker??) and completely unable to spell, despite the horrid use of speak and spells. I stumbled into boolen logic via a video game. From there I found out about Basic, C/C++ and Delphi. Now the adivce above is excellent however if you are new to the field it's always a good idea to study the classics: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/loginataka.html Now I know it's a bit dated at this time, hopefully your school prepared you to think, it's not a university's job to give you "Job Skills" the education of the Computer Science graduates is basically to teach them how to Learn and Re-learn everything very quickly since the field you are going into has a habbit of reinventing itself every 18 months (thank you gordon). As to what or how you should learn, I highly suggest you start with the Unified Modeling language. It's a good place to start, then drill down. Good programmers always tackle large problems as a series of smaller ones. And if your using C/C++ remember to focus on security and creating a portable API!!! Happy Hunting

I think he means an astroturfer - http://catb.org/jargon/html/A/astroturfing.html, specifically definition 2.
And for those who dont like to click on links, astroturfing in this sense basically means that the poster is being paid by Microsoft to appear to be 'an ordinary joe', in an attempt to create the appearance of popular low level support.
Like a politcal party activist writing letters to newspapers, pretending to be the public.

Shhhh

Looking through the first Halloween document over at http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html #_Toc427495768 I noticed this familiar tactic.

(quoted from the document)

"Blunting OSS attacks

Generally, Microsoft wins by attacking the core weaknesses of OSS projects.

De-commoditize protocols & applications

OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

No thanks Microsoft, I'll stick with standard protocols.

It's not a rule that can be invoked like "Whoever finishes the TP must install the new roll.", it's a law in the sense of "E=MC^2".

Thank you! Ever since I found the original phrasing, I've wondered how it mutated to the point that people say that a post invokes Godwin's law rather than demonstrates it. It's sort of like saying that a falling apple invokes the law of gravity, or that the observer invokes it by describing the falling apple.

Maybe one reason they have to fight their critics so hard is the "research" they do. Perhaps if they spent more time researching ways to improve themselves, their software and the world in general instead of looking for the best way to cut off the air supply of any and all other products, they wouldn't encounter such criticism.

Read the Halloween Memos. They do, in fact, expend effort to crush what they see as their only real competition: http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/

...the good old connector conspiracy.

You loose!

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

It seems like folks ought to be checking The Jargon File http://catb.org/jargon to get their definitions of hacker and cracker straight. Or, if you don't like that, try Wikipedia's definitions of hacker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker and cracker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(computing). Hacking is not a crime. Cracking is a crime. Just because a few journalists and Slashdot readers are clueless doesn't change the meaning of the words. Those same clueless folks probably insisted (wrongly!) that the 21st century started in the year 2000.

• It would be a web browser. NOTHING ELSE.
  
• The core HTML renderer would be released as a CLI program, and GUI front-ends for it would either be developed by a seperate group within the same project, or by someone else entirely. Said engine/GUI pair would communicate via sockets or something similar...in other words, a clean, transparent protocol. This would also mean that there could be multiple GUIs for it if necessary.
  Programs used to be developed this way in the early days of Linux...I'm assuming that has only stopped because of the vast influx of Windows refugees who've managed to infect Linux people with Microsoft's broken programming methodology. Monoculture is NOT a good thing...the only people who want it are again, the Windows refugees...and they only want it because it's all they know...not because they've actually thought about it.
  
• Firefox would have a genuinely sane compilation routine, not the convoluted mess they've got now. The system is not designed to allow other people to be able to compile it easily...it's designed primarily to be compiled within the project by people already intimate with it, with precompiled binaries being the only thing used by the outside world.
  
• The Firefox developers wouldn't be such abusive, bad tempered, elitist assholes. Contrary to popular belief, early UNIX development wasn't associated with the kind of elitism, self-righteousness, and relentless vitriol that has customarily sprung up since. It was developed communally, without "community" being the four letter word that Richard Stallman is primarily responsible for turning it into. I've mentioned the LFS project before...Go and sit on irc.linuxfromscratch.org for a while and observe how the people there relate to each other. It's very positive and laid back, for the most part.

