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"Sorry dude you sound like a bogan"

"Sorry dude you sound like a bogan"

I agree with you, this is stupid. But it was Microsoft who declared this a war. So if you're going to blame someone for being stupid, at least blame the right party.

I would love to continue to use the "tools best suited for the task at hand". Unfortunately, in many cases, Microsoft has, or is trying to, drive the "tools best suited" out of the market. No FLOSS developer has ever tried to prevent me from using MS tools (in fact, many bend over backwards to provide compatibility with MS), but MS is trying to deny me the option of using any other tools, FLOSS or not.

The real war is between Microsoft and the free market, and in that war, I am solidly on the side of the free market.

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html

I work at Microsoft, and the production Exchange servers are pretty reliable. There are outages occasionally (as in once every few months), but they are almost always short and announced beforehand. Obviously Microsoft IT has as a whole lot of experience with keeping Exchange running. The Office team usually "dogfoods" the beta of the next version of Exchange, and I've heard that it's (understandably) a little less stable, but still very usable.

Snort. Gee, I don't know why anybody would ever be suspicious of Microsoft.

Go read those papers, the "Halloween documents." They aren't just random FUD, those are internal Microsoft documents stating exactly how Microsoft intends to destroy OSS.

"Embrace, extend and extinguish" isnt' a summary that was randomly invented by OSS paranoiacs, according to sworn testimony the phrase came out of Microsoft VP Paul Maritz' mouth in Intel's meetings with Microsoft .

So we're supposed to not be suspicious when they announce that, gee golly, they're serious about embracing?

You're either a fool or a shill.

There is a direct proof indicating that the bullshit SCO lawsuit was brought into being directly by Microsoft. That lawsuit was not just Microsoft "competing to win", it was Microsoft attempting to wipe Linux off the map permanently via the courts instead of the market.

If you honestly expect people are going to forgive Microsoft for this kind of bullshit because their new asshole-CEO has decided that co-operation is now a better plan, then you and Microsoft have another thing coming. Don't get me wrong, I fully support the idea of interoperating with Microsoft products, but my goal is to do so in order to eventually eliminate them, the way they have (and no doubt continue to) tried to do to us, with the difference being that we WILL win WITHOUT pulling any unethical or illegal bullshit stunts like the SCO lawsuit or the Stac theft.

You want to know the latest trends for Java-based web development? Fewer and fewer people are going to be doing Java-based web development in the future.

Fuck trends. They're wrong. Every day the industry continues to stay with its current ridiculous technologies when vastly superior ones were invented decades ago infuriates me further. If it doesn't infuriate you, you're not paying close enough attention.

My advice: read Lambda the Ultimate and Steve Yegge's blog. Endeavor to learn what the lambda calculus and referential transparency are. If you are sincerely interested in bettering yourself as a programmer and don't go find out who Alonzo Church was then so help me God I will kick you in the balls. Learn about SML and type inference. Learn about Haskell and monads. Learn about process calculi and Erlang. Learn about Lisp and code generation and domain-specific languages. Learn about Scheme and lexical closures and continuations. Learn about Smalltalk and what OO was really supposed to be. Learn about type theory and formalism and the Curry-Howard correspondence. Learn about Forth and Joy and how you can have a powerful, expressive language without even so much as a grammar. Learn about Intercal and Befunge and just how badly your choice of programming language can torture you. Learn about UML and Ruby on Rails and Seaside and agile programming and Java generics and Python generators. Learn about aspect-oriented programming, context-oriented programming and concept programming. Learn about multi-paradigm languages like OCaml or Oz. Learn about weird Lisp dialects with syntax like Rebol or Dylan.

Realize that library design is language design. Realize that asynchronous programming with callbacks and explicit state in a world where lightweight coroutines were around in the days of fucking Simula in the 60s for Christ's sake is cruel and unusual torture. (Sorry, pet programming construct.) Realize that the programming language research community, while considering systems programming a solved problem and generally not interested in talking about human factors, is doing some genuinely promising work. Did you know that there are conc

Yep.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

See the section titled "Necessary Preconditions for the Bazaar Style".

I think this classic bit is very much appropriate here. Managers hear what they want to hear.

Seriously, this is real "top secret" info and goverment got it loose to some God damn hacker?

Nope! It was some god damn black hat cracker.

Seriously, this is real "top secret" info and goverment got it loose to some God damn hacker?

Nope! It was some god damn black hat cracker.

No shit.

Did you just compare OS X to Win 98 and Win Me? If that's what you are basing your whole OS X / Windows argument on, there is your problem. No self respecting Windows user would be caught dead using an OS that old. It would be like running Mandrake 2.x or something. Why would you bother?

Exactly. That's why I'm comparing OS X to Win 98 and ME in terms of virus activity. They have similar market share (roughly 5%), and 98/ME is innundated with current day viruses. An OS X virus would have as much impact economically/socially, but vastly more impact in the media (Worlds First Automated OS X worm).

However, whether you like it or not, computers are as accessible as they are largely because of Microsoft and not because of *nix or Apple.

That's a goofy statement. There's no way to prove it true or false, but I see no reason why OS/2, Novell's GUI efforts, XFree86, or Macintosh OS could have made computing accessible.

The reason I hate Microsoft is not because they are successful. The reason I hate Microsoft is because they ruthlessly (and unethically) bash companies into the ground via illegal tactics. And this is not a disputable claim; it's been verified, repeatedly, in court. Even worse, the above merely refers to contractual fraud/deception; include monopoly tactics, and the picture is bleaker.

Even the venerable IE has its roots in a shady deal with a company (SpyGlass) who would have _never_ licensed to Microsoft had they known what Microsoft was planning.

Furthermore, Microsoft fills the airwaves with disgusting, falsehood-ridden fud. "Linux is a cancer" "Our customers aren't interested in interoperability" "Linux is 10 times as expensive to run as Windows" "Linux was stolen from Minix"

Not to mention Microsoft contribution of both FUD and $$ to the SCO case.

Yes, its safe to say I hate them. In terms of business ethics, Microsoft is pretty much as low as you can go.

Agreed. Anything I have to work on (assuming I'm not submitting to the same source control system as the original authors) gets re-indented to use tabs, no trailing whitespace (it's likely to introduce false diffs), and the One True Brace Style.

First off, as you'll be more effective if you can at least rant about what's bugging you, your problems aren't Linux specific. While you're likely using a Linux distribution--you'd have much the same problems on any of the BSDs or some other Free or Open system--the problem lies with xorg. More correctly, the problem lies with ATI. The card you and I are using is proprietary and, as such, the specs to properly implement a driver for the bloody thing are closed. That means bugs.

The reason that you cannot use GL or tv-out properly is not due to 'sheer amount of Linux bugs' (which, again, the problem is X's) but because the ATI people have not given us the tools we need to use their hardware. If you care so much write ATI a letter asking them to release the specs to their card. Posting partially coherent paragraphs to /. certainly won't help.

My wife complains that linux is total crap!

If you'd like to run a Free or Open system while being able to pipe out video to one terminal and work on another you're going to have to use different hardware. A Linux distro just isn't going to suit your needs due to the proprietary nature of your hardware. Besides, you seem to be pretty pleased with XP, given that this post and posts made previous tend to hold XP up as the example Linux should function toward, so why make the switch? The *nix world is pretty different from the Windows world and approaching things with the mentality of "XP works this way, and so should $FOO!" is limiting.

Linux, it would seem in this case, is the wrong tool for the job.

The difficulty in the post is caused from the sheer amount of linux bugs and deficiencies and not so much from my command of the Engligh language.

I'm not actually sure how a software bug would affect your wet-ware, so perhaps you're trying to say that having to fiddle with things is making you angry and, thus, removing your command of higher discourse? Perhaps this might help.