SED? What an unfortunate acronym for a display technology.

SED: /SED/, n.
  [TMRC, from Light-Emitting Diode] Smoke-emitting diode. A friode that lost the war. See also LER. [Not to be confused with sed(1), the Unix stream editor. ESR]

http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/SED.html

--
BMO

I'm a non-USian who has worked in several open-plan offices and hated it.

Is it made impossible to concentrate simply by virtue of the fact the office is open-plan? No.

Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate? Yes.

Does it make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration? Yes.

Does it mean you're in contact with many other people, so your "chance of being noisily interrupted" must be multiplied by the number of people in the office? Yes.

Does it mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity? Yes.

(n.b. Bad managers are notoriously bad for underestimating the loss of productivity when they break your concentration for something trivial. I've had a manager complaining about my productivity who used to shout down the length of the room to ask my e-mail address, when I'd worked for him for two years, my address was in his Outlook address book and even when he had it written down in his desk drawer. And once you drop the eggs it can take half an hour or more to get back up to speed again. In a busy, noisy department with 50 people in it, you can easily go entire months without achieving flow state even once.)

Also, although of course there's a heft amount of deviation, national character might have something to do with it, too. The Swedish and Dutch people I've met tend to be very considerate and quiet, while the Americans (as a nation) to tend more to the loud, less considerate "get-things-done-even-if-I-have-to-shout-while-I-d o-it" stereotype.

...

Required reading (or it should be): http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

If that's what ESR has to say about asking questions, give me the cathedral instead. At least I'll be given a chapter and verse reference in TFM :-)

Also, have you read that 'smart-questions.html' page? While thorough, it makes me wonder if it doesn't come off as self-serving rather than genuinely helpful to someone who would read the whole thing in the first place.

Just in case you were wondering, RTFM is very rarely a flame. If someone says RTFM, chances are they know what they are talking about and the information you are seeking is in TFM. So go read it. By providing a pointer to the information, they have in fact answered your question.

Now, it may be that you lack the experience to discern what portion of TFM is the information you are seeking. If so, say so! Say that you have looked in TFM and not found an answer. Ask for help explaining specific parts of TFM, or ask for a more specific pointer to what part of TFM you should be looking in.

Reading TFM is an important skill, and one that must be acquired. If you have that skill, then there is no call for you (or anyone else, of course this entire post is directed generally) to go demanding that other people use their energy and time to do what you are perfectly capable of. If you don't have that skill, then the greatest ROI for people responding to your question comes when they encourage you to acquire that skill. If you have trouble acquiring it on your own, then generally you can still find someone who is willing to help you acquire it. But not many people want to spend their time and energy doing something that either you can do or that you should be learning to do, unless such an expenditure will help you learn to do it yourself. If you expect someone to put down little arrows on the ground in front of you when you are lost in an unfamiliar city, then you'd better have some cash in hand. Similarly, many distros offer paid support contracts.

When you spend 5 minutes saying exactly how to do something in detail, you are often setting yourself up to spend another 5 minutes saying exactly how to do something else in detail later. If someone figures out the answer themself, even if it is with guidance and aid (think Socrates), then they are much more likely to be able to figure out the next answer as well.

Required reading (or it should be): http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Exactly! This is a good opportunity to post a link to one of my favorite HOWTO documents of all time: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

I've had mixed results when asking for help in the gentoo forums, and I have found that the wording and the tone of how you ask questions is very important. An article by ESR on the proper way to ask questions http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html.

This of course begs the question, how can you expect n00b to be careful about how a question is asked? after all he is merely a n00b.

This immediately brought to my mind a portion of the Essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The part I am referring to is:

13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."

Seems like a pretty reasonable answer to me.

This immediately brought to my mind a portion of the Essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The part I am referring to is:

13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."