Anyway, good luch and happy hacking!

Therefore, I would like to take a moment and discuss the issue and give some details on what we are going to combat the problem.

aka C|N>K

Of course, you're welcome to describe how specifically DRM prevents OSS software from being written and running on a machine. But you won't -- you'll just go on about how I'm an MS shill and how I must be too stupid to comprehend your nebulous fictional world.

Windows/Linux users, see it here. Pretend it's rotating, or, sit in a front-loading dryer while viewing. (Note: don't actually sit in a front-loading dryer.)

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

It's a regular expression, not a variable name.

Actually its a glob or wildcard expression. To be a regular expression it would have to contain the dot character before the asterisk.

Oh, and nerd *fighting*? Nerds are the last people who are going to want to blow off steam by real, painful, physical fighting...

Actually my sensei's dojo is full of geeks, nerds, and brainiacs. She's an EE, the senior student is a physician, and I'm one of several software guys.

Many techies are budoka. A former boss of mine was an aikido instructor; I worked with one guy who was an early student of Ed Parker, and another who was a Shotokan karate instructor. The famous ESR is a black belt in "Moo Do", "an eclectic martial art based on Tae Kwon Do". As he mentions in the Jargon File,

In 1997, for example, your humble editor recalls sitting down with five strangers at the first Perl conference and discovering that four of us were in active training in some sort of martial art -- and, what is more interesting, nobody at the table found this high perecentage at all odd.

Many others are involed in SCA or similar live HTH combat similuation.

I dunno, maybe you young'ns just aren't as tough as us older geeks who grew up before "frag-fests".

Oh, and nerd *fighting*? Nerds are the last people who are going to want to blow off steam by real, painful, physical fighting...

Actually my sensei's dojo is full of geeks, nerds, and brainiacs. She's an EE, the senior student is a physician, and I'm one of several software guys.

Many techies are budoka. A former boss of mine was an aikido instructor; I worked with one guy who was an early student of Ed Parker, and another who was a Shotokan karate instructor. The famous ESR is a black belt in "Moo Do", "an eclectic martial art based on Tae Kwon Do". As he mentions in the Jargon File,

In 1997, for example, your humble editor recalls sitting down with five strangers at the first Perl conference and discovering that four of us were in active training in some sort of martial art -- and, what is more interesting, nobody at the table found this high perecentage at all odd.

Many others are involed in SCA or similar live HTH combat similuation.

I dunno, maybe you young'ns just aren't as tough as us older geeks who grew up before "frag-fests".

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/Also The Art of UNIX Programming this is an in depth programmers view of the UNIX operating system and related programming languages/utilities. If you don't like his style (He's a little to Guru for some)he also mentions other books/works that can give you help on related topics.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/Also The Art of UNIX Programming this is an in depth programmers view of the UNIX operating system and related programming languages/utilities. If you don't like his style (He's a little to Guru for some)he also mentions other books/works that can give you help on related topics.

Actually the Ross and Wright book really is the worst collegiate mathmatics textbook I have ever used.

But the parent's point about getting a solid foundating in Mathmatics and Language is a good one and will certainly serve you well if you if you are unsure where to start.

If you have not read it allready I belive you will find Eric Raymond's How to Become a Hacker essay useful.

Finally, if you are still unsure where to start install one of the more technically included Linux distributions (such as Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware) and set it up to do whatever you find interesting.

Good Luck!

Intercal is another interesting language, thanks to statements such as COME FROM.

From the jargon file: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Godwins-Law.html

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

It all depends on what the tradition is on slashdot (me not been here long enough to know)

But as it is a deliberate trigger or Godwins then it doesn't auto-end the thread.

Regrding the electrical supply, I expect the problem isn't so much technical as regulatory. There are fairly specific rules, which are defacto laws, regarding where & what sort of power supplies can be integrated into consumer products. While these rules come from the 1st world nations (many countries just ditto US or EU or whomever for whole blocks of construction & product codes) they apply as well to 3rd world nations - it IS a global market, global standards, and everyone deserves safe products. So what sort of electrical supply is installed, and how it plugs in, isn't entirely up to designers.

On a tangent, there used to be a metal bar in second generation IBM PC's called the "Rube Goldberg connector". Underwriters Laboratories & such required that power-supplies be placed in the rear of PCs, so that was where the "Big Red Switch" was also located, as part of the power supply. However this was awkward to get at, so IBM innovated and put a button on front. They still used the equivalent of the "BRS" internally, all they did was run a small metal bar (wire coathanger gauge, but a bit stiffer) from the front power button across the inside of the PC to the power supply.

Lastly, it is interesting to note that there is only one existing glabal standard for power, adopted in every nation: Power Over Ethernet. Same plug, same supply, same logic, all over the planet, for the few folks that use it.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html and knowledge about the basic tools to do it.

What is Python? Python is the really neat computer programming thingy, based heavily on Monty Python's Flying Circus, which was invented by those really funny guys, Monty Python. Lucky for them it was called Monty Python's Flying Circus, because it would have been really inconvenient and confusing if it were called John Howard's Flying Circus, or something like that.

i really hate when programmers try to be funny. this article is asinine. Programming isn't a joke and telling a novice how to program and introducing all that sperflous crap is only going to confuse them even more. If i'm looking to program that means i want to learn to program, don't piss in my cornflakes and call it milk.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

I am going to agree. Java is just too far behind. It's the new COBOL.

American programmers are moving away from it (those that know how to see the future at the bottom of the coffee mug) because they realize that doing java in a corporate job is being at the end of the chain in a 60+ man project with all the remotely creative decisions done by people before the programmers, and they are just implementers of badly-written 500 pages spec that absolutely lack any spark of brilliance, all the while fearing outsourcing by Cognizant and IBM Global Services (yes, India, China, and various sundry other countries) and fighting against newly-minted foreign-born H-1 Visa-holding programmers who think that $63,000/yr would just be quite satifactory and who are itching to take on any project and demonstrate to foggy-eyed managers how many more lines of code they can produce than said American Programmers.

Enter Ruby, Python, and the very esoteric language known as C, and many other beasts (see Factor): tools all for the Great American Hacker to weave magical dream machines that web-service, self-introspect, metacode themselves, and baffle any attempt at explanation but are Rather Tiny, Dastardly Clever and Entirely Fast Enough; coded in 4 days rather than 3 months (as promised) + another 9 months (because management can't see Sunk Costs when it stares them in the face)of which said programmer grandly pronounce, chest a-puffing: "I was instrumental in the design, implementation, and maintenance of the Garguantuan multi-million dollar soul-crushing Monstruosity", would rather effacably mumble "I dabble in computers" and return to watching the "you got an f" veedub commercial on youtube as soon as fleet-footed managers have returned to their dens of power with doors and minds that close.

Forget .NET. Go with Python. It has features that .NET doesn't support yet. They do try (see IronPython), but the Python C implementation has been years in the making is the love child of some of the brightest out there. It's getting to be plenty fast for most tasks, and is so insanely easier to use than java that it's not even funny. Classes are namespaces. Think on that a bit. Then, go run amok in Ruby land, following Matz's fantasy. At last, embrace the Way of UNIX, as so eloquently expounded by none other than ESR.

Java is fighting a rear-guard action. The language is 10 years old. It should be so much better by now. Python is the same age as linux, both 15-16 years old. They are more mature, more robust, more accepted and accepting.

Alas, many will claim that java and .Net have more robust libraries, constructs, and frameworks. I shall remind you all that the way of UNIX leads to simplicity and depth of understanding. See Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines. (for those who grok that, see Master Foo Discourses on the Unix-Nature).

I am going to agree. Java is just too far behind. It's the new COBOL.