Seems like a pretty reasonable answer to me.

rolls round and round, round and round

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincar nation.html

I'm assuming you aren't very senior at 4 months

It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way.

"Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions? Anyone know? Is there any chance that we could end up in court if we interoperate with it?

Yes to the first and yes to the second only it is MS that is in court with the EU commision for not opening up the protocols. They provided API calls instead. It has been explicidly stated by a MS execitive that the purpose of MS protocols is prevent entry into the market of OSS projects. You can't be any cleared then that.

"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

was Re:IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

They should be worried about people that break into computers. Such people are "wannabes", not hackers. They may have some of the skills that would be suited to becoming a hacker, but they don't have the true hacker mentality, which is about building things, not breaking them. As ESR states, "being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer."

How can you be so sure that this is the reason for keeping NTFS private? Were you in the meeting room when this was decided? Have you considered the more practical reason that a public spec must be supported, it costs a lot of resources to support a public spec and Microsoft did see enough business benefits of doing so. No, but I have read the memo.

I started trying to use Linux in the late 90s, and at that point I couldn't even get the monitor resolution working. Linux has come a very long way since then. Ubuntu is 95% of the way there. But hardware compatibility is indeed the big problem. (Well, that, and fonts. All those damn proprietary fonts that you have to figure out how to install yourself or else all your transferred files look like crap.)

1) Printers. Everybody uses printers. Everybody. What does Linux have? CUPS. It's a great printing system. It's put together and maintained by real altruists. Don't get me wrong. But the user interface is HOPELESS. There's a priceless description of the problems, much better than I could say it myself. Gutenprint is a huge addition / improvement to CUPS. When the GUI frontends work (eg foomatic), they help, but the browser-based GUI isn't really in the ballpark. To begin with, a Windows user would never guess how to get at it. It's not like you can go to Start-System-Printers, and a little note pops up saying "type localhost:631 in the address bar in your browser." I know that many of the hardware problems are due to uncooperative manufacturers not providing data for drivers, but John and Jane Q. Public don't care. They have their own problems.

2) Networking. Almost everybody has home networks. In the good old days, say seven years ago, networking was a nightmare on all systems. Windows users are now used to everything just finding everything and not arguing. Wireless and wired. Linux users have the added problem of having to network across OSs. But however the problem gets solved, a solution is not optional. Turning on your computer and having to fight with networking is a kiss of death for Linux.

Speaking of uncooperative manufacturers, that's not something that any amount of change in Linux can solve. It seems to me that that's a regulatory issue. It's a fundamentally anti-competitive practice, and anti-monopoly laws ought to apply. It wouldn't be fair to require manufacturers to make sure their equipment works with everyone else's, but neither should they be able to prevent others from getting it to work. They should be required to provide the necessary information, which is a government function, not a Linux one.

The pattern you describe has a name, it's called the "Wheel of Reincarnation". The Jargon File specifically mentions graphics equipment, even:

"[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.
Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of Samsara, and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea. See also blitter."

see http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnati on.html.

- Roey

This is known as the wheel of reincarnation, and has come up several times in the last forty years of graphics hardware.

You might want to read Eric Raymond's essay Why I am an Anarchist. It explores the very same issues you have raised.

I think they mean hysterical raisins.

Except that the majority of the big lies we've been hearing lately have come from one camp and not the other. HHOS.

Truthfully, I'd rather have heavily biased news sources flagged. Salon is a moderately biased news source. indymedia should be flagged as highly biased. And I agree with you to an extent that a heavily conservatively biased source is more likely to get flagged on Slashdot. It's partly because Slashdot has a mild bias itself, and partly because there have been an explosion in recent years of heavily conversatively biased news sources trying to pretend to be objective and/or middle-of-the-road.

Maybe we could use the term blit, bringing to mind the sound the Pong ball(or square) made whenever it hit a wall? (It's especially apt if you played one of the hockey Pong versions, and shot the puck behind the goal so that it did a rapid zig-zag and popped out the other side.)

oh... wait. I guess that already means something.

"[Take open source.] Open source is not a new technology area. It was a new business model", SB

First RFC April 1969 for the ARPANET. The Open Source Initiative originated in Feb 1998.

"In the last three or four years, we have competed very well by extending our value", SB

"Microsoft has proposed a licencing agreement blatantly tailored to exclude free software from accessing it.", FSF Europe

" RealNetworks .. sued .. Microsoft on antitrust charges .. Our case is based on .. failure to disclose interface information and imposing restrictions on PC makers"

"Open source never goes away as a business model or competitor. We have learned how to compete with open source", SB

"Microsoft is claiming some form of IP rights over .. a total of 130 protocols which Microsoft is offering for license .. Many of the listed protocols are [IETF] RFC to the core TCP/IP v4 and TCP/IP v6 protocol specifications"

"competing with open source will have to be something that's burned bright on the foreheads of our senior people", SB

"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects' entry into the market."

"In the case of open source, we couldn't adopt the business model. We adopted a competitive approach that so far has worked very well", SB

Under NO circumstances lose against Linux"

"Microsoft also indicated there was a lot more money out there and they would clearly rather use Baystar "like" entities to help us get signifigantly more money if we want to grow further or do acquisitions"

"Microsoft and Sun .. announced the antitrust settlement/technology pact between the two on Friday"

"Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) has signed a deal to license SCO Group's Unix intellectual property"

"Microsoft will license the rights to Unix technology from SCO"

"there are cases where software gets monetized through hardware", SB

Like years ago when you bought hardware and the software was included for free.

Just a tongue-in-cheek reference to (Guido Van Rossum?)'s response to a question in the article. Since it's slashdotted, I can't go back and check.

Basically, one of the questions was about what's an important skill for programmers to know. The response was language parsing typical of a programmer, stating that the ability to cook an egg for breakfast is a really important skill, generally speaking. (ESR has a section of the jargon file that might help explain the joke a bit.)

The upshot is that the question was vague, so the question was technically correct, if totally irrelevant.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
According to it's Jargon File entry it's one of the bibles of the Lisp/Scheme world http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/Wizard-Book .html. It's used in various universities, including MIT, as the textbook in CS courses.

What's this?! The great hacker god Eric Raymond is not in this list?!

http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them- the-code
http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/suit.html
http://www.self-gov.org/celebrities/images/eric-ra ymond2.jpg
http://pepelucho.blogsome.com/images/eric_raymond. jpg
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos086.htm
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.htm l

What's this?! The great hacker god Eric Raymond is not in this list?!

http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them- the-code
http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/suit.html
http://www.self-gov.org/celebrities/images/eric-ra ymond2.jpg
http://pepelucho.blogsome.com/images/eric_raymond. jpg
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos086.htm
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.htm l

Except for the fact that Goldfarb was under oath, meaning he goes to jail if he gets caught lying.

Oh, and the documentary evidence that already corroborated this story.

Mike Anderer (the person behind SCO's ludicrous claims that 'spectral analysis' showed that there was lots of Unix code in Linux) was drunk late one night and fired off a stroppy, and semi-literate, email to his paymasters complaining that HE was the person who convinced Microsoft to tell Baystar to pump SCO full of cash, and that he deserved a bonus for it. This email ended up on Eric S Raymond's desk, back when our Eric was the hotline for disgruntled Microsofties with incriminating internal documents to share.

Read all about it here

Thank you for posting one of the most insightful comments I've seen on Slashdot in years. (Please send me some email; I'd like to talk to you further offline.)

In my view, the difficulty of finding a viable, self-sustaining means of paying programmers to write OSS code (without exploiting something else) is one of the greatest challenges the OSS community faces. Of course, we'd all love for all OSS code to be contributed for altruistic reasons, and much is, but the fact of the matter is that programmers gotta eat too. We all have bills to pay and expenses in life (and toys to buy!) -- and most of us are not independently wealthy, free to spend our time as we'd prefer.