American programmers are moving away from it (those that know how to see the future at the bottom of the coffee mug) because they realize that doing java in a corporate job is being at the end of the chain in a 60+ man project with all the remotely creative decisions done by people before the programmers, and they are just implementers of badly-written 500 pages spec that absolutely lack any spark of brilliance, all the while fearing outsourcing by Cognizant and IBM Global Services (yes, India, China, and various sundry other countries) and fighting against newly-minted foreign-born H-1 Visa-holding programmers who think that $63,000/yr would just be quite satifactory and who are itching to take on any project and demonstrate to foggy-eyed managers how many more lines of code they can produce than said American Programmers.

Enter Ruby, Python, and the very esoteric language known as C, and many other beasts (see Factor): tools all for the Great American Hacker to weave magical dream machines that web-service, self-introspect, metacode themselves, and baffle any attempt at explanation but are Rather Tiny, Dastardly Clever and Entirely Fast Enough; coded in 4 days rather than 3 months (as promised) + another 9 months (because management can't see Sunk Costs when it stares them in the face)of which said programmer grandly pronounce, chest a-puffing: "I was instrumental in the design, implementation, and maintenance of the Garguantuan multi-million dollar soul-crushing Monstruosity", would rather effacably mumble "I dabble in computers" and return to watching the "you got an f" veedub commercial on youtube as soon as fleet-footed managers have returned to their dens of power with doors and minds that close.

Forget .NET. Go with Python. It has features that .NET doesn't support yet. They do try (see IronPython), but the Python C implementation has been years in the making is the love child of some of the brightest out there. It's getting to be plenty fast for most tasks, and is so insanely easier to use than java that it's not even funny. Classes are namespaces. Think on that a bit. Then, go run amok in Ruby land, following Matz's fantasy. At last, embrace the Way of UNIX, as so eloquently expounded by none other than ESR.

Java is fighting a rear-guard action. The language is 10 years old. It should be so much better by now. Python is the same age as linux, both 15-16 years old. They are more mature, more robust, more accepted and accepting.

Alas, many will claim that java and .Net have more robust libraries, constructs, and frameworks. I shall remind you all that the way of UNIX leads to simplicity and depth of understanding. See Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines. (for those who grok that, see Master Foo Discourses on the Unix-Nature).

No matter how you try to sugar coat it, everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Clone and hack makes for sloppy code.

You heard it here first.

Yes, but on the internet we use the American English rules

Perhaps you may be correct on sites in the .us domain, but on www.bbc.co.uk they use the Queen's English, and they like it. Tendencies on Slashdot also tend toward "hackish" (jargon) constructions. Eric Raymond offers the example of the difference between "Type 'dd.'" and "Type 'dd.'" in a tutorial about the vi text editor.

so your point is mute.

You mean "moot".

None of the programs you mentioned are open source. How exactly do they follow Eric Raymond's bazaar model? Most of Microsoft's 'integration' was done for marketing reasons rather than technical reasons, except for the kernel mode video interface. There are programs that will trim the fat from Windows installations, so the components cannot be integrated THAT tightly.

Yeah, except for most IT people it is a "more magic" switch, not a crystal.

That's who and why and I can understand that.

Her reaction is generally "just plan better". I argue that the industry has been struggling with this issue for decades. I don't think we're all morons to have built so much infrastructure and come so far, but we still can't solve the simple parts like accurately identifying how long it will take us to accomplish our goal.

Hmmm, I'm still not sure what you want to explain but I'll take a swing anyway. I can think of social, technical and legal complexities to software development. I've talked to my wife about all three. You might be thinking of something completely different.

Talking to my wife is not all that hard, even though she has no interest in programming. Her first and only practice was some kind of basic in grade school. She was an interior designer for a Steelcase for eight years and understands all three classes of difficulties.