I would love to spend my days writing OSS code to benefit the world, and not having to worry about earning money. But that's easier said than done. I have bills to pay and a family to support. My family keeps me pretty busy, but there's only so many hours per day that I actually want to spend at a computer hacking code these days anyhow! Much as I love hacking, my larval stage is well behind me, and these days, I know there's more to life than computers. Besides, I spend my days working on the computer all day at my day job for a proprietary company; by the time I get home, eat dinner, spend time with my wife and daughters, and finally have some free time, I'm simply too tired to go back to working on the computer at night, knowing that I have to wake up early in the morning to go to work. I just don't have the mental energy for it at that point. Meanwhile, on days off, I'm usually either booked solid by family events, errands or other activities -- or relaxing to take a break from this busy routine when I actually do have some spare time.

In practice, I rarely find the time and energy anymore to work on the computer projects I want to be working on. My Gangplank project is a good example. I've released the code as Open Source (after years as a private codebase), but I've rarely found the time to work on it, even though I have a TODO list a mile long. Finally, at the start of 2003, I decided to start tracking just how much time I actually spent on the project, knowing that I was neglecting it more than working on it. While I did spend 34.5 hours in 2003 working on it, most of that was over a span of about 2 weeks when I was motivated to work on it for a while. I didn't touch the project at all in 2004. Throughout all of 2005, I spent 2.5 hours on it. So far, I've spent 15 minutes in 2006 on it. So, in almost 4 years now, I've spent only 37.25 hours on a project that I started way back in 1992. In the last 3 years, it's only been 2.75 hours -- less than 1 hour per year on average!

Now, I'm sure with better time management, I could accomplish more than that, but that's a separate issue. My point is, if my employer was willing to pay me to work on this project, I could have put in all those hours in less than a week, instead of taking 4 years. And I'm sure I'm not the only hacker facing this dilemma. I'm no longer willing to sacrifice any hope of having a life outside of computers in order to spend all my available time hacking on my computer. I'm also a husband and father now, and my family demands and deserves my time. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so much mental energy available to expend. There's gotta be a better way.

I don't have a solution to this problem, but I'm trying to think of one. We need a way that programmers can be paid to write OSS code as their "day job", but there seems to be no viable way to make paid development work self-supporting without sacrificing one of the "sacred cows" of free software -- the "free" part. While the FSF will swear up and down that "Free Software" is really about freedom, not price, we all know that it's equally about both. And as long as someone else can undercut you by giving away your own software for free, you ca

From the Jargon File:

In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms."

I'm a geek. I want a wallet with built in clock, mp3 player, camera, radio and cellphone abilities. (screw iPod! I'm a friggin geek, I have neither OSX nor Windows, I use IRC on a command line and browse in a text browser!) I want it to store securely my passwords and info if I identify properly. Identification should be done on several levels:

The plural of "box" is "boxes", not "boxen".

http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/boxen.html

That's the clever bit. See, since humans are generally the weak link in security setups (see Rubber Hose Cryptanalysis), the system doesn't show the information to any humans. In fact, it never leaves the sender's computer! It's transcribed directly into write-only memory.

Sounds like the Wheel of Reincarnation all over again. And again. And again.

People make fun of him for stuff like this, but ESR has accounted for this possibility.

You think one cable is not enough? Try zero cables. ;)

Real Programmers are named Mel

2. Regular folk should only install software from reasonably trusted sources.

I submit that, in _practice_, there are no "trustable source other than source, and even source has its limits.

If it is possible even the source isn't trustable, how can you begin to trust a pre-built binary -- yes, it is signed, but by who? MS? The government?

It seems the alternative to not installing untrusted sources is [practically] to not install anything, and that's just not very practical. :-(

-l

I'd like to see what it does with a blivet.