Others have done a great job explaining complexities in terms of free software. Voices from the Open Source Revolution has a lot of clear thinking from software masters. Vixie's article about software engineering is particularly germain. You can also get a lot of good thought from the Free Software Foundation's philosophy pages. The Cathedral and the Bazaar deals with the issue explicitly. Indeed, there's an embarrassment of riches matched only by the wealth of text editors in the free software world.

So, how do you get from there to dinner table conversation with the wife who's never written a line of code? It's the same way you try to simplify everything and the largeness of the subject actually helps.

You start with what a program is and everything flows from there. My wife, like most people, understands modularity. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time," is one of her favorite sayings. She also has a basic idea that a program is something that takes information and does something with it. It does not take too much to explain that programs expect specific organization of their inputs to be able to deal with it and that smaller, simpler programs are easier to work with that big complex ones, and the wife then understands modular programming. It's a division of labor kind of thing that runs right into group development and organizational and social complexity. How do you know what the customer really needs? How do you make decisions about meeting those needs and turn those into a blueprint that you can follow? The free software world has solved those problems by letting the customer make the software themselves, and those customers have been organizing themselves very well. At that point, you zoom back into the perspective of a developer getting their hands on some huge project. If you can imagine that the free software developer knows what they want to accomplish, you are then faced with another embarrassment of riches: so many great tools, each of which can take years to explore. Did I say "free software developer"? Yes I did, because I did not want to wade into the swamp of NDA's, cross licensing, binary blobs and other horror stories of legal complexity. That can come later. By now, your wife's head will have popped but you will have explained software development complexity.

Like most things, none of the parts is particularly difficult, there's just a lot of parts.

I know most of you have read this one, but as a service to our new readers:

The Art of Unix Programming. I read that one as a budding PHP coder; while very Unix/C centric (well, duh) the basic philosophies will benefit any coder. My code's not that good, really, but without the principles outlined in the book it would be absolutely horrid.

If the PHP kiddies would read it we would at least have properly indented code.

I forget; what's the official Slashdot position on ESR these days?

Although I have to admit, if people would concentrate on clearing out the poison ivy instead of scratching their personal itch, there'd need to be a lot less scratching. The "poison ivy" is the plethora of badly written tools already in place, with seriously unfortunate user interfaces.

A famous write-up of the failures of user interfaces and configuration tools in open source got slashdotted when written by Eric Raymond, several years ago, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html . It's even funnier because the CUPS authors responded very graciously to his complaints by saying they'd fix at least some of them, and don't seem to have actually fixed *ANY* of the things Eric griped about in the 2 years since then.

LOL, it's not German at all but actually from Das Blinkenlights
See: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.ht ml/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Blinkenlights

It is a feature. Maybe it's a misfeature, but it's still a feature. If it wasn't they wouldn't have spent money putting in touch sensors and the accompanying logic instead of two microswitches and a couple pieces of plastic.

Exactly! The rest is just a SMOP.

While I am loath to criticize the wisdom of another member of the Eric Conspiracy, I respectfully disagree.

El Presidente Bush II, despite all he has done to support the slow erosion of civil liberties and the increase of Presidential executive privilege in the US, is not the only one to blame here.

Arthur Scheslinger wrote The Imperial Presidency about the use of power by American Presidents since the beginning of the US. Especially since FDR, Presidents have steadily increased their powers and influence to a degree unimaginable by the Founding Fathers. This is just a tiny piece of that.

The 1990s and the Clinton years brought us political correctness, the rise of litigation culture and the other half of this problem - increasing desire for ratings and "protecting the children" on behalf of government and industry. Remember Tipper Gore?

It's certainly gotten worse since Bush was sworn in at the beginning of 2001, but he's not the guy who started these problems. Given their history, I don't think Mr Gore (or Mr Kerry for that matter) would have made a huge difference as President in this regard.

They weren't when they published Microsoft's anti-Linux FUD. Maybe they've burned that bridge in the mean time. I don't know; I've tuned them out since then.